Dracula: 10 References And Easter Eggs You May Have Missed

Dracula's final episode, The Dark Compass, shocked a lot of viewers with a sharp turn into the modern age, giving a Sherlock-style twenty-first century reworking to the characters from the English-set portion of Stoker's novel.

One such character is Renfield, in the novel an insane asylum patient with no defined background who serves as Dracula's insect-eating minion, but here reconfigured as surprisingly chipper lawyer Frank Renfield (played by Gatiss himself).

Superficially this seems like quite a radical reinvention of literature's most famous zoophage, but actually there is quite a lot of precedent in previous screen adaptations for Renfield the lawyer.

In the 1931 Bela Lugosi film, along with the earlier stage play on which it was based (and which had the official approval of Stoker himself), the character of "Renfield" is a composite of the book's Jonathan Harker, the lawyer who travels to Castle Dracula at the start of the story, and the original mad minion Renfield. This concept carried over into Francis Ford Coppola's film version, in which Tom Waits played a Renfield who was Jonathan's predecessor as Dracula's lawyer and had been sent mad as a result.

That overlap between Jonathan and Renfield is referenced here by having this version of Jonathan also associated with bugs (rather than consume them by eating, as the book's Renfield does, one is shown crawling inside his eye). Meanwhile, Renfield can be seen in the final episode filling in what he thinks are the answers to crossword clues but actually just writing "Dracula is my lord", a callback to Jonathan repeatedly writing the same when thinking he was penning an account of his adventures in the first episode.