SHERLOCK HOLMES'S MIND PALACE

The BBC series Sherlock makes several references to Holmes’s “mind palace,” an imaginary warehouse where he stores important memories. When he wants to remember something, he closes his eyes and imagines himself walking through the warehouse looking at various memories until he comes upon the memory he is seeking. I believe his mind palace was first mentioned in Season 1, “The Hounds of Baskerville,” when he took a whirlwind trip through his mind palace and solved the mystery by finding the memory he was looking for.

Sherlock Holmes isn’t the inventor of the mind palace. Credit for that invention goes to a gentleman who lived some several hundred years B.C. Marcus Tullius Cicero tells the story of the inventor in his book De Oratore. Here’s what Cicero had to say:

… I am grateful to the famous Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have first invented the science of mnemonics.

 

There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honour of his host. … The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.

He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it. De Oratore,II:lxxxvi:350-355 (pages 465-467 of the Internet Archive translation).

 

Thus we see that the mind palace is a mnemonic device which people have been using for over 2,000 years. Of course, few people have as vast a mind palace as either Holmes or his nemesis Charles Augustus Magnusson.

 

 

I'm going off on a tangent to say I can understand why they changed Lestrade's name from Giles to Greg, but I don't know why they named the blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnusson. In the original Holmes story the villain was Charles Augustus Milverton--a perfectly good name for a villain.

 

 

 

SHERLOCK JUMPS THE SHARK

Back when Happy Days was drawing to a close, the writers started running out of good ideas for stories. Consequently, they wrote an episode where Fonzie got on a pair of water skis and went over a ski jump ramp. The catch was that to make things interesting, a shark had been placed under the top of the ramp. If Fonzie’s jump failed, he would be eaten by the shark. Naturally, the jump was successful, but his feat became a catchword for when series writers run out of ideas and start writing incredibly bad and/or preposterous stories. When this occurs, the series has “jumped the shark.”

I contend that Sherlock, in the episode “His Last Vow,” jumped the shark. If you haven’t seen the episode and want to be surprised by what happens, stop reading now.

Mary Morstan a CIA assassin? Give me a break. If Sherlock was half as perceptive as he’s supposed to be, he would have come up with more than an assessment of “liar” when he first met Mary in “The Empty Hearse.” And I don’t see anyone with Sherlock’s personality being so forgiving after Mary shot and almost killed him. I’m not saying that Sherlock was above killing Magnusson. That was really the only solution for such a man. I am saying that Sherlock should have been sharp enough to figure out that murder was the only solution and find a safer way to kill the man than to shoot him in the head in front of a fully armed SWAT team.

I’ve noted earlier that the writers had written themselves into a corner with “The Reichenbach Fall,” by having Sherlock commit suicide under such circumstances as to make it impossible to come up with a rational explanation for how he faked it. Now, at the end of the third series they raise Moriarty from the dead. If we get to a Season Four, there is no way that they can come up with even a bonehead explanation for how Moriarty survived placing the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth, directing the muzzle toward his brain case, and pulling the trigger. And don’t try to say that the gun was firing blanks. You might want to ask John Eric Hexum what happens when you place the muzzle of a pistol loaded with blanks to your head and pull the trigger, but of course you can’t because he didn’t survive doing that. The violently expanding gas escaping the muzzle will kill quite handily even without a bullet. Arthur Conan Doyle had the good sense to leave Moriarty dead after he went over the Reichenbach Falls. The writers of Sherlock should have emulated him on this point.

Do these complaints mean I do not plan to watch Season Four if and when it comes out? Absolutely not. As flawed as Season Three was, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I just hope that they come up with more logical scripts for Season Four.

ANTICIPATING "SHERLOCK" SEASON 3

I don't like surprises, I don't like to be kept in the dark, and I don't like unhappy endings. That may be why I so often re-read a good book rather than search out a new good book to read.

I quite naturally didn't like being kept in the dark about how Sherlock survived his "Reichenbach Fall." Being a Holmes afficiando of long standing, I knew he was going to "die" in the final episode of Season 2, and I knew he was going to survive.

When he did his swan dive from the top of the hospital, it seemed that only an illusionist of the caliber of David Copperfield could have pulled that off and escaped unscathed. There were some suggestions that Sherlock was engaging in some sleight-of-hand, with his asking his M.E. friend Molly for help and with the bicycle accident Watson had running to look at the body of his fallen comrade. Other viewers with better eagle eyes than me picked up on additional clues.

The hype leading up to the American premiere of Season 3 got me to wondering just how he did it, so I did a modicum of spoiler research and found out that ... But maybe you, the reader, like surprises. Knowing the plot outline has not dimmed my enthusiasm for the premiere on January 19 but has increased it. It appears that they have done some very good things with the story while keeping the characters true to their personalities in Seasons 1 and 2.

I now have another mystery--how did they cram so much action into a single hour? I'll find out tomorrow.

***

Well, tomorrow came and went, and we still don't know how Sherlock pulled off the feat of faking his death. I suspect that we don't know because the writers don't know. They painted themselves into a corner with Sherlock's swan dive off the roof of the hospital, and couldn't come up with a plausible explanation for how he did it.

It seems Season 3 is going to be more character-driven than the two previous seasons. This is good as far as it goes, but it seems that the mystery took a decided back seat to character development in the first episode. As "Elementary's" second season has shown, you can have character development help to drive the plot rather than getting in the way of the plot. The episode of "Elementary" where Moriarty returned was an admirable example of how character development was integral to the mystery. Perhaps "Sherlock" should study how "Elementary" does it before starting production on Season 4.

