Sherlock Semiotics - The subtlety of taxi cabs.

Sherlock is a BBC British television series that follows the adventures of detective Sherlock Holmes and his loyal partner, Doctor John Watson. The first episode of the series, called “A Study in Pink”, uses different semiotic characteristics that guide and help the user understand the characters and the plot better.

One of the things that the show does best is use Signifiers throughout the whole episode to let the audience know that Sherlock is a detective. The first time they introduce Sherlock Holmes, it is a shot from within a body bag, where he is analyzing the dead body. From this shot, we start to notice his fascination and relationship with death. The show also uses Sherlock’s apartment to describe Sherlock’s mind into a physical state. The first thing we notice is the amount of objects and artifacts he has, conveying the idea of a busy and complicated mind, with multiple thoughts and skills happening at the same time. They emphasize the human skull, which represents several aspects of Sherlock’s personality. His loneliness, his relationship with death, and also serves as an intertextuality to the old show as a Victorian era object. We also notice the multiple patterns all over the apartment (wallpaper and rug) representing his fascination of seeing and solving patterns everywhere.

One of the most subtle but interesting things I noticed was the presence of taxi cabs throughout the episode. If you have seen the episode before, and know that the serial killer is a cab driver, you can easily notice how the director subtly introduces a taxi cab in every scene with suspense. Every time Sherlock and Watson are investigating the case or achieve a milestone in the case, a taxi cab is mentioned or physically introduced in a shot. The first time Sherlock and Watson work together and get to a crime scene, they take a taxi cab there, with multiple shots inside the cab.

Another example is the shot when Sherlock and Watson are walking towards a restaurant to face the serial killer, Sherlock is thinking out loud trying to solve the crime and he uses this words ”Who do we trust, even if we don’t know them. Who passes unnoticed wherever they go”. This shot opens with a taxi cab driving by and several taxi cabs parked in the background. We can also notice the presence of taxi cabs on the next shot, where they are waiting for the killer to appear on the location they send on a text message, a taxi cab is the one who parks in front of the destination and the they end up chasing all over London. The director and writers of the show, use the presence of taxi cabs throughout the whole episode to tell the viewer who the killer and suspect is going to be even before Sherlock discovers it.