Hopefully this won't be too closely similar to the canon story The Adventure of the Dying Detective. In that story, to solve a case Holmes pretended that he was dying of a rare disease, not telling Watson that it wasn't true. That story also took place after the Reichenbach incident, but in this current episode I suspect that nobody will ever forgive Sherlock if he puts John through that sort of anguish again!

And would he even believe it? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Ooh, maybe they'll reverse it - Sherlock actually is very sick/dying and John's all, "Yeah, right, like I'm going to believe that."

Of course, Sherlock isn't the only detective in the show. Maybe the title will refer to Lestrade or Donovan?

Other fandom suggestions have been that Sherlock will spend the whole episode slumped on the sofa (hopefully in that arse-enhancing silky blue dressing gown he wore in The Great Game). Someone else scripted the episode thus:

JOHN: Do you love me, Sherlock?
SHERLOCK: No.
Roll credits: The Lying Detective

;-)

I wonder if they'll have a scene where River Song Irene Adler says, "The detective lies."

Wow, what a ride this ep was! The first third-or-so was fairly slow, but the last 30 minutes was some of the best Sherlock to date IMHO.

Mrs. Hudson gets a chance to really shine here, and she takes that opportunity and runs! Not that she wasn't beloved before, but she went up a few notches in my book and I hope there's more like this coming from her in the future.

There was a scene where Sherlock and Smith have a rather public discussion about serial killers with Smith saying that unlike most murderers, their kills are random. That's actually not correct for the most part, and there's quite a bit of evidence to support how targeted and methodical the average SK really is.

I'm doing my best to avoid spoilers, so pardon my wording, but there's also the manner in which the perpetrator du jour kills his victims. In this day and age I think it would be pretty simple to find the real cause of death, but we're not given specifics about how many and if they're all killed in the same manner, so this may not be a nit.

Hopefully this won't be too closely similar to the canon story The Adventure of the Dying Detective. In that story, to solve a case Holmes pretended that he was dying of a rare disease, not telling Watson that it wasn't true.

You were pretty much spot on! Well done you! I agree with the poster above, I was really bored with the first part of this but blimey the end was great. When Holmes hugged Watson I nearly lost it...

There's a new meme out there of a screencap from the opening credits when there's a view over London and the title "SHERLOCK" at the top of the screen. In that meme, the word is crossed out and underneath it now reads, "Mrs Hudson."

When Holmes hugged Watson I nearly lost it...

I'm sure I was only one of hundreds of fans who - as John broke down and then Sherlock put his mug on the table - shifted to the front of their chair and was urging him, "Go on, go on!" When he actually got up and held John, I totally did lose it.

More once I've finished the transcript.

So, what would Holmes's plan have been if he hadn't been given a push by Smith's "daughter"? The meeting took place three weeks before the main body of the episode, and all of his careful preparations to draw Watson into the plot are said to have been arranged two weeks before, so it's just about conceivable that Smith had only just become the target. But short of some unfeasibly long-range plotting on Eurus's part* we have to imagine that Holmes would otherwise have spent months if not years finding a supervillain to expose who hit all the right psychological and practical spots to draw Watson out.

* Not impossible of course, but it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that she could predict the circumstances and effects of Mary's death. But if she didn't, what was her Plan A when stalking Watson on the bus?

I imagine/hope that much of Eurus' planning will be revealed in flashbacks in the next episode. But you're right - at present it all seems terribly contrived and coincidental.

The transcript is now complete and can be found here. A link to the first page is in the Index.

I won’t do direct links to individual pages any more, because spambots are eagerly offering me many different links to porn sites and Louboutin shoes (is that you, Irene??)

I'm too knackered to type up my detailed thoughts on the episode, but may try to drag my weary body and swollen ankles to the laptop tomorrow. It'll help kill time while I await the final episode.

At long last I understand why my transcript of His Last Vow was 7000 words longer than any other Sherlock transcript. I’d always assumed that I just blathered too much, but I now realise it was because of the incredible directing by Nick Hurran, which required me – without knowing why I was doing it – to include the huge amount of phenomenal detail. My transcript of this episode – also directed by Hurran – is already nearly 1000 words longer than Vow and will probably be even longer by the time all of my beta team have added bits.

