The snow day story.

Of all the Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Blue Carbuncle" is probably the one most associated with a particular season. And yet, as Christopher Morley once pronounced in the first line of his introduction to that tale, "Surely one of the most unusual things in the world: a Christmas Story without slush." Not only without slush . . . without snow, as well.

Oh, it's bitter cold, and there's bundling up, but snow? 

No, if you want snow, you have to go to but one story in the  Canon of Sherlock Holmes: "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet." From the fourth sentence: "It was a bright, crisp February morning, and the snow of the day before still lay deep upon the ground, shimmering brightly in the wintry sun," it's all about the snow.

The hansom cabs are driving more slowly through the snow. Sherlock Holmes takes care to knock the snow off his shoes over the client's doormat, only to get them more covered in the stuff when he's out looking for clues. And those clues? Is there a better time for finding tracks that tell a story than after a fresh snow? And Sherlock Holmes knows exactly how to read that story, embossed in that cold, white page.

As we sled into February with snow on the mind of much of America, there could be no better time to warm up that mug of hot cocoa and sit down with the case that came four stories after our non-Christmas-y Christmas story, "Blue Carbuncle." Is it a coincidence that "Beryl Coronet" has the same initials as that other story of the winter season?

Del Gruner versus Charles Augustus Magnussen.

Two third season TV shows with a main character going by the name of "Sherlock Holmes. Two third season villains forced to try to impress audiences that already had Moriarty. And two TV versions of Canonical characters whose modern names have been changed just a bit to make them distinctly new incarnations.

Elementary's Del Gruner. Sherlock's Charles Augustus Magnussen.

As I've considered last night's climax to the season-long Kitty Winter involvement on CBS's Elementary throughout the morning after, I've found it instructive to look at its villain, Del Gruner in comparison to BBC Sherlock's Charles Augustus Magnussen.

In Conan Doyle's original work, it is hard to say who is the more repulsive villain, Baron Adelbert Gruner or Charles Augustus Milverton. They both ruin lives. They both are all about the documentation of sins and things best kept hidden. And they both get Watson's blood up.

But in their recent TV incarnations, one finds distinct differences that show definite traits in the productions that presented them.

Del Gruner has kept a woman prisoner and burned her with a branding iron. (Not shown.)

Charles Augustus Magnussen licks an unwilling woman's face to show dominance. (Shown.)

Del Gruner grab's Joan Watson's arm so hard that it leaves bruises.

Charles Augustus Magnussen flicks John Watson's face with his index finger.

Del Gruner's twist is that he has a secret child by a woman he raped, which proves to be his undoing.

Charles Augustus Magnussen's twist is that he has a secret mind palace of store blackmail information, which proves to be his undoing.

Del Gruner has his head horribly burned with acid after the show's consulting detective allows his apprentice to do what she wants to this man who threatened the detective's friend.

Charles Augustus Magnussen has his head shot clean through by the show's consulting detective, as he is a man who threatened the detective's friend.

One drama uses the language of the over-used stock serial killer genre to mundanely recreate a character we'd like to know more about.

One drama uses minor interpersonal violations to viscerally communicate just how repulsive a character who we knew was repulsive in the Conan Doyle story . . . but man!

And while the nominations are still far off for one of these villain's drama, the other helped win his episode seven Emmy awards and an additional five nominations for excellence in television.

And while Del Gruner seems to have ended mid-season, leaving one to wonder what will happen the rest of the year (Kitty becomes a villain herself and allies with Jamie Moriarty?), Magnussen's finish was the climax to his season (and set up a return of Jim Moriarty?).

It's hard being the villain that's not Moriarty. Harder still without a deft hand holding the pen that works out your schemes for you. Who comes out on top in a Gruner/Magnussen contest is surely a thing for each of us to decide, but given all of the above, I know who I'm picking, despite his inability to recognize proper toilet facilities. Your opinion may differ.

E3:12. Wasted Dels and wasted nights.

Well, there were about three other things of Sherlockian significance I could have written about this week, had time allowed. Yet time did not allow. And Thursday is here. And with Thursday comes that one hour I know will produce a blog, even though it will never be one of the better essays that appears here, because it isn't thought out in advance, meditated upon, or worked through to its logical conclusion.

It's just Elementary watching time, and the reactions and random thoughts that come along with that. And even though when life gives you lemons, you can make lemonade by adding enough sugar and water, and you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear (though I'm sure someone would find than an acceptable challenge and pull it off), well . . . . 

