Witty and dazzling as it may be, BBC’s Sherlock isn’t simply a clever unlocking of Conan Doyle’s seemingly rigid original. The ferrying of Sherlock Holmes through time and quickening his Victorian soul is a resounding success on the front of sheer entertainment, but also a subtle, and often subversive, commentary on the salient issues of the current moment. Take your pick. Modern technology and its influence on people’s lives? Check. The painful process of acceptance of homosexuality as variant of norm? Oh yes. The state of political affairs? Even that…

But here comes the most important kind of compelling magic of Sherlock: as the series progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that the ciphers of the plot, in all their witty, sparkly brilliance, are secondary to the cipher of the main character. The sleuthing stories are transport; Sherlock Holmes is the one being solved. He seems fairly obvious in the beginning – a brilliant mind, “a high-functioning sociopath”, his fancy tickled by detective work and his underfed, infantile ego touchingly visible. But enter John Watson, the limping military angel, the unlocker, and Sherlock’s hermetic heart is warmed and unsealed, allowing the contradictions in him to bloom openly—and all the more violently for that. We, in turn, are given to the torment of guessing, of choosing sides, of merging the impossible opposites within him, to turning him this way and that, to trying him on. Who is he? The answer—even as we assail, without success, the creators of the show for the original meaning—is to be found nowhere but within ourselves, and that truly pushes Sherlock up through the clouds of entertainment and into the stratosphere of real art.

What can be deduced, though, is the properties of Sherlock’s character that make him so irresistible, and at times a train wreck impossible to take one’s eyes off. He is Janus, a two-faced deity of beginnings and transitions, a dissonant violin, a contradiction pleading to be resolved. A genius, yet an idiot. A loved one—and a child. Damaged and brilliant, a blushing virgin and an ultimate calculating – also self-calculating – machine. Lacking in normalcy of feelings yet clearly very emotional. We almost want to ask – good or bad? Angel or demon? Either way, his contradictory, unstable and essentially mythical nature, apart from being the perfect vehicle for the story, makes him relevant to our own internal quandaries—we, after all, would never wish for answers to questions that have nothing to do with ourselves.

…The BBC series has taken off not because it’s Holmes, but because of the way it’s done—while brilliantly written and providing immense entertainment value, it is also a perfect mythological trap, an extremely ambiguous and gripping story of a human heart’s progress.