Investigating Sherlock

The Unofficial Guide

Nikki Stafford

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781770412620
• eBook ISBN: 9781770907881
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

An " intelligent and lively" companion to the hit BBC show starring Benedict Cumberbatch ( Publishers Weekly).
 
He's been depicted as a serious thinker, a master of deduction, a hopeless addict, and a bare-knuckle fighter. His companion is a bumbler, a sympathetic equal, someone helpless in the face of his friend's social inadequacies. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson remain the most-adapted fictional characters of all time. In 2010, when Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman stepped into the roles, they managed to meld many previous incarnations into two glorious performances.
 
Over Sherlock's first three seasons, the Emmy Award–winning series has brought new life to stories over a century old and, with its Holmes and Watson for the twenty-first century, created a worldwide phenomenon.
 
Investigating Sherlock examines each episode through in-depth and fun analysis, exploring the character development and cataloguing every subtle reference to the original stories. With biographies of Cumberbatch and Freeman, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, Investigating Sherlock is great fun, and the ultimate guide to the great detective.
 
"One of the best-researched books out there on the BBC Show, with great interviews of the show's creators and primary actors." — GeekDad
 

Season One (2010)

Dr. Watson, Meet Mr. Holmes

The first season of Sherlock is about the early stages of one of the greatest pairings in all of literature: the friendship of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. In the original 60 stories, with only three exceptions, the entire characterization and voice of Holmes is filtered through the pen of Watson. On more than one occasion, Holmes complains about Watson romanticizing of their adventures together, arguing that Watson’s careful crafting creates a specific story, whereas in the hands of another writer the tale would be very different. Watson’s writing is often self-deprecating, setting up Holmes as the superior mind and himself as the guy who’s just along for the ride. In many subsequent adaptations, the depiction has been exactly that — Holmes as the calm, careful genius, with the bumbling Watson by his side sticking up for him every step of the way.

But a careful reading of the stories shows something very different. Watson is often annoyed by Holmes. In The Valley of Fear, he refers to himself as “one of the most long-suffering of mortals.” When Holmes lies to him in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson is very upset, and he bitterly tells Holmes that he’s wasted his time and shown nothing but distrust of him. There are more subtle hints as well, as when Watson describes Holmes in unseemly ways, pointing out his sexism or quoting deplorable comments, as if these are his tiny acts of revenge for having to put up with a friend who, at times, can be a bit of a dick. Holmes might mock Watson on occasion, pointing out his mental inferiority (and, again, Watson includes this information in the stories as if only to point out the boorishness of his pal), but Holmes values Watson, opens up to him in ways he doesn’t to anyone else, is calmed by him, and when Watson’s life is in danger, Holmes shows more fear than at any other time. A careful reading, like the one Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss would have done, shows the intimacy between these two men — that they are not a genius and bumbling sidekick, but two men on an adventure, side by side.

From the momentous meeting of the two men in “A Study in Pink” to John saving Sherlock’s life at the end of the episode, to the two helping each other solve the case in “A Blind Banker,” to facing death together at the end of “The Great Game,” this first season evolves their relationship from its birth to its maturity, the moment where Sherlock realizes that John is as important to him as he is to John. John pulls Sherlock out of solitude and makes him less of a social outcast, and Sherlock puts the danger and excitement back into John’s life, which is exactly what John needed. Sherlock has the mind of a genius, but John has the social skills and humanity that Sherlock lacks.

This is not the story of a great detective and his sidekick, but of two men: John Watson, a man who is missing something in his life and who finds it in Sherlock Holmes, a man who doesn’t realize he needed someone until he finds John. Ultimately, over the first three seasons, the show’s focus will shift to Sherlock as we see his various strengths and flaws reflected in his foes, but John will always be there, shaping the man that Sherlock becomes.

1.1

A Study in Pink

WRITTEN BY Steven Moffat

DIRECTED BY Paul McGuigan

ORIGINAL AIR DATE July 25, 2010

Sherlock and John meet for the first time and immediately begin investigating a series of suicides that Sherlock believes to be serial murders.

It’s one of the most famous first encounters in literature, when the army doctor meets the world’s first “consulting detective,” who deduces his life story at first glance. When Dr. John Watson, home from the war, runs into his old friend Mike Stamford at the Criterion bar, Mike tells him about a friend of his looking for a flatmate, a man who “is a little queer in his ideas,” Mike says carefully, and perhaps “a little scientific for my tastes — it approaches to cold-bloodedness,” but overall he’s “a decent fellow enough.” And with that ringing endorsement, Watson prepares to meet the great detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. He walks into a lab in St. Bart’s Hospital, where Holmes has just successfully found a way to prove when blood is at the scene of a crime (something that hadn’t actually been done at the time) and is hopping about in excitement. He turns to greet Watson, extending a hand and saying, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and then proceeds to tell him how he knew that. A legendary friendship is born.

According to Gatiss and Moffat, no other adaptation has actually shown this momentous meeting between Holmes and Watson, despite Watson describing it in A Study in Scarlet in some detail. Instead, previous adaptations lead audiences into thinking that Watson and Holmes have always known each other. But for the Sherlock creators, it was important to first show the two separately and then bring them together, because the main theme of the first season was how each man’s life is saved and changed by the other.

“A Study in Pink” opens with images of rapid gunfire, frantic shouting, groups of soldiers running in a whirl of confusion. John Watson sits up in bed, gasping for breath before falling back onto his pillow, turning to his side, and sobbing. Quiet, sad piano chords strengthen our impression that this man is very lonely, traumatized by the war, and consumed by his memories of it.

