Sherlock believes he can waltz back into everyone’s lives so easily because it never occurs to him that his death would deal such a crushing blow to his friends. We see Mycroft’s indifference to the situation, mostly because he knew Sherlock was, in fact, alive, but if that coldness was what Sherlock was used to as an emotional response, how could he have gauged that others would feel differently? Even the Holmes of the stories didn’t anticipate his friend’s reaction, but as soon as Watson wakes up, all is forgiven due to the fact that his friend is alive, which is all that matters to him.
This scene could have been infuriating for viewers, but it’s saved by three things: the realization that among Sherlock’s flaws is a complete ineptitude when it comes to judging human nature; Mary joining in the chorus by asking Sherlock repeatedly if he knows what John’s been through; and the fact that John gets a few good punches in. In a wonderful series of subsequent events, we see them at a café (presumably having been thrown out of the fancy restaurant) and finally a kebab shop. The downshift in locations is akin to John moving from the life he tried to build for himself back to the life he had with Sherlock: each place is less glamorous than the one before it but more exciting, thanks both to the conversation and the amount of blood John draws from Sherlock.
Mary is a wonderful addition to the core group, adding an interesting new layer to the friendship: she’s an outlet for John but she likes Sherlock and is respected by him, even if he regards her with some suspicion. Played by Martin Freeman’s real-life longtime partner, Amanda Abbington, there’s an instant chemistry between Mary and John that makes their relationship more believable — after all, they’re supposed to have been together for a while when we meet her — and later in the episode we see her playfully teasing John in a way only longtime partners can do. When John worked and lived with Sherlock, he could only deal with Sherlock’s frustrating behavior by rolling his eyes or giving Sherlock the occasional lecture, both of which went unnoticed by his flatmate. Now Mary provides a sounding board: he can talk to her about Sherlock, and Mary gives him an objective opinion rather than always siding with John. It’s a much-needed evolution in how the friendship between the two men will rebuild.
Molly, on the other hand, has moved on, or so she says. Ever since her heartfelt speech in “The Reichenbach Fall,” in which she showed Sherlock she was observing more than he realized, he’s seen her in a new light. With John out of the picture and still fuming, Sherlock offers to make her his sidekick, and she comes along for the ride with her Tom Baker–like scarf and forensic knowledge. But when he surprisingly offers to buy her some chips, she pauses, unsure of what is going on; he’s always turned down her suggestions that they socialize. She’s learned her lesson and knows that Sherlock will never love her the way she once wanted him to, and that’s when she reveals there’s another man in her life. Sherlock nods towards her engagement ring, offering her his congratulations, but knowing what we do about Sherlock, it’s obvious he already noticed that ring on her finger. In fact, it’s probable that he knew she was attached all along, which is why he felt comfortable to ask her to be his ride-along: he knew there would be no strings attached. Louise Brealey is as delightful as she always is in the role, shyly stuttering through her obviously preplanned speech about moving on while still looking awestruck and smitten with Sherlock when he’s talking to her. The reveal that she hasn’t quite moved on when she introduces them all to Sherlock Lite, her fiancé, is funny, but it almost seems a little cruel to make her a laughingstock again, just as everyone is finally respecting her.
So now that Sherlock is back, he’s realizing that things won’t be the same. All of these people longed to have Sherlock back, but his long absence means that upon his return, he is no longer central in their lives. It’s interesting to watch, in the next two episodes, how this new role as “one of the gang,” as opposed to “the center of the gang,” will suit him.
Like Molly, Mycroft knew all along that Sherlock was alive, and actually helped orchestrate the fake death, but now that his brother is back their relationship remains unchanged. In a brilliant scene taken right from the story “The Yellow Face,” Mycroft and Sherlock deduce a man from the state of his wool hat, and reveal another tidbit from their childhood. Mycroft once again insists he’s the smarter one, and Sherlock reminds him that he used to say that all the time, making Sherlock think himself an idiot throughout childhood. “Both of us thought you were an idiot, Sherlock,” Mycroft retorts. “We had nothing else to go on till we met other children.” And then, showing that Sherlock really has changed, he tricks Mycroft into admitting that he doesn’t have to remain isolated and alone just because he feels different than everyone around him. In the season two premiere, Mycroft and Sherlock stood together outside the mortuary doors and talked about how they’re different from everyone else because they don’t need friends. Now, in the season three premiere, Sherlock not only doesn’t see himself as being the same as Mycroft, but actually tries to convince Mycroft that friends are important. Whoa.
A lovely sequence shows us that John and Sherlock were meant to be together: we flip back and forth between Sherlock trying to solve an elementary case with Molly while John’s reprimands ring in his ears (despite what we may have thought, Sherlock really does take to heart what John tries to teach him) and John watching the seconds slowly tick by as he deals with one monotonous case after another at his new medical clinic. Sherlock needs the comfort of having John by his side, lovingly keeping him in line, and John needs the excitement and danger that Sherlock brings. When John assaults a patient thinking it’s another Sherlock prank, he realizes that Sherlock has gotten into his head. On his way to 221B Baker Street, he’s attacked, kidnapped, and put inside a bonfire. Welcome back to your old life, John.
