Blog Post #2: A Study in Pink

This pilot episode for Sherlock Holmes holds nothing back in both content and delivery. Although the very beginning has us hurled into the war-torn crevices of Watson's brain, that is the calmest part of the episode. From the moment Watson is introduced to Sherlock, every action and moment has some purpose to the plot of the episode, even if Watson (and even the audience) can't immediately see it.

This is what makes the show so...well, good. Rather than telling us the story, it puts us in the thought process of Sherlock, and therefore essentially forces the viewer to think alongside him. The show takes great care in giving the viewer the opportunity to piece together the clues to solve the problem, but keeps it subtle enough so you have to apply logic to do so. After he has finished analyzing a crime scene, or showing off to someone (friend or foe), Sherlock summarizes every clue he found (and his logic that pieced it together) to come to his conclusion.

Now, on to the semiotics! In the last part of the episode, the murderer waits for Sherlock to choose a bottle, but Sherlock cannot help but to quickly show off his analytical skills to the cabbie (murderer). He picks the murderer apart with these signs (broken down into signifiers and signifieds):

Signifier	Signified
Shaving foam behind left ear	Cabbie lives alone
Photograph of children with wife removed	Wife not dead, loves children
Clothes maintained, but old	Dying
Cabbie decides to murder four people before death	Motivation must be children

This is a repeated pattern in the show; a new clue (sign) or event is unveiled, Sherlock and Watson spend time analyzing it, and in the end Sherlock makes a breakthrough and shares it with the other characters (and ultimately, the audience), explaining step-by-step the how he came to said conclusion. This pattern supports Propp's argument that all fairy tales are similar in structure. Obviously Sherlock Holmes is not a fairy tale, but there is absolutely a pattern among the episodes (I binged all available series last summer) and can confirm this. I will sometimes take advantage of this pattern and pause when Sherlock is about to summarize his conclusion, and try to list all the clues to see how far off I was.