Airs Sunday 5 January 2014 on the BBC.

Transcript!

This is the first episode to be written by all three of the writers. Apparently Moffat wrote Sherlock’s speech, Thompson wrote the stag night and Gatiss wrote the case.

Once again – and in the very first scene of the episode, no less – the part of the production team which makes the newspaper articles does not deserve its salary, repeating a paragraph from the bottom of the first column at the top of the second.

It seems that just about anybody can get into Baker Street without using a key or being let in by Mrs Hudson! Molly just wandered in in the last episode, and once again Greg – like he did in A Study in Pink – gets in all by himself!

I love it when a second viewing of something reveals all sorts of foreshadowing that you couldn’t have noticed first time around. I grimaced sadly when Mrs Hudson said to Sherlock, “I mean, who leaves a wedding early?” and then shook her head and added, “So sad.”

During the photo-taking, I was strangely chuffed to see that the photographer takes a picture of John, Sherlock and Greg together (with the little pageboy standing in front of them wearing either John’s or Sherlock’s top hat).

It seems odd that Janine calls Sherlock “Mr. Holmes” during the photo session. Even if – as I imagine would have happened – Sherlock didn’t go to the wedding rehearsal and so they haven’t met before, it’s a very formal term to use in these circumstances because they must have already been introduced earlier in the day.

Great lines:
SHERLOCK (to the young pageboy): You really do have to wear the outfit.
ARCHIE: What for?
SHERLOCK: Grown-ups like that sort of thing.
ARCHIE: Why?
SHERLOCK: ... I don’t know. I’ll ask one.

Apparently Mrs Hudson has got over the fact that Mr. Chatterjee already has two wives!

Sherlock’s best man speech was an absolute joy. I cried my eyes out typing it for the transcript.

Sherlock tells Mary that her side of the church is looking thin and she replies that it’s an orphan’s lot. John doesn’t have any parents on the top table either and yet Sherlock apparently seems to feel that his side of the church is sufficiently full. It may well be that he has more relatives than just the cousin who is mentioned (even though his sister doesn’t turn up), but it’s a bit of a strange comment from Mary if John is also an orphan. (Or maybe she means the old-fashioned use of the word and is implying that she was orphaned very young and then fostered.)

Sherlock tells Mary how he knows from John’s cousin’s RSVP that she hates her. Amongst his deductions he says that the cousin made three attempts at licking the stamp. There haven’t been lickable stamps on sale for years, to the best of my knowledge – they’re all peel-and-stick these days. It would have been better if the writers had said that the card had been in an envelope and it was the envelope she had struggled to lick.

Once again Mary is utterly adorable, especially in her ‘handling’ of Sherlock and – at the beginning of the Bloody Guardsman case – both of her boys! I’m dreading what may happen to her in the next episode. I know that Mary dies in the Conan Doyle canon but I really hope we don’t lose her yet, and it would be beyond evil for John to lose the most important person in his life two season endings in succession. However, Moffat wrote the next episode ...

Once Mary has sent the boys off to play, they get a taxi. However, we then see footage of them walking across a bridge and onwards to the barracks. Why didn’t they take the cab all the way?

I love Sherlock referring to Sholto as John’s “previous commander” and John catching that!

All right, it was funny to watch, but how the hell did Sherlock whip a bearskin off a Guard’s head without being caught?! Or alternatively how did he break into the stores and get one without being caught?!

I adore how – twice when he’s inside the barracks – Sherlock employs the tried and tested method of apparently becoming invisible to people nearby by turning his head away and not looking at them!

Bainbridge is slumped in the shower with his back against the cubicle door. After the duty sergeant has smashed the door in, Bainbridge is lying on his front. Why did the sergeant turn him over? Bainbridge must have fallen onto his back when the glass broke and the sergeant should have checked his pulse and then left him there. And turning him over on top of broken glass was a really stupid thing to do.

Working slowly through the episode while writing the transcript, I cracked up on seeing the first line of John’s blog entry for “The Mayfly Man,” which starts, ‘We’d just returned from a quiet, civilised evening in the pub ...’!

