Original subtitles

(jazz music)

Downloaded from YTS.MX

- [Voiceover] This is the story

of how the greatest detective

who never lived changed the world.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

Sherlock Holmes.

- Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.

- [Voiceover] And how he did it

happened in ways few could ever imagine.

Through space science.

- The science we're doing here at NASA,

it's really Holmes' 21st century.

- [Voiceover] Popular culture.

- Of course, Sherlock Holmes has to meet Batman.

Because Sherlock Holmes is Batman.

There would be no Batman without Sherlock Holmes.

- Holmes haunts a lot of the popular culture

of the 20th century.

- [Voiceover] Espionage.

- Sherlock Holmes is the patron saint

of intelligence analysis.

- [Voiceover] Forensic science.

- The theory should fit the data,

not the data fitting the theory.

It's very Holmes, yeah.

- [Voiceover] We live in a universe

where Sherlock Holmes

has left his mark everywhere.

(jazz music)

- [Producer] It's 326, take four.

- [Voiceover] Every few years,

a fictional character reemerges.

And captures the imagination of a new generation.

- The name's Sherlock Holmes

and the address is 221B Baker Street.

- [Voiceover] Mark Gatiss is co-creator

of the BBC series Sherlock.

- He has a Victorian superpower,

which still works in the modern day.

I think, essentially, it comes down to the fact

that he is the smartest man in the room.

He can make the connections nobody else can,

and that is timeless.

(playful piano music)

- When you read his Study in Scarlet

and Holmes is introduced to Watson.

And he says,

- Afghanistan or Iraq?

- And Watson's, "How the devil did you know that?"

And Holmes said, "By the way, you're limping."

- I know you're an army doctor

and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan,

quite correctly, I'm afraid.

- Well, of course, that's insane.

There are hundreds of ways that somebody could limp,

but the thing that strikes you about Holmes

is that he takes common sense events

and finds explanations for them.

(gentle piano music)

Well, anyway.

- It must speak of a kind of need we have

to be saved, I think, or to believe

there is something slightly higher than us,

which is gonna come and get us

out of this terrible mess we're all in.

- It seems that Holmes shines a little brighter

for people when things aren't going very well.

And things are going wrong in the world.

- Banks do not have sufficient capital to make loans.

(gunfire)

- So I need somebody who can reassure me that

there are people out there who can make things right.

And right now, we're in a sort of a renaissance of Holmes.

- [Voiceover] The Sherlock Holmes stories

have never been out of print

since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

created the character in 1887.

Holmes first appeared

in a minor Christmas penny press magazine,

the story A Study in Scarlet.

- At first, I think they attracted very little attention,

but after a time, when I began the short adventures,

people began to recognize

that it was different than the old detective.

- He wrote 60 stories, four novels, and 56 short stories.

- They began to buy the magazine.

It prospered and so I may say did I.

- American publishers were

paying Conan Doyle a dollar a word.

Now, in the 1920s, that is very,

very big money indeed.

- [Voiceover] After the Bible,

the Holmes stories are the most widely circulated

and translated books in the world.

- It's often said that he's the most

depicted fictional character,

certainly the most filmed fictional character.

I think it's because of the strange

sort of glamor that he possesses.

It's a rather uneasy sort of glamor

because he is a glacial and frightening character.

- Oh, Professor Moriarty.

- But he's rather like a character from Gothic fiction.

- How fresh?

- Just in. Used to work here.

I knew him. He was nice.

- He's rather like a vampire.

(zipping)

(whipping)

- [Voiceover] Dark glamor is just one aspect of Holmes

that has left its permanent mark on popular culture.

- So bad day, was it?

- [Voiceover] Another is fandom.

Nowadays, millions of people live in the fantasy world

of their favorite TV and film heroes.

- The Klingon universe is really no different

than any other universe.

- [Voiceover] The fictional Sherlock Holmes started it all.

Prior to Doyle's creation,

there had never been a pop culture character

more famous than its creator.

People got confused.

Was Sherlock Holmes a real person?

- The curious thing is how many people around the world

who are perfectly convinced that he is a living human being.

- That idea of understanding the character as real

began even as the stories were being written.

- I'll bet you if you go down Baker Street

and stop a random 10 people

and ask them a question like,

"Did you know that Sherlock Holmes lived here?"

I'll bet you that six or seven out of those 10 will say,

"Yes, I did."

- I get letters addressed to him.

I get letters asking for his autograph,

get letters addressed to his rather stupid friend, Watson.

- Would you like to hear old uncle make a noise like a duck?

(imitates duck)

Oh, sorry.

