This was so much better than episode 2. I was hooked all the way through, and kept glancing at the clock hoping that it wasn’t going to end any time soon.

I love the opening scene in the prison in Belarus with Sherlock grammar-correcting the prisoner into telling the truth! And then the even more brilliant scene of Sherlock shooting a smiley face into the wall out of boredom. But – with the state of the décor of the flat – I’ll bet any money you like that those are the original windows and they aren’t double-glazed, so I’m staggered that, in a busy thoroughfare like Baker Street, nobody heard the gunshots and called the police. (Or maybe they did and the operator recognised the address and put them through to Lestrade.)

It wasn’t until I listened to the DVD commentary that I realised that the smiley face on the wall is sprayed with the same yellow paint from The Blind Banker. I had even noticed the can on the nearby table but thought that it was a can of air freshener.

I can just about accept that John ‘acquired’ the pistol during his army days and somehow managed to keep it when he left, but how much ammunition did he also manage to get hold of?

Great lines:
John (opening the fridge and seeing what’s inside): “Oh, f... There’s a head.” (Calling to Sherlock in the living room) “A severed head!”
Sherlock: “Just tea for me, thanks.”

Sherlock says, “It doesn’t matter to me who’s sleeping with who.” Whoa, Mr. Grammar Policeman, that’s “who’s sleeping with whom.”

Sherlock says that he only puts things in his ‘hard drive’ brain that are useful, and that’s why he no longer knows that the Earth goes round the Sun. So how likely is it that he’ll one day solve a case because he didn’t delete the poem “Round and round the garden”?

I giggle in fangirly delight every time Sherlock walks over the coffee table instead of going round it.

How schoolboy-mischievous is that grin he pulls when Mrs Hudson sees what he’s done to her wall?!

The bomb goes off outside the flat just 35 seconds after John left. Even if he was one or two streets away by then, how come he didn’t hear it?

Why do the police let John through the cordon without clarifying why he wants to pass? He never says, “I live there,” until he meets another policeman near the front door.

There’s no indication that John checks for Mrs Hudson first. If he had seen her, he would have asked about Sherlock but he seems to have no idea that he’s safe until he gets upstairs.

I like how Sherlock asks Mycroft how the diet is, in a continued acknowledgement of the fact that this Mycroft isn’t overweight like the one in the books. And Mycroft’s look of distaste when he says that his case “requires legwork” continues the theme.

Presumably John has stayed at Sarah’s before, or Sherlock couldn’t possibly know that she even has a lilo, but it’s strange that he can’t tell where John slept. Or is he slightly off his game because his ears are still ringing from the explosion? I realise that it’s canonical reference to Mycroft being more clever than him, but it’s a bit clunky, although John’s exasperated, “How ...? Oh, never mind,” is a delight.

Neither John nor Lestrade query why there are only five pips from the Greenwich time signal instead of the usual six.

Up until now I had assumed that Speedy’s, the snack bar in Baker Street, was 221A and that the building containing Mrs Hudson’s flat and the boys’ flat was 221B, but the revelation of there being a 221C Baker Street makes a huge nit of the number on the building’s front door. If the flats inside are numbered A (presumably Mrs H’s), B (S&J’s) and C (the basement flat), the front door should only have “221” and the separate doorbells for each flat should indicate that there are three flats inside. With the door saying “221B”, how is a courier or a new postman going to know where flats A and C are? [In the DVD commentary for episode 1 the writers acknowledge this nit but say that they couldn’t bring themselves to be the first people in Sherlock Holmes history to change the front door.]

The fact that the pink phone rings moments after Sherlock finds the trainers in 221C suggests that there must be a hidden camera in the flat, but nobody seems to think of it. It can’t simply be that someone watched them enter the house, because he wouldn’t know how long it took them to get the keys to the flat.

I don’t know much about mobile phone technology: is it feasible that Moriarty can disconnect it remotely and dial out from it remotely? Because it’s not the hostages who dial out and disconnect the phones themselves.

Martin Freeman has down to a tee the wonderful looks of exasperation and expressions that say, “I am going to kill him,” from John, particularly at the lab when Sherlock demands that he pass him his phone from his own jacket pocket!

The arrival of Jim finally justifies the writers’ decision to make subtle changes to canonical figures, like making Mycroft slim. I’ve seen many posts on various forums from readers of Conan Doyle who said that as soon as Jim was named, they thought, “I bet he’s Moriarty,” and therefore weren’t so surprised when he turned up at the end. Whereas me, I didn’t have a clue.

