Original subtitles

This is the story of how the greatest detective who never lived changed the

world. Sherlock Holmes.

Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary. And how he did it happened in ways few

could ever imagine.

Space science.

The science we're doing here at NASA is really Holmes' 21st century popular

culture. Of course, Sherlock Holmes has to meet Batman.

Because Sherlock Holmes is Batman.

There would be no Batman without Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes haunts a lot of the popular culture of the 20th century.

Espionage. Sherlock Holmes is the featured saint of intelligence analysis.

Forensic science.

The theory should fit the data, not the data fitting the theory.

It's very Holmes.

Yeah. We live in a universe where Sherlock Holmes has left his mark

everywhere.

326, take four.

Every few years, a fictional character re-emerges and captures the imagination

of a new generation.

The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221 B Baker Street.

Mark Gatiss is co-creator of the BBC series Sherlock.

He has a Victorian superpower.

which still works in the modern day. I think essentially it comes down to the

fact that he is the smartest man in the room.

He can make the connections nobody else can, and that is timeless.

When you read his study in Scarlet, and Holmes is introduced to Watson,

and he says... Afghanistan or Iraq.

And Watson's, how the devil did you know that? And Holmes said, by the way,

you're limping. I know you're an army doctor and you've been admitted home

from Afghanistan quite correctly, I'm afraid.

Well, of course, that's insane.

There are hundreds of ways that somebody could limp.

But the thing that strikes you about Holmes is that he takes common sense

events and finds explanations for them.

Well, anyway... It must speak of a kind of need we have to be saved, I think,

or to believe there is something slightly higher than us which is going

to come and get us out of this terrible mess we're all in.

It seems that Holmes shines a little brighter for people when things aren't

going very well.

And things are going wrong in the world.

Banks do not have sufficient capital to make loans.

So I need somebody who can reassure me that there are people out there who can

make things right.

And right now we're in a sort of a renaissance of Holmes.

The Sherlock Holmes stories have never been out of print since Sir Arthur Conan

Doyle created the character in 1887.

Holmes first appeared in a minor Christmas penny press magazine.

The story?

Study in Scarlet.

At first, I think they attracted very little attention.

But after time, when I began the short adventures, people began to recognise

that it was different to the old detective.

He wrote 60 stories, four novels and 56 short stories.

They began to buy the magazine.

After the Bible, the Holmes stories are the most widely circulated and

translated books in the world.

It's often said that he's the most depicted fictional character, certainly

the most filmed fictional character.

I think it's because of the strange sort of glamour that he possesses.

It's a rather uneasy sort of glamour because he is a glacial and frightening

character.

Oh, Professor Magati.

But he's rather like a character from Gothic fiction.

How fresh.

Just in.

Used to work here. I knew him. He was nice.

He's rather like a vampire.

Dark glamour is just one aspect of Holmes that has left its permanent mark

on popular culture.

So, bad day was it?

Another is fandom.

Nowadays, millions of people live in the fantasy world of their favorite TV and

film heroes.

The Klingon universe is really no different than any other universe.

The fictional Sherlock Holmes started it all.

Prior to Doyle's creation, there had never been a pop culture character more

famous than its creator.

People got confused.

Was Sherlock Holmes a real person?

The curious thing is, how many people around the world are perfectly convinced

that he is a living human being?

That idea of understanding the character as real began even as the stories were

being written.

I'll bet you if you go down Baker Street and stop a random ten people and ask

them a question like, did you know that Sherlock Holmes lived here?

I'll bet you that six or seven out of those ten will say, yes, I did.

I get letters addressed to him.

Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional figure who inspired role-playing among

his fans.

Today,

Fan fantasy is a part of popular culture.

Before there were all of these little niches and little pop culture tribes and

little pockets of fandom, there was this incredibly potent character that

just reached out and shaped all of these other things.

The same people who watch Law & Order today are not the same people who are

dressing up as Klingons at Star Trek conventions.

But they all owe a debt to Holmes.

There are Sherlock Holmes groups in Britain, many in the United States.

