MG: Well, we’re not teasing, we just keep saying this: we don’t know.
SM: None of us have decided to stop – at some point we might reassemble, but we’ll see.
MG: Like the Avengers.
SM: Unless we get stuck inside this Escape Room—
MG: Which is entirely possible! [laughter]
SM: —and never get out, the entire cast and production crew, unable to get out of the Sherlock Escape Room—
MG: Wait, wait, that is Series Five! [more laughter] It’s very meta. The entire cast and crew are trapped inside their own escape room, for three 90-minute episodes—
SM: ‘But Benedict, you’re supposed to be the clever one, come on!’
MG: [more laughter] The public have to help us get out. That’s quite good…
July 2010. It is three weeks before the first series of Sherlock broadcasts on BBC One, and show creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are panicking. The BBC has suddenly brought forward the slot for their show “by a substantial amount”. As summer is already a difficult time to launch a series, Gatiss and Moffat are bewildered as to how they will promote it.
“We were sitting around with our heads in our hands,” Steven Moffat remembers, “going, ‘There isn’t enough time to do this. It will broadcast to no one.’ ”
This was when they joined Twitter.
“It was really only one step up from individually knocking on people’s doors and shouting, ‘Sherlock is coming!’ through their letter boxes,” Mark Gatiss explains. “We were almost… desperate.”
“What did we think we’d get?” Moffat muses.
“Four million viewers,” Gatiss replies.
“Four million viewers, tops, and a couple of nice broadsheet write-ups. That was our best-case scenario.”
On the night the debut episode – A Study in Pink – went out, the core cast and crew assembled at Moffat’s house in Kew to watch it, in a state of nervous tension.
Gathering around the wine – “a lot of wine” – were Martin Freeman (Dr Watson), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes), Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue, the show’s producer, who is, handily, also married to Moffat, “which has, over the years, saved us a fortune on cabs”.
In the event, when Sherlock began, the Moffat party had to immediately pause it, as Benedict Cumberbatch still hadn’t arrived.
“He called us – he was stuck in a traffic jam on Baker Street,” Moffat recalls. “Sherlock Holmes, stuck on Baker Street! We couldn’t work out if that was a good sign or not.”
“I think he might have made that up, to be honest,” Gatiss says. “But it’s a really good lie.”
When Cumberbatch finally arrived, the party who made Sherlock watched the show ten minutes behind the rest of Britain.
“But we knew when the climax happened,” Gatiss beams, “because suddenly all our phones were going off, everyone texting, everyone phoning. I mean, exploding.”
“An hour later, I went and sat in the garden,” Moffat says, “and looked at Twitter. I saw that Benedict was trending worldwide on Twitter, Martin was trending worldwide, Sherlock itself was trending worldwide. And people were talking about it with this… passion. As if they were lifelong fans – when, of course, they’d not seen it 90 minutes ago. Everything had changed in 90 minutes.”
Well, we haven’t written any of that yet. Originally, they lived together because they couldn’t afford homes on their own. Now John’s a GP, and Sherlock is the MOST FAMOUS DETECTIVE IN THE WORLD. And the most likely to throw a crying infant out the window.
….Sherlock baby proofed 221b for Rosie….and in the books Sherlock bought Watson’s practice so he would move back…..and we know that jumping out the windows causes no harm. You mean to tell us that Sherlock would not want to deal with a crying baby?
“[Season 4] is going to be… I suppose you’d say… consequences. It’s consequences.” – Steven Moffat x
Remember this quote? These are from Doctor Who’s The Zygon Inversion, episode co-written by Steven Moffat:
Somebody is playing word games. It turns out, actually, (after I thought to check), that Moffs was quoted saying this just 3 months before The Zygon Inversion was filmed, which is – I mean I don’t know much about how these things happen – but like…..possibly around the general time that Moffat was likely to be writing the episode??? The interview linked above where Moffs was quoted was published in March 2015. The Zygon Inversion was filmed in May 2015. Connection much? So according to their own little riddle, if S4 was consequences, then it wasn’t the truth.
Great find @tjlcisthenewsexy! I haven’t watched that particular DW episode, but in general I strongly suspect Moffat of playing word games, and other games too, with us.
But to me this expression is really funny. Because in my country, this game – ‘Truth or Dare’ – has been popular among the kids for as long as I can remember. But we call it ‘Truth or Consequence’. The idea is that you have to choose; either you tell the truth, or suffer the consequences. The other player asks you some embarrassing or ‘matter-of-the-heart’ question, like ‘Who are you in love with?’, and you have to answer truthfully. If you refuse to tell the truth, you have to pay by doing something embarrassing or painful or otherwise inconvenient of your opponent’s choice. And the game goes on until the players get tired of it and want to quit.
