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Continued from Part I. I promise, I'm going to get this part off my chest, and I'll be done. *grins sheepishly* It's only because the relationship between Holmes and Watson is one of the parts most subject to interpretation in adaptations, and I've had several people say the original Holmes would do such-and-such a thing to Watson based on their dynamics in various adaptations (BBC Sherlock, I'm really sorry, you just tend to do this a lot?). And, um. Not so much?
ACD Holmes and his Interactions with People, Part II (John Watson):
Holmes and John Watson:
This is about Watson specifically, but there are a couple of other people mentioned. Before we get to John, for example, I'm just going to bounce us back a few years, to one of Holmes' first friendships (yes, he had a few before John).
In The Adventure of the 'Gloria Scott', Holmes takes a moment to tell Watson about his first official case, and the man, Victor Trevor, who was one of his first friends, the only friend he made during college. According to Holmes: "I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never much mixed with the men of my year. [...] Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull-terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to the chapel."
Following this, while Holmes is laid up recovering from the bite, Trevor comes to visit, gradually more regularly, until they get along famously, and Trevor invites him home for a month of the holidays. And it's Trevor's father who first sets Holmes on the path to detective (after scaring the pants of both Holmes and Trevor when one of Holmes' deductions, that he'd been living in fear for some time, causes him to literally faint dead away on top of them). Trevor was his first client, about two months later when that fear comes home to roost and Trevor's father has a stroke from terror (which hurts Holmes all on its own, he reacts badly to the news). Over the course of the case, Trevor is heartbroken by what they discover, and ends up going to grow tea out in the Terai (the Indian portion, probably), and we don't really see him again. Holmes evidently hears from him afterwards ("I hear he's doing well"), but they've drifted well apart.
So. Holmes was, always, quite withdrawn. But again, it was never really a case of disliking people on their own merits, and more that he just was never really interested, unless someone sort of burst into his life and made him pay attention (by, for example, having their dog bite him, or moving into the same apartment, or knocking his intellectual socks of in a case). He's usually quite personable once you've gotten in, and he tends to form attachments relatively quickly (he was genuinely dismayed at the father's attack/death, despite having only know him a month). Watson isn't the first friend Holmes has had, he's just the one who stayed the longest, and made the most impact. Heh.
The relationship between Holmes and Watson ... I probably don't really need to explore this one too much, I'm sure about five billion essays (slashy or otherwise) have been written on it in the hundred odd years since the stories. However, just to take a quick look on the topic of how much Holmes is a dick to Watson, which seems to be an issue from the adaptations.
Okay. Quick reading list for you: The Adventure of the Yellow Face; The Adventure of the Copper Beeches and The Five Orange Pips; The Adventure of the Reigate Squire (aka Regitate Puzzle, aka Reigate Squires); The Adventure of the Empty House; The Adventure of the Devil's Foot; The Adventure of the Dying Detective; and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.
I'm picking these ones because they're my top picks for ... fraught moments between Holmes and Watson. Really, the overall working relationship is probably best gauged just by reading the canon, these are just the ones I want to focus on for specific incidents. And before we go into them, you need to understand one thing. Holmes is, without a doubt, a smug arrogant asshole who treads on people's finer emotions sometimes. This is a fact. What he usually isn't, though, is malicious or uncaring for people's pain. Right? Okay.
Copper Beeches and Five Orange Pips I'm going to take first, because they're examples of the small little disagreements and needling they engage in.
Copper Beeches is the story where Holmes criticises Watson's writing about their cases, saying: "You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales". Which, oddly, is not the part that bothers Watson, who had been offended mostly earlier in the argument ("It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter," I remarked, with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had once more observed to be a strong factor in my friend's singular character). This is mainly because Holmes offers the latter observation as explanation, that it's on behalf of the science and not his own sense of self worth that he's complaining. Which may or may not make much difference to Watson, he stops describing the debate around here, but basically they were having a (vehement but relatively cordial) difference of values, rather than Holmes randomly going out of his way to complain or knock Watson.
