Sherlock Episode 1.3.1
And the recaps are back again! This time, it's The Great Game, written by the series' other co-creator, Mark Gatiss. Gatiss tries something a little different for this episode. Instead of letting one mystery unfold and deepen over the course of an hour and a half, he tries to cram as many different plots as possible into those ninety minutes. The result is a show that looks like a whole season of Law and Order all mixed together. Does it work? Read on . . .
Sherlock 1.3.1
We open with a string tremolo in Minsk, Belarus. Sherlock and a Nameless Crook are sitting in what looks like a prison visitation room. Sherlock asks the NC what happened, and the NC explains, in a pronounced British working-class accent. The story he tells isn’t especially interesting -- he and his girl went to a bar, got drunk, got into a fight, he stabbed her with his knife, hang down your head, Tom Dooley, poor boy, you’re bound to die. Even Sherlock isn’t interested, except insofar as he can correct the NC’s grammar. Because the NC is not actually relevant to this episode, no one bothers to ask the obvious questions. First: Why does this scene take place in Belarus? Does it add anything to the story? (hint: No.) Second: What exactly does the NC think Sherlock can do for him? He’s been caught, and he’s just fessed up to the murder, so there’s no investigating to be done. Sherlock isn’t a lawyer and can’t help him with his defense (such as it is). And Sherlock is also not a British diplomat, so he can’t try to get the NC back to the UK. In short: Sherlock in Belarus, not doing much of anything. Which makes this scene . . . Entirely Pointless.
Credits! Yay!
The show proper begins at home, in the apartment, with gunfire. In a scene that would probably make Charlton Heston weep for joy, Sherlock is lounging around in his jammies, idly shooting John’s pistol at a smiley face he’s spray-painted on the wall. One would expect to hear the screams of Mrs. Turner’s married ones as illegal bullets pepper their living room, but what one actually gets is John, storming in furious and yelling at Sherlock. Why is Sherlock shooting up their living room? Because he’s bored. Bored, bored, bored. John disarms Sherlock, who flops down on the sofa to bitch at his newly arrived audience.
Said audience doesn’t want to face him without munchies. In what is probably the funniest scene in the entire series, John saunters into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and encounters . . . a severed head. His reaction, and Sherlock’s Eminently Logical Explanation (“Well, where else was I supposed to put it?”) are so perfect that they must be seen to be believed. This scene is nothing less than a classic work of art.
John has been assiduously blogging their exploits, namely Episode One (apparently, We Do Not Speak Of Episode Two), which, Sherlock helpfully reminds us, was called “A Study In Pink.” Sherlock isn’t pleased with the results, since John has been rather less than flattering. In particular, he’s called attention to the fact that Sherlock does not know that the earth orbits the sun, and I really, really want to know the context in which that little bombshell was dropped. Anyway, Sherlock doesn’t care, claiming that he has to reserve his brain space for work-related details and work-related details only. In a less-than-graceful nod to the original Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock compares his limited brain capacity to a hard drive, which kind of makes me wonder what sort of tech setup Mark Gatiss has. Modern hard drives have absurdly ginormous storage capacity; even flash drives come in absurdly large capacities. Was Gatiss perhaps thinking of the hard drive capacity of the 1980s when he wrote this line?
John is not about to spend his evening listening to his roomie bitch like the champion drama queen he is, and leaves the premises. Mrs. Hudson shows up, bringing groceries. I wish my landlord (well, building manager) brought me groceries. Although, at this point, I’d settle for accurate notice of when workmen might be expected to be peeping in my windows. But I digress. Mrs. Hudson is none too pleased at the bullet holes in the wall. Instead of calling the cops, she just charges the damage to Sherlock’s half of the rent. Good ol’ Mrs. Hudson. Live in Florida with an axe murderer long enough, and nothing will ever faze you again.
Sherlock takes this announcement with bad grace and watches John walk away down Baker Street. Just as he’s about to contemplate some other prank, something explodes, blasting the windows in and hurling him to the floor.
