Investigating Sherlock

by Nikki Stafford

  While Sherlock is very aware of just how different he feels, not everything he does in the name of Understanding Human Nature (wait for the monograph) is noticed. Sherlock tries his best to make it through the speech even when he looks crazy; he hates wedding traditions but abides by them anyway; his gift to John and Mary is a beautiful violin song dedicated to them that he performs in front of everyone; he tosses his boutonniere to Janine like a gentleman; and most importantly, he doesn’t announce Mary’s pregnancy to everyone but instead realizes it’s personal information he should give only to them.

  And then he leaves the party before anyone else, realizing the rest of the group is all paired up and the cheese stands alone. “I mean, who leaves a wedding early?” Mrs. Hudson asked him.

  The one whose life just changed considerably when no one was looking.

  HIGHLIGHT Greatest best man speech ever.

  DID YOU NOTICE?

  When Sherlock is on the phone to Mycroft, he says, “What? … What? … WHAT?!” which was a characteristic reaction of David Tennant’s Doctor on Doctor Who.

  While the reference won’t be explained until the next episode, when Mycroft says the word “Redbeard,” he knows that he’s triggering in Sherlock a reaction to a childhood incident that will alter the way he sees the day. This is one of the mind tricks that Derren Brown uses in his act.

  We get more clues in this episode that there’s something about Mary … She sees right through Sherlock’s fibs even when John falls for them; she ends up playing both men by convincing each one that she is in league with the other; and at the party when John says someone is going to die, she not only stays calm but rushes out to join the men and becomes an essential part of how they deal with Sholto. Also watch her reaction when Sherlock reads out the telegram from “CAM” that refers to her as “poppet” and adds, “Wish your family could have seen this.” That will be important in the next episode. And finally, Mrs. Hudson’s chat with John, where she talks about how her husband was running a major drug cartel without her knowing it, is full of foreshadowing.

  Tom suggests that perhaps Bainbridge had concocted a blade made of blood and bone, but his term “meat dagger” is what draws sniggers from people and the disdain of both Sherlock and Molly. And yet the ultimate solution was that the perpetrator used something akin to a meat thermometer. If they had taken him seriously, his words might have triggered the real answer in Sherlock’s mind.

  When playing “Who Am I?” Sherlock asks if he’s the current king of England, which is a nod to the fact that from Sherlock Holmes’s resurrection in 1903 until the final story in 1927, there were kings on the British throne.

  The day after the stag night, Sherlock is Googling Major Sholto and is reading an article about one of the angry family members. Written by Laurie Norris, the title of the story is “V.C. Hero — The Unanswered Questions: Why did my boy have to die?” and is an interview with Madeline Small, whose son Peter was killed in the mission that Sholto led. She claims that Sholto destroyed her family, that Peter was only 18 when she waved goodbye to him two years earlier. “He destroyed us all. And he gets a medal for it,” reads the pull-quote. Peter is the younger brother of Jonathan Small, the photographer at John’s wedding.

  When Sherlock realizes the Mayfly Man is at the wedding, he moves to “part two” of his speech and stutters, “I could go on all night about the depth and complexity of [John’s] … jumpers …” John’s jumpers, or sweaters, have long been a favorite thing to catalog in Sherlock fandom. There are lists and photographs and memes of John Watson’s various jumpers, which have become an essential part of his wardrobe and character.

  Sherlock once again uses the “Vatican cameos” code that he yelled in “A Scandal in Belgravia” just before the safe opened and a gun began shooting people in the room. John finally puts speculation on the exact meaning of the term to rest here when he defines it as meaning “someone’s gonna die.”

  When Sherlock is trying to figure out the common thread between the women in his Council Chamber mind palace, he Googles their resumés to see if they all have worked for the same employer, and they haven’t. And yet when he realizes who the target is, the link between the women is that they all worked for the same employer: Sholto. At first this looks like a mistake in the script, until Sherlock says they probably all had to sign confidentiality agreements, which would be the secret they refused to tell him, and why Sholto doesn’t show up on their resumés.

  FROM ACD TO BBC As the title suggests, many of the details of this episode are taken from the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (originally titled The Sign of the Four).

  This novel introduces Mary Morstan, who comes to Holmes and Watson as a client because her father has disappeared. They eventually discover that her father has died and was part of a ring of men who had found a treasure and were going to split up the money until they were double-crossed. One of the men is the double-crosser, the other is the man who vows vengeance on him. Morstan simply gets caught in the middle and dies of a heart attack. Mary is owed the treasure, but only a small part of is it recovered. By the end of the story, Watson has fallen in love with her and they are engaged.

  The man who does the double-crossing is Major Sholto, and the man who vows vengeance is Jonathan Small, just like the two characters in the episode. Sholto has lost money on a gambling debt, and Small tells him and Morstan about the treasure. Sholto steals it, and Small vows revenge; he means to steal the treasure back from him, but Sholto inadvertently ends up dead. All of this happens before Mary even comes to Holmes and Watson, which means, just as Sherlock says in the episode, Major Sholto is already dead before he solves the case.

