Sherlock: "The Empty Hearse" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 24) my husband Charles and I watched one of the weakest episodes of Sherlock, the BBC-TV reboot of the Sherlock Holmes mythos from 2010 to 2014 that made an international star of the actor who played Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch. It was called “The Empty Hearse” and opened season three of the show, as the previous episode to which it was a sequel, “The Reichenbach Fall,” had ended season two. Writer Mark Gatiss (who also co-created Sherlock with Steven Moffat and played Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter older brother, in all the episodes in which he appeared) really should have been ashamed of himself for this one! The show contained two, count ‘em, two separate and incompatible explanations for how Sherlock Holmes survived his rooftop confrontation with James Moriarty (Andrew Scott) and his apparent suicide at the end of “The Reichenbach Fall.” In one, Holmes was wearing a bungee cord around his waist when he jumped; in the other, there was a large blue air mattress in the street waiting to catch him when he fell; and in both members of Holmes’s squad of homeless people (equivalent to the Baker Street Irregulars in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories) helped carry out the switch in which an already dead body who vaguely resembled Holmes would be put on the street in his place. One of the tricks was that one of the Irregulars would run into Watson with a bicycle, which would distract him long enough to make the switch without him or anyone else noticing. During the two years (one year shorter than Conan Doyle’s pause between killing Holmes off in “The Final Problem” and reviving him in “The Empty House”) Holmes is supposedly “dead,” Dr. John Watson starts dating Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) and is about to propose to her when Holmes reappears disguised as a particularly obnoxious waiter. Holmes, in the meantime, had been infiltrating an international terrorist organization (which is so international we’re not given even so much of a hint as to where it is!) whose other members are brutally torturing him demanding secret information as to when the next terrorist assault on London will be. Holmes breaks up his affair with the young hot-looking lab tech Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), who gave him a short kiss on the lips when he was rescued in at least one version of the flashback but subsequently decided he was just way too weird for her.

There’s also a subplot in that the terror attack on London will take place on a subway train. Holmes and Watson search for the terrorists’ bomb and realize it’s the subway car itself: it’s been planted full of bombs and will be blown up right under the British Houses of Parliament on November 5, the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s famous plot to do just that. Charles, sooner than I did, recognized the disappearing train involved in some sinister plot as from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost Special,” in which Sherlock Holmes (though he’s not named in the story) writes an anonymous letter to a London newspaper giving a bizarre and incongruous explanation for the disappearance of a special train. He turns out to be wrong in Conan Doyle’s story but right in Mark Gatiss’s script, and Holmes and Watson are trapped inside the booby-trapped car while a renegade Member of Parliament named Anderson (Jonathan Aris) sets off the bomb by remote control. Only within the 2 ½ minutes Holmes and Watson have to stop the bomb from going off, Holmes merely reaches behind it and turns off the on-off switch. “Every bomb has an on-off switch,” Holmes tells the thunderstruck Watson. (Alas, that’s far from true in real life.) This show is full of alleged flashback or flash-forward sequences telling or showing things that aren’t about to happen in the story’s reality (such as it is), including an animated or CGI sequence of the Houses of Parliament actually collapsing from the bombs going off under them (which, of course, they really don’t). And the title is explained with the information that “The Empty Hearse” is a private group of Sherlock Holmes fans who’ve come together after his “death” to keep his memory alive and indeed to raise concern about whether Holmes might be alive after all, since they’ve talked to two people – including one who’s allegedly seen him – though when he cuts them out rather cruelly they turn against him and are only too happy to see him arrested. Fortunately, before that they’ve taken steps to rehabilitate his reputation and regain the public trust he had before Moriarty ruined it with his P.R. campaign against him.