- [Voiceover] Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional figure

who inspired roleplaying among his fans.

Today, fan fantasy is a part of popular culture.

- Before there were all of these little niches

and little pop culture tribes

and little pockets of fandom,

there was this incredibly potent character

that just reached out and shaped

all of these other things.

The same people who watch Law and Order today

are not the same people who are dressing up

as Klingons at Star Trek conventions,

but they all owe a debt to Holmes.

- There are Sherlock Holmes groups in Britain,

many in the United States,

Japan is mad for Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle sort of hit something universal.

(jazz music)

- We all know it's not real.

- I do know that he isn't real.

- But he made all that genre escapism legitimate

and it's a nice, enjoyable intellectual exercise.

(jazz music)

- [Voiceover] When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

had enough of Holmes,

he decided to kill him.

Holmes and his arch-nemesis Moriarty

fell over a waterfall in the 1891 classic

The Final Problem.

The public outcry was off the scale.

- There was an outrage and people in the city of London

went around wearing black armbands, mourning armbands.

A woman allegedly wrote to Conan Doyle saying, "You brute."

- I've written a good deal more about him

than I ever intended to do but my hand has been

rather forced by kind friends who continually

wanted to know more.

- Slowly, slowly, he was able to usher him back in.

(gun fires)

- He killed Holmes! He killed Sherlock!

- Watson.

- You!

- There's something Christ-like about Holmes.

He's the man who dies and rises again.

He falls quite a long way but he comes back,

and I think that's one of the reasons

why he inspires that kind of following.

- [Voiceover] Holmes has survived

through to the 21st century

in ways his creator could never have imagined.

- He cannot be contained now.

He's out in the culture like a kind of disease or a germ

and he'll go on infecting the culture, I'm sure, forever.

- There is nothing nicer than to start

a Sherlock Holmes story and, you know,

the wind was blowing a storm down Baker Street,

and the fire was crackling in the hearth,

and Sherlock Holmes cast aside a newspaper

and took his first pipe of the day,

and said, "I'm bored, Watson,"

and then you hear the client's foot upon the stair

and you know that they're gonna be off

and racing and running.

- You know, I owe you an apology.

You've come here for adventure,

and I've none to offer you.

- Very soon out of London, teeming millions comes

the first person who will step up to the door and knock.

- Ring, Watson, the knocker doesn't function,

you should have noticed that.

- [Voiceover] First stop on planet Holmes,

the crime lab.

(jazz music)

Sherlock Holmes' most critical contribution

to the modern world unfolds in crime labs

and morgues all over the planet.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

wrote his Holmes stories,

there was no such thing as forensic science.

E.J. Wagner is the author of

The Science of Sherlock Holmes.

- It wasn't called forensic science.

It was called, usually, medical jurisprudence.

Originally, this was the area of physicians,

who would call in various experts

who knew something about shoes or fine wines

and sort of used their knowledge.

There was no organization for it at all

at the Metropolitan Police,

which was itself very new.

- Impertinent?

She call us policemen.

- And what's wrong with being a policeman?

- In late Victorian era, late 1800s,

policing in London

left a lot to be deserved.

- The crime scenes in those days were simply chaotic.

A crime like Jack the Ripper, for instance.

The bodies were not sketched properly in situ.

Evidence disappeared.

Evidence was never collected.

Evidence was deliberately destroyed

because they were afraid of causing riots,

which was very well meant but it didn't get anywhere

towards solving the crime.

Sherlock Holmes says in one of the stories,

"A greater mess could not have been made

"if a herd of elephants had blundered through."

Well, that is pretty much what happened.

They had no method.

- One of the first principles in solving crime

is never to disregard anything, no matter how trivial.

- If Sherlock Holmes had been running the investigation,

each of those bodies would have been examined

very, very carefully as they lay, as they were found,

not after they were removed to the morgue

where things fell off, dropped off,

evidence was lost.

- Holmes made people realize

that forensics and deductive reasoning,

these are methods that we need to use.

Even today, police forces around the world,

universities who teach forensic crime scene investigation,

use Sherlock Holmes and quote Sherlock Holmes

in lessons as the model.

- Cleanly, expertly, thoroughly.

The work of a skilled surgeon.

- He helped lay the foundation

for this kind of modern crime scene investigation.

- It often annoyed me how

in the old-fashioned detective story,

the detective always seemed to get at his results

by some sort of lucky chance or a fluke.

- That's me jumping to conclusions

to the perpetual detective.

- Conan Doyle was a physician,

and there is a great deal in forensic science

which is really based on medical procedures.

- And I used, as a student,

to have a old professor whose name was Bell,

who was extraordinarily quick at deductive work.