Morning dawns on John, waking up and stretching the kinks out of his neck. He’s fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and he’s been sleeping on Sarah’s couch. This is the only Sarah scene we get this episode, and it’s a shame. She’s wonderful here. How wonderful? Let me count the ways. One: Whether or not she’s dating John, she was at least gracious enough to remain friends with him after the First Date From Hell. Two: She is eminently sensible, having offered him a drink (which he seems to have accepted) and an air mattress (which he foolishly declined). Three: Her general demeanor here is fantastic. She retains a rather wry sense of humor about what must have been an unexpected imposition, teasing John about his choice of sleeping locale, telling him to fix his own breakfast because she has better things to do than wait on him, and generally treating him with a friendly, but brisk, sort of sympathy.
Dear Moffat and Gatiss: For Chanukah, I want more Sarah in Series Two!
John flips on the morning news, sees that his street has exploded, and flips out. Off he heads home, without his breakfast. The windows in his block are all boarded up, debris litters the street, and a small audience has gathered. John pushes past the remarkably ineffectual cops, pausing to glance at the blown-out face of the building across the street. Figuring that his building is stable enough -- it’s been about fourteen hours since the explosion, and 221B is make of Victorian brick; if it were going to collapse, it would probably have done so by now -- he hurries inside, calling for Sherlock.
Despite the boarded-up windows and the shards of glass littering the carpet, Sherlock is fine. Not a scratch on him, or on his violin. Not a hair out of place. No hearing damage, no blast damage, nothing. What caused Sherlock’s preternatural good fortune to emerge entirely unscathed from being blown off his feet the night before? Why, he finds himself in the presence of the scriptwriter, Mark Gatiss himself, in the role of big brother Mycroft “Dr. Presume” Holmes.
Sherlock and Mycroft resume a conversation they had been having. Mycroft wants Sherlock to investigate something that he claims is of national importance, which Sherlock does not want to do. He plucks idly at his violin strings while Mycroft smarms about the Korean elections and “legwork.” Failing to get a reaction from Sherlock, Mycroft turns the oil on John. John, having both a sibling of his own and a better grasp of human nature than anyone else in the room, recognizes this for the tactical-sibling-warfare-gambit that it is and refuses to participate.
The combined force of their cockblocking forces Mycroft to drop the act. He explains, for the benefit of John and the audience, that he wants li’l bro and pal to look into the death of Andrew West, a civil servant found violently dead on some railroad tracks. West was working on the Top Secret Bruce-Partington missile plans, which were -- get this! -- kept on a flash drive. Which is now lost. Gosh darn it! If you think this story is as stupid as John thinks it is . . . well, you’re right. And, unfortunately, it’s all too believable. Go Google “government missing laptop” and see what you come up with.
Mycroft wants Sherlock and John to find the plans. Sherlock’s response, which is a pretty good one, as these things go, is to rosin up his bow and play open strings at Mycroft until he goes away. On a Musician Side Note, I observe that some care has been taken to train Benedict Cumberbatch in at least looking like he knows what he’s doing with the violin. He’s got a nice grip on the bow, and an okay grip on the instrument itself, which someone has thoughtfully equipped with a really nice shoulder brace -- no rubber banded cosmetic sponges for Sherlock! It remains to be seen whether he can actually play the instrument.
Dear Moffat and Gatiss: For Christmas, I want to see Sherlock actually playing the violin in Series Two!
John gets ready to start poking at the Holmes sibling rivalry, but Sherlock’s phone comes to the rescue. Lestrade wants him to come down to Scotland Yard. And, despite being bitchy and grumpy and tetchy and quite a few of the other Seven Dwarfs, Sherlock wants John to come along. Aww.
We chew up a fairly pointless minute or so with some random shots of John and Sherlock in a cab to cover a quick run-through of the theme tune, for anyone in the audience who might have forgotten it.