Until I checked, I assumed that the opening and closing shots of a smoking gun were identical but then I noticed that in the opening shot you can fuzzily see the arm of the person holding the gun and that the person has a dark sleeve, like Vivian had. In the shot at the end, you can’t see beyond the gun.

It was incredibly brave of the director to choose to show us the photo of real-Faith on Sherlock’s phone and the woman in 221B so early in the episode. It certainly went straight over the top of my head but I wonder how many people did squint at the screen and say, “Hold on, that’s not the same woman.”

It wasn’t until after I’d finished the transcript and then sat down to rewatch the entire episode on the TV without stop/starting it all the time that I realised that the scene in Smith’s boardroom included the real Faith. I’d always assumed that it was a false memory narrated by fake-Faith for Sherlock’s benefit and that her version of Faith had appeared in that scene. Much kudos to the casting team for finding two women who looked so alike.

There’s a cut-away shot of Smith cutting the ribbon to open the Culverton Smith Wing of the hospital and the date on the plaque is Thursday 20th July 2014. I don’t understand why the production team included ‘Thursday,’ because (a) plaques don’t usually include that detail and (b) in real life that date wasn’t a Thursday. I doubt that this will turn out to be relevant within the story; it’s just another piece of lazy work by the team.

While I was writing the transcript I initially described Sherlock’s visions of words appearing around Faith as being written in chalk. Someone on Tumblr suggested that the way that the words then dissipate suggested that they might be cocaine or powdered meth crystals, which makes more sense considering the state he’s in at the time.

The kitchen/window deduction was incredibly clever. If he didn’t nick it from elsewhere, all kudos to Steven Moffat for that. And it was certainly more convincing than Sherlock’s two-weeks-ago deductions about John’s choice of therapist, plus the fact that John would bring his old walking cane to the hospital which – even for television when drama often is a tad unrealistic – was rather too much.

The BBC footage of Sherlock’s message ‘written’ on the street map begins with the letter ‘U.’ I’m told that in America, PBS panicked and narrowed the screen to start at the ‘C.’ PBS also muted several of the ‘stronger’ words throughout the episode.

I love the way that the backdrop of 221B rippled down behind Sherlock in the street. And rather than use greenscreen, the production team fitted hydraulics to that part of the living room set and tilted it accordingly to film the scenes of Sherlock walking up the wall.

The reveal that it had been Mrs Hudson driving the car was hysterical!

Sherlock’s ranting speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V” was superb. And it was only when I copy/pasted the speech from the internet so that I didn’t have to try and work out all the words that I realised that “The game’s afoot” is part of the speech and wasn’t Sherlock just using the canonical line from the Doyle stories.

I cracked up laughing when Mrs Hudson opened the boot of her car!

As someone said online, “Dropping your gun to save a cup of tea: the most English thing ever”!

During his phone conversation with Smith, John asks him, “Sorry, did you say all still meeting?” No, he didn’t. That must have been a poor edit, and even though Sherlock was speaking to the therapist and demanding more water during John’s conversation, there really wasn’t time for Smith to say it off-camera.

I love how Mrs Hudson tells John once again that she’s not his housekeeper, and then promptly goes into the kitchen of a complete stranger’s house and starts cleaning up!

I said in the last episode that I was surprised that Molly was chosen as one of Rosie’s godparents because I didn’t imagine that John would be good friends with her. This seems to be confirmed in this episode when he keeps referring to her as “Molly Hooper.” I’m starting to wonder if he and Mary only chose her because they knew she’d then be a soft touch for babysitting.

It took me a long while to realise, but it finally hit me when I was writing up ghost-Mary explaining in the limousine how Sherlock knew which therapist John would choose: all of Mary’s deductions – the choice of therapist, the third Holmes sibling, the fact that Irene texted Sherlock means it’s his birthday (not to mention the location of the fourth recording device which he didn’t even need Mary for) – are actually John’s deductions and he’s getting way smarter than perhaps we thought. As Holmes said in The Abominable Bride, “My Boswell is learning.” (It’s kind of a shame, therefore, that he sits there like an idiot for so long when the therapist starts to reveal who she really is.)

The hospital is called St. Caedwalla’s, and St. Caedwalla is the patron saint of serial killers – or, more accurately, repentant serial killers, which obviously isn’t totally appropriate here but was presumably the closest they could get.

H.H. Holmes actually did exist and wasn’t made up for this story.

