The Empty Hearse

"The Empty Hearse"

"The Empty Hearse" is the first episode of the third series of the BBC television series Sherlock. It was written by Mark Gatiss and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes, Martin Freeman as Dr John Watson, and Mark Gatiss as Mycroft Holmes.

Inspired by "The Empty House" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the episode follows Sherlock Holmes' return to London and reunion with John Watson, along with an Underground Terrorist Network.

The episode was first broadcast on BBC One and BBC One HD on 1 January 2014.

Plot

Two years after his reported Reichenbach Fall demise, Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) has been completely exonerated of the slander that was caused him at the hands of James Moriarty. The opening scene shows a version of how Sherlock might have faked his death: by jumping from the roof with a bungee cable, bouncing back and entering the building through a window, where Molly stood waiting for him. While Sherlock absconded, members of his homeless network put a mask on Moriarty's face so that he would look like Sherlock, and then dragged onto the street to the spot where Sherlock would have landed and sprayed him with fake blood. All while this happened, Watson was lying on the ground, his vision obscured, having just been run over by a cyclist, who was in on the plan and who hypnotised him to give the others extra time to plant the body, this however is shown to be a conspiracy theory of Anderson. Sherlock with the aid of Mycroft returns to London which is under threat of terrorist attack. John has moved on and has a girlfriend, Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington), whom he intends to propose to in a restaurant, when Sherlock enters, disguises himself as a French waiter with a thick accent and visits John's table a couple of times before he notices who he is.Sherlock reveals that he death was fraudulent to John, who fueled by anger, hits him more than a few times. Sherlock enlists Molly to assist him in the case of an underground skeleton behind a desk containing a manuscript: "How I did it" by Jack the Ripper, revealed to be a fake planted by Anderson (now a conspiracy theorist, driven by guilt over his role in Sherlock's defamation) to lure Holmes out of hiding. Later that day, Mary receives a text telling her covertly that John has kidnapped by unknown assailants and will die if he isn't rescued in time, along with a location. Sherlock and Mary come to his rescue on a motorcycle, and manage to drag him out of a pyre on which a Guy was about to be burned. John and Holmes then return to solving Mycroft's terrorist problem, which is revealed to be planned by an "underground movement" in the most literal sense (i.e. a movement based in the London Underground). They discover that a key figure in the plot is a politician named Moran, who with his organisation plots to blow up the Houses of Parliament during an all night sitting on November fifth (Bonfire Night), to vote on a new terrorist law. Near a never used Underground station, they manage to find an Underground carriage that was earlier seen dissapearing with Moran on it, and find that it is rigged with explosives. Sherlock manages to diffuse the bomb by turning the off-switch, but not before making Watson believe the bomb can't be difused, causing him to panic and reveal to Sherlock how much he has missed him, to his later embarrassment. In a flash forward before Sherlock reveals he has difused the bomb, he is seen visiting Anderson and revealing to him how he faked his death as part of a plan to round up Moriarty's network. An alternate version of the faked death is shown, leaving it ambiguous to which one is true, if any of them. Sherlock tells Anderson that he and Mycroft had anticipated thirteen possible scenarios that could happen on the roof. Each possibility had a code name and a plan of action attached to it. Sherlock however, did not anticipated that Moriaty would kill himself. Thus, Sherlock texts his brother one of the code names ("LAZARUS"). His homeless network shut down the entire street and were at the ready. John, who had no idea all this was happening could be seen in the cab driving towards the hospital. When John came, Sherlock made sure he stood at the right spot so that his view of the bottom half of the building was blocked. The homeless network and Mycroft's people set a large inflated cushion which allowed Sherlock to fall on safely and trick everyone. All the people rushed to pull the cushion away and Sherlock ran to hide. Then, Molly who was near a window threw a body double on the ground (the same person who Moriarty used to incriminate of the abduction of Rufus Bruhl's children). John, who had rushed to the scene, only saw a glimpse of the body before he was intentionally knocked down by the cyclist which stalled him and allowed Sherlock to take the place of the body double and put a ball under his armpit to momentarily give the impression of having no pulse. The people that surrounded him then poured blood around and on him to further make the illusion, thus allowing Sherlock to fake his suicide.

In the ending scene, a silhouetted figure with blue eyes wearing glasses is observed watching footage of Sherlock and Mary.