Over at Police Squad!, Lestrade actually knows something Sherlock doesn’t know, which is that the explosion was not the gas leak that everyone thought it was. The only thing that survived was a strongbox containing an envelope addressed to Sherlock. Police Squad! has x-rayed it, but they want Sherlock to do the honors of opening it. Which he does, but not before informing the audience that the envelope is high-quality Czech paper, with his name written by a woman in fountain pen. Only one of these facts will be relevant later on. Inside is an iPhone, cleverly made up to look like Jennifer Wilson’s phone by the subtle trick of . . . putting a bright pink cover on it.
The point of this seems primarily to be a lead-in to Sherlock discovering that Police Squad! are also fans of John’s blog, and now they’ve all read about how he doesn’t know that the earth orbits the sun. See, this is why John doesn’t want to write about his PTSD, like his incompetent therapist asked him to do. Blogs aren’t private.
The phone has a message for Sherlock. Five beeps, which I understand are called “pips” in the UK, which is a Conan Doyle reference that Sherlock awkwardly proceeds to exposit for us, just so that we know, and a photo of a shabby room. Sherlock knows, with the power of having read the script, that this is a warning that more explosions loom in the future, and whisks John and Lestrade back to Baker Street.
The room in the photo turns out to be the living room of 221C Baker Street, which is apparently the basement apartment located in the building 221B Baker Street, and yeah, that doesn’t make sense, so just skip it for now. Mrs. Hudson is happy to lend them the key; it’s currently empty, she just can’t seem to rent it . . . oh. Sherlock gets the door open, and we realize just why Mrs. Hudson can’t rent that apartment. It’s a grubby, dingy, shabby, horrible mess. Even a graduate student wouldn’t live there. As a friend of mine would have put it, 221C is the kind of apartment where people go to end their lives.
Or set up puzzles. Someone’s been in there recently and left a pair of ugly sneakers lined up in the middle of the room. Just as Sherlock lies down to investigate them, the Pink Phone 2.0 rings. A woman’s trembling, watery, miserable voice quavers out, “Hello, sexy.” Intrigued by this most mixed of mixed signals, Sherlock asks her to go on.
The woman turns out to be just a patsy here. She’s reading a script typed onto a pager by a Mysterious Mastermind, encouraged to do this by a large bomb, all wires and blinking lights, strapped to her chest as she sits in her car in a parking lot. The script she reads gives Sherlock twelve hours to solve the puzzle of the shoes. Sherlock doesn’t look a bit surprised, and claims to have been expecting this for a while.
Here’s where the weakness of this episode begins to show. The plot depends entirely on Sherlock solving puzzles on his own, without any meaningful input from Police Squad! So, in furtherance of the plot, Police Squad! is going to become almost comically incompetent, sitting around twiddling those thumbs that are not stuck up its collective butt instead of, I don’t know, tapping the phone, dumping its LUDs, and calling up the Bomb Squad stat, because this is post 7/7 London we’re talking about here and there’s already been an explosion in a residential and heavily touristed area and who am I kidding? This is Police Squad! we’re talking about. Carry on.
Sherlock takes the ugly sneakers to Barts for examination. John, who’s still trying to introduce some real-world procedure to this show, wonders about the crying woman on the phone, but Sherlock cares about her as much as Police Squad! does, which is not at all. He’s far more interested in his lab computer, which he seems to have lifted from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in getting John to fetch the PP2.0 out of the front pocket of the jacket he’s currently wearing, because, with a 12-hour deadline, why be efficient when you can waste time annoying your roomie? Mycroft has texted about the Andrew West case, but Sherlock ignores it.
Just as the computer finishes its analysis, Molly bursts in, followed by her new boy-toy, Jim From IT. Everyone welcome Jim From IT, our latest contestant in Sherlock’s ongoing game of “Gay Or European!” Hooray! Jim enters the room, and oh dear God, I’m almost inclined to say “European” out of sheer contrariness, because Jim is such a walking gay stereotype that you expect the lab to burst into flames from the sheer fabulousness. The mincing walk, the fey voice, the tight v-neck t-shirt -- any of the European gay men that I know would laugh this guy out of the room in a New York second. In fact, I only know one gay man who actually comes across like this, and he’s a) Canadian, and b) kind of a pompous twit.
