So why was The Hounds of Baskerville a failure as an episode of TV? A number of reasons. First among them being that they violated a cardinal rule in mysteries. They never gave the audience/reader the chance to see the answer. It all came out of Sherlock remembering something he read which we the audience hadn’t seen.
The method used by the villain to do his nefarious actions was just idiotic, and didn’t bear close scrutiny
They strained to tie in a tiny D runner about a glowing bunny into the story, but missed utilizing the C runner that should have played into the ultimate solution. Here’s what I mean — they establish that Holmes is desperate because he’s trying to stop smoking. They establish that Henry Knight rolls his own cigarettes and there is the moment when Holmes is breathing in the smoke from Knight’s cigarette. The logical thing was that the drug being use by evil scientist to drive Knight mad was placed in his tobacco so he was constantly breathing it in. Then we would have had a character point about Holmes play into the climax. Instead we have this gibberish of pressure mines and fog, etc. etc. It hit all my oh come on buttons. How did this guy leave work and keep setting these mines each day? There would have needed to be a shit load of them to guarantee that Knight would step on at least one of them. Hikers, and anybody who took tourists out to look for the monstrous hound would be psychotic too.
There were plot points that were never explained. Where did the monstrous footprint come from that the tour guide showed to Holmes and Watson? What made the paw prints that Holmes saw? The dog owned by the gay inn keepers? Why did the motion sensing lights keep going on at Knight’s house? Was it evil scientist? Or just wind blown leaves? Never explained.
How on Earth did Holmes know that the drug was running in the pipes at the lab and that they were leaking, and that Watson would breath enough of the gas to be affected?
What did the glowing rabbit have to do with anything? H.O.U.N.D.S. comes out of nowhere late in the show.
People’s emotional reactions seemed completely random just to allow for Watson to be hurt, and Holmes to be manic, and when Holmes was admitting he was scared it was played so badly that I thought it was just Holmes trying to talk Watson into giving him a cigarette. It had no emotional resonance for me.
Finally when Holmes does his analysis of the out-of-work fisherman and his mother at the Inn it felt like filler, or formula because we have to hear Holmes do his amazing analysis, and not for any reason required by the script. I’ve often spoke of the value of formula. There is nothing wrong with it when used correctly, but this felt forced and pointless.
For all these reasons I found this to be a much weaker episode then the first one. I haven’t watch Reichenbach yet, so we’ll see if they recover from this stumble.
