27 - All-Consuming Fire

If you’re a big fan of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, stop reading this review and go read All-Consuming Fire.  I promise you’ll love it, and the less you know the better.

Twenty years before Mark Gatiss brought Robin Hood to life in “Robot of Sherwood,” Andy Lane did the same with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson in All-Consuming Fire, a wonderful tribute to the work of Sir Doyle that left me with the biggest, dumbest grin on my face with every word.  The central conceit of this one is that, like the original Sherlock Holmes stories, it’s a retelling of events from Watson’s perspective.  Lane conceives Holmes and Watson as real people with unknown names, whose exploits were published under pseudonyms by a friend of theirs.  We read the story along with Ace and Bernice, a secret Holmes novel given to them by the Doctor appropriately titled All-Consuming Fire.  The first act takes place in Victorian London, before the book morphs into a pseudo-Indiana Jones narrative as the Doctor and his numerous companions travel to India to track down an interplanetary gateway.  Putting the Doctor and Holmes together is perhaps the most fanfiction the VNAs have gotten, but the result is absolutely glorious - Holmes is clearly out of his element, but still surprises the Doctor with his cleverness at times.  The audience is reminded that Sherlock Holmes is not a superhuman, but a man with immense knowledge and critical thinking skills; as he drifts to India and then to the planet Ry’leh, he becomes less and less sure of his deductions as the little bits of info he’s learned over the years fall out of relevance.

The title “All-Consuming Fire” has a double meaning - of course the mystery Holmes is trying to solve involves apparent spontaneous combustion, but “all-consuming fire” is also a metaphor for the horrors of 19th century British imperialism.  One of the major villains of the story, Baron Maupertuis, hopes to conquer Ry’leh for the British Empire, and it immediately becomes obvious why Lane chose to set this portion of the story in British-occupied India.  This is what Doctor Who does best: a wacky sci-fi story underpinned by some serious social commentary, and here it’s done masterfully.  All-Consuming Fire is truly a classic that all Doctor Who fans should have on their lists.