The Hounds of Baskerville

WRITTEN BY Mark Gatiss

DIRECTED BY Paul McGuigan

ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 8, 2012

Sherlock and John travel to the moors to investigate a sighting of a gigantic hound.

Doyle’s third Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, is his most enduring, and the Doyle story that has had more adaptations than any other. A man, Dr. Mortimer, comes to Baker Street and reports that the current resident of the great Baskerville estate reportedly died of a heart attack, but Mortimer believes he was murdered. He explains the family curse — the Baskervilles have been haunted by a giant hellhound since the 18th century, and that when he investigated the area where Baskerville had died, he saw something — and utters the now-legendary line, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” The heir to the Baskerville fortune, Sir Henry Baskerville, is coming over from Canada, and Mortimer is worried he will suffer the same fate. Holmes sends Watson to investigate, saying he is unable to come. At the estate, Watson discovers that someone has been stealing Sir Henry’s boots. Watson meets Mr. Stapleton, the local naturalist, who tells him about the great Grimpen Mire, a vast bog that regularly swallows up dogs, horses, and people, since no one but he knows where to step. Stapleton’s sister tries to warn Watson away. Watson discovers there is a murderer loose on the moors and that the Baskerville butler, Barrymore, is related to the murderer by marriage and has been signaling warnings to him using a candle in a window. Barrymore shows Watson a partially burned letter that he suspects was sent to Baskerville the night he died, sent by the daughter of local curmudgeon Mr. Frankland.

Watson sends regular reports back to London, which make up most of the narrative in the novel. One night, old man Frankland tells Watson that he believes the killer is on the moor, because he’s seen a young man carrying out food to someone. Watson investigates and finds none other than Holmes, who has been holed up in a cave all this time, receiving Watson’s reports and doing his own investigation, always a few steps ahead. In the climax of the novel, Holmes and Watson discover the motive in the case, and as a fog rolls in, they travel out onto the moor where they do, indeed, encounter the hound — covered in phosphorous by the perpetrator to make it glow in the dark. At the sound of the hound’s howl, Holmes is legitimately unnerved: “‘Where is it?’ Holmes whispered; and I knew from the thrill of his voice that he, the man of iron, was shaken to the soul.” Later, as they spot the hound and try to get away, Watson says of Holmes’s escape, “Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night.” As they pursue the culprit behind the entire escapade, the offender gets caught in the Grimpen Mire and is sucked down to his death.

As an adaption of an original story, Gatiss’s script is stunning. Knowing that audiences have seen it all before — the hound, the mire, Sir Henry’s boots, the suspects, Holmes and Watson being separated — and that everyone who has read the book or seen one of its many adaptations would know the ending, he upends it and, using all of Doyle’s elements, rearranges many of them, modernizes the story, and changes the eventual outcome. When it comes to adapting Doyle’s material, Gatiss is the master. The phosphorous hound becomes a glowing bunny named Bluebell. The Stapletons — the naturalist and his “sister” — become the scientist with questionable ethics and her daughter, who similarly is a “Miss Stapleton” who sounds the alarm for Sherlock. Sir Henry Baskerville becomes the cleverly named Henry Knight, who is not the heir to the Baskerville fortune, for “Baskerville” has gone from being a family name to the name of a large genetic testing facility. The Grimpen Mire becomes the Grimpen Minefield (with similar results); cranky old Frankland becomes the friendly (or is he?) Dr. Frankland; Barrymore the butler becomes Major Barrymore; and Dr. Mortimer, the man concerned for the welfare of the Baskerville family, becomes Louise Mortimer, Henry’s therapist.

Even if you know the original story, Gatiss keeps you guessing; he delights the knowledgeable Sherlockian while entertaining.

However, as a script that can stand on its own, it’s not as successful. For those who aren’t familiar with the original story, all of the red herrings don’t make a lot of sense. Why are we sent on a wild goose chase for the origins of Bluebell when it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the story? What are the chances that Sherlock, out of boredom, takes the only case that remotely interests him and it just happens to coincide with the more interesting case that walks through his door? Why would Sherlock take on a case that, on its surface, doesn’t actually interest him, merely because of the old-fashioned way the client refers to the dog? As the catalyst for Sherlock’s actions, it seems silly. Why does the UMQRA red herring go on for so long? It’s a hilarious payoff for the reader — the woman in the car sensually moans, “Oh, Mr. Selden!” which is the name of the murderer signaling to Baskerville Hall from the moor — but without knowing that, it just seems like a really long diversion that keeps John out of the way.

