The Sign of Three

WRITTEN BY Steve Thompson, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss

DIRECTED BY Colm McCarthy

ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 5, 2014

Sherlock faces his most difficult task yet . . . when he’s asked to be the best man at John’s wedding.

“A wedding is, in my considered opinion, nothing short of a celebration of all that is false and specious and irrational and sentimental in this ailing and morally compromised world. Today we honor the death-watch beetle that is the doom of our society and, in time, one feels certain, our entire species.”

This glorious romp might not be the most suspenseful of episodes, and is possibly the least Holmesian, but it certainly contains the most entertaining moments of the series. The dialogue is hilarious and the acting brilliant, as we join John and Mary on their happiest day, one that happens “offscreen” in the world of the books. (For good reason, Sherlock would say.) And yet, while the event is a celebration of the relationship between John and Mary, the episode acts as an examination of the friendship between John and Sherlock.

As with any big life change, whether it be marriage or the arrival of a baby, it affects two people the most, but then ripples outward, altering their relationships with other people. Both Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft ring the death knell on the ongoing partnership of John and Sherlock, which terrifies the detective. In the books, of course, Watson gets married, moves on, and continues to come back to Baker Street upon occasion for one adventure after another, with Holmes barely registering that he’d even been away. But this Sherlock is different — the relationships he’s developed since meeting John have significantly altered him, as we saw in the previous episode, and just as he’s awakened to the realization that people actually care about him, and he for them, he’s about to lose the one he cares about the most. Or so he thinks.

By letting emotions (one can hear Mycroft saying that word with derision) invade what has always been a very clinical mind, Sherlock’s mind palace is becoming cluttered and disorganized. In the previous episode, John’s admonishments trickled through Sherlock’s thought process and made him unable to complete tasks. In this episode, when John asks him to be his best man, the very suggestion — along with the implications of such an invitation — render Sherlock immobile. His mind simply shuts itself down completely, like a robot. In the face of the impending wedding, he obsesses over every single detail, as if he were the bride, and the wedding planning doesn’t happen at John and Mary’s flat, but at 221B Baker Street with Sherlock proving to be surprisingly adept at it. Perhaps he missed his calling as an events planner (or, from Janine’s point of view, as a professional wedding guest).

On the stag night, everything begins well when Sherlock once again approaches the event in the traditional way — by handing over a one-inch-thick folder on John Watson’s medical history to a chemist to determine the ideal alcoholic intake throughout the evening to avoid inebriation (don’t all best men carry their own graduated cylinders to the pubs?) — but when John intervenes, it turns into a mess. Sherlock is hilariously drunken and slurring when he’s “cluing for looks” on Tessa’s case — Cumberbatch puts in a performance that’s nothing short of Chaplinesque — and his mind is less competent than an ordinary person’s under the same circumstances. For someone who relies on a mind palace where everything is filed away neatly, alcohol sends a hurricane into the filing cabinets and he can no longer distinguish between an egg and a sitty thing.

At the actual wedding, deductions come at him so fast he can’t keep up with them, simply because he’s not sifting through the information in his mind palace carefully, but finding it haphazardly. Twice he apologizes and says he has given “one more deduction” than he’d expected to. He falls apart during his speech when he suddenly realizes there’s a Mayfly in the room, and the careful Council Chamber mind palace he’d created days earlier is suddenly unfocused, with a naked Irene Adler walking in as Tessa is frozen in her spot, and then everyone disappears except for Mycroft. Mycroft at first talks him through it, then raises the volume of his voice slowly until he’s yelling at his little brother to FOCUS … and both mind palace Sherlock and actual Sherlock at the wedding smack themselves in the cheeks to knock Mycroft out of there, refocus, and figure out who the target is. In front of a large group of people, Sherlock can’t talk out loud about everything the way he normally would and must put up a façade that he is simply giving a (wackadoo) best man’s speech. Sherlock has never worried about what people might be thinking about him before, and a year earlier he would have simply remained rooted to the spot, talking loudly while everyone murmured in confusion around him. But now he’s developed self-consciousness (once again confirming he’s not a sociopath), because he cares about John enough to not want to embarrass himself and, in the process, John and Mary, by suddenly staring straight ahead and speaking like an automaton. And yet, he can’t take John aside and run things by him, so he’s instead left with a hostile and intellectually superior Mycroft in his head, berating him for missing the obvious.