What works so well about this whole scene is that when Mary cleverly figures out a coded message sent to her — one that, as we will later see, was sent by someone who knew she would know how to decode the message — she immediately rushes to Sherlock. Mary could have been the extra, unwanted person in the Sherlock/John relationship, but instead, in this scene, she becomes Sherlock’s ally in a race to save the person who means the most to both of them. In an instant, she goes from potential annoyance to fan favorite. Just as Moriarty strapped a bomb on John because he knew it would be the only thing to unnerve Sherlock, so too does this mysterious individual put John’s life in danger knowing it would smoke out another person. But is it Sherlock he’s trying to bring to the scene, or someone else?
Sherlock and Mary save John’s life, but at the end of the episode, John watches his life flash before his eyes for the second time in as many days as he stands trapped in an abandoned underground carriage with only Sherlock and a ticking time bomb. By saving John’s life at the scene of the bonfire, Sherlock makes up for disappearing for two years without telling John where he was, and they’re back on an even keel. However, the dickish move at the end of the episode — where Sherlock pretends to be confounded by the bomb just so he can force John to forgive him once and for all — shows that some things will never change.
And that’s exactly the way we like it.
HIGHLIGHT “Fffu—” “Cough.”
DID YOU NOTICE?
The main part of the episode begins and ends with John on the Tube: first riding it drearily on his way to Baker Street to face his demons, and secondly standing next to an active bomb. It’s unclear which one is worse for him.
When John looks up the stairs when he visits Mrs. Hudson, you can hear the sounds of “Irene’s Lament,” the violin song Sherlock played when he thought Irene was dead and she wasn’t (clever!). You can also hear a snippet of conversation from “A Study in Pink.”
When the action cuts to Sherlock in a barber’s chair reading a newspaper, the headline is “Skeleton Mystery,” which points to the very case Lestrade puts him on when he returns.
Sherlock refers to Mycroft as “blud,”
which is U.K. slang used in the same way as “brother” in North American slang, meaning someone who is very close to you. However, Sherlock probably means it sarcastically, given that Mycroft is actually his blood brother, but not really a friend. When Mary addresses Sherlock when they are first alone, he looks at her and we can see his mind palace at work. Several words swirl around her head, at first separate and disassociated — only, child, Guardian, Linguist, nurse, part, time, Shortsighted, Clever (this word flashes repeatedly), Disillusioned, Dem, Liar, Lover, Secret (this word appears only once), Tattoo, Lib, Cat, Romantic, Appendix Scar (seriously, how would he know that?) — and then the words begin to come together and some appear more often than others — Secret Tattoo, Cat Lover, Bakes Own Bread, Size 12, Liar Liar Liar.
When the Empty Hearse fan group is meeting at Anderson’s apartment and the news that Sherlock is alive drops, the BBC News ticker reads, “Magnussen summoned before Parliamentary Co[mmittee].” This will become important in the next two episodes.
“Watson’s Theme” plays at several key moments in this episode, but the most interesting use of it occurs when Sherlock and Mycroft are deducing who owned the wool hat left behind at Baker Street and Mycroft insists, “I’m not lonely.” Listen carefully for strings plucking out the notes of “Watson’s Theme” in a humorous fashion.
Even though the word CAM is being used to indicate a security camera in the upper lefthand corner of the Tube surveillance videos that Howard Shilcott shows Sherlock and Molly, it’s clearly there as a hint to the viewer who has read the books, pointing to the answer to the mystery.
Mary knows what a skip code is and then handles herself really well on the motorbike when they’re going down the stairs … as if she’s done this sort of thing before.
One of the texts Mary gets on their way to the bonfire says “things are hotting up here” instead of the more standard “heating up.” While it’s a common phrase in the U.K., it’s unfamiliar to most on the other side of the pond.
Sherlock’s mother’s prattle is hilarious and telling; while Sherlock is out solving mind-boggling cases, his parents are losing their keys and glasses between the sofa cushions.
On the television, as the newsreader is talking about the all-night sitting of Parliament to try to push through an anti-terrorism bill, a commentator argues, “What freedoms exactly are we protecting if we start spying on our own people? This is an Orwellian measure on a scale unprecedented —” His point of view is an interesting one because it’s not only one that Moran seems to share, but what Guy Fawkes was fighting against in the first place (see “Interesting Facts”).
Sherlock tells John that the only people who knew that he was actually alive were Molly, Mycroft, and about 25 members of his homeless network, but he’s lying. Later we find out his parents knew, and then when Molly dumped the corpse out the window, she had two male colleagues helping her do it. One can only imagine how many other people besides John knew.
The code that Moran enters to activate the bomb is 051113, which is the date, November 5, 2013.
Sherlock mentions that he knew there was a corpse that looked just like him, so he had Molly look for it, and then he provided the coat. Perhaps this is what put the idea into Molly’s head that there are other men out there who look like Sherlock. Could Tom be wearing the coat that Sherlock provided to put on the corpse?
