There is a wonderful idea buried inside the premise of Netflix’s The Final Problem, and it goes something like this: What if Sherlock Holmes wasn’t Sherlock Holmes at all? What if he was just some actor who had spent years playing Sherlock Holmes and, somewhere along the way, absorbed enough of the character’s habits, tricks and suspiciously intense staring to convince himself that he could actually solve crimes? That is the hook, and it’s a hell of a hook.
The Final Problem is a Spanish four-episode mystery set in 1959, when men apparently wore excellent suits even while being murdered and wealthy people thought the appropriate response to a storm was to gather in an isolated hotel with strangers. A group of guests becomes stranded on a remote island near Mallorca after bad weather cuts them off from the outside world. Then somebody dies, then another somebody dies, and suddenly everybody is a suspect, the police are nowhere to be found and Benjamin Basil, an aging actor who once played Sherlock Holmes in a series of films, is called upon to do the one thing he is apparently still good at: being Sherlock Holmes.
Except he isn’t Sherlock Holmes. This is important.
Benjamin Basil is an actor. He played Holmes so many times that he has apparently convinced himself — and perhaps everyone else — that the role left something permanent behind. He watches people, studies their clothes, notices things they wish he hadn’t noticed, makes deductions and then insists, with the weary dignity of a man who has been explaining this for decades, that he is merely an actor.
José Coronado makes this conceit work far better than it has any right to.
Coronado gives Basil exactly the right combination of arrogance, sadness and professional competence. This is a man who has spent years being famous and has now reached the point where fame has become mostly a memory, like an old girlfriend who still occasionally sends you a Christmas card. He is washed up, somewhat battered and not particularly interested in being anybody’s hero. Then a corpse appears, and suddenly all those years of pretending to be the world’s greatest detective become unexpectedly useful.
It’s a terrific character, and The Final Problem wisely understands that the fun isn’t simply watching Basil solve a murder. It is watching him inhabit the strange space between actor and character. He knows what Holmes would do because he has done it dozens of times. But does that mean he actually possesses Holmes’ powers of observation, or has he merely become exceptionally good at performing the appearance of genius?
The show doesn’t hammer that question as hard as it might, which is both one of its charms and one of its frustrations. The central conceit could have produced a much broader comedy, with Basil’s fellow guests mocking him, indulging him or wondering whether the old actor has finally lost his mind. Instead, the series mostly plays the mystery straight. Basil is good at this stuff, everyone quickly figures that out and off we go.
There are worse decisions.
In fact, there is something refreshing about the series’ refusal to turn itself into a frantic meta-comedy. We live in an age when every mystery has to wink at the audience, every character has to know they are in a mystery and every piece of dialogue seems to have been written by somebody who has spent three days reading Reddit reactions to Knives Out. The Final Problem mostly says: Here are some suspicious people, here is a dead body, here is a detective, and try to figure it out.
The series also has the good sense to look terrific. The 1959 setting gives it a wonderfully old-fashioned atmosphere, and the isolated hotel does much of the heavy lifting that a good murder-mystery setting is supposed to do. Everybody is trapped, everybody has secrets and nobody is quite as innocent as they look. The scenery is beautiful enough to make you briefly consider getting murdered in Mallorca yourself.
The supporting cast adds to the pleasure. María Valverde is particularly good as Adela Figueroa, an enigmatic widow with the kind of icy intelligence that suggests she has already figured out everybody in the room and is simply waiting for them to catch up. She brings some much-needed voltage to a show that otherwise prefers to keep its emotions under lock and key.
Martiño Rivas also gets an interesting role as Francisco Foxá, an aspiring crime novelist who becomes something of a Watson figure to Basil’s Holmes. He is an audience surrogate, a skeptic and eventually a participant in the investigation. The relationship could have been mined for more comedy, but it provides Basil with somebody to bounce his increasingly elaborate deductions off.
And then there is the mystery itself.
Here, The Final Problem is decidedly old school. This is not the sort of murder mystery where the screen suddenly explodes and a guy in a hoodie announces that the killer is an algorithm. There are clues, there are motives, there are suspicious glances and there are people behaving strangely because, well, they are in a murder mystery and that is what people in murder mysteries do.
The result is more traditional than revolutionary. If you are looking for the next great reinvention of the whodunnit, this probably isn’t it. The series’ central idea is more inventive than the mystery surrounding it, and there are stretches where the pace becomes decidedly leisurely.
But leisurely isn’t necessarily the same thing as bad. Sometimes you want a mystery that gives you time to look around. You want the weird old hotel, the wealthy suspects, the increasingly nervous staff, the storm outside and the locked doors inside. You want the detective to stare at a cigarette butt for approximately six minutes before announcing that its owner has been lying about where he was on Tuesday. This is comfort food for mystery addicts.
The problem is that The Final Problem occasionally seems unsure whether it wants to be comfort food or something more ambitious. Its best idea — the actor who played Holmes becoming a real-life detective — begs to be explored. The series could have pushed harder into the absurdity of Basil’s situation, or into the psychological question of what happens when an actor can no longer separate himself from the character that made him famous.
Instead, it settles for being a handsome, atmospheric murder mystery with a wonderfully eccentric protagonist.
And you know what? That’s not such a terrible bargain.
There is a particular pleasure in watching Coronado’s Basil move through the hotel, absorbing details and gradually assembling the pieces. He doesn’t have the effortless superiority of Sherlock Holmes. He has something much more human: experience. He has spent his life pretending to be brilliant, and now that pretense is proving unexpectedly useful.
That gives the series a little melancholy beneath all the murder. Basil isn’t just trying to find a killer. He is trying to figure out what, if anything, remains of the man he used to be when the roles stop coming. The mystery gives him a reason to be useful again, gives him an audience and gives him a stage.
And perhaps that is the best joke in The Final Problem. The actor finally gets to play Sherlock Holmes when there are no cameras around.
The series may not always move with the urgency of the best modern whodunnits. But the atmosphere is lovely, the performances are strong and Coronado is sufficiently good that you may find yourself wishing Netflix had another four episodes waiting in the basement.
The Final Problem isn’t trying to reinvent Sherlock Holmes. It is doing something more modest and, in its own peculiar way, more charming: It asks what might happen if Sherlock Holmes accidentally escaped from the movies and ended up living inside the body of the guy who played him. The answer involves murder, secrets, a storm, several suspicious people and one very determined actor.
Elementary? Not quite. But close enough.