Fridge Brilliance / Sherlock

Series One

A Study in Pink

• John apparently not only reads his therapist's writing upside down- he also does it from at least six feet away. Several times throughout the show, he demonstrates having particularly keen eyesight- which may be because of, or may have led to, his being a frighteningly good shot with a pistol.
• Epic Fridge Brilliance from John's blog- his writeup of the taxi driver case includes this:
  By the time we got there, I could see that Sherlock was going to take one of the pills. It wasn't because he had to but because it was a game of wits. He wasn't going to let this other arrogant, pompous psychopath win. Which is when someone shot the taxi driver.
  • "I could see that Sherlock was going to take one of the pills"? The only way John could possibly have seen that is if he had- oh, for instance- been watching the whole thing play out through the window opposite, where seconds later someone mysteriously fired a gun and killed the cabbie. John had started this paragraph by claiming to be repeating simply what Sherlock told him, but he forgets himself and goes into directly what he saw.
• If you look on Sherlock's website, it is noted by him that he had to leave his previous flat following a "disagreement with the landlord", which seems to be a rather blatant euphemism for "I got evicted". This apparent eviction occurs at the same time as Sherlock apparently having something in the flat that he is worried about Lestrade and his drug team discovering. It is therefore quite possible that the reasons for Sherlock's eviction could have been drugs related.
  • If this was true, this could also add another dimension to Lestrade's decision to carry out his mock drug bust in this episode. We know that Lestrade is very aware of Sherlock's drug history, and also that he has previously used his blog as a means of communication. Therefore, learning of Sherlock's apparent eviction, and knowing his previous drug history, it's possible that Lestrade may have put two and two together, and become worried that Sherlock may be back on drugs. Thus, his decision to carry out a drugs bust in Sherlock's new flat may not just have been a ploy to take Sherlock down a couple of pegs, but also Lestrade taking the opportunity to see for himself if Sherlock really is as clean as he claims to be, or if he is back on drugs and needs his intervention.
• During his epic deductive rundown in the cab, Sherlock mentions "Then there's your brother..." John's response is easily missed, but it's a vague "... Hmm?" If Sherlock was paying as much attention to John himself as he was to his phone, he would have realised that John had no idea what he was talking about, because he doesn't have a brother... he has a sister with a masculine nickname.
  Sherlock: [shortly afterwards] It's always something...
  • Also in the cab, Sherlock remarks "You're looking for cheap accommodation, but you're not going to your brother for help? That says you've got problems with him..." Well, Sherlock would know all about having problems with a brother. His website reveals he's just been kicked out of the last flat he was in, but there's no way he'll go to Mycroft for help.
• Sherlock and John's first interaction is when Sherlock asks to use Mike Stamford's phone — Mike tells him he left his phone in his coat pocket, and John offers his own phone to Sherlock. Sherlock's need to use someone else's phone is apparently because there's no signal on his own. Later in the series, numerous times, we see that the reception in the lab is absolutely fine, and Sherlock's phone even gets a strong signal at an underground weapons base in rural Devon. He was lying about there being no signal on his phone. He knew Mike's phone was in his coat pocket. He wanted to prompt John into offering him his phone. By doing so he was not only able to deduce from the phone itself, but he worked out that John was left handed (he pulls the phone out of his left pocket using his left hand) and was able to see that he had no tan above the wrists when he held the phone out to him — he'd already deduced from John's comment about "my day" and his haircut and bearing that he was an army doctor, and wanted to know where he'd been deployed. He was also, of course, able to deduce that John was the sort of guy who would lend a stranger his phone and ultimately, Sherlock figures that he could share a flat with this guy. Remembering that not only would few people want to live with Sherlock, Sherlock himself would want to live with few people — he doesn't tolerate fools.
  • He told Molly to text him about the bruises — now why would he do that if there was no reception in the lab? Also, note his glance when John and Mike enter. He knew right then what Mike brought John along for, and the phone business was indeed the start of his flatmate audition for John.
• When Sherlock launches into his initial scan of John, he gets Harry's gender wrong. The knowing look on Mike's face is not just amusement at watching John's reaction to the scan, it's also because Mike knows Harry, or knows about her — he'd previously asked John if Harry couldn't help him. Mike and John both knew that Sherlock had made a mistake and neither of them called him on it.
• John telling Mike; "I'm not the John Watson you know." He's not just addressing Mike in that scene but also the audience. At this point the show is still busy establishing John's character; a depressed war veteran with trust issues and nothing going on in his life. We're later explained that while he may or may not have PTSD, he misses the danger of the war, therefore is also a bit of an adrenaline junkie. While there are similarities to ACD!Watson, as well as other adaptations, this John Watson is a much darker, more sombre character than the Watsons we've come to know before such as Nigel Bruce, David Burke, Edward Hardwicke or even Jude Law. He's much more broken, which also comes across in the bitter way he delivers the line before trying to hide the tremor in his hand.
• Watson's fortune cookie read: "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." It's a quote from the ACD canon (which is itself an allusion to Ecclesiastes.) How many adaptations of Sherlock Holmes have there been already?
• From the meeting between John and Mycroft:
  • John, as a soldier in a place like Afghanistan, has probably undergone training in what to do if you're kidnapped/used as a hostage. It may well be part of the reason he seems unconcerned about his safety while being "kidnapped". After all, when he's kidnapped for real twice over the next two episodes, both times involve him being knocked unconscious, held at gunpoint, and told outright that there's a very good chance he's going to be killed. Mycroft never actually threatens John (he even points out that he's not threatening him). John voluntarily gets into the car, can clearly see the route he's being taken on, and is never threatened with violence or confronted with any kind of weapon. By the time he actually arrives at the warehouse for his chat with Mycroft, it's no wonder he feels free to snark that Mycroft could have just phoned him. Whether Mycroft really is a criminal mastermind or not, John's decided he almost certainly isn't going to harm him.
  • John may have initiated the conversation with Anthea not just as an audaciously confident pass at a beautiful woman, but in part also to test what sort of situation he was in. Kidnappers are less likely to harm you if they know your name and have some kind of emotional connection to you, however small that might be.
  • When Mycroft is finished lecturing John, Anthea approaches and tells John she's been instructed to take him home. She asks the address, and John tells her that it's 221B Baker Street, but that he needs to stop off somewhere first. He referred to 221B as "home" and the flat where he was still living, and where all his stuff was, as "somewhere." Mentally, he'd moved into 221B well before he literally had.
  • There's no way he doesn't know where John is staying or where he's meant to move in to, Anthea is instructed to ask John the address specifically to see where John will ask to be taken.
  • Mycroft had said "And since yesterday you've moved in with him, and now you're solving crimes together..." John never contradicts this information and his expression never changes, which for someone with Mycroft's skills is as good as a confirmation that he was indeed moving into 221B^note It's a similar trick to the one Sherlock uses later on Irene, saying "the photographs are in this room" and using her lack of contradiction to deduce that he's right.
  • Upon meeting John, Mycroft says that he would pay John "to ease [his] way" if John decides to move into Baker Street. When John asks why, the answer is "because you're not a wealthy man". For John to spy on Sherlock properly, he'd have to be living with him. And he's not living with him yet. Mycroft may not just be trying to bribe John for information, he may well think at this point he needs to bribe John to move into 221B in the first place — and that the bribe might not just be a bonus, but a necessity. He knows John is broke and would know that a location like Baker Street would ordinarily be wicked expensive to live in. He also knows that Sherlock has ditched John at a crime scene and may well think he needs to bribe people to put up with his little brother's antics and general dickish behaviour.
  • Alternatively, given what Mycroft says in A Scandal in Belgravia about not using his own people "because they spy on people for money" (showing that he clearly despises them for that), it may be that Mycroft doesn't really want John to spy on his brother. He is very protective of his younger brother, so wants to be sure that John is someone who can be trusted around Sherlock. In his own way, Mycroft scans John and learns all he needs to know about him, and his possible loyalty to Sherlock. It's not about getting information on Sherlock. It's about making sure Sherlock has a true friend in John, who until that day had been a stranger to both Holmes brothers. If John had said yes to the deal and taken the money, Mycroft would no doubt have made sure John didn't stick around for long.
  • There is also the chance that Mycroft wouldn't see John taking the bait as "betraying" Sherlock and making him a threat but as a middle man of sorts between him and his brother. Paying John to watch over Sherlock would make it easier to keep tabs on his dear little brother without necessarily going behind Sherlock's back ^note since he might have already guessed how honest John tends to be and assumed John would tell Sherlock about the deal regardless of what John's decision was while also letting him to help Sherlock (and John) financially with out hurting Sherlock's pride, which is part of why Sherlock needs a flat mate in the first place. After all he knows how his brother thinks and Sherlock's first comment to John after being told about Mycroft's offer and how he turned it down was that John should have said yes because they could have easily taken advantage of it, so as far as Mycroft's concerned this is a win-win situation.
  • Mycroft, on meeting John, makes a point of offering him a chair twice. But he's already psyched John out; he knows his psychosomatic pain is linked to boredom and frustration. John's in a high-stress situation and he's loving every second of it. Sherlock mentioned earlier that John's pain comes and goes when he forgets about it. Mycroft was checking that his theory was right — John didn't need that chair.
  • Mycroft says, that he is the closest thing to a friend, that Sherlock can have to friend — an enemy. But he really means, that hs is the closest thing to his friend — just a brother.
  • Throughout the whole meeting between Mycroft and John, Mycroft seems to be putting John to several tests, as if auditioning him for the role of his brother's flatmate. In addition to testing his bravery by trying to intimidate him, he tests his principles by trying to bribe him, and his temper by insulting him by calling his bravery stupidity. There's one small moment that probably also helped clinch things, even though it came at Mycroft's expense. Mycroft asks to see John's hand; he leans on his umbrella. He's expecting John to come over to him. John simply and literally digs his heels in and holds his hand up, as if to say "you're the one who wanted to see my hand, come here and see it, then." Mycroft, who we've seen is even lazier than Sherlock at times and loves manipulating people and using them as puppets, is forced to go over to John. On the whole, from that meeting, we can see that although Mycroft and John have a personality clash they'll probably never get past, Mycroft respects a lot of John's qualities. His "welcome back" is almost affectionate.
• After John shoots the cabbie, Sherlock seems pretty desperate to know whether or not he picked the right bottle, only giving up on that after realising the cabbie is about to die and he still needs the name of his sponsor. We never do find out if he won or not. The answer? He did. Watch the beginning sequence again where we see the three victims taking the pills — every single one of them takes the bottle closest to them, presumably the one that the cabbie pushed toward them, and they all die. Sherlock, on the other hand, takes the bottle closest to the cabbie. It's highly likely that the cabbie kept the arrangement of the bottles (poison nearest the victim) the same, to see if Sherlock would do better than everyone else. So in all likelihood he never was in any real danger.
  • Alternatively, both pills were the bad pills. From what was shown, the number of pills went from three in a bottle to one in a bottle. You never see the game with two pills. Therefore, both bad pills were in play in the final game. Sherlock was just too tempting a target and worth dying for.
• When the drugs bust turns to the conversation about Rachel, John suggests to Sherlock: "You said that the victims all took the poison themselves... he makes them take it. Well... maybe he... I don't know, talks to them?" Later, the cabbie tells Sherlock: "I didn't kill those four people, Mr Holmes. I spoke to them, and they killed themselves." John, of all people, called it first- and although he thought it had to do with "the death of her daughter somehow", he was still on the right track. Not bad for someone Sherlock had earlier assumed was an "idiot" like "practically everyone."
  • "Talking his victims to death" was even more true in Sherlock's case than the previous victims. They all had the excuse of being threatened at gun point and deciding to take a 50/50 chance of life and death over being shot in the head. Sherlock knew the gun was fake and was free to walk off. But the cabbie manipulated him into agreeing to take the pill anyway, using Sherlock's "addiction" to avoiding boredom and needing to be proved right, even if it meant risking his life. In that sense, Sherlock was just as vulnerable as the previous victims had been.
• It's never stated exactly how the killer picks his victims in the initial episode. But it's implied the whole time: The cabbie considers himself a genius and resents all the people who ignored him, thinking they were smarter. The people he goes after are a businessman who's hiding a mistress from his wife, a politician, and a teenage boy. The woman in pink worked in media and had a string of adulterous lovers. Sherlock even hammers it home that the woman is exceptionally clever. The cabbie is going after the sort of people who think they're so much smarter than everyone else that they can ignore all the rules. And then he targets Sherlock...
• The whole skull-on-the-mantelpiece is played for laughs when Sherlock casually mentions that it is a "friend of [his]", then awkwardly trails off with "Well, I say friend...". The audience is probably supposed to think that it is some Noodle Incident that even Sherlock realises retelling can't end well. However, it might be a subtle hint to Sherlock's insecurities: he may not have been referring to the skull as in "the person whose skull that is", but as the skull as an inanimate object. Plenty of children talk to anthropomorphic objects like toys and stuffed animals growing up, especially those without many friends, as Sherlock is implied to be. We already know that Sherlock talks to the skull, as he later mentions that John is "filling in" for it since Mrs Hudson confiscated it; it might be that he mentions that it is a "friend" to John before remembering that most people consider talking to inanimate objects weird and immature, and tries to brush off the embarrassment by dismissing what he just said to keep up appearances in front of his new potential roommate.
• When Sherlock first meets John, he offers "I like to play the violin when I'm thinking... sometimes I don't talk for days on end... would that bother you?" as "the worst" about him. He never asks John what the worst is about him. Because he's already figured that out. He's talking to a depressed war veteran with a real injury, psychosomatic pain, and PTSD. It wouldn't be hard to deduce the sort of behaviour that might produce.
• John's enquiries into Sherlock's sexuality are hilariously awkward, but certainly well-meant. John isn't gay, but his sister is. It's probable that he's seen people treat her badly, or at least with ignorance or at arm's length, because of it. Which makes him actually going to the trouble of saying to Sherlock "if you're gay, that's perfectly fine, I'm cool with it" pretty heartwarming. Also, his suspicions that Sherlock might be gay aren't exactly a leap of logic at that point. He barely knows the guy, having only one five minute meeting and a couple of hours in knowing him. But of the people he's now met through Sherlock, and who seem to know him very well, three of them have automatically assumed that he's Sherlock's boyfriend. In the one night.
• John suggests that since the victim choked on her own vomit and hadn't apparently been drinking, she could have had a seizure, perhaps drugs. We see in the earlier sequence Sir Jeffrey Patterson in his death-throes evidently having some kind of seizure, and we know that the victims were forced to take some kind of drug, so John was dead right.
• Sherlock's comment about hubris and the "fragility of genius" explains why he tests his intellect by solving crimes rather than committing them: it allows him to be incredibly clever and then brag about it, whereas criminals can't very well flap their mouths about their evil schemes without being caught. It also makes the end of A Study in Pink a bit more heartwarming, since Sherlock chooses to protect John rather than prove to Lestrade how clever he is.
• Lestrade's "drug bust" was brilliantly played.
  • The biggest question about it is that Lestrade seems to be assuming he won't find any drugs, but what if they did find some? What then? Lestrade says the bust "stops being pretend if we find anything", but as he points out, he isn't on the drug squad and neither is anyone on his team. He's heavily implied to not have a search warrant. If they did find anything, it would be totally inadmissible as evidence in court- but Donovan and Anderson and the rest of the cops who hate Sherlock would still know about it. Sherlock doesn't want to give them any more ammunition.
  • The focus during the drugs bust is on Sherlock and whether he does or doesn't have drugs in the flat. They never do find any. You can forgive John, at least, for being slightly nervous though. Because while Lestrade is being smug and Mrs Hudson is flitting in and out in a flap and Sherlock is insulting Anderson and fielding enquiries as to whether the eyes in the microwave are human, there's John standing there amid about ten police officers with a loaded firearm concealed in his belt^note While the issue of whether John's gun is legal is never directly addressed in-universe it's extremely unlikely that the army would simply allow a soldier to keep his service pistol. It's impossible that they would allow him to do so when he'd been diagnosed with PTSD. And it's equally as impossible that anyone with known psychiatric issues would be given a concealed weapons permit or the opportunity to acquire a non-service weapon.
  • There is no such thing in the UK as a 'concealed weapons permit', nor any way to own - let alone walk around with - a smallarm.
  • As it happens, Mrs Hudson had previously confiscated that human skull of Sherlock's that used to sit on the mantelpiece. It's back by the next episode, but Lestrade's team would have had a field day with that one.
  • Lestrade protests that he didn't break into the flat. Without a search warrant (he's implied to not have one) he couldn't very well "break" in by force. But since he's known to Mrs Hudson, who was upset and wanted to know what Sherlock had done, he probably simply knocked on the door and asked her to let him and his team into 221B.
  • If Sherlock shutting down John's defence of him wasn't evidence enough that he'd at least had a past drug problem, Sherlock then declares himself to be "clean." People who have never used drugs don't use that expression- it means he used to use but doesn't right at the moment. To further back up the point, Sherlock says "I don't even smoke." But he's pulling his sleeve up to show Lestrade his nicotine patch at the time. What he means is "I don't even smoke anymore", just as he means "I don't use drugs anymore."
  • Sherlock tells Lestrade he doesn't even smoke, and rolls up his sleeve to show him the nicotine patch he's wearing. Lestrade pulls his sleeve up, showing off a similar patch, and tells him "neither do I [smoke]. So we don't smoke together." But what we're seeing isn't two people who "don't smoke", we're seeing two smokers who are in the process of weaning themselves off cigarettes. One of the unfortunate side-effects of doing so, for 99% of people, is that you become really, really frustrated and emotional, and have next to absolutely no patience or tolerance at all. The slightest provocation can make you insanely angry or ready to burst into tears. Not only does this go a long way to explain Sherlock's behaviour in this scene (he was quite mellow once he'd gotten his three-patch hit and when he was running around Soho and had forgotten about his addiction, but now the patch has lost its buzz, he's under stress from the drug bust, and he no doubt really wants a freaking cigarette. His petulant "everybody shut up!" moment seems to speak to the state of his nerves, and he's probably being genuine when he tells Anderson that he's putting him off.) But Lestrade seems to also be telling Sherlock that just then he is not in the mood to put up with any unnecessary drama either (he turns on Anderson in a way that is fairly out-of-character too.)
  • There is no indication that 221b is in fact free of recreational drugs. When John questions the possibility of Sherlock being a junkie, Sherlock says his name quietly. When John insists that Lestrade could search the flat all day and not find anything recreational Sherlock tells him that John probably wants to "shut up, now." When Lestrade asks if the flat is clean Sherlock returns the focus to him and the fact that he is clean. He never answers the question of the state of the flat.
    Sherlock: I am clean!
    Lestrade: Is your flat? All of it?
• Sherlock texts John "could be dangerous" as an incentive to get him to come to Baker Street after being ditched in Brixton. All he wanted at that point was to use John's phone because he was too lazy to go downstairs and ask to use Mrs Hudson's. John takes the "dangerous" line at face value (and why not, since he's in the middle of being kidnapped and is standing in front of Mycroft when the text comes through) and stops off at wherever he was living at the time to fetch the gun. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have had it on him to save Sherlock's life with it later. That one manipulative little text saved Sherlock's life.
• Angelo's mistaking John for Sherlock's date is a little more understandable when you see that the waiter takes them to the window seat and removes a "reserved" card from the table. Sherlock probably frequents the place alone (he seems well known to all the staff) but on this particular night, while John was getting back from his chat with Mycroft, Sherlock phoned ahead and probably for the first time ever booked a table for two. One next to the window.
• Sherlock ditching John at the Brixton crime scene was pretty thoughtless, but certainly not malicious. Given that he raced off ranting about "pink", his habit of fixating on detail and having a one-track mind, and his later habit of always assuming John is with him even when he's not even in the country at the time, it's entirely possible that it didn't even occur to Sherlock to wonder where John was until he'd found the pink case and was back at Baker Street. We see later in A Scandal in Belgravia that Sherlock has spells in his own little intellectual world and can be quite bewildered and lost coming out of them, especially if he assumes John is around and he isn't. "Could be dangerous" was deliberately placed to get John interested; Sherlock knew he'd treated him pretty poorly and supposed he needed to give John some extra incentive to come back to Baker Street. John is only back at Baker Street for five minutes when Sherlock offers to take him out for dinner, and even during a chase across the city on foot, he doesn't ditch John again.
• When John leaves Mycroft to go back to 221B, his limp seems to have vastly improved overall. When he goes to his flat to get the gun, he uses the cane to get to the desk, packs the gun, and then seems to walk back to the door without using the cane. Arriving at 221B, he takes at least three steps into the living room doorway without using the cane. (Listen for the sound effects. His step is a lot quicker and steadier than normal, and he only puts the cane on the floor as he enters the room.) He's still using the cane in this scene, but much of it is probably out of habit, and he doesn't seem to be in pain... because for most of the scene he's excited about possible danger. When he and Sherlock go out to dinner, he's able to walk with him at a pretty normal pace and he's barely leaning on the cane. (Compare that to his gait when he's trying to get home from Brixton.) There's no way this wouldn't have gone unnoticed by Sherlock.
• In The Reichenbach Fall, Sherlock tells John he doesn't care what people think. But in this episode, not only is it obvious that Sherlock cares what John thinks of him and wants him to think well of him, it's clear that he cares what John thinks about things in general. The amount of times Sherlock uses the word "think" when talking to John is astonishing. When he first blitzes John with his deductions, he says "that's enough to be going on with, don't you think?" When they look at 221B for the first time, Sherlock asks John what he thinks about his website. In the cab, when John asks him who he is and what he does, he doesn't tell him straight away- he asks "what do you think?" instead and waits for John to guess. He takes John to the Brixton crime scene because he specifically wants to know what John thinks of the body. When John gets back to 221B, Sherlock patiently takes him through his deductions about the pink case. It's after he calls John an "idiot" that he asks him if he's noticed what's missing from the suitcase, and then encourages him to think logically about what might have happened with the phone and who now has it. When they go out to dinner, instead of just thinking by talking out loud, Sherlock encourages John to also "think"- he's assuming they're solving this crime together. At no point, ever, does he ask Lestrade what he thinks. Sherlock might have called John an "idiot" in this episode, but if he truly thought John was so far beneath him intellectually, he wouldn't have spent half the episode looking to John for validation or encouraging him to "think."
  • Think about Sherlock, how he is always asking people to look at the crimes and figure it out for themselves; several times in the first episode he asked John questions meant to get him thinking—what Sherlock's job was, how did Mycroft know John? (What do people normally have, could be a sign of social awkwardness, but I doubt it). Sherlock obviously loves being smart and showing off, so why is he inviting people to think about things for themselves? He's saying to people, "This is how I have fun, come play with me." His remarks that no one ever thinks could be his way of saying "This is my world and I'm all alone in it." But, it quickly turns into a huge CMOH when he saw John, who in his own way he had been courting all through the episode by asking him to just "think", and realized not only that John had killed to save his life, but also that John had guessed all on his own who the killer was and where Sherlock would be.
• When John points out that Mycroft could have just called him on his mobile phone instead of the ridiculously elaborate lengths he goes to to have a chat with him, Mycroft makes mention that he's trying to avoid the attention of Sherlock. But Sherlock wasn't with John at the time, and since Mycroft was monitoring John at the time, he must have known that. What Sherlock could do, however, was later look at the call history of John's phone. Sherlock is tech savvy and may well know how to trace a call from a withheld number — or he may even have been able to deduce Mycroft's call from the time of the call and the fact that it was withheld. He's Sherlock Holmes, after all. Later John, on his blog, sheepishly explains to Harry that he didn't return a text from her that morning because Sherlock had confiscated his phone. (No reason for said confiscation is given.) Looks like, as with all of John's other possessions, Sherlock assumes to help himself to John's mobile phone/call history/texts if and when he feels like it.
• Angelo returns John's cane to him, telling him that Sherlock had texted him saying John had forgotten it. If, as it's implied, Sherlock and John ran all the way back to Baker Street after discussing Lestrade's stolen badge, there's no way that Sherlock could have texted Angelo any time between leaving the restaurant and arriving back at Baker Street. (Sherlock might be a genius, but even being a genius doesn't mean you can run and text at the same time.) So when did Sherlock text Angelo, exactly? While he and John were still at the restaurant, of course- well before John had rushed off and left his cane behind. Sherlock was so confident that John would react the way he did and rush off with him that he plain old pre-empted it. While at first John's recovery seems to be something that happened incidentally while they were busy hunting down a serial killer, it becomes more and more obvious that Sherlock actually planned it quite carefully.
  • Sherlock's decisions about the restaurant that night were pretty much entirely centred around John. He chose an address five minutes away, across the street from a restaurant. Why a restaurant? Sherlock doesn't eat when he's on a case, but it's fairly late by now, so it must have occurred to him that John was probably hungry (as well as tired and fed up after having been ditched at the crime scene). Not only that, but John is also broke, so Sherlock's choice of restaurant? One where the owner adores him and will provide food "on the house" (John eats for free, but isn't made to feel embarrassed by it or patronised by Sherlock offering to pay for it). Sherlock could have chosen to observe the cab from anywhere. He also points out that the cab was a "long shot anyway". Unlike the unaired pilot, here Sherlock doesn't seem to have expected to catch the murderer then and there.
• The Cabbie's talk of Sherlock's "fan" gives the impression that Moriarty at the very least gave him the all clear to attempt to kill Sherlock — but later in the series Moriarty outright says he's saving Sherlock's death for "something special". So why would he sanction the death of Sherlock as simply the fifth in a run of apparent suicides without even introducing himself first? Because this is a test. He wants to make sure Sherlock is really intelligent enough to be a worthy opponent before he begins his game, and the best way to test that is to see if he can outsmart the cabbie. Granted, it didn't go exactly as planned, but the bottom line is that Sherlock survived.
• After leaving John with Mrs Hudson to investigate the crime scene, Sherlock shortly return to invite John along. It's probably no small coincidence that between him leaving and returning, John made a loud outburst of anger, while Sherlock was still in earshot.
• In the scene at the park, John and Mike drink coffee at the same park bench Mike had been sitting at. There's a jump-cut so it's not explicitly said, but given John's disability and Mike's excitement to see his old friend again, it's heavily implied that Mike rushed off, bought them both coffee, and brought it back to where John was waiting. It's quite a lot of care and effort toward someone who he hadn't seen in years; someone who doesn't seem all that excited to see him and who has made no effort to keep in touch in recent times.
• Sherlock complains that Anderson "won't work with [him]", even though he needs an assistant. He took John because he knew John would work with him. Keep in mind that this happens before the conversation in the cab where John praises his abilities for the first time. So far, John has reacted to Sherlock's deductions by either complete disbelief, or by being very uncomfortable about them and standoffish with him.
• On the above note, Sherlock goading John into admitting that he's not just a doctor- he's a very good doctor. Sherlock had been introduced to John simply as "John Watson." Sherlock had to deduce that John was a doctor. But he introduces him to Mrs Hudson as "Dr John Watson", addresses him as "Dr Watson" in front of Lestrade (when he'd previous called him "John" as he'd rushed out the door to the crime scene- no doubt this was Sherlock's way of answering Lestrade's "who is he?" in his own good time) and a couple of times actually reminds John that he's a doctor. John's self-esteem is at an all-time low at the beginning of A Study in Pink. He's broke- and while the tremor in his hand would exclude him from the operating theatre, there's really no reason for it to have stopped him from taking up work as a GP. In fact, in The Blind Banker he proves that he's such a good doctor that he literally walks into a clinic and is hired the same afternoon by a fellow doctor who is deeply impressed with his resume and work history, and baffled that someone so patently overqualified would even want a job there. It's possible, if not probable, that John hasn't even bothered to see about locum work in A Study in Pink — something that would help alleviate the boredom and pay the rent — because he's totally lost confidence in his ability to do anything, including practice medicine.
• There's an almost blink-and-you'll-miss-it line where Sherlock deduces that it's the Californian man's first time in London because of the route the cabbie was taking him (a common fare-boosting tactic of cab drivers being to drive tourists to their destination via a long, out-of-the-way route because they're unfamiliar with the area and therefore wouldn't know any better). After learning who the killer was, we know there's another reason he took the man to his hotel via Northumberland Street.