- Joseph Bell would very often bring before his class

some unfortunate sufferer of a mysterious complex disease.

- But he would make his diagnosis of the disease

entirely by his power of observation.

- He certainly had a tremendous influence

on Conan Doyle and, therefore, on Sherlock Holmes.

- So naturally I thought to myself,

well, if a scientific man like Bell

was to come into the detective business,

he wouldn't do these things by chance.

He'd get the thing by building it up scientifically.

- Proof, my dear fellow. We must have proof.

(jazz music)

- [Voiceover] The Sherlock Holmes stories

caught the attention of a French doctor,

Edmund Locard, in the 1920s.

Locard worked with police to solve crimes

and developed a theory that all things leave a trace.

Forensic science was born.

He wrote that Sherlock Holmes inspired

his groundbreaking theories on trace evidence,

and he set the course

for the next century's CSIs.

- Sherlock Holmes taught them.

Locard said he thought everyone

studying forensic science

should read Sherlock Holmes, especially The Sign of Four.

- In the first place, it's been bleached and soaked

by long immersion in salt water.

Would you like to taste it, Watson?

- No, thanks.

- [Voiceover] The Holmes stories featured

an array of forensic tools.

Chemical analysis,

microscopic inspection,

footprint identification,

ballistics,

(gun fires)

handwriting analysis,

(gun fires)

gunpowder residue,

typography,

photographic enlargements.

All of these devices appeared in fiction

before any were actually used by real CSIs.

And today, many forensic scientists admit

Holmes' love of the lab is only half of their job.

The other half is his love for intrigue.

- I love puzzles, and this is a puzzle.

You're trying to figure out what happened.

(gun fires)

- My mind rebels at stagnation.

- I grew up on mystery novels as a kid.

Getting the answer is always been something,

I love information.

- Give me the most abstruse cryptogram,

the most intricate analysis,

and I am in my proper atmosphere.

- I just love it.

When I was seven, I wrote stories about

people getting murdered and me solving the crimes.

- [Voiceover] Holmes' love for cutting edge science

inspires the current generation of forensic analysts

who specialize in fields Doyle could never have imagined.

- This is the typical condition that

we'll get a cellphone in.

- [Voiceover] This expert retrieves data from cellphones

that have been smashed by criminals

trying to erase electronic evidence of their whereabouts.

It's the kind of data collection

that Doyle invented with the fictional Holmes.

- It was method, he said.

You collect all these small facts,

data, data, data, and then I will put it together,

and I will come out with a satisfactory conclusion.

- All we need to do at this point is press Read.

It's reading all the information from the chip.

The word voicemail is in here so we know

that there's probably some kind of voicemail.

- [Sherlock] Broken fibers appear darker

than the rest of the paper

and are therefore visible.

- [Watson] Splendid, Holmes.

- I believe Doctor Tobell meant

to communicate with us by that means.

- [Voiceover] In 1893, Doyle wrote

about the unique character of handwriting,

15 years before it was ever used in a real case.

Today, that tradition continues in this CSI's lab.

- This is called the Video Spectral Comparator,

or VSC for short, and basically

this just uses different wavelengths of light

to distinguish between inks.

- Message was written in ink with this pen?

- No, he used a pencil. This one.

- Thank you.

- So in this case we have an individual

who's found dead and a bunch of things

have been obliterated in the day timer.

- Immerse this sheet

in a solution of fluorescent salts.

The fiber is broken by the writing

and absorbed less of the solution

than other parts of the paper.

- And so you can see here

that we're seeing "lunch with Sue" underneath the scribble

and that's because under this infrared light,

the "lunch with Sue" ink is absorbing the infrared.

- Watson, I'm beginning to see the plan.

- [Voiceover] Holmes believed that data

could be proved useful no matter how obscure.

He collected hundreds of types of tobacco

so that no matter what the criminal smoked,

Holmes would know how to narrow his search.

That premise drives 21st century forensics.

- What Holmes didn't really was saying,

collect your data and don't form

your theory until you have it.

Know a lot about a lot of different things.

He was sort of a one person walking crime laboratory.

He even beat corpses to see where the bruises would form

because that's another very big problem to this day.

Did this bruising take place in postmortem or anti-mortem?

How did this happen?

- [Voiceover] Doctor Joseph Bell

inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

to use the autopsy as a crime-solving tool.

Doyle popularized it in fiction

long before it was put into practice.

And, today, the autopsy is the universal standard.

- At the end of the day, we are death investigators.

This individual who is deceased is our patient,

so to speak, and we are the last people

who are ever going to examine that individual

and get as close to the truth as we possibly can.