So, if we try to apply this on Sherlock (and my belief is that the whole of this show is from Sherlock’s perspective), what possible truth is there that Sherlock refuses to tell us (or anyone, for that matter, including himself)? That he’s in love with John Watson! Well, he actually sort of says it in his best man speech in TSoT, but only in a way that could be taken for an expression of close friendship. He’s not really truthful, is he? So then he must suffer the consequences, and that’s S4! 🙂 He must go through all the pain and suffering that is HLV and TAB and S4; he must see John leave him for someone who breaks his heart shoots him and build a family with this person, reject him and even beat him up. But not even at that point does Sherlock admit to being in love. And then he is converted into an emotional lab rat in TFP. That’s some dire consequences, isn’t it?
So yes, Steven Moffat, I agree; S4 is about consequences, and the game is on! 😉
Truth and Consequences is also the name of a radio program, then television, which also derives the name of the town, real, which appears in the episodes of Doctor Who. The concept is the same of the game that children do, they have to choose between an embarrassing dare or an embarrassing truth. In the radio game the players had to choose between answering too difficult questions or undergoing ridiculous challenges. Often in the midst of these ridiculous trials there was a tearful moment, perhaps with the reunification of a long lost family member. Definitely, I agree with @possiblyimbiassed, it sounds very similar to Sherlock who chooses not to tell the whole truth, at the wedding, at stag night , on the tarmac, and finds himself having to suffer ridiculous consequences …. with family reunification included
I would like to issue a correction to everybody who says that Mary dies in the novels. There is no reference to what happens to her. There is only a reference to Dr. Watson’s sad loss. It doesn’t say she dies. Nowhere in those books does it say that Mary Morstan dies. So there.
“There’s a little joke in there about Nurse Cornish, who’s named after the Cornish boatman,” Gatiss revealed, “who famously, when Conan Doyle’s being rowed across a river in Cornwall, this man says ‘do you write Sherlock Holmes?’
“And he said yeah. And [the man] goes ‘he was never the same after he came back from the dead, was he?’ So he was the first kind of critic.”
“He was the first comment section in the world,” Steven Moffat deadpanned. (x)
“We just called the episode ‘The Final Problem’ for s—s and giggles. We don’t know yet, and I’ve been busy working on other shows. Our show gallops along like a glacier, but expect another ice age in the future.”
The number 57 notoriously recurs in Moffat’s work and this timeline aims to report its mentions.
To note:
The time indicates the airdate.
This timeline is limited to explicit mentions in the dialogue, as this are the only ones that are almost certain to have been intentionally placed by Moffat, and other explicit mentions by Moffat himself.
This timelines excludes mentions of 57 in episodes showrunned by Moffat when they have not also been written by him.
This timeline excludes mentions of numbers similar to 57 (like for example 507), even if they might have been intentionally chosen due to their similarity to it.
2007:
21 july Jekyll: Episode Five
MR. HYDE: 57 years old, ex-smoker, gave up two years ago?
2010:
3 april Doctor Who:
The Eleventh Hour
DOCTOR: Article 57 of the Shadow Proclamation.
2012:
1 january Sherlock: A Scandal In Belgravia
JOHN: 57? SHERLOCK: Sorry, what? JOHN: 57 of those texts, the ones I’ve heard.
Uknown date before 15 january 2012 (since he deleted his Twitter account) Twitter
millieisshort: @Markgatiss @steven_moffat on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you to see the fandom suffering already? Steven Moffat: @millieisshort @Markgatiss 57
2013:
23 november Doctor Who:
The Day Of The Doctor: Cinema Intro
THE DOCTOR (11): I just watched the 100th anniversary special, all 57 doctors.
2014:
25 december Doctor Who: Last Christmas
THE DOCTOR: Clara. Give me any two digit CLARA : 57. THE DOCTOR: All right, all of you, turn to page 57and look at the very first word.
2015:
28 november Doctor Who: Heaven Sent
THE DOCTOR: 57 minutes.
2017:
27 may Doctor Who:
The Pyramid at the End of the World
BRABBIT: 11:57 PM. BILL: Yeah, mine too. SECRETARY-GENERAL: It’s everyone’s. 11.57 PM. NARDOLE: Did you get that, sir? Everyone’s phone’s gone to 11:57. DOCTOR: Yep, same here. BILL: What’s, what does that mean, 11:57?
This list may not be complete because I haven’t watched everything Moffat, but just to show you that the number 57 predates BBC Sherlock, so if anything it is probably tied to Moffat as a person.
The DW shakespeare reference is not one of this examples, not even considering Moffat’s showrunned episodes not written by him.
There is no consensus in the DW fandom on 57 being about bisexuality and some believe it is about the mention of ‘time’ in the sonnet. The belief that it was tied to bisexuality was held only by johnlockers and without a certain reason, as the first 126 sonnets are all addressed to a man and to this day, even if I asked more than once, nobody came to me with a source about 57 being more relevant than all the other 126 sonnets to bisexuality.
Sherlock Fandom Archive 