Babylon 5 Rewatch: “In the Kingdom of the Blind”
Published on April 27, 2026
Credit: Warner Bros. Television
Published on April 27, 2026
Credit: Warner Bros. Television
Published on April 27, 2026
Image: Prime Video
Published on April 27, 2026
Credit: Dan Smith / Prime Video
Credit: Dan Smith / Prime Video
I recently watched the utterly ridonkulous TV show Young Sherlock, which takes some delightfully strange liberties with the character of Sherlock Holmes. (Among other things, Holmes has an intensely homoerotic friendship with Moriarty, his family is a whole disaster, and he’s utterly useless as a detective.)
Watching all of these gloriously silly goings-on, my first thought was: I don’t know if this could ever have been made if Sherlock Holmes hadn’t entered the public domain.
So yeah—for those who missed it, as of April 2023, all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings are now in the public domain in the United States. (They’d been public domain in the UK since 2000.) This puts to an end decades of lawsuits over things like the Ian McKellen film Mr. Holmes, an anthology of original Holmes stories, and most recently Netflix’s Enola Holmes. It also puts an end to years of copyright holders trying frantically to prevent any depiction of Holmes and Watson as lovers.
My guess is that being fully in the public domain will be extremely good for Holmes—as I wrote a few years ago, it’s worked wonders for Arsène Lupin. Holmes has been one of the most popular characters in film and TV pretty much since the invention of the film camera. And for decades, the Conan Doyle Estate exercised a certain amount of control over how the character could be used—depending on who was in control at the time. And some of that control? Was rather homophobic.
When I was a kid, I had a vinyl record of Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. I never saw any of his movies, that I can recall, but I listened to that record countless times and was transfixed by the stentorian authority in his voice. I also remember Jeremy Brett playing a very serious, buttoned-down version of Holmes in the 1980s and 1990s. The Holmes I grew up with was theatrical, masterful, aloof, Victorian, and never without his deerstalker hat and fiddle.

In recent years, though, we’ve gotten a slew of offbeat Holmes portrayals, ranging from Benedict Cumberbatch to Jonny Lee Miller to Robert Downey Jr. to Will Ferrell. Not to mention the astounding Sherlock Gnomes!
As Holmes has moved with agonizing slowness into the public domain, people have been able to take bigger and bigger creative risks—and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.
So here’s what I’ve been able to learn about the history of Conan Doyle’s heirs and their control (or lack thereof) over Sherlock.
According to this fascinating chronology in a 2010 New York Times article, Conan Doyle’s son Denis controlled the character until his death in 1955, and was responsible for fairly serious adaptations like those Basil Rathbone films.
When Denis died, the rights passed to his brother Adrian until Adrian’s death in 1970. That period when Adrian Conan-Doyle controlled the rights to Holmes, from 1955 to 1970, appears to have been the period of some of the greatest micromanaging of the character.
A 1959 Hammer movie, Hound of the Baskervilles, featured Peter Cushing as Holmes, and the production was required to hire Adrian as a technical consultant. In spite of Adrian’s direct involvement, however, the estate was displeased by the changes that Hammer made to the original story in order to give it a stronger horror feel. So plans for further Holmes movies starring Cushing had to be scrapped. (Cushing did play Holmes again in a later TV show and a 1984 movie.)

In 1962, a German production company made a film called Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, starring Christopher Lee as Holmes. Decades before Sherlock and Elementary, this film was to be set in the present day—but the Conan Doyle Estate (meaning Adrian, I guess), objected. According to various sources, the Conan Doyle Estate had approval over the dailies, meaning that they got to view the footage that had been filmed each day, and they were prone to randomly rejecting some scenes here and there. The result was a finished product that makes very little sense and is allegedly set in the past, except that people drive cars in some scenes. (Go to about 48:00, if you want to see for yourself.)
After Adrian’s death, the 1970s saw the rights passing through a few hands, including Conan Doyle’s widow, Denis’ wife, and a Hollywood producer named Sheldon Reynolds. And it seems pretty likely that the constantly shifting control over the character created some opportunities to push the limits somewhat.
Case in point: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is widely credited as being the template for the modern age of Sherlock Holmes stories. It leans into his canonical cocaine use, but also takes greater liberties with the character, depicts him as neurotic and twitchy, and pairs him with a famous historical figure, in this case Sigmund Freud. Writer/director Nicholas Meyer told Alec Nevala-Lee last year in The Atlantic that the book version was delayed for months by negotiations with the Conan Doyle Estate. Meyer had mistakenly believed Holmes was in the public domain, and had to convince the estate to let him go forward with his unconventional take on the character.