FROM ACD TO BBC Parts of this episode are based on “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which is the story Doyle wrote in 1903 that announced the return of Sherlock Holmes a decade after his death (and we thought two years was a long time to wait!).
In that story, Holmes’s choice of disguise to reveal himself to Watson is of an elderly bookseller. Like Mr. Szikora, the man in John’s clinic whom John thinks is Sherlock pranking him, the bookseller is described as “a tall, thin man with coloured glasses.” He drops a book called The Origin of Tree Worship (Szikora instead has a porn DVD called Tree Worshippers), and Watson picks it up for him. The bookseller tells him he has a shop on Church Street, just as Szikora tells John in this episode, and then shows him some other books — British Birds (which means something different in Szikora’s saucy magazine with the same name), Catullus (a book of erotic poetry, which is probably what gave Gatiss the idea to make Szikora a smut peddler), and The Holy War, which is a titillating foreign film in the TV version.
Holmes tells Watson that when he went to Baker Street to reveal himself to Mrs. Hudson (which he does before he tells Watson), it threw her “into violent hysterics,” much as her scream indicates in this episode.
Holmes explains, “I had only one confidant — my brother Mycroft,” just as Mary says in this episode, “He would have needed a confidant …”
Holmes describes what happened at the top of the Reichenbach Falls, and says he and Moriarty were fighting each other but he gained the upper hand: “I have some knowledge … of baritsu [sic], or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me.” In this episode, Sherlock begins explaining his 13 possibilities and says one possibility involved “a system of Japanese wrestling.”
Just before John headbutts Sherlock in the nose, the detective says to him, “You have missed this, admit it …” In the story, when Holmes and Watson immediately embark on their first case together after Holmes reveals himself to him, Watson writes, “It was indeed like old times when, at that hour, I found myself seated beside him in a hansom, my revolver in my pocket, and the thrill of adventure in my heart.”
Sherlock realizes the Parliament Buildings are going to be blown up by Lord Moran. In the story, upon his return to Baker Street, Holmes is hunted by Moriarty’s right-hand man, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who is a sniper planning to assassinate Holmes after killing the son of an earl. When Holmes was dismantling Moriarty’s network, Moran was the one person he couldn’t prove had done anything until Holmes catches Moran in the act of trying to kill him with an air gun.
Throughout the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, Watson sports a mustache, which makes everyone’s disgust with it in this episode even funnier.
In the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, Mary Morstan is a client who comes to Holmes and Watson to help her find her missing father. She is described as “a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste … I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.” Watson instantly falls in love with her, and by the end of the book she accepts his marriage proposal. However, whereas in this episode John becomes engaged to Mary, in the story from which this episode is drawn, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Watson mentions “my own sad bereavement,” which many readers have assumed refers to Mary’s death.
At the beginning of the episode, Sherlock is reading a London newspaper and snorts, “London. It’s like a great cesspool into which all kinds of criminals, agents, and drifters are irresistibly drained.” At the very beginning of A Study in Scarlet, when Watson returns to London from the Afghan war, he describes London as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”
In “The Reigate Puzzle,” Watson mentions that in the year the story is set, 1887, Holmes had exhausted himself with “the whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis.” At the very beginning of this episode, Mycroft says Sherlock has been undercover by getting himself in deep with Baron Maupertuis. The “Sumatra” bit also plays into this episode (see below).
When Mary is reading from what appears to be John’s blog, she’s actually quoting The Sign of Four, where Watson describes Holmes’s methods of solving a case.
Just as Sherlock’s mustache jokes aren’t welcome when he first reveals himself to John, the literary Holmes had bad comic timing, too. After making a bad joke to a client in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” before qu
ickly revealing the solution to the mystery, the client remarks, “Your sense of humour may, as you admit, be somewhat perverted, and its exhibition remarkably untimely, but at least I withdraw any reflection I have made upon your amazing professional powers.”
Mycroft and Sherlock’s deduction of the man based solely on his wool hat is a combination of three stories: “The Greek Interpreter,” “The Yellow Face,” and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” In “The Greek Interpreter,” Watson meets Mycroft for the first time, and Mycroft and Holmes choose two men at the Diogenes Club and begin making deductions about their lives while Watson looks on, agog at the similarities between the brothers. In “The Yellow Face,” Watson and Holmes try to make conclusions about a client using only his pipe (including that it has a sentimental value to the man, considering how many times he’s mended it). In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Watson and Holmes do the same using a hat, and Holmes points out that the hat owner’s hair has recently been cut, judging by the hair-ends found on the hat. They also deduce that his wife has ceased loving him, based on the fact that the hat has not been brushed in a while. Sigh.
During the amusing cuts back and forth between John’s office and Sherlock’s flat, we return to Sherlock just as he’s exclaiming, “Monkey glands!” In “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” a particularly creepy late story, Holmes and Watson get called in to the case of Professor Presbury, who has been seen creeping on all fours in the stairway and climbing the outside walls of the house, and his own dog has to be tied up because it’s trying to attack him. Holmes discovers the condition has been brought on by a drug that uses the glands of a langur, an Asian species of monkey.
Investigating Sherlock Page 15