Benedict does an awesome job of looking genuinely bewildered when Molly runs from the lab after Sherlock thinks he’s done her a favour by telling her that her boyfriend is gay. However, isn’t Sherlock falling into an all-too-human trap of stereotyping people?

If Sherlock is the same age as Benedict, he was 13 when Carl Powers died. How did a 13 year old boy ever get access to police records – and why would he want to? He says he read about it in the papers, but if the police didn’t think there was anything fishy about Carl’s death, I can’t imagine that the newspapers mentioned or even knew about the missing shoes.

Working out a rough timeline starting from the time on the clock in Sarah’s flat that morning, I calculate that John doesn’t go to Mycroft’s office until at least 6 p.m., maybe 6.30. I know that Mycroft is the British government, but he must get some time off! Or does he have to make up the time he was out of the office at the dentist?! However, I love the imperious way he points John back down into his seat.

With three hours to go, it’s about 9 p.m. and at least two hours since John left Mycroft’s office. Why is he still wearing his tie? Why hasn’t he changed back into casual clothes?

Lestrade says that the woman hostage lives in Cornwall, but I’m wondering whether she was brought much nearer to London before being abandoned in the car park, because I can’t think how else the pager that she used could be with Lestrade by 10.30 the next morning.

A lot of online commentators have said that surely someone would have noticed a scared man standing in one spot for so long. The fact is, in central London he just wouldn’t be noticed because everyone else would be passing by and so they would only see him for a few moments, and if they noticed that he was crying, they mostly wouldn’t care or wouldn’t want to get involved. However, once the sniper trains his laser on him, then I would expect one or two passers-by to notice, do a double-take, perhaps wondering if it’s a laser pointer, and then maybe notice the wires sticking out the bottom of his jacket.

I love the editing during the phone conversation between that young man and Sherlock, and the way that the two scenes segue back and forth.

I have no issue with Sherlock being a great actor when required (after all, he has shown it before with the way he can flirt with Molly when he wants something from her, and with the woman above Van Coon’s flat in the previous episode), but I’m kind of surprised that he’s able to turn on real tears at a moment’s notice.

After the conversation with Mrs Monkford, Sherlock says that the police have “only just found the car.” However, Lestrade just said that the blood in the car had been DNA tested and was definitely Ian Monkford’s. DNA results don’t come back that quickly in the real world even if they’re fast-tracked.

Moriarty appears to be getting prescient. Sherlock types his message solving the Monkford case and sends it to his website. The pink phone rings 2½ seconds later. That’s too fast unless there’s a hidden camera in the ceiling watching Sherlock type, and Moriarty started ringing the pink phone before Sherlock pressed Send.

Also, why did Sherlock need to go home to send the message? He could have accessed his website from a computer at Scotland Yard, or wherever it was that Monkford’s car was being kept.

In the café, John (who is being right-handed today as he eats) says that they’ve “hardly stopped for breath since this thing started.” It’s not strictly true. I think they had at least twelve hours, perhaps more, between the end of the Carl Powers case and the start of the Ian Monkford case; and that resolved in the early evening yesterday and now it’s 8 a.m. the next morning, so they have had time to sleep and eat in between.

Great lines:
John: “Has it occurred to you ...?”
Sherlock: “Probably.”

The sniper watching over the old lady must be bored to tears: she’s alone, she can’t move and she can’t see, yet he still has his laser trained on her. He can only be doing this because (a) he loves his job a little too much or (b) Moriarty has ordered him to and is watching by camera.

The timing seems to go awry during the Connie Prince case. The old lady gives 12 hours to solve the case. They go to the morgue to look at Connie’s body, and Sherlock sends John off to research her background and family history. We then get an an 8 hour countdown, i.e. 4 hours have passed. Then we’re at 221B and Sherlock gets a call from the old lady saying there are only 3 hours left. But John has only just arrived at Connie’s house to talk with her brother. What the hell have the boys been doing all this time? I know that Sherlock later says that he knew the answer a couple of hours ago and used the time to work on other things, but John has no such excuse.

And the prescience continues: the pink phone rings the moment Sherlock presses Send to put his solution onto the website. Even if Moriarty is auto-refreshing the site every second, he can’t have seen the message that quickly. Still, at least Sherlock didn’t bother going home to post his message this time.