- [Voiceover] Modern tools make the autopsy

even more powerful than Conan Doyle

could ever have imagined.

- Traditionally, autopsy looks at the organs

in the chest and abdominal area.

However, when you start using a CT scan,

you can start seeing past the body searches,

the internal portions of the extremities,

the muscles, the bones.

So having this technology really provides

a huge amount of additional information

and, in some cases, has eliminated

the need to do an autopsy

as long as the pertinent questions

were answered by the scan.

- [Voiceover] But with all the advancements,

old school Sherlockian forensics are still going strong.

In The Adventure of the Reigate Squire,

Doyle introduced the notion of ballistics analysis

(gun fires)

to determine which gun fired a bullet.

(gun fires)

That practice continues,

and today's forensic experts agree with Sherlock Holmes

that no two weapons are the same.

- We're constantly trying to disprove our theory

to where we are taking consecutively manufactured firearms,

we are test firing them, trying to compare them

to each other, trying to make the firearm

that was made first match with the firearm

that was made second, and to this date

it has still not been done.

So we can still prove and have been proving

over and over again that we can in fact identify

fired bullets and fired cartridge cases

back to a firearm.

- [Voiceover] In 1887's A Study in Scarlet,

Sherlock Holmes analyzed blood

to determine who it came from.

Thirteen years pass before this technique

is put into practice,

and almost a century goes by

before the advent of DNA testing.

- The DNA profiles tests for hair color, eye color,

ethnicity, height, weight, and other physical traits.

It just continues to grow and grow.

The techniques are so robust and reliable

and they just keep improving

and the discriminatory power keeps improving.

- [Voiceover] Sherlock's influence

on criminologists and their methods

runs deeper than any other real historical figure.

That says a lot for a man who never lived.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

had an unusual talent.

Hiding in plain sight.

- Holmes was a master of disguise.

- Hands up, gentlemen.

- (chuckles) Why, it's Mr. Holmes.

- Holmes!

- You can put that thing away now, Watson.

- [Steven] Watson said that the stage lost an actor

when Holmes decided to become a detective.

- Admirable disguise, by the way.

You fooled them completely.

Of course, it didn't fool me.

- I never intended that it should.

- [Steven] He would immerse himself in the character.

He had several bolt holes around London

that were equipped with makeup and costume

that he could retire to and emerge as somebody else.

Completely different identity.

Whether it was a drunken groom,

or a Italian priest, or a up and coming plumber,

Holmes actually became the character.

His master of that technique was really a pioneering thing.

(jazz music)

- Sherlock Holmes.

- Improvement on the other makeup.

Don't you think so, Professor?

- [Voiceover] The tradition of going undercover

lives on in police forces around the world.

- I think some of them are slightly embarrassed,

to tell you the truth,

about how much they are influenced

by what they read when they were 14.

- Dragon Mladovic, 52 years old.

A multi-disciplinary organized crime figure

with massive connections.

- [Voiceover] A team of former undercover cops

now runs a top private investigation firm in Canada.

The team is about to close in on a deadly drug dealer.

Using techniques straight from the pages of Sherlock Holmes.

- Just so you know, this guy has got a record

dating back to 1983.

Assault convictions on an assault causing.

- Mladovic is 6'1", 320 pounds.

He's been involved in martial arts for about 40 years.

He's an absolute bone crusher.

He does a lot of dirty work for the Hell's Angels,

and he's hurt a lot of people.

I will be posing as the boss of a mock

criminal organization this afternoon.

- [Voiceover] To complete his risky job,

Fred Pinnock dons a simple, but effective disguise.

- There are many occasions where deception

and trickery have to be used

to have people responsible for criminal acts

divulge long-held evidence, or admissions.

- My dear Watson, if we're to catch our fishes,

we must use the bait they'll bite on.

- On the surveillance, Julia, you're gonna be wired

so I need to you to let your hair down

to cover that earpiece.

Jake, you're gonna ride with Len.

Julia, you ride with me.

- [Sherlock] Make no mistake, Watson.

It is our greatest antagonist, Professor Moriarty.

- We've gotta beat him.

- Dragon is a dangerous guy.

He has a history of violence.

Having said that, I'd gained his trust over the past year.

He's aware of the deal.

He's eager to make it happen.

I'm confident that he believes this is genuine.

- [Voiceover] General Samuel Wilson is a career spy.

A master of deception.

- Sherlock Holmes was one of the early

practitioners of deception.

Deception is engaging in acts

that mislead, confuse,

discombobulate an opponent.

