HIGHLIGHT
Bill: They call me The Wig.
Sherlock: No they don’t.
Bill: Well, they call me Wiggy.
Sherlock: Nope.
Bill: Bill. Bill Wiggins.
DID YOU NOTICE?
Sherlock is angry with John for blowing his cover in the drug den, but if he hadn’t turned around and said John’s name, John would have gone on his way with Isaac and would have never seen him there.
When John says he’s going to make Sherlock pee in a cup, he sounds exactly like his American counterpart on Elementary, Joan Watson.
According to Magnussen’s file, Mrs. Hudson’s full name is Martha Louise Hudson, she’s a semi-reformed alcoholic who was an exotic dancer, has 21% debt, and her pressure point is marijuana. John Watson’s pressure points are his alcoholic sister and Mary. In Sherlock’s file, it says his porn preference is “normal,” it confirms Mycroft does indeed work for MI-6 (until now it’s just been speculated), and his pressure points are John Watson, Irene Adler, Jim Moriarty, Redbeard, “the Hounds of the Baskerville,” and opium. Interestingly, Molly and Mrs. Hudson aren’t there, and if Magnussen had been paying as much attention to Sherlock as he says he’s been, he would have noticed his attention to both women.
Just to reiterate, Sherlock’s porn preference is listed as normal.
In “The Empty Hearse,” when Sherlock’s mother is chattering on the couch at 221B, she says her husband is always losing his glasses and suggests he wear them on a chain around his neck. In this episode, we see that he took her advice.
When Sherlock is dying, he stumbles down a flight of stairs that looks strikingly like the one from “A Study in Pink.” However, close examination through freeze frames shows that the railings and configurations of the stairs are slightly different, so they’re using a stairwell that evokes “A Study in Pink,” but isn’t the same one.
When Sherlock sees Mary standing in the long corridor with the wooden doors in his mind palace, she’s wearing the same outfit she was at the restaurant when he first meets her in “The Empty Hearse.”
We see Magnussen go down the stairs into his vaults and take out a photo of a girl and then put it onto his projector and stare at it. Now we realize the vaults are just in his mind, so he was simply staring at the photo to memorize it. In “The Empty Hearse,” he’s sitting in his vaults at the end of the episode watching a film of Sherlock and Mary pulling John out of the bonfire, but now we know he was simply playing a mental film over and over in his head in his empty room, not in the vaults as he appeared to be doing.
Magnussen drops several hints about his memory palace throughout the episode: in the first scene at the parliamentary committee meeting, he says he has an excellent memory. When he shows up at 221B, he tells them this is his office, then John’s stats run through his head and he adds it’s his office now, as if the statistics prove he has his filing cabinets close by.
In “The Reichenbach Fall,” Sherlock investigates the old Henry Fishguard case and says that Henry didn’t actually commit suicide. We assumed at the time that was a reference to Sherlock; perhaps it was also a hint about Moriarty?
FROM ACD TO BBC As mentioned, most of this episode comes from “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” Moffat sticks pretty close to the source material for this one, and Lars Mikkelsen plays the part of Charles Augustus Magnussen with aplomb. With the exception of Milverton being clean-shaven and rather plump, they couldn’t have found an actor who more embodies the character in Conan Doyle’s vision. Like Mikkelsen, he is described as “a man of fifty, with a large, intellectual head” who exudes a sense of “benevolence,” except for “the insincerity of the fixed smile and by the hard glitter of those restless and penetrating eyes. His voice was as smooth and suave as his countenance.” Holmes is repulsed by him, and just as Sherlock tries to convey to John how horrible a man he is by likening him to a shark slowly swimming in an aquarium (which is largely unheard by John, who instead is marveling at the fact that he just saw Sherlock snogging a woman), Holmes describes him to Watson: “Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with 50 murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow.”
In addition to the major points listed above:
Holmes proposes to Milverton’s housekeeper; Sherlock proposes to Magnussen’s personal assistant. The detective’s best friend is equally repulsed in both versions.
