Sherlock Holmes (film)/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

 * The Hound of the Baskervilles:
 * Watson remarks on the death of the escaped convict Neil Selden, brother of Henry Baskerville's butler's wife, that "Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him." After the hound set loose by Stapleton fails to kill Henry Baskerville, his abused wife gleefully leads Holmes and Watson to his hideout. Watson doesn't outright say it, but this gives a strong impression of just how evil Stapleton is.
 * The novel opens with Holmes reading about Dr James Mortimer who has written papers on 'Is Disease a Reversion', 'Some Freaks of Atavism' and 'Do we regress?'. Atavism is defined as 'The tendency to revert to ancestral type'. Later on, we discover that the main villain, Stapleton is a relative of the Baskervilles. How? By the fact that he looks almost identical to the painting of the evil Sir Hugo Baskerville (who was responsible for the Baskerville curse). In other words, Stapleton is a reversion to the evil Baskerville type and we have an incredibly brilliant piece of foreshadowing.

Sherlock Holmes

 * Blackwood It's elementary.
 * ended up being an unintentional replacement for . How, you ask?.
 * Why didn't Watson, and where did Blackwood get ? Look closely: Blackwood is.
 * 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  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.
 * 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 One 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.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

 * It's horrifying enough that Moriarty manipulates a man  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
 * 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.