Investigating Sherlock

by Nikki Stafford

  John: It’s not in the rules.

  Sherlock: Then the rules are wrong!

  DID YOU NOTICE?

  John not only makes a crack about Sherlock having Asperger’s when he’s talking to Lestrade, but calls Sherlock “Spock” when Sherlock’s coming undone in the pub. Interestingly, John calls him that right after Sherlock’s famed line from the books, “Once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever remains — however improbable — must be true.” In the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock utters the same line and attributes it to an “ancestor” of his.

  “Watson’s Theme” begins playing when John is scared in the lab, and the music becomes increasingly discordant as his terror grows.

  FROM ACD TO BBC Aside from the major points in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as pointed out earlier, Gatiss alludes to the novel in subtler ways:

  At first Sherlock says John will have to go alone, then says he’s just kidding, that of course he’s coming along, a reference to the fact that Holmes is missing for most of the novel.

  At the beginning of the story, Holmes asks Watson to try a deduction, and when Watson misses all of the key points but still comes up with some good observations, Holmes mocks him: “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.” Sherlock uses those words in his apology to John.

  Just as John is hurt by Sherlock’s rudeness at the pub, Watson is deeply hurt when he discovers that Holmes has been deceiving him by investigating the case as well. He recounts that moment: “‘You use me, and yet do not trust me!’ I cried with some bitterness. ‘I think that I have deserved better at your hands, Holmes.’” Later he says, “My voice trembled as I recalled the pains and the pride with which I had composed [my reports].” And just as Sherlock apologizes to John the following day and all is well, Holmes tells Watson that his reports had actually been quite helpful and shows the worn papers to him. Watson says he forgives Holmes because of the warmth in the detective’s voice.

  At the very beginning of the episode, Sherlock appears in the apartment holding a harpoon and covered in blood. In “The Adventure of Black Peter,” Watson says that one morning Holmes “had gone out before breakfast, and I had sat down to mine when he strode into the room, his hat upon his head and a huge barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm.” He had apparently been stabbing a dead pig at the butcher’s to see how much strength is required to kill one.

  In his frustration, Sherlock says to John that he envies him: “Your mind, it’s so placid, straightforward, barely used. Mine’s like an engine, racing out of control; a rocket tearing itself to pieces trapped on the launch pad.” In “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” Holmes similarly describes his brain: “My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.”

  Fletcher is the kid who wears the hound mask and scares tourists. His name is probably an homage to Bertram Fletcher Robinson, to whom Doyle dedicated the novel for giving him the idea of the story.

  Sherlock gets information from Fletcher by telling him a bet is riding on it. In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes is able to extract information out of someone simply by betting the person that he can’t. As he later explains to Watson, “I daresay that if I had put £100 down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager.”

  We discover in this episode that Lestrade’s name is Greg. In “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Lestrade signs one of his telegrams “G. Lestrade,” and the first initial is never explained. A running joke in upcoming episodes will be Sherlock calling Lestrade by every other name that begins with G, but never Greg, which is a nod to all of the various names that Sherlockians have suggested the G stands for over the years. Perhaps the writers went with Greg because, in the books, Holmes primarily deals with two detectives, Lestrade and Gregson.

  Sherlock observes that Lestrade is “as brown as a nut.” When Stamford first meets Watson upon Watson’s return from Afghanistan, Stamford notes, “You are as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut.”

  Sherlock’s famous line to John at the Cross Keys is reworded from the original that appears in The Sign of Four: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” He repeats the line in several other stories, including “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.”

  Sherlock’s assertion that he has no friends upsets John, and later, during Sherlock’s hamfisted apology, he explains that what he meant was that he only has one friend, not friends plural. In “The Five Orange Pips,” when Watson mentions Holmes’s “friends,” Holmes corrects him: “Except yourself I have none.”

  One of the things that tips off Sherlock to Frankland’s guilt is that he refers to a cellphone, rather than a mobile phone, indicating he’d spent time in the U.S. In “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” Holmes similarly sniffs out a criminal for using the American spelling of a word (plow) rather than the British (plough).

  The twist at the end of this episode is that the Hound is an apparition caused by inhaling hallucinogenic gas. In “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” after a series of occurrences where people are found dead, still sitting upright as if alive, Holmes discovers that hallucinogenic gas is being pumped into the rooms. He and Watson attempt to test it, and Watson describes the feeling of beginning to go mad, as Holmes simply sits in his chair with a look of horror on his face. Watson grabs Holmes and pulls him out of the room to save both their lives.

  INTERESTING FACTS

  Sherlock and John’s argument about Cluedo (or Clue, as it’s called in North America) is a clever wink at the game’s origins. When Hasbro released the game in 1949, they marketed it as “The Great New Detective Game,” with a picture on the front of the box of a detective in a long plaid cape and deerstalker looking through a magnifying glass. Hasbro then made a licensing deal with the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate to use the name “Sherlock Holmes” in their marketing materials, announcing to consumers that this game would allow them to become the great detective himself. In the 1970s, a TV commercial for the game featured Watson and Holmes trying to seek out clues.