I wondered why the boys were on the pub crawl alone, then assumed that John knew that Sherlock wouldn’t go out with a bigger group and that that was why he agreed to go out with Sherlock alone. Then I remembered that in the mini-episode Many Happy Returns, Sherlock told John that all his friends hate him.

Mind you, I can’t imagine why John’s friends would hate him.

The entire drunk scenes were totally hilarious. A lot of people online have said they hated this episode but I totally adored it. People have been complaining that this version of Sherlock isn’t human enough in comparison to Conan Doyle’s version, so I don’t understand why they’re now complaining because he behaves too much like a human!

I must admit, though, that it seems strange that John – a doctor and a soldier, both frequently hard-drinking jobs – is such a lightweight and is plastered within two hours, even knowing that he was sneaking shots amongst the beer.

I cracked up at Sherlock’s pronouncements that “I know ash,” outside the last pub! (For those who don’t remember, Sherlock wrote a blog entry enumerating 243 types of tobacco ash, then took it down when John told him during Scandal that nobody was reading his blog.)

Sherlock is adorable when John tells him that what he just said was funny. He looks totally shy and bashful as he answers, “Thank you.”

While Tessa was telling the boys her story about her ghost boyfriend, it did this shippy fangirl’s heart good to realise that John smiled round at Sherlock at one point and we then saw that some time around then, Sherlock had pretty much put his arm round him!

How hilarious were the drunk deductions?! I and my friends were in hysterics!

Great lines:
JOHN (vaguely): He’s clueing.
TESSA: What?
JOHN: He’s ... hmm? He’s clueing for looks.

I totally adored Sherlock’s slow-motion face-plant into the rug! And Greg’s treatment of them the next morning in the police cell was brilliant!

Sholto told John that he lives in a very remote place, but Sherlock puts pins into his map indicating appearances of the ‘ghost date’ in the middle of London. Even if Sholto’s staff go home after work, they can’t live very far away. There’s no such thing as a remote place within easy travelling distance of central London.

Kudos to Lara Pulver for turning up for an eight second (and wordless) cameo!!

Just after Sherlock has dropped his glass and someone is bringing him a new one, there are two close-up side-on shots of him while he thinks. As soon as I saw the first one I immediately said, “Benedict!” and my friends nodded in agreement. The close-ups were of only his face with his hair out of shot. The moment you remove the curly hair, he looks nothing like Sherlock and everything like Benedict – like in the “Lawrence of Cumberbatch” shot of Sherlock with only his eyes visible at the end of Scandal.

A sure sign that Sherlock’s growing up a bit: he actually thanks Greg for fetching the photographer back. (Mind you, he ought to be berating Greg, who did a lousy job of ‘locking this place down’!)

What happened to the real wedding photographer? Is he lying dead in a ditch somewhere?

Why does Sherlock go through all the rigmarole of looking at the camera? He knows that the photographer won’t appear in any of the pictures – why would he? Or is he actually looking to see whether any of the photos are halfway decent so that he can break it to Mary and John – if necessary – that they won’t be getting any wedding pictures? After all, the man might not have bothered using the camera properly.

For that matter, I’m kind of surprised that Small stayed on and continued to work at the wedding after he had stabbed Sholto. Even if he was just enjoying watching him and knowing that he would die soon, you’d think he would have realised it was time to leave once Sherlock started his ‘Let’s play Murder’ deductions, and especially when Sholto left the room just after Sherlock gave him a note, but he could still be seen in the background all through that scene.

Great lines:
SHERLOCK: Absolutely no reason to panic.
JOHN: Oh, and you’d know, of course?
SHERLOCK: Yes, I would. You’re already the best parents in the world. Look at all the practice you’ve had!
JOHN: What practice?
SHERLOCK: Well, you’re hardly gonna need me around now that you’ve got a real baby on the way.

I wept buckets during the final scene, especially after John and Mary danced off and then Janine already had a dance partner. Sherlock looked so lost and alone in the middle of the crowd.

Just noticed a bad edit: after Sherlock has done his pirouette for Janine, she says, “I wish you weren’t ... whatever it is you are.” When she starts to speak, we’re in front of the pair and Sherlock has clasped his hands in front of him. She pauses halfway through the sentence, and we switch to a view behind them for the second part of her sentence – and Sherlock’s hands are now clasped behind his back. They then continue to switch back and forth every time the camera angle changes.