Jim futzes around, Molly forgets John’s name, Sherlock pegs Jim as gay, Molly refuses to believe him, and it’s all painfully unfunny because it’s as far from subtle as Pluto is from the sun. Even Sherlock resents having to play through this scene, and takes it out on Molly by being snippy at her. And incidentally revealing that he’s dedicated space in his “hard drive” to the particular brands of underwear favored by London’s gay club kids, and, you know, I don’t think Gatiss has really gotten the hang of this whole “hard drive” metaphor here.
Having chased away Molly and her toy stereotype, Sherlock makes John deduce the ugly sneakers, claiming that an outside eye is useful to him, despite almost two-and-a-third episodes of evidence to the contrary. But it does give John something to do, so he starts us off. The ugly sneakers are well cared for, 1980s design, fitted to enormous male feet, belonged to a kid who wrote his name in them. Sherlock patronizes John and takes over, expositing further that the ugly sneakers are original 1980s shoes, the kid who wore them had eczema and weak arches, lived in Sussex and visited London. This triggers something in Sherlock’s mind. A name. Carl Powers. Where Sherlock began.
The scene inexplicably shifts to another cab ride for the next bit of exposition. Here is another point where I would have made a very different directing choice. This is the first of several backstories we’re going to get in this episode. Each of the others is illustrated in some way, except this one. It’s actually the most interesting of the backstories told, too. Carl Powers was an eleven-year-old kid from Sussex who came to London in 1989 for a swim meet, had an epileptic seizure in the pool, and drowned. Sherlock, who we can guess was probably about twelve or thirteen himself at the time, was convinced it was murder, but couldn’t prove it and couldn’t get any grownups to listen to him. The story stuck with him, as it would; hell, I have very strong memories of a pretty grisly murder that took place in my hometown that very same year, so I can well believe that an incident like that would have stuck in Sherlock’s mind, whether or not he witnessed the actual death.
What I don’t understand is why this dramatic and interesting story wasn’t illustrated. We don’t need any more shots of John and Sherlock riding around in taxis. We’ve had at least three or four per episode so far, and they’re not all that interesting visually. I want to see Carl Powers in the pool, or see his parents grieving, or see pubescent Sherlock putting two and two together and getting five for the first time in his life, and his frustration at grownup indifference! Something, anything, that’s not another goddamn taxi ride!
Back at home, Sherlock pores over old newspaper stories while John offers to help and Mycroft texts. Sherlock decides to rid himself of both distractions in one swell foop.
(TVTrope ahoy!) Answer Cut to Mycroft’s office, where John is waiting, wearing his horrible purply-brown sport coat for the occasion. Mycroft wants to know how Sherlock is doing, and John covers manfully, assuring Mycroft that Sherlock is tooling away, which is technically true, because of course, John carefully omits mentioning what Sherlock is actually researching. Mycroft spills a few more facts about Andrew West, and here’s where we get some really stylish story illustration, and why couldn’t we have that three minutes ago? John punctuates this scene with a truly ghastly grimace.
Three hours left to go on the ugly sneaker puzzle, and Sherlock hits on the neurotoxin clostridium botulinum, the true cause of Carl Powers’s death. Someone had poisoned his eczema medication. The autopsy was too late to turn anything up, though I have to wonder why no one examined the medication, but maybe they did things differently in 1989. Anyway, Sherlock posts a note about his solution on his website, which makes an e-mail “whoosh” sound because either Sherlock has a weird sense of web design or the SFX guys were bored that day. The Mysterious Mastermind must have been waiting, refreshing his screen over and over, because the PP2.0 rings a few seconds later. The puzzle has been solved, and the hostage can be freed. Sherlock asks for her location, and we see the bomb squad approaching her car, all by its lonesome in the cold, dark parking lot.
Well, that’s the first puzzle solved. It’s late, and I want to go to bed, so I will break the recap here, with just one final question: Why, in the era of the War on Terror, over the course of nine whole hours, did none of the hundreds of people who passed through that parking lot notice the lady with the enormous scary bomb crying in her car, pick up a cell phone, dial 999, and say, “Hey, Police Squad! There’s a lady strapped to a bomb who’s been sitting outside the mall for the past six hours. Wanna take a look?”
