It’s a trick. It’s just a magic trick. - Derren Brown in Sherlock

For those of you who don’t know Derren Brown he’s an illusionist, a psychologist, a magician, a hypnotist and he’s good at maths.

I believe Mofftiss have done quite a lot of research. In The Hounds of Baskerville Commentary Mark Gatiss reveals that both he and Steven read Derren Brown’s book. I believe the mind palace isn’t the only Derren Brown related element they included in their narrative. I apologize in advance should anyone have pointed these out already.

So there are a few things Derren Brown has done that are applicable to Sherlock. 

Reading people

As you probably know Sherlock Holmes is very good at deducing people. This is indeed possible in real life (to some degree). Derren Brown never explains how he does it, but he can read people’s minds or act as a psychic between the living and the dead as he does here. I suspect he uses a mix between cold reading and deducing.  He even taught an old lady how to read other people whilst playing poker. This lady came second (she only didn’t come first because the other guy was lucky) in a game of poker that lastet about 90 minutes. The other five contestants were Britains best professional poker players who had been playing for years. Because of Derren’s training this woman beat four of them after only having played for one week. Derren taught her how to deduce if someone was lying or not. She picked up on small clues in other peoples body language. This is basically what Sherlock does. He sees small details and deduces what they mean. Sherlock Holmes observational powers aren’t solely based on body language though and he has been practicing for more than just a week.

A Study in Pink - good bottle or bad bottle

In a Study in Pink Sherlock is given the choice between two bottles. The cabbie says he’s a proper genius too and he’s not playing numbers he’s playing his victims. I didn’t believe him until I saw Derren’s videos. Derren brown manages to predict people’s choices very accurately. E.g. He knows wich enevlope a contestant is going to pick and he does it several times in this video where he explains how to win the lottery. He even does this exact same thing with a double and a tripple bluff only with two envelopes, one of which contains money, here (thanks @waitingforgarridebs for pointing this out). If the taxi driver really was as good as he says he is and not just extremely lucky all the time I believe he’d be able to predict wich bottle each victim was going to pick.

The Hounds of Baskerville - Mind Palace

MARK: [The Mind Palace] came about because I remember having in the midst – probably in Cornwall – in the midst of an absolute crisis of intractability, I said, ‘But he’s got to find out what it is, but he can’t just bloody look it up. What is it?’ and you said, ‘Why don’t we do a Mind Palace?’ ’cause we’d both read Derren Brown’s book. (x)

I don’t have said book at hand but basically a mind palace is a memory technique that helps you to store information by picturing it. Derren Brown is very good at stuff like that. He remembered every little detail about the London A-Z in four months. He also helped a man to unconsciously remember the content of hundrets of books in one week. Many memory artists use the mind palace technique. Here’s an example with a shopping list. You take a room or a route you’re familiar with and place the items you want to buy on your route from for example your room to your front door. That way you can close your eyes and walk from your room to your front door in your mind and see the items on your shopping list. Sherlock’s mind palace is a bit bigger than the usual mind palace though. It’s got several corridors and the staircase indicates there are several stories, there’s the whole of 221b in it somewhere (including John’s bedroom upstairs probably).

The Reichebachfall 

- How to stop your heart

So Somebody else who’s name I can’t remember (I also can’t find the post, if you know the post and can provide a link please tell me and I will include it here as well as give credit to the OP) pointed out (I think it was before season 3 aired) that Derren Brown used a rubber ball pressed into his armpit to temporarily stop his heart. You can see the trick here. The ball is visible in his sleeve at the end of the video.

- Lazarus

Sherlock created the illusion of him falling to his death. There were actors people from the homeless network involved, professionals, there was a fake Sherlock body, fake blood and the only person who didn’t know what was going on was John. The whole thing screams Derren Brown. Most of his bigger tricks include several actors, a team of professionals and one individual that has to be fooled (the only difference beaing that Derren doesn’t wait two years to tell these individuals that everything is fake - whoopsie). If you’d like to see what I mean please take an hour and watch Derren Brown - Pushed to the Edge. While Derren’s experiments usually have the purpose of prooving psychological phenomenons Sherlock tired to save John’s life wich is less of a scientific and more of a romantic goal if you think about it.

