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 Adventure of 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 supposed demise, Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) has been completely exonerated of the slanderous accusations against him originated by 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 awaited him. While Sherlock absconded, members of his homeless network put a mask on Moriarty's face so that he would look like Sherlock, dragged the body into the street to the spot where Sherlock would have landed and sprayed him with fake blood. While this happened, John was lying on the ground, his vision obscured, having just been hit by a cyclist, who was in on the plan. Derren Brown then appeared and hypnotised John to give the others extra time to plant the body; this version of events is later shown to be a conspiracy theory invented by Anderson, who feels responsible for Sherlock's death.

Sherlock returns to London, recalled by his brother Mycroft to help uncover a threatened terrorist attack. John now has a girlfriend, Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington), to whom he intends to propose in a restaurant; at this point, Sherlock, disguised as a French waiter, approaches the couple, but is not immediately recognised by John. When Sherlock reveals his identity, John attacks him physically. When John refuses to accept his explanations, Sherlock enlists Molly to assist him in his next case, that 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 to lure Sherlock out of hiding. Later that day, Mary receives a text telling her that John has been kidnapped by unknown assailants and will die if he is not rescued in time, along with a coded location. Sherlock and Mary come to his rescue on a motorcycle, and manage to drag him out of a lit bonfire on which a guy was about to be burned.

John and Sherlock set about solving Mycroft's terrorist problem, which is revealed to be planned by an "underground movement"; having discovered that a key figure in the plot is Lord Moran, known by Holmes to be a foreign agent, they realise that the wording indicates a movement based in the London Underground; Moran and his organisation plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament during an all-night sitting on November 5th to vote on an anti-terrorism bill, by detonating a bomb directly beneath the Houses. Near an abandoned Underground station, John and Sherlock manage to locate an Underground carriage that had earlier disappeared from CCTV with Moran on it, and find that it is rigged with explosives. Sherlock manages to defuse the bomb by simply flicking the off-switch, but momentarily convinces John that he is unable to defuse it, causing the latter to tearfully confess that he forgives Sherlock for his long absence.

In another cut-scene interrupting this situation, Sherlock is seen visiting Anderson and revealing to him how he faked his death as part of a plan to round up Moriarty's network. Sherlock tells Anderson that he and Mycroft had anticipated thirteen possible scenarios that could happen on the roof, each of which had a code name and a plan of action attached to it. Sherlock, however, had not anticipated that Moriarty would kill himself. The code name of the scenario eventually selected was "LAZARUS". His homeless network shuts down the entire street while an unsuspecting John is in a cab headed for the hospital. Sherlock ensures that John stands in a spot where his view of the lower half of the building is blocked. The homeless network and Mycroft's people place a large inflated cushion to break Sherlock's fall, and quickly remove it while John approaches. Molly, who is near a window, throws a body double on the ground (the same person Moriarty used to frame Sherlock for the abduction of Rufus Bruhl's children in "The Reichenbach Fall"). John sees only a glimpse of the body before he is intentionally knocked down by a cyclist; the interruption allows Sherlock to take the place of the body double, cover himself in blood, and place a squash ball under his armpit to momentarily stop his pulse. Anderson casts doubt on the veracity of this version of events.

Moran is ambushed by the police and arrested as he leaves his hotel suite. John asks Sherlock who abducted him and why, questions to which Sherlock has no answers yet. In the final scene, a bespectacled face with blue eyes is seen observing footage of Sherlock and Mary rescuing John from the fire.

Sources

The Adventure of the Empty House

The most obvious source of this episode and its alluded namesake is "The Adventure of the Empty House" (although the episode's storyline is largely original), 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 organisation. In both the story and the episode, Mycroft helps Sherlock fake his demise. The villainous Moran in this episode is namfed after Sebastian Moran, the villain of the original story. In "The Adventure of the Empty House", Watson first encounters Holmes disguised as a heavily accented and bearded book salesman with a shop on the corner of Church Street, who offers Watson some books. In the episode, John encounters a man who owns a DVD shop on the same location; the man offers him DVDs with titles almost identical to the books he was offered in the story ("Tree Worshippers", "British Birds", and "Holy War"). John falsely assumes it is Sherlock in disguise, with embarrassing results.

Other Arthur Conan Doyle short stories

Apart from "The Adventure of the Empty House", the episode contains allusions to many other Doyle short stories:

• Sherlock calls Lord Moran by the code name "giant rat of Sumatra Road" because of his status as mole for North Korea, a reference to "the giant rat of Sumatra" mentioned in passing in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and because Moran's planned terrorist attack involves an abandoned section of the London Underground system called "Sumatra Road".
  • In "The Adventure of the Reigate Squire", Watson mentions in passing the case of the "Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis." The episode references this and the repeated mention of "Sumatra" by similarly featuring a member of the House of Lords, Lord Moran, as the scheming villain. Furthermore, after the beginning of the episode taking place in Serbia, Mycroft mentions Baron Maupertius by name.

• At one point, John mentions to the beard man selling DVDs 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.

• Sherlock refers to an unseen character called Professor Presbury, a character from the story "The Adventure of the Creeping Man".