Japan is mad for Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle sort of hit something universal.

You all know it's not real. I do know that it isn't real.

But it made all that genre escapism legitimate.

And it's a nice, enjoyable intellectual exercise.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had enough of Holmes, he decided to kill him.

Holmes and his arch-nemesis Moriarty fell over a waterfall in the 1891

classic The Final Problem.

The public outcry was off the scale.

There was an outrage, and people in the city of London went around wearing black

armbands, mourning armbands. A woman allegedly wrote to Conan Doyle saying,

you brute!

I've written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do, but my hand

has been rather forced by kind friends who continually wanted to know more.

Slowly, slowly, he was able to usher him back in.

He came home!

There's something Christ-like about Holmes.

He's the man who dies and rises again.

He falls quite a long way, but he comes back.

And I think that's one of the reasons why he inspires that kind of following.

Holmes has survived through to the 21st century in ways his creator could never

have imagined.

He cannot be contained now. He's out in the culture like a kind of disease or a

germ. And he'll go on infecting the culture, I'm sure, forever.

There is nothing nicer than to start a Sherlock Holmes story and, you know, the

wind was blowing a storm down Baker Street and the fire was crackling in the

hearth and Sherlock Holmes cast aside a newspaper and took his first pipe of the

day and said, I'm bored, Watson. And then you hear the client's foot upon the

stair and you know that they're going to be off and racing and running.

You know, I owe you an apology.

You come here for adventure?

And I've none to offer you. Very soon out of London's teeming millions, some

distressed person will step up to the door and knock.

Ring watch and knock. It doesn't function. You should have noticed that.

First stop on Planet Holmes.

The Crime Lab.

Sherlock Holmes' most critical contribution to the modern world unfolds

in crime labs and morgues all over the planet.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes stories, there was no such thing

as forensic science.

E.J. Wagner is the author of The Science of Sherlock Holmes.

It wasn't called forensic science. It was called, usually, medical

jurisprudence. Originally, this was the area of physicians who would call in

various experts who knew something about shoes or fine wines and sort of use

their knowledge. There was no organization for it at all at the

Metropolitan Police, which was itself very new.

In pertinence, she called us policemen.

And what's wrong with being a policeman?

In the late Victorian era, late 1800s, policing...

in London left a lot to be desired. The crime scenes in those days were simply

chaotic.

Crime like Jack the Ripper, for instance.

The bodies were not sketched properly in situ.

Evidence disappeared.

Evidence was never collected.

Evidence was deliberately destroyed because they were afraid of causing

riots, which was very well meant, but it didn't get anywhere towards solving the

crime.

Sherlock Holmes says in one of the stories, a greater mess could not have

been made if a herd of elephants had blundered through.

Well, that is pretty much what happened. They had no method.

One of the first principles in solving crime is never to disregard anything, no

matter how trivial.

If Sherlock Holmes had been running the investigation, each of those bodies

would have been examined very, very carefully as they lay, as they were

found, not after they were removed to the morgue.

where things fell off, dropped off, evidence was lost.

Holmes made people realize that forensics and deductive reasoning,

these are methods that we need to use.

Even today, police forces around the world, universities who teach forensic

crimes and investigation use Sherlock Holmes and quote Sherlock Holmes in

lessons. as the model.

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He helped lay the foundation for this kind of modern crime scene

investigation.

It all annoyed me how in the old-fashioned detective story, the

detective always seemed to get at his results by some sort of lucky chance or

a fluke.

Conan Doyle was a physician, and there is a great deal in

forensic science which is really based on medical procedures.

Joseph Bell would very often bring

before his class some unfortunate sufferer of a mysterious, complex

disease.

diagnosis of the disease entirely by his part of observation.

He certainly had a tremendous influence on Conan Doyle, and therefore on

Sherlock Holmes.

So naturally, I thought to myself, well, if a scientific man like Bell was to

come into the detective business, he wouldn't do these things by chance.

He'd get the thing by building it up, scientifically.

Proof, my dear pillow. We must have proof.

