User Reviews

A fantastic piece of deception by Holmes. We students of the mighty Sherlock Holmes guessed what he was up to when he lured that evil man into his trap and it was a less convulated episode than most of the others. But it was its simplicity that made it brilliant!

Pretty enjoyable entry. As the expiring victim of the dreaded Sumatran fever (or whatever it is), Jeremy Brett seems to be having an awfully good time, overacting outrageously, his make up suggesting not the face of a sick person but a living skull. He warns Watson to stay away from him because it's contagious, and begins muttering about "Oysters, how they do breed." He's losing his wits. He goes on about how surprised he is that the ocean floor is not one solid bed of oysters by now.

He's right that there's something uncanny about oysters, even though he's faking the symptoms. Oysters open and close according to a circadian cycle -- open in the daytime, closed at night. (Or vice versa, I'm not sure.) If you crate up a bunch of oysters on the West Coast and seal the box so no light penetrates, the oysters continue to open and close on Pacific Time. I don't think they adjust to Daylight Savings. If you take that sealed crate of oysters, ship it to Japan, and keep it closed, the oysters will at first keep Pacific Time but eventually will adjust to the circadian cycle of Japan. How do they KNOW?

Best looking actress in this episode: Susannah Harker, no relation to the vampire guy. Watson describes her as "a handsome woman," and she is, but, and here is one of the delights of the series, she's not TOO handsome. She's not as stunning as, say, Elizabeth Hurley and not sexy at all. She's just right for the part. The casting people could almost always be depended upon to exercise the nicest of choices. Here, they did a splendid job with the sadistic and greedy villain too -- Jonathan Hyde as the treacherous guy who poisons his cousin in order to inherit the mansion and kick the handsome widow and her children out. What a beast, but until he stands sneering over the supposedly dying Sherlock Holmes (who has actually trapped him), you can't tell how evil he truly is. And he must be evil if he kicks Susannah Harker out of the mansion. Any normal man would be happy to have her around.

A nice job by all concerned.

I was watching this episode, and was at the point where Mrs. Hudson had gone to fetch Dr. Watson because Holmes had become deathly ill, when I was called away from the TV and wasn't able to return to watch the remaining portion until some days afterward. No matter, because while I was away I had figured out who the murderer of Victor Savage was.....or so I thought.

Victor's boredom with a clearly lucrative career in finance, the delusion that he was really meant to be poet, and his resort to opium under the illusion that it would facilitate his creativity were all portending his family's slide downward to poverty and his own premature death. His cousin Culverton Smith, who would inherit the Savage mansion and who knows what else upon Victor's death, encouraged these air-headed fantasies because Culverton Smith had everything to gain by it.

But if Culverton Smith had everything to gain by Victor's premature death, Victor's wife Adelaide and their children had everything to lose. I couldn't believe she would just stand by and allow her husband's disastrous mid-life crisis jeopardize her children's future and her own luxurious life-style (the terms of the inheritance provided that she would be left with only a "modest" income when Culverton Smith got everything else). What, she was only going to reprimand this guy and make him feel unwelcome in her home whenever her husband was absent?

Besides, we're talking about Sherlock Holmes here, the world's most famous detective; why even go to the effort of writing a story for him that leads in a straight line from a suspect whose motive and means for committing a crime are made crystal-clear, and ends with that suspect unambiguously implicating himself as the perpetrator of that crime? I mean, yawn.

So it had to have been Adelaide who was directly to blame for her husband's death, contriving to cut short her husband's (and therefore his family's) slide downward toward poverty by cutting his life short and having the blame laid on Culverston Smith. When Culverton Smith had already taken possession of the mansion, the widow dressed in mourning stood up in a coach outside that was about to carry her and her children off to their down-sized future and staged her very public denunciation of him, connecting the dots between his windfall and her husband's death for everyone who happened to be within earshot at the time (i.e., Sherlock Holmes). I mean, Dr. Watson got it, why didn't he? But the less-than-serious expression on Holmes' face when he then stepped forward and, for the benefit of Adelaide's ears, added his full-throated warning to Culverton Smith, hiding behind a curtain above, that he would bend every effort to finding the party responsible for Victor's death, seemed (to me) to indicate that the detective had somehow figured out what was really going on.

The discovery that Victor had died from a tropical disease on which Culverton Smith was the world's leading expert seemed more than a bit too convenient. Couldn't Culverton Smith perhaps have had rivals, academic or amateur, jealous and aggrieved because he had unfairly assumed all the credit and received all the plaudits for discovering the insect that had caused the fever? Rivals that could have been promised generous remuneration by the widow for supplying her with some live insects carrying the infection? But Holmes bided his time and seemed to do nothing to share any suspicions he might have been harboring with Scotland Yard. How could the grieving widow just sit and wait until the reputedly quick-witted Sherlock Holmes finally managed to figure out what she had bent every effort to make clear to him. If he didn't "get it", then she would have to make sure that he "got it". When a small package for Holmes arrived at his Baker Street address, again his facial expression seemed to show that he knew exactly what part in someone else's unfolding drama he was now expected to play.

So, playing the role of the dying and delirious detective, Holmes asked that.....Culverton Smith be summoned? Wait, I thought, shouldn't he have summoned Adelaide, and after hearing her claims that Culverton Smith had killed Victor and now was at the point of killing Holmes too after the public warning he had received from the detective, then confronted her with the confession received by Lestrade from her apprehended confederate, the one who had actually supplied her with the bugs?

Okay, I thought, maybe Culverton Smith would arrive first to see Holmes, recognize the detective's symptoms as caused by "his" disease, understand that he was being set up and give iron-clad alibis for why he couldn't have been the one to have infected him, and then provided the names and motives of any entomologists who could have enabled Adelaide to do the dirty deed. But to my dismay, Culverton Smith went ahead and admitted all.

I guess in Conan Doyle's place and time, young English mothers of a certain background couldn't conceivably do away with dangerously deluded husbands taking their families down to the bottom with them, but instead accepted life's vicissitudes with dignity. Anyway, a big let-down. This adventure compares unfavorably with, say, the Last Vampyre. There, you knew that young Jack would be somehow implicated in any crime at the end, but the writers gave you a reason to keep watching the screen and not feel cheated when you got there.

Holmes spends a weekend at a country estate where a rich financier dies of a tropical disease, whose cousin happens to be a principal authority on a very rare tropical poisons. It's story seems thin and it quickly becomes obvious who the perpetrator is. Still, it manages to be pretty diverting and leads to a conclusion that is satisfying if not amusing as the final ten minutes are certainly a treat. The sets, scenery, and periodic flavor continue to be beautiful. Jeremy Brett is fine form here, even though given how ill he was "The Dying Detective" seems like an ironic title. Edward Hardwicke is also great and Jonathan Hyde is splendid as the ruthless Culverton Smith. Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville (billed here as Richard Bonneville) has a small role in the beginning as Victor Savage.