A Purist's Apology to Sherlock

At some point over the summer my girlfriend and I went for a drink in a quiet little pub to the south of St. James' Park.  After leaving we decided to stroll through the park as it is quite lovely in the waning summer sunlight and all the tourists had gone home (plus I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the headless ghost of the lake but no such joy there).  As we crossed over the Mall toward the steps up to Haymarket, I was astonished to see some nutter on a motorcycle hurtling down said steps.  In fact I was horrified.
"What is that idiot doing?" I gasped as his bike bounced and tumbled down the steps.
"We'll go a different way," said my girlfriend, cautiously.  The motorcyclist - who even had a female passenger hanging onto his waste, the swine - disappeared around a corner.  Then he did it again!  Yet again he bounded down those steps with no regard for the safety of us or his passenger.  I was seething.  With the assumption that he'd never do it a third time I took my girlfriend's hand and carried on towards the steps.
Before I could start up them, a man in a high-vis jacket - presumably a policeman - crossed my path and stopped me.
"Sorry mate," he said.  "Can you just wait here please?"
"I'm just trying to get home." I huffed.
"Won't be a minute," said the man apologetically.
"What's going on?" I asked.  "Is it to do with that moron on the bike?"
"We're just filming something actually," the man replied.
My annoyance flipped to mild - but still annoyed - curiosity.  "Oh," I said.  "What are you filming?"
"Sherlock Holmes."
Suddenly I was not annoyed anymore.  "Wow," my girlfriend and I said simultaneously.
"He's not here," laughed the man, presumably referring to Benedict Cumberbatch.  "It's a stuntman.  If you don't mind waiting he's going to come down one more time and then you can go through."
"Not a problem," I beamed.  It wasn't the first time I'd stumbled upon the Sherlock location shoot (I was lucky to catch a glimpse of Martin Freeman running into the show's makeshift 221B a couple of years before), but I was still excited to be seeing it.
Having already learned that the third series of Sherlock was due to adapt The Sign of Four, Arthur Conan Doyle's second full-length novel starring the great detective, I instantly deduced (wink) that this scene - of Sherlock Holmes and a female companion hurtling through the London night - must be taken from that episode, as The Sign of Four is the most exciting, city-spanning nocturnal adventure Holmes has featured in, and it also introduces the character of Mary Morstan, Dr. Watson's eventual wife.  Sure, there were better stories in the Doyle canon, but The Sign of Four is unrivaled in its sheer sense of adventure.  There are locked-room murders, mysterious treks through darkened city streets, stolen treasure and a night-time boat chase along the Thames.  It has so much going on for a rather light read and I couldn't wait to see what Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss were to do with it in their modern retelling.
Fast forward six or seven months and it turns out I was wrong.  The motorcycle scene (which my girlfriend and I eagerly watched in the absurd hope that we'd ourselves turn up as blurry extras) took place in the first episode of the series - The Empty Hearse (a loose retelling of The Empty House).  It was all as enjoyable as ever, but an arrogant part of me was a little disappointed that I was wrong.  Furthermore, The Empty Hearse is a very, very loose retelling of its source material.  Beyond Holmes' dramatic return from the dead and his dispatching of how he managed to fake it, there is really nothing in common.  And that's fine - putting a fresh spin on the old classics is what makes Sherlock so popular and I love seeing how things are rejigged or reinterpreted for a modern setting.  But the stories Moffat and Gatiss have adapted in the past weren't so liberally detached from their origins - The Hounds of Baskerville was broadly a straight up adaptation with a few appropriate changes, and even The Reichenbach Fall, beyond its location change from the mountains of Switzerland to the heart of London, weaves in and out of the beats of Doyle's classic short story The Final Problem.  They take the stories in new directions, but they haven't before junked everything but the title and a few in-jokes.
I loved The Empty Hearse - it didn't matter a jot to me that it was so different because the episode really was about Sherlock's return and how he faked his death.  The rest was just, as he put it, window dressing to bulk out the 90-minute runtime.  But I cautiously assumed, with the drama of his return out of the way, that normal service would be resumed with The Sign of Three, the promised adaptation of my favourite Holmes novel.

I was wrong again.  If anything, The Sign of Three (they always tweak the title a bit) has less in common with the original than The Empty Hearse did.  There are sporadic nods to the story - though mainly only concerning names of characters who are otherwise completely unrelated to their Doyle counterparts - but once again it's a completely original story.  Where Doyle's novel concerns Miss Morstan's mysterious acquisition of priceless pearls and the strange disappearance of her father that leads to a cross-city ramble, The Sign of Three is centred primarily around Watson and Morstan's wedding (which admittedly occurs in the novel also, but only as a couple of lines at the end).  Holmes deduces the attempted murder of John's old army general during his best man's speech, and the rest of the episode is a non-linear series of flashbacks to events leading up to the wedding.  There really are no narrative beats communal of the two.
Now you may think that this is just another internet nerd rant about butchering source material by some purist.  But during my grumbled viewing of the episode, something occurred to me about myself.  The problem isn't the relaxed view the writers have taken to faithfulness - it's me, and my own expectations hindering the experience.  I sat through an entire episode waiting for it to become at least remotely familiar, and in doing so I missed a compelling, unique Holmes story that is inventive in its premise and veers between hilarious and dramatic in its execution.  Holmes as a best man, Holmes getting drunk at a stag party and stifling his own deductive powers as a result, Holmes admitting he loves dancing - that's where Sherlock is at its best; placing Holmes in situations where Doyle never thought to place him and watching him respond in his detached, inhuman way.  This went over my head as I impatiently waited to see something I've already read twenty times and seen portrayed in countless old TV adaptations.  What is wrong with me?  Last night's episode, as it finished and I retroactively admitted that it was a good one, taught me not to be such a purist and to learn to love a bold retelling - it's much better that way, and a note-for-note adaptation will never live up to the expectations of those who have read the original - I sat through innumerable awful versions of Wuthering Heights learning that.  And the episode did wrap up in a neat and clever conclusion worthy of Doyle at his finest.  Furthermore, if I have to be so superficial and ignore creativity for the sake of geek-placation, the episode did revolve around a sprawling nocturnal journey through the city - in the shape of Watson's ill-fated stag party wherein Holmes gets more inebriated than we thought possible, with hilarious consequences.  And that is a far more loving a nod to the original than any tedious, word-for-word transfer from page to screen.
Sorry Sherlock.  I'll be good next week, I promise.