Good grief, this was a fantastic episode! After a poor start to the series – at least in parts – the second two episodes in this season have been stunning.
When Sherlock and John come out of the drug den, just after Sherlock reaches ground level he yells, “Well, I’m not now!” and gesticulates like a seven year old having a hissy fit. Watch John’s face in the background – he is grinning. Apparently this was the umpteenth take of that shot and Benedict hadn’t behaved like that before while saying that line, so it took Martin by surprise.
Was Sherlock just faking being on drugs and was Molly in on it and just pretending that there were drugs in his system and reacting accordingly in case anyone else who was there gave it away outside the room? With Sherlock waiting for an appointment with Magnussen, I can’t see that he would risk being off his game if the appointment came while he was off his head.
Wiggins – whose fanclub I joined within minutes of his appearance onscreen! – goes into deduction mode and comments that John must have dressed in a hurry “this morning”. There’s a flashback to John folding a shirt in his bedroom ... but he’s wearing a red shirt in the flashback and a blue one in the present, and we know that he was in bed when that earlier scene started. I think it’s meant to suggest that Bill is doing a ‘general’ deduction about what John does every working day, but it’s not immediately clear.
Great lines:
BILL (while deducing John): An’ I further deduce you’ve only started [cycling to work] recently, because you’ve got a bit of chafing.
SHERLOCK: No – he’s always walked like that.
Excellent piece of continuity: after the scene at Bart’s, John and Sherlock are in a taxi. We get a long shot of the cab crossing Westminster Bridge and then a close-up of the boys inside the taxi, and reflected in the windows is the building on the other side of the road to the Houses of Parliament – which is exactly where the boys should be after crossing the bridge.
Sadly, to get from Bart’s to Baker Street you don’t go anywhere near the river and you certainly don’t cross it ... Ah well – at least the editors tried!
Great lines:
SHERLOCK: [Mycroft]’s straightened the knocker. He always corrects it. He’s OCD. Doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
(He deliberately pushes the door knocker to one side, then lets himself in.)
JOHN: Why’d you do that?
SHERLOCK: Do what?
JOHN: Nothing.
Why on earth is Anderson’s female colleague during the drugs bust named ‘Benji’?! (Nobody calls her it during the episode but her name is given in the end credits.) It must be an in-joke or a shout-out to a personal friend (or a pet!) of one of the writers.
Does the fact that Mycroft has called in Anderson mean that Anderson now has his job back? (For those who didn’t see the mini episode Many Happy Returns, Anderson’s obsession with Sherlock being alive lost him his job.) Or did Mycroft call him in because he doesn’t work for the police but knows that he’ll not blab about what he may find in the flat?
There’s a bloke sitting in Sherlock’s chair at the beginning of the scene but he scampers off when Sherlock walks towards the chair. Where did he go after that? You’d have expected him to join the others in the kitchen but he just vanishes. No matter what sort of murderous glare Sherlock might have directed to him you wouldn’t expect him to simply leave the building.
Unless there’s a deleted scene somewhere, I don’t see the point (within the episode) of Mycroft mentioning that their parents are in Oklahoma. It is never made clear whether they’re just on holiday – in which case why is Mycroft ruining their vacation for them? – or whether they live there for part of the year but come home to the cottage we see later for the winter.
(Actually, someone commenting on the transcript suggested that Mycroft might actually be saying, “Have to phone our parents, of course, in ‘Oklahoma!’” – as in, they’re either taking part in the musical play of that name or attending a performance of it. However, I’m not totally convinced because the phrasing isn’t quite right, especially for someone as well-spoken as Mycroft. Nice idea, though!)
When Mycroft tells Sherlock that Magnussen is under his protection, I thought, “Cripes – what does Magnussen have on him?!” I suspect that the fanfic writers may have a ball with their suggestions!
Great lines:
JANINE (to John, referring to her relationship with Sherlock): I haven’t told Mary about this. I kind of wanted to surprise her.
JOHN: Yeah, you probably will.
If Sherlock has been seeing Janine for some time – and unless she rarely comes to Baker Street (although it seems that she must have done if she knows that Sherlock and ‘Myc’ argue a lot) – I’m surprised that Mrs Hudson hasn’t rung everyone who knows him to tell them about his new relationship.
