Of course, given that this is the trekbbs, I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned the 1970s tv-movie version of "Hounds" in which William Shatner played Stapledon the butterfly collector . . . .
I didn't know about that, but I have seen Leonard Nimoy play Holmes. It was on a very interesting educational series called
The Universe and I which aired on Kentucky Educational Television back in the '70s and '80s. It was an anthology of 15-minute stories dramatizing and presenting scientific concepts in a variety of different styles and genres. The Nimoy-as-Holmes one, "Interior Motive," was toward the more comedic end of the spectrum, with a very dense, doddering, Nigel Bruce-style Watson, and used Holmes's deductive methods to dramatize how scientists study the interior structure of the Earth.
Here's a summary, a transcript, and a brief clip.
Unfortunately I can find very little online about
The Universe and I. It doesn't even have an IMDb entry. And that's a shame, because some of its episodes were very good and worked as engaging science fiction stories in their own right, and they often had name actors in them. I particularly remember a period piece set in the '50s or '60s with Bill Mumy as a man claiming to be an alien and telling people things about the planets of the Solar System that wouldn't be discovered until the
Voyager missions, with nobody believing him. (Come to think of it, I believe Mumy did some of the music for the series too.) There was another period piece set in WWII or the Cold War or something about a man being shown a secret weapons program that involved altering the four fundamental forces, but it turned out he was a known spy and it was a hoax to pass disinformation to the enemy. And there was a particularly compelling and dark one involving the terraforming of Venus, which was more about the ethics and responsibilities of science than about facts and figures, and could've stood up pretty well as a legitimate SF short.