Sherlock’s mind palace has at times been over-the-top (“The Hounds of Baskerville”), beautifully stylized (“The Empty Hearse”), and funny (“A Scandal in Belgravia”), but its deterioration here gives us more insight into Sherlock’s emotional state than any dialogue could have. It’s a brilliant tactic on the part of the writers. Sherlock is falling apart both mentally and emotionally, because it’s the end of an era, as Mrs. Hudson says.

The little chat with Mrs. Hudson at the beginning of the episode appears to be there for comic relief, but it sits in Sherlock’s head and gnaws at him throughout the ceremony. That his brother uses the same phrase unnerves Sherlock — if Mrs. Hudson says it, he can easily shrug it off and send her out for biscuits, but if Mycroft echoes her words, then maybe he needs to be worried that this really is the end of an era. Mary and John sense Sherlock’s concerns, and Mary coaxes John to convince Sherlock that despite the wedding, the game is still on, even if both men don’t live at the same address anymore. But will it be?

This episode doesn’t just look at the relationship between Sherlock and John, but is an examination of relationships in general. Sherlock deducing the men at the wedding and their dateability for Janine is just the tip of the iceberg — we see Greg Lestrade at the wedding alone (recall that in “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock told him that his wife was sleeping with the PE teacher); Mycroft refuses to come altogether, being far more content with his solitary life; Mrs. Hudson appears to be with Mr. Chatterjee from the sandwich shop, indicating either that secret wife of his in Doncaster is no longer in the picture, or Mrs. Hudson has decided to look past it; Molly is with Tom, but watching Sherlock the entire time. No two relationships are the same, which is why Sherlock’s education on the topic has been so difficult for him.

Sherlock is used to everything revolving around him. The only reason that Lestrade, Molly, John, and Mrs. Hudson even know each other is because of him. He’s used to people dropping things at a moment’s notice for him. The opening scene is a hilarious look at just how much Sherlock means to Lestrade and what the DI is willing to sacrifice for his consulting detective after having to live without him for two years. But it also shows Sherlock’s utter lack of friendship etiquette, making Lestrade think he’s in mortal peril when, in fact, he just needs help writing the best man speech. In “A Study in Pink,” Sherlock barely knew John when he was texting him to come at once, whether convenient or inconvenient (he needed to use a phone and didn’t want to walk down the stairs to ask Mrs. Hudson). But now he calls on Lestrade because he can’t use John for this particular task … and also because even if he could, he’s worried John would no longer come. John and Mary don’t see why their relationship would change everything, but Sherlock does: he’s no longer the center of attention. And with a baby on the way, he never will be again. The scene of the photographer asking Sherlock to please step aside so he can capture the happy couple is meant to be funny, but also meaningful: for the first time since they met, Sherlock has been asked to step out of a picture that involves John. Every time the media photographs Sherlock, John is standing by his side or slightly behind him. Now Sherlock’s being asked to leave the picture altogether.

The mind palace’s cluttered state suggests that maybe Mycroft was right in “A Scandal in Belgravia” when he demonstrated that Sherlock’s relationship with Irene Adler got in the way of things, or in “The Empty Hearse” when he scoffed at the ridiculousness of friendship. But we also see changes in Sherlock that are positive because of his friendship with John — the aforementioned cover-up when he realizes something bad is about to happen at John’s wedding; his informal chit-chat with Janine that begins with him trying to impress her and get her a date at the same time, and ends with him telling her something private about himself; and finally, the way he’s eventually able to disarm Major Sholto by telling him they both know he can’t kill himself at John’s wedding: “We would never do that to John Watson.” This is not Sherlock making an emotionless, clinical appeal based on facts, but one that demonstrates just how much he’s learned about human nature. Just one episode ago he was shouting “Surprise!” in a restaurant and telling Mycroft how “delighted” John will be to see him, completely missing the point, and yet here he talks a man out of suicide by appealing to his basic human decency. Understanding what his death meant to John Watson has utterly changed Sherlock. Even the hilarious notion of the jewel of Scotland Yard using his mind palace to offer dating advice to Janine is important: the deductions he makes about the men point to human nature, not just scientific fact.