Where the episode succeeds for all audiences is when it becomes a study in fear. When Henry Knight first appears, he’s quiet, fidgety, tired-looking, and on the verge of tears. It’s brilliant casting; Russell Tovey, at the time, was starring on BBC’s Being Human as George, the flatmate who happens to turn into a werewolf every full moon. On that show, he plays a charming man who is deathly afraid of the agony of his monthly transformation. In this episode, the dynamic is flipped, and he plays the one afraid of the beast. Tovey is amazing as he fears being forced back out onto the moors; as he awakes from yet another nightmare; as he stands at his patio window and sees a hound’s face smash into it (in the scariest moment of the series); and as he realizes with horror that he almost killed another human being in a hallucinogenic haze.

Knight brings not only the case to Sherlock, but the dread that accompanies it. Until now, Sherlock has very rarely shown fear of any kind. Even as he was about to put the pill in his mouth in “A Study in Pink,” he looked mostly confident in his decision. As he mounted the stairs in “A Scandal in Belgravia,” knowing he would find the criminals who had hurt Mrs. Hudson, he walked with vengeful purpose. In “The Blind Banker,” when Sarah was staring at an arrow that was about to whiz toward her head and Sherlock had a gun pointed at his, he kept his hands in his pockets and coolly talked to General Shan. As a child in the line of fire counted down from 10 and Sherlock had to act quickly in “The Great Game,” he looked anxious but not scared. Even when John stepped out onto the pool deck and was covered in explosives, the look on Sherlock’s face had far more surprise in it than fear.

But in this episode, Sherlock is truly scared. Just as the love he feels for Irene Adler isn’t a traditional sort of romantic love, the terror he feels in this episode isn’t for his own safety; it’s the fear of not knowing what is real. If the hound does indeed exist, then everything he ever believed to be true and untrue is suddenly called into question. What he saw couldn’t be explained away by logic or science, and Sherlock is unable to function in such a world. At the Cross Keys pub, he is frantic, shaking, and angry, filled with uncertainty and acting in a way we haven’t seen before. Contrast his behavior in this scene to the beginning of the episode when he’s bored: he’s also frantic, rude, and angry as he searches for his cigarettes, but in a different way that we already associate with Sherlock. Bored Sherlock causes John to roll his eyes in frustration; doubtful Sherlock causes John to leave the pub in anger. Cumberbatch does an extraordinary job of creating a very subtle, yet meaningful, difference between the two emotions.

But of the three performances, the one given by Martin Freeman is the standout. When Sherlock doesn’t understand something, he experiments on it until he does. In A Study in Scarlet, when Mike Stamford first tells Watson about Holmes (with a note of warning in his voice), he says, “I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness.” In this episode, he does exactly that. Under the guise of the apologetic friend who wants to make it up to John for acting like a jerk in the pub the previous evening, Sherlock makes John a coffee, stirring in the very sugar he’d imbibed the day before, convinced it contains a hallucinogenic agent that caused him and Henry to see the hound when John didn’t. He then stages an elaborate psychological test that nearly scares the life out of John, enhancing his own experience with bright lights and screeching sounds. The sadistic experiment frightens John to such an extent that he ends up cowering inside a cage, so terrified he can barely speak into his mobile phone when he calls Sherlock in a panic. Freeman is astounding in this scene: at first confused, then increasingly scared, and finally so filled with terror you swear you can see the hairs on his head turning gray before your eyes. When he emerges from the cage, he’s gasping for air, barely able to stand up, screaming at Sherlock that the hound was there, and he’s convinced of it. Of all the suspenseful moments in this episode, Freeman’s performance makes this scene the most memorable.

Ultimately, the entire thing comes down to psychology and science, and the planets in Sherlock’s world happily realign (even if, due to his lack of interest in the solar system, he’s unaware of it). The solution to the case works both as an adaptation and simply on its own, as Gatiss continues to jar our expectations yet remains faithful to the sensibility of the story. John discovers what Sherlock tried to do to him, but he remains satisfied that Sherlock was wrong, and that he can throw that in his face as often as he likes in retaliation. Their friendship is intact, and unlike the Holmes of the novel, who deceives Watson and upsets him without a proper apology, this Sherlock stands by John’s side … even if it’s just to experiment on him.

