The Empty Hearse

"The Empty Hearse"

"The Empty Hearse" is the first 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. 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), and Sherlock enlists Molly to assist him, but when John is kidnapped by unknown assailants and is rescued by Sherlock and Mary, John returns to help find the terrorists and an underground plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament during an all night sitting on 5 November, Guy Fawkes Day.

Meanwhile, Philip Anderson, driven by his guilt over his role in Sherlock's defamation, has become a conspiracy theorist who is obsessed with finding conjectures of how Sherlock may have faked his death. The details of Sherlock's deception have still not been entirely disclosed.

In an ending scene, a silhouetted figure is observed watching footage of Sherlock and Mary.

Sources

The episode contains allusions to "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (Holmes deducing all about someone from their hat), "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter" (Sherlock and Mycroft playing a game of trying to out-deduce each other in 221B Baker Street), "A Case of Identity" (a short-sighted woman who falls in love with a man who vanishes, which turns out to be Mr. Windibank, her stepfather), "The Adventure of the Empty House" (in which Holmes returns from a period of feigned death which he spent uprooting the remnants of Moriarty's organization; also the villain being named Moran), "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 Reigate Puzzle" (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).

External links

• "The Empty Hearse" at IMDb