Belgian Chess History

If ever some dimwit decides to feed my blog posts into a machine learning engine and make it produce one of its own, it will probably write about a murder mystery. Sometimes I feel that’s all I ever write about. Today’s post is not going to change that feeling, because we’re talking about Sherlock Holmes again. This time, he is being played by Jeremy Brett. The episode under investigation, The speckled band, is a pretty close adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story of the same name. But there is one very significant alteration: doctor Grimesby Roylott is shown at a chessboard.

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In the ranks of British tv detectives, inspector Morse occupies a prominent but slightly strange position. He is not a brilliant eccentric like Poirot or Miss Marple. He is not a pleasant homebody like inspector Barnaby. He is a lonely, sarcastic curmudgeon, but he is more cultured than inspector Frost. Although he loves Wagner, so there’s still room for improvement. And that, unfortunately, is not going to happen, because inspector Morse is dead. On his deathbed, he solved one final case, and that caused these guys some grief:

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There are certain things the internet loves far more than it should. Not that they’re bad per se, but the internet just obsesses over them. Cats, for example, or Keanu Reeves, or The office. Yes, The office is everywhere. The office memes pervade the internet. The office catchphrases have seeped into common parlance. The office fan communities are big and numerous. Myself, I didn’t really get past the first episode; it just seemed to be about mean people being awful to each other. And Pam. But it turns out that there’s a chess scene in the last episode of the fifth season! Is this why people kept watching?¹ Is this why people love The office?² Let’s see!

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