3.1

The Empty Hearse

WRITTEN BY Mark Gatiss

DIRECTED BY Jeremy Lovering

ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 1, 2014

Two years after his “death,” Sherlock returns to Baker Street after Mycroft tells him of an underground terrorist network that needs to be stopped. More importantly — and terrifyingly — Sherlock must face his friends who thought he was dead.

After almost two years of speculation and fan theories about Sherlock’s faked death, the writers go with the intelligent option: don’t commit to any one answer. Instead we see Anderson’s loopy theory, parts of which are plausible, parts of which are fan service (crashing through the window and kissing Molly long and hard on the lips? Yes, please). We see Sherlock/Moriarty slash fiction (Sherliarty? Morlock?) come to life in the Empty Hearse meeting. And then we see Sherlock’s version, which might actually be correct, but even when he tells a great story of exactly how it was done, Gatiss has already anticipated the audience response. He knew that regardless of what story they went with, the viewers would be unsatisfied and pick holes in it, and so they brilliantly add the little bit of Anderson suddenly pausing and nitpicking what Sherlock had told him. When Sherlock smirks and leaves the room, the insinuation is that what we just saw was perhaps not what actually happened. For all we know, Derren Brown really was there.

Regardless of how he did it, Sherlock lives, and with that revelation comes a whole realm of complications, mostly with regards to the people most affected by his death and how they probably should have been let in on his little secret. At the beginning of the episode, we see a sobered John, quiet, no longer the “confirmed bachelor” that the newspapers declared he was in “The Reichenbach Fall,” which clearly ruffled his feathers at the time. He’s not the man he was at the opening of “A Study in Pink” — he’s no longer alone, he doesn’t walk with a cane, “Watson’s Theme” isn’t constantly playing when we see him — but there’s definitely something missing. There’s an awkwardness about him, whether he’s speaking with Mrs. Hudson or Mary, as if he’s lost some of his confidence. Perhaps where Sherlock always believed he looked smarter by standing next to “ordinary” people, John always felt more self-assured when standing next to someone with no social skills whatsoever.

This is an episode of regrets and apologies, where people discover they have inadvertently hurt someone else but were too caught up in their own miseries to notice. Anderson is almost mad with guilt over what he did, and we take a bitter pleasure in seeing him fall apart in front of Sherlock, begging for his forgiveness (apparently Sally Donovan is not similarly racked with guilt and, as we’ll see in the next episode, is still on the police force despite Anderson being let go). Lestrade is as matter-of-fact as he always is, telling Anderson point blank that this happened as a result of what he and Donovan did, but that what’s done is done and they all have to move on. We know he’s missed Sherlock by his reaction to Sherlock’s return, but Lestrade is either less attached to Sherlock than the rest of them, or he’s really good at hiding his emotions. Molly, of course, already knew Sherlock’s death was fake, so while she’s been sad the past couple of years that he’s no longer around, she hasn’t been mourning him.

Mrs. Hudson and John, on the other hand, have been. We know that John doesn’t like being alone, but the fact that Mrs. Hudson was constantly bustling in and out of 221B insisting she was not a housekeeper — while clearly being their housekeeper (who never dusted) — showed how much she loved being around the two of them. In the past two years, John hasn’t contacted her, leaving her to grieve in the flat by herself. She’s angry with him when he suddenly shows up, and even though the scene is laced with humor, seeing these two people bereft in the face of losing Sherlock is sad indeed. Their network had been dismantled (presumably neither of them has seen Molly); they’ve all become detached.

John is the most broken of all of them, which is why Sherlock’s revelation in the restaurant is as cruel as it is hilarious for the viewers. In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes returns from the supposed dead posing as an elderly bookseller, with whom Watson strikes up a conversation. When Watson’s back is turned, so he can look at some of the books the old man is peddling, Holmes throws off his disguise, revealing himself. Watson takes one look at the detective and, not surprisingly, faints. Holmes is shocked and apologizes upon Watson’s revival, saying, “I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.” Our Sherlock is similarly blind to his best friend’s devotion.

