Airing on 8 January 2012 on the BBC.

Come on Callie! It's been four days!!! Has Emily taught you NOTHING about speed when it comes to writing up things?? Or are you too busy cleaning out your knickers again? ;)

Nag, nag, nag! Is there no rest for the wicked?! I’ve rarely had more than four hours’ sleep a night since the new series started and have spent every waking hour on the computer and avoiding real work typing up the transcripts!

So here’s this week’s transcript.

And these are my initial notes, which I’m sure I’ll have many more of once I’ve caught my breath, finished crying through Reichenbach with three new friends who I met through the Sherlock fandom and who are all crashing at my place over the weekend, and then typed up that transcript, and actually had a chance to sit down and watch this properly for the second time:

TARDIS alert! During the pre-credits scenes, adult Henry looks around bewilderedly when he surfaces from his childhood memories. The camera pulls back to show us where he is and we eventually see above the lip of the Hollow. In the middle of the top of the screen is what looks like a very large tree. As the camera continues to pull back, look to the right of the tree and there is a very square-looking object just before the scene fades out. It does look remarkably like the TARDIS! The producers were asked about this and Sue Vertue said she thinks it’s probably the back of one of the production team’s lorries which they thought would be out of shot.

I loved the nodding dogs in the window of Speedy’s as the episode title came up!

I still haven’t got around to read the Conan Doyle stories but I know a few bits of canon from having watched the Jeremy Brett TV series and from comments I’ve seen around the internet, so I adored how Sherlock’s search for cigarettes included him rummaging through a slipper in front of the fireplace. (However, I didn’t know until someone told me that the harpoon moment is also canon!)

But talking of canon, I thought they rather crow-barred in the “seven per cent” reference.

I adore how Sherlock says “Doncaster” in a south Yorkshire accent!

It’s brilliant how Sherlock’s not in the least bit interested in the missing rabbit case until he realises that it’s a locked room mystery!

During Sherlock’s deductions of Henry’s train journey he says that he had a “cooked breakfast – or the nearest thing those trains can manage. Probably a sandwich.” But we later learn that Henry is rich, so he probably would have travelled first class, and you do get a proper cooked breakfast in first class.

Sherlock passive smoking over Henry had me in hysterics, only because I’ve done pretty much the same thing (although not as obviously ...!) around other smokers ever since I stopped a couple of years ago!

For some reason, most of the Sherlock fandom assumed that Sherlock wouldn’t ever have bothered to learn how to drive – and the producers said similarly in the commentary on the season 1 DVD – so it was a surprise to see him doing so. In real life, the reason that they had to let Benedict drive is that Martin has never learned!

The sales invoice which John finds suspicious in the pub is headed “Undershaw Meat Supplies”. Undershaw is the former home of Arthur Conan Doyle and there is currently a campaign to save the abandoned house from being converted into flats. Mark Gatiss – who wrote this episode – is a patron of the campaign.

Military security at Baskerville is pretty poor if they don’t check the photographs on the ID cards against the bearer. I know Mycroft and Sherlock are brothers but they don’t look that much alike!

I’ve been reliably informed that Corporal Lyons should not have saluted Captain Watson in that specific circumstance but should simply have come to attention. Also I understand that John’s returning salute was rather poorly done.

Mycroft’s reaction to Sherlock using his security pass is a sign that Hounds was written much earlier than Scandal and was filmed first of the three episodes of this series. Indulgent exasperation is something he might have shown before the events of Scandal but since his brother (albeit unwittingly) almost helped a woman bankrupt the country and has potentially condemned hundreds of people to death in future terrorist attacks, Mycroft’s reaction should now be a lot more severe whenever Sherlock misbehaves.

The on-screen Security Authorisation requests seem to suggest that they only start being sent out when Sherlock swipes in at the main entrance to the laboratory, not when his card is first swiped back at the gate. From then on it doesn’t seem as if there’s any missing footage during the boys’ visit to the labs, but somehow twenty-three minutes pass between Sherlock first swiping in and Mycroft texting him.