The Blind Banker

• When John goes to Dimmock to get the diary, Dimmock starts with "That friend of yours..." John, who has just been arrested for something he didn't do thanks to Sherlock, heads him off with "Listen, whatever you say, I'm behind you 100%," and is surprised at how "mild" Dimmock's reaction of "he's an arrogant sod" is. In The Reichenbach Fall, which like The Blind Banker was written by Steve Thompson, he punches the Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard for calling Sherlock a "weirdo", which is an even milder term of disdain. Of course, John was already extremely worked up and upset at the time, so he was probably ready to snap at the slightest provocation, but it's still very much a sign of the development of his relationship with Sherlock — in The Blind Banker he's still only known Sherlock for a few weeks, so he's nowhere near as loyal as he is to him in The Reichenbach Fall.
  • It may also be a case of John responding to the nature of the insult. "Arrogant sod" is a pretty accurate description of Sherlock's behavior toward people he doesn't like (and even people he does like). "Weirdo" implies that there is something intrinsically wrong with the person being insulted. Basically, Sherlock chooses to act like an arrogant sod and so John doesn't mind people calling him on that. He can't help being weird, however, and so John takes offense.
• Sherlock tells Molly he prefers her hair parted on the side. This is probably just a line he doesn't mean, but Molly takes it at face value. She's never shown with middle-parted hair in the series ever again.
• The amount of failed attempts on Sherlock and John's life seem to be part of the total idiocy of the villains of the week, but there is a reason they're 'not really trying'. Shan is shown to be working for Moriarty, who, after seeing Sherlock is intelligent enough to survive the taxi driver incident, has decided he's going to have some fun with a worthy opponent and is probably already setting up the events of the next episode. It's unsurprising he's therefore warned everyone that Sherlock Holmes is off limits until further notice.
• When Sherlock realizes John and his girlfriend have been kidnapped, he has to look at a map to find the tramway they've been taken too. Sherlock not only has to actually find the map, but it looks like it's never been used. We know Sherlock has the area around their flat memorized from the previous episode, but that map is much bigger than that, yet Sherlock's never needed that map till now. His memory is incredible.
• Why does Sherlock open the bathroom door in Edward Van Coon's apartment flat? One might think that Sherlock is looking for clues, which he is able to use the materials in the bathroom to solve the mystery, but it also allows the audience to connect Edward Van Coon with his girlfriend.
• John introduced himself as Sherlock's "colleague" because he didn't want Sebastian to send him out of the room or shut him out of the case. Sherlock's "colleague" would be naturally expected to hear all the details and help, his "friend" could legitimately stay out of it, especially as it's a high-sensitivity case.

The Great Game

• Twice in this episode, John asks Sherlock if he's okay: once after coming home when Baker Street was bombed, and the other after Moriarty leaves at the swimming pool. Sherlock's reaction is the same in both cases: the first thing he does is a confused "hmm?" and then a brief explanation that he's fine. Sherlock clearly isn't used to having someone care enough about him to ask if he's okay after he's experienced trauma. Even Lestrade didn't seem overly worried about him when he came close to death in A Study in Pink. Sherlock's so used to being self-reliant that he's confused as to why John's even asking. Mycroft is already there at the flat after the bombing and given his admission to John in A Study in Pink that he worries about Sherlock, he probably came around with the Bruce-Partington files as a semi-cover for his being worried about the bombing. But it seems he would never actually ask Sherlock if he's okay (in part at least because he's probably worried Sherlock would snap at him/mock him for his sentiment).
• Janus Cars: "The clue's in the name." John correctly recognizes Janus as the god with two faces, but — more pertinently — he is also the god of endings and beginnings, which is exactly what Janus Cars is selling.
• When John comes into 221B to find Sherlock shooting holes at the wall, he takes the gun off him, unpacks it, and locks it up in a strongbox on the desk. You see him pocketing the key. The next time we see the gun is at Vauxhall Arches- John starts to say that he wished he'd brought it, and Sherlock pulls it out of his coat and hands it over. Sherlock later brings it to the swimming pool. So either Sherlock regularly pickpockets John for the key, or he picks the strongbox lock. Either way it's significant that he makes a point of giving John the gun at Vauxhall Arches — even Sherlock and his ego couldn't deny that John is a much better shot than he is. We've so far only seen Sherlock shooting at an actual target twice. He hit the smiley-target on the wall quite impressively — and then missed the Golem by about a billion miles, notwithstanding the flashing lights. He seems to know some impressive, badass looking tricks with a gun when given time and opportunity to plan it all out calmly, but under pressure, apparently not.
  • Which of course makes sense—Sherlock most likely learned at a shooting range or something similar, while John was a soldier.
• Lucy, Andrew West's fiancée, addresses John as "Mr Watson." Of course she would. John only ever introduces himself as "John Watson" and since he's there investigating West's death, there'd be absolutely no need for him to mention that he was a doctor.
• When Sherlock tells John to fetch him his phone out of the jacket he's wearing at the time, all he says in response to John's "where is it?" is "jacket." Instantly, an exasperated John rolls his eyes, goes over to him and non-too-gently gets the phone out of his left-hand breast pocket. In a jacket that presumably, like most men's jackets, has at least four pockets, John knew exactly which one the phone was in and went straight for it- probably because this wasn't remotely the first time Sherlock had asked him to do this.
• Mycroft asks John what Sherlock is like to live with: "hellish, I imagine?". At first it seems odd for him to ask someone what his own brother is like to live with. Doesn't he know? Perhaps not. There's about a ten year age gap and both Holmes brothers probably spent much of their childhood at boarding school, which means they may not have lived regularly with one another ever.
  • Another possibility is that he recognises that it would be hellish for a more "normal" person like John. Mycroft is, if not smarter than Sherlock, at least his intellectual equal, and his much older brother, meaning that Sherlock could hardly boss him around or belittle him to great effect. John has neither advantage, and thus has no defence against the full Sherlock Treatment.
  • Heck, seeing as Mycroft is older and more intelligent than Holmes, its entirely possible if that Sherlock acts the way he does because Myroft acted that way towards him.
• While John may have been infuriated by Sherlock's strategic drawing out of the Connie Prince case, Sherlock may have been doing it partly to help the next unknown hostage. He'd solved the first mystery, when he'd been given twelve hours, too quickly for Moriarty, who upped the ante and gave him only eight for the Ian Monkford case. He gave him twelve again for the old woman on account of it being a "funny one." Sherlock is anticipating five problems. He probably knew that if he came up with the solution to the Connie Prince case too quickly he'd be given less time on the next one. He wasn't going to make that mistake again.
• In the swimming pool scene, Sherlock initially seems to believe that John really was the mastermind of the whole thing, despite John's body language screaming "I'm not doing this of my own will but because my life is being threatened". Why did Sherlock not immediately understand that all was not as it seemed? Because John's "betrayal" shocked him so much that he didn't think of using his Sherlock scan on him.
  • When John is seen in the parka, you can see that he is blinking very rapidly. It turns out he is blinking S.O.S. in morse code.
• In the rest of the swimming pool scene:
  • Jim Moriarty stands for a moment next to a sign that says "deep end." If anyone is precariously close to going off said deep end, it would definitely be "Jim from IT".
  • There's also a "no bombing" sign present. Considering the jacket, there's an added double-meaning.
  • One of the first things Moriarty says to Sherlock is "Is that a British Army Browning L9A1 in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?" Sherlock, producing the gun, readily says "both." Which is an odd and cringeworthy thing to say, as he apparently doesn't get the double meaning behind the expression. But then, why would he? He's spectacularly ignorant of pop culture, would probably not know the name "Mae West" let alone seen any of her films, and has zero sexual experience. It would be more out of place if he did understand the sexual double entendre behind Jim's words. Also, someone as literal as Sherlock would just assume Moriarty was asking if he was finally glad to meet him after everything that had happened, even if he did recognize the reference.
  • Sherlock points out that "People have died." Why is this so important to Sherlock now, and still not to Moriarty? Because Sherlock is finally understanding just how those close to the hostages are feeling when he sees John, his only friend and one of the few people he cares for in the exact same position, with Sherlock being essentially helpless to get him out of the situation. Moriarty doesn't care since he's never had anyone close to him, or at least not close to him and put in that situation.
• Mycroft has begun to realise that the best way to get to Sherlock's reasonable side is through John. During his first conversation with Sherlock regarding the Andrew West case, he goes to give Sherlock the file, then changes his mind and gives it to John instead, talking directly to him. When blowing up Sherlock's phone with text after text doesn't get any kind of response from Sherlock at all, he starts texting John instead.
• Perhaps crosses over with [1] as well as [2]. But during the pool scene, Sherlock's mocking Moriarty by paraphrasing Jimmy Saville's television gimmick. As of recent, Jimmy Saville is very much a reputed depraved monster and has rather dark habits have been brought out into the light many times over since his death. One can't help but think that Sherlock Holmes knew of Jimmy Saville's depraved acts, knew of the twisted monster that man was (and no doubt considering that Moffat's Sherlock is a near 1:1 transplant of the original ACD Sherlock, with one of his traits being 'Knowledge of Sensational Literature – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century'). During the time of The Great Game (circa 2010), Jimmy Saville was close to death, passing away in 2011. One year before the ITV documentary was released. Sherlock was making far more deliberately deeper jabs at Moriarty than noting the superficial similarity of the two Jims.

