ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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I've now watched The Abominable Bride three times, and I think I've got this amazing story figured out.

Before this gets all deep and intellectual, I loved the way the first scene on Baker Street in 1880 did several things to emulate the 1984 Grenada series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett.

The music is a variation on the theme from that series, the camera pans down from a slight elevation to the street level, and Martin Freeman starts narrating the tale in the same manner as David Burke's version of Watson did in the Grenada series from 32 years earlier.

It was a delightful "in joke" for fans of the classic series.

Now, on to deeper matters.

One important aspect of the story in the Christmas special is — in my highly biased opinion — the idea that Sherlock is having doubts about whether or not Moriarty is actually dead. The hints start fairly early.

In The Abominable Bride we see a crazed woman stick a pistol barrel into her mouth and appear to blow her brains out, even though she shows up hours later and murders her husband with a shotgun before she walks off slowly into the fog.



Sherlock is mighty vexed by the idea that somebody could turn their brain into Yorkshire pudding and still walk around in a wedding dress. With him, this is very personnel . . . and we know why.

Later in the morgue, Sherlock is examining the body of the woman, and he starts mumbling things like " . . . blew his brains out . . . how did he survive?"



And when he's talking to Microft about the "Miss me?" note Sherlock found on the murdered man, Mycroft says, "DO you miss him?"

Sherlock: "Moriarty is dead."

Mycroft: "And yet . . ."

Sherlock: "His body was never recovered."



If that isn't plain enough for us, Moriarty himself pays Sherlock a visit and says creepy things like, "The bride put a gun in her mouth and shot the back of her head off, and then she came back. Impossible . . . and yet she did it . . . and you need to know how. It's tearing your world apart!"



And at the end, when John asks Sherlock if Moriarty is alive, he says, "I didn't say he was alive, I said he was back"

Clearly there are some tricky semantics at work here. But when Mary says, "So, then he's dead?" we get what seems like a definite answer.

"Of course he's dead. He blew his own brains out. No one survives that."

This is undeniably true, of course. But I suspect what he really meant was, "Of course he's dead . . . if he blew his brains out. No one survives that."

In other words, two fact have been established in the story.

(1) If a person blows their brains out, they cannot be alive.

(2) If a person is alive . . . they did not blow their brains out.

Now, if that sounds like my own desperate effort to contradict Sherlock's next statement —

"Moriarty is dead. No question."

— I'd like to point out that Sherlock contradicts it himself with his final remark.

"More importantly . . . I know exactly what he's going to do next."

So, Moriarty is definitely dead, but he's also definitely back, and he's doing things which Sherlock can predict. I'm eagerly waiting to see how Moriarty managed that trick.



Obviously a lot of reading between the lines is necessary, and a good place to start might be to ask ourselves this intriguing question.

Why would Sherlock need a drug-assisted mind palace to prove that if someone blows their brains out they can't still be alive?

Let's be logically about this: he obviously wasn't trying to find out if someone could live after such a traumatic injury. He was actually exploring all the ways that such an injury could be faked, and all the reasons someone might have for creating a hoax of that magnitude.

To do this, he used his mind palace to recreate an old and unsolved case that actually used a fake suicide to achieve an ambitious goal. A woman seemed to rise from the dead and commit multiple murders. What Sherlock discovered, of course, was that she faked her suicide and committed one murder — then she died in an "assisted suicide", and another women used the legend of the ghostly bride to commit additional murders and confound the police.

So, what did Sherlock's drug-assisted mind palace teach him? (And us.) Quite a lot, actually. Here's a recap.
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If someone blows their brains out, they're definitely dead.

If someone is not dead, they definitely did not blow their brains out.

Dead people don't rise from the grave to commit murder.

Living people can use deception to get away with murder.

Smart people don't kill themselves when a fake suicide works better to accomplish their goal.
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So, Sherlock has seen ample evidence in his mind palace that a fake suicide can be used to great advantage. But in the final analysis, I don't think this episode was meant to answer the question, "Is Moriarty alive?", I think it was meant to make us keep asking it.

I, for one, have faith that Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Sherlock Holmes, and Jim Moriarty will all do the smartest things possible in the upcoming season. And having Moriarty do nothing smarter than to just kill himself isn"t the smartest thing possible.


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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Well, here we are — seven years later — and the Sherlock series never bothered to resolve the questions which fans like myself really wanted answered.

Like, did Moriarty really just kill himself instead of something worthy of a criminal genius, and how did Sherlock jump off the roof of building but suffer no injuries?

The Sherlock series' third season was entertaining, but it was marred by the fact that we kept waiting for the answers to those questions. The fourth season was, in my opinion, the poorest of the bunch.

Oh well . . .
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

The Producers said at the time that they will never explain how Sherlock survived his fall from the roof. Personally I think that they just couldn't figure out a plausible explanation.

David.