After Frankland pretends that he knows that Sherlock is Mycroft Holmes, Corporal Lyons switches off the alarms. At the end of the corridor, the entrance door not only unlocks but swings open. Up until now all doors have had to be opened with security cards.

Benedict is utterly amazing as bewildered Sherlock, unable to believe his own eyes when he sees the Hound and terrified by his own confusion. The scene between him and John in the pub as Sherlock has his breakdown is just awesome.

I cracked up at John following the flashing light and thinking he’s about to find something really important and secret but in fact stumbling over a dogging site!
But why did the voices from the car which everyone was watching have to be so ridiculous? They sounded like a 1970s Carry On film.

Was Frankland actually in Henry’s back garden and attempting to beef up his terror, or were the lights being triggered by a passing squirrel?

I have to snort slightly about how – despite the ban on casually owning guns in Britain – just about everyone in this series has got access to one! John had one in series 1 and has probably still got it; Henry has one (and I’ll bet he doesn’t have a licence); and Greg manages to get hold of one just like that despite the fact that a police officer should find it even harder than your average man in the street!

Obviously they filmed all of the scenes at Henry’s house on the same day. It’s made more noticeable by the fact that – for some odd reason – Sherlock’s hair looks as if it has been permed in both of his scenes.

Great lines:
SHERLOCK: How about Louise Mortimer? Did you get anywhere with her?
JOHN: No.
SHERLOCK: Too bad. Did you get any information?

You can probably imagine how much this fangirl wibbled during the “I don’t have friends ... I’ve just got one” scene.

Yikes – when did Greg Lestrade become sex on legs?! There are far too many pretty boys in this series – my heart (and underwear) can’t take the strain.

The whole “I made you a coffee/You never make coffee” scene is even more hilarious when you watch it back knowing that Sherlock is acting. His hurt expressions are hysterical.

I suppose it was only to be expected that they would use the same shot of Sherlock driving the Land Rover into Baskerville from the security gates on the two occasions that it happened, but it still annoyed me!

Another gorgeous transition from one scene to another: after Henry has started to nod off at his house but has instantly been haunted by images of the hound, he sits on his sofa sobbing. At Baskerville, the lift doors open and wipe out that scene.

The Mind Palace routine is beautiful, but John implies that Sherlock has told him that you can’t ever fully forget anything, which rather contradicts his assertion in The Great Game that he could delete anything he didn’t want to remember.

How did Louise, Henry’s shrink, get John’s number without him getting hers? The only way she could have his number is if he gave it to her, yet her name doesn’t come up on Caller ID which suggests he doesn’t have hers.

Henry yells at Frankland about how his father was right and had been killed because he found Frankland in the middle of his experiment in the Hollow. The hound groans behind them and everybody spins around to look at it. Bizarrely, as they do so, John and Greg – who a moment ago were either side of Henry and holding him back – are now standing close together facing each other and appear to be just breaking from a bit of a cuddle!

Sherlock is such an idiot sometimes, although he’s really well-written as such. When the hound refuses to be dead and gets up again, John fires a couple of times towards it. Frankland breaks and runs, and Sherlock runs straight across John and his raised pistol, forcing John to lower the gun.

Annoyingly but oh so predictably, the dialogue in the flashback of Sherlock watching John in the lab and talking to him on the phone doesn’t accurately match the dialogue that we heard at the time.

A lot of people have said they didn’t like this episode and that Sherlock was too uncaring about John when he experimented on him. Even without having read the stories, but having seen most episodes of the Jeremy Brett series, I felt that this episode was the most true-to-canon “Sherlock Holmes” story we’ve had so far. It didn’t grab me as much as Scandal did but it felt very true to the genre.

I did a summary and partial transcript of the DVD commentary to this episode here.