plaidadder:

So, very belatedly, I just finally watched the Granada Holmes “The Empty House,” with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke. As followers of the Granada rewatch will know, I quit watching the first time around after they changed Watsons following “The Final Problem.” I will do a separate post that’s just about that episode soon. But first: I could not help but watch “Empty House” with “The Empty Hearse” in mind. Gatiss at least must have been a Granada Holmes fan, so I know he had “Empty House” in mind when he was writing “Empty Hearse.” (Indeed, there are specific things in “Empty House” that I think show up in TRF/TEH, such as the framed print of the Reichenbach Falls hanging above the mantel in 221b ( –>the oil painting of same that Sherlock is supposed to have helped recover in TRF), the champagne celebration with Mrs. Hudson at the end (–>champagne celebration in 221B with Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, and Molly and her new boyfriend). And yet, I think when you put “Empty Hearse” up against “Empty House,” it reveals some interesting things about why Sherlock went off the rails after the hiatus. (If you don’t think it went off the rails, you might not enjoy what’s coming up very much.)

The short story is: there’s good and bad in both adaptations. But in “Empty House,” most of what’s bad was more or less unavoidable. In “Empty Hearse,” the bad–or at least what I consider the bad–is deliberate. “Empty House,” like the canon story it adapts, basically resumes Holmes and Watson’s pre-”Final Problem” relationship. “Empty Hearse” inaugurates a completely new one–one which, even within the context of that episode, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

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