Series Four of Sherlock BBC, The Final Problem ends with Sherlock and John running out through the archway of a building. Once more Cardiff University served as film set for this final scene. As a special tribute of the creators, two signs with the inscription ‘RATHBONE PLACE’ were attached left and right of the entrance. It’s a homage to the famous Sherlock Holmes movies in which Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played detective and doctor in a modern day version updated to the 1940′s. Among other aspects especially those movies led the creators to the idea to do their own modern day version of the Sherlock Holmes stories. This time though updated to the 21st century (X).
In general this last scene of The Final Problem is viewed as ‘Sherlock and John running ‘out of’ RATHBONE PLACE. Meaning: they are leaving behind all the traditional interpretations of their relationship to enter a new territory. The question though is:
Are they running ‘out of’ or ‘on to’ RATHBONE PLACE?
Yes, the sign is attached to the building but is it also meant for the building or rather for the area in front of it?
The real Rathbone Place in London is a street, originally known as Glanville Street and has nothing to do with Basil Rathbone or Sherlock Holmes. It was renamed after Captain Thomas Rathbone, who had owned a house on that street since 1684 (X). Next to it is Rathbone Square with the Rathbone Place Building (X).
Again - does the term ‘place’ on the RATHBONE sign refer to the building or to the area in front of it? Like so many other things in Sherlock BBC, this sign is also quite abiguous. Therefore I wonder what it really stands for. Without an exact definition it’s impossible to say if Sherlock and John are running ‘out of’ RATHBONE PLACE or ‘on to’ RATHBONE PLACE.
That’s an important question, especially if one takes into account a certain statement of the creators about possible future plans for Sherlock BBC: “And we have joked about doing one in black-and-white where they fight the Nazis. So maybe that’s what we’ll do.” (X) So perhaps after all Sherlock and John are running ‘on to’ RATHBONE PLACE and into another mind palace adventure?
Not to forget the ‘mirror’ image below, designed for a promo pic related to Series One, Ep3 The Great Game, which seems to (almost) close another circle backwards from S4 to S1.
Sources of pics: Arwel W Jones Production Design PromoPic S1
Info about Filming Locations Cardiff University
Related posts: It’s a story probably not true by @221bloodnun Sherlocked UK 2017 by @loveismyrevolution The significance of Rathbone Place by @finalproblem & Developement of the Fall
Address: Cardiff University Main Building, Park Place, Cardiff CF10 3AT, Wales
Coordinates (dd.ddddd°): 51.487396, -3.179760
Coordinates (dd° mm.mmm’): N51°29.244, W3°10.786
Comments: Entrance facing Museum Avenue & Alexandra Gardens (not Park Place, though that side should look familiar to you, too - remember Roland Kerr Further Education College?)
i seem to have acquired a number of new followers over the last few weeks, and this is impetus enough for me to actually start posting. i’m afraid i’m somewhat old-fashioned, so i’ll use this space to post my thoughts and ramblings about arthur conan doyle & his beautiful sherlock holmes (in all his many iterations!), pictures, even the odd reblog, but i’ll probably also talk a fair amount about my actual life, which is about to undergo some significant changes as my partner, one-year-old, and i pack up our life in upstate ny and move to cambridge, uk where my partner will be taking up a new position as a special collections librarian.
i am also -- at least for the next two weeks! -- a librarian. i oversee a medieval studies research collection, and am the de facto curator of the medieval and early modern manuscript collection at the university where i’m based. i love both medieval literature & culture and the 19th and early-20th century antiquarians who collected & hoarded manuscripts and wrote about them in pretentious little clubs and coteries. i long ago realized that on some level, i am a victorian at heart. when i get to teach with & about manuscripts, introduce students to these amazing objects, let them touch and smell and play with them for the first time, i am deeply in touch with this inner victorian. to sit in a worn leather chair in my own richly decorated study crammed full with curiosities -- in short, to be a rich white dude in 19th-century london or edinburgh -- that’s my idea of happiness.
in any event, several days ago i was prepping for a manuscript studies lab i ran for an english professor here. as i browsed the stacks a small brown book caught my eye, william audley’s “guide to the art of illuminating and missal painting” (london, 1867). i flipped through the pages and came to some lithographed plates of common manuscript decoration -- illuminated capitals, floral and architectural borders, this kind of thing. i paused because they were pretty and unexpected and then my eye caught the bottom of the page, where in a small fancy script it said “printed and published by george rowney & co., 51 rathbone place, london.” i smiled, because i’m a nerd with holmes on the brain, and because i’m a librarian i did some research: george rowney & company were lithographic printers and suppliers of artists materials, but the company began a generation before, in 1783 as purveyors of perfumes and wig powder. the company still exists, as daler-rowney (http://www.daler-rowney.com), but no longer based at rathbone place.
i’m not sure why i’m writing about this, other than to break the ice and to reflect on a little moment where my holmes fixation brought me a little flicker of pleasure in an otherwise ordinary day.