Sources

The most obvious source of this episode is The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Sherlock Holmes returns from his "Great Hiatus" during which he feigned his death in order to root up the rest of Moriarty's criminal organization. In both the story and the episode, Mycroft helps Sherlock fake his demise. In the story, Sherlock uses the alias "Sigerson", which has led some Holmesians to propose that his father's name was Siger; this may be why Sherlock's parents make an appearance in this episode. The villainous Moran in this episode is the writers' interpretation of Sebastian Moran, the villain of the original story. In "The Empty House", Holmes first encounters Watson disguised as a heavily accented and bearded book salesman with a shop on the corner of Church Street, and offers Watson some books; here Watson encounters a man who owns a DVD shop on the same location. The man offers Watson DVDs with titles almost identical to the books he was offered in the story ("Tree Worshippers", "British Birds", and "Holy War"); Watson assumes it is Holmes in disguise, with disastrous results.

At one point, Watson mentions to this man that his usual GP is "Dr. Verner", who, in The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, is a cousin of Sherlock Holmes who buys Watson's practice so he can move back into his old rooms on Baker Street. In The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter, the first story to feature Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock mentions that his grandmother was the sister of the French artist Horace Vernet. The fact that Holmes impersonates a French waiter may be a reference to his French heritage. The scene where Sherlock and Mycroft try to out-deduce each other in Sherlock's flat is also a reference to a scene from "The Greek Interpreter".

"The Empty Hearse" features Watson's engagement to Mary Morstan, whom he met and wed in the novel The Sign of Four. Mary is seen reading John's blog, and the passage she reads aloud is an almost verbatim excerpt from chapter six of "The Sign of Four" ("[s]o swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent..."). At one point Mary receives a text asking, "John or James?", a reference to The Man With the Twisted Lip, in which Mary calls her husband "James" rather than John (prompting the fan theory that his middle initial stands for "Hamish", a variant of James, which was cited earlier in the series). The film Young Sherlock Holmes also features Sherlock making a series of deductions about Watson which are all exactly correct except that he incorrectly infers that his first name is James rather than John. Watson grows a mustache in this episode, with unfavourable results. Watson is traditionally depicted with a moustache, based on an unwitting description of him by Inspector Lestrade in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.

The episode also contains allusions to The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (Holmes deducing all about someone from their hat--also a brief argument based on the size of the owner's head, a reference to a controversial deduction in the original story), A Case of Identity (a short-sighted woman who falls in love with a man who vanishes, whom Holmes deduces to be Mr. Windibank, her stepfather, trying to preserve his control over her money), The Adventure of the Gloria Scott (Holmes cracks a coded warning message by reading every third word of the message), The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (the reference to "the giant rat of Sumatra", the "giant rat" here being Moran, a double-agent for North Korea, or "rat", and the Sumatra section of the underground), The Adventure of the Reigate Squire (the reference to Baron Maupertuis and Sumatra), and the non-canonical Arthur Conan Doyle story The Lost Special, where a train goes missing into an unused section of the railway, and which appears to feature an unnamed cameo by Sherlock Holmes, referred to simply as "an amateur reasoner of some celebrity" who uses the familiar Holmesian axiom, "when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth" (a variation of which Holmes uses in this episode).

Sherlock's awkward first encounter with Mary while she dines at an expensive restaurant with Watson may be an homage to Sherlock Holmes (2009 film). Holmes discovers a corpse with a book purporting to be by Jack the Ripper describing how he committed his crimes. This may be a reference to the novelization of the movie A Study in Terror, the framing device of which was that Ellery Queen had discovered a lost manuscript describing how Sherlock Holmes had solved the Ripper murders. In the episode, this ends up being a plant by a former Scotland Yard detective, Anderson, which may be a reference to William S. Baring-Gould's theory in his book Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street that Jack the Ripper was actually the Yard's Inspector Athelney Jones of "The Sign of Four".

The various theories propounded by Anderson and his fan club about how Sherlock could have faked his death parodies the multitude of online fan suggestions for the episode, and Anderson's rebuttal to Holmes when he finally explains how it happened at the end of the episode seem like a gentle parody of the inevitable audience reaction.

External links

• "The Empty Hearse" at IMDb