Yet another error in the newspaper reports: they refer to Lestrade as “DCI” (Detective Chief Inspector). The fandom got a bit excited for a while about his promotion, but he’s credited as “DI Lestrade” in the end credits.

When they greet each other at the wedding, John asks Sholto where he’s living. If he doesn’t know, how did he send him a wedding invitation? I suppose he could have emailed; or maybe Sholto has a post office box number?

While reading Bainbridge’s email, Sherlock incorrectly refers to him as “this particular Grenadier.” Bainbridge is actually a member of the Welsh Guards, not the Grenadier Guards, as evidenced by the spacing of the buttons on his jacket. I can forgive Sherlock for not knowing this information, but the writers should have done their research. I bloody well did while writing the transcript!

I withdraw my previous comment about the locations of the various appearances of the ‘ghost date.’ Even if Sherlock had already selected the right women from amongst the 48 or so who were in the Council Chamber, they all met with the Mayfly Man at “his place,” not their own. Presumably, for convenience, he only selected dead men’s homes in an area not too far where he lived. Still, those women must live fairly nearby themselves or they wouldn’t be willing to travel so far for a date.

In the flashback to Sherlock with a dozen cigarettes in his mouth, it looks as if the crew went to the trouble of darkening Martin Freeman’s hair. This scene presumably took place not long after John moved in to Baker Street, so if they did darken his hair for that shot, then kudos to all concerned.

However, Sherlock says (in the present) that it took John “years” to ‘confide’ in him as to his middle name. IIRC, it’s only about 18 months between the first episode and Reichenbach. Anyone else would over–exaggerate without thinking, but it doesn’t seem Sherlock’s style.

It wasn’t until the fourth time of watching that I realised that Sherlock properly finishes his sentence after he freezes while holding up his champagne glass. His line starts, “Today begin the adventures of Mary Elizabeth Watson and John Hamish Watson – the two reasons why every single one of us is ...” and finally, several minutes of footage later, he ends the sentence “... here today.” (Although, in context of his preceding line in his imaginary Council Chamber, he’s actually meaning, “The Mayfly Man is ... here today.”)

There’s a section of the Sherlock fandom which, instead of wanting Sherlock and John to be a couple, prefers to write fanfic and draw fanart linking Mycroft and Lestrade as a couple. A friend of mine – who’s not actually a ‘Mystrade’ shipper – told me that she nearly swallowed her teeth when she realised the potential significance of Sherlock’s lines at the reception, “Lestrade’s so easy to kill, it’s a miracle no–one’s succumbed to the temptation. I’ve got a pair of keys to my brother’s house – I could easily break in there and asphyxiate him.” Yes, presumably the latter sentence actually referred to Mycroft and not Greg, but with shipper glasses on, it could read differently!
(ETA: I eventually made a macro of those lines and posted it on Tumblr and it has been reblogged a lot!)

I think I’ve worked out why Sherlock wants to see the pictures on Jonathan Small’s camera. It may be that Small – confident of not being caught – hasn’t deleted the pictures he took of Bainbridge outside the Barracks. If he hasn’t, then they’re evidence.

While someone might try getting their own glasses filled up would it really happen? More likely the bartenders would fill the bars own glasses then the customers would pour it into the fancy containers. Possible health concerns (if someone gets sick drinking from the customer's glass) and the unusual size not being a standard that the bar has a price for.

Small's brother died serving under Sholto's command, a not-unlikely occurrence when you are a member of the military, but not only was Sholto angry at losing his brother he was insane enough to attempt to murder another person as a dry run.
I have trouble reconciling his desire for revenge and his callousness at cold-bloodedly attempting to kill someone who hasn't done anything to him or his family.

You're right, Keith - I don't think any bar would fill someone's own glasses for them, and certainly wouldn't let them buy just under .8 of a pint. Obviously the scene is done for the humour of Sherlock asking for an unusual amount in unusual containers but in real life the barman would almost definitely insist on him buying 2 pints and then leave him to pour the appropriate amount into the cylinders and leave the rest of the beer in the bar's own glasses.