The scene of Sherlock’s return in “The Empty Hearse” is so beautifully done because John is about to take the final step to divorce himself from his previous life. He’s said his goodbye to Mrs. Hudson, taken one final look at the flat, and is ready to propose to Mary. Sherlock interrupts that last moment with a disguise that’s meant not so much to conceal his identity as it is to catch John off guard. But John barely looks at him, making Sherlock’s big reveal much more difficult than he thought it would be. When John finally does look up, he doesn’t faint but looks like he just might. Martin Freeman plays this moment stunningly well, having John stare in disbelief for a moment, then clumsily stand up and hold onto the table for support, then hyperventilate with surprise, then with rage, and his first words to Sherlock are a complete struggle. Mary looks confused, and when it dawns on her who this stranger actually is, she shares in John’s confusion, and her echoes of “You’re dead!” punctuate John’s heavy breathing and Sherlock’s realization that perhaps this wasn’t the way to handle the situation — “I’m suddenly realizing I probably owe you some sort of an apology.”

Sherlock believes he can waltz back into everyone’s lives so easily because it never occurs to him that his death would deal such a crushing blow to his friends. We see Mycroft’s indifference to the situation, mostly because he knew Sherlock was, in fact, alive, but if that coldness was what Sherlock was used to as an emotional response, how could he have gauged that others would feel differently? Even the Holmes of the stories didn’t anticipate his friend’s reaction, but as soon as Watson wakes up, all is forgiven due to the fact that his friend is alive, which is all that matters to him.

This scene could have been infuriating for viewers, but it’s saved by three things: the realization that among Sherlock’s flaws is a complete ineptitude when it comes to judging human nature; Mary joining in the chorus by asking Sherlock repeatedly if he knows what John’s been through; and the fact that John gets a few good punches in. In a wonderful series of subsequent events, we see them at a café (presumably having been thrown out of the fancy restaurant) and finally a kebab shop. The downshift in locations is akin to John moving from the life he tried to build for himself back to the life he had with Sherlock: each place is less glamorous than the one before it but more exciting, thanks both to the conversation and the amount of blood John draws from Sherlock.

Mary is a wonderful addition to the core group, adding an interesting new layer to the friendship: she’s an outlet for John but she likes Sherlock and is respected by him, even if he regards her with some suspicion. Played by Martin Freeman’s real-life longtime partner, Amanda Abbington, there’s an instant chemistry between Mary and John that makes their relationship more believable — after all, they’re supposed to have been together for a while when we meet her — and later in the episode we see her playfully teasing John in a way only longtime partners can do. When John worked and lived with Sherlock, he could only deal with Sherlock’s frustrating behavior by rolling his eyes or giving Sherlock the occasional lecture, both of which went unnoticed by his flatmate. Now Mary provides a sounding board: he can talk to her about Sherlock, and Mary gives him an objective opinion rather than always siding with John. It’s a much-needed evolution in how the friendship between the two men will rebuild.

Molly, on the other hand, has moved on, or so she says. Ever since her heartfelt speech in “The Reichenbach Fall,” in which she showed Sherlock she was observing more than he realized, he’s seen her in a new light. With John out of the picture and still fuming, Sherlock offers to make her his sidekick, and she comes along for the ride with her Tom Baker–like scarf and forensic knowledge. But when he surprisingly offers to buy her some chips, she pauses, unsure of what is going on; he’s always turned down her suggestions that they socialize. She’s learned her lesson and knows that Sherlock will never love her the way she once wanted him to, and that’s when she reveals there’s another man in her life. Sherlock nods towards her engagement ring, offering her his congratulations, but knowing what we do about Sherlock, it’s obvious he already noticed that ring on her finger. In fact, it’s probable that he knew she was attached all along, which is why he felt comfortable to ask her to be his ride-along: he knew there would be no strings attached. Louise Brealey is as delightful as she always is in the role, shyly stuttering through her obviously preplanned speech about moving on while still looking awestruck and smitten with Sherlock when he’s talking to her. The reveal that she hasn’t quite moved on when she introduces them all to Sherlock Lite, her fiancé, is funny, but it almost seems a little cruel to make her a laughingstock again, just as everyone is finally respecting her.