Series Two

A Scandal in Belgravia

• Unlike the first season, which takes place over two months, A Scandal in Belgravia alone encompasses well over a year. Is it a nod to the ridiculously long real life time between seasons one and two? If so, it functions almost as an apologetic explanation of how much has been going on since we last saw Sherlock, John, etc, and brings us up to speed 18 months later.
• Before they even meet, Sherlock and Irene share a certain connection. Her introductory scene has her taking a riding crop in hand in order to do her "work". Now, what was the first we ever saw of Sherlock in this series?
• Moriarty's designating Mycroft as "The Ice Man" and Sherlock as "the Virgin" aren't just petty jabs at them: he was specifically instructing Irene on how to "play the Holmes boys." Remembering that her main target, and Moriarty's, isn't Sherlock: it's Mycroft. Moriarty (correctly) pegs Sherlock as someone who can be played by a beautiful clever woman who makes him feel special. He's under experienced, so that's part of how she plays him. Mycroft even calls him "naïve," and John is all too aware that the fact that he's apparently never had "a relationship" is part of the intense reaction he has toward Irene. On the other hand, Moriarty warned Irene that, even though he's apparently got more sexual experience than his brother (or Sherlock would have pointed this out when Mycroft mocks him for being a virgin) any attempts at seducing or manipulating Mycroft were going to be hopeless. Sherlock cares about people, despite himself, and so Irene sets out to make him care about her. Mycroft (according to Moriarty) cares about absolutely nobody- except, as Irene correctly deduces, his own little brother. The assumption Mycroft takes lack of empathy to truly frightening levels is confirmed when he seriously suggests torturing Irene, lets her go knowing someone was going to kill her, and is implied to have sanctioned the Karachi hit.
• At the time of John and Mrs Hudson's searching 221B for drugs, it's implied to still be pretty early: John has plans to go out somewhere with Jeanette, who is there for the whole thing. Molly's gone to the hospital to help out with the body. Lestrade has apparently left. He knows Sherlock has a history of drug use and "usual places". As a senior police officer, he probably wouldn't want to compromise himself and his job by being there if and when cocaine (or something else) was found in the flat. He does something similar a week later, on New Year's Eve. He asked Sherlock how many times the guy fell out of the window, and Sherlock's response isn't technically a confession that he did it. Lestrade confirms, in his own snarky way, that Sherlock is responsible, and then stops asking questions and literally walks away so he can't be seen to have helped to conceal a crime.
• When the palace employee remarks that Sherlock looks taller in his photographs, he remarks that he makes use of a "good coat and a short friend." That remark alone indicates the sheer amount of times Sherlock has been photographed with John, to the extent that a stranger might literally have no other frame of physical reference for him. Sherlock is tall but not particularly so (both Mycroft and his friend are taller), so if he'd been photographed beside a variety of other people, that would have become evident.
  • It also makes sense that the only time Sherlock would have been photographed in public would be with John.
• In the Christmas interlude, most of the characters at 221B interact with each other well- Lestrade and Molly get chatty, John's fielding what seem to be at least two conversations at once, Molly and Mrs Hudson discuss her bad hip. Sherlock might have told Lestrade quite cruelly about his cheating wife, but they're talking to one another. One of these characters is not like the others: Jeanette. The only character to talk to her apart from John is Sherlock, who insults her to her face. Everybody else flat-out pretends she's not there. Molly, who is such a darling, makes an effort to chat with everyone in the room except Jeanette, who she probably has never met before. As for John, the only person present that she seems to know well, he responds to Sherlock's insults toward Jeanette by making excuses for him, and otherwise makes no attempt at all to include Jeanette in the general conversation, or introduce her to Molly (as you'd expect that the two young women might be able to find something to talk about.) It's pretty obvious from this, as well as Jeanette's impression of a wallflower and her cold body language with her own boyfriend, that she and John were probably headed for Splitsville even if Sherlock wasn't a jerk with a drug problem. For all that they bicker and drive each other crazy, John, Sherlock, Lestrade, Molly and Mrs Hudson are really very close to one another, and Jeanette simply doesn't "belong" with that crowd.
• Sherlock realises he's overstepped the line when he reads the card on Molly's gift and realises it's for him. Nobody else in the room, except for Molly, has ever read that card or ever does read it. And yet John, Mrs Hudson, Lestrade and possibly even Jeanette all realised before Sherlock did that the card would have said something along the lines of "Dearest Sherlock, Love Molly xxx". For once, Sherlock Holmes was the last to know.
• Molly ends her message to the card with "xxx". In A Study in Pink, Sherlock had pointed out to John that the use of three kisses in text indicates a romantic attachment.
• In the sherlocked scene, Sherlock stands up, moves slowly towards Irene, leans forward, takes her hand softly and whispers in her ear that he knows about her elevated pulse. He certainly knows things about how to raise heartbeats. Of course he is talking about a few hours ago in Baker Street, but he holds her wrists at this moment too which indicates that her pulse is probably elevated again. In fact we can see that Irene is lost for a second as she lets him approach.
• Sherlock embarrassedly tries to tell John that "somebody" personalised their text alert noise on his phone for a joke. It stays that way for months. Even though he looks mortified every time it goes off, Sherlock never takes the ten seconds or so necessary to simply change the text alert noise back to something else. Why not? Because it's turning him on, on some level. And as John remarked in his blog (over Sherlock's Heroic BSOD over Irene's 'death') it's highly likely that Sherlock, having had pretty much no experience in this kind of thing before, doesn't really understand what he's feeling every time he hears the text alert noise.
  • Another component of this is that he refuses to acknowledge that the sound is affecting him in any way; to take even five seconds to change the sound or block her texts would constitute admitting that she and her noise are getting to him.
• At Buckingham Palace, after Mycroft apologises on Sherlock's behalf for turning up in nothing but a bedsheet, Mycroft's friend remarks to the effect that Sherlock must be a full-time job. He's only half right in the assumption. Sherlock is a full-time job, but not for Mycroft- for John (who befriends, protects and assists him) and Mrs Hudson (who feeds, clothes and shelters him.)
• Sherlock might be a virgin partly because he chooses not to get involved in sentiment, but also because, on some level, sex scares him. (Probably because that sort of thing is likely to mess with his intellect/deductive faculties, but there may be deeper and much more personal reasons for this.) Mycroft assumes that sex "alarms" Sherlock (and Sherlock says it doesn't in the voice of one who doth protest far too much) and Irene assumes that seeing her naked has given Sherlock a "fright." (Presumably she's already been in contact with Jim and has heard Sherlock referred to as "The Virgin.") Remember that Mycroft is unlikely to be wrong about Sherlock: he's his brother, has known him all his life, and can Sherlock Scan better than Sherlock can. And Irene, as well as being able to Sherlock Scan as well (of sorts) is a professional sex worker with a gift for knowing what makes people tick and what they "like." Sherlock is definitely not comfortable being alone with Irene, probably because he's feeling sexually intimidated. His "fright" is over once John returns from Irene's kitchen, and he's confident enough to get close to Irene in the "Sherlocked" scene because Mycroft is there. When he and Irene have the "Coventry" conversation, he seems alarmed at first that John isn't there, and then watch his body language when she asks if he's ever "had anyone"...
  • On a similar note, during the above-mentioned scene Sherlock tries to cover how awkward he's feeling by projecting onto John with "I don't think John knows where to look." Irene, seeing through this, promptly puts him in his place with "No, I think he knows exactly where." Sherlock is behaving like a kid trying to look cool in front of the Coolest Kid (Irene) by trying to gang up against John. He tries it again with the reference to "If I wanted to look at naked women, I'd borrow John's laptop" with the implied meaning of "I would never bother with the sort of puerile things John and his lesser mind are interested in." He's immediately corrected- by John, this time- with "you do borrow my laptop." In many ways, Sherlock is the odd man out in this scene, not third-wheel John Watson.
• Despite John being the one who was sent out on location to trudge around a muddy field with his laptop, so that Sherlock could solve the crime in the comfort of his own home, Sherlock never tells John the solution to the case of the hiker with the bashed in head. Or at least, if he did it's never shown. Sherlock and Mycroft agree that the solution was simple, but they don't explain it, and when Sherlock begins to explain it to Irene, he actually sends John out of the room before doing so. On top of this, Sherlock describes Irene, to her face, as "moderately clever" when even in the following episode, John's mind has recently been upgraded to merely "average." No wonder John was so jealous of Irene.
• Sherlock's wildly out of character "Laterz" at Buckingham Palace is not only a passive-aggressive sign of contempt (and parting shot at Mycroft, who almost got him to behave himself)- it may also refer to Sherlock's secret guilty pleasure of watching what John freely admits in The Great Game to be "crap telly," or to the decidedly middle-class origins of the "young female person" whose photographs he is to retrieve.
• If Irene had been wearing clothes in her first meeting with Sherlock and John (and depending on the shape/fabric of said clothes) Sherlock may not have been able to deduce her measurements, or guessed them wrong. Irene's "battle dress" literally saved all their lives- or at least John's.
• That CIA guy that messes with Mrs Hudson and finds himself thrown out the window was also the guy at Irene's, who Mycroft casually threw into Sherlock's path- the one who coldly ordered John to be killed unless Sherlock told him the code to the safe. While in hindsight it seems fairly likely that this was a bluff, and Sherlock's rage and revenge is primarily for Mrs Hudson, Sherlock no doubt hasn't forgotten to pay him back for the threat to John's life. In the aforementioned scene this guy also threatened Irene, and Sherlock has just found out that she's not dead.
• Sherlock tells Mycroft, regarding an indiscreet MOD worker, that he should screen his MOD workers more carefully. In the previous episode, much was made of the case of a 27 year old MOD worker who despite being lower down in the echelons of the ministry somehow was given access to a top secret missile plan. And then was allowed to leave work with it in his possession on a memory stick. And then went to his own engagement party with it in his pocket, got raving drunk, and had it stolen by his drug-dealing future brother-in-law. Sherlock may have missed the point in that particular conversation, as Mycroft swiftly tells him, but he was damn right about the MOD and their apparently very lax security measures!
• In the latter twenty minutes or so of the episode, the connection between "007" and "Bond" becomes crucial. Something about "007" triggers a connection in Sherlock's brain, but for someone who just solved a code in under five seconds, he takes a surprisingly long amount of time to "get it" and connect it to the name "Bond." We're never told in-episode how he suddenly makes the connection. But if you go to the tie-in blogs, you can see that, nearly a year before, John had made him sit down and watch his very first Bond film. He'd been disparaging at first, but had quickly become totally enthralled with it. He had only a very passing acquaintance with the name "James Bond" prior to that and probably didn't know about the 007 part. And those posts have been there for well over a year, making it possible that they were written well before the episode was. It's never mentioned in the context of the film how someone like Sherlock would have any knowledge of lowbrow spy films.
  • John even unintentionally gives him a hint in the actual scene. He says it as "double-oh seven". Sherlock, being less pop-culture savvy, had seconds before read out the same numbers out as "zero zero seven."
  • Mycroft presumably felt free to say "Bond air is go, check with the Coventry lot" in front of his little brother because he assumed Sherlock was so ignorant of pop culture that he would never connect "Bond" with "007" in a million years (and possibly wouldn't get "Coventry" either.) He vastly underestimates, then, what months in the company of his "live-in ordinary person" has done to Sherlock.
• When John is taken to the Battersea Power Station, thinking its Mycroft again, he complains "can't we just meet in a cafe?" Although he doesn't know it, he hasn't been abducted by Mycroft, as he assumes, and Mycroft knows nothing about it. Still, when Mycroft does have a chat with him at the end of the episode, he chooses... a cafe.
• When John punches Sherlock, he flinches in pain and has obviously either skinned or bruised his knuckles doing so. It's the only pain either of them show, even though they both get punched in the face. Irene later points out that John was surprisingly careful with Sherlock, given that it appeared at the time that he really went to town on him, but he wasn't careful about lining up his knuckles to avoid damaging them. Typical for him, John actually hurt himself more than he hurt Sherlock.
• Given that Mycroft offered a dangerous case to Sherlock in this episode (assuming he'd be able to dodge the CIA with no problems), it's possible that Mycroft's "worrying about him, constantly" doesn't mean he's worried at all about Sherlock running around London risking his life solving murders. No, when he offered to bribe John, what he really wanted to know was whether Sherlock was still using drugs. He's worried about his brother being an addict.
• There's a real contrast between both Moffat episodes, Study and Scandal.
  • What was an absolutely funny, ridiculous "drugs bust" in Study becomes a deadly serious attempt at avoiding a drugs bust in Scandal. In Study, John and Mrs Hudson watch in some confusion as the police raid the place searching for Sherlock's drug stash. In Scandal, they're the ones who are searching for Sherlock's drug stash.
  • At the power station, assuming he's speaking to Mycroft at the time, John starts up with "He's writing sad music. Doesn't eat. Barely talks, only to correct the television. I'd say he was heartbroken, but he's Sherlock. He does all that anyway..." From absolutely refusing to "spy on" Sherlock for money in A Study in Pink, John's now volunteering what Sherlock is "up to" to Mycroft before he even asks for that information, as well as rifling through Sherlock's belongings with Mrs Hudson — not for money, but out of concern.
• Regarding Sherlock's mysterious "sock index:" This is generally seen as a throwaway line sprinkled with a nice mixture of Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, Noodle Implement and obvious Crowning Moment Of Funny. Yet this becomes much more understandable when one remembers that throughout the years the character of Sherlock Holmes has been consistently diagnosed with Aspberger's Syndrome. If so, disruption of one of his perfectly arranged systems would be highly distressing to him.
• When Sherlock (deliberately) addresses Jeanette as "Sarah", John jumps in and explains "he's not good with names." Not only does this make it sound like Sherlock isn't being an asshole on purpose, thus not really taking sides between Sherlock and Jeanette, it's also a well-played put-down of Sherlock. He's a genius with a mind palace and almost eidetic memory, someone whose entire self esteem hangs on his being clever, so a claim that he's actually so absent-minded that he can't remember the name of his best friend's girlfriend would have stung. Of course, John might have won the battle, but Sherlock won the war by retorting that the only possible way he could remember Jeanette was by "process of elimination."
• Moriarty's ringtone is "Stayin' Alive", which goes off when Irene phones him at the swimming-pool, causing him to call his snipers off and leave. Considering Sherlock's "plan" was seemingly to shoot the bomb-jacket and take the whole building down, the ringtone (and call) were the distraction that lets Moriarty and Sherlock, well, stay alive.
• In the scene at Buckingham Palace, Mycroft's friend tells John his employer reads his blog, and particularly liked the story about "The Aluminium Crutch." If you read John's write-up of the case on his tie-in blog, you can see that nearly the whole entry is comprised of a word-for-word writeup of a couple of epic voicemails that Sherlock sent John. (It's pretty funny in and of itself.) John wasn't even there, he was on a date. The compliment is therefore Sherlock's- or at least, can be equally shared between Sherlock and John, who took the trouble to type it up. Brings more significance to the "I-told-you-so" look John throws to Sherlock.
  • Going back to the "my employer reads your blog" bit, it's quite obvious that the man works for the royal family. The royal family reads his blog.
• Sherlock, on first seeing Irene's photograph, had to admit he knew nothing about her whatsoever. Mycroft tells him he should have been paying more attention, because she'd recently been in a high-profile sex scandal involving a prominent novelist and their spouse. In The Great Game, Sherlock had specifically said he didn't care "who's sleeping with who." If he'd brushed up on his society gossip, he may not have underestimated Irene the way he initially does.
• A Scandal in Belgravia is all about Sherlock becoming more fallibly human. It deals with his loyalties, emotions and sexuality (or lack thereof.) But one aspect that's always present but never made obvious is that it deals with Sherlock being as fallible, physically, as everyone else. There is no scene in the entire last series of Sherlock showing him eating (though he tells Mrs Hudson in A Study in Pink that he might need some food and presumably goes out to dinner after the episode's events are over.) There's no instance of him sleeping, either; even the location of his bedroom isn't shown until A Scandal in Belgravia. In A Scandal in Belgravia, he's shown both eating and drinking. (In one scene he opens Mrs Hudson's fridge without comment, helps himself to a mince pie, and talks with his mouth full.) The infamous bedsheet scene begins with him rolling out of bed after presumably being there asleep all night; he's also drugged and shown to be just as susceptible to it as everyone else is. Also, when you punch him, he bleeds. It's all very cleverly woven to enrich the depiction of his character and his frail humanity.
• When Sherlock cruelly cuts down Molly on Christmas Eve, he makes a particularly horrible remark about "the size of her mouth and breasts." It seems out of place for Sherlock to comment on Molly's breasts, considering that he's not interested much in Irene's and the episode really emphasises that. But then, as someone who is extremely sexually inexperienced and deeply repressed, Sherlock's entire knowledge of sexuality and reproduction is probably anthropological/psychological. From that point of view, the males of the human species are attracted to women with luscious, full lips (supposedly suggests sexual health) and large breasts (suggests good breeding stock.) He's therefore judging Molly because she doesn't fit up to textbook ideals of what women should look like, and completely ignoring personal taste and preference, because he has no personal taste or preference in that respect. Contrast with Lestrade and John. When Molly took her coat off, John burst out with "Holy Mary!" and Lestrade's jaw dropped as he got out "... Wow." Neither John nor Lestrade would have been passing judgment on the size of Molly's mouth or breasts; all either of them saw was a pretty woman in a nice outfit, and probably it never occurred to either of them to nitpick the details. It's the difference between viewing attraction and sexuality from experience and personal involvement, and viewing it from the outside as something other people do. How many naked women has Sherlock seen, outside of (mostly John's) porn and a bunch of cadavers? Probably, one: Irene. He really doesn't have a whole lot of variety by which to judge what perfectly normal, healthy, living, non-augmented women actually look like, with one woman, who does have the "measurements" of a traditionally ideal woman, and who at the time of meeting him had luscious, full lips painted "blood" red.
• At first, Sherlock's motivation for attacking poor Molly isn't clear. However, moments before he starts his tirade, Molly jokes that Sherlock was complaining about John going to see Harry. She was teasing Sherlock in a friendly way, but (being Sherlock) he reacts by lashing out — but in his mind, all he's doing is finding something to tease her about. Once he opens the card, he realizes what an ass he's being and that he's crossed the line.
• In the scene where John and Irene meet, and Irene reads out some of the texts she's sent Sherlock. If you watch the end, they all come up on the screen. She stops reading aloud one short of the message she sent which read "John's blog is hilarious. I think he likes you more than I do." Which is exactly the conversation she and John proceed to have.
• Sherlock asking John to let him have Irene's camera-phone at the end of "Scandal in Belgravia" is obviously confirming for John and the viewers that Sherlock cared for Irene. Going deeper, when Sherlock explains to John about his first Sherlock Scan of the series (Sherlock analysing John's cellphone) Sherlock deduces that John's sibling must have left their partner because "people tend to keep things [for] sentiment" if they are left by a partner — Sherlock keeping Irene's phone could be seen as this. The last conversation Sherlock had with Irene was one about how she "lost" the "game" because "sentiment [is] a trait found in the losing side", but it seems Sherlock isn't devoid of the trait he despises. This is possibly also a reference to the fact that in the original story "A Scandal in Bohemia" Holmes asks to keep the photograph of Irene.
  • Sherlock asks John for the phone. John starts to tell him no — and Sherlock, who earlier told Irene "I never beg", says, very quietly, "Please."
• During the Christmas sequence, Sherlock in part uses the red wrapping paper on Molly's gift and her red lipstick to deduce that the man she was giving the gift to was someone she was sexually attracted to. A few seconds later, he gets Irene's text telling him of her own gift on the mantelpiece. Wrapped in red paper. Like the blood-coloured lipstick Irene had been wearing the first (and at that point, the only) time she and Sherlock had met. There's a shot of Irene's mouth/lipstick. It takes Sherlock a few more months to figure out the implications of something he just said about Molly, and apply it to Irene. It seems Sherlock is good at deducing/interpreting how others interact with each other, but he's spectacularly blinded to these things when they apply to himself.
• Also during the Christmas scene, when Sherlock humiliates John by calling Jeanette "Sarah" and then revealing that she's the last of a long line of girlfriends that John's had over the past ten months or so, he asks "who was after the boring teacher?" Jeanette, unimpressed, mutters "nobody," implying that she's the "boring teacher".
• Also during the Christmas sequence, Mrs Hudson tells Molly that it's the one night of the year that "the boys have to be nice to me, so it's always worth it." Sherlock is apparently a man of his word, because Mrs Hudson is the only person he doesn't insult and humiliate that night.
  • In later episodes Sherlock makes pointed remarks about Mrs Hudson's drinking even though here she's a bit tiddly.
• When Sherlock tells Irene that he doesn't have the phone, John suggests that Molly and the homeless network help them out by retrieving this priceless piece of international security. It's brushed aside because it turns out that it isn't needed, but even at that point there's a hint that Molly isn't just the silly lovelorn girl she's frequently been portrayed as: she's smart and reliable and loyal and brave and resourceful, and someone Sherlock would be able to trust.
• Sherlock has loved ones; John, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, Mycroft. Irene by on-screen evidence has nobody she really cares about until Sherlock comes along, and she both loses, and thinks that he hates her (look at these facial expressions), until he saves her burqa, so to speak. Who's sadder, really?
• Regarding how quickly Sherlock figured out the password at the end; the information he was originally working from was "she knew she was dying and wanted me to crack the password" versus at the end when he knows "she knew she would live and didn't want me to crack the password". Given how he usually figures out passwords (by guessing what someone would have used from what he knows about them) it's not surprising this has a huge effect on his ability to deduce Irene's password.
• Irene, upon meeting Sherlock, starts with an approach that would have just about any normal man tumbling into her lap. All she succeeds in doing is confusing Sherlock. Then she switches to the intellectual approach, which was probably originally planned for later on in the programme. So she loves control, and in her first meeting with Sherlock, she learns her normal methods of manipulating people aren't going to work.
• The reason Sherlock knew where Irene was and created a plan on how to save her was because he'd been keeping tabs on her ever since she pleaded for help when he cracked her phone code.
• Ultimately, what gives Sherlock his eureka-moment and enables him to guess the pass-code for the phone? Irene taunting him about being a virgin. If she'd kept her mouth shut, she may well have gotten away with it.
• Jeanette tells John that his devotion to Sherlock is heartwarming when Sherlock can't even remember her name. The thing is, it's fairly clear that Sherlock can remember it. Sarah hadn't been in the picture for nearly an in-universe year, is totally different to Jeanette, and once Sherlock had gotten in the insult about her being the "boring teacher" he easily came up with her name. Seconds after Jeanette says this to John, he confuses her with "the last one"- a dick move that gets him dumped on the spot and which is played as a genuine mistake on his part. Sherlock can keep perfect track of John's girlfriends- John himself can't.
• When Molly tells Sherlock in the lab that "we all do silly things", he responds with "Yes- they do, don't they? Very silly." She said that we all do silly things, but Sherlock changes the tense as if she'd said people do silly things. Because Sherlock is arrogant enough to exclude himself from ever having done silly things. "They" do. "He" doesn't. On the other hand, he says "They do, don't they," not "You do, don't you." Which would have been more natural for both Sherlock and the grammatical circumstances. It might be significant that while he's excluding himself from silly humans, he brought her into the bubble with him.
• Mycroft looks so taken aback and confused when his telling Mrs Hudson to "shut up" doesn't go over very well with Sherlock, John or Mrs Hudson herself. Word of God more or less spells out in the commentary of A Scandal In Belgravia that Mycroft and Sherlock come from Old Money. The "Sherlocked" scene, as well as a couple of earlier ones including Mycroft's HBSOD, apparently take place in Mycroft's home, which the writers speculate is actually the Holmes "ancestral pile." The reason Mycroft may have been so dismissive of Mrs Hudson, and then shocked when called on it, may lie in Mrs Hudson's claim to not be Sherlock and John's housekeeper, but then behaving like their housekeeper anyway. In Mycroft (and Sherlock's) upbringing, it was probably perfectly acceptable to speak to "the help" in that fashion. Mycroft doesn't understand that to Sherlock and John, Mrs Hudson isn't just their housekeeper or "the help", she's their surrogate mother.
• Mycroft and Sherlock have a conversation in a morgue corridor about how "caring is not an advantage"; Mycroft tells Sherlock there's nothing wrong with not caring about people. But then the two brothers part ways with Sherlock wishing Mycroft a Merry Christmas, and Mycroft in turn wishing him a Happy New Year. They're both "guilty" of caring, even if this comes out in odd ways or isn't extended to every soul they know. Indeed, throughout the entire series it's all but stated that Mycroft does care deeply about his "baby brother," he just doesn't know how to express it in a healthy way. Even this warning could be interpreted as him trying to protect his brother from getting hurt.
  • Mycroft may be claiming that he doesn't care about people, but watch his face when he first sees the "bashed up" face on the corpse Sherlock has just identified. Sherlock's face doesn't change in the least, but Mycroft looks briefly perturbed.
• Walking the line between Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror- when Sherlock calls Lestrade about the break-in and the burglar, it's fully light outside. By the time the police and ambulance actually arrive, it's much later, and completely dark. It seems that once he'd been reassured that Mrs Hudson and John were both fine, Lestrade made no effort at all to hurry sending the ambulance over. He also doesn't pursue the issue, even knowing full well that Sherlock has just nearly killed someone. Lestrade seems to have more in common with Sherlock than you'd first think. He's fond of Mrs Hudson and of John, and probably completely supported Sherlock badly injuring someone who would threaten or hurt them.
  • Furthermore, on the phone call, Sherlock says that the agent was injured when he "fell out a window", and when Lestrade asks "how many times?" Sherlock responds that he "lost count". It's unlikely that even Holmes would be able to throw a man from a window and drag him back inside multiple times without being witnessed, thus implying that Holmes beat the living piss out of the guy and then threw him out the window.
• It may seem strange how Sherlock deduced Irene's attraction to him through her physiological cues when Molly has been all but throwing herself at him and yet he didn't notice until this very episode. However, Sherlock always seems to think faster whenever he's under duress, whether it be a time limit, a kiss, or anger.
• There was a lot of flak over Irene Adler being a high-class dominatrix in this episode, believing that it's degrading to have a brilliant character reduced to sex work. It is true that the original Irene Adler's former profession was as an operatic contralto (a seemingly much more dignified profession), but in the Victorian Era, a woman in the performing arts (be she an actress, singer, dancer, or in Irene's case, a former opera singer) was considered to be no better than a prostitute.
• There are two times when Sherlock gets the upper hand dealing with Irene Adler and in both he somehow involves or at least mentions John while he neither is present nor has any significant role. It shows either John's high position in Sherlock's mind or Sherlock's particular interest to impress John above all people.
  • First when he has deciphered the email and John has left him alone with Irene (who has some potential intentions to have Sherlock right on the desk) for a couple of hours and what Sherlock does is talking to John who is not there and totally ignoring the presence of the woman.
  • The second time is when Sherlock has deduced the password during which only Mycroft and Irene are present. He begins his deduction with mentioning what John Watson believes about love in his (Sherlock's) opinion and then goes to explain his true one (which is so brilliant and so scientific).
• When Sherlock thought Irene was dead, he was obviously going through a serious grief reaction ("He doesn't eat, barely talks"); but shortly after learning that she was alive, we saw him making teasing conversation in Mrs Hudson's kitchen ("England would fall!") while raiding her refrigerator. John later asks, "So, she's alive then. How are we feeling about that?" — but he already has his answer.
• What Irene achieved with Sherlock is quite remarkable, aside from beating the great detective with a whip and having the privilege to flirt at him over messages; she was the woman, who kissed him when he was out in bed, slept in his bed wearing his cloths and had his intense grief — a sentiment after all — over her fake death. And finally she was the losing opponent that he considered not boring to save from a deserved ending.
• Look carefully at the sequence of events surrounding Phil's visit to Baker Street. He arrives unexpectedly; Mrs Hudson shouts towards the staircase and upwards, towards John's bedroom, "Boys! You've got another one!" Later we see Sherlock dressed entirely in a bedsheet, handling the case via John and Skype — but Phil is still in the flat. Obvious conclusion: either Sherlock was dressed when Phil arrived and stripped to his skin while a client was there, or Sherlock was in John's bedroom in a state of complete undress.
  • Or it could just be that tilting the head back means the voice will carry further.
• On first watching the scene where Irene seems to be winning, you might think that Sherlock feels hurt when she says that Moriarty calls him "the Virgin" and then adds that Moriarty's "her kind of man". It takes another viewing to realize that this is when he finally puts all the fragments of the puzzle together. She can't refuse herself the enjoyment (remember, she's a dominatrix) of humiliating him by addressing his lack of sexual experience and praising his archenemy, despite the fact that she has seemingly already won. Just the kind of person who could not refuse herself the thrill of knowing that the precious password is there in plain sight, all this with her life being at stake. Then there's of course the big hint that she can't help herself making erotic allusions.
• Irene tells Sherlock that any disguise is inevitably a self-portrait.
  • Moriarty's first disguise was as a gay guy with intentions toward Sherlock. As it turns out, Moriarty is fixated with Sherlock but probably not in a sexual way, but was enjoying the absurd nature of literally flirting with your enemy.
  • He also pretends, during The Reichenbach Fall, to be an actor Sherlock payed to act like a master criminal, who fears that Sherlock will turn on him for "revealing Sherlock's plan". We can guess that Moriarty actually fears Sherlock and/or Moriarty plays up his villain act because Sherlock is around.
  • Irene also pretends to be interested in Sherlock as a disguise, and this time there are romantic undertones harboured under the guise.
  • Sherlock is dressed as a priest or vicar of some description. Probably a Catholic one, given the snide comments by Mycroft and Irene in that episode.
  • When we see John lie, it is generally a slight bending of the truth. In "Scandal" we get "I'm a doctor, I saw it [the attack on Sherlock] all happen." In "Hound" we get John pulling rank, when someone questions the validity of Sherlock's pass (one he stole from Mycroft). If we missed it elsewhere, it's showing us how honest John is.
    • John has proved himself the master of telling the truth so it sounds like something it isn't. After all, in the Belgravia example, he is a doctor, and he did see it all happen (because he did it!). In the Baskerville example, in the entire tour he never once tells a lie, even addressing Sherlock as "Mr Holmes." He also rolls with Sherlock's lie about having had a bet with him, by saying that the guys in the pub said that Fletcher had seen the monster (they had, indeed, told him that.)
    • The only time we see John outright lie is in "Scandal" when he tells Sherlock Irene Adler is with a witness protection scheme in America, after Mycroft told John she was beheaded in Pakistan. He lies very badly, small wonder he's mastered the art of twisting the truth. However, the fact that he hangs onto the hope that Sherlock (who can probably read him better than anyone) won't notice his lie shows how desperate he is for Sherlock to avoid dealing with Irene's death all over again. Not that he has to yet.
• Molly's appearance at the Christmas party seems glaringly out of character, but it works in the scene; because it seems in her mind, Christmas Eve was the time to bring herself to Sherlock's attention at last. She must have gone to a ridiculous amount of trouble with her appearance, may have spent weeks agonising over the right outfit, and we never even see what Sherlock's gift was. She's so made up and dressed up that when she takes her coat off, she looks like she's rather uncomfortable. She apparently decided that who she actually is wasn't good enough to please Sherlock, so she went all-out to dress herself up into someone she isn't to get his attention. And Sherlock? He still ignored her. And then, when he stopped ignoring her, he mocked her appearance. There's really no lower blow on the appearance front than mocking a girl for the size of her breasts. Sherlock also takes a potshot at her "small" mouth, too. He's been making nasty remarks about her mouth for an in-universe year, if not more, and once told her that he preferred her with lipstick on. She's wearing lipstick. He not only still mocks the size of her mouth, he calls her a tramp for wearing red lipstick. Later, at the morgue, we see her with her hair down, her makeup scrubbed off, and wearing an adorkable Christmas sweater.
  • The same scene is a bit of a Fridge Tearjerker for what it says about Sherlock. This is the man who can tell a person's life story by looking at their shoelaces. It takes him about five seconds to figure out that Molly is trying to impress a man she is seriously interested in, yet despite the fact that she's never exactly been subtle about her crush, it never even crosses his mind that it could be him. What can we deduce from that about the poor guy's self esteem?
• A possible reference in the fact Sherlock was baffled by seeing Irene naked: a book on alleged hidden meanings in the Sherlock Holmes stories was titled Naked Is the Best Disguise.
• "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" is an odd choice for Sherlock; Mrs Hudson's appreciative, tipsy comments imply that she'd specifically asked him to play, and he was obliging her (though he flat-out refused to wear the reindeer antlers.)
  • Molly accidentally lets slip that Sherlock was "complaining" about John spending Christmas Day with his sister. Complaining? Sherlock nowhere else appears to have ever met Harry, let alone have a problem with her personally, indicating the reason he was complaining is because he wanted to spend Christmas with John. Presumably, he's now gonna have to spend it with... Mycroft. Or perhaps even on his own, as he and Mycroft wish each other a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year that evening, as if they weren't intending to see each other again over the holiday season. If Mrs Hudson also spends Christmas Day elsewhere, leaving Sherlock on his own for the day, and Sherlock is complaining about not spending the day with John, that's a borderline Tear Jerker.
• When asked by John why he doesn't trust the Secret Service to handle Irene Adler's photographs, Mycroft dryly explains that "they all spy on people for money." Mycroft trusts John because he remembers what happened when John was given the opportunity to do the same.
• The Great Game, Sherlock asks if caring about victims will help save them, to which even John admits that it won't, thus Sherlock remarks that he'll continue not to make that mistake. When John is held at gunpoint, Sherlock is adamant that he has no idea what the code is. What motivates him to work it out, along with Irene giving him the clue, is the fact that John is three seconds away from being murdered. Because he cared, he was able to save John's life. If John had meant nothing to him and thus he'd had no real interest in figuring out the code then John would be dead.
  • Because he cared, or because that's the dramatic thing? Watson, in "The Sign of Three", says, "You're not a detective, you're a drama queen.", in effect saying Holmes has a compulsion to cut it fine.
• We see Sherlock's bedroom for the first time in this episode, and it's neat and tidy—compared to the rest of the flat, it is downright immaculate. The kitchen is a mess by necessity, since it's a chemistry lab/body part storage area most of the time, and the living room is generally a tornado zone. But later on in the episode, he tells John not to disturb his sock index, and his personal appearance is always rather polished. Perhaps some of the untidiness in the more public spaces is an exaggeration: since Sherlock meets with clients in the living room, he's presenting himself as the eccentric, unpredictable detective that they are expecting. Or John's natural fastidiousness has rubbed off on Sherlock.

