Sir Arthur Conon Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes must have been the most modern man of his times that is the 19thCentury. His knowledge in various fields now classified under the umbrella, forensics, wasn’t although what made ‘the science of deduction’ possible. His knowledge was accompanied by the optical technology of those times: magnifying glass and microscope.
Reinterpreting Doyle’s great work, BBC has recreated Sherlock and set the series in the modern-day London and have excellently converted the Victorian work into a 21st Century drama. And technology, as we know it now, has been shown as we know it but with a twist. It assists Sherlock in all his endeavors and it has been used in editing to give the viewers more perspective into the consulting detective’s mind.
According to the creator of ‘Sherlock’ and actor who plays his brother Mycroft, Steven Moffat, the most important equipment that has been used and sets Sherlock apart from all the other tech-savvy shows of this time is Sherlock’s mobile phone.
The floating words representing texts, internet searches or any other form of technical interface has become the central identity of the series and this makes the series so astute. The episodes of the series have been edited in a manner to make the viewer get immensely involved in the plot by displaying any text message anyone sends or receives onscreen and Sherlock’s deductions are mostly shown as well.
Five minutes into the first episode, ‘The Study in Pink’, the journalists along with DI Greg Lestrade and Sergeant Donovan receive the same message saying ‘Wrong!’ from Sherlock, which is actually his first onscreen ‘appearance’. We weren’t shown the small screens of the phones of people present, instead the text was shown onscreen.
Sherlock, in the same episode, tells John and their friend Mike how he prefers to text people over making calls. That could be because Sherlock, as per John has the Asperger Syndrome.
But a mobile does a lot more than just texting. Sherlock has been seen using his mobile phone to search for things he doesn’t have knowledge of, like the fictional Van Buren Supernova in ‘The Great Game’, to trace the killer in ‘The Study of Pink’ by tracking the missing phone of victim 4, to check the weather of a different area in the same episode, etc.
In ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’, Irene Alder continually communicates with Sherlock via messages while later, Sherlock is trying to crack the password of her phone after she is allegedly dead.
In Doyle’s novels, Dr. Watson used to make entries in his journal to account his experiences with Sherlock which has been reinvented as blogs in Moffat’s adaptation.
The visual and audio inclusion of the mobile phone and modern technology particularly keeps the interest of viewers and offers additional information without the usage of dialogues between characters.
The deductions Sherlock makes in the series are done quite fast because Sherlock thinks as fast as we Google and it would have been hard to follow the same without the assistance of the words to represent his rapid deductions! The visual effect makes on think Sherlock is a computer himself or at least works like one (at one point he points at his head and tells John him that his brain is a hard drive). This has been done in all episodes of the series. I particularly liked how the deduction-text onscreen was not clear when Sherlock and John got drunk on John’s Bachelor Party and went on to solve the case of the Mayflower Man in ‘The Sign of Three’.
Another scene that struck me the most was when Sherlock deduces Mary Mortsan and those surround Mary in ‘The Empty Hearse’ and the same deductions getting replaced by ‘Liar’ in ‘His Last Vow’.
The modern-day Sherlock series also incorporates social media, for example, in ‘The Empty Hearse’ the screen is flooded with multiple Twitter hashtags stating Sherlock is alive!
But just like how the technology of the 19th Century i.e. the magnifying glass and a microscope amplified Sherlock’s abilities, the natural abilities of Sherlock in the BBC series are merely augmented by his mobile phone. Although, the series makes us recognize how our lives in the 21st Century are mediated substantially.