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A Study in Pink

WRITTEN BY Steven Moffat

DIRECTED BY Paul McGuigan

ORIGINAL AIR DATE July 25, 2010

Sherlock and John meet for the first time and immediately begin investigating a series of suicides that Sherlock believes to be serial murders.

It’s one of the most famous first encounters in literature, when the army doctor meets the world’s first “consulting detective,” who deduces his life story at first glance. When Dr. John Watson, home from the war, runs into his old friend Mike Stamford at the Criterion bar, Mike tells him about a friend of his looking for a flatmate, a man who “is a little queer in his ideas,” Mike says carefully, and perhaps “a little scientific for my tastes — it approaches to cold-bloodedness,” but overall he’s “a decent fellow enough.” And with that ringing endorsement, Watson prepares to meet the great detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. He walks into a lab in St. Bart’s Hospital, where Holmes has just successfully found a way to prove when blood is at the scene of a crime (something that hadn’t actually been done at the time) and is hopping about in excitement. He turns to greet Watson, extending a hand and saying, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and then proceeds to tell him how he knew that. A legendary friendship is born.

According to Gatiss and Moffat, no other adaptation has actually shown this momentous meeting between Holmes and Watson, despite Watson describing it in A Study in Scarlet in some detail. Instead, previous adaptations lead audiences into thinking that Watson and Holmes have always known each other. But for the Sherlock creators, it was important to first show the two separately and then bring them together, because the main theme of the first season was how each man’s life is saved and changed by the other.

“A Study in Pink” opens with images of rapid gunfire, frantic shouting, groups of soldiers running in a whirl of confusion. John Watson sits up in bed, gasping for breath before falling back onto his pillow, turning to his side, and sobbing. Quiet, sad piano chords strengthen our impression that this man is very lonely, traumatized by the war, and consumed by his memories of it.

Sherlock, on the other hand, doesn’t make an appearance until eight minutes in, and the first shot of him is upside-down, opening a body bag. We peer straight up from the bag as he stares down at us, sniffing the air and asking, “How fresh?” Molly Hooper stands near to him, telling him that the dead man used to be a colleague of hers. He stands up, quickly zips up the bag, turns to her with a fake smile, and says, “Right. We’ll start with the riding crop.” Upbeat gypsy music plays as we cut to Sherlock straddling the corpse and beating it mercilessly as Molly looks on, wincing.

What a huge contrast between the introductions of the two key characters: John’s is full of sadness and loneliness; Sherlock’s is humorous. We identify with John more readily because Sherlock comes across as so alien. John is depicted in a spartan, dark bedroom; Sherlock is in a fluorescently lit mortuary. John is all alone and runs into an old friend; Sherlock is with a colleague who has a crush on him but he barely notices she’s there, let alone picks up on her feelings.

When the two men finally do meet up, it’s a glorious scene. Unlike his literary counterpart, this Sherlock doesn’t notice John any more than he did Molly. He’s not leaping about excitedly, but quietly staring through a microscope as if unable or unwilling to speak to anyone at that moment. John simply stands awkwardly in the corner of the room, leaning on his cane and looking uncomfortable. Mike Stamford sits nearby with a smile on his face, waiting for the show to start, and when it does Sherlock does not disappoint.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” he says to John, who looks stunned by the question. John’s bafflement continues throughout the scene for, unlike the Stamford of the book who graciously prepared Watson for his first meeting with Holmes, this Stamford seems amused by John being unnerved. John is a man who is lonely yet unsure of how to integrate back into society, and Sherlock is a man happy to be on his own, yet needs a flatmate. They are thrown together, rather than actually wanting to be friends, and it’s only when Sherlock asks John to join him on a case that the real action begins.