The Hounds of Baskerville

• The name of the episode puts the word "hounds" plural- it might be assumed the biggish dog bought by the pub owners and the vision everyone puts on it. Actually, those hounds are one and the same -fear and stimulus. The other hound is the one in the lab John only sees because Sherlock told him to.
• In The Sign of Three, Mrs Hudson tells John she was more upset about her husband cheating with other women (a lot of them, apparently) than about him running a drug cartel. She said she had no idea he was cheating. Sherlock must have known this, which makes his outing Mr Chatterjee as a cheater as simultaneously a bit heartwarming (he's trying to warn her before she gets in too deep) and horrible (he's such a dick about it, to a woman he knows has suffered deeply from being cheated on before.)
• When Lestrade shows up in Grimpen, John addresses him by his first name. This may not just be a gag (we finally learn the first name of a man ACD didn't even bother to give a first name to) and a demonstration that John and Lestrade seem to have a friendship outside of Sherlock (who doesn't know his name is Greg.) Lestrade has just mysteriously shown up in Grimpen with a heavy suntan, wearing casual(ish) clothing and sunglasses indoors. He's clearly not on duty or, if he's there as a police officer, it may have occurred to John that he might be undercover. Which makes it rather horrifying that the deductive genius who is Sherlock Holmes very loudly addresses him not as "Lestrade" but as "Inspector," as well as helpfully tacking on words like "spy" and "incognito." If Lestrade had been undercover during something important, Sherlock could have got him killed or, at the least, ruined the whole operation by outing him as a police officer in the most blatant way possible. It's only after learning that Mycroft sent Lestrade that John comments on him being a detective from Scotland Yard.
• In A Scandal in Belgravia, Sherlock tells Irene that he's never begged for mercy in his life. Although Irene was talking about begging for mercy in a BDSM kind of way, Sherlock seems to have meant he'd never begged for mercy about anything, and he probably hasn't. Now we see Sherlock go straight from demanding John get him some cigarettes to pathetically begging him- "Tell me where they are, please... please... I'll let you know next week's lottery numbers!"
• By this episode, Sherlock seems to have realised that John will probably never have his deductive observation skills, and he- in turn- will probably never have John's people skills. They seem to have worked out an actual strategy about this, and it's used no less than three times in-episode: on first arriving at the pub, in the Baskerville base, and just before the 'mind palace' sequence. That is: Sherlock looks, John talks. At the pub, John manages to get as much info as possible about the Grimpen Minefield while Sherlock snoops around the premises. In the Baskerville base, John is the one asking most of the questions while Sherlock trails behind looking about. And while Sherlock is testing the sugar, John manages to get Stapleton, who had earlier refused to tell Sherlock anything about her work at Baskerville, to talk about all sorts of incredibly unethical experiments, including human cloning, and to make a full confession about Bluebell the rabbit. It's worth noting that when Sherlock attempts to do the talking, it frequently ends in disaster. He makes a terrible mess of talking to Dr Stapleton in the Baskerville base, arousing a serious amount of suspicion (they would have been caught anyway once the security breach came in, but Sherlock's questions are that incompetent, and show such ignorance of the Official Secrets Act, that Stapleton laughs at him in disbelief). He also manages to immediately put Fletcher on the defensive so that he refuses to have a normal conversation with him, prompting the need for the pretend bet.
• Sherlock comments early in the episode that people who don't believe in coincidence lead "dull lives." He's referring to the fact that he just happened to come across Kirsty Stapleton's mother. Later in the episode, his efforts to deduce where the drug was failed (initially), because he didn't factor in that John would be coincidentally dosed with it, from a source that Sherlock at that point wasn't even aware of, at more or less the same time that Sherlock had attempted to drug his coffee. That he and John could have been coincidentally drugged in quite different ways never seems to occur to him.
• Remember when Sherlock told Lestrade that his wife was sleeping with a PE teacher? Guess who's not wearing a wedding ring.◊ Guess who's in fact very obviously not wearing a wedding ring any more.
• When Sherlock and John are leaving for Dartmoor, they see Mrs Hudson arguing with the man she's been "after" and who Sherlock had revealed had a wife already. John says wryly "looks like Mrs Hudson finally got to the wife in Doncaster." The conversation between the three of them, where Sherlock had told Mrs Hudson about the wife in Doncaster in quite a cruel way, is implied to have happened the day before. Finally? The word heavily implies that although Sherlock thought he was the only one who knew about the wife in Doncaster, John did as well- or at least suspected. Only he didn't tell Mrs Hudson about her in such a brutal, tactless way. It puts an extra spin on John's horrified "Sherlock!" when Sherlock blurts out the news. He wasn't scolding Sherlock for knowing about it, after all, he was trying to get across that all because you know something doesn't mean you have to share it.
• Once Sherlock is out on the moors and has his experience in seeing "the hound", he goes to pieces and his reasoning skills are put to the test. The point he makes, and he's correct, is that emotion clouds his abilities (and that's why he tries to not get emotions involved.) This is neatly demonstrated much earlier than this, though, way back when he's tearing through 221B like a whirlwind desperate for his cigarettes. He's Sherlock Holmes, and John Watson is the most transparent liar in the world. If he'd calmed down instead of getting angry and aggressive, he'd have no doubt found the cigarettes inside of three seconds flat. They weren't exactly cunningly hidden, and he can read John like a book by now. Plus, there's the issue of outside stimuli/drugs. Sherlock might like the idea that he was acting so out of character because of a drug, as if his mind in its pristine drug-free condition was perfect. But in the opening scenes in Baker Street Sherlock's moods are going crazy- and his judgment is off- because he hasn't got access to a drug he's addicted to.
• There's another remark made in those scenes that comes back in a surprising way. John orders Sherlock to apologise to Mrs Hudson for upsetting her. Sherlock responds that he envies John. While he turns this into a typical Sherlock insult about John's mind being "placid, straightforward, and barely used", throughout the rest of the episode we see that Sherlock, in a way, really does envy the way John's mind works. John is straightforward; Henry describes him as exactly that. When he sees the need to apologise, he does; when he sees the hound, he has no qualms with bursting out with "I was wrong", when he discusses the issue with Sherlock later, he points out with no shame that he was "terrified" and "scared to death." Sherlock on the other hand suffers a great deal in the episode because he can't just apologize when he's hurt people, he can't freely admit that he was wrong, and he can't bring himself to properly express ordinary human emotions like fear. The scenes in Baker Street at first glance seem to be funny banter before the story gets underway, but many important themes are laid out very clearly there.
• After the night at the inn, Sherlock is trying to apologise to John in his own weird way — by making John feel appreciated. He compares John to a "conductor of light", but before that, the first thing he exclaims is "You are amazing! Fantastic!" Sound familiar? He's effectively repeating John's first compliments back at him, which shows that he's trying to exercise some rudimentary, primitive form of empathy: He wants to compliment John, isn't sure how to do it, so chooses the things that made him feel good when he heard them, assuming that John would appreciate them as well. It really shows how much Sherlock was impacted by John's acceptance of him back in the first episode, as well.
• Some of the fanbase complains that Sherlock acts too emotional and manic in Baskerville, clashing with what was previously established of his character. But remember the influence he's under in that episode: Going cold turkey on cigarettes, and a hallucinogenic drug that stimulates fear and paranoia and is implied to affect an overactive mind like Sherlock's on a stronger level. He's doubting himself, has no experience dealing with such a thing, and is honestly freaked out. Making people act like not themselves is exactly what drugs do to people, and watching Sherlock act out is uncomfortable exactly the way watching your otherwise decent friend or relative show withdrawal would be.
• A case of Reality Is Unrealistic: What Sherlock calls his "Mind Palace" actually is a real memory technique that exists, complete with the somewhat ridiculous hand gestures and wild associations.
• Mycroft is seen texting Sherlock, despite having been characterized as someone who only texts when he has no way of talking. In The Reichenbach Fall we find out that he is a member of the Diogenes Club, where uttering even a single word is an offense that, if it happens three times, will be met with expulsion from the club...
• Before they're about to go into Baskerville for a second time, Sherlock explains to John that he'll have to go searching for the hound on his own because Sherlock has to talk to Major Barrymore. He then uses the line; "Could be dangerous." — a Call-Back to A Study In Pink. We know that, from Sherlock to John, this isn't a warning for caution, it's Sherlock's way of baiting John because he knows he's excited by the idea of throwing himself into danger. At this point Sherlock believes he's drugged John with whatever caused himself to become so afraid on the moors and isn't certain when the effects will begin to take hold of John or if they've already begun. He uses the line even though John doesn't show any resistance to the plan; just to give his confidence an extra boost as Sherlock is aware that the experiment he's going to set up for him will be a terrifying experience.
• At the time when Sherlock tells John "I don't have friends", little does he know that Lestrade is already preparing to make the trip to Dartmoor to keep an eye on him, make sure he's okay, and join in on his and John's adventure. Not just because Mycroft told him to, but because whether Sherlock realises it or not, Lestrade is his friend — Sherlock is wrong the next day when he counts Lestrade out and tells John he only has one friend... and he's proven wrong less than thirty seconds later! It's also a bit Fridge Horror that after being so distressed at the idea of not having friends, Sherlock's reaction to Lestrade is to be outrageously rude and aggressive toward him — it's like he honestly can't help himself. On some level, he's lonely and longs for friends, and then he treats them like crap, because he's broken like that, and he honestly doesn't know any better.
• In the abovementioned scene when Lestrade arrives, John addresses him as "Greg" and Sherlock does a double-take of confusion and, for a brief second, almost anger. It's after this that he assumes "Greg" is an alias of some kind, which means that he would have to have assumed that John was "in on" this little arrangement orchestrated by Mycroft and was playing along with the alias. Even though it's been made abundantly clear to him from the start that John will not side with Mycroft, and certainly won't spy on him on Mycroft's request. Given his words about not having friends the night before, and that he's only just then got John to start talking to him again, you can forgive the poor guy for being intensely paranoid that everyone is in some kind of conspiracy against him.
  • Plus, John willingly worked with Mycroft against Sherlock in just the last episode because it was a danger night, and Sherlock's drug issues are especially prominent in this episode. Thinking John, Lestrade, and Mycroft are in cahoots (to keep him from getting cigarettes in Dartmoor, maybe?) isn't that unrealistic.
• During the climactic scene in the Hollow in particular, we see some pretty varied responses from the characters, all stemming from the same stimulus — fear. Sherlock freezes up (the first time he sees the hound, he simply does nothing) and then, very much in-character, he starts frantically rationalising, not just to Henry but to himself. John goes into fight-or-flight (flight when he's locked in the lab, fight when he's got a gun in his hand) Lestrade verbalises and vents it with "oh my God, oh Christ" and Henry has a full-fledged screaming meltdown. Comparing the scenes where Sherlock first sees the hound and when John is apparently locked in the lab with it, there's so much difference in how these two very different men responded to being afraid. Sherlock was brought to tears; John almost collapsed on the spot. Sherlock assumed he was losing his mind, John assumed he was going to die.
• When Lestrade shows up, he tells Sherlock: "Look, I'm not your handler. And I don't just do what your brother tells me." There's a significant gap between "your" and "brother" which, along with Lestrade's tone, that highly implies that Lestrade doesn't have a lot of time for Mycroft Holmes. The pause could possibly be Lestrade self-censoring an intensifier, e.g. "your bloody brother."
  • Adorable fridge brilliance from the same scene. The very first time Lestrade sees John Watson in A Study in Pink he totally and utterly blanks him. The second time, at the Brixton crime scene, he asks Sherlock who John is in front of him as if he isn't there. Here, Lestrade actually interrupts Sherlock ranting and raving at him, and makes a point of specifically and warmly greeting John.
• When Dr Frankland mentions to John that he particularly liked the story of the Aluminium Crutch, John seems a little irritated. This isn't addressed in the actual series, but the probable reason for it can be found in John's writeup on his blog. He's being praised by all and sundry (including royalty) on his writeup of one of the very few cases that he didn't even help Sherlock with. He was on a date at the time and his writeup consists of Sherlock's voicemails explaining how he'd solved the case.
• When Sherlock rips the gasmask off Dr Frankland's face, he sees Moriarty. But why does Sherlock fear Moriarty so much? Because Moriarty is the only person who has attacked Sherlock not physically or intellectually, but by threatening Sherlock's heart, sending Irene after him to toy with his emotions and putting John in actually physical danger. Had neither of those happened to Sherlock, it's unlikely that Moriarty is what Sherlock would have seen, considering how much fun he had been having with him in The Great Game.
• In the original Hound of the Baskervilles, everybody except Holmes believed the hound to be a supernatural apparition, but it turned out to be a real aggressive, large, and glow-in-the-dark dog. In The Hounds of Baskerville, everyone thinks that a flesh-and-blood, genetically modified dog is attacking people... but it turns out to be the effect of hallucinogenic drugs, essentially a ghost of the mind.
• John shoots the dog with the gun he's just taken off Henry, who was about to commit suicide with it. Not only was this handy in that he happened to have a loaded, ready-to-go gun in his hand when he needed one, it also speaks to the fact that Lestrade (it seems) still doesn't know for a fact that John still owns, and uses, his (illegal) service pistol. If John had used his own gun, either he would have had some explaining to do to the DI about why he had one, or Lestrade would have had to turn a very blind eye to what had happened...
  • In reference to the above, all of them are hallucinating. To each of them, that dog is however scary their own minds can make it. While Sherlock seems frozen, Henry is panicking, but Lestrade and John shoot at the dog. And in magnificent callback to John's nearly superhuman shooting skills, Lestrade shoots three times and misses.John shoots twice and kills the dog. While hallucinating.
  • Lestrade is a police officer though, and the hound isn't very difficult to hit. Maybe Lestrade was hallucinating the hound as something much bigger than it actually was,and when he shot, he was actually hitting his hallucinated, gigantic version of the hound.
• In the above scene, both Sherlock and John seem very out-of-character when they arrive at the Hollow to find Henry with a gun in his mouth. Logically, by freaking out and raising their voices, both of them are actually fuelling Henry's own meltdown (shouting isn't going to calm him down.) They both should, and probably do, know this. But the so-called high-functioning sociopath freaks out, blurting out "No, Henry, no!" and John, who is rarely reduced to a panicked mess about anything (including Sherlock's own apparent suicide in the next episode) ends up shouting "No, no, no... Henry, for God's sake!" Why the sudden reactions? The H.O.U.N.D gas they have no idea they're standing in. Finding Henry with a gun in his mouth is plenty of stimulus for a hell of a lot of fear.
• Having coffee with Henry, John declines sugar. Not only is this for the audience's benefit to set up the later coffee/sugar drama, it also seems to be the first time Sherlock has realised that John doesn't take sugar in his coffee- despite being his best friend and flatmate for a total of fourteen in-universe months. John really wasn't kidding when he later says Sherlock never makes coffee, and it explains how he totally buys that Sherlock didn't actually know he doesn't take sugar.
• John's initial reaction to Major Barrymore. Barrymore's clearly a cross, alpha-male type, and knows that scowling at people and demanding to know what the bloody hell is going on usually intimidates. Even Sherlock seems rattled, blurting out unconvincing reasons for doing an inspection while almost running away. Corporal Lyons seems terrified of Barrymore. John isn't- because of his previous career as an army doctor. He's no doubt known higher-ranking officers who've behaved like this. He's also no doubt had to treat them at their most vulnerable, when they were sick or injured, where he was in a position of power, regardless of anyone's rank. He's aware that Barrymore isn't some military robot, but a human being who bleeds when he's hurt and probably whines like everyone else when he comes down with the flu. Given those sort of considerations, Barrymore seems a whole lot less scary to John.
• Obvious when you think about it, but why was the big dog the innkeepers owned uncontrollably aggressive, particularly in the end sequence in the hollow? Well, because it, too, had been drugged by the Baskerville gas and was probably as terrified of Sherlock and co. as they were of it.
• When Sherlock is freaking out after first seeing the hound, he can be seen making the same gesture he uses to go to his mind palace, although we aren't introduced to this ability until later in the episode. This makes more sense as of His Last Vow, wherein Sherlock visits his old dog Redbeard in his mind palace to calm himself from going into shock. He's trying the same thing, but it doesn't work because the thought of a giant hound is clouding his thoughts of Redbeard.
  • In light of what we now know about Redbeard, it would also explain why Sherlock was so worked up over the similarly-named rabbit Bluebell.
  • Near the end of the episode, it is mentioned that the owners didn't put down the dog. John said "Suppose they just couldn't bring themselves to do it", to which Sherlock responds with "I see". John smiles and says "No you don't", which Sherlock does not contradict. However, in light of his childhood pet Redbeard, which had to be put down, it is entirely possible that Sherlock really does understand the "sentiment" in this case.
  • Or given what we later find out about Redbeard's true identity and fate, maybe not.
• The beginning Baker Street sequence is more or less played for laughs, but there's a couple of rather heartwarming implications there. Sherlock and John "agreed" to Sherlock giving up smoking cold turkey; this has apparently called for a complete strategy, including Sherlock paying off local cigarette merchants. John's job is apparently to deny Sherlock his nicotine fix no matter how much he begs, but there's a secret stash and John knows where it is, just in case Sherlock becomes a complete mess and John judges that it's better that he relents and gives him a cigarette for the sake of his health and sanity. Otherwise, why not just throw out the cigarettes altogether, instead of hiding them?

