So like all good detectives, we wanted to get to the bottom of the question of Sherlock’s ‘Death Date’, as many of you have been discussing it and it would appear the first anniversary of his supposed suicide is very soon.
WHAT WE KNOW:
1. John posted on his blog, “He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him”, which has the date as 16th June, with the exact year unspecified.
2. The sports news on the back page of The Sun featuring the headline of Sherlock’s suicide we see Mycroft reading in The Diogenes Club dates the events in the newspaper around Sunday 3rd July 2011, with the paper itself published the day after on Monday 4th July 2011.
3. Donovan states earlier in the episode, “They’re at St. Aldates. Posh boarding place down in Surrey.” And Lestrade continues, “School break, all the other boarders went home.” A private boarding school in the UK breaks up for the summer holidays in early July, usually on a Saturday. The fact that the boarders have gone home suggests end of year rather than half term, not to mention Reichenbach is pretty fast paced after the recovery of the kidnapped children [the cab chase, the arrest, the snipers, confronting Kitty, John’s visit to The Diogenese and Mycroft, Sherlock’s visit to Molly and finally John and Sherlock meeting up again at St. Barts, leading directly to the rooftop confrontation with Moriarty], and an educated guess would suggest these proceeding events took place over hours rather than days and certainly not weeks to fit in with it being a break in term time.
We know then that there are some inconsistencies, so we thought the best thing to do was to consult the blogger himself, and we don’t mean John Watson, but Joe Lidster.
Joe told us, “Trying to get all the dates to fit was tricky - especially when there’s lots of different people working on the different aspects of the show.”
Obviously in situations like this, it’s easy for something to slip through, no matter how meticulous you are, and Joe suggested, “I’d go with the July date.”
Considering the blogs counter is stuck at 1895, we all agreed that when Jim hacked into John’s blog the week before, he probably infected it with a virus that messed up all the dates. Tongue no doubt planted firmly in cheek, Joe added, “Yeah. That’s what happened.”
So we may not be any closer to having an exact date for Sherlock’s ‘Death Day’, but we now know at least why there are small differences between the episode and the blog.
N.B. According to the canon, Sherlock Holmes died May 4th, 1891. The case of (BBC) Sherlock’s Death Date has certainly been a three patch problem worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself, and hopefully a puzzle to be resolved in series 3.