[Mostly a smooshed-down version of some key points from this older post.]
🎵 And under we go... 🎵
If everything after the explosion in The Final Problem wasn’t real, and Eurus isn’t really Sherlock’s sister, that means her song couldn’t actually have been about what the episode suggested. No sister = no hidden message about wanting her brother’s attention.
🎵 My soul seek the shade of my willow’s bloom... 🎵
The song existed before the explosion happened, though, which suggests it’s still something. But what?
Here are the full song lyrics (some of which were never sung in the episode, and only appeared onscreen while Sherlock “solved” the riddle):
I that am lost, oh who will find me?
Deep down below the old beech tree.
Help succour me now the east winds blow.
Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go!
Be not afraid to walk in the shade
Save one, save all, come try!
My steps - five by seven
Life is closer to Heaven
Look down, with dark gaze, from on high
Without your love, he’ll be gone before.
Save pity for strangers, show love the door.
My soul seek the shade of my willow’s bloom
Inside, brother mine -
Let Death make a room.
Before he was gone - right back over my hill.
Who now will find him?
Why, nobody will.
Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen.
Lost forever, nine by nineteen.
Eurus’ song is clearly inspired by canon story The Musgrave Ritual, which includes a mysterious poemy-thing that turns out to be a verbal treasure map. Here’s a snippet of that:
Where was the sun?
Over the oak.
Where was the shadow?
Under the elm.
How was it stepped?
North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.
You can see the similarities, including the mentions of trees and use of “___ by ___” number pairs.
Gatiss and Moffat’s song is wordier, crams in more elaborate symbolism, and seems less likely to be the setup for a sneaky geometry puzzle. But maybe it’s still some kind of verbal map?
Let’s dig in to a big difference between Eurus’ song and the canon ritual: the number pairs. In canon, the pairs are all “twins”: ten by ten, five by five, etc. In Eurus’ song, the pairs don’t match: sixteen by six, five by seven, and nine by nineteen.
Those numbers are what give us something to “decode.” And here’s the key:
The very last shot of the episode is John and Sherlock running out of Rathbone Place, a London post office. (Or rather--another building with signs added so it could stand in for the Rathbone Place post office, which was demolished soon after Series 3 aired.)
If Eurus’ song is a map, where do the random number pairs point? The London postal service has that covered:
So we take London postcodes and apply them to the numbered pairs in Eurus’ song. This is where the fun begins. (The... deeply nerdy fun. I enjoy it, anyway. 🥳)
First up:
Help succour me now the east winds blow.
Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go!
“East” is in the rhyming line, so let’s check the E postcode, and... yes!
E16 is next to E6. Sixteen by six.
Next:
My steps - five by seven
Life is closer to Heaven
“Heaven” isn’t a compass direction, so this one is a little trickier. If we instead think of “closer to Heaven” as “up,” then on a map that would become “north.” Let’s try the N postcode...
Sure enough, N5 is next to N7. Five by seven.
Finally:
Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen.
Lost forever, nine by nineteen.
Not a lot of great directional clues in that pair of rhyming lines. Let’s back up and grab the whole verse:
Before he was gone - right back over my hill.
Who now will find him?
Why, nobody will.
Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen.
Lost forever, nine by nineteen.
Maybe we can use “right back” to suggest returning to where we started. Is the E9 postcode next to the E19 postcode?
Nope.
Actually, there aren’t any “9″ postcodes next to “19″ postcodes in London.
Does this mean our treasure hunt is over?
Nope!
Trivia time: There is no E19 postcode. E1 through E18 all exist, but then the list jumps to E20.
You may remember when London hosted the Olympics in 2012. Officials decided the Olympic Park needed its own postcode, but skipped E19. The park, now officially known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, was assigned postcode E20.
So you could say E19 was lost forever. Doomed by the queen, even, since the park bears her name.
And is E9 next to E20? E20 is so small that it doesn’t look like those are bordering postcodes on some of the zoomed-out maps above, but with help from Google Maps you can see E9 smushed up against the Olympic Park:
E9 by E20. There may never be a nine by nineteen, but at least now we know where the song wants us to look on a map.
So we can start to see places of interest in London highlighted by Eurus’ song-map. What do we do with that information? More importantly, what was Sherlock supposed to do with that song stuck in his head?
