The modern hero of the popular British crime drama, “Sherlock” ponders in one memorable episode, “When does the path we walk on lock around our feet?”
“When does the road become a river with only one destination?” he reflects during the opening of Series Four, produced for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Titled “The Six Thatchers,” for the featured ceramic statues of the Iron Lady, it is a haunting fable, narrated by the brilliant consulting detective, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved stories and best-known fictional character, the immortal Sherlock Holmes, launched more than a century before.
Sherlock concludes, “Death waits for us all in Samarra” and immediately questions his fatalistic deduction, “But can Samarra be avoided?” He is referring to the famous 1933 retelling by the English writer, W. Somerset Maugham, of an ancient Mesopotamian tale about a Baghdad man’s vivid encounter with the dark angel of death in Samarra, the Iraqi city, that was founded in 5,500 B.C on the banks of the Tigris River.