The vampire Lestat, Dorian Gray, Carl Kolchak, Adelbert Gruner . . . Stuart Townsend has played some pretty wonderful characters, sometime in better productions than others. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example, such promise, yet such a failure in the eyes of many. Not Townsend's fault. Queen of the Damned, a first quality vampire romp in its own right, yet forever a follow-up to Tom Cruise deciding he needed to play a vampire in a movie with all the big-budget trimmings wrapped around a badly-cast lead. And now, Stuart Townsend gets to follow in the footsteps of so many who talents get all the use of an actor in a second Star Wars trilogy.

Hold up, Lucy Liu is wearing a scarf and hat like the fourth Doctor going to a funeral in a mini-skirt.

Sorry, that was just weird. But as Kitty Winter prepares her acid, and Joan Watson is coming dangerously close to Del Gruner, one wonders where this will wind up going. The first half was rather uninspired, hence the musings upon Stuart Townsend above. Which means I'm not wondering from suspense, but just because I know the Canonical outcome of the Kitty Winter/Adelbert Gruner relationship, and wonder whether it will be echoed here. At half-time, I'm betting not, as they really haven't portrayed Gruner with enough loathsome detail to justify an acid-dousing catharsis. And they have to give Joan Watson a little more to do, just because it's Elementary. but I'm betting Mr. Elementary stops her in the end.

Well, Kitty got a little near facial disfigurement in with a branding iron, and guess who stopped her?

Still wondering why they showed the heroin packets during the "previously on" segment and trying to figure out what the Gruner/Kitty/Mr. Elementary torture and death possibilities have to do with . . . ah, I think meeting Kitty kept Mr. E. from doing heroin again back in London. And off he goes with that weird Jason Statham walk to let Kitty decide what to do with her once-tormentor.

And a couple of actual Canonical details later, Kitty Winter heads for the airport to depart Elementary, taking Olivia Lovibond with her and the hour of Elementary as well.

Good-bye, Miss Kitty. Guess we had to know you were just a temp. Good job at fulfilling your proper destiny, even if it was an unexpectedly sleepy time getting there.

Multiple media seeds planted in a junior high mind.

Early autumn 1970.

That is when I first encountered Sherlock Holmes. But unlike so many other Sherlockians who have a definite love-at-first-sight moment and subsequent tale to tell, mine has two first meetings, and to tell the truth, I'm not sure which came first. But they were both in early autumn of 1970.

One was reading my first Sherlock Holmes story in an eighth grade literature book. The story was "The Speckled Band" and it was crammed in there with tales by the likes of O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, and D.H. Lawrence. Shoving so many literary styles into a pre-pubescent brain at a time when I was making my pleasure-read transition from books on UFOs and stage magic to the science fiction of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov was a bit of a "pearls before swine" gesture. I didn't take to Conan Doyle's Victorian style at all, as much as I wanted to know more about the legendary Sherlock Holmes.

Around that same time, and possibly before, I was sitting in the dark of Fairfield, Illinois's Strand Theater with my dime Coke and fifteen-cent bag of popcorn when a preview for Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes came on the screen. (Side note: My ticket was still thirty-five cents, as I had not yet appeared in the junior high graduation photos the movie theater owners kept in the ticket booth to see who now needed to be paying full price.) As the great Miklos Rozsa score rampaged all over the sound system, the three minute preview built it's way to a climax featuring an attack by the Loch Ness Monster. Add in Christopher Lee's appearance, and it flipped a whole lot of my switches. (Hammer films, particularly Lee's Dracula movies, were the Strand's Saturday afternoon matinee bread and butter back then.)

Due to the fact I was a junior high kid with little control over my life in those days, I would not see that film until five years later, but a seed was planted. I'd get to the Canon in my later high school days and eventually a joyous reunion with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in college. But I've always wondered: Would I have gotten back to Conan Doyle without the seven-per-cent solution of Private Life that I had injected in that fall of 1970?

It's hard to separate the influence from the Sherlock Holmes of TV and films from that of the original literary Sherlock at this point. We cannot strip all of those adaptations and actors from our history and know what the Sherlockian world would look like now if Doyle alone was a solitary Atlas holding up our fan world. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar probably wouldn't be going for cocktails with the Baker Street Irregulars doing a Jonny Lee Miller impression, that's for sure.

Revisiting my Sherlockian origins this morning, I have to laugh at a certain line repeated twice in that Private Life preview, which now seem like a post-hypnotic suggestion, implanted in my young mind for a day when I would be blogging about Holmes and CBS would come out with a certain TV series. (Italics are added by me, but since the line was spoken, who knows if they were there in 1970?)

"The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was anything but Elementary!"

Yes, it was. Yes. It was.

Girls Gone Baker Street.

At what point does a written work move from having adaptations to having interpretations?

Whatever that point is, we're definitely there with our friend Sherlock Holmes.