The Empty Hearse - Anderson’s theory

“Derren [Brown] is a friend of mine. [We thought,] ‘What if someone had hypnotised him? …Oh, we might as well just ask Derren!’ Rather than having some person in a black cloak and a top hat and a stage moustache. But he was thrilled to do it.” (x) (x)

Lestrade thinks Anderson’s theory is stupid, but I must admit it’s very well thought through. Because the situation is of course quite shocking for John he is in a heightened state, allowing Derren to put him into a hypnotic sleep. You can see this phenomenon here and compare it to the scene in teh.

(x)(x)

The Sign of Three - What do we say about coincidence?

The universe is rarely so lazy. That’s what the writers told us. But also Derren Brown. In his show Enigma he foresees two random choices again. Derren has 6 men choose a number from 1 to 6 at random, then a letter from A to F. Then he called a Lady from the audience who again chose a letter at random and then a picture. The picture was turned around so she basically chose one of 6 blank pages randomly. Now listen to what he has to say:

“Two random events. But nothing is random”

Afterwards it turns out he predicted the most popular picture right at the beginning. He also predicted the order the pictures would stand in - two years earlier. What a coincidence.

His last Vow - You have to controll the pain.

When Sherlock get’s shot by Mary, mp!Molly, mp!Anderson and mp!Mycroft tell him what to do: decide wich way to fall, don’t go into shock and controll the pain. I’m going to focus on the last two here. 

In Trick or Treat s2 e4 Derren brown teaches Angela how to reach a mediumistic state, allowing her to stay calm for over 20 minutes locked inside a sack. It’s dark, claustrophobic and it get’s warmer in there every second. She has to concentrate on staying calm as well as trying to find a way to unlock the sack she’s in. This mediumistic state allows her to keep her breath almost 3 times longer that she usually would. The way this works is instead of focusing on keeping your breath you think about something positive, keep a nice picture in front of your eyes. This is exactly what Sherlock did in order to stay calm. First he went looking for John in his mind palace but instead he found Mary blocking his way to him. So instead he thought about Redbeard. This is how he keeps himself from going into shock. In order to contain the pain he seeks out Moriarty- Later on he restarts his heart by thinking about John in danger, causing his body to get into a heightened state and release a lot of adrenaline (this is called Lazarus effect. Please check out this meta here)

The Abominable Bride - Peppers Ghost

Pepper’s ghost was pretty much already explained in tab. Instead of a mirror you have a reflection in a piece of glass, allowing the person to appear transparent. You need two light sources, one in the area behind the glass as well as in the area where the person who’s supposed to be the ghost is standing. Then you need to place the glass panel at a 45 degree angle in order to hide the “real ghost”. This is all explained again in this video where Derren invites a few girls to a trip in a supposedly haunted house.

His last Vow - These are prepared Words Mary.

We know how this scene goes. “These are prepared words Mary. I’ve chosen these words with care… The problems of your past are your business. The problems of your future are my priviledge.”

Derren Brown taught a guy how to be a Faith Healer. Faith Healers “heal” people who are blind or deaf or in pain. They don’t actually make ilnesses go away. So after 6 months of training Derren sends this pastor named James onto the stage and he performs miracles. Until at one point where other healers usually ask for donations, he holds a speech. In the voice over Derren says “This is a carefully worded speech.” Sounds familiar? They are lying to a room full of people and pretend to cure diabetes. Then, at a point in the show where other faith healers would demand donations, James explains how fraudulent healers take pills away from people who depend on them, cause harm to them and blame the vicitms for not being faithful enugh when their healings have no effect. If you can apply this parallel then this is strong evidence that John’s carefully worded speech is not what Mary thinks it is.

