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Canon References In BBC Sherlock


believeinsherlock

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Thanks again, you two! The Boscombe Valley Mystery, that's in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. No wonder I couldn't place the scene, because that book has been missing from my collection ever since I last moved and I only just found it again.

 

And of course once I flipped through it, I also found some more passages that are referenced in the BBC version:

 

"...Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything of importance, but..." that was used in The Great Game, when John tries to analyze the trainers.

 

Some of the things Sherlock notices about Kitty Riley that tell him she's a journalist are very similar to the Holmes' observations on his client in "A Case of Identity": the pressure-marks of the typewriter on her sleeve, the smudge of ink on her finger.

 

I'm sure the fake fire alarm to get Irene Adler to look in the direction of her hiding place has already been commented on here, as well as Holmes dressing up as a clergyman and letting himself be injured to gain access to her house. In her letter to him, she states that she's keeping the photograph he was supposed to get "to safeguard myself" - the original Irene was already very much concerned about her "protection".

 

I reference I wish they had made is when Holmes says to the king: "From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty", in response to a snobby remark on the part of the monarch.

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Yes, I love that line (and Jeremy Brett delivers it very well).  But since our Sherlock never actually meets his client, I guess they couldn't figure out a way to use it.

 

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Also in "A Case of Identity" there is some discussion between Holmes and Watson about where to look when it comes to women:

 

“You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite invisible to me,” I remarked.
“Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look (...)"

 

To be fair, I think I'd better hasten to add that of course the woman in question was fully clothed, unlike Irene.

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Sherlock pointing out that the cabbie in A Study in Pink has traces of shaving foam on his cheek reminds me of what Holmes says during the train ride in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" about Watson's shaving being uneven because he had bad light. With the cabbie, the remark was meant to illustrate that he obviously lived alone. Hmmm, Boscombe Valley takes place during Watson's marriage - is Holmes trying to say something unkind about his wife? Shut up, brain, shut up...

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As I recall, Holmes's comments about Watson rather explicitly involved the relationship of his bedroom window to his shaving mirror -- rather than Watson's relationship with his wife.  ;)

 

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Hail to the voice of reason.

 

Another little reference: In "The Five Orange Pips", Holmes glances at his client's shoes and is able to tell where he walked to Baker St from by "that clay and chalk mixture". This might have been the starter for the trail in the kidnapping case in The Reichenbach Fall.

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They even show a lot of Holmes' characteristic poses as desribed by Doyle: the fingertips brought together underneath the chin when thinking, curling up in his chair with his knees under the jaw or lying rolled up on the sofa. Instead of hectic finger twitching, though, they show Sherlock's eyes darting restlessly back and forth when he's alert, which I am sure works much better on screen.

 

 

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they show Sherlock's eyes darting restlessly back and forth when he's alert, which I am sure works much better on screen.

 

  And it shows how many people are just "watching" the episodes and who are really paying attention...or observing....when they actually manage to take notice of what is going on in Sherlock's eyes.

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  And it shows how many people are just "watching" the episodes and who are really paying attention...or observing....when they actually manage to take notice of what is going on in Sherlock's eyes.

 

 

Think I need therapy of some sort? :-)

 

Observing people closely is part of my (future) job, so maybe I just can't "turn it on and off like a tap". But honestly, isn't that pretty much shoved in the viewers' faces? Why else would they show all those close-ups of his face when he's under stress - to let us admire the cheekbones?

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Why should you need any sort of therapy?  Did I imply that? I did not. I was stating a fact, because I know there have been posts all through these threads that have mentioned Sherlock's eyes and the emotion they were emitting in response to some comment made by John, Mycroft....or any other character or situation.

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Why should you need any sort of therapy?  Did I imply that? I did not. I was stating a fact, because I know there have been posts all through these threads that have mentioned Sherlock's eyes and the emotion they were emitting in response to some comment made by John, Mycroft....or any other character or situation.

 

No, of course you didn't, I know. It was a compliment, right? Thank you! I am so bad at taking those - not used to it, I guess.

 

The actor does do a lot with his eyes. I used to think that Roald Dahl was right when he had one of his characters say that the mouth, not the eyes, is the most expressive feature in a face. But here that is only true for Mycroft.

 

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Remember "I'd be lost without my blogger"? In "A Scandal in Bohemia", Holmes says "I'd be lost without my Boswell". Boswell, I have just found out, was the biographer of Samuel Johnson.

 

In "The Five Orange Pips", there is a paragraph where Holmes speaks about his mind as if it were a house, mentioning "brain attic" and "lumber room". The place sounds fairly modest but might have given the idea of introducing the Mind Palace.

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Actually, I think Holmes's "attic" gave rise to Sherlock's "hard drive" in "The Great Game" (quote from Ariane DeVere's transcript):

 

JOHN: It’s primary school stuff. How can you not know that?
SHERLOCK: Well, if I ever did, I’ve deleted it.
JOHN: “Deleted it”?
SHERLOCK: Listen. (He points to his head with one finger.) This is my hard drive, and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful ... really useful. Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish, and that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters. Do you see?

JOHN: But it’s the solar system!
SHERLOCK: Oh, hell! What does that matter?!

 

The concept of a "Mind Palace" was thought up by somebody else (not connected with Holmes), and merely "borrowed" for the program.

 

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The dialogue from The Great Game I think came from "A Study in Scarlet". You're right, the "brain attic" appears there as well. Following is a long quote from the original, but since it's old enough there should not be any copyright problems (I hope):

 

" 'I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.'
'But the Solar System!' I protested.
'What the deuce is it to me?' "

 

I am sure the Mind Palace is a concept they took from somewhere else, but the idea of using it at all might have been inspired by Holmes speaking about his mind as if it were a house, mightened it?