The Sherlock Holmes stories caught the attention of a French doctor, Edmond

Locard, in the 1920s.

Locard worked with police to solve crimes, and developed a theory that all

things leave a trace.

Forensic science was born.

He wrote that Sherlock Holmes inspired his groundbreaking theories on trace

evidence, and he set the course for the next century's CSIs.

Sherlock Holmes taught them.

Locard said he thought everyone studying forensic science should read Sherlock

Holmes, especially The Sign of Four.

In the first place, it's been bleached and soaked by long immersion in salt

water. I don't know if you like the taste of it. The Holmes stories featured

an array of forensic tools.

Chemical analysis.

Microscopic inspection.

Footprint identification.

Ballistics.

Handwriting analysis, gunpowder residue, typography,

photographic enlargements.

All of these devices appeared in fiction before any were actually used by real

CSIs.

And today, many forensic scientists admit Holmes' love of the lab is only

half of their job.

The other half is his love for intrigue.

I love puzzles.

And this is a puzzle. You're trying to figure out what happened.

My mind rebels in stagnation.

I grew up on mystery novels as a kid. Getting the answer has always been

something. I love information.

Give me the most abstruse cryptogram, the most intricate analysis, and I'm in

my proper atmosphere.

I just love it.

When I was seven, I wrote stories about people getting murdered and me solving

the crimes.

Holmes' love for cutting-edge science inspires the current generation of

forensic analysts who specialize in fields Doyle could never have imagined.

This is a typical condition that will get a cell phone in.

This expert retrieves data from cell phones that have been smashed by

criminals trying to erase electronic evidence of their whereabouts.

It's the kind of data collection that Doyle invented with the fictional

Holmes.

It was method, he said.

You collect all these small facts, data, data, data, and then I will put it

together, and I will come out with a satisfactory conclusion.

All we need to do at this point is press read.

It's reading all of the information from the chip.

The word voicemail is in here, so we know that there's probably some kind of

voicemail.

Broken fibers appear darker than the rest of the paper and are therefore

visible. Splendid, Holmes.

I believe Dr. Tobel meant to communicate with us by that means.

In 1893, Doyle wrote about the unique character of handwriting, 15 years

before it was ever used in a real case.

Today, that tradition continues in this CSI's lab.

This is called the Video Spectral Comparator, or VSC for short.

And basically, this just uses different wavelengths of light to distinguish

between inks.

So in this case, we have an individual who's found dead, and

a bunch of things have been obliterated in the day timer.

And so you can see here,

that we're seeing Lunch with Sue underneath the scribble, and that's

because under this infrared light, the Lunch with Sue ink is absorbing the

infrared. Watson, I'm beginning to see the plan.

Holmes believed that data could be proved useful no matter how obscure.

He collected hundreds of types of tobacco, so that no matter what the

criminal smoked, Holmes would know how to narrow his search.

That premise drives 21st century forensics.

What Holmes was doing really was saying, collect your data and don't form your

theory until you have it. Know a lot about a lot of different things.

He was sort of a one-person walking crime laboratory.

He even beefed corpses to see where the bruises would form, because that's

another very big problem to this day.

Did this bruising take place as post-mortem or anti-mortem? How did this

happen? Dr. Joseph Bell inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to use the autopsy as

a crime-solving tool.

Doyle popularized it in fiction long before it was put into practice.

And today, the autopsy is the universal standard.

At the end of the day, we are death investigators.

This individual who is deceased is our patient, so to speak, and we are the

last people who are ever going to examine that individual and get as close

to the truth as we possibly can.

Modern tools make the autopsy even more powerful than Conan Doyle could ever

have imagined.

Traditionally, autopsy looks at the organs in the chest and abdominal area.

However, when you start using a CT scan, you can start seeing parts of the body

such as the internal portions of the extremities, the muscles, the bones.

So having this technology really provides a huge amount of additional

information. And in some cases, has eliminated the need to do an autopsy as

long as the pertinent questions were answered by the scan.

But with all the advancements, old school Sherlockian forensics are still

going strong.