Watching Mrs Hudson flatten herself against the wall while Magnussen and his goons walk past her, I initially assumed that she was instinctively nervous of Magnussen. Then I remembered that the last time black-suited security men were in the house, she was roughed-up and hurt by them.
Great line (after John has been frisked by the security man, who finds a tyre lever stuck down his jeans):
JOHN: Doesn’t mean I’m not pleased to see you.
Shortly after Magnussen arrives at 221 he pulls up his files on Sherlock and John and they give John’s full name. If he has so much information about Sherlock – enough to know about Redbeard, a childhood family pet – why doesn’t he know his full name? Obviously it would spoil the surprise later for us, but within the story he ought to know something as fairly straightforward as that.
My spit-take at seeing Magnussen’s knowledge that Sherlock has a ‘normal’ porn preference was somewhat dulled by my annoyance at his list of ‘pressure points’ including “Hounds of the Baskerville.” Shouldn’t that read “Hounds of Baskerville”? Baskerville is a place and doesn’t merit a ‘the’ in front of it. It’s almost as if someone has read the Conan Doyle canon! (I somewhat suspect that that may have been an error by Moffat rather than the production team.)
Sherlock explains how the corrupted key card is going to work and says to John, “If it’s corrupted, how do they know it’s not [Magnussen]? Would they risk dragging him off?” That makes no sense. Magnussen owns the bloody company – surely all his security team know him on sight?
For that matter, if it’s Janine’s key card that Sherlock nicked – which presumably it must be – why does it only give access as far as the canteen? How does she get up to Magnussen’s office every day?
When Mary turns to face him and point her gun at him, Sherlock has multiple flashbacks of moments when Mary was in his presence and his many deductions float around her. In one of the flashbacks she’s in John office at the surgery when Sherlock wasn’t there.
Bad editing (though I’ll forgive it in view of the massive number of jumpcuts they had to do during the scene): after shooting Sherlock, Mary turns to look at and point her pistol at Magnussen again. The scene freezes and the camera angle changes – and now Mary is pointing her gun at Magnussen but is looking at Sherlock.
Again, a slightly forgiveable error – although the team could have tried a bit harder: when Sherlock is trying to identify the pistol which shot him, his eyes aren’t looking directly at the first gun he chooses.
As Sherlock starts to fall backwards in slow motion, the room seems to tilt to the left. Look towards the windows as it happens – rather delightfully, a plant in a pot on the windowsill starts to slide sideways!
Someone online pointed out that Sherlock’s memory of Redbeard being put down should have triggered a more understanding response at the end of Hounds when he didn’t seem to understand why the landlords of the inn would feel sentimental enough not to put the dog down. However, I suppose it’s possible that he has buried that memory so deep in his Mind Palace that it only surfaces in moments of extreme stress.
Somebody else, while commenting on the transcript, made the heartbreaking deduction that when Mycroft mentioned Redbeard to Sherlock during their phone conversation at the wedding, he wasn’t snidely reminding Sherlock not to get emotionally involved with anyone (or anything). She suggested that Mycroft knew that the memory of Redbeard is something that calms Sherlock down, and that Mycroft sensed that Sherlock had only phoned him because he was starting to panic about being in front of so many people.
I stared in appalled horror at the first sight of the man in the straitjacket in the padded cell, because I thought he would be revealed to be an insane version of Sherlock himself. But I was staggered when it turned out to be Moriarty. I’d never expected to see him back, although it makes perfect sense within the story.
The entire scene – from Mary shooting Sherlock to Sherlock opening his eyes on the operating table – was the most intense seven minutes of footage that I have ever attempted to transcribe. Watching it in minute detail as I continually stopped and started the recording blew my mind. Everyone involved in creating those scenes – from the writer to the director, from the editor to anyone else who worked on it, and Benedict himself who acted his bloody socks off throughout it – deserves every award under the sun.
