#devil's foot

some Devil's foot doodles from Granada series, these two have overtaken my brain

i'd very much like to develop my own design for Holmes and Watson because this is still very much jeremy brett (although he is sherlock holmes to me) and edward hardwicke

some of the images are from @spacehomos 's post of screen caps (you can try guessing which)

Robert Downey Jr as a cocky American detective who claims to be better and–inexplicably–more British than Sherlock.

Jared Harris as Mycroft’s long lost evil twin, Yourcroft, the memory of whom Mycroft turned into a goldfish.

obviously the inclusion of holmes quitting coke in this episode is unique to granada and didn’t happen in the book, but I’m obsessed with that choice as it runs parallel to the events of the story, like there really could not be a better episode to have him do that. 

so here we have sherlock holmes finally in a place where he’s willing to look directly at the consequences of his addiction, the fact that it is an addiction, the fact that he’s a human person with a body that can and will deteriorate regardless of how smart he is, and most impactfully maybe, the fact that he’s been stressing watson the fuck out for something just short of two decades at this point. so he quits, absolutely cold turkey, and the ensuing days are basically just watson seeing him through his withdrawals.

enter The Case, which will always find them, because vacations are literally impossible when you’re sherlock holmes, you are an unsolved crime magnet. long story short, our perpetrator poisoned his family by burning a toxic root powder in the fireplace. by the time holmes figures this out, the official cops have arrived and they ask him to leave. he gives his client a tip to pass on to them about the powder, snags a sample of it for himself and dips.

AT THIS POINT, he ALREADY KNOWS that’s what killed them. HE KNOWS. he knows. I’m screaming. this man is at least several days clean, neck deep in withdrawals, looking for some sort of fucking substitute, and that is A HUNDRED PERCENT all this is. this is sherlock holmes placing all of his stock in being too smart to get hurt, dragging watson along with him because somehow he still fails to recognize that his man is LITERALLY ride or die. there is really practically nothing to be gained as far as the case goes by experimenting on himself to understand the effects of the root. like PLEASE SIR you already know the effects, there are two bodies and two near-vegetables to show for it.

and like watson absolutely knows what the root is, he has the same information holmes does and it doesn’t take a genius to put together that this substance holmes took from the crime scene is what killed two people. the fact that watson agrees to stay is because he KNOWS if he leaves that there’s an extremely high likelihood holmes will die. he should be pissed as hell at holmes for it, I’m losing my mind that in the book watson just happily forgives him. I’m super glad that they at least gave him some chiding remarks in the granada episode, like it doesn’t make sense to not have SOMETHING to say about it because that sure was a choice holmes made.

also maybe worth mentioning on that note that in the book, we see watson’s hallucinations instead of holmes’s, which are about what you would expect, AND THEN we see watson literally strong-arming his way through it!! when he realizes holmes is in a bad way, because the protection instinct overrides EVERYTHING.

anyway the point is that none of that needed to happen AT ALL and imo it’s absolutely a byproduct of quitting coke. I love this entire episode as sort of a lesson on mortality for holmes now that he’s a bit older (because clearly almost being tossed into a waterfall didn’t do the job) and also HOPEFULLY a lesson in not abusing watson’s loyalty, which like, the fact that he needed a lesson on that at all is probably a little indicative of the mental low he’s at here.