For that matter, the barman wouldn't simply have responded, "Pints?" to Sherlock's request for "two beers." He would have insisted on knowing what type of beer Sherlock wanted.

The dictionary definition of monomania is:
mental illness especially when limited in expression to one idea or area of thought
and
excessive concentration on a single object or idea

so I suppose Small could have got so obsessed with his idea of how to kill Sholto that he was determined to ensure that it would work, and thought that the only way he could do it was with a practice run. Presumably his obsession prevented him from caring about the harm he would do to the innocent victim.

The continuity is quite poor in this episode - and indeed in this series. We miss director Paul McGuigan and his superb attention to detail.

When the newlyweds are greeting their guests outside the venue, a woman - wearing a shocking pink outfit - and her grey-haired husband are the first people we see close up. They move on and David - Mary's ex-boyfriend - is next up ... and the pink-clad woman and her husband are queuing up behind him!

During the drunk deductions scene, when Sherlock throws up on the rug John's arms are folded, but then the camera angle changes and his arms are down as he finishes Sherlock's sentence for him.

Also, in the police holding cell Sherlock's hands are all over the place every time the camera changes angle - which is particularly clever considering he's supposed to be unconscious.

In the foyer of the wedding venue, the clock on the wall shows 3 minutes to 4 throughout the entire scene. I certainly hope that it's broken, because this is the middle of May and yet the establishing shot of the venue before we see Sherlock waltzing with Janine shows that it's now dark outside. In the middle of May and on a sunny day like this has been, it wouldn't get dark until at least 9.30 pm. Considering how attentive the crew are to times on a clock in the next episode, it's a shame that once again (like in Scandal) they're clumsy with timing in this one. Additionally, it's a bit late for the evening event to be starting anyway. Even if it's been delayed by John treating Sholto and then Sholto being taken off in an ambulance, you'd think that the bride and groom would be having the 'first dance' long before 9.30.

The DVD subtitles are also shockingly bad. Why they didn't just use the BBC's ones is anyone's guess, but the subtitler sometimes doesn't have a clue. I'll admit that I and my team struggled with some of the dialogue this year but I hope we got most of it right in the end. In the final scene during the pub crawl, I initially wrote Sherlock as saying, "I know ash!" and then, after being dragged off by John, saying, "Ash. I know ash." However, I was always convinced there was a second syllable after the final 'ash' and eventually after many very pleasurable attempts to lip-read Sherlock when he pointed back towards the guy who tried to punch him, I decided that he does say, "I know ash!" initially but after being dragged off he then says, "Ashtrays. I know ashtrays." You can't hear the final 's' but he's drunk and slurring and the music's loud and it's the only way the sentence makes sense.
However, the DVD subtitles have him saying, "I know Ash!" and then, "Ashton. I know Ashton." Who the heck is Ashton?! Is the subtitler a fan of Ashton Kutcher?! Errors that bad just confuse the heck out of viewers, especially those with poor hearing who can't check the dialogue for themselves.

For ages I assumed that Sutton Mallet - the venue of the wedding - was a made-up town and I only thought to google it recently. Because of the 'Sutton' I assumed it was in Surrey (which isn't too far from London) but it's a real town in Somerset, which is in the south west of England. Why are John and Mary getting married so far from London? We find out more about Mary's origins in the next episode - keeping spoilers out of here - and she doesn't originate from the west country, and neither does John seem to have west country origins. And even if most of the guests stayed at a hotel overnight both before and after the wedding, it would have been a heck of a day trip for the wedding rehearsal. No wonder Sherlock didn't appear to go!

Additionally, what's Sherlock doing in Baker Street that morning?! It's a long drive - about 160 miles, taking well over 3 hours depending on traffic - to Somerset and it's a bit risky not staying nearer the wedding location the night before. And for a while I wondered what he was doing putting on his wedding suit and then sitting in a car for several hours and getting it all creased, but we don't actually see him start to put it on, only take it from the wardrobe door. Maybe he was about to put it into a dress bag and didn't actually change into it until he arrived at the venue.