And while we’re talking about awards for brilliance, can we talk about the music at the end of that scene in particular? From the moment that Sherlock opens his eyes in the padded cell until he opens them on the operating table, the music is bloody sensational. And it wasn’t until I’d listened to it many many times that I realised that that musical sequence is based on what I and a friend refer to as the ‘John alone’ music. There’s a now-very-recognisable sequence of four notes which have often played when John is at his most vulnerable – they were the first notes we heard in A Study in Pink when he woke from his nightmare; they played in Hounds when John was in the Baskerville lab and starting to get scared and Sherlock wouldn’t answer the phone; they played as he cried at Sherlock’s grave; and the sequence is absolutely what this music is based around as Sherlock claws his way up from death in order to keep his vow to John and to protect him from his psychopath of a wife. It’s a staggeringly brilliant concept and makes me cry even more every time I listen to that piece.
However, it’s slightly puzzling that during the entire Mind Palace sequence Sherlock never summons John to help him. Sure, both Molly and Anderson have more practical knowledge of death and its causes, but after his furious reaction to and rejection of Mycroft in the Council Chamber in The Sign of Three and his announcement to John in the real world that “it’s always you,” it does seem odd that he leaves John out of his attempts to survive this experience, especially when John must have vast knowledge of gunshot wounds, including the one in his own shoulder.
Rather gloriously, someone on Tumblr has suggested that that part of the episode bears more than a passing resemblance to A Christmas Carol. There’s a dead man from Sherlock’s past in chains; three imaginary people try to help save him (Molly, Anderson and Mycroft); and part of the episode takes place at Christmas! (Also, apparently Steven Moffat has said in a past interview that A Christmas Carol is his favourite story.)
John tells Mary that Sherlock’s first word when he woke up was her name. For the longest time I thought this was nitpickable because Sherlock has a breathing tube down his throat and I know from personal experience that it’s pretty much impossible to speak around that thing. But someone with much better ears than me pointed out that, just as we switch to the next scene, there’s a very soft whisper of ‘Mary’ and when I watched the end of the preceding scene again, Sherlock does close his mouth around the tube at the very last moment. Mind you, it’s a good thing they cut away before the whisper because there’s no way that Sherlock could have formed the ‘r’ of her name, and really the voiceover should have sounded like ‘Mawy.’
The first newspaper that Janine shows to Sherlock has the strapline, “Sherlock is as red blooded as they come, claims fiancé”. There should be two ‘e’s at the end of the final word but seeing as it’s the Daily Mail, I’ll actually forgive that error!
While John and Greg are trying to track Sherlock down, there’s a brief shot of Big Ben and we can hear it chiming. Oddly, it appears to be chiming two minutes past nine. Good choice of image, Mr Director.
In 221B with Greg and Mrs H, John says, “He’s Sherlock. Who would he bother protecting?” Unknown to themselves, the three people in the room at the time are the very three people who Sherlock did bother protecting in Reichenbach.
When did Sherlock put John’s chair back? He can’t have done it since the shooting, even if he secretly popped back to Baker Street once he escaped from hospital – which he might have done to collect his clothes, unless they were in a cupboard in his hospital room – but surely he wouldn’t have had the strength to lug the chair out of wherever he had put it.
After John has noticed the bottle of Claire de la Lune beside his chair, with its distinctive crescent moon shape, we dissolve to a shot of the real Moon, but it’s half full. Couldn’t a cameraman nip out on another day and get a shot of the crescent Moon to match the perfume bottle more accurately, or even find some stock footage?
When Mary goes to Leinster Gardens, we get a clear shot of two street signs attached to a lamp post. The one for Leinster Terrace points to Mary’s right and the one for Leinster Gardens points straight on, yet after her encounter with Bill she turns left – and yet she’s then in the correct place and another street sign on the road confirms it. Why did the production team point the first sign for the Gardens in the wrong direction?
When the team were filming this series and doing outdoor scenes at North Gower Street aka Baker Street, they put an estate agent’s sign up on the wall of the building over the road showing that the house was for sale. The fandom wibbled massively about this, yelping, “The empty house!” and assuming that there would be some connection with the Conan Doyle story of that name, in which Holmes returns after his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, and part of which takes place in the vacant house opposite 221B. Now it seems that that was just another wind-up to throw the fans off-kilter – and I love the soft sigh that Sherlock gives over the phone to Mary before he says, “the empty houses” in reference to the false-fronted ones in Leinster Gardens.