  When Sherlock is sitting in the pub, shaken after seeing the hound, he says to Watson, “Cherchez le chien.” It’s a clever turn on the sexist phrase “cherchez la femme”: if a man is acting strangely, look for the woman, because his behavior must be the responsibility of a woman.

  Dr. Stapleton tells John that the rabbits glowed because of GFP, or green fluorescent protein, thanks to the presence of the gene from jellyfish that makes them glow. In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to scientists who isolated and extracted the gene, while other researchers have successfully inserted GFP into developing embryos of zebrafish, causing them to glow.

  NITPICKS Let me get this straight: there’s a top-secret government project that is so classified only the highest CIA official would be given clearance, but they have their own sweatshirts with not only the name of the secret project emblazoned on the front of them, but the location of where the project was being carried out? And then when Frankland was using the top-secret hallucinogenic to kill Henry’s father that night, he just happened to be wearing the sweatshirt? Were they testing the hallucinogenics on themselves?!

  OOPS

  In the British army, one does not salute an officer who is not in uniform; one instead stands at attention. But when John reveals that he is, in fact, an officer, the soldier instantly salutes him.

  Watch the top of your screen closely when John climbs out of the cage in a frenzy, pacing back and forth as he talks to Sherlock. At one poin
t, the camera cranes too high and you can see the studio lights and edge of the set.

  When Sherlock is trying to discover Barrymore’s password, he finds a photograph of a young Barrymore with his father and says he has a Distinguished Service Order ribbon that places him in the 1980s. However, Barrymore is not wearing the 1980s DSO but the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, which replaced the DSO and wasn’t issued until 1995.

  THE MIND PALACE

  In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” Sherlock’s thought process is referred to as his “mind palace” for the first time in the series. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes gives a detailed explanation of how his mind works, and it has been quoted in part by nearly every incarnation of the character since:

  I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

  Holmes’s explanation is in response to Watson, soon after meeting him, inexplicably drawing up a list of everything the great detective doesn’t know, including astronomy. Later, in “The Five Orange Pips,” Holmes brings up the idea again and explains, “A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”

  Leave it to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock to convert Holmes’s “brain-attic” into a palace. In season one, the mind palace is pictured as a series of words and phrases that appear onscreen (as when Sherlock is investigating the corpse of the woman dressed in pink), or a series of maps and road signs (as when he and John are chasing the taxicab through the streets of London). In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” we actually watch from the outside as Sherlock enters his mind palace, and we see the stream-of-consciousness of his brain patterns moving from one item to the next. His eyes are closed, and his hands flick away the unnecessary words and images while reorganizing in the air the ones he needs. And when he finally hits upon the answer, his entire body jolts, as if he didn’t see the solution coming. In season three, the writers take it one step further: rather than keep the audience on the outside, we’re invited inside the mind palace and see its corridors, rooms, and doorways, and the prominent items — and people — that reside there.

  Sherlock’s mnemonic patterns are a method of loci, a system of building up a mind palace or memory palace that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. The idea is simple — imagine a series of rooms, and commit certain items to those rooms. As one walks through the memory palace of one’s mind, one can remember every item stored in there simply by looking at the various shelves and drawers where the items have been stored. Participants in memory competitions use the technique; they are asked to remember a series of numbers or playing cards, and then to repeat them back in the same order. By pre-assigning a mental image to each card or number and a place in the memory palace, the best competitors are able to do it quickly and easily. The technique is used and taught by British mentalist Derren Brown, who is a longtime friend of Mark Gatiss and appears in Sherlock’s third season.

  2.3

  The Reichenbach Fall

  WRITTEN BY Stephen Thompson

  DIRECTED BY Toby Haynes

  ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 15, 2012

  Jim Moriarty returns to make everyone question everything they ever thought they knew about Sherlock.

  “Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that I am one of them.”

  We’ve giggled at Sherlock’s arrogance, laughed out loud at his putdowns directed at the police force, and shaken our heads when he mocks John for being a less intelligent life form than him. But in “The Reichenbach Fall,” Sherlock’s hubris turns out to be his (almost) fatal flaw.

  When people first meet Sherlock, they can’t help but be impressed. When he looks at John’s phone and deduces John’s situation, his personal wealth, and family secrets, we’re all amazed. John is in awe, and Sherlock basks in the pride of knowing he just mesmerized his new friend. But very quickly it starts to get tired. Some of Doyle’s stories begin with Holmes staring at Watson and saying something that would suggest he’s reading his mind. By the time he explains that Watson looked up from his paper, checked his watch, looked out the window, stared at a painting, looked back at the paper, and then glanced at the bookshelf and therefore must have been thinking of the Afghan war, every reader’s patience is growing a little thin. Similarly, we see John trying to get Sherlock to stop “showing off” all the time. In “The Blind Banker,” Sebastian mocks Sherlock and says people hated him for doing his thing. In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” Sherlock begins deducing things about Henry’s train trip and John tells him he’s showing off, to which Sherlock (suffering through nicotine withdrawal) bellows, “Of course, I am a show-off. That’s what we do.” Henry, on the other hand, is wonderstruck by Sherlock’s genius.