Sherlock tries to discourage the old lady from talking about Moriarty’s voice, but surely Moriarty always intended to kill her, because he knows she will be interviewed by the police and by Sherlock once she’s been rescued and will give them that information then.

For all his claims that he doesn’t really care about the hostages, and regardless of his later argument with John, Sherlock does a gorgeously pained bite of his lip when he realises that the old lady has been killed.

Great lines:
Sherlock: “I’ve disappointed you.”
John (bitterly): “That’s a good deduction, yeah.”
Sherlock: “Don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes don’t exist and if they did I wouldn’t be one of them ... Oh, you’re angry with me, so you won’t help. Not much cop, this caring lark.”

The timing is a bit confusing after this. The old lady is killed between 6 and 7 p.m. We next see Sherlock and John at 221B watching the news of the explosion at the old lady’s block of flats. It’s daylight outside, so it’s the following day (it was dark at Scotland Yard when the old lady died). Sherlock is sent the photo of the river and eventually resorts to phoning Lestrade (and no doubt Sherlock/Lestrade shippers are delighted that he simply says, “It’s me”); then we see a fast-forward scene of the tide beginning to recede at night-time and reaching low tide in the light. So have two days now passed since the old lady died? And why does Moriarty not give a deadline this time?

Great lines:
Lestrade: “Any ideas?”
Sherlock: “Seven, so far.”

Lestrade: “I don’t see ...”
Sherlock: “You do see. You just don’t observe.”
John: “All right, all right, girls, calm down.”

John: “Fantastic.”
Sherlock (shrugging): “Meretricious.”
Lestrade: “And a happy new year!”

Sherlock: “You’ll never find him, but I know a man who can.”
Lestrade: “Who?”
Sherlock (grinning): “Me.”

I love John’s “Oh, here we go again” look as he follows Sherlock off the beach.

Sherlock gives a £50 note to the homeless woman, then goes back to the taxi and asks John, “Have you got any cash?” as if he hasn’t got any left. He’d have been really popular if he had tried to pay the cabbie with a fifty!

I love the idea of using the homeless as the modern-day version of the stories’ Baker Street Irregulars.

John gets random texts from Mycroft asking for progress on the Bruce-Partington investigation. But Sherlock said earlier, “Mycroft never texts if he can talk,” and we know that Mycroft – while still a bit sore – is recovered from his root canal work.

I love the way that, when Mycroft texts John while he’s in the security guard’s bedroom, the message seems to appear on the wall and, for a moment, John is actually blocking part of the message until he moves out of the way.

On two occasions Sherlock uses the museum manager’s name but I’m sure he mispronounces it both times, calling her “Miss Wencleslas.” I can only assume that Benedict had problems with the name, and Mark Gatiss certainly pronounces it the usual way in the commentary.

After visiting Westie’s fiancée, John gets a taxi back to Baker Street. He gets out of the taxi just as Sherlock comes out and collects the note from the homeless woman, telling John to hold the cab. So up until then, John had intended to let it go ... except he hadn’t paid the driver.

Most ridiculous moment in this series: Sherlock looking up at the sky at Vauxhall and seeing a beautiful starfield. Has Mark Gatiss never been to London at night? You never get a sky like that in London, not even on the clearest night. Dramatic licence is one thing, but that’s just ludicrous.

Great lines:
Sherlock: “Homeless network – my eyes and ears all over the city.”
John: “So you scratch their backs and ...”
Sherlock: “Yes, then I disinfect myself.”

John says that there can’t be that many “Professor Cairns” in the phonebook. Somehow, I can’t imagine there’d be any “Professor Cairns” and, even if she did list herself with her title, she wouldn’t give the planetarium as her address.

If the person narrating the commentary at the planetarium sounds familiar, that’s because it’s none other than the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. Before the episode was broadcast, there was misinformation on the internet that Davison would be the voice of Moriarty, who wouldn’t be seen onscreen.

The fight scene at the planetarium is gorgeously filmed apart from the long shots when it’s sometimes painfully obvious that they’ve got a couple of hobbits doubling for Martin and Benedict in order to make the Golem look taller. However, I particularly love the way the supernova explodes on the wall behind Sherlock at the end.

Hearing the little boy’s voice starting the ten second countdown was possibly the most shocking moment of the series so far. And a real-life FYI: the boy was cast in his first acting role by his very proud parents Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue, the Executive Producers!!