Lady Eva Blackwell from the story becomes a combination of Lady Elizabeth Smallwood and Mary Watson. Like with Blackwell, Magnussen has letters that implicate Smallwood’s husband in a scandal, and her husband commits suicide over it, as we see in a newspaper headline. However, Smallwood doesn’t take matters into her own hands like Blackwell does — that side of the literary character is embodied in Mary.
Just as Milverton keeps a notebook in his pocket that leads Holmes to believe he’s brought Lady Blackwell’s letters to 221B, so does Magnussen show Sherlock some fake letters to make him believe they’re Smallwood’s.
Sherlock refers to Magnussen as “the Napoleon of blackmail,” but in the stories it’s Moriarty to whom he refers as “the Napoleon of crime.”
Sherlock in the drug den is taken from a story called “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” In that story, Watson is awakened late one night by a neighbor who asks him if he could help her get her husband out of an opium den. The man’s name is Isa Whitney (on Sherlock the boy’s name is Isaac Whitney). When Watson goes to the opium den to extract him, he finds Holmes there, disguised as an old man and working on a case involving the den.
Just as Molly slaps Sherlock and says, “How dare you throw away the beautiful gifts you were born with?” at the beginning of The Sign of Four, as Watson is chastising Holmes for doing cocaine, he says, “Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”
As mentioned earlier, Holmes makes great use of the “Baker Street Irregulars” in the stories, his name for Sherlock’s “Homeless Network.” Wiggins is the name of the kid who does the talking for the gang.
In dozens of stories, a trademark line of Holmes is to remind Watson to bring a gun. Here, for the first time, he distinctly tells John not to bring one to Magnussen’s office.
John gaining weight post-marriage is from “A Scandal in Bohemia,” where Holmes suggests he’s put on “7.5 pounds” since marrying, and even though Watson insists it’s only seven, Holmes sticks to his original proposition.
When Janine visits Sherlock in the hospital, she says she’s bought a cottage in Sussex Downs. “There’s beehives,” she says, “but I’m getting rid of those.” This is a reference to the fact that, as mentioned in three of the later stories, Holmes eventually retires to a cottage in Sussex Downs where he takes up beekeeping.
Sherlock leads Mary to Leinster Gardens where she discovers two “empty houses.” In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Sebastian Moran sits in Camden House waiting to assassinate Holmes, and Holmes is able to sneak up on him by creating a dummy of himself in the window of 221B across the street, which he has Mrs. Hudson come and move slightly every few minutes, just as John sits in the empty house in this episode, and Mary takes him to be a dummy.
In The Sign of Four, the fortune that Mary Morstan’s father was cheated out of is called the Agra treasure, because it was taken from the Agra fort in India. Watson worries throughout the story that if they do recover the fortune, Morstan’s station will be raised so high that she’ll never consider his marriage proposal. In this episode, Mary’s initials are revealed as A.G.R.A., and if John reads the information on the memory stick that she gives to him, she be
lieves it could keep them apart.
Sherlock’s mother wrote The Dynamics of Combustion. In The Valley of Fear, Holmes mentions that among Professor Moriarty’s many academic achievements was his brilliant book The Dynamics of an Asteroid.
Magnussen says that “for those who understand these things Mycroft is the most powerful man in the country.” In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” Holmes refers to his brother as “the most indispensible man in the country.”
Mycroft features more heavily in this episode than any other, probably because in the books he has the same brain capacity that Magnussen demonstrates in this episode. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” Holmes explains to Watson what Mycroft does for the British government: “He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living … In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant.”
The discussion between John and Sherlock on the tarmac is taken from the same story that gives this episode its title: “His Last Bow.” In that story, Holmes and Watson are reunited after over two years apart to take down a German spy ring. Chronologically, it’s meant to be the last adventure they have; written in September 1917, it’s set in August 1914, on the eve of the First World War. After solving the case, Holmes takes Watson aside for a conversation, saying, as Sherlock does at the end of the episode, that it may be “the last quiet talk that we shall ever have.” Then Holmes looks off at the sea and says, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” He’s referring to the impending war, and the Germans being the “cold and bitter” wind that shall blow on England from the east.