This episode is based on the first Sherlock Holmes story, a novel called A Study in Scarlet (1887). Split into two parts, it first recounts the original meeting between Sherlock Holmes (who describes himself as a consulting detective) and Dr. John Watson, and their first case together: a man has been murdered, a wedding band has been found at the scene, and during the course of their investigation a second man is murdered. Despite the evidence pointing to other suspects, Holmes triumphantly announces at the end of part one that he has caught the murderer: Jefferson Hope, a cab driver who had been driven by revenge (rache) to track down the two men who had murdered the woman he loved back in America. The book then shifts in part two to the American Midwest several years earlier, and a long story involving kidnapping, murder, and Mormonism. Critics often dismiss the second part, which explains that the devout Latter-Day Saints tried to force Jefferson Hope into polygamous relationships and then threatened to kidnap the one woman he loved so she could marry the group leader, leading to his avowed revenge on the men who perpetrated it. However, despite Doyle being a little loose with the details of Mormonism, the accusations the story lobs against the Church of Latter-Day Saints — namely its treatment of women — is an issue that still continues today; the story almost seems ahead of its time. Despite moving away from Baker Street and onto the American frontier, it is still a rip-roaring story full of suspense and intrigue, returning us to Holmes and Watson only at the very end, as Jefferson Hope finally explains how he tracked down the murderous men who’d ruined his life.

Steven Moffat plays with the story, managing to include key components but changing enough of it to keep even the most ardent Sherlock Holmes fan guessing. The way he uses details of Doyle’s work but alters their significance will be one of the key trademarks of the show — stay loyal to the source material, but give the longtime Holmes fans something new. The wedding band that was essential in the book becomes a detail on the corpse of the woman dressed in pink. When Anderson, the smarmy forensics guy who despises Sherlock, suggests that the word RACHE etched in the ground could be German for “revenge,” Sherlock mocks him and says of course it’s not, it’s the beginning of the word “Rachel.” In the book, Lestrade suggests the word could be short for Rachel, and Holmes informs him sarcastically, “‘Rache’ is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.” (It seems that no matter what century we place him in, Holmes will contradict the suppositions of the police force.) At the scene of the crime, Sherlock deduces the story behind the victim; his literary counterpart deduces who the killer is. The pills remain the same — in the book we are told that “of the two pills in that box, one was of the most deadly poison, and the other was entirely harmless” — but Jefferson Hope doesn’t just randomly kill people for money, he’s committing crimes of passion.

The scenes of Sherlock’s deductions are brilliantly done, both by showing the words flashing across the screen to give us a tiny insight into Sherlock’s mind palace, and through Benedict Cumberbatch’s extraordinarily fast delivery of his lines. The astounding conclusions he comes to about John simply by looking at his mobile phone, and his work at the scene of a crime alongside the perplexed Lestrade utterly astonish his new friend. Some of the deductions might be considered a little silly, but if we suspend our disbelief and just enjoy the moment, the quickness with which Sherlock takes in the scene and identifies major clues that any other person would have missed, and then presents his findings with magnificent drama, renders the other characters and the viewers at home simultaneously gobsmacked and delighted.

But Sherlock is far from perfect. When he leaves John all alone and rushes away from the crime scene (so used to working solo he inconsiderately forgets all about his new companion), the sad piano chords and the lonely look on John’s face (and Sally Donovan’s words of caution) make us wonder if Sherlock, though fun to watch, isn’t exactly best friend material. Sherlock’s changeability and untrustworthiness are cornerstones of his character in the episodes to come, and the doubt that both Mycroft and Sally attempt to put in John’s mind is purposefully made plain in this first episode: a man who seems to know too much might be hiding something.