However, Gatiss isn’t going to let the warm feeling of a satisfactory ending sit with us for long. The episode ends jarringly, with Mycroft standing in a room with Moriarty, telling him he’s free to go. Covering the walls is Sherlock’s name written over and over again; in case we’ve forgotten who Sherlock saw flash before his eyes during his hallucination of the hound, we’re reminded in this eerie scene. We’ve seen Sherlock deal with love and fear. We know what comes next.

HIGHLIGHT John explaining to Sherlock that they will never play Cluedo (or Clue) again.

Sherlock: Why not?

John: Because it’s not actually possible for the victim to have done it, Sherlock, that’s why.

Sherlock: Well, it was the only possible solution.

John: It’s not in the rules.

Sherlock: Then the rules are wrong!

DID YOU NOTICE?

John not only makes a crack about Sherlock having Asperger’s when he’s talking to Lestrade, but calls Sherlock “Spock” when Sherlock’s coming undone in the pub. Interestingly, John calls him that right after Sherlock’s famed line from the books, “Once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever remains — however improbable — must be true.” In the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock utters the same line and attributes it to an “ancestor” of his.
“Watson’s Theme” begins playing when John is scared in the lab, and the music becomes increasingly discordant as his terror grows.

FROM ACD TO BBC Aside from the major points in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as pointed out earlier, Gatiss alludes to the novel in subtler ways:

At first Sherlock says John will have to go alone, then says he’s just kidding, that of course he’s coming along, a reference to the fact that Holmes is missing for most of the novel.
At the beginning of the story, Holmes asks Watson to try a deduction, and when Watson misses all of the key points but still comes up with some good observations, Holmes mocks him: “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.” Sherlock uses those words in his apology to John.
Just as John is hurt by Sherlock’s rudeness at the pub, Watson is deeply hurt when he discovers that Holmes has been deceiving him by investigating the case as well. He recounts that moment: “‘You use me, and yet do not trust me!’ I cried with some bitterness. ‘I think that I have deserved better at your hands, Holmes.’” Later he says, “My voice trembled as I recalled the pains and the pride with which I had composed [my reports].” And just as Sherlock apologizes to John the following day and all is well, Holmes tells Watson that his reports had actually been quite helpful and shows the worn papers to him. Watson says he forgives Holmes because of the warmth in the detective’s voice.

At the very beginning of the episode, Sherlock appears in the apartment holding a harpoon and covered in blood. In “The Adventure of Black Peter,” Watson says that one morning Holmes “had gone out before breakfast, and I had sat down to mine when he strode into the room, his hat upon his head and a huge barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm.” He had apparently been stabbing a dead pig at the butcher’s to see how much strength is required to kill one.

In his frustration, Sherlock says to John that he envies him: “Your mind, it’s so placid, straightforward, barely used. Mine’s like an engine, racing out of control; a rocket tearing itself to pieces trapped on the launch pad.” In “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Holmes similarly describes his brain: “My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.”

Fletcher is the kid who wears the hound mask and scares tourists. His name is probably an homage to Bertram Fletcher Robinson, to whom Doyle dedicated the novel for giving him the idea of the story.

Sherlock gets information from Fletcher by telling him a bet is riding on it. In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes is able to extract information out of someone simply by betting the person that he can’t. As he later explains to Watson, “I daresay that if I had put £100 down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager.”

We discover in this episode that Lestrade’s name is Greg. In “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Lestrade signs one of his telegrams “G. Lestrade,” and the first initial is never explained. A running joke in upcoming episodes will be Sherlock calling Lestrade by every other name that begins with G, but never Greg, which is a nod to all of the various names that Sherlockians have suggested the G stands for over the years. Perhaps the writers went with Greg because, in the books, Holmes primarily deals with two detectives, Lestrade and Gregson.

Sherlock observes that Lestrade is “as brown as a nut.” When Stamford first meets Watson upon Watson’s return from Afghanistan, Stamford notes, “You are as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut.”

Sherlock’s famous line to John at the Cross Keys is reworded from the original that appears in The Sign of Four: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” He repeats the line in several other stories, including “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.”

Sherlock’s assertion that he has no friends upsets John, and later, during Sherlock’s hamfisted apology, he explains that what he meant was that he only has one friend, not friends plural. In “The Five Orange Pips,” when Watson mentions Holmes’s “friends,” Holmes corrects him: “Except yourself I have none.”

One of the things that tips off Sherlock to Frankland’s guilt is that he refers to a cellphone, rather than a mobile phone, indicating he’d spent time in the U.S. In “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” Holmes similarly sniffs out a criminal for using the American spelling of a word (plow) rather than the British (plough).