I’m not sure how Gene Wilder was able to make The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother in 1975. I can’t find any info about it online—it’s possible that because this movie was a parody, it was covered under fair use.
An early 1980s anime series called Sherlock Hound, which was partially created by a young Hayao Miyazaki, featured—you guessed it—a canine version of Holmes, in a world full of anthropomorphised animals. This TV show was massively delayed due to interference from the Conan Doyle Estate, and Miyazaki had to depart the project after only working on the first few episodes.

In 1980, control over Sherlock Holmes fell into the hands of Conan Doyle’s youngest child, Jean Conan Doyle (1912-1997). A former British Women’s Royal Air Force officer, Jean served in the military for thirty years, working in intelligence during World War II before being promoted to a squadron officer in 1944.
Jean wanted to do justice to her father’s legacy—but according to the Times article, she also had a “whimsical” streak and was keen to authorize more fanciful works like Young Sherlock Holmes. Plus Without a Clue, the comedy in which Watson is the real genius detective, and Holmes is a paid actor who’s there to give Watson plausible deniability. (One website claims she attended the premiere and exclaimed that her father would have loved the joke.)
(At a certain point in the early 1980s, Jean claimed control over the rights to Holmes, but so did a producer named Sy Weintraub, resulting in a lot of confusing litigation over dueling TV productions in the U.K.)
There’s a pervasive myth on the internet that Star Trek: The Next Generation fell afoul of the Conan Doyle Estate when an early holodeck episode featured Data as Holmes, squaring off against a holographic Moriarty. Supposedly the producers of TNG thought Holmes was already in the public domain—but in fact, the attorney who represented the Holmes estate, Jon Lellenberg, told me back in 2009 that Paramount had obtained permission to use Holmes and Moriarty from the Conan Doyle Estate.
Apparently, at a certain point Jean changed her mind about allowing people to take liberties with Sherlock, judging from this 1988 interview. In it, she lays out some ground rules that would have prevented many of the best recent adaptations:
I won’t give permission for [a film or TV show] to be done unless the characters are shown in character and in period and are very well written. For a time I did allow pastiches to be published on these terms, but always against my inner judgment and I don’t allow it any longer… Jon Lellenberg, who acts as my agent, has certainly had to say no on my behalf to many projects… I am a protector of Sherlock Holmes’ reputation, and therefore, my father’s literary reputation.
At the time that interview happened, Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain in the United Kingdom (though he went back under copyright there from 1996 to 2000). During that period, a book came out which depicted Holmes and Watson as lovers. My Dearest Holmes was written by Rohase Piercy and published by Gay Men’s Press.
Jean was decidedly not amused, telling her interviewer:
That is a book produced by some homosexuals in society. I think they’ve got some rather inappropriate name, and I think they’re absolutely disgraceful to suggest that there was a homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson. There was never any such thing.
When Jean died, she bequeathed the copyrights to the Royal National Institute for Blind People, which ended up selling them back to the Doyle heirs.
At a certain point, multiple parties were claiming to control the rights. Both Sheldon Reynolds’ ex-wife Andrea Plunket and the Conan Doyle Estate separately collected payments from Warner Bros. for the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie, according to the Times article.

Plunket—whose claims to control over the Sherlock Holmes copyright seemed somewhat tenuous—shared Jean Conan Doyle’s revulsion at the notion of making Sherlock Holmes gay. After Robert Downey Jr. told David Letterman that Holmes might be a “butch homosexual,” Plunket threatened to withdraw permission for Warner Bros. to make a sequel. She said, “I am not hostile to homosexuals, but I am to anyone who is not true to the spirit of the books.”
In 2011, the Conan Doyle Estate authorized a brand new Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz, in what was described as a final effort to return the character to his roots, without any of this recent “blasphemy.”
A 2013 lawsuit over an anthology resulted in a finding that all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and novels were in the public domain—except for ten stories that had been published after 1923. (Weirdly, this ruling relied on Silverman v CBS, a 1989 case involving notorious minstrel-show characters Amos ’n’ Andy, who were adapted for a Broadway musical at the time based on the understanding that they were in the public domain.)
The judge in the 2013 case wrote: “Characters and story elements first articulated in public domain works are free for public use, while the further delineation of the characters and story elements in protected works retain their protected status.”
That finding left the door open for a lawsuit over the 2015 movie Mr. Holmes, in which Ian McKellen played the character as an old man.
As recently as 2018, the excellent Japanese TV show Miss Sherlock was apparently paying the Conan Doyle Estate for the right to use the character, as were the producers of the comedy Holmes and Watson.