• In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter", the first story to feature Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock mentions that his grandmother was the sister of the French artist Horace Vernet. The fact that Holmes impersonates a French waiter at the beginning of the episode 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" where they engage in a similar competition while sitting in Mycroft's Diogenes Club.
  • Sherlock and Mycroft's competition is over analyzing a particular knitted hat, a reference to "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", where Holmes also deducted several facts about a man from his hat. Furthermore, in the episode, when Mycroft determines that the knitted hat belonged to a man, Sherlock asks, "Why, the size of the head?", to which Mycroft reproachingly replies, "Don't be silly. Some women have large heads, too." Sherlock's subsequent look of guilt is a satirical allusion to the controversial and pseudoscientific phrenology involved in the original short story, where Sherlock Holmes deducted that the owner of the hat was intelligent based on the size of his head, remarking "a man with so large a brain must have something in it."

• The episode features John's engagement to Mary Morstan, whom he met and wed in the 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 message on her mobile phone that starts with the phrase "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, a theory incorporated into A Scandal in Belgravia). The 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes had also featured Sherlock Holmes 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.

• Sherlock solves the mentioned text message by reading every third word of the message, a reference to "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott" where he does the same.

• John Watson grows a moustache in this episode, with unfavourable results. Watson is traditionally depicted with a moustache in other Sherlock Holmes adaptations, based on an unwitting description of him by Inspector Lestrade in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton".

• In a short scene, Sherlock very quickly solves an adaptation of "A Case of Identity" when a young woman consults him about the disappearance of her online boyfriend, determining that it was in fact her stepfather who had posed as her online boyfriend in order to break her heart, keep her at home in grief, and maintain control over her finances. Mere moments after first hearing the woman's story, Sherlock promptly tells her stepfather, who has feigned concern and joined her in consulting him, that he is "a complete and utter pisspot", alluding to Holmes's reprimand of the man in the original short story.

• The episode also references 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" (which might also be alluded to in this episode when Sherlock is called "this detective who became something of a celebrity two years ago", when his name is being cleared on television) 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 the episode).

Other

Sherlock's awkward first encounter with Mary while she dines at an expensive restaurant with John may be a homage to the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, where he also meets Mary at an expensive restaurant with Watson, albeit being invited in the movie.

In the episode, Sherlock discovers a skeletal corpse with a book purporting to be by Jack the Ripper describing how he committed his crimes. This may be a reference to the novelisation of the 1965 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 hoax planted by a former Scotland Yard detective, Phillip Anderson, which may be a reference to William S. Baring-Gould's theory in his 1962 book Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street that Jack the Ripper was actually the Yard's Inspector Athelney Jones of the first Holmes novel The Sign of Four.

Next to Lazarus of Bethany being a Biblical figure who is raised from the dead, the code word 'LAZARUS' that Sherlock texted to Mycroft may also be a reference to the 2007 Doctor Who episode "The Lazarus Experiment", in which Mark Gatiss (who portrays Mycroft Holmes) played Professor Lazarus.

Gatiss has stated that his use of the London Underground as a setting was strongly inspired by the 1968 Doctor Who serial The Web of Fear, a story which is primarily set in the Underground after London is evacuated due to the spread of a deadly web-like fungus via the Tube network.

The various theories propounded by Anderson and his fan club (the eponymous "The Empty Hearse") 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 seems like a gentle parody of the inevitable audience reaction.

Production

The resolution to how Holmes had faked his death was filmed in April 2013 at St. Bart's Hospital

The resolution to how Holmes had faked his death at the end of "The Reichenbach Fall" was filmed in April 2013 at St. Bart's Hospital in London. The filming was attended by several hundred fans, who producer Sue Vertue begged not to leak too much information. Telegraph journalist Sheryl Garratt reported that the filming was deliberately confusing to the watching fans, and the explanation of how Sherlock faked his death was blanked in the script.

Casting

Many of the cast of the previous two series returned, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman playing Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson. Freeman's real-life partner Amanda Abbington joined the cast as Mary Morstan, Watson's own girlfriend. Cumberbatch's parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton, appear briefly as Sherlock's parents in the episode.

Broadcast and reception

The episode was first broadcast on BBC One on 1 January 2014. According to overnight figures, the episode was viewed by 9.2 million people in the UK on BBC One, with the viewership peaking at 9.7 million in the first 5 minutes.

The episode received critical acclaim upon broadcast, with The Guardian's Sam Wollaston proclaiming "...an explosive return for Cumberbatch and Freeman, full of fizz, whizz and wit." Similarly, The Telegraph's Chris Harvey said, "This was the triumphant return of the most charismatic, most fun character on British television."

The Mirror gave the episode a perfect five star review, with the author Josh Wilding's headline being, "Stunning explanation in The Empty Hearse for how Sherlock faked his death won't satisfy everybody, but it works."

Metro also awarded the episode four out of five stars, with reviewer Tim Liew stating, "The Empty Hearse is a fast-paced yarn filled with breathtaking audacity and laugh-out-loud moments." The episode also received very positive reviews from American critics, with The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman saying "The acclaimed detective, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, returns for season three as superb (and unscathed) as when he left."

Some commentators noted how the episode had a lighter tone compared to the previous episodes. However David Mather, who runs fan site Sherlockology, told BBC Radio 5 Live's Victoria Derbyshire that he had been inundated with mixed responses from fans.

As of January 2, 2014 "The Empty Hearse" has acquired a 86% Audience Approval on Rotten Tomatoes a 9.5 rating on IMDB with more than 4,000 votes, and a 9.4 user rating on TV.com with a little more than 50 votes.

External links

• "The Empty Hearse" at IMDb