I haven't seen the last two installments of "Sherlock 3" yet, but the reviews seem to suggest that as Sherlock becomes more human in the series, the series suffers. Here is another area where "Sherlock" could take a lesson from "Elementary." "Elementary" started off with a more human Holmes in the throes of chemical dependency. The storyline was actually enhanced as Holmes worked through his chemical dependency. The critics seem to think that in the English rendition, Sherlock's discovery of his humanity has a negative effect. As far as episode 1 is concerned, it hasn't been much of an impediment to the story. We'll see how things play out in the next two episodes.

SHERLOCK versus ELEMENTARY

As a child, I found some of my grandmother's furniture to be fascinating. She had a number of barrister book cases filled with books. I spent many hours examining and reading the books in my grandmother's library. I actually wore some of her books out by reading and re-reading them. One set of books that I almost demolished was a two volume collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Thus began a lifelong fascination with Doyle's great detective. I have read and re-read all of Doyle's stories multiple times; I have watched many (but not all) of the Sherlock Holmes movies and television shows; and I have listened to every Sherlock Holmes radio play I could get my hands on.

Although I found some of the television and movie portrayals of the great detective to be unwatchable, I thoroughly enjoyed the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies. Rathbone became the cinematic Holmes against whom all subsequent Holmeses are measured. The latest movie series with Robert Downey, Jr., is quite good, although not quite what Conan Doyle had in mind. The television series with Jeremy Brett was good, but I found Brett to be a little too heavy to be a convincing Sherlock Holmes. Many have played Holmes on radio, but none better than Clive Merrison in the BBC series.

Now we have two competing television series about the great detective--Elementary on CBS and Sherlock on BBC. Although they both bring Holmes to the twenty first century, they give very different portrayals. Elementary's Holmes (Johnny Lee Miller) is a recovering drug addict who lives and works in New York City, while Sherlock's Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a self-proclaimed "high functioning sociopath" living at the venerable address of 221B Baker Street in London.

Cumberbatch's Holmes seems to me to be closer to the original than Miller's. For example, Cumberbatch's Holmes is ridiculed by his enemies as a virgin, while Miller's Holmes seems to be quite promiscuous. Cumberbatch may be a little too close to the original Holmes; he sometimes comes off as a caricature of the original. I like both Cumberbatch and Miller as Holmes.

While both Cumberbatch and Miller are reasonable facsmiles of the original Holmes, Elementary's Watson is nothing like the original. First, he's a she (Lucy Liu). Second, Elementary's Watson is not a disabled veteran with PTSD. She's a surgeon who lost her nerve when she lost a patient on the operating table. Despite the fact that she's nothing like the original Watson, Liu carries off the part of Watson quite well. She's no dunce, and she becomes an indispensable colleague of Holmes. Sherlock's Watson (Martin Freeman) appears to me to be the second coming of the original Watson. He's a combat wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and he's quite capable of handling himself in a scuffle. He's nothing like the bumbling Watson created by Nigel Bruce. Although I liked Bruce as Watson, I prefer the more capable Watsons portrayed by Liu and Freeman.

When we come to Irene Adler, we stray far afield from the original character. Sherlock's Irene (Lara Pulver) is a thoroughgoing scoundrel, somewhat on the same plane as the Irene Adler from Robert Downey's Holmes movies. The original Irene was a resourceful woman who lived somewhat outside the law, but she was not a villain. Elementary's Irene (Natalie Dormer) is a far more complex  character than either the original Irene or Sherlock's Irene. As with the Irene Adler from Robert Downey's Holmes movies, both Sherlock's and Elementary's Irene Adlers have a connection to Holmes's archnemesis, Moriarty. I think I prefer Sherlock's Irene Adler to Elementary's.

The original Moriarty was a professor of mathematics and the Napoleon of crime. Neither of the new Moriarties are professors, and aside from the fact that they are both brilliant the sole resemblance they have to the original Moriarty is their thoroughgoing criminality. Sherlock's Moriarty is as nutty as a fruitcake, while Elementary's Moriarty seems to be a more interesting, complex character. I was glad to see the original Moriarty go over the Reichenbach Falls, and I impatiently awaited the demise of Sherlock's Moriarty. I didn't like the character in the original stories, and I haven't liked him in any of his subsequent reincarnations--until Elementary. When offstage Elementary's Moriarty was the embodiment of evil, but when onstage was someone for whom you could feel sympathy. I didn't want to see Elementary's Moriarty die.

Both Elementary and Sherlock thoroughly reworked Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's older and smarter (and heavier) brother. In Elementary, he is a skinny restaurant owner. Sherlock's Mycroft, although he is also thin, is much closer to the original. I liked Sherlock's Mycroft.

Both series abound with sly allusions to the original stories by Doyle, and it is fun picking them out. I do believe, though that Elementary far surpasses Sherlock in the area of plotting. The story line for the first two seasons of Sherlock veered into the surreal, with some of the characters, Moriarty in particular, engaging in irrational behavior. I'm not going to say that Elementary's plots were more realistic, but they did seem to be less unrealistic and the characters behaved rationally for the bizarre situations they found themselves in.

In the final analysis, both shows are entertaining and very watchable. As the saying goes, "Though he might be more humble, there's no police like Holmes."