Cause to him to take actions that are not

in his best interest, but maybe in yours.

Or not to act when he should act.

- I'm always eager to get it going,

now we're just waiting for his call.

So, they will be calling in a couple of minutes.

Hello?

- [Scot] Once you get your phone call

from Fred that they're in place,

then get him in the car and drive him over there.

(jazz music)

- [Voiceover] The criminal steps straight into the trap.

- Holmes had a way of smoking people out.

Holmes confused, misled people

to where they suddenly appeared

and he had them in their grasp.

- I would say you were wrong,

and Mr. Sherlock Holmes was correct.

- Good evening, Professor Moriarty.

- [Voiceover] A single slip-up, and the undercover agents

could find themselves in a deadly situation.

- [Scot] You will meet and greet our subject.

Before he gets in the car, I want you to check him out,

make sure he's got nothing on him that he shouldn't have.

Okay, then let him in the car.

- No worries.

- [Voiceover] Now, the moment of greatest danger.

- Who do we have here?

- How are you?

- Doing fine.

- [Voiceover] It's a moment that echoes Holmes.

- Who's this bloke?

- He's bloodthirsty (mumbles),

but there's good money to spend for information.

- I recognize Sherlock Holmes', as we would say,

fine Italian hand in the business of deception,

of which he was a master.

- Give it 6,000 units?

- Approximately, yes.

It will cost you 40 dollars

per unit. - [Fred] 40 per unit? Yeah.

How fast can this happen?

- Soon as you get me the money,

within about I would say, within 24 hours?

- Okay, we'll halve the cash right now.

- I think maybe at sometime we will become good friends.

- Yeah.

- Good friends do good business.

- Yeah.

- I never did think much of this dressing up business.

- It was necessary, I assure you.

- [Voiceover] Another violent criminal

is caught in a snare.

Thanks to the art of disguise

inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

But his undercover influence doesn't end there.

Others consider Holmes the master spy.

The model for the 21st century's

high stakes game of espionage.

General Sam Wilson is one of the United States'

most decorated spies.

For what exactly, he will never say.

But he will admit that it all started

reading Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy.

- I found so much that was deep and substantive,

meaningful and rich in Holmes as a figure,

and in the intellectual feats

that he was able to achieve.

I simply found myself fascinated with it.

- [Voiceover] Wilson worked for 10 US presidents

as a secret agent, never revealing his own secret.

Sherlock Holmes was his silent protector.

- I absorbed Holmes and his life,

and was aware of his thesis that the human mind

is a most powerful tool if it is finely honed

and educated and concentrated on solving problems.

Holmes, to me, was a problem-solver.

The intricacies of his mind simply appealed

to me very, very greatly.

And I think they were a benefit to me

as I've moved into intelligence as a career.

- [Voiceover] Spies never retire.

They just work in the shadows.

And General Wilson now imagines

what might have happened

if intelligence officials had used

Sherlock Holmes as their model

to catch Osama bin Laden.

- Sherlock Holmes would have found

Osama bin Laden for us much sooner.

We can't keep secrets these days.

One of the things that we always preach

was how to avoid the spotlight

at the end of the action.

And just fade away.

Holmes was good at this.

Give the credit and the publicity to someone else.

Just fade away into the shadows,

so we work again another day.

- By the way, they left this satchel behind,

probably of no value.

- No value!

Why, well it's bonkers.

You amateurs always overlook the important things.

- [Voiceover] Sherlock Holmes set the stage

for the dangerous world of modern undercover operations.

Master of the art of being invisible in plain sight.

Every day, human hunters stalk the streets.

Looking for opportunities to commit violent crimes.

In the late 20th century, criminologists realized

that most of these predators

follow recognizable patterns.

Police call it behavioral science,

or more simply, profiling.

And in 1887's Study in Scarlet,

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle anticipated profiling

by almost a hundred years.

- This makes four, Inspector.

All defenseless women here in the heart of London.

- [Voiceover] Lee Rainbow is the UK's top criminal profiler.

A modern Sherlock.

- I think set in terms of crime scene assessment,

what we do is very similar to the Holmes approach

in gathering data, using the data to drive the theory,

rather than vice-versa.

And hypothesis-generation, and testing.

Search for further data to support

or refute those hypotheses.

And then coming up with a best fit

for the known information,

which is essentially what Holmes was using.

One of our roles is to very much recognize

that the theory should fit the data,

not the data fitting the theory,

and that's very much what we do.

- The truth is only arrived at

by the painstaking process of eliminating the untrue.

We are not able to do that in this case

without further data.

- Everything we do is driven by data, everything.

