Hello again, thanks so much for chatting! :) I do love finding a fellow enthusiast!
About Holmes and the drugs, I think you're right that, as shown on screen in the Granada series, Watson mostly just silently disapproves, although I think in one of the early episodes with David Burke they gave him some of Watson's lines from "The Sign of Four," which was the second story Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the characters. In that novel Watson really lays into Holmes about the habit -- "How can you risk such damage to the great powers with which you have been endowed?!" I read somewhere once, though I don't know for certain if it's true, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was ahead of his time in having Watson so vocally insist that cocaine was terribly dangerous and addictive. I think that at the time Doyle started writing, in the mid-1880s, cocaine was not considered all that dangerous by many doctors, and it was certainly not illegal.
In the stories, it's clear that Watson actively but slowly gets Holmes to quit taking the drug. I think my favorite passage about it is in the otherwise mediocre story "The Missing Three-Quarter." Watson starts off his narration by saying:
Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes's ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes. Therefore I blessed this Mr. Overton whoever he might be, since he had come with his enigmatic message to break that dangerous calm which brought more peril to my friend than all the storms of his tempestuous life.
Reason 1,001 why I <3 Watson.
By the way, I see from your other journal entries that you've been watching a lot of different versions of Holmes, which is awesome! You may have already found this, but if not, I think you'd really enjoy a Holmes book by Nicholas Meyer called The Seven-Percent Solution. It's his version of how Holmes managed to quit cocaine, and it's lovely (there is a movie as well, but it's not as good as the book).
Also, you're quite right about the commentary where Benedict talks about Brett (it's during the diner scene in TGG). Ariane De Vere has written a transcript -- I'll put the relevant quote below :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-08-16 11:52 pm (UTC)About Holmes and the drugs, I think you're right that, as shown on screen in the Granada series, Watson mostly just silently disapproves, although I think in one of the early episodes with David Burke they gave him some of Watson's lines from "The Sign of Four," which was the second story Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the characters. In that novel Watson really lays into Holmes about the habit -- "How can you risk such damage to the great powers with which you have been endowed?!" I read somewhere once, though I don't know for certain if it's true, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was ahead of his time in having Watson so vocally insist that cocaine was terribly dangerous and addictive. I think that at the time Doyle started writing, in the mid-1880s, cocaine was not considered all that dangerous by many doctors, and it was certainly not illegal.
In the stories, it's clear that Watson actively but slowly gets Holmes to quit taking the drug. I think my favorite passage about it is in the otherwise mediocre story "The Missing Three-Quarter." Watson starts off his narration by saying:
Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes's ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes. Therefore I blessed this Mr. Overton whoever he might be, since he had come with his enigmatic message to break that dangerous calm which brought more peril to my friend than all the storms of his tempestuous life.
Reason 1,001 why I <3 Watson.
By the way, I see from your other journal entries that you've been watching a lot of different versions of Holmes, which is awesome! You may have already found this, but if not, I think you'd really enjoy a Holmes book by Nicholas Meyer called The Seven-Percent Solution. It's his version of how Holmes managed to quit cocaine, and it's lovely (there is a movie as well, but it's not as good as the book).
Also, you're quite right about the commentary where Benedict talks about Brett (it's during the diner scene in TGG). Ariane De Vere has written a transcript -- I'll put the relevant quote below :)