INTERESTING FACTS
As soon as Magnussen leaves Sherlock’s flat, Sherlock rushes out to a cab and directs the driver to Hatton Garden. This is an area of London near Camden that is known as London’s jewelry quarter, and clearly he’s going there to pick up Janine’s ring.
Sherlock deduces that one of Magnussen’s security guards is an ex-con and a white supremacist based on his tattoos, which are a number 14 behind his ear (shown first), and then a series of five dots placed the way they would appear on a die. They’re shown in the incorrect order: the five dots indicate he’s an ex-con by representing the four walls and the prisoner stuck in the center. The 14 tattoo is a common white supremacist tattoo referring to 14 words from an infamous quote by white nationalist leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Amanda Abbington says the show’s firearms expert told her the gun she uses to shoot Sherlock was the same one Daniel Craig used in Skyfall. “I hope that’s true and he wasn’t just taking the mickey out of me,” she laughs.
Numbers 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens are indeed false fronts that contain no real houses behind them. There were once five-storey houses built there just like the other upscale houses in the neighborhood, but when the route between Paddington and Bayswater stations opened, the houses at these two addresses had to be torn down to open a stretch where the steam engines could “vent off.” The façade was kept, however, with the windows darkened, and even some longtime residents of the area have no idea those houses aren’t real.
The boy who plays the young Sherlock Holmes is Louis Moffat, Steven Moffat and producer Sue Vertue’s son.
Sherlock tells John that his full name is William Sherlock Scott Holmes. This is not from Doyle canon, but is instead part of the much larger Sherlockian game that’s been played by fans and scholars alike since the early 20th century, treating Holmes and Watson as if they’re real people. Sci-fi writer Philip José Farmer often wrote several fictional biographies of literary characters. Now known as the “Wold Newton family” of books, the premise was that a meteorite fell near Wold Newton in Yorkshire in 1795, and some people going by in a coach were exposed to radiation. As a result, their descendants ended up with extraordinary intelligence and strength, and included such literary luminaries (all now related through this incident) as Allan Quatermain, James Bond, Sam Spade, Professor Moriarty, Nero Wolfe (who is now Sherlock Holmes’s son), and Sherlock Holmes. After Farmer got the world started, others jumped in and began expanding the Wold Newton world, and not only was Holmes’s name expanded to William Sherlock Scott Holmes, he was one of eight children, which include Mycroft, his sister Shirley, and Rutherford, his vampire twin. Obviously.
Another result of Holmesian speculation was a fictional biography of Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould called Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962). In that book, he wrote that Sherlock was the youngest of three brothers, and that the eldest is Sherrinford. When Arthur Conan Doyle was trying to come up with the name of his great detective, one of the early names he considered was Sherrinford. Holmes mentions in “The Greek Interpreter” that his family were “country squires,” and the eldest brother would have had to take over that position. Because Mycroft works in government and Sherlock is clearly not a country squire, Sherlockian scholars have speculated for decades that there must have been another brother. Mycroft says mysteriously in this episode, “You know what happened to the other one,” referring to another Holmes brother.
NITPICKS There’s no mention in the episode that Magnussen keeps his identity hidden, and yet when Sherlock is explaining to John how to break into Magnussen’s private lift by deactivating the magnet on the swipe card, he said the security guards won’t take Sherlock away because he might be Magnussen. If Magnussen takes that lift every day and the security guards are so close they’d be on him in an instant, don’t they know what their boss looks like?
OOPS
When Lady Elizabeth Smallwood’s “file” shows up on screen, it says her first name is Alicia.
Though it looks like Sherlock has dozens of pressure points, it’s just the same six items scrolling past us quickly on the screen, as if, once again, the writers never realized their fans had a pause button on their remotes.
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