Finally, there was a 2020 lawsuit over Netflix’s first Enola Holmes movie, because the Conan Doyle Estate insisted that Netflix’s film was using aspects of Holmes’ character that had been established in those final ten stories that were still under copyright. In particular, the Conan Doyle Estate argued that those final ten stories, which were still under copyright, were where Holmes began to show more emotion and became “warmer.” Netflix’s attorneys countered that “copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect.” This case was settled, which means we never got to learn whether “respecting women” is a trait that can be covered by copyright.[end-mark]
This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.
The post Sherlock Holmes Is Finally Free To Be Gay appeared first on Reactor.
Published on April 27, 2026
Image: Ollie Upton/HBO
Published on April 27, 2026
Image: Random House Worlds / Cover art by Eleonor Piteira
Published on April 27, 2026
Officially the Mrs. Murphy mystery series (34 volumes since 1990, and counting) is written by the prolific human author Rita Mae Brown, but the books acknowledge that the actual author is a rescue cat named Sneaky Pie Brown. Sneaky Pie’s literary alter ego is a tabby cat named Mrs. Murphy. She, with her corgi housemate Tucker and her neighbor and eventual housemate, the grey cat Pewter, help their human solve crimes in, around, and about the small town of Crozet, Virginia.
The human in question is Mary Minor Haristeen, better known as Harry. When the first volume begins, she’s the postmistress of Crozet, and she’s in the middle of a divorce from the local veterinarian. She quickly finds herself in the middle of a series of murders, each of which is foreshadowed by a postcard with an image of a famous grave site and the message, “Wish You Were Here.”
The cats and the dog solve the murders in fairly short order, thanks to their superior senses and their equally superior intelligence. The hard part is getting the humans to pay attention to clues that are painfully obvious to cats and a dog. Human senses are so weak and they are so slow on the uptake.
The animals have full and complete conversations with each other and the rest of the natural world, sometimes quite complex in their analysis of history, culture, and political shenanigans. Humans hear incomprehensible animal noises, which very occasionally might be translated in somewhat of the right context. More often, they miss the point, whether it’s by an inch or a mile.
As the series goes on, the post office closes and Harry switches to farming and horse breeding. About halfway through, she remarries. She still keeps stumbling across bodies and being guided to solve crimes by her guardian animals.
In this world, cats and a dog accompany their human just about everywhere. They ride around with Harry in her beloved vintage truck, and they accompany her to the post office—in fact, when the old office is closed and the new one enforces federal regulations about animals in public buildings, that’s Harry’s cue to change careers. They go off on freelance investigations as much as they can, though it can get complicated when the clues they need to find are miles away and they have to rustle up transport.
Each book features additional animals. Often it’s a dog or dogs. Animals in the wild may show up, either friendly or actively hostile. One of the most unusual animal sidekicks appears in number fifteen, Puss ’n Cahoots: a monkey named Miss Nasty, who thoroughly lives up to her name.
Human coauthor Rita Mae Brown is a horse person as well as a cat and dog person, and horses are frequent background characters and occasional guest stars. The amount of animal participation in general varies from book to book, but Puss ’n Cahoots puts the horses front and center, and the intrepid trio of cats and corgi has to navigate a tangle of human and animal politics.
This is not my part of the horse world, but it’s adjacent: it’s set at a major horse show in Kentucky. The horses are being shown are American Saddlebreds, and Harry and her husband are more or less on their honeymoon, visiting friends who are breeders and trainers. Harry is shopping for horses for herself and for a client back home; her friends are competing in the show.
Brown knows her stuff. I keep a shortlist of authors with exceptional horse knowledge, and she’s well up there. She knows Saddlebreds, she knows Thoroughbreds, and she knows all the little tiny details of care, feeding, equipment, everything that goes into keeping, breeding, and showing horses.
As usual in the series, more than one mystery drives the book, but they’re all rooted in the world of horses and showing, with a side of politics. Brown is a feminist icon (she holds the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement from the Lambda Literary Foundation) and a lifelong civil rights activist; she weaves her convictions into her mysteries, as in this one, which looks at the trafficking of illegal immigrants through horse farms.
She does it with a light touch, through the voice and attitude of her main character, Mrs. Murphy. We hear from plenty of others, too, and especially Tucker and Pewter. Tucker is a loyal friend and partner to both Harry and the cats. Pewter is strongly food-driven, but she’s also quite intelligent, and she’s good at sorting out clues, though she leaves the more athletic achievements to Mrs. Murphy.
In this volume, in addition to the nasty monkey, we meet a truculent gang of barn cats, led by a snaggletoothed orange tom named Spike. It takes some doing, but Mrs. Murphy and her cohort enlist his help in solving the various mysteries. It’s not just brain work, either; the animals play an active role in bringing down the villains—using tooth and claw to good effect.