In The Adventure of the Reggot Squire, Doyle introduced the notion of

ballistics analysis to determine which gun fired a bullet.

That practice continues, and today's forensic experts agree with Sherlock

Holmes that no two weapons are the same.

I'm constantly trying to disprove our theory to where we are taking

consecutively manufactured firearms...

We are test firing them, trying to compare them to each other, trying to

make the firearm that was made first match with the firearm that was made

second. And to this date, it has still not been done.

So we can still prove and have been proven over and over again that we can,

in fact, identify fired bullets and fired cartridge cases back to a firearm.

In 1887's A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes analyzed blood to determine who

it came from.

13 years pass before this technique is put into practice.

And almost a century goes by before the advent of DNA testing.

The DNA profiles tests for hair color, eye color, ethnicity, height, weight,

and other physical traits.

It just continues to grow and grow.

The techniques are so robust and reliable and they just keep improving

and the discriminatory power keeps improving.

Sherlock's influence on criminologists and their methods runs deeper than any

other real historical figure.

That says a lot for a man who never lived.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes had an unusual talent, hiding in plain

sight.

Holmes was a master of disguise.

Hands up, gentlemen.

Oh, why, it's Mr. Holmes.

Holmes! Put that thing away now, Watson.

Watson said that the stage lost an actor when Holmes decided to become a

detective.

An admirable disguise, by the way.

Fooled him completely.

Of course he didn't fool me. I never intended that it should.

He would immerse himself in the character.

He had several...

Boltholes around London were equipped with makeup and costumes that he could

retire to and emerge as somebody else.

Completely different identity.

Whether it was a drunken groom or an Italian priest or an up-and-coming

plumber, Holmes actually became the character.

His mastery of that technique was really a pioneering thing.

Sherlock Holmes.

Improvement on the other makeup?

Don't you think so, Professor?

The tradition of going undercover lives on in police forces around the world.

I think some of them are slightly embarrassed, to tell you the truth,

about how much they are influenced by what they read when they were 14.

Dragan Milatovic, 52 years old, a multidisciplinary organized crime figure

with massive connections.

A team of former undercover cops now runs a top private investigation firm in

Canada. The team is about to close in on a deadly drug dealer, using techniques

straight from the pages of Sherlock Holmes.

Just so you know, this guy's got a record dating back to 1983, assault

convictions and an assault causing.

Milanovic is 6'1", 320 pounds.

He's been involved in martial arts for about 40 years.

He's an absolute bone crusher.

He does a lot of dirty work for the Hells Angels, and he's hurt a lot of

people. I will be posing as the boss of a mock criminal organization this

afternoon. To complete his risky job, Fred Pinnock dons a simple but effective

disguise. There are many occasions where deception and trickery have to be used

to have people responsible for criminal acts divulge long-held evidence or

admissions.

My dear Watson, if we're to catch our fishes, we must use the bait they're

bite on. On the surveillance, Julia, you're going to be wired, so I need you

to let your hair down to cover that earpiece.

Jake, you're going to ride with Len.

Julia, you ride with me.

Make no mistake, Watson.

This is our greatest antagonist, Professor Mariachi.

You've got to beat him.

Dragon is a dangerous guy. He has a history of violence.

Having said that, I gained his trust over the past year.

He's aware of the deal. He's eager to make it happen. I'm confident that he

believes it's legitimate.

General Samuel Wilson is a career spy, a master of deception.

Sherlock Holmes was one of the early practitioners of deception.

Deception is engaging in acts that mislead, confuse,

discombobulate an opponent.

Cause him to take actions that are not in his best interest, but may be in

yours.

Or not to act when he should act.

I'm always eager to get it going. We're just waiting for his call.

It'll be calling in a couple minutes.

Once you get your phone call from Fred that they're in place, then get him in

the car and drive him over there.

The criminal steps straight into the trap.

Holmes had a way of smoking people out.

Holmes confused, misled people to where they suddenly appeared and he had them

in their grasp. I would say you were wrong and Mr. Sherlock Holmes was

correct. Good evening, Professor Moriarty.