  Moriarty loved watching Sherlock in action in the first season. Moriarty’s closest interaction with Sherlock was through Jeff the cab driver in “A Study in Pink,” but in “The Great Game,” Moriarty speaks indirectly to Sherlock by forcing others to repeat his words, like some deranged Cyrano de Bergerac. He tells Sherlock — through one of his bomb-laden victims — that he loves to watch him dance. He puts Sherlock through one test after another, delighting at seeing the great detective at work. When he meets Sherlock at the pool, he seems to enjoy every moment, and even tells Sherlock he can’t bring himself to kill him (he’s saving that for another day). Moriarty can’t stand the thought of being the only person on the planet so ingenious, so when it’s Sherlock’s time to die, Moriarty wants to make it special.

  In “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock revealed to Adler that he had taken her pulse, and that was how he knew what she was thinking when she was coming on to him. But when she agreed to help Moriarty decode a message by going through Sherlock, she was allowing Moriarty to take Sherlock’s pulse, to size up the situation and see if he would fall for her tricks. What Sherlock does for Irene is show off. As Mycroft later said, Sherlock is so caught up in trying to impress Adler that he doesn’t pause to consider what information he might be giving to her. Realizing that with a little bit of praise, Sherlock’s pride would be so strong he’d lose sight of his morality, Moriarty uses that hubris against him.

  As Sherlock’s fame grows and he becomes more recognizable — to John’s chagrin, since a private detective’s very occupation relies on anonymity — he becomes more aloof and distant, tossing aside meaningful gifts from people and making snide remarks about their usefulness. John has to play the good cop to Sherlock’s bad one more and more, and when Sherlock encounters Kitty in the men’s washroom, he doesn’t have John nearby to soften what he says. He’s vicious in his deduction of who she is, becoming more menacing as he leans in and says, “You … repel … me.” By the time he gets to Moriarty’s trial, all Sherlock does is scoff at the jury and the judge and show off, even correcting the barrister questioning him, much to Moriarty’s delight. The villain stands in the dock, chomping on gum and smirking as he watches the room become more uncomfortable in Sherlock’s presence than in his own, until Sherlock, unsurprisingly, goes one step too far and ends up in the cell beside Moriarty. There’s a wonderful cinematic mo
ment when Sherlock’s back is to us as he enters the cell, and Moriarty is on the other side of the wall, facing us. Sherlock turns to look forward, and Moriarty turns his back on us. Yin and yang indeed.

  Sherlock wants the world to see how smart he is — a vulnerability Moriarty is only too happy to exploit. It’s why he sent Adler to get Sherlock to decode the seat numbers on the Bond Air jet, because he knew Sherlock would want to impress her. Sherlock’s face is all over the papers, whereas Moriarty traditionally works anonymously, using conduits to act as his mouthpieces. When Moriarty pulls off the perfect criminal trifecta at the beginning of the episode, breaking into the Tower of London (Andrew Scott is marvelous in this scene as he dances his way up to the glass case), the Bank of England, and Pentonville Prison simultaneously, he risks having a more recognizable face than Sherlock’s. But even with these high-profile stunts, he redirects attention back to the detective, first by writing “GET SHERLOCK” in giant letters on the glass, then by having his lawyer call him to the witness stand in his trial. At this point he’s got all of the puzzle pieces together to reveal the end of his long con: pinning everything on Sherlock. Moriarty knew cops like Anderson and Donovan suspected Sherlock anyway; he knew when he let him go at the pool that Sherlock’s hubris would put his face in all the papers; he knew that everyone perceives the sleuth’s deductions to be almost like magic tricks. So it was time to reveal the biggest trick of all: that Sherlock was Moriarty all along.

  The scene where Jim reveals that he is actually Richard Brook, a small-time actor who has been used and abused by Sherlock, is superb. Jim cowers in the corner, holding his arms in front of him, his hair messy, his shirt unclean, looking like a man who is exhausted by having to play the villain when really he’s just “The Storyteller.” At first the viewer scoffs at Kitty’s gullibility and the nerve Moriarty has to think he can so easily do away with Sherlock. But then Kitty pulls out Richard Brook’s CV, press clippings, interviews, and “Richard” begs them to look at the DVD as his voice wavers in fear before the dark specter of Sherlock. The real magic of this scene is looking at the faces of everyone in it. Kitty is smug, because she is thrilled to know that the man so repelled by her is actually a master villain. John just looks confused, never wavering in his belief in Sherlock. Jim looks terrified, with his back against the wall and his eyes wide with horror. As Kitty rushes over to the corner to get the CV and John is talking to her, Jim rubs his hands over his face, then pulls his hands aside and looks at Sherlock, a goofy smile spreading over his face as if to say, “Gotcha!” And Sherlock’s reaction is the best of all. He stands as if in awe, the reality of what Moriarty has done dawning on him, a “why didn’t I think of that first” look on his face. He stares at Jim, mouth slightly open, as Jim grins at him, and a smile twitches in the corner of Sherlock’s mouth.