Discussion Post: The Adventure of the Devil's Foot

[spacemutineer.livejournal.com]

Welcome back, everyone! A quick update about the poll: 100% of you said you wanted to keep the discussion questions. Wow! I'll definitely keep it up then. Thanks for voting and thanks in general! Happy to hear you like them.

Anyway, onto our discussion of The Adventure of the Devil's Foot. What did you think? Here are a few questions to get you started.

- Is Watson Holmes' doctor? Perhaps only on occasion? Watson calls Holmes his patient here, but Dr. Moore Agar is the one who prescribes rest for Holmes in the first place.

- Obviously, the big questions have to do with the experiment. Is Holmes off his game here? Perhaps from the illness? Because this whole enterprise is so profoundly poorly conceived.

Every person who has been exposed to this toxin is dead or hopelessly insane. But when he finds the likely culprit, Holmes deliberately exposes himself and Watson to it, with only an open window as a semblance of a safety measure. He admits in his preamble about it that there is a risk of death ("the premature decease of two deserving members of society"), but later claims he "never imagined that the effect could be so sudden and so severe." Really? All the victims have been found in their chairs, having never made it to stand or even try to crawl away. That points to a fast-acting, powerful poison.

Let's say he just ignored those points. After all, impulsivity and an ignorance of danger are Sherlock Holmes' trademarks. However, they are not Doctor Watson's. Yet Watson goes along with this scheme without a single question or word of caution. Which makes me wonder (and this will come up in future stories as well) how reliable John Watson is as a narrator. From what we know of Watson, he is steadfast and reliable, yes, but he is also sensible and competent. I understand he would want to help Holmes if at all he could, but surely the doctor must know brain damage is possible here at the very least. Would he really allow Holmes to put the both of them at serious risk just to prove a point? If not, why tell the story this way? Simply to keep the story moving and keep Holmes at the front and center of it?

- One last thing about the experiment. Watson describes his terrifying experience of the poison vividly. What must it have been like then for Holmes, who was inescapably lost inside it? He is extraordinarily imaginative and highly controlled. To lose that control and have his imagination used against him to create his own worst nightmares must be excruciating. And what horrors those worst nightmares must contain!

Comments

[wild-huntress.livejournal.com]

Maybe this is a weird reaction, but I find the experiment scene to be among the funniest in the canon. Seeing a genius like Holmes do something so absurdly stupid (like a teen boy trying to make homemade flame throwers or set snow on fire with gas) is quite a contrast. Perhaps Watson just got swept along by Holmes's "masterful nature" for a few moments? They had only a very brief preamble to the experiment, after all. At any rate, it's very lucky for Holmes that he was there to rescue him from a sudden and potentially fatal idiot ball!

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

When I came to the part where Watson rescues Holmes I practically cheered for BAMF!Watson, which isn't what I expect from canon.

Did Holmes perhaps assume that with his superior intellect he could cope with the effects of the poison? Or perhaps because they were aware of the effects they thought they would be able to react in time and truly hadn't realised how fast and thorough the poison was?

[darkest-alchemy.livejournal.com]

Ah, I love this story far too much.
I think Watson is Holmes' doctor since he can't help but take on that role sometimes since he is one and he loves Holmes (however he loves him) but it's not in any official sense. Though I do wonder what kind of doctor Agar is too, and whether he's perhaps more a doctor of the mind than the body, whereas Watson really only deals with physical ailments.

I find this story fascinating though because of how self-destructive Holmes is. Already close to a complete breakdown, he's not being rational, although we know he can be reckless in his experiments right from A Study in Scarlet with Stamford's remarks about him testing poisons and also his drug addiction suggests a self-destructive streak. I think he's sunk into such a state that he almost doesn't care if he kills himself and he's just not thinking rationally enough to realise he's risking Watson too (which in his right mind, I don't believe he would ever do; put him at risk, but not such an unacceptable one as this). I also love Granada's take on it, where additionally Holmes has just given up cocaine, but then he effectively goes and seeks out an even more deadly drug straight away because he's still in this apparently quite depressed and destructive state.

Why does Watson go along without really protesting? Well I'm sure he did protest much more than he recorded, because he does stand up to Holmes sometimes and can be quite domineering when Holmes is ill, but he doesn't like writing about himself much, but I think too he's probably sure that if he doesn't stay with Holmes and try to keep him safe while he does this, Holmes will probably sneak off and do the experiment by himself later and then he'd almost certainly manage to kill himself. So I believe he thinks it's just safest to stay with Holmes and be a part of the experiment, so he can save Holmes when he's in danger.

[methylviolet10b]

DEVI's one of the canon stories where it seems likely that there's much more to the story than Watson recounts. I think Watson-as-narrator is often not so much unreliable but "omits more than he tells." Which is great for us fanfiction writers, anyway, but does leave gaping plot questions. ;-)

As for Holmes, he's clearly not at his best in this story. He's mentally impaired, whether through ill-health, depression, the long-term effects of his drug use (and attempts to wean off same), or some combination thereof. I really *don't* think he thought through his "experiment" logically - to almost tragic results.

[shouldboverthis.livejournal.com]

In another note, I wonder why Sterndale was so stupid to show an extremely dangerous poison to a man he already distrusted.

[spacemutineer.livejournal.com]

In my head, I imagine Sterndale was showing him a little of everything, not even thinking it would be a problem, but when Mortimer heard about a fear poison, it caught his attention. Things would have turned out so much better if he'd just stuck to showing off his wood carvings and lion pelts...

[castiron.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Watson is ordinarily Holmes's doctor, but Holmes was sufficiently recalcitrant that Watson insisted on a second opinion?

Fast-acting and powerful the poison may be, but it's entirely possible that Holmes assumes fast-acting means, say, 10-15 seconds (plenty of time to react) rather than nearly instantaneously. Possibly he also assumed that since a much larger quantity had burned, the relatively small sample he took would be less dangerous. (And perhaps after all the chemical experiments at 221B, Watson is more willing to trust Holmes's judgement on this than he should be.)

Tangentially, Holmes clearly doesn't store then-current linguistic theories in his lumber-room; I'm pretty sure Cornish was known to be a Celtic language, and by then the Celtic languages were established as part of the Indo-European language family.