If we had to sum up what Sherlock has gained through his friendship with John and the experience of returning from the dead, it’s a sense of self-consciousness. He knows when he’s being a jerk now. At the beginning of the speech, he confirms everyone’s worst fears by first stuttering, then flipping through the telegrams as if they don’t matter, then condemning the very institution of marriage before insulting John, Mary, the bridesmaids, the vicar, and pretty much everyone else in the room. But then he acknowledges that what he just did was wrong, that it shows a lack of understanding of what beauty or virtue is, before bestowing upon John the nicest things he’s ever said to him. Suddenly, Mary is smiling widely, John looks like he’s about to cry, Molly and Mrs. Hudson are dabbing at their eyes, and the guests are wondering why everyone thought the detective would be a disaster. (They’ll soon find out.) His speech is heartfelt, and everyone can see Sherlock is not a heartless machine, but a man who has learned how to appreciate and even love his friends.

While Sherlock is very aware of just how different he feels, not everything he does in the name of Understanding Human Nature (wait for the monograph) is noticed. Sherlock tries his best to make it through the speech even when he looks crazy; he hates wedding traditions but abides by them anyway; his gift to John and Mary is a beautiful violin song dedicated to them that he performs in front of everyone; he tosses his boutonniere to Janine like a gentleman; and most importantly, he doesn’t announce Mary’s pregnancy to everyone but instead realizes it’s personal information he should give only to them.

And then he leaves the party before anyone else, realizing the rest of the group is all paired up and the cheese stands alone. “I mean, who leaves a wedding early?” Mrs. Hudson asked him.

The one whose life just changed considerably when no one was looking.

HIGHLIGHT Greatest best man speech ever.

DID YOU NOTICE?

When Sherlock is on the phone to Mycroft, he says, “What? … What? … WHAT?!” which was a characteristic reaction of David Tennant’s Doctor on Doctor Who.
While the reference won’t be explained until the next episode, when Mycroft says the word “Redbeard,” he knows that he’s triggering in Sherlock a reaction to a childhood incident that will alter the way he sees the day. This is one of the mind tricks that Derren Brown uses in his act.
We get more clues in this episode that there’s something about Mary … She sees right through Sherlock’s fibs even when John falls for them; she ends up playing both men by convincing each one that she is in league with the other; and at the party when John says someone is going to die, she not only stays calm but rushes out to join the men and becomes an essential part of how they deal with Sholto. Also watch her reaction when Sherlock reads out the telegram from “CAM” that refers to her as “poppet” and adds, “Wish your family could have seen this.” That will be important in the next episode. And finally, Mrs. Hudson’s chat with John, where she talks about how her husband was running a major drug cartel without her knowing it, is full of foreshadowing.
Tom suggests that perhaps Bainbridge had concocted a blade made of blood and bone, but his term “meat dagger” is what draws sniggers from people and the disdain of both Sherlock and Molly. And yet the ultimate solution was that the perpetrator used something akin to a meat thermometer. If they had taken him seriously, his words might have triggered the real answer in Sherlock’s mind.
When playing “Who Am I?” Sherlock asks if he’s the current king of England, which is a nod to the fact that from Sherlock Holmes’s resurrection in 1903 until the final story in 1927, there were kings on the British throne.
The day after the stag night, Sherlock is Googling Major Sholto and is reading an article about one of the angry family members. Written by Laurie Norris, the title of the story is “V.C. Hero — The Unanswered Questions: Why did my boy have to die?” and is an interview with Madeline Small, whose son Peter was killed in the mission that Sholto led. She claims that Sholto destroyed her family, that Peter was only 18 when she waved goodbye to him two years earlier. “He destroyed us all. And he gets a medal for it,” reads the pull-quote. Peter is the younger brother of Jonathan Small, the photographer at John’s wedding.
When Sherlock realizes the Mayfly Man is at the wedding, he moves to “part two” of his speech and stutters, “I could go on all night about the depth and complexity of [John’s] … jumpers …” John’s jumpers, or sweaters, have long been a favorite thing to catalog in Sherlock fandom. There are lists and photographs and memes of John Watson’s various jumpers, which have become an essential part of his wardrobe and character.
Sherlock once again uses the “Vatican cameos” code that he yelled in “A Scandal in Belgravia” just before the safe opened and a gun began shooting people in the room. John finally puts speculation on the exact meaning of the term to rest here when he defines it as meaning “someone’s gonna die.”
When Sherlock is trying to figure out the common thread between the women in his Council Chamber mind palace, he Googles their resumés to see if they all have worked for the same employer, and they haven’t. And yet when he realizes who the target is, the link between the women is that they all worked for the same employer: Sholto. At first this looks like a mistake in the script, until Sherlock says they probably all had to sign confidentiality agreements, which would be the secret they refused to tell him, and why Sholto doesn’t show up on their resumés.

