1. The Creeping Man
Dismissed as "risible science fiction" by Sherlock Holmes scholar David Stuart Davies, The Creeping Man is the most ludicrous and downright fantastical of all the Holmes stories. For a fun activity, read the following brief synopsis and then try to imagine Cumberbatch and Freeman responding in character to these events. Holmes and Watson are asked to go to the home of a Professor Presbury who has recently returned from an unannounced, two week disappearance to Prague and is now regularly attacked by his dog for reasons unknown. Also, the Professor has been behaving strangely since his return seen crawling around his room on his hands and feet and scaling the walls of his house at night. Eventually, Holmes deduces that the Professor became addicted to a strange drug which he has brought back with him from Prague a drug that makes him believe he is a monkey and thus behave like one. Now, TV's Sherlock has tackled mind-altering drugs before, namely the fear hallucinogen from The Hounds of Baskerville but this is on a whole different scale, and to even fathom bringing this story to the screen is to imagine an episode so absurd that for all its likely lavish, kinetic directorial style it could still be mistaken for an episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Let's leave this one in the books and stick to psychopaths and evil geniuses, shall we?