Sherlock Season 2 [Blu-ray]

DVD Wholesale Quick Overview:

It really is quite good and over time the productions might be seen as excellent. The key factor remains how often you can watch them. First and foremost I liked the decision to move the series into our times. Jeremy Brett’s performances of Holmes in the 19th century are unrivaled. You needed something different. Now I began with the second season and from the start I knew that I had missed something. This was later confirmed after I saw the prior episode from the previous season, The Great Game. It left Holmes, Watson & Moriarty in a standoff by the pool. It left the audience hanging just like the old serial films from cinema. Want to find out what happened? Come back for the next film. The series also made .more use of flashbacks as well as posting texts and thoughts on the screen towards the development of the plot and its characters. Each show may borrow from not one but several stories. They retain their connection to Doyle but are also different. The writing and acting are both quite good but so is the cinematography, the direction and the editing. The entire production of the Sherlock series was well done. So starting with this season I eventually bought them all.. Don’t buy Season 2 without Season 1.-DTL

I gave the first season DVD of “Sherlock” only four stars, because of the weak third episode, which was actually filmed first. As the documentary on Disk 2 says, this season takes on the three biggest Holmes stories, involving Irene Adler, the hound of the Baskervilles, and Sherlock’s supposed end and the death of James Moriarity. The first two episodes are brilliant, better than anything in the first season. The third episode, the Reichenbach Fall, is positively out of this world, over the top magnificent.

As I was watching it, it occurred to me how much easier it is to write about a character with superhuman, or seemingly superhuman characteristics, such as Jason Bourne, Gandalf the Grey, Jedi knights, and every comic book superhero you can name. You can have them do virtually anything you want, in any given situation. If you need lots of different skills, you create teams like the Fantastic Four or the X-Men or the Avengers. Their roles are one extended deux ex machina. The thing which turns these stories into comic books is that you then must create villains with superhuman powers to make it a fair fight. It also helps if you throw in a secret vulnerability or two such as Kryptonite. The original Sherlock Holmes character is so durable because while his powers appear almost magical, they are never outside the realm of acute human observation and ratiocination, although I think that if a person trained themselves in Holmes’ methods, their success rate would be nowhere near Holmes’s 96% accuracy. This may also be why Gandalf is such a successful character. You can count on one hand how often he uses overt magic between both “The Hobbit” and “LOTR”.

And, in these three episodes, we get a huge helping of the four most freakishly superhuman characters in the Holmes corpus. Aside from Holmes, we get lots of Mycroft Holmes (far more than in the stories), James Moriarty, the “consulting criminal” and Irene Adler, whose persona is built up quite a bit from her appearance in only one original story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”.

Just as I was marvelling over my observation about superhuman characters, in episode 3, the writers turn it all around on Sherlock (something which never happens in the stories) and he is, as Lestrade’s female sargeant describes him, freakish. His success is in coming to correct conclusions from thin evidence is thought to be too good to be true, and he is indicted for perpetrating a crime he just solved.

Here I get into dangerous waters, risking giving too much away. I can only suggest that the richness and cleverness with which these stories are displayed on the screen is far more engaging than anything I, or Arthur Conan Doyle, for that matter, could have put on paper.

Possibly the greatest treat is the interaction between Holmes and Moriarty, which virtually never happens in the stories. One of the most marvelous things about Holmes, Mycroft, and Moriarty is that they defy all the usual trademarks ascribed to them by Doyle, they fit into the 21st century perfectly, with no trace of a mannerism saying “look how clever I am in transplanting these characters”, and yet they are totally true to the soul of the characters created by Doyle. Mycroft and Moriarity are both youngish and thin. Sherlock literally mocks several of the usual trademarks such as his deerstalker cap. Best of all, Moriarty is depicted as quite literally bordering on a kind of brilliant insanity. Moriarty, in the opening scene, done, I believe, to a track of music from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (it may be “The Thieving Magpie Overture) is worth the price of admission.

The other two episodes are similarly brilliantly executed, with a few twists you won’t find in Doyle’s stories. I am almost inclined to suggest you be sure to get Season 1 before getting Season 2, so the second does not spoil the experience of the first, with is first rate, but a bit messy in the end.

– B. Marold

DVD Wholesale Main Features:

Format: Import
Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Subtitles: English
Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired: English
Region: All Regions
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number of discs: 2
Rated: PG-13 Parents Strongly Cautioned
Studio: Imports
DVD Release Date: January 31, 2012
Run Time: 266.00 minutes
ASIN: B005UL53AQ