Five Pips is a smaller case, but it makes reference to something from Study in Scarlet which serves as a small running joke between them: that Watson, early in their acquaintance, had run up a quick analysis of Holmes' areas of knowledge and defined his weaknesses: "Philosophy, Astronomy, and Politics were marked at zero. Botany variable, Geology profound within fifty miles of the town. Chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique. Violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cucaine and tobacco." The thing about it, though, is that Holmes cheerfully acknowledges all of that, and grins at the last one. It's a running joke they have, that Holmes has limits too, that Watson is sometimes aggravated by them. They have disagreements, and different talents, and mostly that's acknowledged between them (though Watson could wish Holmes took him more seriously on the last - however, at the time you could buy cocaine from any chemist, and Watson would have been one of the few who recognised the downsides at the time).
Then we take Yellow Face. Because, as said in Part I, it's one of those stories that shows Holmes' reactions to being wrong. Five Pips does as well, and in that instance, he went out and utterly ruined the criminals that he'd been wrong about, because they'd killed a man who went there on his advice and Holmes takes that amiss. But in Yellow Face, Holmes erred on the side of pessimism, and he's actually happy to have been proven wrong (also, he and Watson both react with relief and happiness to the kid, it's kind of adorable: she laughs, and Watson "burst out laughing out of sympathy with her merriment"). The line the story ends on is this: "Watson, if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you."
Holmes doesn't mind being wrong, so long as his mistakes haven't gotten anyone killed or hurt. And Holmes is aware of his own tendencies to get caught up in his deductions (or to prevalue cases). And it's Watson he asks, deliberately and verbally, to slap him upside the head about it. In short, Holmes recognises that Watson often has a valid interpretation of events even when it contradicts his own, and not only accepts but asks Watson to speak up when that's the case. Holmes values Watson, not as someone to prop him up and make him look good, but as a friend and companion who can stand up and tell him when he's being a blithering idiot. (And, if you read more of the stories, basically the partnership is a lot more two-way than many adaptations make it look: there are moments when Holmes is visibly lost in admiration for Watson, usually those moments when Watson stands up where other men would back out).
However. There are, yes, some really significant moments where Holmes gives the impression that he is completely oblivious to how what he does might hurt someone, and others where he acts even despite knowing it. One particular tendancy he has, which the next three stories highlight, is to pretend to be sick or dying or, in that one spectacular three year instance, dead, and not factoring in the extent to which that would affect the people he left behind. Mostly Watson. The three cases in question are Reigate Squire, Dying Detective and Empty House.
Empty House is the most famous instance. Not the three years, those were sort of necessary to avoid being killed. But Holmes, when revealing himself to Watson after Watson has spent the past three years mourning him, does it in typical Holmes showman's style, oblivious to the cost it will have. He goes in in disguise, carries the disguise off for a few minutes, then makes Watson look away for a second so he can whip it off and stand there grinning when Watson looks back around. Watson, not surprisingly since it's basically his friend come back from the freaking dead where a complete stranger had been a second ago, faints, for about the first time in his life. As you do, when goddamn ghosts rise from the grave and play games with you.
This is lessened, though, by what Holmes does immediately afterwards, which is leap across, put Watson to rights, and then apologise profusely. "My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea you would be so affected." (What, people rise from the grave all the time, Holmes? Honestly). And proceeds to be very solicitious for the rest of the reunion: "Wait a moment. Are you sure that you are really fit to discuss things? I have given you a serious shock by my unnecessarily dramatic appearance." So at least he catches on quick. The pretenses may be necessary, it's the little details where you act like nothing happened and give people heart attacks that are (most of ) the problem.
Dying Detective, set later, shows that he didn't really learn his lesson, though. At least as far as pretending to be dead/dying and scaring the pants off your friends goes, however necessary it proves to be. The story involves Holmes pretending to be deathly ill to lure a suspect who infects people with deadly diseases into confessing. In the course of this pretense, which he thought Watson not a good enough actor to pull off, he sends Watson away, tells Watson he's not the right kind of doctor to be treating him, and won't even let Watson stay with him while Watson thinks he's dying. The middle one was the worst, since Holmes saying "If I am to have a doctor whether I will or not, let me at least have someone in whom I have confidence" strikes Watson to the core. Holmes immediately tries to soften it at the time, saying it was a disease Watson had no expertise in, but still. The pretense wears horribly on both of them, with Watson running around in a blind panic out of fear for his friend, and bitterly hurt that Holmes doesn't trust him, and Holmes having to watch Watson be hurt.