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The dialogue from The Great Game I think came from "A Study in Scarlet". You're right, the "brain attic" appears there as well. Following is a long quote from the original, but since it's old enough there should not be any copyright problems (I hope):

 

" 'I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.'

'But the Solar System!' I protested.

'What the deuce is it to me?' "

 

I am sure the Mind Palace is a concept they took from somewhere else, but the idea of using it at all might have been inspired by Holmes speaking about his mind as if it were a house, mightened it?

 

You're right, of course -- that particular quote is clearly the direct ancestor of the Sherlock scene (and I've added a couple more lines to the scene, above, for purposes of further comparison).  You're also right that the copyrights on the original stories have (with, I believe, a few odd exceptions) been allowed to expire.

 

I now see what you mean about the Mind Palace -- they felt comfortable borrowing the concept because it was so compatible with canon.

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Exactly. Speaking of the solar system, isn't the original Professor Moriarty supposed to be (among other things) an expert on Astronomy?

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Then here's another way in which Doyle's ideas have been nicely worked into the plot - Moriarty chooses the picture with the super nova to rub Sherlock's ignorance about these things in his face.

 

They certainly went far away from the original with Moriarty, save for the "undulating" body language and overall evilness. Which I guess is good. Nothing could have been better, at least not better acted. And it bothers me even less (or would bother me even less if it bothered me at all), because when it comes to the old stories, Moriarty is my other blind spot aside from Mycroft. There was no way I was going to read a story about Holmes being killed when I was in my teens and that avoidance has sort of carried on. I did at last read "The Valley of Fear" a few weeks ago (and was glad to), but I still can't quite stomach "The Final Problem". Because in the original, he actually dies. He's dead, period, that is the truth in Doyle's fictional world and bringing him back was an afterthought I have never found convincing.

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Interesting.  I first read "The Final Problem" before watching "Reichenbach" (though in anticipation of it, thanks to Moftiss's much more civilized clues for Series 2).  What with knowing that Conan Doyle's Holmes did return from his apparent death, and willing to bet good money that Sherlock's Sherlock would do likewise, I had absolutely no trouble reading the original story.

 

Even though I can intellectually understand your distaste for the story, I still find it hard to imagine myself in that state of mind.  Maybe that's because my brother and I grew up watching the old black-and-white Frankenstein movies on midnight television, and became accustomed to the "On second thought, he isn't really dead" syndrome.

 

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What I mean is I knew then and know now that Doyle meant and wanted him to really be dead. The return wasn't planned, like Sherlock's. The creator killed his creature (talk about Dr Frankenstein, Carol...) and because a creator is the god of his universe, that death was actually real for an impressible teenager who virtually lived inside her books. I hated Doyle for being so callous about his one great creation, anyway, and this was the limit.

 

As a grown-up, of course I know this is silly, but some things just stick, I guess. And on a more intellectual level, I dislike "he / she is not really dead" plots. It makes a mockery out of tragedy. But of course Sherlock is allowed to break that rule any time!

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It is really great how, in the episodes that clearly follow a certain Doyle story, the very tone and atmosphere of those stories is evoked. For example, "A Scandal in Bohemia" is very light-hearted and funny. At the beginning of A Scandal in Belgravia, we have unusually colorful and bright scenery and lots of comedy going on (although the episode then shifts towards the darker world that "Sherlock" usually takes place in and so feels more true to the series as a whole). On the other hand, "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is one of the scariest Holmes stories, very bleak and frightening, and the episode made from that is so reminiscent of horror movies that I am actually posting this while watching it, so as not to get too caught up and forfeit more sleep...

 

Another example of where they improved on the source is that they allowed Sherlock to go to Dartmoor with John right away, after nodding to the story by making him joke about wanting to stay home.

 

And another little detail that they use here (and elsewhere) is that the original Holmes often sends police or clients on by themselves to wherever he's supposed to work and will always travel alone (or just in the company of his chronicler, which for Holmes is probably much the same thing) if he can.

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What I mean is I knew then and know now that Doyle meant and wanted him to really be dead. The return wasn't planned, like Sherlock's. The creator killed his creature (talk about Dr Frankenstein, Carol...) and because a creator is the god of his universe, that death was actually real for an impressible teenager who virtually lived inside her books. I hated Doyle for being so callous about his one great creation, anyway, and this was the limit.

 

As a grown-up, of course I know this is silly, but some things just stick, I guess. And on a more intellectual level, I dislike "he / she is not really dead" plots. It makes a mockery out of tragedy. But of course Sherlock is allowed to break that rule any time!

 

I believe that Frankenstein's monster was supposed to be really dead too -- until that movie turned out to be so popular that they decided to make another one!

 

But, yes, I do see your point about Conan Doyle intentionally killing off his own character.  At least Holmes did manage to take Moriarty with him.

 

The stories that bother me the most are the ones where a popular character is killed off simply because the actor no longer wants to play him/her -- e.g., Tasha Yar and Data in ST:TNG.  Seems to me like there's usually a more creative way to deal with the real-life situation, especially if the death (like Tasha's in particular) serves no other purpose, and I often wonder if the character was killed merely out of spite.

 

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In "The Blue Carbuncle", Holmes gets information out of a man by pretending he bet money on it, because he notices the "Pink'Un" in his pocket and concludes that he is fond of betting. That was used in The Hounds of Baskerville.

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