Sherlock Holmes and Land Wars in Asia

[andraste]

I watched the first episode of Sherlock with friends today, and enjoyed it.

However, one thing that bemused me is that Sherlock has never seen The Princess Bride! This in itself is entirely plausible, since his interest in eighties fantasy romances strikes me as limited. However, I was surprised that he at no point suggested the solution to the pill problem that is blindingly obvious to anyone who has watched it. Possibly that scene is more tense if you don't spend the whole time thinking of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

What surprised me even more is that the friend I watched it with said she hadn't seen anyone in Sherlock fandom discussing the parallel!

Comments

[calapine]

I've seen it mentioned a lot, usually followed by someone pointing out it's also the answer in A Study in Scarlett, the book the first episode's based on.

[andraste]

I've seen it mentioned a lot, usually followed by someone pointing out it's also the answer in A Study in Scarlett, the book the first episode's based on.

Good point! It's been fifteen years since I read A Study in Scarlett (give me Hound of the Baskervilles or The Sign of Four any day) so the movie comparison was fresher in my mind. (And as far as I remember Book!Holmes does not spend ten minutes sitting across the table from the murderer debating which pill to take.) That just makes it weirder that the show doesn't bring it up!

Unless it's meant to be a possibility that's obvious to the audience, but not to Holmes because he's obsessed with finding the right answer and here there are only two wrong ones available.

[musesfool]

I think some people are acting on the theory that without Holmes in his usual time period, there IS no iocane poisoning scene in Princess Bride. I've also been told that the two scenes (er, Study in Scarlet and PB) are not so similar that the latter couldn't have come about organically, even without a Holmesian predecessor, so I don't know. It was certainly my first thought, and distracting throughout the scene that nobody else ever mentioned it.

There was a really interesting discussion somewhere about how detective fiction would have evolved differently without Holmes... *digs through tags* here.

[darchildre]

Okay, it is possible that I am missing your point, but the thing with the iocane is that both glasses are poisoned, right, and Wesley has an immunity to iocane powder? Because that is definitely not what happens in Study. One of the pills is totally harmless, as Mr Hope says: I was a fairly good dispenser, so I worked this alkaloid into small, soluble pills, and each pill I put in a box with a similar pill made without the poison. I determined at the time that when I had my chance, my gentlemen should each have a draw out of one of these boxes, while I ate the pill that remained.

So if the show is playing true to that aspect of the original story, then it's true that only one of the pills is poisoned.

[calapine]

That's what seems to happen in Sherlock, yes, but I think a lot of people assume they're both poisoned as they're more familiar with Princess Bride than Study in Scarlett.

[voleuse]

Sherlock has never seen The Princess Bride!

Yes! That was driving me nuts throughout the entire scene: OBVIOUSLY the killer had spent the last several years developing an immunity to iocane powder. But I guess if Study in Scarlet preceded The Princess Bride...my head hurts a lot now.

[(Anonymous)]

As a former frequenter of alternatehistory.com I can assure you that the most headache-retardant solution is to presume that a remarkably similar author wrote a remarkably similar story in ATL which all of the characters happen not to know about, but which was able to fill the causal gap up to the OTL reference.

... Which is still not a very headache-retardant solution :(

[rachel_martin]

When I saw the title of this post, I thought you were going to comment on something that really struck me. In the original SH books published in the late 1890s-early 1900s, Watson is an Army doctor back from the war in Afghanistan. So we have a version set in 2010 and.... Watson is an Army doctor back from the war in Afghanistan. Ouch. An unexpected reminder of the uselessness of prosecuting a war in Afghanistan.

[lizvogel]

because he's obsessed with finding the right answer

That was my assumption. Not that the housemate & I didn't turn to each other and chorus "Princess Bride!" as soon as the scenario appeared -- but for Sherlock, exclaming "Look over there!" and switching the pills and then watching the bad guy's reactions would have been too easy.