@waitingforgarridebs @jenna221b @johnnlocked

Bringing this back because of recent setlock events

Benjamin Caron was the director for a lot of Derren Brown’s projects e.g. The Heist, Enigma and Trick or Treat

Reblogging because I’ve been catching up on Derren Brown’s work and having a hard time finding metas that I know must be out there. This one is a pretty good precis of Brown’s methods and how they’ve been used in the show.

One of the things about his"predictions" is that they aren’t predictions at all: he influences people’s choices, so that they walk into a situation he’s pre-defined, sometimes months or years in advance (kind of like… us). Like the OP, I never found “it’s not chance, it’s chess” believable until I’d seen Brown do this repeatedly. Similarly, “I’m going to talk to you, and then you’re going to kill yourself” is how he would do it, although he would (or at least could) also use touch and planted visual cues.

Thanks a lot for reblogging this brilliant meta by @victorianlovers​, @devoursjohnlock! (I’ve had this answer brewing in my draft folder for quite some time by now, but here it is finally). I think this is an interesting and very comprehensive analysis, well worth reading and contemplating. I feel sure many of the things we see in BBC Sherlock are based on trickery and emotional/psychological manipulations, very much in the spirit of Derren Brown. It also struck me that maybe it’s not just a question of Mofftiss having read Derren Brown’s books - maybe Brown is actually part of the show? I mean, in TEH it gets obvious that he’s employed as an actor, but what if he’s also counseling the show makers about how to trick the audience? Because - as shown in this meta - there are indeed so many Brown-type methods and references presented in the whole BBC Sherlock show that it appears to be more behind it than just the authors reading a couple of books. 

Links and more musings under the cut.

Keep reading

wow, that’s a lot more points of contact than I would have expected! I haven’t watched any Derren Brown stuff, except for one short video of a trick he did with Martin Freeman a while back, and it creeped me out (which I expected, but, yeeks), so I’m unlikely to pursue any of the links. But it’s good to have them for those who will. (Like the catalog of horror films referenced in S4, which is itself almost more than I want to know about any of them!) Sure would be nice to think that S5 could be the story Sherlock gets to tell for himself, with the happy ending!

SOLUTIONS  OR  CHOICES

In the episode The Empty Hearse three possible solutions for the fall from Bart’s roof - the Reichenbach Fall - are presented. While the first and the second are right away explained as the imaginations of someone else, the third one claims  to show the real event. On a closer look though that solution is also rather unlikely. Sherlock’s account of the event gets recorded on camera, (including image interference, which is always a bit suspicious) by no one other than Anderson (I’m the last person you’d tell the truth). Furthermore there is that little incident with the inexplicable timelaps, when Sherlock talks to Anderson about the possible destruction ot the Parliament and this at a time where he and John are still in the carriage with the giant bomb.

But why are three solutions for the fall offered in the first place, I wonder? Three variations, filmed in detail … it feels a bit much and not really necessary. Normally, a single but solid and plausable solution would have been sufficient, one would think. 

Unless …. the three solutions aren’t about possible ways to survive a real fall from a rooftop but something else entirely. 

What if the truthfulness of the different solutions isn’t the important part at all? The most notable feature in all three solutions is, that in each one Sherlock teams up with someone else. With Molly, with Jim, with Mycroft. What if this is the key aspect for the presentation of three fall solutions? To demonstrate three different possibilities … three different choices.

Three solutions or three choices?

Weiterlesen

Wow, this is just the most brilliant thing I have ever read about the three solutions, @ebaeschnbliah! This is beautiful. And you know what? In TFP, the last episode so far, both Jim and Mycroft are dismissed, they do not provide any solution or help. John, however, stays with Sherlock to the end, he is the one who helps him up after the coffin scene, who has become family for Sherlock. And this is mirrored in the scene with Molly who is even wearing the same jumper she wore when acting as a John substitute in TEH.

wow, indeed, @ebaeschnbliah this is brilliant, and can i say how wonderful it is to have a new, major insight into a key element of the show, even this many years later! I think it also points up how important it is that molly is always there as a john mirror. Sherlock asking her for help, is him WANTING to ask john. You could almost re-visualize all his key scenes with molly, as scenes with john, except then the story would be over too soon! This also makes me want to re read @asherlockstudy ’s TRF/TEH metas, because of the insight into jim here, and in them. And @just-sort-of-happened ’s metas about sex vs romance.