I don’t know why Joe Harrison bothers dealing drugs. All he needs to do to make money is to charge people to come to his flat and stare at his wallpaper, and they’ll get exactly the same high. I was getting spaced out watching it behind his head while he was sitting on the sofa confessing how Westie died, and that was even before the lights of the pub started to merge with it!

The background music while Joe drags Westie’s body onto the roof of the train is fantastic. I wonder, however, if there really is anywhere nowadays in London where you can just step onto a train roof from a nearby wall. [Mark Gatiss admits as much in the commentary.]

There’s also an utterly gorgeous scene change after the flashback to Westie’s body being found. John walks across the screen, wiping out that image and returning the scene to Joe’s flat.

Best line ever (at least in this series):
Sherlock (shouting at a reality show on the TV): “No, no, no! Of course he’s not the boy’s father! Look at the turn-ups on his jeans!”

It’s now four days since the bomb went off outside 221B. I know that glaziers might be hard to find with all the damage done in the area, and maybe Mrs Hudson needs to wait for the insurance money before she can afford the repairs, but even if S&J can’t afford to chip in at present, you’d think that Mycroft could (and would) pull some strings to spare his younger brother from having to sit around indoors wearing his coat.

I’ll admit it: I did gasp momentarily when John stepped into view at the pool. Remember that when this was broadcast in Britain, no further episodes had been commissioned, so there was no obligation that everybody needed to be who they were meant to be for a sequel. However, if I had had time to think it through I would have remembered that Moffat and Gatiss are massive Conan Doyle fans and just wouldn’t tinker with the canon that dramatically.

Which leads on to the issue of Jim. As a non Conan Doyle reader, I only knew Moriarty from earlier TV shows and films, so I had a vague idea of what he was meant to be like but wasn’t married to the idea and so I didn’t have an issue with him being so dramatically different from earlier canon. Many many other people absolutely loathed this new version – although quite a few of them have come back after watching the episode again and have said, “Actually, on second viewing, he’s better than I initially thought.”

There’s a fascinating theory online that before John is allowed to reveal the bomb, he may be blinking in Morse Code in an attempt to alert Sherlock to what’s going on. After he says, “Evening,” it really does look as if he blinks three times quickly and then three times more slowly, spelling out the first two letters of S.O.S. before the camera cuts away from him. Others argue that that’s reading too much into the fact that John is simply blinking rapidly because he’s terrified, and they also ask what would be the point when Sherlock is bound to know the truth shortly anyway. I’m kind of in the middle but I’d love it to be true because it would be a clever piece of scripting and would also make sense because at that point John couldn’t know when or even if Jim is going to let him show Sherlock what is really happening. Also, it would be a supreme piece of acting from Martin who would have been blinking messages while also delivering his lines. However, I’d be equally content if Mark Gatiss said that he never wrote that into the script.

Great lines:
Jim: “Isn’t [John] sweet? I can see why you like having him around, but then people do get so sentimental about their pets.”

Jim: “Kill you? Uh, no, don’t be obvious. I mean, I’m gonna kill you anyway some day. I don’t wanna rush it, though. I’m saving it up for something special. No-no-no-no-no. If you don’t stop prying, I’ll burn you. I’ll burn the heart out of you.”
Sherlock: “I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one.”
Jim: “But we both know that’s not quite true.”

Jim’s savage snarl as he says, “I’ll burn the heart out of you,” is awesome. Also, when he tells Sherlock, “we both know that’s not quite true,” Sherlock does a very obvious involuntary blink which suggests that he knows exactly what Jim means.

I love the disparaging look Jim gives Sherlock as he discusses how disappointed he would be if Sherlock shot him now. I also love the way Sherlock delivers the line, “Catch you later.”

Brilliant moment: the way John’s knees buckle as Sherlock runs off after Jim.

Benedict does a superb job of portraying Sherlock all flustered, hyped up and out of control when he comes back to the pool, with all the pacing, doing stupid things like scratching his head with the business end of the cocked pistol, and the way his gun hand jitters.

However, I got quite annoyed at the pair of them, especially Sherlock, and was yelling at the screen, “Get out of there! There’s a bomb near you which Jim could trigger at any time, and the snipers might still be nearby! Get OUT!”

Great lines:
John: “I’m glad no-one saw that.”
Sherlock: “Hmm?”
John: “You ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool. People might talk.”
Sherlock: “People do little else.”