Sherlock narrates the text he sent to Faith, and she arrives at the mortuary. How did she know where her father would be? If she had to search the hospital first, how was Sherlock’s calculation of the time of her arrival so accurate? For that matter, Sherlock shouldn’t be certain where she was when she received the text. Fake-Faith might be a recluse but we don’t know whether the real one is – and indeed she doesn’t look like one.

I rolled my eyes when John said to Greg that Sherlock shot Magnussen. The whole issue of Sherlock’s involvement in Magnussen’s death is top secret confidential and only a few people know about it. Obviously there’s John and the police snipers and the helicopter pilot, all of whom won’t or can’t talk, but there’s no way in the world that Greg – even if he is Sherlock’s ‘handler’ – has been told about it!

I always do my best to describe in detail what’s happening during every moment of the episode. However, I gave up even trying when Sherlock lay on the floor of the mortuary and gazed up at John after he savagely confirmed that Sherlock had killed his wife, instead writing, “At this point your weeping transcriber refuses to even attempt to describe the next ten seconds as Benedict, while barely moving a muscle in his face, gives an absolute masterclass of a man’s life slowly but irrevocably falling apart.” He was stunning during those moments.

I loved Mrs Hudson deducing how Sherlock behaves in different situations. She was a total star throughout this episode, especially the way she spoke to Mycroft when initially he refused to leave the room.

When John finds the envelope stabbed to the mantelpiece there’s another envelope propped up behind it. It’s upside down and very old and stained and it’s addressed to Sherlock at “156 Montaguest, London.” In the canonical stories, Holmes moved into Baker Street after living in apartments in Montague Street. Presumably this envelope hints that he has a very old unsolved case. (And on this occasion I’m sure that the production team deliberately typed the address like that instead of “Montague St” as a kind of Easter Egg for anyone paying close attention. *Callie pats herself on the back for paying close attention.*)

The whole scene between Smith and Sherlock in the hospital room was stunning, appalling and terrifying. The only thing that spoiled it was the inexplicable disappearance of the police officer after he couldn’t get the door open. I know that Nurse Cornish was in on it and presumably had been instructed by Sherlock to do her best to keep the policeman out of the room, but it would have helped if we’d seen how she did it, especially when Greg had just rung him and told him that Sherlock was in danger. It’s not like the door looked so strong that he couldn’t have just kicked it open. Additionally, Smith should have heard the police officer trying to open the door and couldn’t know that it had conveniently jammed, so he ought to be more concerned that someone could come in, instead of continuing to confess to Sherlock.

I wonder how many online fans are now really annoyed that they spent so much time looking up all the towns in the world called “Hell” after Mary’s “Go to Hell” message at the end of the previous episode!

When John asks Sherlock if he and Irene go to a discreet Harvester, I had to add a transcriber’s note explaining that Harvester is a restaurant chain and that they don’t go and sit on a tractor in the middle of nowhere! I know this is a British show but the writers frequently seem to forget/not care that this show is seen worldwide and that very British references are not helpful.

If this version of Sherlock Holmes has the commonly accepted birth date of the canonical Holmes, then the “happy birthday” scene takes place on 6th January. That means that the scenes outside the therapist’s house (and everything that followed, of course) happened no more than a week before that, judging by the healing state of Sherlock’s eye; and Sherlock’s walk with Faith is three weeks before that, i.e. around the second or third week of December. We see Christmas lights above the street where Sherlock does his window/kitchen deduction but otherwise there’s little sign of Christmas in other scenes; there aren’t even decorations in the children’s ward. And the very bright sunlight outside the therapist’s house is really rarely seen in southern England in early January. And why didn’t Mrs H stop to put on a coat while the boys from Speedy’s were dragging Sherlock to the car? Even on a sunny day it’s never warm enough to go out without a coat in January!

Someone pointed out that when Sherlock walks towards his weeping friend, he momentarily hesitates when he’s lifting his arms, suggesting that he’s afraid of being rejected like he was when he reached towards John in the Aquarium.

I love how the horns of the skull on the wall seem to come out of the head of the man who’s insisting that his wife is channelling Satan! This shot may have been inspired by much online speculation after The Sign of Three aired, when people pointed out how the horns were either side of Mary’s head when she gave Sherlock and John a double thumbs-up before they went out to investigate the Bloody Guardsman case. Fandom reckoned that this was a clue that Mary was not as innocent as she seemed at the time.