Mycroft Holmes is a character who appears only twice in the books, and is bordering on obese, so the tall, slim Mark Gatiss isn’t exactly who the readers would have in mind, which is an impeccable way to trick us into thinking that the man with the umbrella is Moriarty, Sherlock’s true arch-nemesis. (Incidentally, Moriarty isn’t mentioned until much later in the books, either.) Gatiss — who was cast in the role when writer Steve Thompson marveled that Gatiss looked like Cumberbatch’s older brother — plays Mycroft wonderfully, with so much confidence and knowledge that John is unnerved by him. Mycroft is a true Holmes, as quick with deductions as his brother (wait for a delightful scene in season three where the two go head-to-head in trying to sum up the measure of a man through his wool hat), and what he has to say to John lies at the heart of the series. We have been led to believe that John is a man haunted by his memories of the war; however, Mycroft instantly sees through that façade in a way even John’s therapist has been unable to. John wasn’t even wounded in the leg, he was hit in the shoulder. He doesn’t actually need a cane because his injury is psychosomatic. And as for him sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night amidst nightmares of war and gunfire? Those weren’t nightmares at all, they were dreams of a time when John was part of a group of people doing something exciting, believing they were saving the world. His sobs don’t come from bad memories of the war; they come from his realization that those images are nothing but dreams, and he’s stuck in a drab apartment all alone. He longs to return to a life of danger and excitement, of purpose. Mycroft is spot on with his deduction — “You’re not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson; you miss it” — and John waves him off, but now the audience knows an essential truth about the character. Sherlock is the companion he’s been waiting for: when you’re a friend of Sherlock Holmes, you enter into a life of excitement, danger, and fearing for your life. Often while still sitting in your own apartment.

Sherlock, on the other hand, pretends he doesn’t need John as much as John needs him. He has already figured out that John desires a life of danger, and apparently talks to John only because Mrs. Hudson took his skull from him. Sherlock makes John think that he sees him as someone only useful when needed who can be abandoned thereafter. Even though Sherlock takes John along on adventures, he appears to do so just so he has an audience on hand to praise his abilities.

Sherlock is characterized as a loner by choice, but also by nature. No one wants to be around him. Donovan and Anderson loathe him (and based on his crude comments to both of them implying a lewd affair, who can blame them?) and Lestrade vacillates between needing Sherlock’s help and wishing he’d just go away. Mycroft can’t even speak to his own brother and lurks in the shadows, paying other people to watch Sherlock for him. Molly Hooper has a crush on him, but he is so hurtful to her that she tries to avoid him as best she can. Mrs. Hudson loves Sherlock like a son, but is equally annoyed by his appalling behavior. In the case of each character, they prefer when Sherlock’s away, but they need him, whether it’s to help them solve a case, absolve their guilt for their lack of filial responsibility, fan the flames of their masochistic unrequited love, or to pay the rent.

The highlight of “A Study in Pink” is the drugs bust. In one madcap whirlwind of a scene, John discovers that Sherlock used to be a junkie; Sherlock issues the best put-downs of the episode — “Anderson, don’t talk out loud; you lower the IQ of the whole street”; he continues to work out his deductions in spite of the madness happening around him; John gets pushed further to the side and is nearly forgotten; Sherlock shows that despite his genius he’s utterly unaware of true human emotions (he’s baffled as to why a woman’s mind would turn to her stillborn daughter in her final moments); and we get the most poignant moment of dialogue in the episode. Sherlock asks John what he would say if he thought he was dying. “Please god, let me live,” John replies. Sherlock, annoyed, tells him to use his imagination, and John replies more directly, “I don’t have to.”

In this one brief exchange, John silences Sherlock and every­one in the room. Like Sherlock, he craves action and danger. But unlike Sherlock, he’s been shot, as he later admits, and has lain dying on the battlefield. He has faced death, and that’s why he continues to crave adventure. Once you’ve been given a second chance, you don’t want to waste it. Sherlock has underestimated his new flatmate until this moment, but amidst the chaos that follows, the murderer walks right into the room, and Sherlock turns, realizes immediately who he is, and leaves with him, telling no one. Again, John has been forgotten, but he doesn’t matter to the great detective: Sherlock is about to step into the cab of the murderer who has stymied him and everyone else, and that makes the cab driver the most important person in the world to Sherlock at the moment.