As my personal struggles to deal with CBS's Elementary as anything Sherlockianly viable have evidenced, we don't all share the same vision of that creature with the label "Sherlock Holmes" attached to him, and given our increased ability to give those visions creative expression . . . well, interpretations are going to abound in the years ahead.

The new web series, Baker Street, featuring Jane Watson and her companion Sherlock Holmes is not just a "gender bent" version of Holmes and Watson -- it also has a certain sort of "fan bent" versioning to it as well. In the past couple of decades, we've seen the rise of an over-sympathetic attitude toward Dr. Watson and an almost antipathy toward Sherlock Holmes that seems to stem from a view of Watson as the long-suffering "girl" in their "couple," and Holmes as the rude, non-understanding "boy." And as the movie Without A Clue seemed to prophecy, the higher Watson gets raised up to someone special in his own right, the more Sherlock Holmes has to be lowered to that status I've characterized as "broken Holmes." Mix those two concepts, and you can see a bit of where Baker Street originates from in our cultural zeitgeist.

Baker Street is a well-made series, primarily a two-woman show, and will definitely make you ponder your own views of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in this day of interpretation over adaptation. Jane Watson is the main character, narrator, and troubled hero of the piece. Sherlock Holmes is her nerdy little room-mate whose place in this world is something both Jane, and the rest of us (even those who think they know Sherlock Holmes) are unsure of. Both actresses are well-cast, and their relationship is much more antagonistic than Holmes and Watson of the Canon . . . which one wonders is a part of the difference between a male pair of fellow lodgers and a female one.

Jane Watson's relationship with the professor she works with is a little creepy due to their age difference (and was there any doubt as to what his last name would be?), and her video explanation of working with Holmes while doing yoga in the third episode is extremely distracting to anyone with a traditional XY lifestyle. There is more of Gilmore Girls to the series than Starsky and Hutch (Anybody got a more current action buddy cop show reference? That's just sadly dated.) as the show is more dialogue based than fights-and-chases, but that seems to suit it just fine.

As all this may intimate, I'm not entirely comfortable with Sherlock Holmes and Watson as presented in Baker Street, due to whatever age/gender/taste issues I've gained over the years, but I'll be back to watch it if and when it returns. It's a very good effort and definitely worth trying out.

E3: 11. More Elementary than usual.

"The Problem of Thor Bridge" in four minutes -- hey, Elementary is doing the Canon! Or did back in November of 2013. This morning, as I went to the on-demand to catch up on this week's episode, I wound up watching an episode of Elementary that I apparently missed quite a while back. Maybe it was the Thanksgiving holiday of that year, or maybe it was the rampant disgust at what the show had done to Mycroft Holmes in that year, but what I found was that I had actually missed one of the better, more focused episodes of the show.

Spinning off "Thor Bridge," the episode called "On the Line," builds a pretty good story on top of a Canonical inspiration and actually uses the oddness of NYPD allowing him to work with them as a part of its tale. And it's just Mr. Elementary and Joan Watson, working well together. No idiot version of Mycroft, no cute and cuddly version of Kitty WInter, no random trivia rolled in as plot points. Just a solid story, spinning off an actual Canonical tale and ending with a solution inspired by a totally different Sherlock Holmes story. If every episode of Elementary was like this one, my opinion of the show might have been slightly different. Why the on-demand service decided to serve up this little gem to me this week before the latest serial killer to cross Mr. Elementary's path, I'm not sure. But on to this week's episode "The Illustrious Client."

Canonical title, yes, but the "Previously on Elementary" starts with that ridiculous Kitty-Winter-versus-Joan-Watson singlestick fight and follows with all those details that makes one go, "Oh, yeah, this is how this show regularly goes." And we start with Joan's new job at an insurance company. But this is Kitty Winter's episode and Ophelia Lovibond immediately has me regretting the "no cute and cuddly version of Kitty Winter" comment earlier in this rant. The lady can definitely grab audience attention when she wants to.

And both that November show "On the Line" and this week's "The Illustrious Client" were written by Jason Tracey, who has proven himself the best of the Elementary writers since his first outing "Snow Angels." And both stories feature imprisoned women . . . only this time the release of those prisoners isn't the end of things. Kitty and Joan's work with a human trafficking victim start taking the show to a darker, more serious place, but then the bandying of the name "Simon DeMerville" takes a Sherlockian a bit out of the story for a moment. The standard Elementary use of a Canonical name ("DeMerville") with a character who has no similarity to the one in the original Sherlock Holmes story is more of a distraction than a help at moments like this.