Continuity glitch: the bomb jacket moves about a lot behind the boys as the camera angles change.

That quiet despairing “Oh” from John as he sees the laser point return to his chest and the look of tearful anguish on his face breaks my heart each time I see it.

OK, these are the Best Lines Ever: the unspoken conversation when Sherlock looks down at John and his eyes silently say, “I’m about to do something that’ll probably get both of us killed,” and John’s tiny “Do it” nod in return. It gives me chills every time.

It was only after watching all three episodes a zillion times that I realised that the oft-repeated “death violins” music (as it’s referred to by one of Executive Producers), i.e. the music that plays during the final moments of this episode, includes a repeated double-beat representing a heartbeat. It’s always there every time that musical sequence is played, but it’s much more prominent during this poolside scene.

As I said above, the new season hadn’t been commissioned when this episode was aired in Britain, and so this could have been the final episode. For some reason, I was far more happy with the cliffhanger ending while there was a possibility that we would never find out what happened next. If we had known there would be further episodes, I think that a cliffhanger would have annoyed me a lot more.

There is much discussion about whether Jim really is Moriarty. On the one hand, this was originally only a three-part series and might never be re-commissioned, and the writers admit that they wanted to bring in Sherlock’s real arch-nemesis while they could. There’s also the point that the confrontation takes place at the swimming pool, which is presumably meant to be this show’s version of the Reichenbach Falls where Holmes and Moriarty confronted each other in the stories. However, would Moriarty really endanger his own life like this?

Just before Sherlock turns the pistol on Jim and then on the bomb, one of the lasers seems to be floating about and appearing intermittently on the curtains near Jim. Is this another clue that this isn’t the real Moriarty and that the snipers are watching him as much as they’re watching the other two?

I am reliably informed that a gunshot into a jacket of Semtex will not set off an explosion. Despite that, Sherlock still has the option of putting a bullet into Jim’s head and again I doubt that the real Moriarty would take the risk, which again suggests that Jim might be a tame and dedicated (and quite probably insane) lackey.

Maybe the writers deliberately left the options open. If the viewers had liked this version, they would have kept him as the real Moriarty. Now that the general consensus seems to be hatred, they have the option of killing off Jim and are still able to bring back Moriarty to later episodes. And remember that in A Study in Pink Jeff hinted that ‘Moriarty’ might be more than a person.

I have loved this series so much (you may have noticed by the reams that I’ve written about it!). In particular I can’t heap enough praise on Paul McGuigan, the director of episodes 1 and 3 who brought in his film experience to great effect. I’m really excited that there will be more episodes, hopefully in 2011. They can’t come soon enough!

There's a summary of the DVD commentary for this episode here.

Someone on another forum pointed this one out: just before the explosion outside 221B, Sherlock walks from the sofa to the window and his dressing gown is hanging off his right shoulder (and Callie wibbles fangirlishly for a moment before recovering herself). It remains in that position whenever the camera looks at him from the side; but when the camera looks at him from the kitchen, the dressing gown is back up on his shoulder, and it moves back and forth throughout the scene.

Mycroft gives Westie’s full name as “Andrew West” but the end credits list the actor as playing “Alan West.” I used to know an Alan West and when I saw the credits I wondered why I hadn’t reacted during the episode, but I kept forgetting to listen properly during that scene until recently.

I recently read a fanfic story which suggested that when the old woman says, “Help me ... his voice was ... he sounded so soft,” she is actually narrating words dictated to her by Moriarty over her earpiece. There’s no proof of this, of course, but it’s a fun theory.

The subtitles (at least on the Region 2 DVD) have Joe arriving at Lucy’s house and greeting her with “Hi, Liz,” rather than, “Hi, Luce,” as I imagine it should be. Those drugs have really messed with his brain if he can’t even remember his sister’s name!

Another continuity error in the poolside scene. Shortly after Moriarty’s arrival, Sherlock aims his pistol at him, and a few moments later braces his right hand with his left. However, when the camera looks at him from behind, he only has his right hand raised.

I hope that wasn't really Moriarty. Part of it, I admit, is that I have also seen Simm's Master in Doctor Who, and one of those is enough.

And, he didn't really seem together enough to run a criminal empire the way Moriarty is supposed to. "I'm just so... changeable." Loopy, though I suppose that could be an act within an act.