Again, Holmes pulls it back at the end, after they've arrested the man and Holmes is explaining the necessity of the pretense (he needed both Mrs Hudson and Watson to act convincingly, and thought neither of them quite had the skills to pretend blind terror unless they actually were terrified). He does apologise, not particularly well (and had I been Watson, I'd have punched him regardless at that point), but it's what he says after Watson finally asks why Holmes wouldn't even let him near that sort of clears him: "Can you ask, my dear Watson? Do you imagine I have no respect for your medical talents? Could I fancy that your astute judgment would pass a dying man who, however weak, had no rise of pulse or temperature? At four yards I could decieve you."
Which, since it answered what Watson actually feared, that Holmes didn't trust him as a doctor (he allows that subterfuge isn't his talent, so Holmes might be justified there, but as a doctor he would hope to be trustworthy), that Holmes didn't trust him to take care of him ... Yes. That pulls it back. If, perhaps, mostly by accident -_-;
The third story, Reigate Squire, is set earlier than both of those, and I mostly include it to show that Holmes has always had a tendancy to do that: to pretend weakness or illness to lure his enemies, and he never really seems to get that it hurts his friends. In that case, he actually had been ill recently, but while investigating a house, he fakes a collapse to divert a conversation (and later, in an almost Looney Tune-esque move, knocks over a table and blames Watson in order to disappear for a minute). Again, though, he apologises afterwards to Watson: "I could see you were commiserating with me over my weakness. I was sorry to cause you the sympathetic pain which I know that you felt."
Generally, though, Holmes appears to be of the form 'do it first, ask forgiveness later'. It's not one of his finer qualities, really.
Now. There are two more stories I want to look at, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs. The former is one I particularly want to deal with because I think it was the basis for the whole 'Sherlock poisons John with fear drugs' thing from BBC Sherlock's The Hounds of Baskerville, which is one of the two real story elements I have a problem with (the other one being Scandal in Belgravia, in its entirety, and, um ... would you believe I actually really liked the first season? It was just the second one ...). I want to look at Devil's Foot as a compare & contrast between original and adaptation. Three Garridebs, though, is just because I want to burble about one of the finest moments of Holmes-looking-after-Watson in the original canon, so we'll save that for a little lift at the end, yes? *ducks sheepishly*
Okay. Devil's Foot. Going up to the adaptation for a second, BBC Sherlock, there is a part in The Hounds of Baskerville where Sherlock deliberately locks John, and only John, in a lab with a suspected fear drug, mostly to test his theory. It is, without doubt, one of the most assholish things the BBC Sherlock ever did, especially given John's reaction to the drug. It stands as pretty conclusive proof that this version of Sherlock is ... Um. Not a nice man. At all. Even towards his friends. He's (mostly) a good, loyal person who does actually care, but he's also ... well, the sort of person who will lock his friend in an abandoned lab, wait to see if he's poisoned with fear gas, listen to him be terrified for a bit, then go and let him out. Ah. Yes.
Now. There is an ACD precedent for what he did, in the basics, but what happens in the case of Devil's Foot carries a much different tone from Hounds. In this story, Holmes suspects that a hallucinogenic drug which causes sufficient terror to kill two people outright and drive two others to dementia was used as a murder weapon. In order to prove this theory, he proposes to test this drug. All of this is in line with the above. The major difference is in how he goes about it.
First, Holmes explains his theory to Watson, telling him about the poison and the risk. Then, he sets out to test the poison in the room (with windows and doors open, just in case), with both himself and Watson, but first he gives Watson the option to withdraw. So, unlike Sherlock above, Holmes means to test it primarily on himself, not a friend, and mostly wants Watson there as insurance. Which he then, quite obviously, turns out to need, when the drug (rather vividly described by Watson) sends them both into such an increasing spiral of horror that they nearly follow in the paths of the previous victims. It's only because Watson manages to shake off the terror long enough to catch a glimpse of Holmes and becomes galvanised to save his friend, pulling them both out of the room, that they survive undamaged.
And the first thing Holmes says afterwards? "Upon my word, Watson! I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for oneself, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry."
To which Watson answers: "You know that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you."
At which point Holmes gets a little giddy and cynical, and comes back with: "It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson. A candid observer would declare that we were already so."