FROM ACD TO BBC As the title suggests, many of the details of this episode are taken from the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four (originally titled The Sign of the Four).

This novel introduces Mary Morstan, who comes to Holmes and Watson as a client because her father has disappeared. They eventually discover that her father has died and was part of a ring of men who had found a treasure and were going to split up the money until they were double-crossed. One of the men is the double-crosser, the other is the man who vows vengeance on him. Morstan simply gets caught in the middle and dies of a heart attack. Mary is owed the treasure, but only a small part of is it recovered. By the end of the story, Watson has fallen in love with her and they are engaged.
The man who does the double-crossing is Major Sholto, and the man who vows vengeance is Jonathan Small, just like the two characters in the episode. Sholto has lost money on a gambling debt, and Small tells him and Morstan about the treasure. Sholto steals it, and Small vows revenge; he means to steal the treasure back from him, but Sholto inadvertently ends up dead. All of this happens before Mary even comes to Holmes and Watson, which means, just as Sherlock says in the episode, Major Sholto is already dead before he solves the case.
Jonathan Small teams up with a diminutive Islander named Tonga, who shoots poison darts through a blowpipe (Holmes accidentally shoots and kills him during a chase scene). In one of Sherlock’s stories during his speech, he talks about a dwarf with a blowpipe.
When Small is trying to steal the treasure, Tonga kills Sholto by shooting a poisoned dart at him, making him very much like the “invisible man with the invisible knife” that Archie suggests at the wedding reception, which ultimately helps Sherlock solve the case.

Mycroft is running on a treadmill and patting his stomach as Sherlock calls him, once again making a joke about the original obese Mycroft compared to the wafer-thin Mark Gatiss.

In “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” Holmes states, “I am not often eloquent. I use my head, not my heart,” and that statement could sum up most of the sentiments in Sherlock’s best man speech.

One section of Sherlock’s speech — “If I burden myself with a little help-mate during my adventures, it is not out of sentiment or caprice, it is that he has many fine qualities of his own that he has overlooked in his obsession with me” — is taken directly from “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” a late story narrated by Holmes rather than Watson: “Speaking of my old friend and biographer, I would take this opportunity to remark that if I burden myself with a companion in my various little inquiries it is not done out of sentiment or caprice, but it is that Watson has some remarkable characteristics of his own to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his exaggerated estimates of my own performances.”

When Sherlock mistakes John’s question about who the best man he ever met was, he replies, “Billy Kincaid, the Camden Garrotter.” In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the place directly across the street from the empty house is Camden House, and the killer — or garrotter — who operates from there is Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s right-hand man.

During Sherlock’s speech, he mentions “The Hollow Client,” which is not a case from Sherlock Holmes canon, although it could be a play on the title of one of the stories, “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.”

Sherlock recalls John watching a woman walk back and forth in front of their flat, clearly full of indecision. Sherlock says, “Oscillation on the pavement always means there’s a love affair.” This comes from “A Case of Identity,” where it’s Holmes who watches the woman outside and concludes, “I have seen those symptoms before … Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur.”

Lestrade suggests someone tiny could have come through the air vent and receives only derision from Sherlock. However, his conclusion is both a reference to Tonga in The Sign of Four, who is a dwarf who comes down through a skylight window, and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” which involves a snake crawling through the air vent to kill someone in their sleep. (And yes, it’s as creepy as it sounds.)

In one scene, we see Sherlock stuffing handfuls of cigarettes into a Persian slipper, which is a reference to Holmes shoving pipe tobacco into a Persian slipper in “The Naval Treaty” and “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

I hate to bring down the party, but while Doyle never explains how Mary died, many readers have speculated that she died in childbirth.