Nor do I like the idea of Moriarty being revealed so early in the series (if there is to be a series). I like him behind the scenes, mysterious, and I agree with Callie that it *does* seem silly to have him out in the open where Watson or Sherlock could have killed him (If John had been more suicidal, for instance).

How long are these when aired in England? They're an hour and a half on PBS here, and they seem to cover everything adequately, but I was surprised to find out that Foyle's War was almost half an hour shorter on air than on the DVD's.

That said: I enjoyed this series, loved the bits of the stories that I recognized, woven through (I'm not a die-hard Sherlock fan, so I'm sure I missed a lot) & am looking forward to more.

They're 90 minutes long in the UK as well, but the PBS versions of all three episodes had cuts because of the introduction (and the coming-soon commercials). Most of them weren't critical to the episode, although it's a shame you didn't get the bit where John interviewed the security guard's flatmate, because that has one of the best visual moments in the whole series. However, I'm glad to say that the pool scene was shown in its entirety in the PBS version.

Apparently the US version of the DVDs will include all the missing footage.

Just watched this again. Moriarty shooting the old woman really doesn't make sense unless, for some reason of his own, he always planned to. He didn't *have* to choose a blind woman and, having done so, he didn't *have* to speak to her directly, so--why did he? Unless we're going with the slightly unhinged "I'm just so--changeable" model, but *that* doesn't make sense for someone who has successfully been running a criminal consulting agency. Maybe the next episodes will clear that up?

And why did he change his pattern for the painting? Good, shocking moment there, when the phone call did come, but why?

Pity about the cuts. I'll have to hope for the DVD. At least they weren't as big as the Foyle's War ones.

I almost forgot: The scene in the planetarium was gorgeous, but what was Professor Cairns doing there? And how did any of the three know she'd be there? She's alone and fast-forwarding, so it isn't a regularly scheduled show. The way it plays out, it almost looks like she's checking up on the supernova, but there are vastly easier ways of double-checking a date--the library, the internet, the reference books an astronomy professor surely knows. So why was she there?

It wasn't really made clear, was it? I can only think that she was doing some editing of the tape (I recall her mumbling, "Come on, Neptune, where are you?" which isn't relevant to any search for information about supernovas). Perhaps she was preparing a special version for a lecture or something. However, there's still no explanation of how Sherlock and John, or the Golem, found out where she was. Did they ring every Cairns in the phonebook and ask for the Professor, then when someone replied, "She's out," demanded to know where she was, claiming to be a work colleague or the police?

I think that Moriarty always intended to kill the old woman. However, it doesn't make sense why he spoke to her direct through the earpiece. If he wanted to keep his voice secret, he could have used someone else to speak to her, and then she would give false information about his voice and accent to the police. If he really did speak to her himself, then he definitely always meant to kill her. It kind of makes sense because he doesn't want Sherlock winning every round, but Sherlock should be smart enough to realise afterwards that he was never going to win that round, and therefore it wouldn't be such a disappointment and wouldn't knock his confidence.

At Alex Woodbridge’s flat, the text message alert on John’s phone for Mycroft’s message is a different tune to what it was earlier at 221B and what it is later at the art gallery.

How come John has a handy flashlight in his pocket when they’re at Vauxhall Arches? Does he always carry one around?

Why is Miss Wenceslas’ necklace missing when she is being interviewed by Lestrade and Sherlock at Scotland Yard? Were they afraid she might use it as a deadly weapon?

Continuity error: John goes to the place on the railway line where Andrew West’s body was found, and at least part-realises what may have happened when the points close. Sherlock appears behind him saying, “Points,” and as John looks round at him, the points are open again.

It has been confirmed (by Mark Gatiss, I believe) that John was not blinking an SOS to Sherlock; it was just Martin blinking quickly.

“Is that a British Army Browning L9A1 in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” asks Moriarty. Well, apparently Sherlock was just pleased to see him, because it’s a Sig Sauer P226 which he pulls out of his suit. That’s really clumsy, ’cause if they couldn’t find a Browning in the props box, surely they could have changed the line even on the day of filming?

This is another brilliant moment that I didn’t notice for many months, but as Jim walks past John to take the memory stick from Sherlock, John starts talking silently to himself. I’m no good at lipreading so I don’t have a clue what he’s saying, but I can only assume that he’s egging himself on to take a grab at Jim in order to let Sherlock escape.

The final shooting script of this episode has now been released and is available here.