A single slip-up and the undercover agents could find themselves in a deadly

situation.

You will meet and greet...

Our subject, before he gets in the car, I want you to check him out, make sure

he's got nothing on him that he shouldn't have.

Okay? Then let him in the car.

Now, the moment of greatest danger.

Who do we have here?

How are you?

Doing fine.

It's a moment that echoes Holmes.

Who's this bloke?

He's a bloodthirsty Eden.

But there's good money to spend for information.

I recognize Sherlock Holmes, as we would say, fine Italian hand in the business

of deception, of which he was a master.

Leave it 6,000 units?

Approximately, yes.

It will cost you $40 per unit? $40 per unit, yeah.

How fast can this happen?

As soon as you get me the money, within about, I would say within 24 hours.

Okay, Will has the cash right now.

Good.

I think maybe at some time we will become good friends. Yeah.

Good friends do good business. Yeah.

I never did think much of this dressing up business. It was necessary, I assure

you.

Another violent criminal is caught in the snare, thanks to the art of disguise

inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

But his undercover influence doesn't end there.

Others consider Holmes the master spy, the model for the 21st century's high

-stakes game of espionage.

General Sam Wilson is one of the United States' most decorated spies.

For what exactly, he will never say.

But he will admit that it all started reading Sherlock Holmes stories as a

boy.

I found so much that was deep and substantive, meaningful and rich in

Holmes as a figure and in the intellectual feats that he was able to

achieve. I simply found myself fascinated with it.

Wilson worked for ten U.S. presidents as a secret agent, never revealing his own

secret.

Sherlock Holmes was his silent protector.

I absorbed Holmes and his life and was aware of his thesis that the human

mind is a most powerful tool if it is finely honed and educated and

concentrated on solving problems.

Holmes to me was a problem solver.

The intricacies of his mind simply appealed to me very, very greatly.

And I think they were a benefit to me as I moved into intelligence as a career.

Spies never retire.

They just work in the shadows.

And General Wilson now imagines what might have happened if intelligence

officials had used Sherlock Holmes as their model to catch Osama bin Laden.

Sherlock Holmes would have found Osama bin Laden for us much sooner.

We can't keep secrets these days.

One of the things that we always preached was how to avoid the spotlight

at the end of the action.

And you just fade away.

Holmes was good at this. Give the credit and the publicity to someone else. Let's

fade away into the shadows so we can work again another day.

Sherlock Holmes set the stage for the dangerous world of modern undercover

operations. Master of the art of being invisible in plain sight.

Every day, human hunters stalk the streets, looking for opportunities to

commit violent crimes.

In the late 20th century, criminologists realized that most of these predators

follow recognizable patterns.

Police call it behavioral science, or more simply, profiling.

And in 1887's Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle anticipated profiling

by almost a hundred years.

This makes four, Inspector.

All defenseless women here in the heart of London.

Lee Rainbow is the UK's top criminal profiler.

A modern Sherlock.

I think certainly in terms of crime scene assessment, what we do is very

similar to the Holmes approach in gathering data, using the data to drive

the theory rather than vice versa, and hypothesis generation and testing, the

search for further data to support or refute those hypotheses, and then coming

up with the best fit for the known information, which is essentially what

Holmes was using.

One of our roles is to very much recognise that the theory should fit the

data. not the data fitting the theory, and that's very much what we do.

The truth has only arrived at by the painstaking process of eliminating the

untrue.

We are not able to do that in this case without further data.

Everything we do is driven by data.

Everything.

There's a tendency to glamorise and romanticise the intelligence operator,

the James Bond.

That is the exciting arena.

That's where the headlines are.

There's a tendency to ignore faceless analysts laboring, putting bits and

pieces of evidence together and trying to figure out what they mean.

And that's Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes spanned pretty much the field of deception, collection

operations, and so on.

But when I stopped to think about doing what he was, I would say, first and

foremost, the world's greatest intelligence analyst.

