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 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 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; 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 mustache, 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), 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 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).

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