The one quibble I have with this otherwise delightful entry in the series is that horses are the whole point of the show, one of the mysteries involves a stolen horse, Harry is there to scope out horses, we learn a great deal about bloodlines and histories and various show classes, but the horses just aren’t there as people. Unlike the dogs and cats and monkey, they barely have anything to say for themselves. They come across more as tools and equipment than as distinct personalities.
The impression I get is that they’re big, beautiful, athletically gifted and wildly expensive, but they’re not all that bright. It’s an impression that sticks with me across the volumes I’ve read so far. They’re a business and a form of transport, very important but not as individuals, not the way the cats and dogs are.
I’d be interested to know if that’s how it is through the whole series and through Brown’s fox-hunting books as well. It won’t stop me from reading on, because I love Mrs. Murphy and company, but as a diehard horse girl, I Have Questions. Or rather, in the vein of actual author Sneaky Pie, my actual author is a horse, and she is not impressed.
Now mind you, Thoroughbreds are flighty things and Saddlebreds are all up there on those long, long necks with those long, narrow heads, but they are just as smart as the little furry things and they have better noses than a dog. Granted they’re not as portable, but they have one considerable advantage: they’re their own transport. They can cover enormous amounts of ground, and when it comes to defending humans, there’s this little matter of several millennia of horses in combat.
But that’s hardly a dealbreaker. This has quickly become one of my favorite mystery series. It’s got great characters, well-drawn setting, and nicely set up mysteries, but the animal detectives add that extra bit of something.
They know it, too. And that’s the best part.[end-mark]
The post The Collected Works of Sneaky Pie Brown: The Mrs. Murphy Mysteries appeared first on Reactor.
Published on April 27, 2026
Photo: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
Published on April 24, 2026
Image: Lionsgate
Published on April 23, 2026
Courtesy of NBCUniversal
Published on April 23, 2026
Screenshot: Prime Video
Published on April 23, 2026
Image: Apple TV
Published on April 23, 2026
Screenshot: Epic
Published on April 22, 2026
Photo: Warner Bros. Studios
Published on April 22, 2026
Photo Credit: Emily V. Aragones/AMC
Published on April 22, 2026
Image: Marvel Studios
Published on April 22, 2026
Photo: AMC
Happy Wednesday!
I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!
Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!
Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.
Published on April 21, 2026
Published on April 21, 2026
Screenshot: Warner Bros.
Published on April 21, 2026
LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), has announced the finalists for this year’s Hugo Awards. Members of the 2025 and 2026 WorldCons cast 1,488 nominating ballots for this year’s awards; organizers note that in total, “nominators made 23,543 nominations for 4,299 works and individuals across 21 categories.”
Members of LAcon V will be able to vote for the winners when the final ballot opens in May. The awards will be presented in Anaheim, California, on August 30, 2026.
Congratulations to the finalists!
1,153 ballots cast for 555 nominees. Finalists range 126-210.
807 ballots cast for 172 nominees. Finalists range 90-241.
414 ballots cast for 144 nominees. Finalists range 36-64.
507 ballots cast for 549 nominees. Finalists range 26-60.
687 ballots cast for 185 nominees. Finalists range 52-136.
362 ballots cast for 243 nominees. Finalists range 19-42.
479 ballots cast for 250 nominees. Finalists range 31-70.
650 ballots cast for 149 nominees. Finalists range 85-313.
471 ballots cast for 249 nominees. Finalists range 40-98.
357 ballots cast for 159 nominees. Finalists range 29-110. (924 raw noms)
305 ballots cast for 128 nominees. Finalists range 30-84.
234 ballots cast for 95 nominees. Finalists range 27-74.
228 ballots cast for 220 nominees. Finalists range 10-28.
324 ballots cast for 93 nominees. Finalists range 34-100.
224 ballots cast for 61 nominees. Finalists range 33-66.
370 ballots cast for 198 nominees. Finalists range 31-69.
308 ballots cast for 158 nominees. Finalists range 22-54.
176 ballots cast for 137 nominees. Finalists range 12-22.
202 ballots cast for 229 nominees. Finalists range 12-35.
244 ballots cast for 169 nominees. Finalists range 12-48.
290 ballots cast for 156 nominees. Finalists range 17-76.
The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but were found to be ineligible:
Best Series:
Astounding Award:
The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but declined nominations:
The following nominee received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but was withdrawn by the showrunners to abide by the limitation on number of episodes of the same show allowed in the category.
[end-mark]
The post Here Are the Finalists for the 2026 Hugo Awards appeared first on Reactor.