The Great Game

The Great Game is the third episode of the television series Sherlock. It was first broadcast on BBC One and BBC HD on 8 August 2010.

Plot
Sherlock Holmes is bored and lacking a case. Dr John Watson, finding Sherlock impossible to be around, spends the night at his girlfriend's flat, and sees news of an explosion at Baker Street on the television. He rushes home and finds Mycroft pressuring Sherlock to investigate the murder of an MI6 clerk and the disappearance of a flash drive with important defence plans. Sherlock refuses.

Sherlock is called to Scotland Yard. Inside the bombed-out flat was a strongbox containing a cell phone similar to the one belonging to the victim from "A Study in Pink". A message on the phone leads Sherlock to a pair of trainers in a basement and then receives a call from a terrified woman, obviously reading a message from a third party. If Sherlock does not solve the puzzle in twelve hours, the explosive vest she is wearing will be detonated.

While Sherlock and John examine the trainers, they are interrupted by Molly Hooper, who introduces her new boyfriend Jim, an IT employee, but Sherlock deduces Jim is gay, and Molly storms out. Sherlock traces the shoes to a schoolboy named Carl Powers, who drowned in a pool in London. Sherlock, who was underage at the time, was unable to convince the police to take his theories seriously, but he proves that Powers was poisoned via his eczema medication. The booby-trapped woman is freed.

A second message shows a sports car, stained with blood, and another hostage gives Sherlock eight hours to solve the mystery. Sherlock interviews the owner of the agency that rented the car, deducing that he has a distinct suntan and was recently in Colombia. Finding that the blood in the car had been previously frozen, Sherlock concludes that the lost man, Ian Monkford, paid the agency owner to help him disappear. Once again, the hostage is freed.

A third message and a third hostage point Sherlock to the death of television personality Connie Prince, apparently from tetanus. Supposedly, she cut herself on a nail, but the wound was made after her death. Sherlock pins the crime on the housekeeper (also her brother's lover), who murdered Prince by increasing her botox injections. Although Sherlock solves the puzzle in time, the bomber triggers the explosives when the hostage, who is blind, starts describing her kidnapper's voice. The blast kills her and eleven other people in her building.

The fourth message is a photograph of the River Thames, though no hostage calls. Sherlock finds the corpse of a security guard on the riverbank, identifying the murder as the work of "the Golem", an assassin. Sherlock traces the Golem through his network of homeless persons, but is too late to stop the murder of another victim, an astronomy professor whom the guard had talked to, having realised that a recently discovered painting by Vermeer was a fake. While Sherlock is examining the painting at the museum, the fourth hostage (a child) calls, giving Sherlock only ten seconds to prove the painting is a fake. He does so, and the museum curator admits to faking the picture, and that her secret "partner" was called Moriarty.

Investigating Mycroft's case in secret, Sherlock and John trace the MI6 clerk's death to his prospective brother-in-law, who confesses that he stole the flash drive and accidentally killed him. The man stole the memory stick because of his financial troubles, but still has it because he had no idea how to sell it.

Sherlock waits for John to go out and then arranges to meet Moriarty. He is met instead by John, wearing an explosive vest. Moriarty appears and turns out to be Molly's boyfriend Jim. Moriarty tells Sherlock to stop interfering with him, but Sherlock refuses. Moriarty leaves momentarily but soon returns, having multiple snipers target both Sherlock and John. Sherlock aims his handgun at Moriarty, but then changes his aim to the explosive vest, which he had previously thrown across the pool deck.

The episode (and the first series) ends on this cliffhanger.