The case of the stepfather posing as the online boyfriend is an allusion to “A Case of Identity,” where a woman receives a series of letters that turn out to be penned by her stepfather, also named Windibank. Just as Sherlock has some choice words for the stepfather in this episode, Holmes calls the man a “cold-blooded scoundrel.” At the beginning of that scene, Sherlock sits next to the woman and pats her hand sympathetically while listening to her story. This is right out of “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” where Watson describes a client showing up who is distraught, and Holmes pushes the man into a chair and then “patted his hand and chatted with him in the easy, soothing tones which he knew so well how to employ.”
When talking to the bookseller, Mr. Szikora, John determines that his regular doctor is Dr. Verner. In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Dr. Verner is mentioned as the one who buys Watson’s medical practice when he leaves to join Sherlock at 221B.
The note on Mary’s phone — “John or James Watson?” — refers to the moment in the books when, as mentioned earlier, Mary refers to John as “James.”
In “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” Holmes is sent a skip code like the one on Mary’s phone and determines that he has to read every third word of it to decode it.
John is shocked to discover that the two people Sherlock quickly ushers out of the flat are his parents. In the books, there’s never a mention of Sherlock Holmes’s parents. In “The Greek Interpreter,” Watson writes, “I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his early life.”
Sherlock refers to Moriarty’s network as consisting of a bunch of “rats deserting a sinking ship,” then calls Moran “the big rat,” and finally discovers that Moran has hidden the bomb in a deserted Underground station under Sumatra Road. All of these descriptions are alluding to a single line in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” where Holmes receives a note that mentions “the case of Matilda Briggs.” Holmes explains, “Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson … It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”
John’s ultimate forgiveness in the face of certain death at the end of the episode echoes the words that Watson writes at the end of “The Final Problem,” when he states that he shall forever regard Holmes as “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.”
INTERESTING FACTS
Derren Brown is a British illusionist, mentalist, and hypnotist who is best known for his mind-reading tricks, demonstrated in TV series such as Mind Control, Tricks of the Mind, and Trick or Treat. He performs live and often uses celebrities as his guinea pigs, and he has done several sensationalized specials where he performs dangerous and incomprehensible stunts. Brown has been a friend of Mark Gatiss for years, and in Anderson’s version of how he thinks Sherlock faked his death, Derren Brown is the man in the hooded jacket who comes up to John and puts him to sleep momentarily to reset his watch. He’s a good fit for Sherlock, since he has written several books about mind tricks and how to improve one’s memory, including directions on how to build a memory palace. Shortly before this episode aired, Moffat gave another nod to Brown in the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special, “Day of the Doctor,” when UNIT covers up the Doctor’s rather conspicuous arrival in central London as a Derren Brown stunt.
The date of the unsuccessful terrorist plot coincides with Guy Fawkes night. On November 5, 1605, a group of English Catholics attempted to assassinate King James I of England (who was also King James VI of Scotland) by blowing up the House of Lords on the day of the opening of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was the man in charge of the explosives, and he was the one caught the night before as he was guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath Parliament. Fawkes, along with several other conspirators, was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, a gruesome process that involved hanging a man until he was not quite dead, then disemboweling and beheading him, his body then drawn into four pieces. Just as Fawkes was about to be hanged, he leapt from the gallows and broke his neck, killing himself instantly to avoid having to endure the torture to follow. Since then, Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night, is held on the fifth of November in England, where effigies of Fawkes are burned and fireworks are set off in a show of patriotism. The tradition of carrying the effigy around during the day, as we see the boys do in the episode, asking John to give them a “Penny for a Guy,” was to collect money for the evening’s fireworks, but this tradition has fallen by the wayside in recent years, which explains John’s perplexed reaction. Bonfire Night has traditionally been far more popular than Halloween in the U.K., but in recent years the Fawkes traditions are dwindling and more Britons are celebrating Halloween instead. Some of this has been caused by a turn in the emotional tide when it comes to Fawkes: donning a Guy Fawkes mask (made famous by the graphic novel and film V for Vendetta) has been popularized by the activist network Anonymous, and they are increasingly worn by anti-establishment activists at protests.