INTERESTING FACTS

Sherlock says the best man he ever knew was Billy Kincaid. In the 1988 comedy Without a Clue, Ben Kingsley plays John Watson, a man who creates a fictional detective called Sherlock Holmes so he can write about the cases for which he’s actually the private detective. He hires a man named Kincaid (Michael Caine) to impersonate the great detective.
When Sherlock relates the story of the French decathlete found dead amongst hundreds of matchboxes, all empty except for one, John asks him what the final one contained and Sherlock opens it to reveal only a glow and a look of glee on Sherlock’s face. This motif is an homage to several films that use a glow to indicate something so important it can’t even be shown onscreen, such as in Repo Man (in the trunk of the car), Pulp Fiction (in the mysterious briefcase), Kiss Me Deadly (also a glowing briefcase, and the film Tarantino claims was his inspiration), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (the unseen contents of the Ark of the Covenant).
When Sherlock is reading Bainbridge’s appeal for his services, he mutters, “All the nice girls like a soldier,” which John corrects to “sailor.” They’re referring to the traditional British song “All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor.”
Amanda Abbington revealed that drunk John Watson was very much like drunk Martin Freeman. “I loved [the stag night scenes] … He did stuff in those scenes that he does at home, or when he’s mucking about. Like in the episode when someone says, ‘Mr. Holmes,’ and he points at Sherlock and whistles, that’s my favorite bit. Martin does that a lot. Martin and Ben bounce off each other so beautifully.”

NITPICKS

For a man who couldn’t tell a chair from an egg when he was drunk, how does Sherlock remember that Tessa used John’s middle name?
Sherlock refers to Bainbridge as a Grenadier, but the Grenadier Guards are the senior-most members of the Guards Division, and Bainbridge looks like he’s more of a junior member.

OOPS

When we first see the reception line, Mary and John are greeting an older woman in a pink dress and large white hat and a white-haired man in a light-gray suit. Then David steps up, and that same couple is standing behind him. As soon as he moves on, Mary greets them both again.
Sherlock says that Bainbridge had a wound in his stomach, but we later see both him and Sholto being stabbed in the back, and when he’s lying on the ground in the shower all of the blood is coming out of his back.

SHERLOCKIANS WEIGH IN

Peter Calamai

Peter Calamai, C.M., holds the investiture of The Leeds Mercury in the Baker Street Irregulars and is also a Master Bootmaker in The Bootmakers of Toronto. A veteran journalist and author, he won the Morley-Montgomery Award for the best article published in the Baker Street Journal in 2012.

Do you think Sherlock is a faithful interpretation of the characters of Watson and Holmes?

Yes. Too many people get hung up on the modern setting of the BBC Sherlock, yet the messages of the canon transcend clattering hansom cabs, pea-soup fog, and Victorian dress and manners. They are eternal: the misery that lies beneath the external shows of normalcy in many households, the conquering pull of true love and the jealousy that can accompany it, the desperate measures arising from greed, the sacrifices of patriotism, and so on. Above all is the eternal message of the profound companionship between two men who are superficially very dissimilar and their interactions with these and other themes.

To be meaningful to today’s audiences Hamlet need not be staged by actors in Elizabethan dress on the open-air stage of the replica Globe in London. Reimaging Shakespeare’s plays in a contemporary setting reveals their eternal messages afresh. So too for the canon. (Director-playwright Charles Marowitz recently demonstrated this point in “The Adventure of Sherlock’s Last Case,” Baker Street Journal 64, no. 4 [Winter 2014]: pp. 19–23.)

What is your favorite aspect of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s reimagining of the stories? What is your least favorite?

I love the show-off cleverness of the script, casting, and direction. Sherlock never talks down to its viewers, unlike the American Elementary; it is a show about a detective while Elementary is merely yet another detective show. As well, Sherlock rewards Holmesians (the British term) with what the Japanese would call “fan service” — insider comments like the visitor counter on Watson’s blog page being stuck at 1895. The secondary characters are superb — Andrew Scott as a maniacal Jim Moriarty, Lara Pulver as a nakedly scheming Irene Adler, and Lars Mikkelsen as evil personified Charles Magnussen.

I hate when important plot developments are conveyed by images of messages on the screen of a smart phone, unreadable on a 20-inch television set.

What has been your favorite screen adaptation of Doyle’s stories so far?

I have many favorites. Like a baby chick imprinting on whatever it sees first, whenever I visualize Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone is the dominant image. No other actor comes as close to the Paget illustrations. Yet for raw physicality it has to be Jeremy Brett, when he was healthy in the early Granada episodes.

The complex relationship between Holmes and Watson is captured best by Christopher Plummer and James Mason in Murder by Decree. The scene of Watson attempting to spear the final pea on his plate was rewritten at Mason’s request to make it even more comical. For inspired directing there’s Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Even the four Canadian films with the hopelessly miscast Matt Frewer can be admired for the authentic Victorian buildings (in Kingston, Ontario).

Finally, all Sherlockians look forward to seeing the restored 1916 silent film starring William Gillette, who could once again be recognized as the foremost actor to play Sherlock Holmes.