Ronald Howard's Final Problem

 Sometimes, even a complete fool can point you to facts you never saw where there . . .

I don't know if you listen to a podcast called Sherlock Holmes Is Real, being the sort of Sherlockian with a level of intelligence that are the typical readers of this blog, but their latest episode "The Footage of the Tyrant's Daughter," called my attention to something I had never realized before. And maybe you hadn't noticed it either.

I was never a tremendous fan of the Ronald Howard TV series, Sherlock Holmes, that ran from October 16, 1954 to October 17, 1955, with thirty-nine half-hour episodes. The show was as much comedy as drama, with Watson and Lestrade played for laughs, as well as a lot of Holmes's clients. Like all shows of the time, there wasn't much continuity, and Sherlock Holmes featured more original scripts than adaptations and a whole lot of pretending France was England.

The final episode The Case of the Tyrant's Daughter was the focus of the Sherlock Holmes Is Real "experts" this week, and I think there was something that they missed completely as they became distracted by the show's end credits and some lower case letters there. And that was that they were dealing with the final time that viewers saw Ronald Howard's version of Sherlock Holmes.

One might even say it was that Holmes's "Final Problem."

For the very last time TV audiences saw that Sherlock Holmes, he was sitting looking sick to his stomach after accidentally drinking tea mixed with a rare Egyptian poison.

He has poisoned himself, and the last thing we see on screen, the last image from the whole TV run of the show is Watson's panic.

Was this season cliffhanger, which was never resolved, this Sherlock's "Final Problem?" Was "The Case of the Tyrant's Daughter" secretly the "Dying Detective," only this time he really dies?

Perhaps the tone of the show was just wacky enough that audiences took Holmes's self-poisoning as just another comic riff to get Watson over-excited, but Holmes doesn't seem to be faking internal issues from the poison. There's not Professor Moriarty in this TV series. No arch-villain other than Sherlock Holmes himself, who seems to have done himself in. With no second season to rectify matters, Sherlock Holmes leaves us like this year's CBS Watson -- with the thought that the main character may now just be dead, and no official assurance that things were otherwise.

I hope the folks on the Sherlock Holmes Is Real podcast take up this issue, though I shudder to think what nonsense they'll be coming up with to pile on it. But I do have to thank them for pointing out Sherlock Holmes's self-poisoning end to that series, which I certainly hadn't noticed before.