This story has always fascinated me. And despite some serious misfires by the production team, overall I love what they’ve done with it.

This episode, for me, is about more than the case. Everyone’s all “Three Garridebs” this and “Three Garridebs” that; but in canon, IMHO, “Devil’s Foot” is just as big a milestone in Holmes and Watson’s relationship. The adaptation emphasizes and expands that into something which–for me, anyway–becomes profound and moving. In the context of the Granada series, “Devil’s Foot” is a kind of emotional sequel to “Empty House,” in which the Reichenbach trauma is–surreptitiously and subterraneously–reopened, worked through, and healed. Mercifully, this episode is largely unconcerned with radix pedis diaboli’s central African origins; we do hear the occasional bit of drumming in the soundtrack, but we don’t have to submit to anything like the festival of stereotypes that opens “Six Napoleons.” The lethal horror induced by the drug is instead referred back to the one fear that drives all others–death–and its close companion, loss.



The premise of this episode–that Holmes has pushed himself to the point of physical collapse, and Watson has hauled him out to Cornwall to nurse him back to health–tragically coincides with some of the things happening in Brett’s life at around this time. I’m sure that history is well known to anyone who’s reading these reviews, so I won’t rehearse it here. It’s sad watching this and thinking about the fact that at this point, Brett didn’t even have ten years left to live. But that’s part of the story, as this episode tells it: we’re all dying, and sometimes the best thing we can do is embrace that knowledge instead of running from it.



In the canon story, Watson’s narration hints that Holmes’s vices may have had something to do with the health crisis that sends them out to the back end of Cornwall. Holmes has ground himself down with “constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own.” Gary Hopkins, the screenwriter, takes this hint and runs with it, using this episode to resolve Holmes’s addiction storyline. But, as I’m going to argue, Holmes’s addiction is revealed, in this episode, to be a symptom of, or a metaphor for, something much deeper.



This episode begins with Holmes sitting grumpily in the carriage, swathed in a truly amazing array of wraps, telling Watson darkly, “You should have traveled alone,” to which a pained Watson responds, with false cheerfulness, “Nonsense! We’re on holiday!” The episode ends with one of many reversals, as Holmes waves away Watson’s concerns about his decision to let Sterndale go by repeating his own line back to him: “And besides, as you’re always telling me, we’re on holiday!” In between, Holmes undergoes a serious transformation which leads to a seismic shift in their relationship. And it all starts with that scene at the neolithic tomb, when Watson says, “I suppose death is always with us.”



Of course it really starts long before that. But Watson, as we know, has never been able to get Holmes to do anything he REALLY doesn’t want to do. The cocaine use is the prime example of that. So as much as he bitches about it, the fact that Holmes agreed to go on this holiday indicates that he really does take the doctor’s advice seriously, and that he really is starting to worry about his own health. Almost as soon as they get out to their remote cottage, of course, Holmes breaks out the seven percent solution. But although we’ve seen plenty of other scenes where Watson catches Holmes using, this one is really different. First, we’ve never actually seen Holmes in the act of shooting up before. He’s always either looking at the syringe and thinking about it, or just rolling down his sleeve and putting the paraphernalia away as Watson walks in. This time, we watch him tying off and trying to raise the vein, and we can see how agitated and desperate he is. We also see him rather pathetically trying to conceal all of this from Watson–and that’s also new. In the earlier episodes, when Watson walks in on him after he’s done the deed, Holmes’s typical response to Watson’s silent reproach is a brazen stare with which Holmes basically dares Watson to comment on it. This is the first time Holmes has betrayed any shame or guilt over using cocaine. And again, that’s got to be because he’s starting to think about the possible consequences.



But when Watson says “death is always with us,” that opens things up on a lot of levels. In one sense, it’s a universal truth: we’re all mortal, death is a certainty for everyone. Implied, of course, is a message to Holmes: you’re mortal too, and if you don’t start taking better care of your body you’re going to destroy it. But I think it also has a personal meaning, as in: death is always with us, death is part of this relationship now. Specifically, your death. This is Watson telling Holmes: I lived with your death for three years. I’m still living with it. I don’t have to wonder what it’s going to be like for me when you die, because I already know. And every time you shoot up, every time you chase after someone bigger and stronger and more heavily armed than you, every time you skip a meal or work for 72 hours straight, I see what’s coming. Every time you neglect or mistreat your body, I know you’re bringing us closer to the day when the worst thing in the world is going to happen to me. Again.



So when Holmes agrees, at least in my reading, he’s accepting not just the fact of death but the specific thing that Watson is telling him: that Holmes’s death is something that will happen to Watson too. And this is very important. Holmes came back in “Empty House” and made his confession and they made up; but Holmes didn’t really get what he did to Watson by deceiving him. His experience of those three years was completely different from Watson’s. For Holmes, those years were about cheating death: staying one step ahead of the assassins until he could come back home and shut them down for good. For Watson, the same years were about accepting Holmes’s death and learning to live with it. As much fun as they’ve been having since “Empty House,” they’re still far apart in ways they don’t want to talk about.