Mycroft tells Sherlock where John will be dining that evening and adds, “They have a few bottles of the 2000 St-Emilion, though I prefer the 2001.” Wine critic for the Financial Times and author of The Oxford Companion to Wine Jancis Robinson wrote a piece on the St-Emilion wines and explained that the 2001 was overlooked because it came after the popular and boffo 2000 year, but before the dreadful 2002 crop, but that the 2001 is actually superior to the much-touted 2000. We now know what newspaper Mycroft pledges fealty to, though he doesn’t notice that he just declared the younger wine better than its older brother.
The #Sherlocklives hashtag that appears all over the screen when the news breaks was one used in the BBC’s social media campaign in the month leading up to this episode.
The fantastic visual trick of making viewers think Mycroft and Sherlock were playing chess when they were, in fact, playing Operation led one innovative fan, Red Scharlach, to create her own version of what she thinks would be the perfect iteration of the game. Simply Google “Sherloperation.”
The man brought to John’s clinic with a case of the piles is Mr. Blake. This is a nod to Sexton Blake, a multi-authored fictional detective first created in 1893 and modeled on Sherlock Holmes, right down to the facial features, housekeeper, sidekicks, and ubiquitous pipe. Originally created as a comic strip character, Blake has been the subject of novels, adaptations on the stage, radio, movies, and even a television series that ran for four seasons on ITV. In 2003, Professor Jeffrey Richards described him as “the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes.” While Gatiss may have been making a snide comment about Blake by giving the name to a man suffering from hemorrhoids, it would have been funnier if the man John mistakes as Sherlock was named Mr. Blake instead.
Sherlock’s parents are played by Benedict Cumberbatch’s real-life parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton. Benedict later told Radio Times, “I nearly cried watching it … I’m so proud of them and I’m so proud of the reaction they got — and I think they’re perfect casting as my parents!”
NITPICKS If Scotland Yard had scoured the room with the skeleton in it and failed to notice the easily opened trapdoor on the side of the desk, they really are as incompetent as Sherlock makes them out to be.
OOPS Sherlock’s messy application of the fake mustache in the restaurant is suddenly perfect by the time he gets to John’s table.
3.2
The Sign of Three
WRITTEN BY Steve Thompson, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss
DIRECTED BY Colm McCarthy
ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 5, 2014
Sherlock faces his most difficult task yet . . . when he’s asked to be the best man at John’s wedding.
“A wedding is, in my considered opinion, nothing short of a celebration of all that is false and specious and irrational and sentimental in this ailing and morally compromised world. Today we honor the death-watch beetle that is the doom of our society and, in time, one feels
certain, our entire species.”
This glorious romp might not be the most suspenseful of episodes, and is possibly the least Holmesian, but it certainly contains the most entertaining moments of the series. The dialogue is hilarious and the acting brilliant, as we join John and Mary on their happiest day, one that happens “offscreen” in the world of the books. (For good reason, Sherlock would say.) And yet, while the event is a celebration of the relationship between John and Mary, the episode acts as an examination of the friendship between John and Sherlock.
As with any big life change, whether it be marriage or the arrival of a baby, it affects two people the most, but then ripples outward, altering their relationships with other people. Both Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft ring the death knell on the ongoing partnership of John and Sherlock, which terrifies the detective. In the books, of course, Watson gets married, moves on, and continues to come back to Baker Street upon occasion for one adventure after another, with Holmes barely registering that he’d even been away. But this Sherlock is different — the relationships he’s developed since meeting John have significantly altered him, as we saw in the previous episode, and just as he’s awakened to the realization that people actually care about him, and he for them, he’s about to lose the one he cares about the most. Or so he thinks.
