Saturday Matinee Double Feature: Can Jack the Ripper Bring Back the Sherlock Team?

The following is a post written by A.I. synthesizing a conversation we had regarding my grief over losing the Sherlock Series as a regular binge experience. 

We attempt to seduce the Sherlock contingent back to tackle a very hard case indeed.

 

Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper

A Study in Terror (1965) & Murder by Decree (1979)

Two killers. One legend. And a detective who sees the difference.

🍿 Feature One: A Study in Terror (1965)

The first time Holmes stepped into the fog.

Before graphic novels, prestige television, or modern reinterpretations, A Study in Terror dared to place Sherlock Holmes directly inside the 1888 Whitechapel murders. John Neville’s Holmes moves through a London that is still half‑Victorian melodrama, half‑proto‑modern thriller — a city where aristocratic secrets, pawned surgical instruments, and a missing heir converge into a conspiracy only Holmes can untangle.

The film’s most important contribution is conceptual: it establishes the idea that the Ripper case is not merely a crime, but a system.

It also introduces Mycroft Holmes to the cinematic canon — a detail that becomes crucial later, when we imagine Mark Gatiss stepping back into the role of the Empire’s most elegant bureaucratic shadow.

A Study in Terror is brisk, colorful, and deceptively sharp. It plants the seed of a distinction that will become central to Ripper studies:

The Whitechapel Killer is one man.
Jack the Ripper is something else entirely.

🔪 Feature Two: Murder by Decree (1979)

Holmes descends into conspiracy, class warfare, and narrative terror.

If A Study in Terror is the spark, Murder by Decree is the full conflagration. Christopher Plummer’s Holmes is compassionate and morally outraged; James Mason’s Watson is steady, humane, and deeply loyal. Together they navigate a London where the fog is not just weather — it is policy.

The film leans fully into the two‑killer dichotomy:

1. The Whitechapel Killer

A real murderer, likely someone in the Kosminski orbit.
A creature of pathology, proximity, and opportunity.

2. Jack the Ripper

A constructed killer — born from letters, hoaxes, and a press hungry for sensation.
A myth curated by the powerful to terrify the powerless.

This is where the film aligns with the darker corners of Ripperology:

• The Ripper letters as psychological warfare
• Masonic influence and political cover‑ups
• The ruling class weaponizing fear to maintain order
• The idea that the myth outlives the man

Murder by Decree understands that the Ripper legend is a narrative machine, not just a crime scene.

🧩 The Dichotomy: Two Killers, One City

This Saturday Matinee becomes a meditation on duality — not just of killers, but of London itself.

The Whitechapel Killer

The real murderer.
The man with the knife.

Jack the Ripper

The fictional persona.
The man with the pen.

This split lets a broader cultural constellation of 1888 drift into view:

• Walter Sickert as a Ripper letter writer — Patricia Cornwell correct in a narrative sense, if not a forensic one.
• Moriarty as the architect of the terror campaign, weaponizing myth for class control.
• Oscar Wilde discussing split personalities with Holmes — the city as Dorian Gray.
• Bram Stoker absorbing the fog and blood into the embryonic shape of Dracula.
• Doctor Watson briefly under suspicion because of his medical knowledge — a Victorian anxiety made flesh.
• Harry Houdini, age fourteen, as the future debunker of fictional Jacks — the boy who will one day tear illusions apart.

This is the architecture that binds the double feature together: the difference between the killer who acts and the killer who is invented.

🕰️ Holmes in 1888: The Case That Was Always Waiting

The BBC Sherlock series ended with Holmes and Watson mythologized, almost unmoored from linear time. The final montage suggested that their adventures could continue indefinitely, outside chronology.

So here is the offer:

What if the one case Sherlock Holmes was always destined to face — the Ripper murders — is the one case he has never solved?

Not a reboot.
Not a revival.
A revelation.

Why this seduces the Sherlock Quartet

 

Steven Moffat

A narrative built on duality, mythmaking, unreliable documents, and the idea that stories themselves can kill — a perfect playground for structural experimentation.

Mark Gatiss

Mycroft in 1888 — the original power broker — navigating class politics, Masonic influence, and the machinery of Victorian secrecy.

Benedict Cumberbatch

A Holmes forced into moral confrontation, not just intellectual mastery — closer to Plummer’s haunted detective.

Martin Freeman

A Watson who becomes a suspect, a witness, and ultimately the emotional center of the case — a man forced to confront the possibility that the Ripper myth was designed to frame people like him.

🎩 The Invitation

You close the curtain on this Saturday Matinee with a summons:

London, 1888. Two killers walk the streets.
One with a knife.
One with a pen.
And the Game is once again Afoot.

A double feature becomes a doorway.
A doorway becomes a summons.
And the fog rolls in once more. 

Geeky Tidbits

Georgia Brown, the singer in the opening number of A Study in Terror, played Helena Rozhenko on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Helena was foster mother to Worf.  

John Neville, Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Terror was also The Well-Manicured Man in The X-Files.  

Christopher Plummer, Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree, played General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. His daughter Amanda later played the villain Vadic in Star Trek: Picard. 

Sir Anthony Quayle appears in both pictures. My favorite Quayle role was Falstaff.  

Interesting case regarding Holmes and Sigmund Freud. From a Novel by Nicholas Meyer, Director of Star Treks II and VI. 