The Reichenbach Fall

• After Sherlock is locked up in contempt of court, John faithfully bails him out again, all the while saying that he told him not to get clever, and generally acting like he's mortified by Sherlock's behaviour. But while Sherlock might have got himself locked up simply for his smart mouth, later John almost cheerfully gets himself arrested for assaulting a police officer. It's a perfect demonstration of the old proverb "a good friend will bail you out of jail. A best friend won't, because they'll be right there with you in the cell saying "damn, what are we going to do now?""
• During Sherlock's note, he tells John he researched him, looked up everything he could about him to impress him. If you watch A Study in Pink, John goes home after meeting Sherlock for the first time and runs his name through a search engine, finds his website (and possibly other stuff too) and spends some time researching Sherlock. Not to impress him, but because he was impressed with him. Of course, he makes absolutely no secret of this, downright saying at the earliest opportunity "I looked you up on the internet last night... found your website."
  • There's one line in A Study in Pink that hints that Sherlock's claim to have researched John may not have been entirely a lie. He makes an offhand comment about John being a "war hero." Hero, not veteran. There's a later comment in John's blog from Bill, making a reference to the fact that John has at least one medal (and it's implied not to be a standard service medal.) Running John's name through a search engine might not have yielded anything about his family life, or at least not about an obscure sister named Harry, but it might have yielded mention of him if he'd been honoured by the military or involved in something high-profile or was mentioned as a casualty in a media report. In The Hounds of Baskerville, Sherlock tells John that all because he heard someone calling their dog "Whiskey" doesn't mean it was "cheating", it was simply listening. It's not at all clear that Sherlock would consider researching John to be "cheating", especially since his deductions about Harry, Clara and the psychosomatic limp seem to be honest, non-cheating deductions. It would also make sense that, while John was researching Sherlock, Sherlock was similarly drawn to John and decided to research him right back.
• Fugitives Sherlock and John end up in the lab of St Bart's. Molly clearly knows they're there; she had spoken to Sherlock there before John arrived, and evidently spent some time after that doing whatever it was that Sherlock needed her to do for him. It's hard to imagine that she also doesn't know that the pair of them had earlier been arrested and therefore needed somewhere to lie low for a bit. Given that she knows Lestrade well enough to spend the previous Christmas Eve in his company socially, and to know he spends his Christmases in Dorset and that his marriage had been in trouble the previous year, it's highly unlikely that Lestrade wouldn't have been in touch with her that morning. Which leads to the speculation that she either had to lie to Lestrade in order to hide her friends, or that Lestrade knew entirely well that Sherlock and John were in the lab and was working with Molly to hide them.
• When Moriarty shakes Sherlock's hand at the end, Sherlock cocks his head in a slightly puzzled manner, looking at him in confusion... at least, that's what you realise when you notice that Moriarty used his right hand to shake hands with him, despite being left-handed (as we see earlier in the episode, with the teacup). Moriarty left his main hand free to grab his gun and kill himself, and Sherlock has just enough time to notice that.
• In A Study in Pink, the cabbie tells Sherlock "See, no-one ever thinks about the cabbie. You're just the back of an 'ead. Proper advantage for a serial killer." In The Reichenbach Fall, Sherlock gets into a cab that Jim Moriarty is driving, and neither he nor John (who hailed the cab) have apparently learned that it's a good idea to at least glance at your friendly taxi driver before getting in.
  • They probably did learn, but at this point they seem to be too distracted and shaken to think about it, especially if you remember that in ACD canon,^note The Final Problem, no less Sherlock warns John to never get into the first or second cab that drives up to him if he suspects trouble. But Sherlock appears to be in a daze ever since the little girl screamed (which would've clued him in as to what Moriarty was planning for him) — he keeps conversation to terse one-liners and obviously just wants to get back to base and think in peace.
    • Which in turn could also mean that Sherlock at least partly suspected that something bad was going to happen to him on the drive back to Baker Street. Even if he's too dazed to focus on the cabbie, he seems to be on edge more so than normal and we've never seen him order John to stay away from him like that before. He may have deliberately distanced himself from John so that if anyone did try to hurt him then John wouldn't be caught in the crossfire.
  • Also, not only was Moriarty's first crime committed also the first Sherlock investigated, but the first crime that Sherlock specifically knew was orchestrated by "Moriarty" was about a cab driver who terrified people into committing suicide "by taking to them for a long time" (further connecting to John's joke about the mannequin Sherlock hanged).
• The Chief Superintendent is appalled at Lestrade giving Sherlock access to all sorts of classified information; he tells Lestrade to shut up, shouts at him that he's a bloody idiot, and orders him to bring Sherlock in. Nobody brings up the fact that John Watson was also given classified information. At one point in The Blind Banker, (which admittedly is not a case Lestrade worked on, lamentably) DI Dimmock actually gives John the diary of one of the victims and Sherlock isn't even with him at the time. John's not even an amateur detective, he's more or less the amateur detective's PA/handler.
  • While Donovan thinks Sherlock is a psychopath who's crossed the line, it apparently never even occurs to her that John could have helped him. Her attitude toward John has always been a bit ambiguous, but although she's quick to put down Sherlock, she's always seemed quite decent toward John. Lestrade ignores all implications that Sherlock is involved, because he likes him. Donovan ignores the implications that if Sherlock is involved, John either helped or at least knew about it... because she likes him.
• When Lestrade is ordered to arrest Sherlock, he calls John the very first chance he gets to warn him. He may well have just wanted John to let Sherlock know what was happening, and for them to both be sorted out and prepared by the time the police arrived. But judging from his reaction when they go on the lam, Lestrade's phone call may have been in the hopes that by the time the police arrived, Sherlock (and perhaps John) would be nowhere to be found...
• One of the very first exchanges between Sherlock and John in A Study in Pink involves John making the mistake of referring to Sherlock as an "amateur" and Sherlock launching into a Sherlock Scan of John that he wraps up with "you were right. The police don't consult amateurs."(Implying "because I'm not one.") He's quite offended by the idea. In The Reichenbach Fall, count how many times Sherlock is called or referred to as an "amateur" both by the press and by the police...
• There's been some confusion about the significance of the I.O.U. clue. It's probable you missed the third one — that's right, there's three. Watch the scene where Sherlock pretends to take John hostage. Pay careful attention to the wall they back away towards. There's an I.O.U. graffitied on it, with black angel wings, no less. Three I.O.U's; Three gunmen; Three bullets; Three victims. The apple in the flat: John. The building opposite New Scotland Yard; Lestrade. Baker Street; Mrs. Hudson.
• In an early scene at Baker Street, John casually walks past a dummy hanging in the kitchen by a rope around its neck, and snarks at Sherlock "So... did you just talk to him for a really long time?" Sherlock's response is that the victim in question didn't commit suicide, and "the Bow Street Runners missed everything." The Bow Street Runners being a precursor to Britain's police force, hinting the case is probably at least two hundred years old. In any case? In the end, Jim did just talk to Sherlock for a really long time, and Sherlock didn't commit suicide. No doubt Sherlock is going to later claim that there were plenty of clues in this episode, and complain that John, Lestrade, the rest of Scotland Yard and millions of television viewers "missed everything."
  • Sherlock is really quite harsh on the Bow Street Runners, considering that their job was more or less to patrol the streets and arrest anyone caught red-handed committing a crime- they were not detectives, and certainly would not have had the skills or means to investigate whether or not an apparent suicide was actually a murder. Of course they "missed everything."
  • It's possible that what Sherlock meant was that the man in question never committed suicide but was in fact murdered. However, he never says that. It's possible that Sherlock had been investigating not someone who was murdered but thought to have committed suicide, but someone who was thought to have committed suicide but faked his own death. Although it seems that the man in questioned died by hanging and not by a fall onto asphalt, Sherlock still may then have used aspects of that case in his own fake suicide, making what seems like a random interlude almost an instance of Chekhov's Skill.
• It's been wondered how Sherlock could have faked not having a pulse. But he didn't need to. John never takes his pulse; he puts his hand on Sherlock's wrist, but in a way that he couldn't possibly have taken a pulse. He then tries to, pleading "let me just check,"- and then someone literally prises his hand off Sherlock's wrist and he's kept away by bystanders as Sherlock's body is carted off. The bystanders seem to be comforting John and in a way they probably are, but their primary purpose seems to be to keep him away from Sherlock.
  • In addition, a man in a suit with a stethoscope around his neck was taking Sherlock's pulse, but with his fingers. Why would he do that if he had a (much more accurate) stethoscope? Could the stethoscope have been simply a costume?
• In the scene at Kitty's house, when "Richard Brook" stumbles into the scene, "Brook" tells John that he knows that he's a good man, and begs him not to hurt him. Effectively identifying two things: John is a "good man" (in the sense that he does have a strong moral principle that Sherlock usually lacks) and he is far more likely than Sherlock to lash out at "Brook" physically (and he definitely seems about to.) Why does Jim know this? Because the last time he had a confrontation with Sherlock, John showed no hesitation in grabbing him and going from being Jim's hostage to taking Jim as his hostage, expecting that he would probably be killed for it, in order to help Sherlock escape. The confrontation at the pool happened a year before. Clearly, that display of reckless bravery must have made quite an impression on Jim.
• The Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard calls Sherlock a "weirdo"; John punches him. What's interesting is that, in justifying the "weirdo" remark, the C.S remarks "often are (weirdos), these vigilante types." What he doesn't know is that Sherlock isn't a vigilante; he solves crimes for fun, not because of a pressing sense of compassion or justice. John, as Sherlock pointed out the night he met him, has a "strong moral principle." He cares about the victims, and while he does get his adrenaline fix out of solving crimes with Sherlock, he cares about righting wrongs and about justice. John is the vigilante weirdo. Which makes it even more satisfying that he punched someone for saying it.
• Kitty Reilly has "Make Believe" on her wall. It's two lines, though, which can be read in three different ways- the usual "fairytale" way, or "make [people] believe" or "invent believable things"- both good mottoes for a journalist with no morals.
• When Kitty approaches Sherlock in the men's bathroom, he dismisses her, but he only really rounds on her when she blocks his escape and threatens to run a story on how Sherlock and John's relationship is not just platonic. Sherlock has never, not once, even bothered to react to various people assuming he and John are gay before now. That he does so now is Fridge Brilliance in two ways- the first being that he's finally realised that John doesn't like that. He may have been ranting and raving about the deerstalker at the time, but he surely picked up how annoyed John was about the "bachelor" newspaper story. Secondly, this is the very first time anyone has used the assumption that Sherlock and John are gay in a nasty or threatening way. She's clearly expressing the idea of the story as a threat, indicating she knows there's a pretty good chance they aren't gay, people will assume they are anyway, and that Sherlock can be blackmailed into giving an interview to prevent such a "shameful" story coming out. Everyone else who's assumed Sherlock and John are gay lovers have been totally cool with it and happy for them.
• In The Reichenbach Fall court scene, Sherlock was his usual self in front of the judge and the jury and got himself locked up for contempt against the court. Sherlock was repeatedly admonished by John beforehand not to do so, which makes his behavior completely unacceptable, except it's not Sherlock trying to be clever and superior. He's shown in the past he can act normal to get into crime scenes and people's homes with little difficulty. In all likelihood, he's suffering from stage fright and nervousness as he usually prefers to avoid direct contact with people, to the point of preferring texting to calling people, so he probably acting defensively in front of so many people by analysing them to calm himself down.
  • He also seems honestly very apprehensive in the police car beforehand. Just prior to being held in contempt he looks up at John for some sort of reassurance; on seeing John's disapproving expression his own expression changes, but he just can't seem to help himself, and is quite apologetic to John when he bails him out afterwards.
  • That Sherlock does so poorly in the witness box is really a heartwarming testimony to his friendship with John. In the sequences where he is being lauded as the "Reichenbach Hero", John is always by his side to speak for him, or quietly correct his manners, or instruct him on how to react and behave. Sherlock, by this time, does what John tells him without too much questioning, particularly when John insists he needs to get the business with the deerstalker "over with" and just play along for civility's sake. Sherlock, in being put in a witness box, is now being separated from John, who is too far away to really do anything to help except try to convey his thoughts via facial expression. Without John's help, Sherlock doesn't really know what to do or say, which gets him in trouble inside of about thirty seconds. Upshot: socially, Sherlock can't function without John.
• When Sherlock and Jim are taking tea in 221B, Sherlock asks him how he intends to "burn" him. Jim responds, "I did tell you. But did you listen?" He's just finished talking about how he threatened the loved ones of the twelve jurors to ensure a not guilty verdict. That's exactly how he intended to burn Sherlock. He even then taps out in binary "there is no key." If Sherlock was listening, then the rooftop sequence plays totally differently- although he couldn't have expected Jim to commit suicide, Sherlock knew about there being no key way in advance, and told Jim he thought he had a code-key so that he wouldn't suspect that he knew what Jim's real game was, using his friends as leverage- though probably he only expected Jim to use John again, as he had before. If Sherlock understood Jim here, then he was in pretty much total control on that roof, and was in fact in total control for most of the game.
  • When Sherlock tells Jim he doesn't need the code, "If I got you..." he adopts briefly Jim's sing-song voice. The same sort of tone Jim himself used for "But did you listen?" It may well serve as a code for "yes, I was listening (and noted the above)".
  • Another clue that Jim will use Sherlock's love of his friends as leverage: the last time he had talked about burning Sherlock was by the pool in The Great Game, where he said (in spectacular fashion) "I will burn you. I will burn the heart out of you".
• John and Moriarty mirror each other- inadvertently but in the most amazing way- in The Reichenbach Fall. Fore mostly, there is a repetition of two phrases: "I owe you," and "For Me." Compare Moriarty's constant use of "I owe you", with John's "I was so alone... and "I owe you so much..." On the rooftop, Moriarty urges Sherlock to kill himself, taunting "... for me?". At Sherlock's grave, John begs Sherlock "one more miracle, Sherlock, for me... don't be dead... would you do that, just for me?" It's a brilliant way of comparing Sherlock's worst enemy with his best friend. And then of course as it turns out Sherlock "killed himself," and presumably returned, just for his friends, of which John is clearly the best.
  • Another example of phrases coming up in different contexts: when Sherlock and John are called to Buckingham Palace in "Scandal", Watson asks Sherlock what they are doing there. Sherlock immediately replies "I don't know." In "Fall", when Moriarty visits him, he asks Sherlock if he has trouble saying "I don't know"- Sherlock sort of shrugs and gives a dismissive "I dunno" which Moriarty admits is a clever way out of an awkward question. Sherlock is obsessed with impressing Moriarty, apparently more than his best friend, who he loves to show off to. This could be Fridge Horror, emphasising Sherlock's unhealthy obsession, but could equally be rather sweet that Sherlock likes John enough to admit what Sherlock sees as a crippling weakness (not being able to know everything).
    • Sherlock does something that later seems quite out of character in A Study in Pink- he not only gets very obviously annoyed at himself for getting Harry's gender wrong (and starts ranting and raving about it in front of John) but he also admits "I wasn't expecting to get everything right," and "there's always SOMETHING (that I get wrong when I make deductions)". Later in the series he seems, as you point out, almost afraid to admit that he's ever wrong. Though he does conceded in The Hounds of Baskerville that the retired fisherman's "mother" could be an aunt or an older sister, though mother was more likely. He's really uncomfortable at admitting in the same episode that he got the location of the drug wrong; however, since that error came at John's expense, it's an understandable reaction.
    • There's another significant place that "I don't know" shows up- at Irene's place in A Scandal in Belgravia, when Sherlock, Irene and John are being held at gunpoint. Given the guns, Sherlock snottily says he doesn't know the code; when the CIA agent responds by threatening John with execution, Sherlock immediately panics and shows no hesitation in blurting out "I don't know the code. I don't know the code- she didn't give it to me- I DON'T know it!!"
• Look at what happens after Sherlock falls. Though admittedly Sherlock falls off the roof of a medical establishment, paramedics appear virtually within a minute, with no ambulance sirens beforehand, seemingly out of nowhere — and afterward, cart him off to some dark corner. They also keep John away from him. All part of the plan?
  • St Bart's has no emergency department, so there should not have been any paramedics at the scene. Also, real paramedics would not have bodily heaved Sherlock up on that stretcher without putting a neck brace on him first. So yes — all part of the plan.
  • Also, if you watch the sequence carefully, you can see that four people pick Sherlock up off the ground, put him onto a stretcher and wheel him into the hospital with practiced precision. Two of them are paramedics, so its likely they are going through a routine they've done many times before. However, the other two are simply bystanders to Sherlock's fall- city boys judging by their clothing. There's no way they'd be that calm and precise, let alone allowed inside the casualty department. A small hint to the revelation at the end.
• In the rooftop scene, Sherlock gives John a big hint that he was lying about being a fake. He describes what he did as "a magic trick", and then tells John "I researched you." What he's doing is describing techniques that pretend "mediums" use to make others think they're genuinely psychic; the "magic trick" is called "cold reading", which is similar to what Sherlock actually does, using visual clues to make deductions about a person. Only, in Sherlock's case, there was never any deception or claims that he could simply do this because he was "psychic"; he told people exactly what he had noticed and how. Researching John is what is known as "warm reading" — researching your subject without them knowing so you can wow them with your information later. The amazed subject thinks it came out of the "psychic's" own head and not from talking to people who knew them, public records, etc. So, which is it, Sherlock? Did you use a "magic trick" or did you straight up just research John? There is no real reason, given, that he couldn't do both, but he genuinely seems to change tack after explaining that it was a "magic trick" when John doesn't buy such a weak explanation.
  • There's another thing the "magic trick" line could be referencing: If you hold a rubber ball (remember what he kept playing with?) in your armpit, you cut off the blood supply to that arm, practically stopping your pulse. It's often called a magic trick (mind-over-matter, I-can-stop-my-heart-by-will-alone style) or a science trick.
  • It's also an echo of The Blind Banker, where Sebastian tells John that Sherlock had a "trick" he used to do in university, and Sherlock, offended, replies that it wasn't a trick and that he "merely observed."
  • The grammar in this scene is actually brilliant and hints at Sherlock's survival. He tells John "I researched you", using the past tense. Then he takes a pause. The next words out of his mouth are "It's a trick, it's just a magic trick". In the present tense. Considering how precise Sherlock always is, this sounds like he's trying to tip John off that what he's doing at that moment is a trick; he isn't referring to his reading of John at all.
• As Sherlock points out to Moriarty, "Richard Brook" is an English approximation of the German name "Reichenbach." "The Reichenbach Fall = The Fall of Richard Brook. Fall can also simply translate to case, so it's either "The Fall of Richard Brook", or "The Case of Richard Brook". Deliberate ambiguity?
• Moriarty's suicide. Being predominately of the factor 2 criteria of Psychopathy (criminality) correlates with a high suicide rate. Holmes seems to have predominately factor 1 traits (narcissistic), which correlates with a low suicide rate.
• It makes sense that Sherlock doesn't know what a deerstalker is. After all, who made them famous? Sherlock Holmes!
• Of course John can't believe that Sherlock is a fake. In their final phone conversation, he says to Sherlock: "The first time we met, you knew all about my sister." Sherlock replies that he just looked all that stuff up to impress him. But he didn't know everything about John's sister — he got her gender wrong. If he had actually "researched" John, he would have known that he had a sister and not a brother. John must have realized this, and that would have made him certain that Sherlock was lying.
  • John also must have worked out that Sherlock couldn't have researched him long ago; it was probably one of the first explanations he considered after their first meeting. How could Sherlock have even known to research him when John only met the man because a mutual acquaintance happened to run into him and took him straight to Sherlock. John has also been working with Sherlock for a couple years and seen him make his deductions dozens of times, and he personally knows Sherlock never researched them.
• Molly confronts Sherlock when she is worried about him and says that if he needs her for anything, she will be willing to help. His response is a faltering "Why would I need you?", implying his lack of understanding about wanting to help someone you love unconditionally. This example of Sherlock's lack of co-dependence is touched on very briefly in A Scandal in Belgravia when John tells Sherlock he'll be in the next room over if Sherlock needs anything, to which Sherlock responds "Why would I need you?". He may not want to need the support of people near him, but in The Reichenbach Fall he (eventually) asks Molly for help outright, something we never saw in A Scandal in Belgravia.
  • Sherlock is almost heartwarmingly ignorant of how much he does depend on other people- most specifically, John. When he asks John why he would need him, John's response is a good-naturedly sarcastic "no reason at all."
  • He's heartwarmingly ignorant of his own emotions in general, preferring logical explanations for everything. The kidnapping takes place two months after Sherlock had tea with Jim. So either a) Sherlock's spent two months looking sad around Molly but not John in anticipation of his own death and probably not understanding what he was feeling, or b) Sherlock has already intuited Moriarty's endgame and that this was the beginning of his "fall," but had not yet acknowledged that because of his preference for logic. Either way, it seems Sherlock is most himself around Molly, and she's the one who knows what he's anticipating. He just doesn't recognize that part of who he is or what he's feeling or intuiting.
• John's total contempt for Mycroft giving Jim Sherlock's personal information becomes much more profound when you remember that, in A Study in Pink, John found himself confronted by someone he assumed to be a "criminal mastermind" of Moriarty-like calibre, who tried to bribe him to hand over Sherlock's personal information. ^note  Before A Study in Pink first aired in the UK, it was not known which part Mark Gatiss was playing, and reviewers who got early copies of the episode were instructed not to reveal this. On first viewing, the idea that Mycroft is actually Moriarty was deliberately encouraged not just by the events in the episode but the PR surrounding the series. John, although he had only just met Sherlock, had been treated badly by him, and had absolutely no reason to be loyal to him, turned him down. The "criminal mastermind" was of course Mycroft, but John didn't know that at the time, and for all he knew, he was about to be executed and chucked in the Thames. He still said no. Not only that, but he immediately went to Sherlock and disclosed that someone had tried to bribe him, and was able to say honestly that he hadn't accepted the bribe. Mycroft gave out the information on his own brother, and then (apparently) didn't even admit it, neither to Sherlock nor John. (Of course, there's an indication that Mycroft thought it a matter of international security to do so. However, there's also an element in what he tells John of his pride, in being the only one who could get Jim to talk, "just a little." All that, and he didn't even get the information he needed, and even if he had, it was all a lie anyway.)
• Sherlock's terse remark to Watson saying "People will talk" (about him ripping the bomb off Watson in The Great Game) to which Sherlock retorts "People do little else," as of The Reichenbach Fall turns out to ring true, as the newspapers dash off how he was nothing but a fraud — thus talking about him even though he is "dead," by sheer virtue of that foiling Moriarty's plan since the worldwide Internet movement "I believe in Sherlock/Moriarty is real" sprung up in response and was probably mirrored in-series too!
• Sherlock's treatment of Molly in A Scandal in Belgravia seems to have ushered in a totally different element to their relationship. Molly has definitely stopped being slavishly obsessed with him, and she no longer seems anywhere near as willing to put up with his crap. Her heart-to-heart with Sherlock ends in her demanding to be thanked, in her own gentle but insistent way. When Sherlock obliges, she deliberately says she's going to get some crisps and asks him if he wants anything, so that in the same breath she can finally say no to him. Not to mention that when he and John first demand Molly's help and Sherlock arrogantly tells her she's coming with them, she crossly replies "I've got a lunch date!" Season One Molly was so incredibly obsessed with Sherlock that an afternoon working her backside off with him in the lab would be next door to heavenly and she would have happily ditched any other lunch date in the world. Look at how she behaves when Jim comes into the lab in The Great Game. She ignores the man she's dating because she's too busy fawning over Sherlock, even though he's ignoring her.
  • On the above note, Molly tells Sherlock that she ended it with Jim — not the other way around, as you'd expect, or because the whole point became moot after he tried to kill John and Sherlock. She specifically says she "ended it" — implying it was entirely her decision — and it's unlikely that Molly would lie about this when she's been shown to be almost painfully honest so far. Blog comments indicating she was still dating Jim at the time of the pool standoff have been ret-conned out of existence, so it's a fair reading that she dumped him shortly after Sherlock told her Jim was gay, and for that reason.
• The gingerbread man that Moriarty sends Sherlock; not only is it "burnt to a crisp" (referencing Jim's fixation with burning Sherlock) but it also seems like a reference to the actual story, considering the fact that Jim uses all of these fairytale references throughout the episode. "Run, run, as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man", anyone?
  • Which ties in later when John, supposedly Sherlock's "hostage", asks Sherlock what they're going to do now. Sherlock replies that they're doing what Moriarty wanted, becoming fugitives. "Run!"
    • Burn gingerbread man represents Sherlock? At the end of that story, the gingerbread man is tricked by a fox, who then eats it. At one point in the episode, Moriarty even wears a fox pendant.
• The episode mentions quite a few different children's stories in relation to Moriarty's plan. But the most important one, one which wasn't even mentioned in depth in the episode, was Humpty Dumpty. For one, Moriarty's plan involved Sherlock's death, and he seemed quite happy that they ended up on a roof. "All the king's horses and all the king's men" wouldn't be able to put back together someone who had just fallen or jumped from the roof of a building. Secondly, he made Sherlock fall in a metaphorical sense, a fall from grace. Sherlock even says in the episode that an idea can't be destroyed once it's made its home, hence why no one would be able to put back together Sherlock's reputation after a doubt had been planted. Finally, Sherlock was crying on the rooftop. This might not have been part of Moriarty's plan, but it's definitely a fall. The almighty, self-proclaimed sociopath that is Sherlock Holmes, crying? That's definitely a fall that can't be fixed.
• It's a popular assumption that Sherlock's disdainful treatment of Molly was what eventually lead to her being in the position to help him without being on Moriarty's radar. Moriarty didn't consider her someone Sherlock cared for. What if the same can be said about Mycroft? Moriarty certainly didn't think threatening Mycroft's life would be incentive for Sherlock to throw himself off the roof, as evidenced by the fact that Moriarty didn't arrange a sniper for him. Lampshaded when John asked Sherlock if Mycroft could help them when they were running from the police and Sherlock replies, "A big family reconciliation? Now’s not really the moment." Perhaps Sherlock didn't want to go to his brother for help because it would have drawn Moriarty's attention to Mycroft as someone Sherlock might rely on.
  • It makes even more sense for Sherlock to use Molly when you consider that, in the past, she was the one Moriarty used to get to Sherlock. Moriarty didn't consider that Sherlock would forgive her for that or think to use her again.
• This is equal parts Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror, really — Sherlock does his scan on the jurors in the courtroom and their reactions show he deduces correctly. So how could they believe that it was all a set-up? Because Moriarty also claimed that it was "Sherlock" who threatened them in their hotel-rooms ... not really all that surprising that someone knows your job if he also knows your kids and how to harm them, from their perspective.
• The big twist about Moriarty living a second life as a television actor actually makes perfect sense as a strategy against Sherlock. It gives Moriarty a respectable cover identity to hide behind, yes, but it also leaves very little risk of Sherlock recognising him and figuring out his scheme—since, as we know from the show and the blogs, Sherlock is blissfully ignorant of pop culture, and he practically never watches TV. For Sherlock's nemesis, becoming a television star is Hiding in Plain Sight.
• The previous episode brought up how Sherlock failed to win a game of Cluedo (the original British game, called Clue in the US) because he kept insisting that Mr. Black was not murdered but committed suicide. He says it's "the only logical solution" and when John tells him the rules never say that, he snaps "then the rules are wrong!" While it's funny, it also shows how Sherlock's Complexity Addiction is so huge that he can't accept a simple board game can be straightforward, there must be some deeper mystery. Given all that, it's no shock Sherlock falls hook, line and sinker for Moriarty's entire "fake hacking bug" scam because to him, Moriarty creating a hacking device with an intricate musical note formula is more logical than him just bribing people to open the door. Just as Moriarty figured, Sherlock's obsession how "you always want everything to be so clever" allowed him to fall into his trap.
• Just a small thing, but Moriarty's obsession with chewing gum in this episode could be another indication of his similarities to Sherlock. Sherlock is shown throughout the series to have given up smocking- something that is used to both serious and humorous effect- and frequently relies on nicotine patches. However, chewing gum is another substitute for cigarettes, hinting that Moriarty is also struggling to give up.
• At the end of The Great Game, Moriarty looked perfectly happy to let Sherlock shoot and detonate a bomb that would have killed them both along with John, and even gets pissed at his phone ringing and interrupting it. Keeping that in mind, is it really such a shocker he later has no qualms shooting himself to ensure Sherlock's death? His willingness to die along with him had already been shown in that earlier episode.