By letting emotions (one can hear Mycroft saying that word with derision) invade what has always been a very clinical mind, Sherlock’s mind palace is becoming cluttered and disorganized. In the previous episode, John’s admonishments trickled through Sherlock’s thought process and made him unable to complete tasks. In this episode, when John asks him to be his best man, the very suggestion — along with the implications of such an invitation — render Sherlock immobile. His mind simply shuts itself down completely, like a robot. In the face of the impending wedding, he obsesses over every single detail, as if he were the bride, and the wedding planning doesn’t happen at John and Mary’s flat, but at 221B Baker Street with Sherlock proving to be surprisingly adept at it. Perhaps he missed his calling as an events planner (or, from Janine’s point of view, as a professional wedding guest).
On the stag night, everything begins well when Sherlock once again approaches the event in the traditional way — by handing over a one-inch-thick folder on John Watson’s medical history to a chemist to determine the ideal alcoholic intake throughout the evening to avoid inebriation (don’t all best men carry their own graduated cylinders to the pubs?) — but when John intervenes, it turns into a mess. Sherlock is hilariously drunken and slurring when he’s “cluing for looks” on Tessa’s case — Cumberbatch puts in a performance that’s nothing short of Chaplinesque — and his mind is less competent than an ordinary person’s under the same circumstances. For someone who relies on a mind palace where everything is filed away neatly, alcohol sends a hurricane into the filing cabinets and he can no longer distinguish between an egg and a sitty thing.
At the actual wedding, deductions come at him so fast he can’t keep up with them, simply because he’s not sifting through the information in his mind palace carefully, but finding it haphazardly. Twice he apologizes and says he has given “one more deduction” than he’d expected to. He falls apart during his speech when he suddenly realizes there’s a Mayfly in the room, and the careful Council Chamber mind palace he’d created days earlier is suddenly unfocused, with a naked Irene Adler walking in as Tessa is frozen in her spot, and then everyone disappears except for Mycroft. Mycroft at first talks him through it, then raises the volume of his voice slowly until he’s yelling at his little brother to FOCUS … and both mind palace Sherlock and actual Sherlock at the wedding smack themselves in the cheeks to knock Mycroft out of there, refocus, and figure out who the target is. In front of a large group of people, Sherlock can’t talk out loud about everything the way he normally would and must put up a façade that he is simply giving a (wackadoo) best man’s speech. Sherlock has never worried about what people might be thinking about him before, and a year earlier he would have simply remained rooted to the spot, talking loudly while everyone murmured in confusion around him. But now he’s developed self-consciousness (once again confirming he’s not a sociopath), because he cares about John enough to not want to embarrass himself and, in the process, John and Mary, by suddenly staring straight ahead and speaking like an automaton. And yet, he can’t take John aside and run things by him, so he’s instead left with a hostile and intellectually superior Mycroft in his head, berating him for missing the obvious.
Sherlock’s mind palace has at times been over-the-top (“The Hounds of Baskerville”), beautifully stylized (“The Empty Hearse”), and funny (“A Scandal in Belgravia”), but its deterioration here gives us more insight into Sherlock’s emotional state than any dialogue could have. It’s a brilliant tactic on the part of the writers. Sherlock is falling apart both mentally and emotionally, because it’s the end of an era, as Mrs. Hudson says.
The little chat with Mrs. Hudson at the beginning of the episode appears to be there for comic relief, but it sits in Sherlock’s head and gnaws at him throughout the ceremony. That his brother uses the same phrase unnerves Sherlock — if Mrs. Hudson says it, he can easily shrug it off and send her out for biscuits, but if Mycroft echoes her words, then maybe he needs to be worried that this really is the end of an era. Mary and John sense Sherlock’s concerns, and Mary coaxes John to convince Sherlock that despite the wedding, the game is still on, even if both men don’t live at the same address anymore. But will it be?