This is ... a much, much different tone from the adaptation. It's not Holmes callously testing a drug on his friend to see what happens, it's Holmes rather stupidly testing a drug on himself, with a friend alongside him because he doesn't quite want to do it alone, and then heartily regretting it afterwards when he realises he's been a blithering idiot. *smiles faintly* And it also shows that he does truly value Watson, and in some ways thinks Watson slightly insane for putting up with him.
As I said. It's one of the major indicators that while adaptations may follow many of the plots or contain many of the story elements of the original, the characters and the character dynamics are often very different, despite carrying the same names. Even stories with exactly the same scripts as each other but with different actors may be subject to that (see various versions of the same play, for example). You really, really can't judge the original characters by the way they're presented in adaptations.
*shakes head* Anyway! Coming back purely to the original Holmes and how he interacts with Watson. Just to finish up, as I said, I want to look at things from the other angle: one of the best moments in the series where Holmes shows overriding concern for Watson (I'm guessing it's one of the moments included in every slash essay ever written about them). Usually it's the other way around, if mostly because Holmes is the one going out getting himself hurt and sick and shot at and beaten up (seriously, it happened a lot, even if we don't count Moriarty), but Three Garridebs is the story where it's Watson who gets badly hurt on the job, and Holmes ... has a little meltdown, really.
Basically, the pair of them sneak up on and surprise the villain of the piece. Who does what any self-respecting villain would do, whips out a revolver, and tries to shoot them. It happens very quickly, what Watson describes is feeling something sear across his thigh, and then a crash as Holmes' pistol came down on the man's head, leaving the villain sprawling on the floor with blood pouring down his face. Holmes does a quick weapons check on the fallen man, and then 'my friend's wiry arms were round me and he was leading me to a chair'.
Holmes panics. "You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" Watson tells him (after a moment to think the wound well worth the love in Holmes' face) that it's only a scratch. Holmes, who has by this point ripped off some of Watson's trousers with a pocket knife to get to the wound, agrees, with 'an immense sigh of relief'. And then Holmes turns to the villain, now sitting up looking dazed from where Holmes pistol-whipped him, and says: "By the Lord, it is as well for you. If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive."
*smiles, shakes head* You can sort of see why a century's worth of fans thought there was something there. I don't tend towards the slashy end myself, usually, but oh yes, there was mutual love and devotion going on there. Going back up to Yellow Face and Dying Detective, also mutual respect, and the trust that they'll check each other should either of them need it. From Five Pips, Copper Beeches, we see they've disagreements and different philosophies on certain issues, and are willing to have it out with each other. Holmes is willing to be wrong, Watson is willing to just be amazed by what his friend does, even when it sometimes hurts him.
They are, in so many ways missed by a lot of later adaptations, very equal in the partnership. (I did like that about Downey!Holmes and Law!Watson, though they've a different dynamic again, but how much of that is my mad adoration of Law's Watson in general might be questionable).
But. Coming back to my main point. Holmes, in pretty much all incarnations, is sometimes a dick. Watson, usually by virtue of being the one close enough, often catches the brunt of that. However. Between adaptations, the degree varies, the tone varies, and just basically the dynamic varies. You cannot tell me, based on how Sherlock acts in the BBC series, how ACD Holmes would have acted. By the same token, how ACD Holmes would have acted does not necessarily define how the later versions should act. There just ... I would really, really like it if people actually acknowledged that there is a difference, sometimes. The character based on another character is not, in fact, the same character, even if they carry the same name.
Some adaptations are closer than others (Granada, for example), some are farther (characterisation wise, I tend to think BBC Sherlock is the farthest I've seen, though Downey's Holmes is ... weird? He's like what you'd get if you punched ACD Holmes in the face until the aloofness fell off, and then put him on permanent fast-forward). But in general, though adaptations carry the name, they're not at all the same beast as the original, and it will show, in large ways and small.
And yes, I'm going to finally shut up, now. Heh. Finis!
