An all-nude Canon.

I had forgotten about Mycroft.

Through a curious chain of events, I found myself watching Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows just the other evening. And as I was enjoying becoming reacquainted with how charming Robert Downey Jr. can be as Sherlock Holmes, I saw something my mind had apparently blocked from convenient memory:

Mycroft Holmes in the nude.

As much mention has been made of naked Sherlock and nude Irene in the Sherlock episode "A Scandal in Belgravia," few really want to bring back the thought of Mycroft's bare-bottomed encounter with Mary Morstan-Watson in the Holmes home. But the thing of it is, now that we've seen three nude Canonical characters across two adaptations, the collector impulse in the Sherlockian brain suddenly is inspired to want more.

Of course, some characters take more easily to naked than others. Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes both have their clothes off in the first Downey Sherlock Holmes. And Gabrielle Valladon, the almost-Irene of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has a scene that's quite "rewarding," according to Holmes, making up for her not-quite-Canonical nature. Irene is an adventuress and Sherlock Holmes is quite beyond social proprieties when it suits him, so those two don't seem quite the big deal.

But I think it's Mycroft who is the dam-burster that truly sets the idea of an all-nude Canon in motion. It's just seems so unlike him. If he can run 'round the house in the buff, then why not Mrs. Hudson? Jabez Wilson? Helen Stoner? Why not an Oh! Calcutta! style version of . . . hmmm . . . The Hound of the Baskervilles? Really, it does have one of the more gender-balanced casts in the Canon, and enough implied and otherwise references to various sexual relationships without going full-on Gruner.

If Inspector Clouseau can have an all-nude segment of one of his greatest cases (A Shot in the Dark will forever remain one of the movie classics of my childhood.), then why not Sherlock Holmes? If he's modest, like Clouseau, he can always walk around with his violin, as Clouseau did a guitar. (Not passing any instrument-related judgments there, of course.)

The original Canon, of course, just gives us a lot of naked feet, some naked eyes, a couple naked truths, and one naked knife, but that was the Victorian era after all. This is the . . . oh, yeah, the post-Janet-Jackson-Super-Bowl era . . . perhaps we're going to have to wait another hundred years for the all-nude Canon.

And if it's a hundred years before we get another naked Mycroft too, well, maybe that's okay.

(And yes, ladies, I'm sure fat old guys are sexy, too. Just not to me. But who knows, I might get bored in my old age. I mean, as it is I'm ending blogs with rambling parenthetical statements, and who knows what that's the first step toward? G'nite, everybody!)