- There's a tendency to glamorize, romanticize

the intelligence operator.

The James Bond.

That is the exciting arena.

That's where the headlines are.

There's a tendency to ignore

faceless analysts laboring,

putting bits and pieces of evidence together

and trying to figure out what they mean.

And that's Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes spanned pretty much

the field of deception, collection operations and so on.

But when I stopped to think

about who and what he was,

I would say first and foremost

the world's greatest intelligence analyst.

- [Voiceover] One cutting edge technique

owes its inspiration to the Holmesian method.

It's called geographic profiling.

And it's proven to narrow down

where a violent offender hunts,

and even where he lives.

Ian Laverty is one of the creators

of a geo-profiling program

inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

- Well, to start with in geographic profiling,

you need a series of connected locations.

It's like the old pin maps that the police

used to put on the wall,

stick little pins in the map

and then they'd stare at the pattern and say,

"Hmm, I wonder what this means?"

So, what we do is enter the crime locations

into the program, and it does the

very complicated calculation, actually,

where it runs through the entire city.

If the criminal lived here, and he traveled

to all of these crime scenes,

how long would it take?

Then it moves over a little bit,

and as you do that, you're building up

the probability map that shows you

where the criminal more likely descend

over the entire city.

- We thought we were the hunters.

Instead of which, we're the hunted.

- [Voiceover] Scot Filer is a profiler

and private investigator in Canada.

- People commit crimes for a reason.

People think it's random,

it's really not a random process.

There are reasons that people choose

to do things the way they do.

And that's the premise behind the software.

It takes all those scientific considerations into play.

When the algorithm behind the software is working,

these maps allow us to prioritize

the search area for the suspect.

- Sherlock Holmes was all about applying

his knowledge with a little bit of intuition.

He was a very smart guy.

But what we have that he didn't have

is a whole lot of information.

He had the kids that ran around the streets

gathering information for him,

but we have the modern equivalent

in the computer tools that we use

and they have a whole lot more information to go on.

If Sherlock Holmes is today,

he'd have apps like ours on his smartphone,

and he'd be using them all the time.

- [Voiceover] But Lee Rainbow points out

that despite computers,

the data still needs a detective like Holmes

to make sense of it.

- You still need that human aspect to it,

to identify which are the important variables.

Those things can't be done by a computer.

- [Sherlock] There's something in that bag

she wants to show me.

- [Watson] What makes you say that?

- Bag doesn't match her dress.

And again you must pick the size rather than style

to accommodate some bulky object.

- Sure, amaze me, Holmes.

- Elementary, my dear fellow.

- Anybody can get in front of a computer

and punch keys and make something come out of it.

What goes into that is the human factor.

Holmes was an expert in logic,

reasoning out explanations,

looking at the evidence that remains,

and putting the puzzle together.

So at the end of the day, what comes out of it

is an informed hypothesis about what you think

happened between the victim and the suspect.

That's the critical piece.

It's about the analyst,

and the skills and knowledge

that the analyst brings to the process

that makes it successful.

- [Voiceover] Sometimes, when the profilers hit a dead end,

old school lie detection comes into play.

Theo Hollamby is one of the world's

top polygraphic analysts.

- I think that Holmes would probably

would have appreciated a instrument like this,

to be very honest with you.

Because he used the powers of observation

to see if somebody was sweating or

that his heart was beating faster than normal.

- I've been studying the faces of our fellow passengers.

Fascinating hobby.

And sometimes most enlightening.

- We can actually see that his body is reacting

when you ask him a certain type of question.

- [Voiceover] The polygraph has been a forensic tool

since Conan Doyle's time.

And it's still going strong.

- At the moment, it is still the best tool

to use in any investigation, according to me.

There's a lot of other scientific ways to investigate.

Statement analysis, or the reading of the body.

But it's with the polygraph

you can actually put something on paper.

You can say the body reacted

to a certain question at that time.

And this is what the body did.

Did you steal that watch?

- No.

- [Voiceover] Many profilers admit

their model was Sherlock Holmes.

A fictional character who used deduction

to close in on criminals that were too elusive

for standard police methods.

- It's very Holmes.

I make it akin to doing a crossword puzzle.

You know, you get one piece of data

that starts giving you a clue for the next.

You slowly build up this picture,

which is very intellectually challenging like a crossword.

But the completion of that crossword

is you catch your bad guy.

And for me, that's a goal, that's a job.

I love it, I really do, yeah.

- [Watson] What are you thinking of?

- I'm thinking of all the women who can come and go

in safety in the streets of London tonight.

- [Voiceover] Sherlock Holmes is known

all over the planet.