Great line:
MYCROFT (channelling me pretty much every 25th of December): Oh, dear God, it’s only two o’clock. It’s been Christmas Day for at least a week now.
I love how Daddy Holmes has his glasses on a chain around his neck! (Referencing back to how Mummy said in The Empty Hearse that he should get a chain so he could stop losing them.)
Great touch: John shows the pen drive to Mary at the Holmes’ cottage, and some time afterwards – in flashback – we see her first give it to him in Baker Street. When she first gives it to him the initials on it are very dark. Frequently during the early part of their conversation in the cottage he is rolling the pen drive in his fingers, and the letters are much more faded. It seems clear that he has spent a lot of time in the intervening months rolling the drive in his fingers while deciding whether or not to look at its contents.
When John first takes his coat off at 221B when he, Mary and Sherlock arrive there, his back is to the camera and there’s an interesting bunching of something under his cardigan. The fandom has been speculating that he may be wearing a bullet-proof vest under his shirt, which would make sense in case Mary fired towards who she thought was Sherlock in the house in Leinster Gardens. However, it’s not very obvious from other angles, so maybe Martin Freeman just dressed quickly for that scene and his shirt is a bit bunched up.
Mis-spoken line: while explaining why Mary didn’t shoot him in the head, Sherlock says, “One precisely-calculated shot to incapacitate me in the hope that it would bide you more time to negotiate my silence.” I suspect that Benedict ought to have said, “... buy you more time ...”
[Edit: Apparently “to bide more time” is the archaic and accurate original version of the phrase. Whether Moffat and/or Benedict know that and therefore deliberately used it is unknown.]
[Edit to the edit: In the final shooting script which is available online (see my entry below dated 28 February 2017 for a link), the original line was “... in the hope it would give you time to negotiate my silence.”]
Clever touch: in flashback, Mary dials 999 on (presumably) Magnussen’s phone and the operator asks her which service she requires. We immediately hear sirens, which doesn’t seem to make sense until it’s later revealed, in the present at 221B, that Sherlock has called an ambulance for himself and so it’s that ambulance’s sirens that we actually heard.
I wish there had been some explanation of what happened between Mary and John during the “months of silence” between John finding out what she is and the Christmas reunion. Did he leave her and move back to Baker Street as Sherlock thought he would, or did he continue to live with her but they barely spoke? I have to assume the latter, otherwise I can’t see why they would have accepted the invitation to the Holmes’ cottage for Christmas, but I wish it had been stated.
Also, Mummy’s pronouncement that they’re ‘doing’ Christmas because Sherlock is home from hospital suggests that he was in hospital for several months and has not long been released. He probably brought on his longer incarceration by being up and about only a week after the shooting, but it still begs the question: did Mary really save his life? Considering that he actually died on the operating table – albeit only briefly – she didn’t do that good a job of saving his life; and additionally a trained operative like her really should have shot to kill and not succumbed to sentiment even for the sake of her husband. If she had killed Sherlock and left Magnussen alive, he would have no greater a hold over her than he already does.
I may have pouted a little when the restaurant scene between Sherlock and Magnussen ended. I had been very much hoping that we would see Sherlock get up and leave the restaurant, preferably with the camera behind him. After all, we all know how those hospital gowns gape at the back ...
Great touch: in the first scene in the Holmes kitchen, the clock above the door shows 4 minutes past 2. Sherlock’s mental countdown starts from 7 minutes and 37 seconds. When he goes back into the kitchen after everyone is unconscious, the clock shows 11 minutes past.
Just before they get into the helicopter, Sherlock rattles off the following in one breath – “One false move and we’ll have betrayed the security of the United Kingdom and be in prison for high treason. Magnussen is quite simply the most dangerous man we’ve ever encountered, and the odds are comprehensively stacked against us.” – and he doesn’t even take a deep breath beforehand! (*Callie promptly has some positively filthy thoughts about Benedict’s breath support and the uses to which he could put it*)
Great lines (after the above marathon speech):
JOHN (indignantly): But it’s Christmas.