  Jonathan Small teams up with a diminutive Islander named Tonga, who shoots poison darts through a blowpipe (Holmes accidentally shoots and kills him during a chase scene). In one of Sherlock’s stories during his speech, he talks about a dwarf with a blowpipe.

  When Small is trying to steal the treasure, Tonga kills Sholto by shooting a poisoned dart at him, making him very much like the “invisible man with the invisible knife” that Archie suggests at the wedding reception, which ultimately helps Sherlock solve the case.

  Mycroft is running on a treadmill and patting his stomach as Sherlock calls him, once again making a joke about the original obese Mycroft compared to the wafer-thin Mark Gatiss.

  In “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” Holmes states, “I am not often eloquent. I use my head, not my heart,” and that statement could sum up most of the sentiments in Sherlock’s best man speech.

  One section of Sherlock’s speech — “If I burden myself with a little help-mate during my adventures, it is not out of sentiment or caprice, it is that he has many fine qualities of his own that he has overlooked in his obsession with me” — is taken directly from “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” a late story narrated by Holmes rather than Watson: “Speaking of my old friend and biographer, I would take this opportunity to remark that if I burden myself with a companion in my various little inquiries it is not done out of sentiment or caprice, but it is that Watson has some remarkable characteristics of his own to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his exaggerated estimates of my own performances.”

  When Sherlock mistakes John’s question about who the best man he ever met was, he replies, “Billy Kincaid, the Camden Garrotter.” In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the place directly across the street from the empty house is Camden House, and the killer — or garrotter — who operates from there is Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s right-hand man.

  During Sherlock’s speech, he mentions “The Hollow Client,” which is not a case from Sherlock Holmes canon, although it could be a play on the title of one of the stories, “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.”

  Sherlock recalls John watching a woman walk back and forth in front of their flat, clearly ful
l of indecision. Sherlock says, “Oscillation on the pavement always means there’s a love affair.” This comes from “A Case of Identity,” where it’s Holmes who watches the woman outside and concludes, “I have seen those symptoms before … Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur.”

  Lestrade suggests someone tiny could have come through the air vent and receives only derision from Sherlock. However, his conclusion is both a reference to Tonga in The Sign of Four, who is a dwarf who comes down through a skylight window, and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” which involves a snake crawling through the air vent to kill someone in their sleep. (And yes, it’s as creepy as it sounds.)

  In one scene, we see Sherlock stuffing handfuls of cigarettes into a Persian slipper, which is a reference to Holmes shoving pipe tobacco into a Persian slipper in “The Naval Treaty” and “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

  I hate to bring down the party, but while Doyle never explains how Mary died, many readers have speculated that she died in childbirth.

  INTERESTING FACTS

  Sherlock says the best man he ever knew was Billy Kincaid. In the 1988 comedy Without a Clue, Ben Kingsley plays John Watson, a man who creates a fictional detective called Sherlock Holmes so he can write about the cases for which he’s actually the private detective. He hires a man named Kincaid (Michael Caine) to impersonate the great detective.

  When Sherlock relates the story of the French decathlete found dead amongst hundreds of matchboxes, all empty except for one, John asks him what the final one contained and Sherlock opens it to reveal only a glow and a look of glee on Sherlock’s face. This motif is an homage to several films that use a glow to indicate something so important it can’t even be shown onscreen, such as in Repo Man (in the trunk of the car), Pulp Fiction (in the mysterious briefcase), Kiss Me Deadly (also a glowing briefcase, and the film Tarantino claims was his inspiration), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (the unseen contents of the Ark of the Covenant).

  When Sherlock is reading Bainbridge’s appeal for his services, he mutters, “All the nice girls like a soldier,” which John corrects to “sailor.” They’re referring to the traditional British song “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor.”

  Amanda Abbington revealed that drunk John Watson was very much like drunk Martin Freeman. “I loved [the stag night scenes] … He did stuff in those scenes that he does at home, or when he’s mucking about. Like in the episode when someone says, ‘Mr. Holmes,’ and he points at Sherlock and whistles, that’s my favorite bit. Martin does that a lot. Martin and Ben bounce off each other so beautifully.”

  NITPICKS

  For a man who couldn’t tell a chair from an egg when he was drunk, how does Sherlock remember that Tessa used John’s middle name?

  Sherlock refers to Bainbridge as a Grenadier, but the Grenadier Guards are the senior-most members of the Guards Division, and Bainbridge looks like he’s more of a junior member.

  OOPS

  When we first see the reception line, Mary and John are greeting an older woman in a pink dress and large white hat and a white-haired man in a light-gray suit. Then David steps up, and that same couple is standing behind him. As soon as he moves on, Mary greets them both again.

  Sherlock says that Bainbridge had a wound in his stomach, but we later see both him and Sholto being stabbed in the back, and when he’s lying on the ground in the shower all of the blood is coming out of his back.