But his influence also reaches into space.

Inspiring NASA scientist, Dr. James Garvin.

- Science operates in a lot of different ways,

but perhaps at the most visceral level,

it's very forensic.

All of us who are fans of that 221B Baker Street idea

recognize in reading those stories

of more than a hundred plus years ago,

that this is science applied to understanding.

- [Voiceover] Garvin was an intern when NASA

first put a camera on Mars in 1975.

He's now the agency's top scientist.

He's defined NASA's direction for space exploration,

and owes it all to reading Sherlock Holmes as a little boy.

- Sherlock Holmes, I might have known.

- I really came into science by being curious,

as all young people probably are.

They may not realize it, but they are.

I mean, I liked rocks and bugs,

but other kids liked beating up

their neighborhood kid, or sister,

whatever it is, it's that curiosity,

but once you read Sherlock Holmes stories,

and you see the interplay between thinking,

evidence, solving something that matters,

you know, death of people, kind of does,

you realize that's what science is.

We are crime solvers.

But the crimes are the problem you're solving.

Ocean heat flow, climate stories on Earth.

Why Venus is so weird.

Whether life exists on Mars

or the bigger universe, are we alone?

I read Holmes before I became a scientist.

- [Voiceover] What Garvin learned

from the Sherlock Holmes stories

is that data comes first.

Theories follow.

- Nothing but an ordinary match folder.

- [Gregson] Where does that leave us?

- I imagine to something very important, Gregson.

- [Voiceover] And with that,

a generation of scientists regard space

as a Holmesian mystery that needs to be solved.

- [Dr. Garvin] How do we figure these things out?

How do we make it into that puzzle-solving,

forensic science that Sherlock Holmes demonstrated

in these great stories?

And we do so with data, with information.

And we increase that information in ways

that is like increasing the pool of evidence

you would have in a mystery, in a crime story.

What's the puzzle of water on Mars?

Well, we went to Mars.

We saw a dry, alien, apparently sterile dessert.

We landed, we sat there for years,

nothing really much happened.

And then, revolution.

The forensic puzzle changed.

We got a little more information,

as Holmes did in the stories by Sir Conan Doyle.

When you put the extra piece of information in,

and even though it might seem small, kaboom!

We now have the wet warm Mars,

the Mars where following the water makes sense.

Today, following the carbon.

It's so Holmesian, and I think that's what

is attractive to some of the scientists.

We kind of operate like Sherlock Holmes did,

you know, hundred and forty, fifty years ago.

But with new pieces of data.

- [Voiceover] NASA's role has evolved.

The agency now studies scientific mysteries on Earth

as much as the stars.

But Garvin says Sherlock Holmes' methods

still rule his vision.

Listen to the facts.

Then make your analysis.

- The 19th key of the keyboard

is the 19th letter of the alphabet.

- [Voiceover] Garvin and his team went back

to the moon missions

and found new evidence in old data.

- Seemingly a dead world we visited

with astronauts 40 years ago.

Been there, done that.

In fact, that's not the case.

The moon is actually a repository of information

about the whole solar system,

and we've just come to realize that

from the new evidence we're getting from new missions.

So it's all about the information.

We get it from every perspective we can.

That's very Holmesian.

Those pieces of evidence give us the story

where we can play the Holmesian game,

and that's what's so beautiful.

We're discovering our own future

and our future questions.

- [Voiceover] From the moon to the stars,

Sherlock Holmes' influence stretches

deep into space exploration.

But back on Earth, it's driven popular culture

in ways that cannot be measured.

(rock music)

Sherlock Holmes has been imitated

and adapted more than any other

fictional character in history.

- Mr. Holmes, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!

- Good morning, Mr. Holmes.

- [Voiceover] Mr. Holmes.

- [Irene] Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

- [Voiceover] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

created a character who exploded

onto the world of fiction

and has left his mark on three centuries.

(jazz music)

- We are living in Sherlock Holmes' world.

There are just so many creators of fictional universes

who are inspired by Holmes.

You could go back and say that Holmes

was the Model T of all modern science fiction,

of mystery fiction, of genre fiction.

- All right, Kato.

We're going to introduce Mr. Grant

and the world to The Green Hornet.

- The marks of it are on every mystery novel,

every detective figure.

And every conflict between the rational and the irrational.

From The X-Files to Lost,

to the police procedurals.

(dramatic music)

- I wanna report a murder.

- Who was murdered?

- I was.

- It all comes back to Holmes.

It's hard to find something in modern entertainment

that Sherlock Holmes did not touch in one way or another.

- Holmes is a character who conjured something so powerful

and so vital that that character just escaped

and went running through the culture.

