Also the episode at the end of Series 2, where Holmes jumps off the building but survives, is their modern take on that. Each of the episodes has had a real Holmes story (or two) at its core, usually with a different, twist, ending.
The woman who complained about never being in the stories (and who was in the background of the secret society), have we seen her before? Should she look familiar?
The woman who pulled SH at Watson’s wedding (before he ran away) ?
The Modern Mycroft is frequently shown worrying about his weight, exercising, and being needled by Sherlock about having once been fat. It’s one of the cleverest bits about the modern brothers, I think.
I would think that not having read the books would be a real impediment to catching all the bits in the tv show. People should get on that. I’ve loved the stories since eight grade, when I read them all while stuck in bed with pneumonia. I still love the originals, even while I love the Modern Sherlock’s reimagining the characters with an understanding that comes from 100 years of hero worship.
The more I think about it, the more this really bothers me about the episode. Putting people in KKK robes (with marching! and firelight!) with the message “sometimes they do bad things - even murder, but underneath it’s for a really good purpose. They’re just misunderstood.” is deeply fucked up.
I know the writers are British, not American. But the entire production knew that this was going out to an international audience, someone should have noticed that there were problems with the visual symbolism and that this was a bad idea.
Too clever by half. The cast were having fun, the rest of us got lost along the way.
The visual symbolism couldn’t have been an unfortunate coincidence that went unnoticed by a British production team. In the original Doyle story “The Five Orange Pips”, men who had been marked for death by the Ku Klux Klan receive envelopes containing five orange seeds or pips. The murder victim is an Englishman who’d lived in America and had crossed the KKK. In “The Abominable Bride” Sir Eustace receives an envelope containing five orange seeds, Sherlock remarks that this is used as a death threat in America*, and then Sir Eustace is murdered by a secret society that marches around at night wearing hooded robes because he had wronged one of their members while in America. The resemblance of the women’s group to the KKK must have been deliberate.
It also appears to have been totally meaningless, or at least that’s the more charitable interpretation. Either this episode intentionally evoked a violent white supremacist hate group for no good reason or we were meant to see the women’s group as comparable to the KKK. Since I find it difficult to believe that the writers actually thought it would be a good idea to suggest that either Victorian women who wanted to vote and have careers were as bad as the KKK or that the white supremacist cause is as righteous and noble as women’s suffrage, I’m going to assume that this was a case of trying to be clever but going very, very wrong.
*I have never heard of this outside of Holmes fiction, and don’t know if orange seeds were ever really used in this way by the KKK or anyone else in the US.
As soon as I saw the purple KKK group, I paused it and told my wife that the KKK was, indeed, part of the solution in the Orange Pip story. I was surprised that they maintained this…while making the robes and hoods purple.
I was stunned when it was revealed to be a woman’s group.
Very, very odd. They should have dropped or massively changed the robes.
Unrelated, what was the relevance of what was in Holmes little book that…uh, someone picked up in the airplane? I believe it had notes on “Red Beard” and a few other things. Red Beard made me think of the red-headed-league, but the rest looked to make no sense. Did anyone else see this? It was either Mycroft or Watson that picked it up and looked at it. It was not the list of drugs taken.
In the show, Redbeard was Sherlock’s dog that was put to sleep when he was a kid. He never quite got over it, as he is shown in “His Last Vow” being greeted by the dog after Mary shoots him - he thinks he’s dying and he sees his dead dog coming towards him.
My son and I both laughed at the Terry Pratchett reference at the end:
One of the proposed titles for the story was “The Monstrous Regiment” -
also the title of a Terry Pratchett Diskworld novel about a unit of new infantry recruits entirely populated by disguised women.
The book title was taken from the writings of John Knox - against women ruling. I find it much more likely that it was a reference to that than to Pratchett.
Very likely - I did not know that.
And if it was a reference to a book, it was more likely to Laurie R. King’s novel A Monstrous Regiment of Women, the second book in her Mary Russell series featuring a retired Sherlock Holmes. King, Pratchett, and this episode were all ultimately referencing John Knox’s remarkably misogynist polemic pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, published in 1558.
And that’s based on what, the fact you personally didn’t get it?
Why do you think those particular female characters from SH’s past were chosen, how would you describe SH’s relationship with women?
When was that first part ever stated? I remember Redbeard as the dog in the mind palace scene, but the repeated references to it make me think that maybe Redbeard is more than just a dog.
Ha, I might have known! I wondered where they got their title for this special, and here’s a quote from the ACD story The Musgrave Ritual:
Was Ricoletti walking with a limp when he came out of the opium den? I have to go back and watch again.
Sherlock says something to the dog like “They’re putting me down now, too.”
I think you’re right that it refers to something more than a dog now, though.
I will gladly admit that I don’t get whatever it is you’re driving at here. Would you care to explain what you think Molly Hooper, Janine Hawkins, and the other female characters have in common with members of the Ku Klux Klan?
I don’t “care” enough.
Here’s a 2012 Steven Moffat interview I hadn’t seen before, on how Conan Doyle inspired him: Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat: how Conan Doyle inspired me | Radio Times