Seeing Lady Smallwood’s card showing her first name as Alicia sent me off to Tumblr posting these screencaps reminding people that she was called Elizabeth Smallwood in His Last Vow – except on the DVD when Magnussen’s file notes showed her as Alicia. Additionally, the D-notice at the beginning of Thatchers is signed by “E Smallwood.” One could almost start to wonder if there are two of them! Also, someone pointed out that she shouldn’t be calling herself “Lady Alicia Smallwood” anyway. In Vow, Sherlock read a newspaper article announcing Lord Smallwood’s suicide. If she married into the name, then her official title is “Alicia, Lady Smallwood,” not “Lady Alicia Smallwood.” It’s like how officially nobody should have ever used the title “Princess Diana” because she married into the title and wasn’t born to it. She was “Diana, Princess of Wales.” Yes, people would call our character ‘Lady Smallwood’ in the same way that they’d call her ‘Mrs Smallwood’ in different circumstances, but her card should read “Alicia, Lady Smallwood.”

Under whatever-her-name-is’s card is a notebook with written notes of Sherlock’s bolt-holes that Mycroft should monitor. The bottom note reads “Clock Face – Elizabeth Tower?” This is a shout-back to when Mrs Hudson suggested to John (in Vow) that Sherlock had a bolt-hole “behind the clock face of Big Ben.” The majority of people refer to the tower as Big Ben, but Big Ben is actually the largest of the bells inside and the tower itself was recently renamed Elizabeth Tower.

It’s very lucky for Eurus that she and Faith have such similar appearances. But then she does mention that ‘a mutual friend’ put her and Culverton in touch, so I imagine we’ll find in the next episode that that ‘friend’ was Moriarty and so he did all the hard work of finding a lookalike with a psychotic father.

We get a new flashback of Faith/Eurus walking alone across the Golden Jubilee footbridge and not needing the walking cane. Presumably she did this after she left Sherlock by the railings at the riverside. However, she’s walking in darkness and it was dawn when she left Sherlock. (I’ll actually let them off for that error, because I imagine they filmed it at the same time as they filmed Sherlock and Faith walking across the same bridge when it was still dark.)

When Sherlock examines the note in the kitchen, why is it so dark in there? It’s pretty dark even before he turns off the overhead light, but it’s daylight in the front room. It’s rather convenient that the blind was down over the window just when it needed to be.

The fact that Eurus knows about John realising there’s a third Holmes sibling suggests that she’s got cameras/microphones in Sherlock’s flat.

Incidentally, there has been much online debate about the spelling of the Holmes sister’s name. The name of the Greek god of the East Wind can be spelled Eurus or Euros (and she pronounces it more as ‘Euros’) but the BBC subtitles spelled it Eurus and I’m fairly sure that the producers give the subtitler any complicated or unusual names that appear in the episode. I wait to see whether the next episode or the writers/producers confirm their spelling.

After the episode aired, the Production Designer Arwel wyn Jones tweeted a picture of the wallpaper behind Eurus in ‘her’ consultation room and drew attention to the fact that it looks like blown clouds, adding “the East wind?” Much as I love how he likes to wind up the fandom, I find it hard to believe that within the episode Eurus went to the real therapist’s house, murdered her and then redecorated before John arrived!

Benedict and Martin were both sensational in this episode. And I confidently predicted that Martin in particular would be a shoo-in for a nomination for Best Supporting Actor in all the TV awards ... until Sian Brooke blew him out of the water when the end reveal showed that she had brilliantly portrayed three different people! Actually, I suspect that Toby Jones will also be considered for Best Supporting Actor. I fear that most TV awards will only nominate one person per show for that award, so sadly Martin is unlikely to get a look-in.

There was much more new background music in this episode and it was phenomenal.

This story is basically broken up into three bits.

1. The bit with an apparently stoned Holmes flailing about trying to prove a guy is a serial killer. (While it had some nice bits, it was the least effective.)

2. The real story of Holmes trying to get Watson back. (Which also shows what a mistake it was to kill off Mary. TPTB actually went and successfully created a third person who fit in well with an established duo and then they go and kill her off. *sigh*)

3. The twist which upended the whole story and put earlier bits in a new perspective.

Sadly the weak point for the whole story is the killer who has virtually no character development at all.

Callie - are actually John’s deductions and he’s getting way smarter than perhaps we thought.

