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Sherlock - Easter Eggs & Hidden Details
Easter Eggs
In the first episode, John Watson and his friend Mike Stamford meet while holding coffee cups from "Criterion Bar."
This is a direct reference to the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, where John Watson runs into his old friend at the Criterion Bar, which leads to him being introduced to Sherlock.
John Watson's blog post titles are modern puns on the original Conan Doyle story titles.
For example, "The Speckled Band" becomes "The Speckled Blonde," and "The Greek Interpreter" becomes "The Geek Interpreter." This is a running gag that pays homage to the source material throughout the series.
The codename 'Vatican Cameos' is used by Sherlock and John as a distress signal.
This is a reference to an unsolved case that Holmes mentions in passing in the original story "The Hound of the Baskervilles." The show's writers took this throwaway line and turned it into a significant plot device and an inside joke for fans of the books.
In "The Hounds of Baskerville," Sherlock frantically searches for cigarettes inside a Persian slipper.
This is a nod to the original stories, where Conan Doyle's Holmes keeps his tobacco stored in a Persian slipper on the mantelpiece.
In "His Last Vow," a bodyguard is shown to have a tattoo of five pips (dots) on his hand.
Sherlock identifies him as a white supremacist. This is a subtle reference to the Conan Doyle story "The Five Orange Pips," where the antagonists were members of the Ku Klux Klan.