But after this conversation, we see some signs that Holmes is starting to understand Watson’s position. He buries the syringe, thus finally kicking (at least till their Cornwall holiday is over) the habit Watson has been after him to stop from day one. But more important, he learns how to live without constant external stimulation. He lets himself just be. I’m not trying to get Zen about this; but the long solitary walks, the “meditations,” the hours spent communing with the weird death-laden landscape they’re in–all of this is new. Up to this point, he’s only ever sat still while either listening to music or smoking his way to the solution to a tricky case. This is him learning to treat himself as just as important and interesting as other people’s problems. Pouring out the vial and burying the syringe stands in for the renunciation of a way of being that he now understands is destructive both to himself and to Watson.



So this is big, for him: trying to let go of self-neglect and find a more sustainable way of being in the world. But as with any major life change, the decision may be sudden but the implementation is gradual, often partial, and always comes with stall-outs and relapses. Watson’s furious when the case turns up–another first, because in the past he’s always welcomed a case as something that will keep Holmes away from the syringe for a few more days. We don’t know if Holmes ever tells Watson that he’s buried the syringe; but Watson’s a doctor, he must figure it out. He’s angry because he’s afraid the case is going to trigger a relapse–not into the drug habit, but into the habits of self-destruction that have become part of his investigative method. And, in fact, he’s right; as soon as Holmes has a case, he snaps right back into his usual mode.



All of this comes to a head in the “experiment” Holmes does with the poison.



So let me say, first of all, that for Doyle, what Holmes does with this unidentified white powder is certainly on the edge, but it’s not so far outside the box as to be insane. Back when Doyle was starting out in medicine, one of the ways doctors determined the lethality of a particular substance was to take it themselves and document their symptoms. And it’s worth remembering that this was probably the fastest and surest way to determine whether the powder was actually the cause of death. There’s no “send it to the lab for testing” in ACD canon. Holmes IS the lab. He knows more about forensic chemistry than anyone in England at this point, and of course he hasn’t brought his equipment to Cornwall. So unless they were going to test it on some unfortunate animal (as Holmes does in Study in Scarlet), this is what would naturally occur to a guy who does not like to wait for results. Doyle did a similar experiment on himself with gelseminum, and wrote it up as an article. Holmes takes what Doyle would have considered sensible precautions: he ensures proper ventilation, reduces the dose, and uses the buddy system. The fact that it nearly kills both of them anyway is really a testament to the astonishing toxicity of this particular substance, though Holmes does berate himself afterwards for having ever thought this was a good idea.



The adaptation treats this very differently. Holmes’s experiment is presented as a return to the self-destructive craving for stimulation that’s now clearly a threat to his life. There are numerous visual cues that prime the modern viewer (the 1988 viewer, anyway) to read this as an analogy for Holmes’s drug use, which is a metaphor for the same death drive. The white powder, the spoon, and the burner evoke other TV representations of people preparing heroin for injection. Unlike in canon, and as with the drug use, Watson protests loudly and calls this “insane.” And yet, as with the drug use, Watson can’t talk him out of it and winds up becoming a party to it, because he’s afraid that left to himself, Holmes is going to kill himself doing this.



Now. What happens next is, from an artistic point of view, terrible. And yet, I’m going to argue, it is also extremely meaningful, and makes this episode so much more important than it would otherwise be.



In the canon story, of course, everything is from Watson’s point of view. So during the experiment, we get Watson’s interiority, but not Holmes’s. In an adaptation, you want to be able to deliver *more* than the original text does; and this episode attempts that by going into Holmes’s head and giving us his interiority. I 100% applaud this decision. It is a golden opportunity for character development, and for us to learn more about emotions that Holmes will never verbalize. Good for you, Gary, for seizing it.



And yet, this decision brings the production team smack up against the main problem with adapting “Devil’s Foot:” No stream of actual images can possibly REALLY be as scary what people supposedly experience when they’re on this drug. Doyle wisely avoids giving us the content of Watson’s hallucinations, and instead just tells us what Watson’s sensations are. But on film, the only way to get into Holmes’s head is to show us what’s in there. And there is definitely nothing you can represent–certainly nothing you can represent on network television in 1988–that wouldn’t be vastly disappointing to the viewers after all this buildup.



But in fact, the montage that represents Holmes’s RPD hallucinations isn’t vastly disappointing. It’s fucking DISASTROUS. It is a catastrophic cinematic fail. This is not only the worst part of this episode, it is the worst part of ANY of the episodes I have yet seen, and I’m including all of “Resident Patient.” It’s a mishmash of unconvincing 80s horror cliches, fake blood, crude attempts at visual distortion and disorientation, trippy closeups of Jeremy Brett’s goggle-eyed stare of horror, and–for some reason–random William Blake engravings

That’s Nebuchadnezzar being driven mad by God, so I guess there is some thematic connection, and it’s also true that famous drug user Jim Morrison of the Doors got the name of his band from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell so perhaps this is also a continuation of the drugs analgoy but…it’s bad. The whole thing is awful. I mean I laughed, out loud, hysterically, throughout. And I thought, you know what, this one time I wish I could bring in Moffat and Gatiss here and have them do this part, because this hallucinatory mind palace stuff is something they excel at, and at which the Granada team, or at least this particular Granada team, evidently *sucked.*



And yet.



