the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that “nice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to think” is possibly the funniest character ever devised
I feel like the modern equivalent is that guy you think is super well put together until you find out exactly how much red bull he ingests on a regular basis.
Modern Sherlock is that very nice English Professor-seeming guy who you bring a problem and while walking from the door of his office to his desk he starts explaining the entire solution you need
And upon reaching his desk he’s like “Excuse me one moment.” and pulls out one of those huge Monster canisters they legally aren’t allowed to make anymore, cracks the whole thing, chugs it, takes a deep breath, and then nods at you and is like “Alright, and then what you need to do is…”
Imagine how much better the dynamic of bbc sherlock could have been if they did this.
why even modernize it to energy drinks??? coke didn’t go anywhere. we still have coke. energy drinks aren’t NEARLY chaotic enough.
Its is more like you hiring some guy to do private investigation about how your husband maybe cheating on you and Sherlock comes to your house high as fuck. Walks into your living room and without taking a moment to even talk to you or sign any paperwork, he turns around—pupils as big as god—and just says
“Its your best friend Brenda. I’ll email you the invoice.”
and walks right out of your house.
Because when it was written cocaine was legal and even considered healthy and useful by some laypeople, even though doctors knew it wasn’t, and Watson was always trying to stop people from encouraging Sherlock’s addiction because HE KNEW BETTER.
So consider this, Holmes, at 2am, desperately searching the flat for the stashes of NOS cans, only to keep coming up with passive aggressive pamphlets about the dangers of caffeine overdose.
Watson wakes up to a stench like Satan’s ass to find Sherlock sitting by his bed with a re-heated pot of cold brewed Deathwish Coffee that had been hidden in the back of the toilet tank (brewing) for five months. Sherlock is trying to say he’s proud of John’s cleverness in finding most of the stashes, but he’s passed into the fifth dimension and all John gets is a creepy vibrating grin and a sound like a shaken cat.
TLDR, Sherlock did die when he fell off the Falls, but he was so coked up his body didn’t stop moving until like a decade later.
Sherlock as one of those cryptid types the baristas talk about (there’s a post floating around somewhere) who comes in and orders a venti with as many shots as they are legally allowed to add, plus a few more for good measure (and a hefty tip) and then adds energy drink on top of it before chugging the whole thing, to the absolute horror of the cafe staff.
This is the kind of Sherlock Holmes discourse I demand on my dash. Bring me more!
Further discourse! Everyone is missing the fact that Sherlock used cocaine to “escape from the commonplaces of existence” when he didn’t have a case. The drugs are a substitute. Which means that when you hire him he’s stone-cold sober and JUST AS WEIRD.
So it’s more like realizing that your flatmate with the caffeine/sometimes drug death wish will only chill the fuck out when he has some strange mystery to unravel, so you spend your free time scouring reddit posts that might actually feature a real missing person. Or a ghost. You really don’t care which at this point. When you finally find something your flatmate is THRILLED and straight up stops eating because he thinks he can survive on intellectual curiosity alone, and yeah that’s not good, but it’s better than what he was doing to himself before. Your success is comparative, okay? You stick around for the meeting partly because you’re curious, partly because this is your home too remember, and partly because you’ve found that writing up these insane excursions helps pay off your student loans. Your Patreon is thriving. The entire time your flatmate is interviewing this poor SOB he keeps breaking into manic grins and you’re kicking him under the table, trying to help him remember that others aren’t happy about a death in the family. Halfway through he pulls a cigarette from a stash in his smelly bedroom slipper, offering the client one and yeah, that’s very nice, but… no. No thank you. He’s dressed impeccably and has a violin worth millions just lying on the floor, but the flat as a whole looks like a tornado just blew through and there’s something growing on the walls beside the makeshift lab. Is he rich? Dirt poor? Impossible to tell based on the surroundings. The entire time he rattles off observations about the client not at all related to the case and his continuing good mood depends entirely on how impressed the guy is. If he mentions “magic tricks” or “I saw that on Youtube” you’re prepped for damage control.
By 8:00pm you’ve finally convinced your flatmate to look up from his research and go half on a pizza, but the second it gets there he shrieks in excitement and runs out the door, demanding that you follow with your legally dubious gun. You apologize profusely to the delivery guy and double his tip, begging him not to call the cops. No, not because you’re afraid of arrest, you just know the head of the local precinct and he’s a pain in the ass.
You run after your flatmate knowing damn well you have to be up early tomorrow because despite maintaining a private practice you still don’t make enough to get your own apartment.
You are living your best life.