Sherlock: Help succour me now...
Mycroft and Sherlock: ...the east winds blow.
Sherlock: Sixteen by six...
Mycroft: ...and under we go. You’re starting to remember.
Sherlock: Fragments.
Since this is just meant to be a quick rehash post, I can’t go too far down that rabbit hole right now. But speaking of “under we go,” I can point you to something else Sherlock’s writers have set up that involves underground tunnels belonging to the London postal system.
Read that post, then consider who would have a very good use for a coded map that incorporates London postcodes. I think you can connect the dots.
[Mostly a smooshed-down version of some key points from this older post.]
So remember that bank heist at the start of The Sign of Three?
The robbers (who we’ve previously established were not the Waters family) were methodically working away at stealing a lot of gold from a bank surrounded by cops.
Like, a lot of gold.
Let’s do some quick math.
Standard gold bars weigh 12.4 kg (27.34 lb).
We saw the robbers could only carry three bars at a time--that’s already 37.2 kg (82.01 lb).
Based on the image above, I estimate there were at least 948 gold bars in that vault to start.
The robbers took every single bar. That’s 11760 kg (25916 lb) of gold.
11.76 metric tons (12.96 US tons).
That’s about the same as the weight of a cruise ship anchor. Or five rhinos. Or twenty grand pianos.
And these three guys were going to get that much gold out of the bank with... a wagon?
No. No way. Not buying it.
Even if they weren’t surrounded by cops, they couldn’t just walk out of a bank with a bunch of loose gold bars stacked on a wagon.
[Now, if you want to argue about that or suggest various other strategies for getting a ridiculous amount of gold out of a building, go see the original post this is based on. I did the nitpicky counterargument stuff over there. This time it’s the smooshed version, and I’m cutting to the chase.]
How could robbers steal a bunch of gold from a bank?
Let’s start with what Sally Donovan was saying as she and Lestrade headed into the bank:
Right.
“The tunnel entrance.”
The tunnel entrance into a bank full of gold.
Now why does that sound familiar? 🤔
Maybe because we’re in a Sherlock-Holmes-inspired universe, and we can refer back to an Arthur Conan Doyle story about exactly that: The Adventure of the Red-Headed League.
The robbers in that canon story used a tunnel to break into a bank in order to steal a large amount of gold. (And hey, our clowns--or at least the ones with hair--are even redheads!)
So that solves part of the problem for the robbers. Get the gold to the tunnel (no worries about the police having the entrance covered thanks to their man on the inside at Scotland Yard) and the robbers have a chance of getting out without being seen.
But we know all that gold is super-duper heavy, so they’d still need a practical way to move it inside the tunnel.
And this is where I introduce you to my friend Mail Rail.
Mail Rail--more properly known as the Post Office Railway--is a miniature underground railway that carried mail beneath London for 75 years. The system was closed down in 2003--left fully-functional, but sealed off and abandoned under the city. (A section of Mail Rail became a ride at the Postal Museum, but that wasn’t until a few years after TSoT aired. Most of the Mail Rail system is still closed.)
An abandoned, computer-controlled train system designed to carry heavy cargo (but perfectly capable of carrying people) in tunnels under London. I’m not sure you could invent a better way to pull off a modern-day Red-Headed League bank heist if you tried, yet this is totally real.
Now, the first time I brought this theory up, I was assuming the writers would just cheat and say that an old Mail Rail tunnel was somehow connected to a bank. Like how they cheated by moving Sumatra Road across town in The Empty Hearse because a) who cares, b) the canon reference is too good to pass up, and c) who cares.
But since then I’ve spent more time reading about what happened to the post office buildings that were on the Mail Rail system.
One of them, the former King Edward Street postal headquarters, has been converted into the London headquarters for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Now, I dunno whether they’d ever have a cage full of gold bars in their basement, but the fact is that’s a member of the London Bullion Market Association sitting on top of an abandoned mini train tunnel so GOOD ENOUGH.
And as a bonus? That particular financial institution / former Mail Rail station...
...is right next to where Sherlock jumped in The Reichenbach Fall.
That’s all well and good, but maybe you’re thinking there’s no way the writers plan to return to this bank heist storyline when more Sherlock gets made?
I’ll just remind you of three things from Series 4:
The repeated clown references.
The repeated train references.
The final shot of The Final Problem.
The last time we saw John and Sherlock, they were apparently mid-adventure, bounding out of a building named Rathbone Place.
“Rathbone Place” was also the name of one of the small handful of Mail Rail stations.
This case isn’t just something that’s going to happen in the future--it’s already started.
