But Sherlock is far from perfect. When he leaves John all alone and rushes away from the crime scene (so used to working solo he inconsiderately forgets all about his new companion), the sad piano chords and the lonely look on John’s face (and Sally Donovan’s words of caution) make us wonder if Sherlock, though fun to watch, isn’t exactly best friend material. Sherlock’s changeability and untrustworthiness are cornerstones of his character in the episodes to come, and the doubt that both Mycroft and Sally attempt to put in John’s mind is purposefully made plain in this first episode: a man who seems to know too much might be hiding something.
Mycroft Holmes is a character who appears only twice in the books, and is bordering on obese, so the tall, slim Mark Gatiss isn’t exactly who the readers would have in mind, which is an impeccable way to trick us into thinking that the man with the umbrella is Moriarty, Sherlock’s true arch-nemesis. (Incidentally, Moriarty isn’t mentioned until much later in the books, either.) Gatiss — who was cast in the role when writer Steve Thompson marveled that Gatiss looked like Cumberbatch’s older brother — plays Mycroft wonderfully, with so much confidence and knowledge that John is unnerved by him. Mycroft is a true Holmes, as quick with deductions as his brother (wait for a delightful scene in season three where the two go head-to-head in trying to sum up the measure of a man through his wool hat), and what he has to say to John lies at the heart of the series. We have been led to believe that John is a man haunted by his memories of the war; however, Mycroft instantly sees through that façade in a way even John’s therapist has been unable to. John wasn’t even wounded in the leg, he was hit in the shoulder. He doesn’t actually need a cane because his injury is psychosomatic. And as for him sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night amidst nightmares of war and gunfire? Those weren’t nightmares at all, they were dreams of a time when John was part of a group of people doing something exciting, believing they were saving the world. His sobs don’t come from bad memories of the war; they come from his realization that those images are nothing but dreams, and he’s stuck in a drab apartment all alone. He longs to return to a life of danger and excitement, of purpose. Mycroft is spot on with his deduction — “You’re not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson; you miss it” — and John waves him off, but now the audience knows an essential truth about the character. Sherlock is the companion he’s been waiting for: when you’re a friend of Sherlock Holmes, you enter into a life of excitement, danger, and fearing for your life. Often while still sitting in your own apartment.
Sherlock, on the other hand, pretends he doesn’t need John as much as John needs him. He has already figured out that John desires a life of danger, and apparently talks to John only because Mrs. Hudson took his skull from him. Sherlock makes John think that he sees him as someone only useful when needed who can be abandoned thereafter. Even though Sherlock takes John along on adventures, he appears to do so just so he has an audience on hand to praise his abilities.
Sherlock is characterized as a loner by choice, but also by nature. No one wants to be around him. Donovan and Anderson loathe him (and based on his crude comments to both of them implying a lewd affair, who can blame them?) and Lestrade vacillates between needing Sherlock’s help and wishing he’d just go away. Mycroft can’t even speak to his own brother and lurks in the shadows, paying other people to watch Sherlock for him. Molly Hooper has a crush on him, but he is so hurtful to her that she tries to avoid him as best she can. Mrs. Hudson loves Sherlock like a son, but is equally annoyed by his appalling behavior. In the case of each character, they prefer when Sherlock’s away, but they need him, whether it’s to help them solve a case, absolve their guilt for their lack of filial responsibility, fan the flames of their masochistic unrequited love, or to pay the rent.
The highlight of “A Study in Pink” is the drugs bust. In one madcap whirlwind of a scene, John discovers that Sherlock used to be a junkie; Sherlock issues the best put-downs of the episode — “Anderson, don’t talk out loud; you lower the IQ of the whole street”; he continues to work out his deductions in spite of the madness happening around him; John gets pushed further to the side and is nearly forgotten; Sherlock shows that despite his genius he’s utterly unaware of true human emotions (he’s baffled as to why a woman’s mind would turn to her stillborn daughter in her final moments); and we get the most poignant moment of dialogue in the episode. Sherlock asks John what he would say if he thought he was dying. “Please god, let me live,” John replies. Sherlock, annoyed, tells him to use his imagination, and John replies more directly, “I don’t have to.”
In this one brief exchange, John silences Sherlock and everyone in the room. Like Sherlock, he craves action and danger. But unlike Sherlock, he’s been shot, as he later admits, and has lain dying on the battlefield. He has faced death, and that’s why he continues to crave adventure. Once you’ve been given a second chance, you don’t want to waste it. Sherlock has underestimated his new flatmate until this moment, but amidst the chaos that follows, the murderer walks right into the room, and Sherlock turns, realizes immediately who he is, and leaves with him, telling no one. Again, John has been forgotten, but he doesn’t matter to the great detective: Sherlock is about to step into the cab of the murderer who has stymied him and everyone else, and that makes the cab driver the most important person in the world to Sherlock at the moment.