Sherlock, on the other hand, doesn’t make an appearance until eight minutes in, and the first shot of him is upside-down, opening a body bag. We peer straight up from the bag as he stares down at us, sniffing the air and asking, “How fresh?” Molly Hooper stands near to him, telling him that the dead man used to be a colleague of hers. He stands up, quickly zips up the bag, turns to her with a fake smile, and says, “Right. We’ll start with the riding crop.” Upbeat gypsy music plays as we cut to Sherlock straddling the corpse and beating it mercilessly as Molly looks on, wincing.

What a huge contrast between the introductions of the two key characters: John’s is full of sadness and loneliness; Sherlock’s is humorous. We identify with John more readily because Sherlock comes across as so alien. John is depicted in a spartan, dark bedroom; Sherlock is in a fluorescently lit mortuary. John is all alone and runs into an old friend; Sherlock is with a colleague who has a crush on him but he barely notices she’s there, let alone picks up on her feelings.

When the two men finally do meet up, it’s a glorious scene. Unlike his literary counterpart, this Sherlock doesn’t notice John any more than he did Molly. He’s not leaping about excitedly, but quietly staring through a microscope as if unable or unwilling to speak to anyone at that moment. John simply stands awkwardly in the corner of the room, leaning on his cane and looking uncomfortable. Mike Stamford sits nearby with a smile on his face, waiting for the show to start, and when it does Sherlock does not disappoint.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” he says to John, who looks stunned by the question. John’s bafflement continues throughout the scene for, unlike the Stamford of the book who graciously prepared Watson for his first meeting with Holmes, this Stamford seems amused by John being unnerved. John is a man who is lonely yet unsure of how to integrate back into society, and Sherlock is a man happy to be on his own, yet needs a flatmate. They are thrown together, rather than actually wanting to be friends, and it’s only when Sherlock asks John to join him on a case that the real action begins.

This episode is based on the first Sherlock Holmes story, a novel called A Study in Scarlet (1887). Split into two parts, it first recounts the original meeting between Sherlock Holmes (who describes himself as a consulting detective) and Dr. John Watson, and their first case together: a man has been murdered, a wedding band has been found at the scene, and during the course of their investigation a second man is murdered. Despite the evidence pointing to other suspects, Holmes triumphantly announces at the end of part one that he has caught the murderer: Jefferson Hope, a cab driver who had been driven by revenge (rache) to track down the two men who had murdered the woman he loved back in America. The book then shifts in part two to the American Midwest several years earlier, and a long story involving kidnapping, murder, and Mormonism. Critics often dismiss the second part, which explains that the devout Latter-Day Saints tried to force Jefferson Hope into polygamous relationships and then threatened to kidnap the one woman he loved so she could marry the group leader, leading to his avowed revenge on the men who perpetrated it. However, despite Doyle being a little loose with the details of Mormonism, the accusations the story lobs against the Church of Latter-Day Saints — namely its treatment of women — is an issue that still continues today; the story almost seems ahead of its time. Despite moving away from Baker Street and onto the American frontier, it is still a rip-roaring story full of suspense and intrigue, returning us to Holmes and Watson only at the very end, as Jefferson Hope finally explains how he tracked down the murderous men who’d ruined his life.

Steven Moffat plays with the story, managing to include key components but changing enough of it to keep even the most ardent Sherlock Holmes fan guessing. The way he uses details of Doyle’s work but alters their significance will be one of the key trademarks of the show — stay loyal to the source material, but give the longtime Holmes fans something new. The wedding band that was essential in the book becomes a detail on the corpse of the woman dressed in pink. When Anderson, the smarmy forensics guy who despises Sherlock, suggests that the word RACHE etched in the ground could be German for “revenge,” Sherlock mocks him and says of course it’s not, it’s the beginning of the word “Rachel.” In the book, Lestrade suggests the word could be short for Rachel, and Holmes informs him sarcastically, “‘Rache’ is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.” (It seems that no matter what century we place him in, Holmes will contradict the suppositions of the police force.) At the scene of the crime, Sherlock deduces the story behind the victim; his literary counterpart deduces who the killer is. The pills remain the same — in the book we are told that “of the two pills in that box, one was of the most deadly poison, and the other was entirely harmless” — but Jefferson Hope doesn’t just randomly kill people for money, he’s committing crimes of passion.

The scenes of Sherlock’s deductions are brilliantly done, both by showing the words flashing across the screen to give us a tiny insight into Sherlock’s mind palace, and through Benedict Cumberbatch’s extraordinarily fast delivery of his lines. The astounding conclusions he comes to about John simply by looking at his mobile phone, and his work at the scene of a crime alongside the perplexed Lestrade utterly astonish his new friend. Some of the deductions might be considered a little silly, but if we suspend our disbelief and just enjoy the moment, the quickness with which Sherlock takes in the scene and identifies major clues that any other person would have missed, and then present...

Table of contents

• Investigating Sherlock: The Unofficial Guide
• “Everything had changed in 90 minutes”: The Genesis of Sherlock
• Benedict Cumberbatch: How a Mimic Became a Star
• Martin Freeman: Not Just Another Nice Guy
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Father of Sherlock Holmes
• Sherlock Episode Guide
• Season One (2010): Dr. Watson, Meet Mr. Holmes
• Season Two (2012): Love, Fear, and Death
• Season Three (2014): The Evolution of the Mind Palace
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Nikki Stafford
• Copyright