Sherlock 1.3.1
We open with a string tremolo in Minsk, Belarus. Sherlock and a Nameless Crook are sitting in what looks like a prison visitation room. Sherlock asks the NC what happened, and the NC explains, in a pronounced British working-class accent. The story he tells isn’t especially interesting -- he and his girl went to a bar, got drunk, got into a fight, he stabbed her with his knife, hang down your head, Tom Dooley, poor boy, you’re bound to die. Even Sherlock isn’t interested, except insofar as he can correct the NC’s grammar. Because the NC is not actually relevant to this episode, no one bothers to ask the obvious questions. First: Why does this scene take place in Belarus? Does it add anything to the story? (hint: No.) Second: What exactly does the NC think Sherlock can do for him? He’s been caught, and he’s just fessed up to the murder, so there’s no investigating to be done. Sherlock isn’t a lawyer and can’t help him with his defense (such as it is). And Sherlock is also not a British diplomat, so he can’t try to get the NC back to the UK. In short: Sherlock in Belarus, not doing much of anything. Which makes this scene . . . Entirely Pointless.
Credits! Yay!
The show proper begins at home, in the apartment, with gunfire. In a scene that would probably make Charlton Heston weep for joy, Sherlock is lounging around in his jammies, idly shooting John’s pistol at a smiley face he’s spray-painted on the wall. One would expect to hear the screams of Mrs. Turner’s married ones as illegal bullets pepper their living room, but what one actually gets is John, storming in furious and yelling at Sherlock. Why is Sherlock shooting up their living room? Because he’s bored. Bored, bored, bored. John disarms Sherlock, who flops down on the sofa to bitch at his newly arrived audience.
Said audience doesn’t want to face him without munchies. In what is probably the funniest scene in the entire series, John saunters into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and encounters . . . a severed head. His reaction, and Sherlock’s Eminently Logical Explanation (“Well, where else was I supposed to put it?”) are so perfect that they must be seen to be believed. This scene is nothing less than a classic work of art.
John has been assiduously blogging their exploits, namely Episode One (apparently, We Do Not Speak Of Episode Two), which, Sherlock helpfully reminds us, was called “A Study In Pink.” Sherlock isn’t pleased with the results, since John has been rather less than flattering. In particular, he’s called attention to the fact that Sherlock does not know that the earth orbits the sun, and I really, really want to know the context in which that little bombshell was dropped. Anyway, Sherlock doesn’t care, claiming that he has to reserve his brain space for work-related details and work-related details only. In a less-than-graceful nod to the original Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock compares his limited brain capacity to a hard drive, which kind of makes me wonder what sort of tech setup Mark Gatiss has. Modern hard drives have absurdly ginormous storage capacity; even flash drives come in absurdly large capacities. Was Gatiss perhaps thinking of the hard drive capacity of the 1980s when he wrote this line?
John is not about to spend his evening listening to his roomie bitch like the champion drama queen he is, and leaves the premises. Mrs. Hudson shows up, bringing groceries. I wish my landlord (well, building manager) brought me groceries. Although, at this point, I’d settle for accurate notice of when workmen might be expected to be peeping in my windows. But I digress. Mrs. Hudson is none too pleased at the bullet holes in the wall. Instead of calling the cops, she just charges the damage to Sherlock’s half of the rent. Good ol’ Mrs. Hudson. Live in Florida with an axe murderer long enough, and nothing will ever faze you again.
Sherlock takes this announcement with bad grace and watches John walk away down Baker Street. Just as he’s about to contemplate some other prank, something explodes, blasting the windows in and hurling him to the floor.