When John volunteered to get into a car that took him to Mycroft, he was faced with someone who saw him for who he really was. Now, similarly, Jeff kidnaps a willing Sherlock, then deduces the man behind the Belstaff coat. Earlier in the episode, Sherlock talks about the murderer with some awe, telling John, “I love the brilliant ones, they’re all so desperate to get caught. Appreciation, applause, at long last the spotlight. That’s the frailty of genius, John: it needs an audience.” The look on John’s face when Sherlock says that is revealing — the viewers aren’t the only ones who notice that Sherlock just described himself.

As Sherlock sits across from Jeff and at first scoffs, “Oh, I see, so you’re a proper genius too!” when Jeff suggests they’re more alike than Sherlock would think, Jeff just smiles because he knows Sherlock’s limitations. Like the best criminals, Sherlock’s hubris is greater than his intelligence. He needs criminals to keep committing crimes so he can play his little game and find them. He needs to know why people think the way they think, why they do the things they do. As Jeff goads Sherlock to take the pill, he says, “What’s the point of being clever if you can’t prove it?” Sherlock shies away from the public accolades, but as long as he can exhibit his genius to Lestrade and the police force, and now John, Sherlock is content.

At his heart, he is addicted to danger, to intrigue, to mysteries, and, most of all, to being right. He doesn’t stop to think that he could simply take both pills to a lab and have them analyzed to figure out which one was the correct one; after all, Jeff might have succumbed to his brain aneurysm by then, forfeiting the game, and Sherlock wouldn’t be able to prove himself correct to Jeff.

But just before Sherlock puts the pill in his mouth, John gets there right on time and, like an expert marksman, stops the scene in its tracks. Faced with a life-and-death situation, the trembling of John’s hand has ceased. He has found the danger and adventure he’s been looking for, and in that same moment he becomes absolutely essential to Sherlock, who immediately covers up what John did. He tacitly understands that John is, in fact, important to him. Oh, he’ll still use him when he needs the occasional pen tossed in his direction and can’t bother to walk three steps to get it, but he also realizes how vital it is to have just one person in your corner.

Benedict Cumberbatch is luminous as Sherlock Holmes, somehow finding a balance between curt and nasty and yet engendering sympathy: he is a man who might yet be a hero. If this were a show just about him, viewers might come to loathe him and see him as inhuman, cold, insensitive, and arrogant, basking in the awe of those around him and caring more for his deductions than behaving like a human being. But the reason we like him is because John does. Martin Freeman is perfection as John Watson, a flawless portrayal of a man whose deepest fear is loneliness, who is awed by Sherlock’s mind yet unafraid to call out Sherlock when he acts like an ass. Much to Sherlock’s surprise, the detective’s growing friendship and appreciation of John forces him to care about someone other than himself for once. And, as Sherlock will discover time and again, caring for someone else can be as much of a danger as a comfort.

The writing and direction of this episode are superb, and Moffat and Gatiss recognize that there is a lot of humor to be mined from Doyle’s books. Sherlock’s pithy comebacks to both Anderson and Donovan, or his reaction to John turning down Mycroft’s offer to pay him to spy on Sherlock — “We could have split the fee. Think it through next time” — or the way Sherlock and John walk away from the crime scene at the end, giggling like two schoolboys … all of these moments demonstrate that this will be a show that knows how to combine humor with drama. There are the ongoing “are they gay?” jokes, from Mrs. Hudson insisting she’s okay with it and that Mrs. Turner next door even has “married ones,” to Angelo, the restaurant owner, assuming Sherlock’s on a date (and ignoring their insistence that they’re not by bringing out a romantic candle), to John awkwardly trying to find out if Sherlock’s in a relationship and Sherlock mistaking his general interest for a romantic one. Moffat and Gatiss both know that over the years there has been some serious speculation and scholarship surrounding the possible romantic relationship between the two men, and decide to attempt to nip it in the bud right away by making it a joke. (Of course, as any fan knows, the shippers watching the show who want the relationship to be there will find it anyway — as they did with Xena and Gabrielle — and the Johnlock fanfic is alive and well.)

