'Sherlock' recap – The Hounds Of Baskerville

By Ian Cullen Jan 11, 2012, 23:28 GMT

Review: This new take on the classic ‘Hound Of The Baskervilles’ story gives off a new slant where experimental drugs and genetic engineering take centre stage.

Synopsis: Sherlock and John investigate the truth about the monstrous creature which apparently killed their client’s father.

Review: This new take on the classic ‘Hound Of The Baskervilles’ story gives off a new slant where experimental drugs and genetic engineering take centre stage.

We still have the eerie foggy moors where the house attacks and such, and like in the original story, the hound is considered to be more local folklore due to the fact that it hasn’t attacked in 20 years.

The episode begins with Sherlock Holmes who is rather bored and in dire need of a cigarette.

Cumberbatch shows us a much more manic Holmes than usual as he systematically tears his front room apart in front of Watson in search of his secret stash of cigarettes.

His boredom is brought to an end when a frantic Henry Knight pays Holmes a visit to ask him to investigate his father's murder, which happened on the Moors near Baskerville 20 years prior.

After an initial consultation, Holmes and Watson follow Henry Knight back to Baskerville and the game as Holmes would say “is on.”

After Holmes encounters the hound during a late night walk with Henry Knight on the moors, he pretty much completely breaks down to a point where he refuses to acknowledge to Henry that he saw the hound.

Yet the next day when he sat with Dr. Watson, Holmes acknowledges that he did in fact see the hound and admits that he does not like not being in control of his faculties - yet he is completely stumped by the case.

As the episode draws to a close it is revealed that the hound is a vision that is brought on via the dispersal of drugs via military mines, which Henry had been unwittingly triggering during his evening walks along the moors.

The murderer being a former friend of Henry’s father, who was working on drugs that could be dispersed under battle field conditions in order to disorientate enemy solders. The hounds in the episodes title being a clever anagram for the scientific project that the murder was a part of.

All in all, this was a pretty good episode if not a little predictable in this update of the classic story for the 21st century.

We get a fantastic performance from Benedict Cumberbatch who shows us a more human side to Sherlock, and as ever Martin Freeman is absolutely solid as John Watson.

The guest performance from Russell Tovey as the distraught and tormented Henry Knight (Who would be Henry Baskerville in the original story) was fantastic.

While not as good as last week's episode, this update of The Hound Of The Baskervilles was fairly good and executed fairly well, but a part of me can’t help but think that it lost a little something with the more science-fiction spin that this particular story has been given.

Ian Cullen is the owner of www.scifipulse.net and also hosts a weekly podcast that can be found at www.sfp-now.com you can follow him on Twitter @SciFiPulse