Morning dawns on John, waking up and stretching the kinks out of his neck. He’s fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and he’s been sleeping on Sarah’s couch. This is the only Sarah scene we get this episode, and it’s a shame. She’s wonderful here. How wonderful? Let me count the ways. One: Whether or not she’s dating John, she was at least gracious enough to remain friends with him after the First Date From Hell. Two: She is eminently sensible, having offered him a drink (which he seems to have accepted) and an air mattress (which he foolishly declined). Three: Her general demeanor here is fantastic. She retains a rather wry sense of humor about what must have been an unexpected imposition, teasing John about his choice of sleeping locale, telling him to fix his own breakfast because she has better things to do than wait on him, and generally treating him with a friendly, but brisk, sort of sympathy.
Dear Moffat and Gatiss: For Chanukah, I want more Sarah in Series Two!
John flips on the morning news, sees that his street has exploded, and flips out. Off he heads home, without his breakfast. The windows in his block are all boarded up, debris litters the street, and a small audience has gathered. John pushes past the remarkably ineffectual cops, pausing to glance at the blown-out face of the building across the street. Figuring that his building is stable enough -- it’s been about fourteen hours since the explosion, and 221B is make of Victorian brick; if it were going to collapse, it would probably have done so by now -- he hurries inside, calling for Sherlock.
Despite the boarded-up windows and the shards of glass littering the carpet, Sherlock is fine. Not a scratch on him, or on his violin. Not a hair out of place. No hearing damage, no blast damage, nothing. What caused Sherlock’s preternatural good fortune to emerge entirely unscathed from being blown off his feet the night before? Why, he finds himself in the presence of the scriptwriter, Mark Gatiss himself, in the role of big brother Mycroft “Dr. Presume” Holmes.
Sherlock and Mycroft resume a conversation they had been having. Mycroft wants Sherlock to investigate something that he claims is of national importance, which Sherlock does not want to do. He plucks idly at his violin strings while Mycroft smarms about the Korean elections and “legwork.” Failing to get a reaction from Sherlock, Mycroft turns the oil on John. John, having both a sibling of his own and a better grasp of human nature than anyone else in the room, recognizes this for the tactical-sibling-warfare-gambit that it is and refuses to participate.
The combined force of their cockblocking forces Mycroft to drop the act. He explains, for the benefit of John and the audience, that he wants li’l bro and pal to look into the death of Andrew West, a civil servant found violently dead on some railroad tracks. West was working on the Top Secret Bruce-Partington missile plans, which were -- get this! -- kept on a flash drive. Which is now lost. Gosh darn it! If you think this story is as stupid as John thinks it is . . . well, you’re right. And, unfortunately, it’s all too believable. Go Google “government missing laptop” and see what you come up with.
Mycroft wants Sherlock and John to find the plans. Sherlock’s response, which is a pretty good one, as these things go, is to rosin up his bow and play open strings at Mycroft until he goes away. On a Musician Side Note, I observe that some care has been taken to train Benedict Cumberbatch in at least looking like he knows what he’s doing with the violin. He’s got a nice grip on the bow, and an okay grip on the instrument itself, which someone has thoughtfully equipped with a really nice shoulder brace -- no rubber banded cosmetic sponges for Sherlock! It remains to be seen whether he can actually play the instrument.
Dear Moffat and Gatiss: For Christmas, I want to see Sherlock actually playing the violin in Series Two!
John gets ready to start poking at the Holmes sibling rivalry, but Sherlock’s phone comes to the rescue. Lestrade wants him to come down to Scotland Yard. And, despite being bitchy and grumpy and tetchy and quite a few of the other Seven Dwarfs, Sherlock wants John to come along. Aww.
We chew up a fairly pointless minute or so with some random shots of John and Sherlock in a cab to cover a quick run-through of the theme tune, for anyone in the audience who might have forgotten it.
Over at Police Squad!, Lestrade actually knows something Sherlock doesn’t know, which is that the explosion was not the gas leak that everyone thought it was. The only thing that survived was a strongbox containing an envelope addressed to Sherlock. Police Squad! has x-rayed it, but they want Sherlock to do the honors of opening it. Which he does, but not before informing the audience that the envelope is high-quality Czech paper, with his name written by a woman in fountain pen. Only one of these facts will be relevant later on. Inside is an iPhone, cleverly made up to look like Jennifer Wilson’s phone by the subtle trick of . . . putting a bright pink cover on it.