One cutting-edge technique owes its inspiration to the Holmesian method.

It's called geographic profiling, and it's proven to narrow down where a

violent offender hunts and even where he lives.

Ian Laverty is one of the creators of a geoprofiling program inspired by

Sherlock Holmes.

Well, to start with in geographic profiling, you need a series of

connected locations.

It's like the old pin maps that the police used to put on the wall, stick

little pins in the map, and then they'd stare at the pattern and say, hmm, I

wonder what this means.

So what we do is enter the crime locations into the program, and it does

the very complicated calculation, actually, where it runs through the

entire city if the criminal lived here.

And he traveled to all of these crime sites. How long would it take? And then

it moves over a little bit. And as you do that, you're building up a

probability map that shows you where the criminal is more likely to live over the

entire city.

We thought we were the hunters, instead of which we're the hunted.

Scott Filer is a profiler and private investigator in Canada.

People commit crimes for a reason.

People think it's random. It's really not a random process. There are reasons

that people choose to do things the way they do. And that's the premise behind

the software. It takes all those scientific considerations into play when

the algorithm behind the software is working. These maps allow us to

prioritize the search area for the suspect.

Sherlock Holmes was all about applying...

his knowledge with a little bit of intuition.

And he was a very smart guy.

But what we have that he didn't have is a whole lot of information.

He had the kids that ran around the streets gathering information for him,

but we have the modern equivalent in the computer tools that we use, and they

have a whole lot more information to go on. If Sherlock Holmes was around today,

he'd have apps like ours on his smartphone, and he'd be using them all

the time.

But Lee Rainbow points out that, despite computers,

the data still needs a detective, like Holmes, to make sense of it.

You still need that human aspect to it, to identify which of the important

variables. Those things can't be done by a computer.

There's something in that bag she wants to show me.

What makes you say that? The bag doesn't match her dress.

They're getting her to pick the size rather than style to accommodate some

bulky object.

Anybody can get in front of a computer and punch keys and make something come

out of it. What goes into that is the human factor.

Holmes was an expert in logic, reasoning out explanations, looking at the

evidence that remains, and putting the puzzle together.

So at the end of the day, what comes out of it is an informed hypothesis about

what you think happened between the victim and the suspect.

That's the critical piece. It's about the analyst and the skills and knowledge

that the analyst brings to the process that makes it successful.

Sometimes, when the profilers hit a dead end, old-school lie detection comes into

play.

Theo Hollomby is one of the world's top polygraphic analysts.

I think that Holmes probably would have appreciated the instrument like that, to

be very honest with you, because he used the powers of observation to see if

somebody was sweating or that his heart was beating faster than normal.

I was studying the faces of our fellow passengers.

Fascinating hobby, and sometimes most enlightening.

You can actually see that this body is reacting when you ask him that certain

type of question.

The polygraph has been a forensic tool since Conan Doyle's time, and it's still

going strong.

At the moment, it is still the best tool to use in any investigation, according

to me.

There's a lot of other scientific ways to investigate, statement analysis or

the reading of the body.

But with a polygraph, you can actually put something on paper. You can say the

body reacted to a certain question at that time, and this is what the body

did.

Did you steal that watch?

No.

Many profilers admit their model was Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character

who used deduction to close in on criminals that were too elusive for

standard police methods.

It's very Holmes.

I make it akin to doing a crossword puzzle. You get one piece of data that

starts giving you a clue for the next.

You slowly build up this picture, which is very intellectually challenging, like

a crossword.

But the completion of that crossword is, you catch a bad guy.

And for me, it's a perfect role, perfect job.

I love it.

I really do.

Yeah.

What are you thinking of?

I'm thinking of all the women who can come and go in safety in the streets of

London tonight.

Sherlock Holmes is known all over the planet, but his influence also reaches

into space.

Inspiring NASA scientist, Dr. James Garvin.

Science operates in a lot of different ways, but perhaps at the most visceral

level, it's very forensic.

All of us who are fans of that 221B Baker Street idea recognized in reading

those stories of more than 100 plus years ago that this is science applied

science. to understanding.