So now that Sherlock is back, he’s realizing that things won’t be the same. All of these people longed to have Sherlock back, but his long absence means that upon his return, he is no longer central in their lives. It’s interesting to watch, in the next two episodes, how this new role as “one of the gang,” as opposed to “the center of the gang,” will suit him.

Like Molly, Mycroft knew all along that Sherlock was alive, and actually helped orchestrate the fake death, but now that his brother is back their relationship remains unchanged. In a brilliant scene taken right from the story “The Yellow Face,” Mycroft and Sherlock deduce a man from the state of his wool hat, and reveal another tidbit from their childhood. Mycroft once again insists he’s the smarter one, and Sherlock reminds him that he used to say that all the time, making Sherlock think himself an idiot throughout childhood. “Both of us thought you were an idiot, Sherlock,” Mycroft retorts. “We had nothing else to go on till we met other children.” And then, showing that Sherlock really has changed, he tricks Mycroft into admitting that he doesn’t have to remain isolated and alone just because he feels different than everyone around him. In the season two premiere, Mycroft and Sherlock stood together outside the mortuary doors and talked about how they’re different from everyone else because they don’t need friends. Now, in the season three premiere, Sherlock not only doesn’t see himself as being the same as Mycroft, but actually tries to convince Mycroft that friends are important. Whoa.

A lovely sequence shows us that John and Sherlock were meant to be together: we flip back and forth between Sherlock trying to solve an elementary case with Molly while John’s reprimands ring in his ears (despite what we may have thought, Sherlock really does take to heart what John tries to teach him) and John watching the seconds slowly tick by as he deals with one monotonous case after another at his new medical clinic. Sherlock needs the comfort of having John by his side, lovingly keeping him in line, and John needs the excitement and danger that Sherlock brings. When John assaults a patient thinking it’s another Sherlock prank, he realizes that Sherlock has gotten into his head. On his way to 221B Baker Street, he’s attacked, kidnapped, and put inside a bonfire. Welcome back to your old life, John.

What works so well about this whole scene is that when Mary cleverly figures out a coded message sent to her — one that, as we will later see, was sent by someone who knew she would know how to decode the message — she immediately rushes to Sherlock. Mary could have been the extra, unwanted person in the Sherlock/John relationship, but instead, in this scene, she becomes Sherlock’s ally in a race to save the person who means the most to both of them. In an instant, she goes from potential annoyance to fan favorite. Just as Moriarty strapped a bomb on John because he knew it would be the only thing to unnerve Sherlock, so too does this mysterious individual put John’s life in danger knowing it would smoke out another person. But is it Sherlock he’s trying to bring to the scene, or someone else?

Sherlock and Mary save John’s life, but at the end of the episode, John watches his life flash before his eyes for the second time in as many days as he stands trapped in an abandoned underground carriage with only Sherlock and a ticking time bomb. By saving John’s life at the scene of the bonfire, Sherlock makes up for disappearing for two years without telling John where he was, and they’re back on an even keel. However, the dickish move at the end of the episode — where Sherlock pretends to be confounded by the bomb just so he can force John to forgive him once and for all — shows that some things will never change.

And that’s exactly the way we like it.

HIGHLIGHT “Fffu—” “Cough.”

DID YOU NOTICE?

FROM ACD TO BBC Parts of this episode are based on “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which is the story Doyle wrote in 1903 that announced the return of Sherlock Holmes a decade after his death (and we thought two years was a long time to wait!).

Throughout the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, Watson sports a mustache, which makes everyone’s disgust with it in this episode even funnier.

In the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, Mary Morstan is a client who comes to Holmes and Watson to help her find her missing father. She is described as “a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste … I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.” Watson instantly falls in love with her, and by the end of the book she accepts his marriage proposal. However, whereas in this episode John becomes engaged to Mary, in the story from which this episode is drawn, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Watson mentions “my own sad bereavement,” which many readers have assumed refers to Mary’s death.

At the beginning of the episode, Sherlock is reading a London newspaper and snorts, “London. It’s like a great cesspool into which all kinds of criminals, agents, and drifters are irresistibly drained.” At the very beginning of A Study in Scarlet, when Watson returns to London from the Afghan war, he describes London as “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

In “The Reigate Puzzle,” Watson mentions that in the year the story is set, 1887, Holmes had exhausted himself with “the whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis.” At the very beginning of this episode, Mycroft says Sherlock has been undercover by getting himself in deep with Baron Maupertuis. The “Sumatra” bit also plays into this episode (see below).