Outside Sholto's room, Sherlock says to John and Mary, "Bainbridge was stabbed hours before we even saw him." Actually, he was stabbed while they were watching him. Before we see the boys sitting on the bench opposite the barracks and watching Bainbridge, there's a close-up of him on guard, and as the camera pulls back towards the boys, Small is standing beside him pretending to take a selfie with his phone.

Someone commenting on the transcript was very distressed that Sherlock left the wedding without taking his violin with him. I suspect that poor Greg got a text shortly afterwards demanding that he retrieve the violin and get it to Sherlock at his - or, rather, Sherlock's - earliest convenience! But again, if they're so far from London, where was Sherlock going? I would have assumed he would have a room at the hotel - unless he's just going off for a walk and coming back later.

Since you already caught all the good stuff Callie , perhaps you can clear something up for me... What is the connection to the ghost dates and the Mayfly? Were the 'victims' associated with Sholto and Small was canvassing for information? Was he testing his ability to assume other identities and disappearing?

Callie: Bainbridge is actually a member of the Welsh Guard, not the Grenadier Guards, as evidenced by the spacing of the buttons on his jacket.
Beautiful catch! I was going to look that up myself but now I don't have to.

KAM: I have trouble reconciling his desire for revenge and his callousness at cold-bloodedly attempting to kill someone who hasn't done anything to him or his family.
Callie: I suppose Small could have got so obsessed with his idea of how to kill Sholto that he was determined to ensure that it would work...
I'm not sure I would diagnose Small with monomania, just an obsessive case of revenge, but why not do something more overt? Although interesting, Small's practice run didn't work, and he probably would've known that, so why not just openly kill Sholto to make a statement?

I find Small's method of murder unlikely to succeed. I've worn many different uniforms, not any from the UK mind you but I'm still pretty sure I would be able to feel a dagger-like object finding its way through my torso. The tissue damage and blood loss would also have to be significant enough that once the belt was removed only immediate medical attention would do any good. The belt itself would be extremely difficult to pierce, and since Small didn't leave the blade in the body the entry point could potentially heal itself, due to the pressure from the uniform, given enough time between receiving the injury and removing the belt. Callie pointed out how that wasn't the case with Bainbridge, but Sholto was probably in little danger since it was likely a couple hours from the post-ceremony photo shoot where he was stabbed.

The drunk scenes were indeed hilarious, but why not simply inform Tessa they were drunk, or celebrating something rather, and would get back with her the next day? I would think at least John would've said something along those lines.

As I understand it, all five of the women worked for Sholto. Sherlock couldn't find this out when he researched them because they had all signed non-disclosure agreements and presumably therefore their employment records which he searched didn't show what they were doing.

That raises the question that if Sherlock couldn't find out where they worked, how did Small? The only way I can think of is that he lurked around Sholto's house and followed the women, then found ways of chatting them up. So Robyn wasn't very good at security if she didn't spot him hanging around!

I like the idea that - being obsessed with rehearsing things - Small rehearsed assuming other identities!

I imagine Small didn't want to be caught murdering Sholto. He may hate him and want him dead but isn't so obsessed that he wants to go to prison for the rest of his life.

Which reminds me of something that's always puzzled me - Sherlock's pronouncement, twice, to Small that "You should have driven faster." What difference would it have made? He was going home. Even if he had got there, Lestrade would have got him there, so why would it have made a difference?

Yes, Small must have known that Bainbridge didn't die, simply because it wasn't in the press. I suppose he could have adjusted the point of entry to ensure that he pierced a vital organ when he stabbed Sholto, but then why would that organ only fail once the belt was taken off? I don't think that Bainbridge or Sholto would have simply bled to death through such a small hole.

Oh, the drunk scenes are ridiculous in reality. Even if the boys were too drunk to tell Tessa they were drunk, she should have realised they were inebriated and called the whole thing off instead of meekly going to the ghost's flat with them. She's a bloody nurse, FCOL, and ought to recognise drunken behaviour easily. Also, I can imagine they both probably fell asleep/passed out on the cab ride to the flat and would have been difficult to wake up.