At the end of the episode, as John and Sherlock leave the crime scene after the younger Holmes reveals Mycroft’s identity — “You can imagine the Christmas dinners” — their friendship has already grown in leaps and bounds, and they are no longer two individuals, but a team.

HIGHLIGHT

Sherlock: Why have I got this blanket? They keep putting this blanket on me.

Lestrade: Yeah, it’s for shock.

Sherlock: I’m not in shock.

Lestrade: Yeah, but some of the guys want to take photographs.

DID YOU NOTICE?

FROM ACD TO BBC Aside from what was mentioned already, there are other small details from A Study in Scarlet:

The description of Holmes in the books is quite similar to the physical attributes of Sherlock on the show: “In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision.”

The second victim is James Phillimore, who runs home in the rain to get his umbrella and never returns. In “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” when Watson is listing off their unsolved cases, he says, “Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr. James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.”

Sherlock asks to borrow Mike’s phone, saying he prefers to text rather than make a call. In the books, Holmes famously sends telegrams everywhere, long after telephones were widely used.

When Sherlock finds out about the fourth murder, he shouts with excitement and says, “Oh, it’s Christmas!” In The Valley of Fear, Watson describes the look of delight on his friend’s face right after an announcement that someone had been murdered: “It was one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed … Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long overstimulation.”

Sherlock deduces a lot of information about John based on his cellphone. In The Sign of Four, Watson hands Holmes his watch, and Holmes comes to similar conclusions — that the watch belonged to his brother who was an alcoholic, that their relationship was a stormy one, etc. Watson is very upset at first, thinking that Holmes had made inquiries into his past, until Holmes explains how he figured it out. In the books, Harry is indeed Watson’s brother, not a nickname for his sister, Harriet.

One of the many inconsistencies in the Sherlock Holmes stories is where Watson’s war wound is actually located. In A Study in Scarlet, he says quite specifically that he was honorably discharged from the war because of a wound in his shoulder. However, in later stories the wound mysteriously travels to his leg. Some fans have speculated that the shot was another magic bullet à la JFK, which entered his shoulder, ricocheted off something, and then came back through his leg. Gatiss and Moffat pay homage to Doyle’s inconsistency by first having John walk with a cane for a leg injury, which is determined to be psychosomatic, and only at the end of the episode does John reveal he was actually wounded in the shoulder.

Another inconsistency in the canon is the name of the landlady: first, she is Mrs. Hudson. Then, in a couple of stories, she becomes Mrs. Turner. Then Doyle returns to Mrs. Hudson. As a nod to the inconsistency, Mrs. Hudson refers to a Mrs. Turner, the next-door neighbor who is also a landlady. Amusingly, the joke carries over to John Watson’s blog (JohnWatsonBlog .co.uk), which is run by the BBC, where there are often comments left by “Marie Turner,” who, as she reveals in later comments, is actually Mrs. Hudson borrowing Mrs. Turner’s laptop.

Sherlock’s declaration — “The game, Mrs. Hudson, is on!” — is a reworking of Holmes’s famous, oft-repeated pronouncement, “The game is afoot!”

Mycroft Holmes is introduced in “The Greek Interpreter” as “absolutely corpulent,” with a massive face, which is why there are several jokes in upcoming episodes about him being on a diet. In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” Watson says of Mycroft that “after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind.”

Sherlock’s texts to John as John is meeting Mycroft for the first time — “Come at once if convenient”; “If inconvenient, come anyway” — are taken from a telegram that Holmes sends to Watson in one of the final stories, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

John discovers early on that at times he’s no more important than an inanimate object, and that Sherlock doesn’t even notice if he leaves a room. In “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” Watson says this was his role in Holmes’s life in the later years: “He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me — many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead — but none the less, having formed the habit, it has become in some way helpful that I should register and interject.”