The twist at the end of this episode is that the Hound is an apparition caused by inhaling hallucinogenic gas. In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” after a series of occurrences where people are found dead, still sitting upright as if alive, Holmes discovers that hallucinogenic gas is being pumped into the rooms. He and Watson attempt to test it, and Watson describes the feeling of beginning to go mad, as Holmes simply sits in his chair with a look of horror on his face. Watson grabs Holmes and pulls him out of the room to save both their lives.

INTERESTING FACTS

Sherlock and John’s argument about Cluedo (or Clue, as it’s called in North America) is a clever wink at the game’s origins. When Hasbro released the game in 1949, they marketed it as “The Great New Detective Game,” with a picture on the front of the box of a detective in a long plaid cape and deerstalker looking through a magnifying glass. Hasbro then made a licensing deal with the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate to use the name “Sherlock Holmes” in their marketing materials, announcing to consumers that this game would allow them to become the great detective himself. In the 1970s, a TV commercial for the game featured Watson and Holmes trying to seek out clues.
When Sherlock is sitting in the pub, shaken after seeing the hound, he says to Watson, “Cherchez le chien.” It’s a clever turn on the sexist phrase “cherchez la femme”: if a man is acting strangely, look for the woman, because his behavior must be the responsibility of a woman.
Dr. Stapleton tells John that the rabbits glowed because of GFP, or green fluorescent protein, thanks to the presence of the gene from jellyfish that makes them glow. In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists who isolated and extracted the gene, while other researchers have successfully inserted GFP into developing embryos of zebrafish, causing them to glow.

NITPICKS Let me get this straight: there’s a top-secret government project that is so classified only the highest CIA official would be given clearance, but they have their own sweatshirts with not only the name of the secret project emblazoned on the front of them, but the location of where the project was being carried out? And then when Frankland was using the top-secret hallucinogenic to kill Henry’s father that night, he just happened to be wearing the sweatshirt? Were they testing the hallucinogenics on themselves?!

OOPS

In the British army, one does not salute an officer who is not in uniform; one instead stands at attention. But when John reveals that he is, in fact, an officer, the soldier instantly salutes him.
Watch the top of your screen closely when John climbs out of the cage in a frenzy, pacing back and forth as he talks to Sherlock. At one point, the camera cranes too high and you can see the studio lights and edge of the set.
When Sherlock is trying to discover Barrymore’s password, he finds a photograph of a young Barrymore with his father and says he has a Distinguished Service Order ribbon that places him in the 1980s. However, Barrymore is not wearing the 1980s DSO but the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, which replaced the DSO and wasn’t issued until 1995.

THE MIND PALACE

In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” Sherlock’s thought process is referred to as his “mind palace” for the first time in the series. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes gives a detailed explanation of how his mind works, and it has been quoted in part by nearly every incarnation of the character since:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Holmes’s explanation is in response to Watson, soon after meeting him, inexplicably drawing up a list of everything the great detective doesn’t know, including astronomy. Later, in “The Five Orange Pips,” Holmes brings up the idea again and explains, “A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”

Leave it to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock to convert Holmes’s “brain-attic” into a palace. In season one, the mind palace is pictured as a series of words and phrases that appear onscreen (as when Sherlock is investigating the corpse of the woman dressed in pink), or a series of maps and road signs (as when he and John are chasing the taxicab through the streets of London). In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” we actually watch from the outside as Sherlock enters his mind palace, and we see the stream-of-consciousness of his brain patterns moving from one item to the next. His eyes are closed, and his hands flick away the unnecessary words and images while reorganizing in the air the ones he needs. And when he finally hits upon the answer, his entire body jolts, as if he didn’t see the solution coming. In season three, the writers take it one step further: rather than keep the audience on the outside, we’re invited inside the mind palace and see its corridors, rooms, and doorways, and the prominent items — and people — that reside there.

Sherlock’s mnemonic patterns are a method of loci, a system of building up a mind palace or memory palace that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. The idea is simple — imagine a series of rooms, and commit certain items to those rooms. As one walks through the memory palace of one’s mind, one can remember every item stored in there simply by looking at the various shelves and drawers where the items have been stored. Participants in memory competitions use the technique; they are asked to remember a series of numbers or playing cards, and then to repeat them back in the same order. By pre-assigning a mental image to each card or number and a place in the memory palace, the best competitors are able to do it quickly and easily. The technique is used and taught by British mentalist Derren Brown, who is a longtime friend of Mark Gatiss and appears in Sherlock’s third season.