When Mary is reading from what appears to be John’s blog, she’s actually quoting The Sign of Four, where Watson describes Holmes’s methods of solving a case.

Just as Sherlock’s mustache jokes aren’t welcome when he first reveals himself to John, the literary Holmes had bad comic timing, too. After making a bad joke to a client in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” before quickly revealing the solution to the mystery, the client remarks, “Your sense of humour may, as you admit, be somewhat perverted, and its exhibition remarkably untimely, but at least I withdraw any reflection I have made upon your amazing professional powers.”

Mycroft and Sherlock’s deduction of the man based solely on his wool hat is a combination of three stories: “The Greek Interpreter,” “The Yellow Face,” and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” In “The Greek Interpreter,” Watson meets Mycroft for the first time, and Mycroft and Holmes choose two men at the Diogenes Club and begin making deductions about their lives while Watson looks on, agog at the similarities between the brothers. In “The Yellow Face,” Watson and Holmes try to make conclusions about a client using only his pipe (including that it has a sentimental value to the man, considering how many times he’s mended it). In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Watson and Holmes do the same using a hat, and Holmes points out that the hat owner’s hair has recently been cut, judging by the hair-ends found on the hat. They also deduce that his wife has ceased loving him, based on the fact that the hat has not been brushed in a while. Sigh.

During the amusing cuts back and forth between John’s office and Sherlock’s flat, we return to Sherlock just as he’s exclaiming, “Monkey glands!” In “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” a particularly creepy late story, Holmes and Watson get called in to the case of Professor Presbury, who has been seen creeping on all fours in the stairway and climbing the outside walls of the house, and his own dog has to be tied up because it’s trying to attack him. Holmes discovers the condition has been brought on by a drug that uses the glands of a langur, an Asian species of monkey.

The case of the stepfather posing as the online boyfriend is an allusion to “A Case of Identity,” where a woman receives a series of letters that turn out to be penned by her stepfather, also named Windibank. Just as Sherlock has some choice words for the stepfather in this episode, Holmes calls the man a “cold-blooded scoundrel.” At the beginning of that scene, Sherlock sits next to the woman and pats her hand sympathetically while listening to her story. This is right out of “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” where Watson describes a client showing up who is distraught, and Holmes pushes the man into a chair and then “patted his hand and chatted with him in the easy, soothing tones which he knew so well how to employ.”

When talking to the bookseller, Mr. Szikora, John determines that his regular doctor is Dr. Verner. In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” Dr. Verner is mentioned as the one who buys Watson’s medical practice when he leaves to join Sherlock at 221B.

The note on Mary’s phone — “John or James Watson?” — refers to the moment in the books when, as mentioned earlier, Mary refers to John as “James.”

In “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” Holmes is sent a skip code like the one on Mary’s phone and determines that he has to read every third word of it to decode it.

John is shocked to discover that the two people Sherlock quickly ushers out of the flat are his parents. In the books, there’s never a mention of Sherlock Holmes’s parents. In “The Greek Interpreter,” Watson writes, “I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his early life.”

Sherlock refers to Moriarty’s network as consisting of a bunch of “rats deserting a sinking ship,” then calls Moran “the big rat,” and finally discovers that Moran has hidden the bomb in a deserted Underground station under Sumatra Road. All of these descriptions are alluding to a single line in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” where Holmes receives a note that mentions “the case of Matilda Briggs.” Holmes explains, “Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson … It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”

John’s ultimate forgiveness in the face of certain death at the end of the episode echoes the words that Watson writes at the end of “The Final Problem,” when he states that he shall forever regard Holmes as “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.”

INTERESTING FACTS

NITPICKS If Scotland Yard had scoured the room with the skeleton in it and failed to notice the easily opened trapdoor on the side of the desk, they really are as incompetent as Sherlock makes them out to be.

OOPS Sherlock’s messy application of the fake mustache in the restaurant is suddenly perfect by the time he gets to John’s table.