From: Elementary s7ep10
Title / Name: “The Devil’s Foot” / Mortimer Tregennis
Reference: Eponymous canon story tells of Mortimer Tregennis, who threw powdered Devil’s foot root into the fire at a card game his siblings were playing with him, before escaping, hopefully to inherit the family estate.
In the original, Brenda Tregennis’ lover, classic Victorian character Leon Sterndale, African explorer and badass, kills Mortimer vigilante style in revenge, with his own Devil’s foot root. Holmes finds Sterndale’s motives so sympathetic that he lets him go.
In the Elementary episode, “The Latest Model,” this exact story (including the year it happened, 1910), is the subject of a documentary made by a plagiarist of another character’s diligent research work, making the latter potentially homicidal. Sherlock & Joan aren’t investigating the Devil’s foot story, but the dangers of the men who retold it.
So, though the story itself wasn’t updated and enacted in Elementary, instead it was preserved like a period piece or a fossil, in the middle of the contemporary mystery being solved around it.