Series Three

Many Happy Returns

• Doubles as a moment of heartwarming: in the tape Sherlock made for John's birthday he nervously suggests a smile and wink for the end, saying people seem to like it and it "humanises" him. The only time we ever see Sherlock do the smile-and-wink routine before this is in A Study in Pink, when he meets John for the first time. Given how twitchy and self-conscious he is on the uncut tape, it goes to show how anxious he was at that first meeting to make a good impression. He must have been, in his own odd way, desperate for John to like him and accept him.

The Empty Hearse

• When John first steps inside the front door of Baker Street after what's implied to be about two years of avoidance, he's immediately bombarded with memories: of Sherlock's "you invaded Afghanistan" joke and the piece of music he wrote while he was grieving for Irene Adler. John's instinctive memories of Sherlock had nothing to do with his intellect or any of the cases he solved. They were of the first time he heard Sherlock laugh, and of the first time he saw him grieving. They're of Sherlock at his most human.
• When Mary goes to Sherlock fearing John has been kidnapped, she greets Mrs Hudson by name, but Mrs Hudson asks "hang on, who are you?" Even though John hadn't visited Mrs Hudson in years since Sherlock's "death", he must have talked about her a lot, enough for Mary to address her by name and assume she was allowed to come straight in and go up the stairs to Sherlock.
  • By a similar token, Mary knew about Sherlock's suicide in fair detail ("you died... you jumped off a roof") and had visited his grave, but she doesn't recognise him when he's standing right in front of her at the restaurant. John obviously kept no photos of Sherlock after his "death", or if he did, he didn't show any to Mary, who has an abnormally retentive memory.
  • It's also possible that she didn't connect "waiter hilariously interrupting John's proposal" with "John's dead best friend who is dead" — she realises who he is the instant he says "not dead".
• For some of Sherlock's fans, the fast-paced music used at the very beginning might be off for a Sherlock soundtrack. That's because it's Anderson's mind, narrating his theory on Holmes' fake suicide.
• At one point, we see Sherlock entertaining an older couple at 221B whom we assume to be clients, seeing as how he had already taken some cases that day. The lady is going on about how their trip to London has been so far and telling other little random stories with the man occasionally commenting as well, and it seems like she's just rambling on without getting to whatever problem they want him to solve...and then John shows up and Sherlock kicks them out and casually reveals they were his parents. Looking back, not only were they not telling him about a case, they were finishing each other's sentences and were completely not put off by Sherlock acting... well, like himself and kicking them out when his friend showed up.
  • Interesting how the both of them are dressed and how they behave. Sherlock's mother wears a long dark coat with the collar turned up, sits straight and proper, as well as doing most of the talking. Basically, genius or not, Sherlock is definitely his mother's son. However, even more interesting, his father is much more laid back, lets his wife do most of the talking while still having an input, wears more casual shirts, jeans and jacket. He also prompts Sherlock to call more because his mother worries (and most probably he does too), being a moral compass for the detective. Sound familiar?
• Sherlock's scan of Mary is extremely intense, with many more words and observations than normal. Given that Moriarty was able to masquerade as Molly's boyfriend because Sherlock was too casual, Sherlock is being extra careful that John's girlfriend doesn't turn out to be a criminal.
  • The word "liar" in fact appears as one of the observations, but it is easily missed. The brilliance kicked in later when Mary's skills as a master spy were revealed: The scan is intense because she is purposely overloading Sherlock with information in order to hide her true identity.
    • Sherlock might think of the word "liar" as in white lie. Remember Mary's opinion on John's mustache?
    • Also, he'd only just been rescued from Serbia. He's in a lot of pain and he's still sleep-deprived.
• Les Misérables is about a good criminal, a man who "is" the law being wrong, and a group of rebels trying to overthrow their government. Of course Mycroft wouldn't be a fan!
• When Mary gives a cheeky dramatic reading of John's blog, the account is logged in — as "Watson." This isn't John's log-in name, which is his full name; he claims the blog is "ancient history" so it's unlikely he'd stay logged in, and the tablet Mary's reading on is probably her's. Inference: she created the "Watson" account, after becoming engaged the night before (she's wearing her engagement ring) and because she's gleefully looking forward to when it becomes both their names. D'aww.
• Something quite obvious, but the codename Sherlock and Mycroft utilized for the plan to fake the former's death, Lazarus, apart from recalling a role by Mark Gatiss in a Doctor Who episode, was primarily also harkening the story of the resurrection of Jesus's friend Lazarus... and how, for that matter, the resurrection of Lazarus was well-questioned and speculated upon as a an elaborate hoax by Jesus's enemies. Assuming Sherlock has multiple plans for how to fake his death, the code Lazarus may have been referring to a method that involved replacing a dead body with a live one (Sherlock), thus the body laying on the pavement is resurrected.
• If Sherlock's explanation to the Conspiracy Theorist is in fact the truth, then his line to John about it "all being a magic trick" takes on a whole new meaning. Sherlock directed John's attention towards him while his confederates set up his fake death. This is essentially standard procedure for a Stage Magician: Get the audience looking one way, then do something else while they're distracted. Sherlock really was doing a magic trick! He was never referring to his deductions at all.
• Just after Mycroft looses Operation we get the below exchange. This could (in part) explain why at the beginning of the series Sherlock is so desperate, and goes to such ridiculous lengths, to prove he's clever; because he spent a lot of his childhood thinking he was stupid. It also means he treats people (though less so than at the beginning of the series) whom he thinks of as "stupid" the same way it is implied that Mycroft treated him (and still sometimes does) when they were children.
  Sherlock: That takes me back... [mimicking] "Don't be smart, Sherlock, I'm the smart one".
  Mycroft: I am the smart one.
  Sherlock: I used to think I was an idiot.
  Mycroft: Both of us thought you were an idiot, Sherlock. We had nothing else to go on. 'Til we met other children.
  Sherlock: Oh yes, that was a mistake...
  Mycroft: Ghastly, what were they thinking of...
• Tying in to the above Fridge, a comment on YouTube points out that Sherlock and Mycroft aren't simply playing Operation to illustrate how childish they are. If they had tried to play chess, Mycroft (who is the smarter of the two brothers) would simply beat Sherlock. They're playing a game that relies on Skill, not Intellect.
• Usually, Sherlock going to his "mind palace" is accompanied by visual effects illustrating his thought processes for the audience. When he goes to his mind palace to figure out how to defuse the bomb in the subway, the audience only sees Sherlock's face with no idea what he's thinking. We then find out that he was putting on an act for John. He found the "off" switch on the bomb and never had to defuse it. No wonder we didn't see the mind palace. He didn't actually go there.
• It's very clear, from his conversation with Mycroft and Anthea, that Sherlock has only one coat style that he regards as "his", and that he values it:
  Sherlock: Where is it?
  Mycroft: Where's what?
  Sherlock: You know what.
  • Mycroft does know. And Anthea realizes how significant that specific coat is, because only once he's wearing it does she greet him with "Welcome back, Mr Holmes."
• Mary's reaction to Sherlock having a deep dark secret seemed unusually flippant, but it makes sense once you realize that she has a deep dark secret, and if you look carefully at what Mary is doing she is scanning Watson to see what his reaction to Sherlock is.
• Sherlock's somewhat annoyed reaction to Lestrade hugging him. At first it might seem like it's just Sherlock not being comfortable with being hugged, but remember how John reacted to him being alive by attacking him three times. His reaction to Lestrade hugging him was probably not so much "Seriously? A hug?" than it was "Oh sure, he's hugging me!"
• A piece of absolute genius at the end of the episode, where an ominous figure watches footage of John's rescue. We later identify this man as Charles Augustus Magnussen, but the shot also reveals (if you know where to look) the second great twist of the series finale. ^{Major spoiler!}The camera pans through a complex room and across several strange objects — unsettling porcelain statues, a rabbit sitting by a magician's hat... If you're familiar with the method of loci, you'll know that memories are frequently triggered by unusual combinations of images, just like the ones we see here. C.A.M. has a memory palace.
• Mr and Mrs Holmes are dressed very similarly to John and Sherlock. Apart from the fact that we now know that the great Sherlock Holmes dresses like his mother, it gives us a clue as to why Sherlock took such an immediate liking to John; consciously or unconsciously, John reminds Sherlock of his father.

The Sign of Three

• The opening scene is hilarious, but thinking about it: Pre-Reichenbach, assuming Lestrade didn't correctly write Sherlock's plea off as Sherlock being dramatic, he would have called/texted Sherlock to find out what the problem was or contacted John/Mrs Hudson/Molly and told them to deal with Sherlock. After Reichenbach, however, after Sherlock was cornered to the point he fully embraced the isolation Moriarty put into play and supposedly killed himself in response, of course, Lestrade would leave a crime scene and bring everything from squad cars to a helicopter when he received a message declaring Sherlock was in need of assistance. Lestrade took Sherlock's reappearance much better than John did, but he still hasn't completely healed from the loss suffered.
  • Notably, Lestrade doesn't come until Sherlock says "please." The man never, ever says please, so it's not surprising George or Graham or whatever his name is concludes that Sherlock is in serious trouble.
• While this episode is structured around Sherlock's speech, it also has another structure. Sherlock's character development is divided into almost 3 distinct beats as he sees him—what he was/what he gains/what he loses—he realizes what he means to John (And what that means about Sherlock as a person who has worth) suddenly. His loss when he realizes that Mary is pregnant hits him very suddenly too, but they were always gradually building beneath his notice. John had grown to care for him gradually, and Sherlock has softened and become more human, and everything that Sherlock gains in his realization of that moves him closer to the inevitable loss of John, because of course, while he's John's best friend, he's also his Best Man. It's a WALTZ. He was dancing the whole episode. After the loss, he is left standing there without a partner, just as he is in the actual episode.
• When Sherlock steps away from John and Mary at the end of the episode, after he realizes that she is pregnant, he does so willingly and without any prompting. It's a call back to earlier in the episode when he had to be prompted to step out of the picture of the bride and groom.
• Sherlock's imagining Irene, in her "battle dress", no less, and telling her to get out of his head because he's "busy" may indicate he imagines her that way when he's not busy.
• Sherlock finding out that he's not the only antisocial, standoffish person that John has befriended. The timeline is skewed, but Mary sort of implies that John was friends with the tortured Sholto before he was friends with Sherlock. He didn't push the "high-functioning sociopath" away partly because he'd already had practice in seeing the hidden worth in people and pursuing it.
  • Major Sholto tells Sherlock that he thinks they are alike. He doesn't explain why he thinks they are alike, and it seems an odd thing to say at first because he'd never met Sherlock before that day and hadn't spoken personally with him at all. But he's just listened to Sherlock's best man speech. The one where he describes himself as an "unpleasant, rude, and all-round obnoxious arsehole" who is redeemed only by the warmth and constancy of John's friendship. Sherlock described himself as the man John has "saved, so many times, and in so many ways." Sholto is even more emotionally closed off than Sherlock is, but he obviously identified with Sherlock because he also feels that it was only John's friendship that redeemed and saved him after his war trauma. And his affection for John is the only reason he doesn't commit suicide on the spot... John has saved him again.
• One of Sherlock's great failures was not getting anyone to listen to him when he was young and knew that Carl Powers had been murdered, because no one listens to children. Compare to Archie, who not only is very much like Sherlock (right down to the curls and the distaste for social norms), but who also has ideas about who's trying to kill Sholto. And Sherlock listens! He asks for his opinion and takes him seriously, and in the end, Archie is right.
• Mary's ex, David, bears a notable resemblance to John in colouring, build and clothing. Mary obviously has a "type"!
• Sherlock's "Am I the current king of England?" remark makes sense of why he couldn't deduce the identity of his client in A Scandal in Belgravia. It's because he knows absolutely nothing about the royal family. Apparently it is up there with basic astronomy and the room numbers of each guest at John's wedding in knowledge that he considers not worth remembering.
• The two answers in the "Who am I?" are actually a huge hint to the character arcs of Sherlock and John in Series 3. First is Sherlock who is, simply, himself. Or rather he's Sherlock Holmes as John sees and describes him. However, Sherlock isn't able to work it out, meaning he doesn't know himself, just as he said at the end of The Empty Hearse when John remarks that he loves being Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock replies he doesn't even know what that means. Sherlock has changed and grown a lot from the man we knew him as in the past two series. A lot of this series is about him trying to find out who he wants to be and what his place is in the world which, at this point in the episode, is still clearly a mystery to him. Now what on earth links John to Madonna? Well Madonna calls up two images. One is a religious figure of devotion, purity and motherhood. Not too far from a loyal and good doctor as well as a soon-to-be father. The other Madonna is pop icon who made herself famous by pushing the line of indecency; a rather diverse person that to some is a hero and others scandalous. This is John's other persona; the side he's trying to repress in order to lead a happily married life — the adrenaline junkie who hungers for violence. The doctor who had "bad days" and killed people. Neither him nor Sherlock know which "Madonna" is being referred to here, Sherlock just says he picked it from some papers — were the papers about the pop star or the Virgin Mother? Is John a kind doctor and loving husband/father or just a danger addict?
• The sequence where John saves Private Bainbridge's life reveals that Sherlock, for all his intelligence and wide range of knowledge, doesn't know basic first aid. Most specifically, he doesn't know that firm pressure will stem bleeding from a wound. If he hadn't learned this from John, he would have had no idea that the pressure of Major Sholto's belt was acting in the same manner as he had used his scarf on Bainbridge, and he would never have solved the case in time to save Sholto's life.
  • It's very unlikely that Sherlock, an expert anatomist and detective, would be unaware of such a basic fact of biology. John prompts him because like many people in emergency situations he knows the theory but is still at a loss. It is likely that telling the story may have pushed the idea to the front of his mind and so helped him to the solution.
• This between Mary and Sherlock:
  Mary: Solve it and he'll open the door, like he said.
  Sherlock: I couldn't solve it before, how can I solve it now?
  Mary: Because it matters now.
  • John agrees with Mary, and Sherlock is able to solve the case, and save Sholto's life. Remember this question from The Great Game?
    Sherlock: Will caring about [the victims] help save them?
  • John had answered "no." The answer, in this case anyway, is yes. Sherlock doesn't really know or particularly care about Sholto, perhaps, but he identifies with him and shows empathy with him. And he certainly cares about John. The idea of someone John obviously cares about a lot committing suicide at his wedding is enough for Sherlock to step up and solve the case in mere seconds.
• Sherlock's conversation with Sholto and his demeanour implies quite a bit about Sherlock's actions at the end of The Reichenbach Fall. He identifies with this man, who is held responsible for all these deaths because of who he was (a soldier), who is essentially letting himself be killed, because he once stood there and did the same thing. Sherlock felt responsible for the danger that Moriarty put his friends in, and for all the death and pain that Moriarty had caused because he saw Sherlock as a worthy adversary. ("I created Moriarty.") Sherlock didn't realize at that point that John cares about him for more than his cleverness, and so he tries to break John's faith in him by telling John that he was a fake, to protect him and so that the loss would hurt less, saying basically as Major Sholto says here "I really don't believe in collateral damage. Please leave me." Sherlock didn't believe he mattered to anyone, and so he really did all but commit suicide. He goes along with Moriarty's story, like Sholto is going along with his murderer's. He sees Major Sholto about to make the same choice he did, and because he now knows how much his actions cost, and he knows how much John cares about him and what that means, he's able to talk Major Sholto down, by saying "We would never do that to John Watson." Sherlock steps back, knowing that it will work, because he knows that he would also never do that to John (at least not anymore.)
• When Sherlock asks Molly for advice on his and John's alcohol tolerance levels for John's stag night, she says, "You think I like a drink?....That I am a drunk?" It's funny, but think back to his conversation with Molly in the previous episode, where she said that one of the things she and Tom did together was go to the pub on the weekends. Sherlock wasn't making assumptions; he remembered.
  • Again on the subject of alcohol, when Lestrade bails Sherlock and John out of the drunk tank after the disastrous Stag Do, he gleefully mocks them for being a "couple of lightweights." At the actual wedding, Lestrade proves he is not a lightweight. He's shown drinking beer after beer for the entire reception, but at the end is still sober enough to lock the place down, pursue a suspect and make an arrest. He doesn't even seem to be noticeably tipsy.