Sherlock referring to the case as a “three-patch problem” is a reference to the “three-pipe problem” he faces in “The Red-Headed League.” The look of euphoria on Sherlock’s face as he slaps on the last patch matches Holmes’s expression when he injects cocaine in front of Watson in The Sign of Four.

The idea that John is a man attracted to danger is certainly part of the stories. In one example, from “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” Holmes tells Watson that he knows Watson will want to accompany him on a particular case simply because it involves danger, and adds, “I should know my Watson by now.”

Jeff tells Sherlock, “You are just a man. And there is so much more than that. An organization.” This echoes Professor Moriarty’s statement to Holmes in “The Final Problem”: “You stand in the way not merely of an individual but of a mighty organization, the full extent of which you, with all your cleverness, have been unable to realize.”

At the end of the episode, Sherlock begins deducing who could have shot Jeff Hope when he suddenly realizes it was John, and he tells Lestrade to forget everything. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” Holmes and Watson break into Milverton’s place to help cover up a crime that happens when they’re there. When Lestrade tells Holmes that two men were seen at Milverton’s place and describes one of them to him, Holmes laughs, “That’s rather vague. My, it might be a description of Watson!”

At the end of the episode, Mycroft says he has a “minor position” in the British government, to which Sherlock replies, “He is the British government.” In the stories when Holmes describes his brother to Watson, he says, “You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.”

INTERESTING FACTS

NITPICKS If Sherlock had already moved into the flat, why doesn’t Mrs. Hudson look surprised when he knocks on the front door and waits to be let in?

OOPS Sherlock and John agree to meet at 221B Baker Street to check out the flat at 7 o’clock the following evening. However, when they meet there, it’s clearly mid-day.

THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION?

It’s something that has irked scientists and linguists for decades: Sherlock Holmes does not solve crimes through deductions, but inductions. However, in every adaptation since Doyle, the incorrect word has been used, including on Sherlock. So what is the difference between deduction and induction?

According to science humorist Dave Zobel in his book The Science of TV’s The Big Bang Theory, “Deductive reasoning begins with a collection of statements known to be true.” These aren’t guesses, but known facts put together to reach a conclusion that is infallible; in other words, there’s no way this conclusion could be incorrect. Induction, on the other hand, is based on observations where the observer then uses “pattern matching, hunches, and intuition to try to guess at a rule that accounts for those observations.” These conclusions could be proven false if the guess is wrong. It’s like in a game of Clue: players propose a solution when they’ve seen enough evidence to make an educated guess, but until one knows every single card one’s opponents are holding, one cannot know for certain which three cards are hidden in that envelope.

Let’s look at Sherlock’s “deductions” in “A Study in Pink.” When he’s investigating the corpse of the woman, he says her marriage is falling apart because the inside of her wedding ring is shiny but the outside is tarnished, as if she pulls it off regularly for a string of affairs but doesn’t bother polishing it. Her coat collar is slightly damp, the umbrella unused, which means she’s been in rain-soaked Cardiff and the wind prevented the umbrella from being opened. Are those indisputable conclusions? Of course not: perhaps she takes the wedding ring off each night because she doesn’t like sleeping with it on; perhaps she washed her coat and it wasn’t completely dry when she had to put it on; perhaps the button on her umbrella didn’t work and she was unable to open it. Sherlock’s observations lead him to certain plausible conclusions, but those conclusions are never infallible. In Doyle’s books, there are several instances where Holmes offers up his “deductions,” and they turn out to be wrong.

Sherlock is better at observing and making educated guesses than anyone else, but deduction doesn’t even come into it. That said, for the purposes of matching what is said on the show, throughout this book I use the term deduction (with a wince) to describe what he does.