Alana: You should definitely check out YSH and I SWEAR to god I saw that same pilot . . . As for the canonicity of Holmes, I think at some point he stopped being a character on the written page and became a cultural entity that we all own. How many people have you met who even know he’s a story from a novel? Very few nowadays do . . . and yet everyone knows who Sherlock Holmes is.

Zia: It was SO GOOD! I’m so glad you liked it to! And I DID enjoy the new movie. It’s not terribly deep but the choices were interesting, and not entirely off kilter. Holmes is, after all, supposed to be a martial arts expert. And I particularly enjoyed Jude Law’s Watson. He did a fantastic job. Let me know what you thought of it if you saw it!

Gillian: ME TOO! And I adore Midsomer Murders. I am going to have to IMDB him and see if I’ve seen that episode . . . Thanks for the heads up!

I am still yet to see the latest incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, but I suspect I’ll love it.

The first Sherlock Holmes film I remember impacting me was, embarassingly enough, a TV pilot called alternatingly 1994 Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes Returns. It was a time travel sort of story — Holmes cryogenically freezes himself to return in modern day to solve crimes — and I remember a poignant moment when he realizes that the whole wing of forensics has been developed, and that his method is no longer so unique as it once was. That pathos always appealed to me — that even in his heyday, Holmes is sort of alone in the world, because there’s no one like him, and that were what makes him special removed from him, he’d have to confront it — and I think the new film captured that pretty clearly in the Watson/Holmes relationship. Now, whether that’s cannon or just too much emotion for the devotees to the short stories is, of course, up for debate!