It's a modern caricature of the original Conan Doyle stuff. Obviously the original was written as being bang-up-to-date too but the makers of this re-take knew perfectly well they could not match Conan Doyle on his own turf and went off at a tangent. A good try but of course not in the same 'League'.
Yes, they could commision yet another faithful-as-possible adaptation of the original stories, but really, what would be the point?
It's fan fiction, from one of the strongest fandoms there is. The whole point is to do something differently, exploring the characters and settings. It's just like all that slash you probably don't read on the internet, but by a couple of established TV writers with a stonking great budget.
The terminator-like thought 'screens' are way out of date and might be fine for a robot but the human brain simply doesn't work like that. Not even if you are Sherlock Holmes. Unless of course he is later revealed to be an android*.
If you're going to nitpick, let's be realistic here for a minute. For a start, no robot is ever going to 'think' by overlaying English text (or 6502 assembly code) on it's raw uninterpreted visual input. That's just ridiculous.
On the other hand, if you want to convey someone's thoughts on screen, you don't have a whole lot of options. You can have them do a voice over. Or you can cut to a series of flashbacks to them learning relevant things. Or flash forward to them explaining why they did what they're about to do. Or you could draw some text or diagrams on the screen. Why not? It's quick, easily interpreted, and doesn't detract from the pace like traditional approaches. If you're going to object to that, then why not the dozens of other screen storytelling cliches that were no doubt used in the same programme, but we're so used to that they were allowed to pass without comment?
I can take or leave Sherlock's thought overlay, but I *really* like the way that pop-up text is used to show what people are reading from electronic devices, as an alternative to a clunky close-up of a MovieOS display, or writing in a phone call where a text message would be used. I also loved the way the subtitles were done on Heroes (both the open captioning of non-English languages, and the closed captions for the hearing impaired on the HD-DVD
[1] release) - positioned around the screen like speech bubbles in a comic, rather than boringly static at the bottom of the screen. It's innovative, I like it, some people don't.
As for brains, mine works in a way not entirely dissimilar to redshift's, at least some of the time. It's not verbal, or really visual, just an abstract sense of the connectivity of a system. Good for problem solving, but hard to communicate without translation. If a writer were to represent it on screen, they'd probably resort to a high-speed series of clichés reminiscent of The Matrix, Prison Break or Numb3rs (or any science fiction scene that results in a character having a spontaneous nosebleed). But that's really not what's happening in my head.
[1] I'm not sure whether the Blu-Ray standard allows you to do that with closed captions.