Garvin was an intern when NASA first put a camera on Mars in 1975.

He's now the agency's top scientist.

He's defined NASA's direction for space exploration and owes it all to reading

Sherlock Holmes as a little boy.

Sherlock Holmes, I might have known.

I really came into science by being curious, as all young people probably

are. They may not realize it, but they are.

I mean, I like rocks and bugs, but other kids like beating up their neighborhood

kid or sister, whatever it is. It's that curiosity.

But once you read the Sherlock Holmes stories and you see the interplay

between thinking, evidence, solving something that matters, you know, death

of people kind of does, you realize that's what science is. We are crime

solvers, but the crimes are the problem you're solving.

Ocean heat flow, climate stories on Earth.

why Venus is so weird, whether life exists on Mars or the bigger universe,

are we alone?

I read Holmes before I became a scientist.

What Garvin learned from the Sherlock Holmes stories is that data comes first.

Theories follow.

Nothing but an ordinary match folder.

Where does that lead us?

I imagine to something very important, Gregson.

And with that, a generation of scientists regards space as a Holmesian

mystery. that needs to be solved.

How do we figure these things out? How do we make it into that puzzle-solving

forensic science that Sherlock Holmes demonstrated in these great stories? And

we do so with data, with information, and we increase that information in ways

that is like increasing the pool of evidence you would have in a mystery, in

a crime story.

What's the puzzle of water on Mars?

Well, we went to Mars.

We saw a dry, alien, apparently sterile desert.

We landed, we sat there for years.

Nothing really much happened.

And then, revolution.

The forensic puzzle changed.

We got a little more information, as Holmes did, in the stories by Sir Conan

Doyle. And you put the extra piece of information in, and even though it might

seem small, kaboom! We now have the wet-warm Mars.

The Mars where following the water makes sense. Today, following the carbon.

It's so Holmesian. And I think that's what is attractive to some of us

scientists.

We kind of operate like Sherlock Holmes did, you know, 140, 50 years ago, but

with new pieces of data.

NASA's role has evolved.

The agency now studies scientific mysteries on Earth as much as the stars.

But Garvin says Sherlock Holmes' methods still rule his vision.

Listen to the facts.

Then, make your analysis.

Key of the keyboard is the 19th letter of the alphabet.

Garvin and his team went back to the moon missions and found new evidence in

old data.

Seemingly a dead world. We visited it with astronauts 40 years ago.

Been there, done that. In fact, that's not the case. The moon is actually a

repository of information about the whole solar system. And we've just come

to realize that from the new evidence we're getting from new missions.

So it's all about the information.

We get it from every perspective we can.

That's very Holmesian. Those pieces of evidence give us the story where we can

play the Holmesian game, and that's what's so beautiful. We're discovering

our own future and our future question.

From the moon to the stars, Sherlock Holmes' influence stretches deep into

space exploration.

But back on Earth, it's driven popular culture in ways that cannot be measured.

Sherlock Holmes has been imitated and adapted more than any other fictional

character in history.

Mr. Holmes!

Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Good morning, Mr. Holmes.

Mr. Holmes?

Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a character who exploded onto the world of

fiction and has left his mark on three centuries.

We are living in Sherlock Holmes' world. There are just so many creators of

fictional universes who are inspired by Holmes. You could go back and say that

Holmes was the Model T of all modern science fiction, of mystery fiction, of

genre fiction.

All right, Cato, we're going to introduce Mr. Grant and the world to the

Green Hornet.

The marks of it are on every mystery novel, every detective figure, and...

Every conflict between the rational and the irrational.

From the X-file to the lost to the belief procedurals.

I want to report a murder.

Who was murdered?

I was.

It all comes back to Holmes.

It's hard to find something in modern entertainment that Sherlock Holmes did

not touch in one way or another.

Holmes is a character who conjured something so powerful and so vital that

that character just escaped and went running through the culture. And it had

a power that Doyle couldn't tame.