I was watching one of the Jeremy Brett eps, when I realized Watson is smarter than assumed. Forget the title of the story, but it was the one where Watson sends Holmes letters and Holmes deduces a crime has happened/is happening and I realized that Watson must have subconscionsiously noticed the same details and made sure to include them amongst his descriptions for Holmes to see.

H.H. Holmes actually did exist and wasn’t made up for this story.

Kind of odd though. On Monday I watched Timeless which had two of the team captured by Holmes in his murder hotel and then the guy gets referenced in Sherlock.

At the bus stop during Sherlock’s deductions about Faith’s note, he says that she kept it folded inside a book “for the first few months,” then he adds that it’s been on display on a wall “for the past few months.” But earlier in 221, Faith/Eurus said that Smith’s confession happened “three years ago,” so where was the note in the intervening period? Or had Sherlock inadvertently stumbled on the fact that the note actually was only written several months ago, but he was too stoned to realise? (I’d love to think that Moffat did that deliberately but I really doubt it.)

Also, who kept the note in their kitchen for several weeks/months, doing lots of cooking with spices to get the scents into the paper? I wondered for a moment if Eurus had ‘reprogrammed’ the kitchen staff at Sherrinford but I doubt their kitchen is only ten feet wide.

*giggles* Or did Jim acquire the note from Smith and then kept it in his kitchen while cooking delicious meals until he handed it over to Eurus?! I’m not serious – for one thing, she would have had to keep it in a sealed plastic bag for the past few years to keep the scents fresh.

Realising that Sherlock was looking for a way to “go to hell” in order to follow Mary’s request to him to save John, the look of joy on Sherlock’s face in the street when he realises that Smith is probably a serial killer has much more significance.

Part of Mary’s (or really, John’s) deductions about how Sherlock did his “two weeks ago” planning is that all that Sherlock had to do was to “find the first available lunchtime appointment with a female therapist within cycling distance of your surgery.” That really is nonsense when you consider that John only made the appointment two days ago. How could Sherlock possibly know that that appointment would stay open for two weeks? He surely can’t have contacted the real therapist and asked her to hold the appointment open for when a Dr John Watson rang to book it, but not to say anything to John when he did ring. Although ... maybe Sherlock did do that, and that’s when Eurus sprang into action and took over the house.

Also there’s no sign of John’s bike either outside or inside the therapist’s house. Could the props people not be bothered to find and bring one?

Why does Smith’s assistant twice refer to him as “Calverton” instead of “Culverton”?

At the end of the episode we see an overhead view of John in the therapist’s back room and that angle makes it clear that the jagged red rug on the floor look like a spreading pool of blood. I can’t imagine that the real therapist would have had something that gory-looking in her consulting room, so maybe my earlier snarky comment about the ‘East Wind’ wallpaper was wrong and Eurus did redecorate before John came!

But what was Eurus’ purpose for this entire stunt, particularly when she wasn’t going to kill or abduct John at this point?

And, of course, the most critical question of all: did Eurus ever return Mrs Hudson’s coat?!

The final shooting script of His Last Vow was recently released online and it has explained the confusion over Alicia/Elizabeth Smallwood. Basically Steven Moffat called her 'Alicia' in the early part of the script and then called her 'Elizabeth' later. Presumably nobody noticed until very late in the editing process. I've shown the relevant bits of the script in an update to my earlier Tumblr post here.

However, I still think it would have made more sense to call her Elizabeth here. The only use of ‘Alicia’ was on the Season 3 DVD and was shown visually when Magnussen looked at her during the opening scene of Vow, whereas ‘Elizabeth’ was spoken aloud several times by him and Sherlock in 221B.

Continuity error: Smith leads the boys along a corridor in the hospital on the way to his "favourite room." Sherlock spots something in a room to his left and goes in there. After a conversation, Smith leads Sherlock out of the room (while John hangs back a bit when ghost-Mary speaks to him) but instead of turning left out of the room to continue their journey down the corridor, Sherlock and Smith turn right.

Continuity error: at 221B with (fake-)Faith, Sherlock walks towards the kitchen holding her note. She is sitting on the client chair in the middle of the room, several feet away. After Wiggins opens the kitchen doors and asks who he's talking to, Sherlock shuts the doors and turns round towards Faith. His hands are empty and she is now holding the note.