Sherlock: 10 Ridiculous Plot Points Lifted Straight From The Books

2. The Disappearing Train Car

The main threat in The Empty Hearse turned out to be corrupt peer Lord Moran's plot to blow up the Palace of Westminster on Guy Fawkes' Night with a tube train packed with explosives. Many viewers responded to this narrative with a little disappointment by pointing out its obvious similarities to V for Vendetta. However, while the tube train bomb may be reminiscent of one source, another element of that plot is straight from Doyle. In the episode, Sherlock is confronted by what appears to be the mystery of Moran getting on the tube car at one station and disappearing before it arrives at the next station. Eventually he works out that it isn't the man that has disappeared but the train car, diverted into an empty abandoned station. This is taken directly from the plot of a Doyle story written during the period of the Great Hiatus. While The Lost Special does not refer to Holmes by name €“ he was dead at the time, after all €“ it is fairly obvious who the "amateur reasoner of some celebrity" in the story might be. In The Lost Special a private train travelling from Liverpool to London disappears, it is confirmed to have passed one station and never appeared at the next. It takes the Holmesian detective to reveal the train must have been diverted onto abandoned tracks. And Another Thing: The lost station is named Sumatra Road, while Moran is described as the chief among the "rats" that Sherlock observes as indicators of trouble. Both of these are references to the Giant Rat of Sumatra, a reference in The Sussex Vampire to a previous case that Holmes describes as: "a story for which the world is not yet prepared."