A lot of people have written pastiche Sherlock Holmes stories. The new

Sherlock Holmes series at the BBC was a startling success.

But why has Sherlock Holmes remained so popular?

The great Sherlock Holmes himself.

Many believe it's all about his relationship with Dr. Watson.

Watson, Watson, whoever.

Who, me?

I think the real allure is the duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Their

relationship, the milieu that they inhabit.

How are you? How are you? I haven't seen you for years.

I want you to meet my old friend, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes, this is Stinky.

Sherlock Holmes had become so much about trappings, about the fog, about the top

hats, about the handsome cabs, that at a stroke, by modernizing it, it becomes

about them again, which is the friendship between these two men.

The buddy film genre began with Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

Watson.

Watson! Coming home!

Buddy films owe a tremendous amount to Sherlock Holmes, obviously.

And you'll notice that these duos tend to kind of have the same sort of

interplay that Holmes and Watson had.

I think the idea of a pairing of two men, one of whom is rather distant and

unknowable, and one of whom is much more like us, I think this is terribly

important.

You don't mind breaking the law?

Not in a good cause.

Well, the cause is excellent.

Well, then I am your man.

Splendid. It's like he's crazy, but he's crazy because he sees everything as it

is. That's what makes him crazy, and it's also what makes him great.

That's pure Holmes.

You can see it in Lethal Weapon.

You can see it in Butch Cassidy in The Sundance Kid.

You can see it in Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Before all of them, though, there was Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. That's

the prototype.

In the 21st century, the Holmes-Watson relationship

has taken on a new dimension.

The homoerotic buddy-cop combination as we know it today owes just about

everything to Holmes and Watson. Holmes himself was... extremely ambiguous,

didn't show a whole lot of interest in women. Irene Adler was the only woman

who fascinated him.

What the relationship between Holmes and Watson captures is a kind of intimate

male relationship that, in a way, predates those categories of sexuality

that we're all stuck with now.

Holmes, I think your visitor will want me out of the way. Not a bit, Doctor.

Stay where you are.

I am lost without my Boswell.

There was a very definite homoerotic vibe to the relationship depicted in the

Granada TV series, largely thanks to Jeremy Brett's performance, I think. And

it's now a running gag in the new BBC Sherlock series because all the people

they meet, of course, assume that they're rather more than flatmates.

There's another bedroom upstairs if you've been needing two bedrooms.

Of course we'll be needing two.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have denied the implication.

Male relationships in his era were different.

But there is one thing in the stories that was not ambiguous.

Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict.

His favorite method, injecting what he called the 7% solution.

The fact that he was a drug addict, the fact that he's a bit of a sociopath.

That's an incredibly potent thing in fiction.

The hero who is also potentially a demon or has something demonic inside that

both gives him his power and makes him a liability, that's incredibly powerful.

Addicted.

Super heroic.

Sociopathic.

Scientific.

Genius.

Sherlock Holmes anticipated the future.

A complex, flawed character, so worshipped some people forget that he

never existed.

We're going to be having a gathering of Sherlock Holmes people in the city where

I live, in Oxford.

There is a pub there where Sherlock Holmes undoubtedly stayed because of

internal evidence in the stories. And, you know, I've just been writing the

chronology of what guests are going to do. And they were, you know, I'm going

to say, just think, when you actually go in there, Sherlock Holmes really did

stay here, exclamation mark.

We're talking about him like he's real. We can't help ourselves.

We're not saying Arthur Conan Doyle did it, are we? We're saying that Sherlock

Holmes did it. I mean, I do know that he isn't real.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dropped a fictional character on our planet, and

he hit like a bomb.

The ripple effect of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of stopping over a century

later.

In a world that doesn't often make sense, cold, calculated reason, gives

people a feeling of safety and strength.

Holmes appears in the strangest of places because we need him.

Good work, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps I underestimated you.

I've written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do, but my hand

has been drawn, of course, by kind friends who continually wanted to know

more. And so it is that this monstrous growth has come out. I don't want to

really... A comparatively small seed.

Oh, good boy.

Come along.