Sherlock: Every Deleted Scene Explained | Screen Rant
Some episodes of the BBC’s Sherlock had to get rid of a couple of scenes for different reasons, and here’s every deleted scene and why they were cut. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes made his debut in the story A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and became widely popular after the short story “A Story in Bohemia” was published in The Strand Magazine in 1891. The detective appeared in a total of four novels and 56 short stories, and his stories have been adapted to all types of media for over a hundred years, with recent ones reigniting interest in the original adventures of the character.
Among those is the BBC’s TV series Sherlock, created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and which aired from 2010 to 2017. Sherlock brought the famous detective (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) to modern-day London and combined the cases written by Conan Doyle with new ones in order to adapt them to a modern context. Along with Sherlock came some of the most important characters from his stories, such as his partner and best friend John Watson (Martin Freeman), Irene Adler (Lara Pulver), and the detective’s archenemy Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott).
Like any other TV show, not all scenes made it to the final cut of the episodes, and Sherlock has its own collection of deleted scenes – some were cut due to time constraints, others because they messed with the pace of the story, and some of these would have greatly pleased fans. Here’s every deleted scene from Sherlock and why they were cut.
“The Blind Banker” is the title of season 1’s second episode, and it follows Sherlock and John Watson as they are hired by an old acquaintance of the detective who asks them for help. The main case of the episode, then, is all about a Chinese smuggling ring ready to kill in order to retrieve a stolen item, and in the process, they left a series of ciphers representing numbers in an ancient Chinese numeral system. Two scenes were reportedly cut from “The Blind Banker” due to time constraints, and they didn’t really add much to the story, so they weren’t a big loss. First, a scene right after the opening credits and before John was seen struggling with the checkout machine at the supermarket, introduced the audience to Edward van Coon and followed him during his final moments. The scene saw Van Coon jumping out of a cab as soon as he got home and before the driver could ask him if he wanted a receipt. Van Coon rushed up the elevator, locked the door of his apartment, took his SIG-Sauer P226 from the kitchen, ran to his bedroom, and jammed a chair against the door, but as viewers now know, that wasn’t enough to save himself.
The other cut scene from “The Blind Banker” was part of the final moments of the episode, after Sherlock took the jade hairpin from Van Coon’s secretary. He and John took it back to the museum, where the hairpin was added to the costume of Empress Wu mannequin. Later, a close-up showed Soo Lin Yao’s (Gemma Chan) name on the list of museum benefactors, as she was killed due to her links to the criminal ring “Black Lotus Tong”. As mentioned above, these scenes don’t change the story of the episode nor add much to the case, except for showing how dangerous the “Black Lotus Tong” were and the impact that Soon Lin Yao had on the museum.
The finale of Sherlock season 2 saw the detective killing himself after being tricked by Moriarty, but by the end of the episode, his survival was teased. Sherlock made a full return in season 3’s premiere episode “The Empty Hearse”, and John was understandably upset about him faking his death. To Sherlock’s surprise, John was in a relationship with Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) and was planning on proposing, but those plans were postponed once he made his unexpected return. Although it took them a while to go back to the partnership and friendship they had before Sherlock’s fake death, they eventually did and by the next episode, “The Sign of the Three”, they were the best friends they were before.
In that episode, Sherlock and John were getting ready for the latter’s wedding, and during his best man speech, Sherlock began to ramble about John’s role in some notable cases, including one they attempted to solve while drunk from John’s bachelor party. According to Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch (via Digital Spy), there’s a deleted scene from the bachelor party where Sherlock and John got drunk at a gay club. Freeman shared they “got mullered in a gay club and all these topless guys were going by”, while Cumberbatch said he had no idea why his and Freeman’s characters were there and “why they didn’t have their clothes on”. Sherlock fans, and especially those supporting the “Jonhlock Conspiracy Theory”, would have surely loved to see Sherlock and John getting drunk at a gay bar during such a special occasion.
Sherlock season 4 began with the episode “The Six Thatchers”, which followed the aftermath of the reveal of Mary’s real identity, as she turned out to be a former assassin. The episode saw Mary giving birth to her and John’s daughter, but their relationship was already fractured due to her lies, and John ended up cheating on her with a woman he met on the bus (who later on in the season turned out to be Sherlock and Mycroft’s sister, Eurus Holmes). According to Amanda Abbington, there was a dinner scene with John and Mary where she “was just saying that she’s flying out of control and she doesn’t feel like she’s grounded”, thus introducing the idea that the couple was drifting apart, which led John to cheat on her. It’s unknown why the scene was cut but it was most likely due to it messing with the pace of the story, and getting rid of that scene actually helped make the subsequent events more surprising and heartbreaking, as at the end of the episode, Mary is killed when jumping in front of a bullet shot at Sherlock.
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