And then, we get Joan in her new job with her new boss, Del Gruner, talking insurance, which takes one a little bit further from the women's tale. Unlike that 2013 episode, which started at the end of the Canon's "Thor Bridge" and grew from there, "Illustrious Client" and Gruner just have a Sherlockian sitting around waiting for the moment when they connect Gruner to the crimes that Kitty Winter was a victim of. Watching Kitty, Joan, Mr. Elementary, and the NYPD struggling to get to that connection adds a degree of frustration to the viewing, but having Kitty Winter rough up Violet DeMerville off-screen helps soothe that little issue.

Not that I'm in favor of woman-on-woman violence, mind you, but we all know how frustrating the Canonical Violet DeMerville was to Kitty Winter. A few whacks with the single-stick might have made for the stuff of a fun "Illustrious Client" fan-fic, so the implying of same here is not completely unwelcome.

When Kitty Winter finally recognizes Gruner's voice as that of her tormentor, Ophelia Lovibond delivers another great performance (both her scenes with Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller in this show always seem to elevate things just a bit). But at that point, the show is suddenly over, and one realizes this was all just set-up for going after Gruner full-on next week.

So, as this week's Elementary is just half a story, it's a little hard to render a verdict on it until then. The wikipedia episode guide says next week we get an entirely different writer . . . the show's creator Rob Dougherty. The guy who gave us idiot Mycroft, blew up the contents of 221B Baker Street, and generally . . . well, I will ere on the side of kindness and shut up now.

On it goes.

The unspecial "making of" special.

At this point in the march of my years, there are a good many things whose existence I remember the beginning of. Big things like cell phones and the world wide web, and little things like felt-tip pens and taco salads. One thing I definitely recall the popular rise of was the "making of" special.

The "making of" special may have had earlier versions in featurettes and promotional films, but it really didn't hit its stride until George Lucas created a sensational little movie called Star Wars. Between its enormous fan following and all the innovative special effects, there was enough material and ratings hopes for an hour-long TV special, and once Star Wars got the ball rolling, other big new movies with special effects like Jurassic Park made the "making of" special a part of their promotional toolbox.

And then came video tapes and DVDs, with that wonderful potential for the "DVD extra." Since DVDs had all that extra space, movie-makers had incentive to come up with all sorts of added material to help DVD sales, and the "making of" special was an easy thing to add there. (Now that we have streaming, all those added features are, sadly, going out of style again. Sometimes new tech takes away as well as gives.)

And all along the "making of" special timeline, I have avoided those bastards.

I love movies. I love the magic fictional worlds they create. I don't need such things of the dinosaurs or flying broomsticks of those magic fictions explained to me as having been done by robots and wires. I know that it's trickery, and I want to be tricked. I don't go into work the next day and go, "HOLY SHIT! THERE'S DINOSAURS ON THIS ISLAND AND THEY WANTED IT TO BE AN AMUSEMENT PARK, BUT THE DINOSAURS KILL PEOPLE!" but for a couple of hours, it's fun to exist in that world, and hold the memories for a little joy later on.

Seeing the robot guts of those lovely dinosaurs can ruin those much-loved memories, so I have always just left them alone. But time marches on, and things change. Boy, do they change . . . .

With the rise of our new internet connectivity, people have become very, very concerned about our newfound social taboo, the spoiler. "***SPOILER ALERT!***" warnings became de rigeur, and boy, would you hear about it if you dared give away a plot twist to a fan ahead of their viewing of some anticipated movie or TV show.  And yet, and yet, and yet, the rabid fan desire to get to new material ahead of anyone else has now given us #Setlock, the paparazzi of a single TV show.

We don't get to see the next installment of BBC Sherlock, the Christmas special, until a full twelve months from now, and yet we're getting a single-picture-by-single-picture "making of" special from that fan paparazzi as the special gets filmed, leaking into our Twitter, Facebook, etc.  feeds whether we like it or not. Back when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman were just filming random street scenes in London the last time out, they were easy to ignore. London streets are London streets, nothing distinctive, nothing giving things away.

But whatever is going on now, with some definitely distinctive costuming, would have been a wonderful treat had we gotten served said delicacy with all the presentation its creators intended. But after all the theory and speculation that fueled Sherlock fandom during the post-Reichenbach-Fall year, a fan activity seems to have taken hold that has carried over into the current hiatus. More speculation, more grabbing at these #Setlock clues. But do we really need it or care about it this time around?

I know it seems to be irritating some of the cast and crew a little more this time out. And I know that the pictures crossed a threshold with me this morning, as someone who has never enjoyed the "making of" special and avoided them all my life. Suddenly we're getting a very unspecial "making of" special produced and delivered real-time by amateurs, and that's just not cool.

Not cool at all.