ETA: Okay, so not quite yet. Continued a little in ACD Meta III: Holmes and Gender/Race
Links to Stories Used:
All stories are hosted on Wikisource, except for Devil's Foot, which is on authorama.com, and Dying Detective, which is on Gutenberg
The Adventure of the Gloria Scott
The Five Orange Pips
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
The Adventure of the Yellow Face
The Adventure of the Empty House
The Adventure of the Dying Detective
The Reigate Puzzle (AKA The Reigate Squire)
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
Holmes and John Watson:
This is about Watson specifically, but there are a couple of other people mentioned. Before we get to John, for example, I'm just going to bounce us back a few years, to one of Holmes' first friendships (yes, he had a few before John).
In The Adventure of the 'Gloria Scott', Holmes takes a moment to tell Watson about his first official case, and the man, Victor Trevor, who was one of his first friends, the only friend he made during college. According to Holmes: "I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never much mixed with the men of my year. [...] Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull-terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to the chapel."
Following this, while Holmes is laid up recovering from the bite, Trevor comes to visit, gradually more regularly, until they get along famously, and Trevor invites him home for a month of the holidays. And it's Trevor's father who first sets Holmes on the path to detective (after scaring the pants of both Holmes and Trevor when one of Holmes' deductions, that he'd been living in fear for some time, causes him to literally faint dead away on top of them). Trevor was his first client, about two months later when that fear comes home to roost and Trevor's father has a stroke from terror (which hurts Holmes all on its own, he reacts badly to the news). Over the course of the case, Trevor is heartbroken by what they discover, and ends up going to grow tea out in the Terai (the Indian portion, probably), and we don't really see him again. Holmes evidently hears from him afterwards ("I hear he's doing well"), but they've drifted well apart.
So. Holmes was, always, quite withdrawn. But again, it was never really a case of disliking people on their own merits, and more that he just was never really interested, unless someone sort of burst into his life and made him pay attention (by, for example, having their dog bite him, or moving into the same apartment, or knocking his intellectual socks of in a case). He's usually quite personable once you've gotten in, and he tends to form attachments relatively quickly (he was genuinely dismayed at the father's attack/death, despite having only know him a month). Watson isn't the first friend Holmes has had, he's just the one who stayed the longest, and made the most impact. Heh.
The relationship between Holmes and Watson ... I probably don't really need to explore this one too much, I'm sure about five billion essays (slashy or otherwise) have been written on it in the hundred odd years since the stories. However, just to take a quick look on the topic of how much Holmes is a dick to Watson, which seems to be an issue from the adaptations.
Okay. Quick reading list for you: The Adventure of the Yellow Face; The Adventure of the Copper Beeches and The Five Orange Pips; The Adventure of the Reigate Squire (aka Regitate Puzzle, aka Reigate Squires); The Adventure of the Empty House; The Adventure of the Devil's Foot; The Adventure of the Dying Detective; and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.
I'm picking these ones because they're my top picks for ... fraught moments between Holmes and Watson. Really, the overall working relationship is probably best gauged just by reading the canon, these are just the ones I want to focus on for specific incidents. And before we go into them, you need to understand one thing. Holmes is, without a doubt, a smug arrogant asshole who treads on people's finer emotions sometimes. This is a fact. What he usually isn't, though, is malicious or uncaring for people's pain. Right? Okay.
Copper Beeches and Five Orange Pips I'm going to take first, because they're examples of the small little disagreements and needling they engage in.
Copper Beeches is the story where Holmes criticises Watson's writing about their cases, saying: "You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales". Which, oddly, is not the part that bothers Watson, who had been offended mostly earlier in the argument ("It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter," I remarked, with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had once more observed to be a strong factor in my friend's singular character). This is mainly because Holmes offers the latter observation as explanation, that it's on behalf of the science and not his own sense of self worth that he's complaining. Which may or may not make much difference to Watson, he stops describing the debate around here, but basically they were having a (vehement but relatively cordial) difference of values, rather than Holmes randomly going out of his way to complain or knock Watson.
Five Pips is a smaller case, but it makes reference to something from Study in Scarlet which serves as a small running joke between them: that Watson, early in their acquaintance, had run up a quick analysis of Holmes' areas of knowledge and defined his weaknesses: "Philosophy, Astronomy, and Politics were marked at zero. Botany variable, Geology profound within fifty miles of the town. Chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique. Violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cucaine and tobacco." The thing about it, though, is that Holmes cheerfully acknowledges all of that, and grins at the last one. It's a running joke they have, that Holmes has limits too, that Watson is sometimes aggravated by them. They have disagreements, and different talents, and mostly that's acknowledged between them (though Watson could wish Holmes took him more seriously on the last - however, at the time you could buy cocaine from any chemist, and Watson would have been one of the few who recognised the downsides at the time).