When John volunteered to get into a car that took him to Mycroft, he was faced with someone who saw him for who he really was. Now, similarly, Jeff kidnaps a willing Sherlock, then deduces the man behind the Belstaff coat. Earlier in the episode, Sherlock talks about the murderer with some awe, telling John, “I love the brilliant ones, they’re all so desperate to get caught. Appreciation, applause, at long last the spotlight. That’s the frailty of genius, John: it needs an audience.” The look on John’s face when Sherlock says that is revealing — the viewers aren’t the only ones who notice that Sherlock just described himself.
As Sherlock sits across from Jeff and at first scoffs, “Oh, I see, so you’re a proper genius too!” when Jeff suggests they’re more alike than Sherlock would think, Jeff just smiles because he knows Sherlock’s limitations. Like the best criminals, Sherlock’s hubris is greater than his intelligence. He needs criminals to keep committing crimes so he can play his little game and find them. He needs to know why people think the way they think, why they do the things they do. As Jeff goads Sherlock to take the pill, he says, “What’s the point of being clever if you can’t prove it?” Sherlock shies away from the public accolades, but as long as he can exhibit his genius to Lestrade and the police force, and now John, Sherlock is content.
At his heart, he is addicted to danger, to intrigue, to mysteries, and, most of all, to being right. He doesn’t stop to think that he could simply take both pills to a lab and have them analyzed to figure out which one was the correct one; after all, Jeff might have succumbed to his brain aneurysm by then, forfeiting the game, and Sherlock wouldn’t be able to prove himself correct to Jeff.
But just before Sherlock puts the pill in his mouth, John gets there right on time and, like an expert marksman, stops the scene in its tracks. Faced with a life-and-death situation, the trembling of John’s hand has ceased. He has found the danger and adventure he’s been looking for, and in that same moment he becomes absolutely essential to Sherlock, who immediately covers up what John did. He tacitly understands that John is, in fact, important to him. Oh, he’ll still use him when he needs the occasional pen tossed in his direction and can’t bother to walk three steps to get it, but he also realizes how vital it is to have just one person in your corner.
Benedict Cumberbatch is luminous as Sherlock Holmes, somehow finding a balance between curt and nasty and yet engendering sympathy: he is a man who might yet be a hero. If this were a show just about him, viewers might come to loathe him and see him as inhuman, cold, insensitive, and arrogant, basking in the awe of those around him and caring more for his dedu
ctions than behaving like a human being. But the reason we like him is because John does. Martin Freeman is perfection as John Watson, a flawless portrayal of a man whose deepest fear is loneliness, who is awed by Sherlock’s mind yet unafraid to call out Sherlock when he acts like an ass. Much to Sherlock’s surprise, the detective’s growing friendship and appreciation of John forces him to care about someone other than himself for once. And, as Sherlock will discover time and again, caring for someone else can be as much of a danger as a comfort.
The writing and direction of this episode are superb, and Moffat and Gatiss recognize that there is a lot of humor to be mined from Doyle’s books. Sherlock’s pithy comebacks to both Anderson and Donovan, or his reaction to John turning down Mycroft’s offer to pay him to spy on Sherlock — “We could have split the fee. Think it through next time” — or the way Sherlock and John walk away from the crime scene at the end, giggling like two schoolboys … all of these moments demonstrate that this will be a show that knows how to combine humor with drama. There are the ongoing “are they gay?” jokes, from Mrs. Hudson insisting she’s okay with it and that Mrs. Turner next door even has “married ones,” to Angelo, the restaurant owner, assuming Sherlock’s on a date (and ignoring their insistence that they’re not by bringing out a romantic candle), to John awkwardly trying to find out if Sherlock’s in a relationship and Sherlock mistaking his general interest for a romantic one. Moffat and Gatiss both know that over the years there has been some serious speculation and scholarship surrounding the possible romantic relationship between the two men, and decide to attempt to nip it in the bud right away by making it a joke. (Of course, as any fan knows, the shippers watching the show who want the relationship to be there will find it anyway — as they did with Xena and Gabrielle — and the Johnlock fanfic is alive and well.)
At the end of the episode, as John and Sherlock leave the crime scene after the younger Holmes reveals Mycroft’s identity — “You can imagine the Christmas dinners” — their friendship has already grown in leaps and bounds, and they are no longer two individuals, but a team.
HIGHLIGHT
Sherlock: Why have I got this blanket? They keep putting this blanket on me.
Lestrade: Yeah, it’s for shock.
Sherlock: I’m not in shock.
Lestrade: Yeah, but some of the guys want to take photographs.
DID YOU NOTICE?
Throughout the series, there is a gorgeous, plaintive piano melody consisting of four chords (Am, D9/A, Gm, F/C) that’s called “Watson’s Theme.” Present at moments when John is alone or sad, it always serves to take a scene that’s already full of pathos (due to the brilliance of Martin Freeman) and make it even more heartbreaking. In this episode, it’s the first music we hear, in the scene following John’s dream as we see him alone in his apartment. It plays again when John comes out of the crime scene he visited with Sherlock to find that his flatmate has departed without him, when Mycroft reminds him of the life he had before Sherlock, when Sherlock takes the taxi and leaves John at the apartment, in the taxi on the way over to where Jeff is with Sherlock, and finally when he’s running through the halls of the building looking for Sherlock. In each instance, the sad chord progression indicates John’s fear of the banal, lonely existence he had before he met the dynamic Sherlock Holmes. Listen for it at key moments throughout this season.
