There is a Holmes fan who comments on every episode of Sherlock on the Onion AV Club review, listing all the canon references. These are their notes for this week:
Nebuly • a day ago
Notes on ‘The Final Problem’; mostly canonical, but with a couple of Sherlock references as well. I almost certainly didn’t catch everything, so please add away if you noticed something I didn’t.
The home movie and flashbacks show Mycroft as a portly child, which is in keeping
with his ‘obese’ appearance in the canon.
As has been noted, the ‘east wind coming’ reference is from ‘His Last Bow’ (1917),
where Holmes is talking about the approach of World War I.
The fact that Mycroft is seven years older than Sherlock is established in ‘The
Greek Interpreter’.
The name of the Holmes ancestral home—Musgrave—is from ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, where it is the home of Reginald Musgrave, a man with whom Holmes had had a slight acquaintance in university. Later on Euros calls it the site of Holmes’s very first case, which in the show is a reference to Redbeard/Victor Trevor. Canonically, ‘The Gloria Scott’ (which involves Victor Trevor) was Holmes’s first case, as it took place while Holmes was still in university; ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ is Holmes’s third professional case after becoming a consulting detective. Mycroft’s comment about the house—where there was always honey for tea—is a reference to Rupert Brooke’s 1912 poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, with its famous closing lines ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?’
Euros’s song holds the clue to Redbeard/Victor’s disappearance: all I could make out was ‘deep down below the old beech tree, 16 by 6’ (I understand the BBC
subtitled the song; does anyone have a transcription?), which is a conflation of elements from two different Musgrave rituals. The ritual in the canonical story goes thus:
'Whose was it?' 'His who is gone.'
'Who shall have it?' 'He who will come.'
'Where was the sun?' 'Over the oak.'
'Where was the shadow?' 'Under the elm.'
‘How was it stepped?' 'North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.'
'What shall we give for it?' 'All that is ours.'
'Why should we give it?' 'For the sake of the trust.'
So the tree and the 16 by 6 reference come (sort of) from that ritual, while ‘deep down below’ comes from the 1943 film Sherlock Holmes Faces Death starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, which is loosely based on ‘The Musgrave Ritual’. The ritual in the film is completely different from that of the story, and ends with the words ‘Where shall he go? / Deep down below / Away from the thunder / Let him dig under’.
Sherrinford Island is a reference to Sherrinford, the original given name Conan Doyle gave Sherlock in the draft version of A Study in Scarlet.
In ‘The Cardboard Box’ we learn that Holmes’s violin is a Stradivarius worth 500
guineas (£525) that Holmes purchased for 55 shillings (two pounds and 15 shillings) from a dealer in the Tottenham Court Road.
‘The Vatican Cameos’ is an unrecorded case mentioned in The Hound of the
Baskervilles. It’s also a warning used between Holmes and Watson in ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’.
Moriarty’s brother was a station-master: in The Valley of Fear we learn that one of Moriarty’s two brothers (who were both also named James, apparently) was a station-master in the west of England.
Nathan Garrideb is an eccentric antiquarian in ‘The Three Garridebs’, who never leaves his flat on Little Ryder Street. Unbeknownst to him, a criminal named Killer Evans had had the flat before him, and hid a counterfeiting machine in it. In order to lure Nathan out, Evans tells him that his name is John Garrideb, and that an eccentric American named Alexander Garrideb has willed his substantial fortune—$15 million—to three men with his strange surname, if they can be found. Evans eventually tells Nathan he has found a third Garrideb—Howard—and sends Nathan off to get him, so that Evans can ransack Garrideb’s flat and retrieve his machine.
The deductions about the Garridebs, with Sherlock and Mycroft trading deductions, are similar to a scene in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, where the brothers make deductions about a half-pay officer they see in the street.
Static on some of the screens within Sherrinford looks like a waterfall (‘The Reichenbach Falls’, where Holmes met his death in the canonical ‘Final Problem’).
Victor Trevor—Redbeard—was a university friend of Holmes’s. During a visit to Trevor’s house, Holmes solves his first case (‘The Gloria Scott’).
At the end, when the policeman with Lestrade says of Sherlock ‘He’s a great man,’ Lestrade replies ‘Better than that; he’s a good one.’ At the end of the first episode of Sherlock, ‘A Study in Pink’, Lestrade says of Sherlock ‘He’s a great man. Some day he might be a good one.’
Mary’s ‘final court of appeal’ is what Holmes calls himself in A Study in Scarlet.
The stick-men figures on the chalkboard are from ‘The Dancing Men’.
Mary describes Sherlock and John as ‘Two men sitting in a scruffy flat, like they’ve always been there and always will.’ Sherlockian scholar Vincent Starrett wrote a
much-loved (by Sherlockians) sonnet called ‘221B’, which begins ‘Here dwell together still two men of note / Who never lived and so can never die.’
Mary calls Sherlock and John ‘the best and wisest men I have ever known.’ Watson describes Holmes thusly at the end of the canonical ‘The Final Problem’.
If this is indeed the last episode of Sherlock, it’s been fun doing these, and I hope people enjoyed them.
Beryl Stapleton, BSI
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/frustrating-brilliant-sherlock-stays-frustrating-r-248468
Arthur, put the kettle on and dig out those lemon hand wipes.
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