Another brilliant discussion I seem to have missed long ago. :) Yes @ebaeschnbliah - I can only agree; Sherlock is asking himself a question about what to do. Or maybe it’s already hindsight and he’s trying to figure out what went wrong? 

In any case, the subtext reading makes a lot of sense. And I think you’re right, @ebaeschnbliah, that Sherlock presents three options to himself and tries to opt for the third, but I’d guess the ‘real’ events are actually not described at all, not in any of his three scenarios. Perhaps, as you say in your ‘The big question’ meta, he’s afraid of risking that his and John’s friendship might be destroyed by the options of Love and, in particular, Sex. Maybe in that moment, Sherlock couldn’t even imagine the Love option would work because it seemed too soppy and un-realistic to him? And the Sex option outright frightened him in its cruelty (=indifference towards John’s friendship)? So he (thought he) went for the brain option, the ’rational’ one. Except that’s actually the least realistic one - partly because this one meant the biggest and most outrageous form of betrayal and deception (which Sherlock might have realized if he’d used his empathy there, but he probably didn’t), and partly because - quite logically - this scenario didn’t take into account all the many things that were likely to just go wrong (as Fanclub!Anderson - another John mirror - points out). 

So - since Scenario #3 isn’t really plausible either, I believe what really happened (the text, not the subtext) might have been something slightly different. I think it’s interesting that The Fall, as we see it in TRF, isn’t actually confirmed by other media - why? It does say in these two news videos (X, X) which were embedded in John’s blog posts, that Sherlock Holmes jumped to his death from the roof of St Bart’s hospital. But nowhere does it say that John witnessed it, and John hasn’t written anything about TRF on his blog, except for the fact that Sherlock had saved two kidnapped children, and that he was now dead. And nothing whatsoever is said about Moriarty’s body. For all I know, John could just as well have received Sherlock’s phone call and then been told that Sherlock jumped to his death. And did the encounter with Moriarty on the rooftop even happen?

But the most interesting thing with the Love option depicted in TEH, in my opinion, is this: What is Derren Brown doing there? 

He’s playing a magic trick of suggestion on John, isn’t he? Just like Sherlock has been accused so many times of doing on people, and just like Sherlock (supposedly) told John that he was doing right before the Fall: 

And yet this Love option is dismissed in favour of the ‘brain’ one (sub-textually it’s Sherlock’s work - Lestrade - that dismisses it; “all that matters to me is the work”). But which one is more likely to succeed; a staged suicide involving a giant inflatable cushion unseen by both John and a sniper following him, a series of successive events that needed to happen exactly as planned without the slightest miscalculation, an extremely Sherlock-like, recently dead body, a skilled army doctor who lets himself be stopped from examining his best friend’s body and 25 homeless people helping out without being detected, or a simple, ‘magic trick’ performed on John? Balance of probability? So I think the ‘truth’ must have been different still. But I can sympathise with John on one point: how Sherlock actually pulled off this trick isn’t really that interesting; the important thing to figure out is why.

@gosherlocked @raggedyblue @sherlockshadow @sarahthecoat @loveismyrevolution @sagestreet

good to re read this, with the additional discussion. VERY interesting suggestion, that what we see in the episode isn't entirely corroborated, thus probably isn't "what really happened", but a metaphorical representation of what it felt like.

I remember reading a meta back in s3 hiatus, about "i owe you a FALL" meaning, not a fall off a cliff or building, but a fall in LOVE. SO many expressions use this kind of metaphor. falling in love, bursting with feelings, feeling the earth move (earthquake reference in TLD), fireworks. Even "magic" as a metaphor for the mystery of love. Then "on the rocks" for romantic strife, "crash and burn" for the end of romance, which sounds like what the girl on the plane is afraid of.