SHERLOCK (smiling): I feel the same.
(He turns and sees John’s expression. His smile fades.)
SHERLOCK: Oh, you mean it’s actually Christmas.
(The above, of course, harks back to A Study in Pink when Sherlock danced around the living room saying, “Four serial suicides and now a note. Oh, it’s Christmas!”)
The reveal of Magnussen’s ‘vaults’ was awesome.
Within 24 hours of the episode being aired in the UK, the BBC itself had put a T-shirt on sale with “I don’t understand” on the front and “I still don’t understand” on the back!
Of course, possibly the biggest and laziest nit of the entire nine episodes (ten, if you count the pilot) is why Magnussen’s security men didn’t search the boys before they were taken inside the house. Even if Magnussen was so cockily confident that they wouldn’t harm him that he instructed his men not to bother, any security man worth his salt would have said, “Yes, sir,” and frisked them anyway. If Steven Moffat couldn’t be bothered to come up with a plausible explanation of how John was allowed in with a gun in his pocket, he should have damned well written another way that Magnussen could be killed.
If Benedict doesn’t get a BAFTA this year simply on the basis of the look he directs towards John just before he kills Magnussen, and his expression as he kneels on the patio afterwards, there is no justice in this world. And if I wasn’t sobbing already (which I was), the sight of young Sherlock in Mycroft’s mind’s eye was completely heartbreaking. Also, somebody pointed out that Mycroft probably doesn’t have that much of an imagination and so, if his mental image of his younger brother is crying, then it must mean that the adult version is weeping too.
Young Sherlock was played by Louis Moffat (although he’s credited as Louis Oliver), the son of Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue. Prior to this, he was the voice of the little boy over the phone in the art gallery in The Great Game (and drew Henry Knight’s drawing of the Hound in Hounds!). According to an interview with Steven, Louis had been pestering his dad to be given a role in one of his shows and eventually Steven and Sue somewhat reluctantly allowed him to audition for this part but let the rest of the casting crew choose which of the five auditionees they wanted. Whether or not they chose Louis out of loyalty to their bosses, he did a great job in his final scene.
[The commentary to this episode wonderfully tells how Steven told Louis that he could go for the interview but that neither he nor Sue would be involved in the selection. Steven thought that Louis would understand but his son looked up at him and told him straight-faced, “You are the worst dad in the world”!]
Mycroft says, “I am not given to outbursts of brotherly compassion. You know what happened to the other one.” So what did happen to the other one? And what was his name? Is/was this Sherrinford, who might have been a third Holmes brother in the Conan Doyle canon?
Great lines:
SHERLOCK (to Mary at the airfield): You will look after [John] for me, won’t you?
MARY: Oh, don’t worry. I’ll keep him in trouble.
SHERLOCK: That’s my girl.
It was rather adorable to see Sherlock kiss her cheek and actively hug her rather than just tolerate her affection.
I winced when I realised that Sherlock was being sent on the undercover job that Mycroft had earlier predicted would kill him in six months.
There has been much protest from some parts of the fandom that there was no final hug between Sherlock and John at the airfield, but I think they behaved exactly as I would expect them to. Neither of them is good at emotion, especially with each other, and John even struggles to talk emotionally to his own wife. As for the idiot faction who wanted Sherlock’s “Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again, I might as well say it now” line to end, “I love you,” they just need a reality slap! That’s what fanfiction is for!
Thinking back, and considering what his real first name is, it was a bit of a nerve for Sherlock to have called Wiggins ‘Billy’ in such a sarcastic tone!
I love the way that the drumbeat signifying the end credits started and then fritzed out to result in even more scenes.
Even if it was someone else using Jim’s image for the broadcast message, where did they get the live footage at the end?! Or was that done just to wind up the fandom before the next season? I suspect the latter – I don’t think that Jim is still alive.
There’s much speculation that Janine will turn out to be Jim’s sister, but I think it’s too obvious. She has such a similar accent that it’s too blatant and I don’t think the writers would do something so straightforward.
Awesome episode. I cried buckets typing bits of this transcript.