If we get past the dreadful execution and consider the content, this hallucination is really important. We find out that what Holmes fears most at this point is death. And not just for what it’s going to do to him, but for what it will do to Watson.



So this montage starts out with a lot of shots of Holmes at the tomb where they have that first conversation about death. We also get the view of the sea from above, which reminds us that in a lot of ways this landscape replicates the Reichenbach setting: wild and sublime landscape, the most mountainous you can find in England, sheer cliff dropping down to a roiling body of water below. Sure enough, from there we get into the flashbacks to his fight with Moriarty from “Final Problem,” and to the shot of Holmes and Moriarty flying down the Reichenbach falls.



What they use at this point in the montage is various false-color versions of the footage they shot of Holmes and Moriarty falling off the cliff for the end of “Final Problem.” But of course what’s shown in that footage is something that never actually happened. Holmes never did go into the chasm. It’s Watson’s imagination of what happened. So when Holmes sees this, it’s not a flashback. He’s not remembering something he experienced. He is, for the first time, seeing his own death from Watson’s point of view.



Let us remember that this drug forces people to confront things so terrifying that they will literally be driven insane if they contemplate them for too long.



So this means the following: 1) Holmes now recognizes the experience of watching your partner die as lethally terrifying. 2) This tells you something about how terrifying the prospect of Watson’s death is to him. 3) It also tells you something about how terrified he is of his own feelings about the fact that he inflicted this unspeakable horror on the person he loves most.



In other words: Holmes finally gets it. He’s experiencing what it was like to be Watson during those three years, and he’s fucking terrified by it. And that’s going to change everything.



Because of the decision to go into Holmes’s head, we don’t get to see Watson using his last shred of “strength and sanity” to drag Holmes to safety. But we get something a lot more powerful instead. We hear Watson calling Holmes’s name, and we see Holmes, from Watson’s POV, writhing in convulsions while Watson frantically tries to get Holmes to recognize him:




Originally posted by halloawhatisthis



And then he finally does:

And the first word out of his mouth is:



“JOHN!”



First name. First time.



I tell you, I got chills.



In the canon story, Holmes makes Watson a little speech about how dangerous and reckless this was and how sorry he is to have exposed him to all this danger. Watson treasures this moment because, he says, “I had never seen so much of his heart before.” As different as the adaptation is, this moment instantly captures the effect Doyle was striving for here. The first name tells you: this is a breakthrough moment. What’s happening here, and the visuals keep reminding us, is that they are re-playing the “Empty House” reunion scene, with the roles reversed and with a completely different kind of emotion from Holmes. In the reunion scene, Holmes also reaches out for Watson; but here, instead of saying, “I’ve come back to comfort you,” the same gesture says, “For the love of God, comfort me.” In “Empty House,” it’s Holmes bringing Watson around after his faint; here, it’s Watson trying to drag Holmes back to the land of the living. In “Empty House,” it’s Watson who has to grab onto Holmes to reassure himself that he’s real; here, it’s Holmes clinging to Watson for dear life:




So this is Holmes finishing up Watson’s journey. Watson thinks he’s pulled Holmes back from the brink; but for Holmes, it’s as if Watson’s come back from the dead. Because after all, though the adaptation doesn’t emphasize this as much as the story does, this little stunt could have killed Watson just as easily as it could have killed Holmes. This is Holmes learning that from now on, death is something that comes for both of them if it comes for one of them, and that he never wants Watson to go through that again.



And so when he apologizes, and says that this experience was “an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend,” it’s not just about the poison. It’s about the Fall. Holmes finally understands enough about what he did to offer a truly meaningful apology. This is the moment that the gulf between them closes, and the relationship is truly repaired. And I only wish they would have stayed with Hardwicke a little longer to let us watch this sink in for Watson.



Instead, we have to content ourselves with the final conversation, after Watson has once again objected to Holmes’s decision to let a murderer go because he killed in revenge for the woman he loved. Well, that’s all traceable to Doyle’s biography and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But they do something very interesting with this little snippet from the canon story:



“I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done. Who knows?”



So, when Holmes says “I have never loved,” well, the whole episode has been about showing us why that’s bullshit. He has loved, and the person he has loved is the person he’s saying this to. But the rest of it…Holmes is basically saying, if anyone ever harms the person I love, I will fuck them up. And in the adaptation, Watson gets to say it back: yeah, I would probably do the same in that situation. Now, “I will kill anyone who hurts you” is kind of a strange way to say “I love you;” but honestly, if you watch the scene, I think that’s basically what they both mean. This is the ILY exchange. They’re closer now than ever before. Death is still with them. But now they’ve faced it together. They’ve both gone into that chasm and come back out. And they’re finally, now, on holiday. Together.