The point of this seems primarily to be a lead-in to Sherlock discovering that Police Squad! are also fans of John’s blog, and now they’ve all read about how he doesn’t know that the earth orbits the sun. See, this is why John doesn’t want to write about his PTSD, like his incompetent therapist asked him to do. Blogs aren’t private.
The phone has a message for Sherlock. Five beeps, which I understand are called “pips” in the UK, which is a Conan Doyle reference that Sherlock awkwardly proceeds to exposit for us, just so that we know, and a photo of a shabby room. Sherlock knows, with the power of having read the script, that this is a warning that more explosions loom in the future, and whisks John and Lestrade back to Baker Street.
The room in the photo turns out to be the living room of 221C Baker Street, which is apparently the basement apartment located in the building 221B Baker Street, and yeah, that doesn’t make sense, so just skip it for now. Mrs. Hudson is happy to lend them the key; it’s currently empty, she just can’t seem to rent it . . . oh. Sherlock gets the door open, and we realize just why Mrs. Hudson can’t rent that apartment. It’s a grubby, dingy, shabby, horrible mess. Even a graduate student wouldn’t live there. As a friend of mine would have put it, 221C is the kind of apartment where people go to end their lives.
Or set up puzzles. Someone’s been in there recently and left a pair of ugly sneakers lined up in the middle of the room. Just as Sherlock lies down to investigate them, the Pink Phone 2.0 rings. A woman’s trembling, watery, miserable voice quavers out, “Hello, sexy.” Intrigued by this most mixed of mixed signals, Sherlock asks her to go on.
The woman turns out to be just a patsy here. She’s reading a script typed onto a pager by a Mysterious Mastermind, encouraged to do this by a large bomb, all wires and blinking lights, strapped to her chest as she sits in her car in a parking lot. The script she reads gives Sherlock twelve hours to solve the puzzle of the shoes. Sherlock doesn’t look a bit surprised, and claims to have been expecting this for a while.
Here’s where the weakness of this episode begins to show. The plot depends entirely on Sherlock solving puzzles on his own, without any meaningful input from Police Squad! So, in furtherance of the plot, Police Squad! is going to become almost comically incompetent, sitting around twiddling those thumbs that are not stuck up its collective butt instead of, I don’t know, tapping the phone, dumping its LUDs, and calling up the Bomb Squad stat, because this is post 7/7 London we’re talking about here and there’s already been an explosion in a residential and heavily touristed area and who am I kidding? This is Police Squad! we’re talking about. Carry on.
Sherlock takes the ugly sneakers to Barts for examination. John, who’s still trying to introduce some real-world procedure to this show, wonders about the crying woman on the phone, but Sherlock cares about her as much as Police Squad! does, which is not at all. He’s far more interested in his lab computer, which he seems to have lifted from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in getting John to fetch the PP2.0 out of the front pocket of the jacket he’s currently wearing, because, with a 12-hour deadline, why be efficient when you can waste time annoying your roomie? Mycroft has texted about the Andrew West case, but Sherlock ignores it.
Just as the computer finishes its analysis, Molly bursts in, followed by her new boy-toy, Jim From IT. Everyone welcome Jim From IT, our latest contestant in Sherlock’s ongoing game of “Gay Or European!” Hooray! Jim enters the room, and oh dear God, I’m almost inclined to say “European” out of sheer contrariness, because Jim is such a walking gay stereotype that you expect the lab to burst into flames from the sheer fabulousness. The mincing walk, the fey voice, the tight v-neck t-shirt -- any of the European gay men that I know would laugh this guy out of the room in a New York second. In fact, I only know one gay man who actually comes across like this, and he’s a) Canadian, and b) kind of a pompous twit.