Then we take Yellow Face. Because, as said in Part I, it's one of those stories that shows Holmes' reactions to being wrong. Five Pips does as well, and in that instance, he went out and utterly ruined the criminals that he'd been wrong about, because they'd killed a man who went there on his advice and Holmes takes that amiss. But in Yellow Face, Holmes erred on the side of pessimism, and he's actually happy to have been proven wrong (also, he and Watson both react with relief and happiness to the kid, it's kind of adorable: she laughs, and Watson "burst out laughing out of sympathy with her merriment"). The line the story ends on is this: "Watson, if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you."
Holmes doesn't mind being wrong, so long as his mistakes haven't gotten anyone killed or hurt. And Holmes is aware of his own tendencies to get caught up in his deductions (or to prevalue cases). And it's Watson he asks, deliberately and verbally, to slap him upside the head about it. In short, Holmes recognises that Watson often has a valid interpretation of events even when it contradicts his own, and not only accepts but asks Watson to speak up when that's the case. Holmes values Watson, not as someone to prop him up and make him look good, but as a friend and companion who can stand up and tell him when he's being a blithering idiot. (And, if you read more of the stories, basically the partnership is a lot more two-way than many adaptations make it look: there are moments when Holmes is visibly lost in admiration for Watson, usually those moments when Watson stands up where other men would back out).
However. There are, yes, some really significant moments where Holmes gives the impression that he is completely oblivious to how what he does might hurt someone, and others where he acts even despite knowing it. One particular tendancy he has, which the next three stories highlight, is to pretend to be sick or dying or, in that one spectacular three year instance, dead, and not factoring in the extent to which that would affect the people he left behind. Mostly Watson. The three cases in question are Reigate Squire, Dying Detective and Empty House.
Empty House is the most famous instance. Not the three years, those were sort of necessary to avoid being killed. But Holmes, when revealing himself to Watson after Watson has spent the past three years mourning him, does it in typical Holmes showman's style, oblivious to the cost it will have. He goes in in disguise, carries the disguise off for a few minutes, then makes Watson look away for a second so he can whip it off and stand there grinning when Watson looks back around. Watson, not surprisingly since it's basically his friend come back from the freaking dead where a complete stranger had been a second ago, faints, for about the first time in his life. As you do, when goddamn ghosts rise from the grave and play games with you.
This is lessened, though, by what Holmes does immediately afterwards, which is leap across, put Watson to rights, and then apologise profusely. "My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea you would be so affected." (What, people rise from the grave all the time, Holmes? Honestly). And proceeds to be very solicitious for the rest of the reunion: "Wait a moment. Are you sure that you are really fit to discuss things? I have given you a serious shock by my unnecessarily dramatic appearance." So at least he catches on quick. The pretenses may be necessary, it's the little details where you act like nothing happened and give people heart attacks that are (most of ) the problem.
Dying Detective, set later, shows that he didn't really learn his lesson, though. At least as far as pretending to be dead/dying and scaring the pants off your friends goes, however necessary it proves to be. The story involves Holmes pretending to be deathly ill to lure a suspect who infects people with deadly diseases into confessing. In the course of this pretense, which he thought Watson not a good enough actor to pull off, he sends Watson away, tells Watson he's not the right kind of doctor to be treating him, and won't even let Watson stay with him while Watson thinks he's dying. The middle one was the worst, since Holmes saying "If I am to have a doctor whether I will or not, let me at least have someone in whom I have confidence" strikes Watson to the core. Holmes immediately tries to soften it at the time, saying it was a disease Watson had no expertise in, but still. The pretense wears horribly on both of them, with Watson running around in a blind panic out of fear for his friend, and bitterly hurt that Holmes doesn't trust him, and Holmes having to watch Watson be hurt.
