The longer episodes are generally disappointing
Although I love the whole series, and I hold every single episode close to my heart as one of my own, I have come away from this return visit with the nagging feeling that the five feature-length episodes are probably about the weakest in the whole series. The best of the bunch, ‘The Sign of Four’, benefits from a great villain in John Thaw, but as mentioned earlier, what is meant to be a high point of the drama – a night-time riverboat chase along the Thames – never quite gets going, and flattens the overall impact of the episode. The first disappointing instalment in the entire run is ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. This is a shame as expectations for the most famous Holmes story are inevitably high. The first hour is pretty good, but it doesn’t sustain, and the incidental death of the villain is poorly handled. In a later interview, Jeremy Brett himself expressed regret about the episode, feeling that it could have so much better. Although ‘The Master Blackmailer’ follows the story of ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ with a fair degree of fidelity, and is directed with visual flair by Peter Hammond, the deus ex machina ending, in which Holmes and Watson are bystanders to events rather than shaping them, is dramatically unsatisfactory. The weakness is Conan Doyle’s originally, and perhaps a bolder rewrite could have found a way for Holmes to orchestrate the story’s resolution. The supernatural and mystical elements brought into ‘The Last Vampyre’ and ‘The Eligible Bachelor’ are, rightly, considered controversial, and they do not sit comfortably with the rest of the canon. It doesn’t help that ‘The Eligible Bachelor’ is based on ‘The Noble Bachelor’, one of Conan Doyle’s weaker stories. It is fleshed out beyond all recognition into an instalment that can be enjoyed as melodrama, but is hard to swallow as anything else.
