Sherlock: 10 Ridiculous Plot Points Lifted Straight From The Books

6. The Depth To Which The Chocolate Flake Had Sunk

After the enormous success of Eighth Doctor Paul McGann's return in The Night of the Doctor, the preview mini-sode looks set to become a cornerstone of the BBC's marketing for literally every show they've got. In this case, Christmas gave us Many Happy Returns, a short in which former antagonist turned Sherlock-obsessive Anderson attempts to prove to Lestrade that, as the twitter marketing would have it, #SherlockLives. Anderson's evidence for Sherlock's continued existence comes from scouring news sources for bizarre cases and bizarre-r solutions from all around the world. Only, for it to be obvious that it is Sherlock that's solving these cases, the solutions have to be extra fanciful, the deductions based on minor details absurd even by the detective's usual standards. For example, Anderson identifies a case in New Delhi that was solved by measuring the depth to which a chocolate flake had sunk into the victim's ice cream cone. Strange as it may seem, this actually is an example of Holmes' methods as taken from Doyle's stories. In The Six Napoleons, Holmes refers to a previous case that he had solved by measuring the depth which parsley had sunk into butter on a hot day. Notably in neither book nor TV show are we shown the details of this melting time methodology. And Another Thing: The scene in the Tibetan monastery is based on the details Doyle gives in The Empty House of what Holmes got up during the period in which Mycroft helped fake his death. Holmes tells Watson that he spent two years in Tibet and amused himself by spending some days with the head lama.