Again, Holmes pulls it back at the end, after they've arrested the man and Holmes is explaining the necessity of the pretense (he needed both Mrs Hudson and Watson to act convincingly, and thought neither of them quite had the skills to pretend blind terror unless they actually were terrified). He does apologise, not particularly well (and had I been Watson, I'd have punched him regardless at that point), but it's what he says after Watson finally asks why Holmes wouldn't even let him near that sort of clears him: "Can you ask, my dear Watson? Do you imagine I have no respect for your medical talents? Could I fancy that your astute judgment would pass a dying man who, however weak, had no rise of pulse or temperature? At four yards I could decieve you."
Which, since it answered what Watson actually feared, that Holmes didn't trust him as a doctor (he allows that subterfuge isn't his talent, so Holmes might be justified there, but as a doctor he would hope to be trustworthy), that Holmes didn't trust him to take care of him ... Yes. That pulls it back. If, perhaps, mostly by accident -_-;
The third story, Reigate Squire, is set earlier than both of those, and I mostly include it to show that Holmes has always had a tendancy to do that: to pretend weakness or illness to lure his enemies, and he never really seems to get that it hurts his friends. In that case, he actually had been ill recently, but while investigating a house, he fakes a collapse to divert a conversation (and later, in an almost Looney Tune-esque move, knocks over a table and blames Watson in order to disappear for a minute). Again, though, he apologises afterwards to Watson: "I could see you were commiserating with me over my weakness. I was sorry to cause you the sympathetic pain which I know that you felt."
Generally, though, Holmes appears to be of the form 'do it first, ask forgiveness later'. It's not one of his finer qualities, really.
Now. There are two more stories I want to look at, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs. The former is one I particularly want to deal with because I think it was the basis for the whole 'Sherlock poisons John with fear drugs' thing from BBC Sherlock's The Hounds of Baskerville, which is one of the two real story elements I have a problem with (the other one being Scandal in Belgravia, in its entirety, and, um ... would you believe I actually really liked the first season? It was just the second one ...). I want to look at Devil's Foot as a compare & contrast between original and adaptation. Three Garridebs, though, is just because I want to burble about one of the finest moments of Holmes-looking-after-Watson in the original canon, so we'll save that for a little lift at the end, yes? *ducks sheepishly*
Okay. Devil's Foot. Going up to the adaptation for a second, BBC Sherlock, there is a part in The Hounds of Baskerville where Sherlock deliberately locks John, and only John, in a lab with a suspected fear drug, mostly to test his theory. It is, without doubt, one of the most assholish things the BBC Sherlock ever did, especially given John's reaction to the drug. It stands as pretty conclusive proof that this version of Sherlock is ... Um. Not a nice man. At all. Even towards his friends. He's (mostly) a good, loyal person who does actually care, but he's also ... well, the sort of person who will lock his friend in an abandoned lab, wait to see if he's poisoned with fear gas, listen to him be terrified for a bit, then go and let him out. Ah. Yes.
Now. There is an ACD precedent for what he did, in the basics, but what happens in the case of Devil's Foot carries a much different tone from Hounds. In this story, Holmes suspects that a hallucinogenic drug which causes sufficient terror to kill two people outright and drive two others to dementia was used as a murder weapon. In order to prove this theory, he proposes to test this drug. All of this is in line with the above. The major difference is in how he goes about it.
First, Holmes explains his theory to Watson, telling him about the poison and the risk. Then, he sets out to test the poison in the room (with windows and doors open, just in case), with both himself and Watson, but first he gives Watson the option to withdraw. So, unlike Sherlock above, Holmes means to test it primarily on himself, not a friend, and mostly wants Watson there as insurance. Which he then, quite obviously, turns out to need, when the drug (rather vividly described by Watson) sends them both into such an increasing spiral of horror that they nearly follow in the paths of the previous victims. It's only because Watson manages to shake off the terror long enough to catch a glimpse of Holmes and becomes galvanised to save his friend, pulling them both out of the room, that they survive undamaged.
And the first thing Holmes says afterwards? "Upon my word, Watson! I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for oneself, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry."
To which Watson answers: "You know that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you."
At which point Holmes gets a little giddy and cynical, and comes back with: "It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson. A candid observer would declare that we were already so."