This episode doesn’t just look at the relationship between Sherlock and John, but is an examination of relationships in general. Sherlock deducing the men at the wedding and their dateability for Janine is just the tip of the iceberg — we see Greg Lestrade at the wedding alone (recall that in “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock told him that his wife was sleeping with the PE teacher); Mycroft refuses to come altogether, being far more content with his solitary life; Mrs. Hudson appears to be with Mr. Chatterjee from the sandwich shop, indicating either that secret wife of his in Doncaster is no longer in the picture, or Mrs. Hudson has decided to look past it; Molly is with Tom, but watching Sherlock the entire time. No two relationships are the same, which is why Sherlock’s education on the topic has been so difficult for him.
Sherlock is used to everything revolving around him. The only reason that Lestrade, Molly, John, and Mrs. Hudson even know each other is because of him. He’s used to people dropping things at a moment’s notice for him. The opening scene is a hilarious look at just how much Sherlock means to Lestrade and what the DI is willing to sacrifice for his consulting detective after having to live without him for two years. But it also shows Sherlock’s utter lack of friendship etiquette, making Lestrade think he’s in mortal peril when, in fact, he just needs help writing the best man speech. In “A Study in Pink,” Sherlock barely knew John when he was texting him to come at once, whether convenient or inconvenient (he needed to use a phone and didn’t want to walk down the stairs to ask Mrs. Hudson). But now he calls on Lestrade because he can’t use John for this particular task … and also because even if he could, he’s worried John would no longer come. John and Mary don’t see why their relationship would change everything, but Sherlock does: he’s no longer the center of attention. And with a baby on the way, he never will be again. The scene of the photographer asking Sherlock to please step aside so he can capture the happy couple is meant to be funny, but also meaningful: for the first time since they met, Sherlock has been asked to step out of a picture that involves John. Every time the media photographs Sherlock, John is standing by his side or slightly behind him. Now Sherlock’s being asked to leave the picture altogether.
The mind palace’s cluttered state suggests that maybe Mycroft was right in “A Scandal in Belgravia” when he demonstrated that Sherlock’s relationship with Irene Adler got in the way of things, or in “The Empty Hearse” when he scoffed at the ridiculousness of friendship. But we also see ch
anges in Sherlock that are positive because of his friendship with John — the aforementioned cover-up when he realizes something bad is about to happen at John’s wedding; his informal chit-chat with Janine that begins with him trying to impress her and get her a date at the same time, and ends with him telling her something private about himself; and finally, the way he’s eventually able to disarm Major Sholto by telling him they both know he can’t kill himself at John’s wedding: “We would never do that to John Watson.” This is not Sherlock making an emotionless, clinical appeal based on facts, but one that demonstrates just how much he’s learned about human nature. Just one episode ago he was shouting “Surprise!” in a restaurant and telling Mycroft how “delighted” John will be to see him, completely missing the point, and yet here he talks a man out of suicide by appealing to his basic human decency. Understanding what his death meant to John Watson has utterly changed Sherlock. Even the hilarious notion of the jewel of Scotland Yard using his mind palace to offer dating advice to Janine is important: the deductions he makes about the men point to human nature, not just scientific fact.
If we had to sum up what Sherlock has gained through his friendship with John and the experience of returning from the dead, it’s a sense of self-consciousness. He knows when he’s being a jerk now. At the beginning of the speech, he confirms everyone’s worst fears by first stuttering, then flipping through the telegrams as if they don’t matter, then condemning the very institution of marriage before insulting John, Mary, the bridesmaids, the vicar, and pretty much everyone else in the room. But then he acknowledges that what he just did was wrong, that it shows a lack of understanding of what beauty or virtue is, before bestowing upon John the nicest things he’s ever said to him. Suddenly, Mary is smiling widely, John looks like he’s about to cry, Molly and Mrs. Hudson are dabbing at their eyes, and the guests are wondering why everyone thought the detective would be a disaster. (They’ll soon find out.) His speech is heartfelt, and everyone can see Sherlock is not a heartless machine, but a man who has learned how to appreciate and even love his friends.
Investigating Sherlock Page 16
