Sherlock Holmes (film)/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

Sherlock Holmes

• Blackwood kills the ginger dwarf with cyanide (which deprives the body of air), and buries him in the earth. He kills his father in a bathtub filled with fire-heated water. He kills the American lodge member with by setting him on fire with what said member thought to be rain. And finally, his machine, beneath the earth, would poison the very air Parliament breathed. It's elementary.
  • Lord Blackwood's death ended up being an unintentional replacement for the parliament. How, you ask? Lord Blackwood died by hanging, in the air, from a bridge, which connects two pieces of earth.
• Why didn't Watson come to Holmes' aid atop Tower Bridge, and where did Blackwood get a sword for his final fight? Look closely: Blackwood is wielding Watson's sword cane, which Holmes of course makes sure to take with him at the end. Watson loses his sword cane when he gets thumped by the large French fellow, and he doesn't regain it during the ensuing fight scene. Blackwood might have found it on the sewer floor.
• One of the points of criticism that was raised was that Holmes and Watson's relationship was more tense and prone to bickering than their solid friendship in the original novels. Of course, if you subscribe to the idea that Watson's a bit of an Unreliable Narrator and that the movie is getting under the skin of the original stories this makes a bit more sense, since Watson's hardly going to write about all the times that he and Holmes bicker like an old married couple.
  • Also This Troper would like to fill this in somewhat. He has a Heterosexual Life Partner in real life. While our friendship can never be broken, we bicker A LOT, often sounding like a married couple. So having them bicker for me didn't make it feel as if they were less friends. The opposite, they were so good friends they were basically married. This is the reason Holmes is so jealous of Watson's fiance!
    • I'd reverse that cause and effect - after years of sharing a home, a job and a life, Watson is marrying someone else, moving away and quitting the detective business. Holmes is enormously jealous and feeling abandoned and is lashing out at his best friend.
• Holmes drinking eye surgery medicine just seems like an amusing throwaway joke, until you learn that cocaine was widely used in Victorian times as an local anesthetic for eye surgery.
  • Even better, Holmes's creator Conan Doyle, specialised as an Opthalmologist (eye doctor) in real life.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

• The Chess Motifs throughout the film cast Holmes and his allies as the black pieces, and Holmes takes the black side when he and Moriarty play chess in the Grand Finale. This clashes with the general color-coding of pop culture, which mandates that Light Is Good and Dark Is Evil. But in chess, white and black have nothing to do with good and evil, but rather with offense and defense. White moves first, and is therefore on offense, while black moves second, putting them on defense. And Holmes is very much on defense throughout most of the movie.
  • A rule in chess is that if a pawn makes it to the other side of the board, it is promoted to a queen. Mary was pretty much a 'pawn' in the game since she didn't have much of a role in the case except as Watson's wife. However, at the end, she was instrumental in taking down Moriarty's organization because Moriarty was too busy with Holmes and Watson to notice her. In other words, Holmes turned Mary from a pawn to a queen.
• Easy to not notice because it is so funny, but during the climax of Game of Shadows, Holmes reveals that he swapped Moriaty's note book with one containing flick picture of a fish eating the fisherman, harkening back to Moriaty's boast in the torture scene. The fridge logic is that Holmes only managed to swap the books immediately during that same toture scene. So what, did he know in advance how Moriaty was going to specifically (and so unpleasantly) tease him?
  • As mentioned over at the Headscratchers page, the same piece of music was playing when they met at the university, and they discussed it, with the metaphorical subtext being clearly understood between the two of them.
• Every event in The Final Problem happens in some form or another in The Game of Shadows. It is feasible that Watson toned it down into the "marketable" story that was published.
• At the end of the first film, Watson and Mary find Holmes hanging from the ceiling. Watson quickly says: "Suicide is not in his repertoire, he's far too fond of himself for that." - Cut to the final confrontation at the end of the second film and it appears Holmes has in fact killed himself to stop the villain. He really is too fond of himself.
• There are plenty of instances with gay subtext in 'The Game of Shadows' but one is particularly subtle. Apparently, Brighton has a substantial Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. It was called 'The Gay Capital of Britan'. This is where Watson and Mary are going to have their honeymoon.
  • That is a bit of a stretch - Brighton's (well deserved, bless it) reputation for gayness is modern and in fact the more obvious connotation of the town, to British viewers at least, is that Brighton is the traditional destination for the 'dirty weekend'. It's exactly where young couples, whether married or no, headed for rumpy-pumpy.
• When Holmes and Moriarty meet in Moriarty's classroom, both make perfectly clear that they'll stop at nothing to oppose the other. At first, I was scratching my head and thinking Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? - to both of them. Then I realized, this is Holmes and Moriarty. It's completely in character for both of them to want the challenge of a Worthy Opponent.
• 1891 was a hallmark in the road to World War I in Real Life, as it was the year that the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy was renewed (in response to France approaching Italy), France and Russia signed an alliance, and Britain refused an alliance offer from Germany. So Mycroft's comment that the conference's aim is to defuse the current crisis between France and Germany (who were sworn enemies since the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871) but that in case it doesn't work everybody else is there to decide which side they pick is part this and part Shown Their Work.
• At first it seems anachronistic for guns like the Mauser C96 to be appearing in 1891, and simply an example of a cool and rare gun being shoehorned into a Victorian story. It's perfectly plausible for Moriarty's weapons business to be involved in advanced weapon design, and the Maxim machine gun that formed the basis of semi-automatic research was almost a decade old at the time of Game of Shadows. After Moriarty's death and the collapse of his empire, the plans would have been taken and developed into the C96 model half a decade later.
• At first, many of the weird, steampunk-like things appearing in both films appear to be merely Anachronism Stew designed to appeal to fans of 21st century action movies. But when you take a closer look, many of the elements--weird weaponry, concerns over foreign invasions, and stories about phony supernatural events--are exactly the sort of stories Victorian fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's works would have seen in other popular stories and novels of the day. This isn't a case of Did Not Do the Research on the Victorian Era, but a careful reconstruction of the tropes found period pulp fiction that eventually inspired our current action movie cliches.

Fridge Horror

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

• It's horrifying enough that Moriarty manipulates a man into committing suicide by threatening to kill his wife and children, who are being held hostage. Then you realize that, given Moriarty's policy of "no loose ends," he almost certainly had the man's family killed ANYWAY.
• Bear with me here, but there is a distinct possibility that MORIARTY IS ALIVE. Holmes is shown to survive the fall from the castle by using the oxygen device he ostensibly took from Mycroft. This got me wondering - why on earth would Mycroft have had one in the first place? Simple - the altitude of the castle meant the air would be thin. Thus, all the guests of summit would likely have had such a device - including Moriarty.
• Holmes crashing Watson's honeymoon in (terrible) drag is indisputably hilarious, but let's talk about travel times for a moment. Even today, Cambridge to London isn't exactly a short trip. Holmes' meeting with Moriarty is sometime after 4 PM, when the Professor's lecture concludes. Watson and Mary's train appears to be departing in the early evening sometime. It's heavily implied that the reason Holmes is dressed as a woman is because he simply grabbed the first available disguise and "made do" in a mad rush to the station, not even bothering to shave, because he wasn't certain if he was going to make the train. And he had the entire journey back to London to imagine what was going to happen to Watson and Mary if he didn't.