To top off the kinship between Jack the Ripper and Star Trek, don't forget the episode Wolf in the Fold, written by Robert Bloch, himself a Ripperologist of a sort. See Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.

For more A.I. conversations on Ripperology, see my other blog. 

Cornwell's Ripper

I first read Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed in the first decade of this century. I thought she nailed it. As far as I was concerned, she had apprehended Jack the Ripper!

I’m not as sure today after reading her new edition of that book. Don’t get me wrong. Her case is still strong. If she hasn’t exactly collared the killer, she is at least in proximity to him. Her research has created tools which will aid in the eventual resolution of the case. A resolution which may not comport with her findings but that I predict will validate her efforts. I hope that validation will be enough compensation for the genuine suffering she endured tackling the case.

This is in spite of all the moronic barriers the UK has set up to prevent any thorough examination of the evidence. Jack the Ripper is apparently a protected copyright of the United Kingdom. The forensic value of studying human darkness is apparently lost on Britain. The case is at once an opportunity to decode the autonomic compulsions that animate killers like the Ripper and bring them to light where things like early intervention and prevention become possible. It lends credence to the Class Theory approach to the Ripper that if he wasn’t in league with the Royals he was at least doing the upper class the service of dispatching female vermin. The suffering of the poor in Britain persists because it is of social utility to the ruling class. That is a point hard to argue with, phony calls for unity to the contrary.

Cornwell is not a class theorist. And I don’t want to misrepresent her position. Read her books. The first and the rewrite. But I went there when I read her. I went to “class warfare”. I went to Freud and Jung. I went to Oscar Wilde. And The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Freud because there seems a clear case of castration anxiety if not performance anxiety in Cornwell’s Killer. The blade becomes the substitute penis compensating for any anatomical inadequacies or deformities. With it the Ripper achieves the ultimate penetration. In psychoanalytic circles, old and new, the ability to penetrate a female was analogous to social success for the healthy Freudian Male. It was a symbol of making one’s way in the world. Reich took that further. Sexual satisfaction was the key to mental health if not bodily health for all humans, male, female, and in between or outside. Cornwell’s Ripper is a man who has been deeply humiliated in the sexual arena. Fear of being sexually laughed at, rage over the humiliation. He literally dissected his anxieties.

Jung because we’re talking about an almost completely disembodied society in Victorian England. Nothing as earthy and disgusting as sex was allowed by the stiff uppers. Freud’s return of the repressed morphs into Jung’s Shadow. The sexual impulse killed off by Judeo-Christian animal abuse is resurrected in the autonomic nervous system where it becomes an autonomous being. Blended with any unprocessed emotions endemic to anatomical deformity, it can become quite the monster. Think of Morbius’s Id in Forbidden Planet.

It doesn’t mean disfigurement necessarily leads to homicidal behavior. The Elephant Man was not a mass murderer. And I’m not sure physical disfigurement was the Ripper’s problem as much as the social disfigurement brought about by Victorian sexual mores which were crimes against humanity.

This is the reason we should study the Ripper (as opposed to exploiting him). We ourselves are in danger of complete disembodiment due to moral inquisition in the form of “wokeness”. The dark is being repressed on a scale not seen since Victoria. The monstrous is manifested by repression. The idea I have no monster in me begs the unconscious mind to make one. Why do the woke find sex so disturbing? Why is it, along with race, the weapon of choice in murder by cancellation? Why do they so readily confess the sins of others, so classically projecting the shadow that one imagines Carl Jung turning in his grave? What monster will emerge from wokeness? The completely disembodied hologram? The zombie? The Cyborg? All of them, cyborg, hologram, zombie inquisitors flogging disgusting flesh like abusive dog fighting trainers?

I would side with the Class Theorists in that Cornwell’s Ripper seems the very incarnation of “class warfare”, a monster of Upstairs, Downstairs proportions. A protector of the chastity of the wife and a deep penetrator of foul lower class genetically inferior female sexuality. Not ok to rip the wife. But you can do anything to a whore. This was a direct result of the horrific sex hatred of the period.

But Cornwell’s Ripper was a painter. If she hasn’t done so already, Cornwell might want to write an analysis of his artwork where the art is the only evidence. That would be a good book. It causes me to wonder. Oscar Wilde knew Cornwell's Ripper. Could Dorian Gray have been Wilde’s Ripper Thesis?

Of course, that would mean the painter wasn’t the Ripper. The model was. Cornwell’s Ripper painted the actual Ripper! He was the original Rippersploitationist. Maybe even his publicist.

This line of "thought" is why some believe the “Ripper” to have been an ordinary “sex killer” without any special genius to him. His work was co-opted by publicity hounds out to make a quick buck. This view certainly causes one to turn to Aaron Kosminski as a person of interest whatever the status of DNA evidence against him. Kosminski’s effeminacy fits the profile of the inadequate sexual milquetoast out to achieve penetration any way he can a la the bantam rooster syndrome.

If that seems too colorful by half, let’s check our shaming mechanisms. Sex should be a considerably lighter subject than the heavy water experiment Victorians made it out to be. As such, the true “Jack the Ripper” was toxic Victorian sexual shame. It blanketed the UK during the Ripper Era.

And that means anyone could have been the “Ripper”.

Any sex. Any class. Any one.