And it had a power that Doyle couldn't tame.

- A lot of people have written pastiche

Sherlock Holmes stories.

The new Sherlock Holmes series at the BBC

was a startling success.

- [Voiceover] But why has Sherlock Holmes

remained so popular?

- The great Sherlock Holmes himself.

- [Voiceover] Many believe it's all about

his relationship with Dr. Watson.

- Dr. Watson, you mad?

Who, me?

- I think the real (mumbles) is the duo

of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Their relationship, the milieu that they inhabit.

- How are you, I haven't seen you for years.

I want you to meet my old friend Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes, this is Stinky.

- Sherlock Holmes had become so much about trappings,

about the fog, about the top hats, about the hansom cabs,

that at a stroke, by modernizing it,

it becomes about them again,

which is the friendship between these two men.

- [Voiceover] The buddy film genre began

with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

- Watson!

- Coming, Holmes!

- Buddy films owe a tremendous amount

to Sherlock Holmes, obviously.

And you'll notice that these duos

tend to kinda have the same sort of interplay

that Holmes and Watson had.

- I think the idea of a pairing of two men,

one of whom is rather distant and a noble,

and one of whom is much more like us.

I think this is terribly important.

- You don't mind breaking the law?

- Not in a good cause.

- Oh, the cause is excellent.

- Well, then I am your man.

- Splendid.

- It's like, he's crazy, but he's crazy

because he sees everything as it is.

That's what makes him crazy,

and it's also what makes him great.

That's pure Holmes.

You can see it in Lethal Weapon.

You can see it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

You can see it in Star Trek.

Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

- Before all of them, though,

there was Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

That's the prototype.

- [Crew] And action!

- [Voiceover] In the 21st century,

the Holmes-Watson relationship

has taken on a new dimension.

- The homoerotic buddy cop combination

as we know it today owes just about everything

to Holmes and Watson.

Holmes himself was extremely ambiguous,

didn't show a whole lot of interest in women.

Irene Adler was the only woman who fascinated him.

- What the relationship between Holmes and Watson captures

is a kind of intimate male relationship that, in a way,

predates those categories of sexuality

that we're all stuck with now.

- Holmes, I think your visitor would want me out of the way.

- Not a bit, Doctor, stay where you are.

I am lost without my Boswell.

- There was a very definite homoerotic line

to the relationship depicted in the Granada TV series.

Largely thanks to Jeremy Brett's performance, I think.

And it's now a running gag

in the new BBC Sherlock series,

because all the people they meet of course,

assume that they're rather more than flatmates.

- There's another bedroom upstairs

if you'll be needing two bedrooms.

- Of course we'll be needing two.

- [Voiceover] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

would have denied the implication.

Male relationships in his era were different.

But there is one thing in the stories

that was not ambiguous.

Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict.

His favorite method,

injecting what he called the 7% solution.

- The fact that he was a drug addict,

fact that he's a bit of a sociopath,

that's an incredibly potent thing in fiction.

The hero who is also potentially a demon,

or has something demonic inside him

that both gives him his power

and makes him a liability.

That's incredibly powerful.

- [Voiceover] Addicted.

Super heroic.

Sociopathic.

Scientific.

Genius.

Sherlock Holmes anticipated the future.

A complex, flawed character so worshipped

some people forget that he never existed.

- We're going to be having a

gathering of Sherlock Holmes people

in the city where I live, in Oxford.

There is a pub there,

where Sherlock Holmes undoubtedly stayed

because of internal evidence in the stories.

And you know, I've just been writing the chronology

of what guests are gonna do.

And you know, I'm gonna say, just think,

when you actually go in there,

Sherlock Holmes really did stay there.

Exclamation mark.

- We're talking about him like he's real.

We can't help ourselves.

Really, it's, we're not saying

Arthur Conan Doyle did it, are we?

We're saying that Sherlock Holmes did it.

- I mean, I do know that he isn't real.

- [Voiceover] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

dropped a fictional character on our planet,

and he hit like a bomb.

The ripple effect of Sherlock Holmes

shows no sign of stopping over a century later.

In a world that doesn't often make sense,

cold, calculated reason

gives people a feeling of safety and strength.

Holmes appears in the strangest of places

because we need him.

- Good work, Mr. Holmes.

Perhaps I underestimated you.

- I've written a good deal more about him

than I ever intended to do, but my hand has been

rather forced by kind friends

who continually wanted to know more.

And so it is that this monstrous growth

has come out, out of one that's really

a comparatively small seed.

(jazz music)

- Goodbye.

Come along.

(jazz music)