Jim futzes around, Molly forgets John’s name, Sherlock pegs Jim as gay, Molly refuses to believe him, and it’s all painfully unfunny because it’s as far from subtle as Pluto is from the sun. Even Sherlock resents having to play through this scene, and takes it out on Molly by being snippy at her. And incidentally revealing that he’s dedicated space in his “hard drive” to the particular brands of underwear favored by London’s gay club kids, and, you know, I don’t think Gatiss has really gotten the hang of this whole “hard drive” metaphor here.
Having chased away Molly and her toy stereotype, Sherlock makes John deduce the ugly sneakers, claiming that an outside eye is useful to him, despite almost two-and-a-third episodes of evidence to the contrary. But it does give John something to do, so he starts us off. The ugly sneakers are well cared for, 1980s design, fitted to enormous male feet, belonged to a kid who wrote his name in them. Sherlock patronizes John and takes over, expositing further that the ugly sneakers are original 1980s shoes, the kid who wore them had eczema and weak arches, lived in Sussex and visited London. This triggers something in Sherlock’s mind. A name. Carl Powers. Where Sherlock began.
The scene inexplicably shifts to another cab ride for the next bit of exposition. Here is another point where I would have made a very different directing choice. This is the first of several backstories we’re going to get in this episode. Each of the others is illustrated in some way, except this one. It’s actually the most interesting of the backstories told, too. Carl Powers was an eleven-year-old kid from Sussex who came to London in 1989 for a swim meet, had an epileptic seizure in the pool, and drowned. Sherlock, who we can guess was probably about twelve or thirteen himself at the time, was convinced it was murder, but couldn’t prove it and couldn’t get any grownups to listen to him. The story stuck with him, as it would; hell, I have very strong memories of a pretty grisly murder that took place in my hometown that very same year, so I can well believe that an incident like that would have stuck in Sherlock’s mind, whether or not he witnessed the actual death.
What I don’t understand is why this dramatic and interesting story wasn’t illustrated. We don’t need any more shots of John and Sherlock riding around in taxis. We’ve had at least three or four per episode so far, and they’re not all that interesting visually. I want to see Carl Powers in the pool, or see his parents grieving, or see pubescent Sherlock putting two and two together and getting five for the first time in his life, and his frustration at grownup indifference! Something, anything, that’s not another goddamn taxi ride!
Back at home, Sherlock pores over old newspaper stories while John offers to help and Mycroft texts. Sherlock decides to rid himself of both distractions in one swell foop.
(TVTrope ahoy!) Answer Cut to Mycroft’s office, where John is waiting, wearing his horrible purply-brown sport coat for the occasion. Mycroft wants to know how Sherlock is doing, and John covers manfully, assuring Mycroft that Sherlock is tooling away, which is technically true, because of course, John carefully omits mentioning what Sherlock is actually researching. Mycroft spills a few more facts about Andrew West, and here’s where we get some really stylish story illustration, and why couldn’t we have that three minutes ago? John punctuates this scene with a truly ghastly grimace.
Three hours left to go on the ugly sneaker puzzle, and Sherlock hits on the neurotoxin clostridium botulinum, the true cause of Carl Powers’s death. Someone had poisoned his eczema medication. The autopsy was too late to turn anything up, though I have to wonder why no one examined the medication, but maybe they did things differently in 1989. Anyway, Sherlock posts a note about his solution on his website, which makes an e-mail “whoosh” sound because either Sherlock has a weird sense of web design or the SFX guys were bored that day. The Mysterious Mastermind must have been waiting, refreshing his screen over and over, because the PP2.0 rings a few seconds later. The puzzle has been solved, and the hostage can be freed. Sherlock asks for her location, and we see the bomb squad approaching her car, all by its lonesome in the cold, dark parking lot.
Well, that’s the first puzzle solved. It’s late, and I want to go to bed, so I will break the recap here, with just one final question: Why, in the era of the War on Terror, over the course of nine whole hours, did none of the hundreds of people who passed through that parking lot notice the lady with the enormous scary bomb crying in her car, pick up a cell phone, dial 999, and say, “Hey, Police Squad! There’s a lady strapped to a bomb who’s been sitting outside the mall for the past six hours. Wanna take a look?”