Actually, I believe that this one was spelled "The Last Vampyre", probably to make it look quaint. This episode irritated me. The early episodes followed Conan Doyle's storylines very closely. The minor alterations, used either to pad the storyline out to a full hour, or to add to the characterizations, did not affect the storyline as a whole.

THIS storyline, on the other hand, diverges so wildly as to be virtually unrecognizeable.

Conan Doyle's original story was neat and unpretentious, made colorful with a touch of vampirism, and made shocking by the fact that it was family attacking family. A husband fears that his second wife is trying to kill her own son, because she has twice been found sucking blood from his throat. Turns out the real culprit is the man's elder son by his first wife, a crippled fifteen year old twisted by malice and jealousy for his healthy and beautiful half brother. (This characterization would probably be considered politically incorrect by today's standards.) The wife had kept silent, even in the face of her husband's belief in her vampirism, because she loved him so much she could not bear to tell him the truth about his beloved elder son. As no real harm has come to anyone but the family dog (used as a guinea pig to test the poison's virulence), Sherlock placidly prescribes a year at sea for "Master Jacky" and the story ends happily.

The televised version, not content with a simple storyline that would have filled a single hour quite well, padded it out to movie length by adding characters whose only purpose seemed to be to get themselves killed. (This kind of gratuitous violence is not something I expect of a Sherlock Holmes production, especially not one on "Mystery!".) Master Jacky's malice is padded out to a really sick morbidity. The wife's efforts to save her little son are in vain; he dies. (Sherlock, in spite of the evidence, claims at the end that Jacky was NOT a killer, and the baby's death, from pneumonia, was strictly a coincidence.) Jacky himself dies, trying to play out his fantasies. Far from having a happy ending, the family is shattered. The husband and wife don't seem to have very much love for one another. I found myself wondering why Sherlock had been called in at all. His efforts did absolutely nothing to help the situation, and he was left with the very meager satisfaction of knowing that he had figured things out. Just too late to be of any good. He might just as well have stayed home, and I wish that he had.

There is also an implication, at the end, that Sherlock considered this incident a story "for which the world is not prepared," suggesting that Watson deliberately altered the facts when he reported it. If this were the case, why report it at all? Why not just throw out, during another report, the tantalizing hint of the adventure of the Sussex vampire, "another story for which the world is not prepared"?

I normally enjoy vampire stories, but this one really rubbed me the wrong way.

I've seen it spelled both ways, but went ahead and changed it to quaint.