His Last Vow

• It's mentioned that John is addicted to danger, even on This Very Wiki. But one more thing is mentioned as evidence for this by Sherlock and Mary: all his friends are psychopaths. Think back to Sherlock's birthday present to him as mentioned in Many Happy Returns: a treatise on how all John's friends hate him but hide it. The evidence was there, but John didn't see it.
• In the course of the episode, both Sherlock and Mary find themselves in the same position: They can shoot Magnussen here and now, but they don't want to because John's presence (and history with firearms) would make people suspect John as the killer. Mary can't come up with any better solution than leaving Magnussen alive. Sherlock, of course, takes a third option by stalling for time until Mycroft and the SWAT team arrives, providing several reliable witnesses who can clear John's name.
• The reveal that Magnussen's Appledor vaults was in fact all in his head and that his glasses are not in fact a high-tech version of Google Glass but simply part of Magnussen's ticks to remember facts about people mirrors the ultimate reveal in The Reichenbach Fall when Moriarity revealed that his computer code was a ruse and he'd engineered the impressive crimes used to promote it using mundane means.
  • It's also interesting insight into both Holmes and Magnussen and their methods and motivations: Holme's Sherlock Scan is a deluge of bits and pieces, while Magnussen's is mechanical and efficient. This befits Sherlock's investigative endeavours and Magnussen's illicit ones: it's a more precise science to commit a crime than to solve it.
• So why is Mary one of the few women not freaked out by Sherlock's...Sherlockness? She's a former professional killer. She's seen worse. She probably done worse.
  • It also explains why she finds John's outbursts of violence sexy (at least, when they're not directed at her) and why she can "tell when [Sherlock's] fibbing."
• Sherlock doesn't have a mental representation of John in his Mind Palace. If he did, said mental John would have turned up to give medical advice when he got shot. The reason why he doesn't is probably because he just assumes the real John will always be with him.
  • Or perhaps because of his strong sentimental attachment to John which leads back to a line from A Scandal in Belgravia.
    Sherlock: This is your heart and you should never let it control your head.
• Both Sherlock and Mary insist that John somehow knew that Mary was more than she seemed, and Mary even says he saw that she was a former assassin and married her anyway. It seems news to John, but the beginning of the episode sort of implies it. John very weakly protests that Mary can't come with him to fetch Isaac because she's pregnant, but doesn't really mind when she gets in the car anyway. Afterwards, he apparently is fine with his pregnant wife (unarmed and still dressed only in a nightie, dressing gown and slippers) alone in a car with two very high smackheads, one of whom had already shown he was violent by threatening John with a knife. John had confiscated the knife by then, but it was still an abnormally reckless thing to be okay with Mary doing... unless he subconsciously realised she could take care of herself if any trouble arose.
• Moriarty's apparent survival was in fact foreshadowed in The Empty Hearse. Anderson's first theory involved Moriarty's body being disguised as Sherlock. As he was still part of the police force at that point, he would have been privy to information about the case. The only way Anderson's theory is possible is if Moriarty's body was not found on the roof of St. Barts.
• Sherlock's use of Janine as a tool to get access to another person foreshadows Mary having done the same.
• Mrs. Hudson has a bad hip... from exotic dancing.
• When Sherlock escapes from hospital, Mycroft is briefly seen trying to track him down via GPS. The mission code name (which he no doubt thought up himself): Ugly Duckling. Since this is Mycroft, it could refer to Sherlock, the ugly duckling, being the little boy who thought he was stupid but who was actually brilliant. More likely, given their conversation in The Empty Hearse, Mycroft considered it an appropriate code-name because Sherlock recently still considered himself a friendless sociopath, an "ugly duckling." But now he has gone on the run while seriously injured in order to protect John and reconcile him to his wife, and a number of real, honest-to-God friends of his are frantically scouring London looking for him. Transformation into beautiful swan: near complete.
• Sherlock prompting Mary to demonstrate her Improbable Aiming Skills served two purposes. On the face of it, he was showing John, rather than just telling him, that Mary was a crack shot and could have killed him instantly if she'd chosen to. But remember also, John is abnormally attracted to dangerous people and situations. He was probably turned on by Mary's display of badassery, which made him more likely to accept Sherlock later pointing this out to him at 221B.
  • On the above scene: Sherlock begins by speaking to Mary using a phone and earpiece and ends up speaking to her face to face. The information given by earpiece is stuff that would hurt John to overhear (her name is an alias, her life is a façade, she's bored being "the doctor's wife") and the information Sherlock says aloud is exactly what he wants John to know about Mary (she could have killed him instantly but didn't; she is in trouble and needs help.) He even goads her into confessing her fear of losing John or breaking him before finally cutting the exchange short. In other words, he did everything possible to display Mary to John in as positive a light as possible.
    • He also bends down to pick up the coin, breaking eye contact and showing his back to her while she is holding a loaded gun and had just used it. John, a trained soldier, would understand this as meaning Sherlock didn't see Mary as a threat to him.
• Despite having had a rough deal for almost all of his marriage, John agrees to spend an awkward Christmas with Mary and with the Holmes family. He's still wearing his wedding ring, and later complains that he mows the lawn "loads", hinting that if he and Mary were actually living under separate roofs, he was still keeping up appearances and fulfilling what he felt were his household duties. Now think back to what Sherlock said about Harry and John in A Study in Pink. He deduced that John's primary rift with Harry was not about her drinking, but because she walked out on her wife. For whatever reason, John feels very strongly about people abandoning their marriages. It may have influenced his decision to try to reconcile to Mary.
• At the Holmes House, Mycroft specifically tells his mother to call him by his first name, not Mike or Mikey. Later, Sherlock reveals that his first name is really William. It's entirely possible that, after Mycroft was teased for being different and having such an eccentric name, the Holmes's gave their second son a more normal name, but he rejected it in order to be more like his big brother, who season 3 has shown he admired a lot in the past and (probably) in the present.
  • Truth in television as well: A lot of Brits don't go by their first name.
• Sherlock's previous assertion that his mother "understands very little" might seem strange after the Christmas sequence, where Mary finds a book she wrote and Mr. Holmes refers to her as a "genius." However, keep in mind that Sherlock is a chemist and his mother is a physicist — a little competition there?
• According to Magnusson's overlay, Sherlock's porn preference is "normal". Which makes sense, if he's just feigning an interest in it, or isn't really interested enough to develop a kink or fetish. Or if the only porn he's ever bothered to look at is what he found when he borrowed/confiscated John's laptop. He may not be interested in porn at all, but has played up his preferences a little in order to make himself look weaker to Magnussen (building off the theory that his drug addiction was also a fake to make Magnussen underestimate him).
• Why does Sherlock sound so condescending when he calls Wiggins "Billy"? Billy is short for William so it's likely that he was called that at some point before he started going by "Sherlock".
• When Sherlock finds out the truth about Mary, you'd expect her word cloud to have a variety of words like "assassin" "false identity" and things like that. All there is is the word "liar" over and over. Because it was the one thing he originally did catch: When Sherlock first met Mary and scanned her, the word "liar" appeared exactly once, but it was easily missed amidst the flurry of other (some would say irrelevant) information. The overload of information suggests that Mary purposely overstimulated Sherlock's scan in order to hide her true nature. Sherlock may also be mentally berating himself for picking up that clue the first time but completely failing to work out its significance.
• Whenever we see Sherlock analyze someone, the words that pop up are usually normal when they aren't fancy to emphasize a point. When Magussen analyzes someone, it looks like he's reading off a computer directory. Magussen is colder than Sherlock could ever be, high-functioning sociopath or not, ergo machine-like.
• By his use of drugs in the episode's beginning, Sherlock inadvertently saved his own life. When Molly found drug residue in his urine sample, she was so outraged she slapped him — hard and more than once. By this, she transformed his mind-palace image of her into someone who could slap him, hard enough to get his attention when he was busy dying of blood loss.
• Sherlock frequently refers to himself as a sociopath. But one of the earliest signs of sociopathy is sadism towards animals as a child. This episode reveals that Sherlock loved animals when he was a kid.
• Sherlock's naïve assumption that the Watsons will just have a "domestic" about his shooting (and then get over it and reconcile quickly to again work together) isn't just wishful thinking. It's based on his observations of John. After all, it took John only a couple of days to freely forgive Sherlock for putting him through two years of hell, and he's aware now that he's John's best friend — the strongest relationship Sherlock has ever experienced. Since Sherlock doesn't really understand romantic relationships or marriages from an emotional perspective, he doesn't understand why Mary's lying to John (for a similar amount of time, about a pretty similar thing) would affect him much more deeply.
• Mary, a former intelligence agent, is able to shoot a hole through a coin, but fails to notice that the figure she assumes first to be Sherlock and secondly to be a dummy is actually her own husband. This seems a bit of a clanger, except Sherlock had already observed in The Empty Hearse that Mary is short-sighted. He and John would have arranged the distance and shadows of the scene, knowing Mary's short-sightedness would also give her compromised vision in low light.
• When Sherlock interrupts Mary's attempted execution of Magnussen, she doesn't threaten to shoot him. She threatens to kill him. He says "no, Mrs Watson. You won't," and deliberately ignores her order not to move. She shoots him, but in a way that he later explains to John was intended to be non-lethal. Given how quickly Sherlock thinks and his choice of words there, his later explanation of Mary's dilemma must have occurred to him as soon as he saw her. Why won't she just execute them both and leave? Because she's Mrs Watson. His step forward seems less of a mistake on his part and more his urging her to do what he later says struck him as a logical thing to do.
• The web of lies and half-truths about Sherlock's presence in the drug house! "I'm on a case," true — he was only in that sordid environment in the hopes that his drug habit, as he said, might "hit the newspapers". (Magnussen's newspapers. Ones John doesn't read.) Sherlock's a graduate chemist with a massive Homeless Network: if he'd only wanted a high, he could easily have purchased or synthesized one. That doesn't mean he wasn't there to get high. He was in fact seriously impaired, higher than even he realized, high enough that he completely forgot he was undercover when he heard John's voice. High enough that he was losing time and trying to cover it up with the rather pathetic "People were talking, none of them me, I must have filtered" excuse.
• When Mycroft goes to search Sherlock's room for drugs, Sherlock panics, successfully keeping him out. We find out later of course that it's because Janine was in there and obviously Sherlock doesn't want Mycroft to see a half naked woman in his room. But Sherlock does immediately call off Mycroft, at first he just rolls his eyes, knowing that there are no drugs in his bedroom. It isn't until Mycroft says "you haven't been home all night" that Sherlock's eyes get wide and he says something. Apparently the fact that he hasn't been home all night is the reason he knows she's in there... so apparently Janine randomly comes over when he's not home just to sleep in his bed. And does it often enough that he can predict it.
  • Sherlock doesn't care about Mycroft finding a half-naked woman in his room. He cares about him finding Janine in there. Mycroft would quickly deduce that Sherlock was using Janine to get to Magnussen and ruin everything.
• Sherlock had a childhood dog he loved dearly, Redbeard. It's mentioned several times throughout the series how he never had friends growing up and his own brother apparently treated him like an idiot. It's not unusual for unhappy and/or lonely children to have a dog they view as their best friend, mixing both this and Tear Jerker explaining why Redbeard is a pressure point for him even well into his adult life.
• Magnussen mocks John when he says he still doesn't understand many things about Magnussen's MO... but the reason John doesn't understand is that, for all Magnussen has extraordinary talents, John has common sense and realises that Magnussen's schemes are just going to get him murdered one day, especially given the true nature of the Appeldore Vaults, and while the security services might protect him now, plenty of people will be happy to let the killer off lightly. He can surround himself with security goons, but he doesn't seem to vet them much- judging by how it works out with Janine, Magnussen obviously assumes that when he "owns" someone they'll be loyal to him, and he's wrong. The man's psychopathic arrogance means he has no concept of how vulnerable he really is.
  • With his complete lack of empathy, Magnussen may simply assume everyone thinks the same way he does, acting purely out of self-interest and therefore completely locked down by his blackmail. The thought never occurred to him that someone would be willing to throw themselves under the bus to take him out for good, least of all "the hero"; Sherlock.
• Remember what Donovan said in "A Study in Pink"? That someday, Sherlock would be standing over a body, and he'll be the one who put it there. As it turns out, her prediction came true, on all accounts. However, nothing said anybody would mourn for this particular body.
• Connecting this to the next season finale: If you watch carefully, there's a hint that it's not Moriarity sending out the "Did You Miss Me?" messages: His jaw doesn't actually move. It's a recording of his voice and a shot of his face, that's all. It's being projected by someone else. Someone who had access to recordings of him and phenomenal hacking skills. Almost certainly Eurus.
• Also delayed to Season Four: Magnussen knows one of Sherlock's pressure points is "Redbeard." Redbeard isn't a dog. The dog never existed and only Sherlock thinks it did. But the child murdered by Mycroft and Sherlock's secret sister did. Mycroft isn't afraid of anything Magnussen knows about the government or even Sherlock personally. He's deathly afraid Magnussen will find out about Sherrinford and its secret prisoner and everything Mycroft has covered up to protect his family.
• The day Sherlock and John break into Magnussen's apartment, John makes a point of mentioning that he would check his schedule—and Sherlock says that he's already checked, and he knows John is available that night. Why was John available? Because Mary had already planned to break into Magnussen's apartment the same night.

2016 New Year's Special

The Abominable Bride

• The title "The Abominable Bride" is a reference to both the plots of the episode; the "ghost" from the Victorian setting, and Sherlock's drug addiction from the modern setting.
• Why does Sherlock hallucinate the Suffragette conspiracy as an eerie, hooded cult? Because, as it's been made clear in the past, he has problems with relating to women and finds the idea of romance vaguely threatening.
  • Which is why Victorian!Sherlock didn't realize Victorian!Molly is a woman despite the evidence hovering right in front of his face before Victorian!John points it out to him.
• On the above, Sherlock's subconscious reimagining Molly Hooper as a man speaks volumes about his relationship with her. On one hand, it might help explain why he's impervious to her romantically... he just can't see her "in that way." On another level, even though he's been shown to ignore, dismiss and sometimes insult Molly, his subconscious makes her into a fellow man and colleague, one Victorian!Sherlock respects as an equal and addresses as "Hooper", the same way he addresses Victorian!Watson and both Lestrades by their surnames. Hooper may be abrasive, but Victorian!Holmes recognises "he" is easily as clever as he is, and is in a professional position of authority over him.
• All the woman presented at the cult's meeting, of all people why do they have to be someone Sherlock knows? Sherlock needed stand-ins to fill the missing details of Abominable Bride case, and those that he subconsciously chooses all have histories of abuse from men.
  • In Janine's case, we even see a series of flashbacks of the way Sherlock used her to close in on Magnussen before she talks about "you've no idea how that bastard treated her."
• Throughout the episode, there are several hints that are dropped pertaining to the real twist of the episode, namely, Moriarty's potential survival in the present day, such as the 'YOU' of the titular bride being similar to the 'IOU' featured in The Reichenbach Fall, and the below conversation — in which Mary is summoned by "M", which is reminiscent of the very end of His Last Vow.
  Mary: Mrs. Hudson, tell my husband I'll be home late. I have some urgent business.
  Mrs. Hudson: Is everything alright?
  Mary: Oh you know, just a friend in need.
  Mrs. Hudson: Oh dear, what friend?
  Mary: England.
• Victorian!Mycroft is morbidly obese. Most versions of Mycroft tend to be less physically active than Sherlock, and therefore fat, but Mycroft isn't due to dieting and exercise. There have also been a few hints over the series that Mycroft has lost considerable weight fairly recently; Sherlock keeps needling him with "how's the diet going?" and his suits are too big.
• During the initial sequence where Victorian!Watson and Victorian!Mary are arguing between themselves, Victorian!Sherlock plays a melody from his violin, the same one that his modern-day counterpart plays during Mary and John's wedding. It reflects how modern Sherlock cares about them both. Or how their marriage, which the song was for, is nothing but arguing and they simply do not get along
• Victorian!John noted that Victorian!Sherlock kept a photo of Irene Adler in his watch. A modern version of Irene.
• Of course Victorian!Holmes can't save Sir Eustace and chooses not to bring the suffragists to court. If he interferes in what actually happened (Sir Eustace was killed and the crime was never solved), it stops being a true simulation of the events, and the whole point of the exercise is lost.
• At one point Victorian!Watson mentions the possibility of Emelia having a secret twin, to which Victorian!Sherlock pauses to consider. Longer than usual, in fact. Now, a question: is thinking about Emelia or Moriarity?
  • Or, after "The Final Problem," Or subconsciously remembering Eurus?
• Victorian!John asked Victorian!Sherlock how he could survive the Fall off the waterfall. His only answer is; "Elementary, my dear Watson." After all, "It's not the falls that kill you. It's the landing."
• Delayed Brilliance for Season 4: Eurus being a hidden sister of the Holmes boys seems to be prefigured by the fact that Sherlock's drug "enhanced" deductions about Moriarty result in an analogy involving the invisibility of Women as a whole. And Moriarty in a dress, too!

Series Four

The Six Thatchers

• The first break-in was suspicious because someone took the bust of Margaret Thatcher from the dark living room out to the porch, which is permanently lit. Of course AJ had to move it: he had to be able to see if the flash drive was there, and he wouldn't have been able to in the dark.
  • That's literally part of the plot (and straight out of ACD canon).
• Mycroft's office looks like a nicely-furnished prison cell. Which is appropriate, for someone who's even more rigid and less human than Sherlock. His kitchen looks like someone took the tiles off the walls of a prison shower and plopped a fridge in it. Similarly grey and lonely, especially with the large number of takeout menus on the empty fridge.
  • On the above, Mycroft's recurring weight problem makes increasing sense when you see his fridge is bare and he seems to live almost entirely on takeout. Oh, Mycroft.
• Lestrade is completely dismissive of Sherlock when he says that his brunette, forensic pathologist date is "wrong for him." While Lestrade instantly believes every word Sherlock says when he's helping him with a case, he knows full well that "wrong for you" is an opinion, not a deduction based on evidence. And Sherlock's hardly qualified to give his opinion on personal relationships, hence the remark about "Mystic Meg."
• Many people thought that Sherlock being able to brawl with one of the most dangerous assassins in the world for an extended period of time and ultimately win the fight was unbelievable, but it actually makes perfect sense. Sherlock is himself a highly skilled fighter, though he prefers to think his way out of situations. Based on skill alone, he is likely on a similar level to high-level boxer or martial artist. Good enough to easily defeat the average person, but nowhere near the skillset of an elite mercenary. However, those aren't his only abilities. Sherlock's vast intellect and brainpower grant him extraordinary logical, deductive and reasoning capabilities. Previous episodes have also shown his extremely good split-second decision making abilities. These abilities would amplify his already extensive fighting skills, and make it no surprise that Sherlock is able to keep up with an elite fighter.
• John suddenly having an affair can seem out of character for him, until one learns that the woman involved is actually a master manipulator, who apparently can change the mind of someone with a few words. Attracting a recently reformed womaniser in his first year of parenthood must have not be a very tough challenge for her.
• While Sherlock thinks the bust contains the Black Pearl of the Borgias (as it does in "The Six Napoleons"), it actually contains a USB drive with Mary's backstory with A.G.R.A. In The Sign of the Four the first clue to Miss Morstan's backstory and the Agra treasure was a set of mysterious pearls.