John’s mug says “In Arduis Fidelis,” which translates to “Faithful in adversity.” Not only is it the motto of the British Army, but it also proves relevant to his relationship with Sherlock.
When John opens his desk drawer at the beginning of the episode, we glimpse a gun inside. It’s the same revolver that he shoots at the end of the episode, adhering to Chekhov’s principle, which states that a playwright should never introduce a gun on stage unless he intends for it to go off at some point during the play.
In the U.K., there are many opponents to the vast number of CCTV cameras, who liken them to Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. In a sly wink to that, the cameras in Sherlock are actually being controlled by Sherlock’s big brother.
FROM ACD TO BBC Aside from what was mentioned already, there are other small details from A Study in Scarlet:
After running into Mike Stamford, John joins him at a bar called the Criterion. In this episode, “Criterion” is written on John’s coffee cup.
We see Sherlock beating a body with a riding crop to see how quickly bruises form; in the story, Stamford says he’s heard of Holmes beating dead bodies to see how quickly bruises form.
Sherlock’s blog is called “The Science of Deduction,” which is the title of chapters in both A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.
At one point in the novel, Watson notices that Holmes has a vacant, dreamy stare, and says, “I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.” Similarly, John refuses to entertain the thought that Sherlock may have been a junkie.
When John and Sherlock catch up to the cab, they discover its passenger is innocent: he’s simply an American visiting London for the first time. In the novel, Jefferson Hope is the American visiting London for the first time.
When Holmes realizes that the murderer drives a cab, he says a line very similar to that of Sherlock’s on the show: “supposing one man wished to dog another through London, what better means could he adopt than to turn cabdriver?”
Jefferson Hope suffers from an aortic aneurysm, whereas Jeff Hope has a brain aneurysm.
The description of Holmes in the books is quite similar to the physical attributes of Sherlock on the show: “In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision.”
The second victim is James Phillimore, who runs home in the rain to get his umbrella and never returns. In “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” when Watson is listing off their unsolved cases, he says, “Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr. James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.”
Sherlock asks to borrow Mike’s phone, saying he prefers to text rather than make a call. In the books, Holmes famously sends telegrams everywhere, long after telephones were widely used.
When Sherlock finds out about the fourth murder, he shouts with excitement and says, “Oh, it’s Christmas!” In The Valley of Fear, Watson describes the look of delight on his friend’s face right after an announcement that someone had been murdered: “It was one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed … Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long overstimulation.”
Sherlock deduces a lot of information about John based on his cellphone. In The Sign of Four, Watson hands Holmes his watch, and Holmes comes to similar conclusions — that the watch belonged to his brother who was an alcoholic, that their relationship was a stormy one, etc. Watson is very upset at first, thinking that Holmes had made inquiries into his past, until Holmes explains how he figured it out. In the books, Harry is indeed Watson’s brother, not a nickname for his sister, Harriet.
One of the many inconsistencies in the Sherlock Holmes stories is where Watson’s war wound is actually located. In A Study in Scarlet, he says quite specifically that he was honorably discharged from the war because of a wound in his shoulder. However, in later stories the wound mysteriously travels to his leg. Some fans have speculated that the shot was another magic bullet à la JFK, which entered his shoulder, ricocheted off something, and then came back through his leg. Gatiss and Moffat pay homage to Doyle’s inconsistency by first having John walk with a cane for a leg injury, which is determined to be psychosomatic, and only at the e
nd of the episode does John reveal he was actually wounded in the shoulder.
Another inconsistency in the canon is the name of the landlady: first, she is Mrs. Hudson. Then, in a couple of stories, she becomes Mrs. Turner. Then Doyle returns to Mrs. Hudson. As a nod to the inconsistency, Mrs. Hudson refers to a Mrs. Turner, the next-door neighbor who is also a landlady. Amusingly, the joke carries over to John Watson’s blog (JohnWatsonBlog .co.uk), which is run by the BBC, where there are often comments left by “Marie Turner,” who, as she reveals in later comments, is actually Mrs. Hudson borrowing Mrs. Turner’s laptop.
Sherlock’s declaration — “The game, Mrs. Hudson, is on!” — is a reworking of Holmes’s famous, oft-repeated pronouncement, “The game is afoot!”
Mycroft Holmes is introduced in “The Greek Interpreter” as “absolutely corpulent,” with a massive face, which is why there are several jokes in upcoming episodes about him being on a diet. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” Watson says of Mycroft that “after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind.”
Sherlock’s texts to John as John is meeting Mycroft for the first time — “Come at once if convenient”; “If inconvenient, come anyway” — are taken from a telegram that Holmes sends to Watson in one of the final stories, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”
Investigating Sherlock Page 5