  SHERLOCKIANS WEIGH IN

  Peter Calamai

  Peter Calamai, C.M., holds the investiture of The Leeds Mercury in the Baker Street Irregulars and is also a Master Bootmaker in The Bootmakers of Toronto. A veteran journalist and author, he won the Morley-Montgomery Award for the best article published in the Baker Street Journal in 2012.

  Do you think Sherlock is a faithful interpretation of the characters of Watson and Holmes?

  Yes. Too many people get hung up on the modern setting of the BBC Sherlock, yet the messages of the canon transcend clattering hansom cabs, pea-soup fog, and Victorian dress and manners. They are eternal: the misery that lies beneath the external shows of normalcy in many households, the conquering pull of true love and the jealousy that can accompany it, the desperate measures arising from greed, the sacrifices of patriotism, and so on. Above all is the eternal message of the profound companionship between two men who are superficially very dissimilar and their interactions with these and other themes.

  To be meaningful to today’s audiences Hamlet need not be staged by actors in Elizabethan dress on the open-air stage of the replica Globe in London. Reimaging Shakespeare’s plays in a contemporary setting reveals their eternal messages afresh. So too for the canon. (Director-playwright Charles Marowitz recently demonstrated this point in “The Adventure of Sherlock’s Last Case,” Baker Street Journal 64, no. 4 [Winter 2014]: pp. 19–23.)

  What is your favorite aspect of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s reimagining of the stories? What is your least favorite?

  I love the show-off cleverness of the script, casting, and direction. Sherlock never talks down to its viewers, unlike the American Elementary; it is a show about a detective while Elementary is merely yet another detective show. As well, Sherlock rewards Holmesians (the British term) with what the Japanese would call “fan service” — insider comments like the visitor counter on Watson’s blog page being stuck at 1895. The secondary characters are superb — Andrew Scott as a maniacal Jim Moriarty, Lara Pulver as a nakedly scheming Irene Adler, and Lars Mikkelsen as evil personified Charles Magnussen.

  I hate when important plot developments are conveyed by images of messages on the screen of a smart phone, unreadable on a 20-inch television set.

  What has been your favorite screen adaptation of Doyle’s stories so far?

  I have many favorites. Like a baby chick imprinting on whatever it sees first, whenever I visualize Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone is the dominant image. No other actor comes as close to the Paget illustrations. Yet for raw physicality it has to be Jeremy Brett, when he was healthy in the early Granada episodes.

  The complex relationship between Holmes and Watson is captured best by Christopher Plummer and James Mason in Murder by Decree. The scene of Watson attempting to spear the final pea on his plate was rewritten at Mason’s request to make it even more comical. For inspired directing there’s Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Even the four Canadian films with the hopelessly miscast Matt Frewer can be admired for the authentic Victorian buildings (in Kingston, Ontario).

  Finally, all Sherlockians look forward to seeing the restored 1916 silent film starring William Gillette, who could once again be recognized as the foremost actor to play Sherlock Holmes.

  3.3

  His Last Vow

  WRITTEN BY Steven Moffat

  DIRECTED BY Nick Hurran

  ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 12, 2014

  Sherlock takes drastic action in an attempt to stop the tyranny of Charles Augustus Magnussen.

  A stunning closer to season three, “His Last Vow” is the culmination of all of the episodes that come before it. John still has the same addiction to danger we first saw in “A Study in Pink”; John and Mary become another example of love leading to danger and heartbreak like in “A Scandal in Belgravia”; Moriarty is in Sherlock’s head now as much as he was in “The Great Game,” “The Hounds of Baskerville,” and “The Reichenbach Fall”; Sherlock faces fear and possible death as he did in “Hounds” and “Reichenbach”; and Sherlock is haunted by his childhood in ways that were hinted at in “The Empty Hearse” and “The Sign of Three.”

  One of the major criticisms of Sherlock’s third season is that, for a show that claims to be a faithful adaptation of the books, it no longer conveys the same tone as the Doyle canon. Just as Steven Moffat came to Doctor Who and began exploring the emotional side of the Time Lord alongside the week-to-week ad
ventures, some said he has decided to focus on the psychological elements of the Great Detective over his cases. Detractors said “The Sign of Three” might have been very fun and psychologically revealing and emotional, but was it Sherlockian?

  Canonically, Sherlock Holmes is a man who is cold and clinical, with occasional sparks of warmth and humanity. Watson says of Holmes, “All emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.” Doyle makes no mention of his parents, Mycroft is mentioned only four times in the stories (and there’s a sense of rivalry without cruelty), and Holmes always stands superior to Watson. Watson looks up to him, even if he does so begrudgingly at times. Watson refers to their friendship with intimacy and affection, but doesn’t make a big deal about it. Watson’s marriage is barely registered by Holmes who continues working on cases; if Watson happens to show up, he takes him along with him, but doesn’t seem to miss him if he doesn’t. At times years go by where the men aren’t in contact. When Holmes dies at the Reichenbach Falls, Watson is shattered, but when Holmes returns Watson is overjoyed and ready to tackle their next case immediately. He mentions Mary’s death in passing and the men go off to help the helpless once again.