This is ... a much, much different tone from the adaptation. It's not Holmes callously testing a drug on his friend to see what happens, it's Holmes rather stupidly testing a drug on himself, with a friend alongside him because he doesn't quite want to do it alone, and then heartily regretting it afterwards when he realises he's been a blithering idiot. *smiles faintly* And it also shows that he does truly value Watson, and in some ways thinks Watson slightly insane for putting up with him.
As I said. It's one of the major indicators that while adaptations may follow many of the plots or contain many of the story elements of the original, the characters and the character dynamics are often very different, despite carrying the same names. Even stories with exactly the same scripts as each other but with different actors may be subject to that (see various versions of the same play, for example). You really, really can't judge the original characters by the way they're presented in adaptations.
*shakes head* Anyway! Coming back purely to the original Holmes and how he interacts with Watson. Just to finish up, as I said, I want to look at things from the other angle: one of the best moments in the series where Holmes shows overriding concern for Watson (I'm guessing it's one of the moments included in every slash essay ever written about them). Usually it's the other way around, if mostly because Holmes is the one going out getting himself hurt and sick and shot at and beaten up (seriously, it happened a lot, even if we don't count Moriarty), but Three Garridebs is the story where it's Watson who gets badly hurt on the job, and Holmes ... has a little meltdown, really.
Basically, the pair of them sneak up on and surprise the villain of the piece. Who does what any self-respecting villain would do, whips out a revolver, and tries to shoot them. It happens very quickly, what Watson describes is feeling something sear across his thigh, and then a crash as Holmes' pistol came down on the man's head, leaving the villain sprawling on the floor with blood pouring down his face. Holmes does a quick weapons check on the fallen man, and then 'my friend's wiry arms were round me and he was leading me to a chair'.
Holmes panics. "You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" Watson tells him (after a moment to think the wound well worth the love in Holmes' face) that it's only a scratch. Holmes, who has by this point ripped off some of Watson's trousers with a pocket knife to get to the wound, agrees, with 'an immense sigh of relief'. And then Holmes turns to the villain, now sitting up looking dazed from where Holmes pistol-whipped him, and says: "By the Lord, it is as well for you. If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive."
*smiles, shakes head* You can sort of see why a century's worth of fans thought there was something there. I don't tend towards the slashy end myself, usually, but oh yes, there was mutual love and devotion going on there. Going back up to Yellow Face and Dying Detective, also mutual respect, and the trust that they'll check each other should either of them need it. From Five Pips, Copper Beeches, we see they've disagreements and different philosophies on certain issues, and are willing to have it out with each other. Holmes is willing to be wrong, Watson is willing to just be amazed by what his friend does, even when it sometimes hurts him.
They are, in so many ways missed by a lot of later adaptations, very equal in the partnership. (I did like that about Downey!Holmes and Law!Watson, though they've a different dynamic again, but how much of that is my mad adoration of Law's Watson in general might be questionable).
But. Coming back to my main point. Holmes, in pretty much all incarnations, is sometimes a dick. Watson, usually by virtue of being the one close enough, often catches the brunt of that. However. Between adaptations, the degree varies, the tone varies, and just basically the dynamic varies. You cannot tell me, based on how Sherlock acts in the BBC series, how ACD Holmes would have acted. By the same token, how ACD Holmes would have acted does not necessarily define how the later versions should act. There just ... I would really, really like it if people actually acknowledged that there is a difference, sometimes. The character based on another character is not, in fact, the same character, even if they carry the same name.
Some adaptations are closer than others (Granada, for example), some are farther (characterisation wise, I tend to think BBC Sherlock is the farthest I've seen, though Downey's Holmes is ... weird? He's like what you'd get if you punched ACD Holmes in the face until the aloofness fell off, and then put him on permanent fast-forward). But in general, though adaptations carry the name, they're not at all the same beast as the original, and it will show, in large ways and small.
And yes, I'm going to finally shut up, now. Heh. Finis!
ETA: Okay, so not quite yet. Continued a little in ACD Meta III: Holmes and Gender/Race
Links to Stories Used:
All stories are hosted on Wikisource, except for Devil's Foot, which is on authorama.com, and Dying Detective, which is on Gutenberg
The Adventure of the Gloria Scott
The Five Orange Pips
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
The Adventure of the Yellow Face
The Adventure of the Empty House
The Adventure of the Dying Detective
The Reigate Puzzle (AKA The Reigate Squire)
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
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