The Lying Detective

• When Sherlock rushes down to the front door of Baker Street to deduce that Faith Smith is suicidal and stop her from leaving with a loaded gun, there's a very brief flashback to John in A Study in Pink, leaving the Brixton crime scene, cane in hand. Faith isn't the first suicidal person Sherlock has spent all night with to keep them from eating their gun.
• When John at first refuses Mrs Hudson's demand that he examine Sherlock at his therapist's office, she gets angry and threatens to cut him off. John stands firm, though — until Mrs Hudson starts pretty blatantly fake-crying against the car. She knows from the events of A Scandal in Belgravia that John melts the second she starts to cry.
• When Faith is about to leave 221B, Sherlock rushed down and asked for her handbag. Faith subconsciously pulls her arms away when she thinks Sherlock wanted to see the evidence of self-harm. The truth is there are no real scars. Eurus is impersonating Faith and there's no way she'll let Sherlock see her bare arm in case he deduces the deception.
• Sherlock can't tell John about his plan to deal with Culverton. Telling John why he took on this case would've broken his promise to Mary.
• Eurus's disguises only worked because of the circumstances Sherlock and John did and didn't see her in. Sherlock only saw John's therapist for a few moments on one occasion, and while completely high. John never saw "Faith" when she visited Baker Street, and Sherlock never saw the girl John flirted with on the bus.
  • And on the above, the fact that John didn't recognise his therapist as the same girl he was texting speaks both to how shallow the dalliance was in the first place (she bitterly points out how he didn't even bother looking properly at her face) and to how grief-stricken he is later.
    • Alternately, he was actively avoiding looking at her properly because he knew he shouldn't be cheating, and/or she's lying to mess with him. Most of the audience didn't notice either.
• The therapy session is in a bright and airy room in someone's house, with lots of space. The interrogation scene is in a dark, cramped room, at close quarters, across a table. The former is between a therapist and patient, the latter is between two friends talking about another friend.
• John's hallucination of Mary is notably absent in the scene where John gives Sherlock a savage beating in the morgue. Obviously: she's a projection of all his better instincts, and in no way could he imagine Mary being OK with him hitting Sherlock or blaming him for her death. He wanted to lose control, so he deliberately removed her from his thoughts altogether while he did.
• Sherlock tells Faith that the name she can't remember can't be a single word, because people are almost always known by two, unless they're celebrities. In The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty writes "Get Sherlock" on the glass at the Tower of London, and absolutely everyone knows he's talking about Holmes.
• Keep track of what Mary is wearing in this episode. At the beginning, and for most of it, she's wearing the same outfit she was wearing when she was shot and died — John's most traumatic memory of her. By the end, she's wearing something we see her wearing in The Sign of Three as she and John are preparing for their upcoming wedding — one of the happiest memories John would have had of her. It's a subtle sign that he's starting to heal from his grief.
• We see the top bit of Sherlock's bare back towards the end of this episode—and fortunately, there seem to be no traces of the absolutely brutal beating he received in "The Empty Hearse."
• John is left-handed. But every time that we see him throw a punch throughout the series, he does it with his right hand. Even in the morgue, in his most raw, irrationally emotional state, he attacks Sherlock with his right hand. Seems curious—until you remember that he was shot in the left shoulder. He may not have the strength in that arm that he used to. Or he might instinctively continue to protect that shoulder, especially in high-pressure, high-emotion situations.

The Final Problem

• One little girl managed to be awake in an airplane with all oxygen masks deployed and everybody in it asleep... Telltale signs that it's all a work of someone's fictional mind.
• While Mycroft watchs Eurus's tapes, John goes out into the Governor's balcony and looks down at the rocks, for no explained reason. A few seconds later, we learn that he had realized Sherrinford was compromised. He was looking for an escape route.
• On the meta side: One of the motifs during the "gauntlet" set up is "emotional context." The entire episode provides one for the entire series. Little tiny interactions are now given emotional context from the very beginning. For example, think of when Sherlock angrily growled out "I don't have friends!" At the time, it seemed very caustic. Now, while still caustic, he's also bitter and scared, whether he realizes it or not. Or how about the "What made you this way" "I made me this way" interaction from The Abominable Bride?
• A lot about Moriarty's plans in The Reichenbach Fall make more sense knowing he got information about Sherlock from Eurus. First he locks up children with poisoned candy and leaves them to slowly die, mirroring Eurus leaving Sherlock's childhood friend in a well when they were children.
  • And then of course, Moriarty also set up a plan to kill all of Sherlock's friends, something that hits Sherlock hard since he's lost a friend before when he couldn't solve the problem.
• In The Hounds of Baskerville, Sherlock eventually deduces that Henry Knight had experienced such a traumatic event as a child that he imagined a dog into the memory, when it was actually a human being. Sherlock seems to tumble to this conclusion almost out of nowhere, but in The Final Problem we find out Sherlock has done exactly the same thing. Only in Henry's case, he imagined the attacker as a frightening hell-hound, and in Sherlock's, he imagined the victim, his childhood friend Victor, as a beloved Irish Setter.
• Alongside the same vein of a very, very long foreshadowing: of course it wasn't Sherlock that had upset Mummy in A Study In Pink. But they never said Myrcroft did so either. It therefore meant the third sibling, their sister Eurus, that did.
• Of course Mycroft would play Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest: Lady Bracknell is a powerful, conservative, arrogant, cold-blooded, scheming social climber; Wilde's idea of what was wrong with The Establishment. Further, the part is quite often played by a male in drag.
• When Eurus plays the violin in her cell, it sounds surprisingly clear. Clearer than Eurus' speech, in fact. Five or so minutes later, it is revealed that her cell has no glass. It's a hint that most people miss due to audio tropes.
• Sherlock usually dominates any situation he can. However, after the events in The Final Problem, where he finds out he has a tragically insane, extreme super-genius little sister, who originally taught him to play the violin, they play together. Notice which he chooses; second fiddle.
• Throughout all four series, Mycroft repeatedly complains that he hates Christmas and never spends it with his family. In this episode, we see it's an excuse to be absent because he spends Christmas with his little sister. The one Sherlock can't know about, the one his parents think is dead.
• Eurus' psychological "experiments" seem rather heavy handed. More like a comic-book villain than the mistress of manipulation she supposedly is. We've seen her doing better in earlier episodes. Unless, of course, the real plan wasn't to conduct 'experiments', it was to get Sherlock to love her, confess her sins, and improve her relationship with her family. Sure, it was a bit dramatic, but if there's anything that runs in the family...
  • To that end, her "experiments" are extremely effective in emotionally exhausting all three men in her trap. She may have wanted to wear Sherlock down so far that he would admit his love for her out of exhaustion.
• Mycroft's avoidance of "leg work" comes back to bite him in his ordeal with Eurus. John and Sherlock are so accustomed to seeing (and perpetrating) violence that they can put aside their morals and acclimate to their situation and get to solving her sadistic puzzles quickly. Meanwhile, Mycroft insists that he will not compromise his morals to commit murder (even to save an innocent woman), protests that Eurus's treatment of the Garrideb brothers is cruel and wrong, and vomits at the sight of David's suicide. John has to tell him that "today we are soldiers." He doesn't start becoming actually helpful until halfway through the Garrideb puzzle. If he'd spent a little more time in the field, in physically and emotionally difficult situations like Sherlock and John, it might have gone very differently for all three of them.

Other

Miscellaneous

• Why is Moriarty played by an Irish actor? "Moriarty" is an Irish surname: it's an Anglicisation of "Ó Muircheartaigh" (pronounced a bit like "O Moor-her-tee") and the family name originates in County Kerry in Ireland. Of the dozens of actors who've played Moriarty in various adaptations of Sherlock Holmes over the decades, Andrew Scott is nevertheless the first one to play him as an Irishman.
• Throughout two series, Mycroft's three-piece suits don't always seem to fit him particularly well. This is perfectly in line with the idea that Mycroft struggles with his weight — any rapid gain or loss would mean he would find it difficult to have his clothes tailored/new ones purchased so that they always fit properly.
• Anthea's "forgetful" attitude. It seems like she's never paying attention much or able to retain details. Recall A Study in Pink when Mycroft confronts Sherlock. Afterward, Mycroft mentions that Sherlock's security status should be updated. Despite being present for the entire conversation, Anthea still asks Mycroft who's status is to be updated. She also seems to have no recollection of John despite interacting with him several times throughout the series. While some are chalking this up to her being absorbed with whatever she does on her phone, it's also possible that it's really just a front; Obviously Mycroft uses her in his more subversive operations, such as kidnapping people, so perhaps she's just creating a front of not being able to retain any information so no one would try to capture her to acquire information on Mycroft and his operations.
  • An admittedly less likely possibility is that she actually has a condition that makes it difficult to retain new memories, and is employed by Mycroft for this reason. Her phone reminds her of her own condition and reminds her to have fun with it (thus she actually forgets John but knows from his reaction that he's one of their "marks").
• It's been pointed out that John's devotion to Sherlock borders on the co-dependent and slavish. But in The Hounds of Baskerville, we see John pulling rank on a young corporal and giving him an order in tones we've never heard John use before. He's not abusive and doesn't raise his voice, but there's real, quiet authority behind it — and the corporal immediately responds to it. As a soldier, John would recognise the importance of rank and hierarchy in running a smooth operation — those in authority need to be trustworthy and soldiers under that authority need to trust and obey without asking questions. At Sherlock's grave, before finally walking away, John's quick-turn is how a lower ranking officer would leave the presence of a higher one after being dismissed. The whole time, consciously or unconsciously, John has viewed Sherlock as his superior officer, someone he needs to trust and take orders from in order to make their friendship/crime solving work. The fact that he does trust him, and does take orders from him, really is the only reason it works — if John stood up for himself more, argued the point or even questioned some of the ludicrous things Sherlock asks him to do over two seasons (including housebreaking and arson) neither the friendship nor the professional partnership would survive. Sherlock is a typical alpha male. The scene where he offers Moriarty John's chair, and Moriarty assumes dominance by instead taking Sherlock's chair, tells you all you need to know about that. He doesn't react well to attempts to boss him, bully him or dominate him (like Mycroft does. Look how healthy that relationship is.) There can't be two Sherlocks. John can and will lead the way if he has to, or if it's better for everyone at the time, but mostly it's more practical to just roll his eyes at Sherlock's ridiculousness and trust that, in the end, his "superior officer" is a genius who knows what he's doing.
  • This dynamic is further enforced in The Sign of Three, when John realizes the corporal is still alive. He immediately takes charge of the situation, knowing that his expertise at a combat doctor is needed. Sherlock shows his trust in John by taking the subservient role after a short questioning of John calling him "nurse" because he also realizes in that moment that John is essentially prompting Sherlock like he does with social protocol.
  • This interpretation is reminiscent of the "batmen" in the British Army; A batman was a soldier acting as a valet/servant/bodyguard for a superior officer (which was actually a nice job for a soldier, since it's easier and less dangerous than the battlefield and can offer nice promotions). J.R.R. Tolkien used the relationship between a batman and his officer to create another famous bromance: Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings.
• A couple of funny things noticed about John and Sherlock's dress styles — namely, their collars. Note the Lampshading in The Hounds of Baskerville when John tells Sherlock not to "turn [his] collar up so [he] looks cool." Then, in The Reichenbach Fall, when Sherlock goes in to interrogate the little girl and he decides to "not be himself," the first thing he does is turn his collar back down. This is funny, but it becomes adorable in hindsight during The Great Game. While John goes off to investigate Mycroft's case without Sherlock, he flips up the collar on his jacket — he's imitating Sherlock! In the next scene, he's back with Sherlock, and he's turned the collar back down.
  • Another on their clothing and general "style"- they're practically disguises when you think about it. Sherlock is a tall, dark, handsome Sharp-Dressed Man who is actually a socially awkward dork who's never had a girlfriend, loves science (a traditionally but unfairly designated 'nerdy' pursuit), who utterly fails at normal friendships, has a childish streak, is irresponsible, has serious problems with empathy and basic social interactions, and can't cope with basic stuff like eating every day or holding down an actual regular job. Despite looking the part, he can be extraordinarily fragile. He just happens to have great taste in clothes. John looks completely adorkable most of the time, but he's worldly, practical and resilient. He's clever, witty, and can be very charming. Although he has a blog, he's not in the least tech savvy — he can barely type properly — and has expressed that he has no interest in typically "nerdy" pursuits as chatrooms, textspeak or graphic novels. Further contradicting the adorkable stereotype, he seems to make friends easily when he feels like it, is an enthusiastic and competent womaniser, will punch you- hard- if you piss him off, and has no problems killing people if he decides they're not very nice.
  • While we're on the subject of clothing, check out Jim's outfits. They're very sharp but the dude is covered in skulls. Also, his suits aren't particularly well-fitting either, not even as much as Mycroft's and certainly not as much as Magnussen's. It hints that Moriarity is not really as dangerous as he likes to think he is.
• Sherlock's three friends are more than that — they're family. His clear maternal substitute in Mrs. Hudson puts up with his eccentrics, takes care of him and does her best to protect him and put his interests first. Lestrade is a clear paternal substitute — he's somewhat distant, he tries to rein Sherlock in and get him to follow rules (e.g. not nick evidence), but he's also there when Sherlock needs him and goes to check up on him just because he might need his help. John, to further this analogy, makes a better big brother than Mycroft ever did, again through his unconditional and unwavering support of Sherlock and his willingness to punch or chew out anyone who hurts him. Their close friendship is something undefinable, something far more than friendship, which everyone assumes must mean it's romantic — but the other alternative, the closest label you can give it is brotherhood. And while she's not mentioned during the confrontation with Moriarty, for whatever reason, we know that Sherlock also cares about Molly, having admitted that she "does count and he's always trusted her". While Molly is clearly romantically attracted to Sherlock, his affections for her resemble more that of a big brother, one who can often appear callous and mocking at times but he doesn't intend to ever really hurt her feelings and shows his protectiveness of her when he warns her off being with "Jim from I.T" because he's gay and he wants to save her further heartache. And in the end, Molly is the one person he's able to confide in and turn to for support in his darkest hour, in a way he was unable to with either of the other familial figures in his life. Molly even comments that Sherlock reminds her of her father which is much more like a comment one would give to a sibling rather than an intended boyfriend.
• Regarding Molly Hooper- it seems that part of the reason Sherlock walks all over her isn't because he's deliberately trying to be cruel, it's because he can, and for most of the time Molly never defends herself or fights back. Virtually the first thing we see Sherlock do is insult her appearance. Molly's response? "... Okay." We've seen that Sherlock actually attempts to treat everyone like this- because he simply doesn't know any better. The only difference between Molly and Sherlock's other friends- notably John and Lestrade- is that others are far less willing to put up with Sherlock's bullshit. John is incredibly loyal and adores Sherlock, but if Sherlock insults him or does something particularly heartless, he has no problems in pulling him up about it. John picks his battles, but he wouldn't respond to a downright insult with "Okay." Lestrade isn't afraid to respond to Sherlock's behaviour by calling in a fake drug bust to demonstrate that a DI from Scotland Yard needs to be given a certain amount of respect. Mrs Hudson too loves Sherlock and is never really angry with him, but again, it was most certainly not okay when Sherlock vandalised the living room wall. Sherlock seems to be genuinely so socially awkward and unaware of his own words and behaviour (certainly earlier in the series) that he needs his friends to let him know, without reservation, that what he's just done or said is "not good." Molly at first seems very reluctant to criticise him even when he's being awful to her, probably giving Sherlock the impression that she doesn't really mind that much. It's worth noting that whenever she DOES stick up for herself, Sherlock is taken aback, and responds respectfully and kindly to her (as respectfully and kindly as he's capable of, that is).
• The furniture and furnishings of 221B- most notably, the chairs. John stakes a claim on the armchair virtually the second he walks into 221B- it becomes his chair, and Sherlock only sits in it once, when he's more or less forced out of his own chair by Moriarty in an interesting little dominance game. John's chair is comfortable, old and old-fashioned. There's a Union Jack throw-pillow. It's very much old Queen-and-Country stuff. Sherlock's chair, on the other hand, is a much more modern and fashionable chair, bringing the old and the new into the same room. The three-seater sofa up against the wall can go either way but tends to be Sherlock's, especially in season one. In The Great Game when John comes home to find Mycroft is sitting in his armchair, he doesn't take the sofa- he sits on the coffee table. And in the latter half of A Study in Pink, Sherlock and John walk into the flat to find Lestrade stretched out on Sherlock's chair like he owns it, as if that in and of itself puts Sherlock on the back pedal. In A Study in Pink Sherlock refers to the desk as "my desk", but it very soon becomes communal property. As for the various knick-knacks, they too marry well the old and the new- very Victorian features such as beetles displayed on cards, old oil paintings, wooden crates, etc are interspersed with painfully new ones- the TV, the phones and laptops lying around, the fridge, the microwave. It's respect to the old, Victorian Sherlock Holmes while updating the story.
  • In A Study in Pink, there's a fairly subtle moment which may also be a nod toward Victorian meets Modern. When John arrives first at 221B for the first time when he and Sherlock are supposedly only checking the place out, he completely ignores the modern doorbells on the right hand side of the door, and knocks using the huge ornate brass knocker instead.
• Irene never calls John by his first name. Moriarty never does either. Mycroft initially switches between "have a seat, John" to "time to choose a side, Dr. Watson". The CIA in A Scandal in Belgravia call him "Dr Watson" when they're threatening to shoot him. Generally, those who don't address John by his first name use "Dr Watson" as a vague sort of insult/threat. Since John never introduces himself as "Dr Watson", it may well be a term of address that he dislikes. Irene, Moriarty and Mycroft are all clever enough to realize this, and call him "Dr Watson" to annoy him. It's also interesting that in the case of Irene and Moriarty, both of them call him "John"- to Sherlock, but never to John's face. To Sherlock, John is always just John- the only time he calls him "Dr Watson" is in front of Lestrade at the Brixton crime scene, as a way of letting Lestrade know that the stranger he'd just brought to a crime scene was an MD. The fact that Irene and Moriarty only ever call him "John" to Sherlock may well be a way of letting Sherlock know how close he actually is to John Watson.
• John's blog entry of 23rd March threatens Sherlock with a Bond night in the comments section, and Sherlock's site later confirms that they had one. Given Sherlock's general disdain for what he considers useless knowledge, it's doubtful he would have correctly interpreted Mycroft's line about the Bond plane in "A Scandal in Belgravia" without said night.
• There are many items of interest in Sherlock's bedroom- including a Judo certificate- but the most brilliant perhaps is a photograph of Edgar Allan Poe on the far wall. Poe was the creator of detective Auguste Dupin, the first popular detective in literature and very much Doyle's basis for the character of Sherlock Holmes himself.
• Why does Sherlock sign all his texts "SH"? Because he frequently uses other people's phones to send texts when his own phone is indisposed.
• Mrs. Hudson's sometimes teeth-grindingly dense comments, assumptions or behaviour make a lot more sense when it's confirmed at the end of Series 3 that she has a marijuana habit. She is probably stoned approximately half the time she opens her mouth.
• In John's blog entry for 11 August, Sherlock explains that he's writing John's blog because John and Mary are on Sex Holiday. He pointedly corrects himself — honeymoon — and adds, "Apparently we aren't allowed to call it Sex Holiday. Apparently we really shouldn't tell children that John and his wife have gone on Sex Holiday." Why would Sherlock, of all people, think of this in terms of what one should and should not tell children? Because someone — probably John or Mary or both — read him a sharp lecture during the reception, after overhearing him telling little Archie, the ring bearer, that as soon as the party was over Dr and Mrs Watson were going away on Sex Holiday.
• In the DVD commentary for The Great Game, Cumberbatch hinted that Sherlock as a child discovered that his father was having an affair. But in series 3, we see the Holmes parents still happily married. We also learn that Sherlock's mother quit her impressive job as a physicist at some point to focus on her family. Could the affair have been what triggered her decision?
• On Sherlock's Science of Deduction website, there's a number of posts in which he asks for help from the readers with some simple codes that we all know he could have cracked in fifteen seconds flat. There's no real in-universe reason given for this, unless, of course, you think about the fact that the famous detective and his friend have gathered quite a fan following from people of all ages. He intentionally put codes up for the younger fans to solve so they could feel included, too. As we've seen from Archie, Sherlock has a bit of a soft spot for kids.
• Sherlock's repeated attempts to please John by giving him things, and the fact that John gradually recognises that that's Sherlock's "love language" and the only way he really expresses emotions like gratitude or sympathy or remorse. Some of it takes a while to sink in, but there's a definite pattern. In A Study in Pink, Sherlock ditches John at a crime scene- then apologises later by taking him out with him to dinner, then on a chase across London, "curing" his psychosomatic pain, and offering to give him Lestrade's badge. Later, Sherlock's gratitude isn't "thanks", it's "good shot" and "... dinner?" In The Blind Banker Sherlock, seeing John flustered, embarrassed and probably totally broke, offers him his bank card. After having kept John up all night deciphering book code, he suggests they go out and when John tells him he has a date, it's highly implied that all three of the circus tickets were funded by Sherlock. In their last scene together in The Blind Banker, Sherlock tries to make up for what John has been through (being partly Sherlock's fault) by making him a cup of coffee. In John's blog, there's a mention of Sherlock's reaction to finding out John had broken up with Sarah, largely due to Sherlock-related reasons: Sherlock responds to the news by buying John beer. In The Hounds of Baskerville John is so used to this that Sherlock can manipulatively use making coffee for John as a way of poisoning him. John even tells him he doesn't have to keep apologising. At the end of the episode, Sherlock does bring John a non-poisoned cup of coffee, as a way of apologising, as well as offering him various ketchups while avoiding admitting to what he did, clearly guilty about the whole thing.
  • Mycroft seems to do this too. His offering Sherlock a cigarette in A Scandal in Belgravia was more to test his willpower on a possible "danger night" than anything else, and we later see that Sherlock saw through it, though Mycroft thought Sherlock would buy the "Merry Christmas" line. Since both Holmes brothers apparently equate showing repressed affection for someone by giving them stuff, or taking them somewhere cool, the obvious and very sad conclusion is that their parents were the same way. It seems more and more clear, the more we learn about Mycroft and Sherlock, that they were deprived of ordinary parental affection, and thus find it nearly impossible to show "normal" affection to others.
  • There are two instances in particular where Sherlock is unable to express himself by his usual methods, and so tries to do so in the usual way: verbally. In The Great Game, he tries to thank John for selflessly risking his own life to give him a chance of escaping, and in The Hounds of Baskerville he tries to apologise to John for telling him to his face that he doesn't have friends, and therefore, that John is not his friend. Both times he finds this excruciating, and although both times John knows what he's trying to express and appreciates it, it's worth noting that nowhere in either scene are the expressions "thank you" "thanks" "sorry" or "apologies" ever found.
• On the above note, Sherlock, having some sociopathic tendencies, is a skilled manipulator and lies very convincingly. Except when it comes to telling lies to John, where he is almost always awful at it, and has to rely on John's naivete or fear or other factors to avoid being caught out. Examples include lying to John about what happened in Soo Lin's flat in The Blind Banker, lying to him about giving Mycroft the memory stick in The Great Game, lying to him about the hound glowing in The Hounds of Baskerville, lying to him about not caring about Mrs Hudson in The Reichenbach Fall and, later in the episode and the most epic example of all, lying to him in the phone call at St Bart's. In all these examples he's so awkward or acts so badly that it's clear he's not comfortable telling those lies. He finds lying to others easy when he's able to put on a fake persona, but with John he's genuine, making it difficult for him to effectively lie. By the end of series 2, he actually goes out of his way to avoid having to directly lie to John.

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