The BBC has put together a new series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries set in the present day. I watched this episode the other day and it was pretty good. Not quite as real-life gritty as some of the other murder mysteries I've seen recently, more . . . playful, perhaps?
I may be giving something away here, so be warned. One of the elements of the story involves choosing one of two apparently identical bottles. The contents of one of the bottles is good, the contents of the other are bad. By the law of averages, one should have a 50-50 chance of choosing the good bottle. However, the villain of the hour has managed to rack up a string four good bottles in a row. Now how could he do that?
I gave it a little thought and I came up with a couple of ways, some more interesting than others. Not too long ago, a character on The Good Wife was asking Kalinda, the private investigator, about why people do things and Kalinda responded by saying it was either for love, sex or money, or some such. The character replies that people aren't really that simple, are they? And Kalinda says in my experience, yes, they are.
So here's one explanation for our villain's string of successes. He had prepared a script, and using an innocuous test, run the script by several unsuspecting people and watched how they responded. He may have had to tweak his script to get it just right, but after he had run it by 10, 20 or 100 people he had it pretty well dialed in and he was confident how his marks would respond. That's when he starts playing for real.
Then there's the simpler trick I just remembered. He could have marked the bottles with ultraviolet ink that would only visible to someone wearing special glasses, and as he was wearing glasses, they could have been special and so he could have easily told the two bottles apart.
Lastly, we don't really know that he had four successes in a row. If he was able to tell the bottles apart, if he got stuck with the wrong one, all he had to do was bale. His intended victim would appear to be the victim of a practical joke.
Your assuming he was telling the truth the whole time. This trick was done in the Princess Bride. Both bottles contain poison. The cabbie would have built a resistance to the poison by progressively increasing his dosage until he could be resistant to a lethal amount but a normal human could not. This is why he would panic when his victim's cellphone would ring. He knew there was a chance that he may not have killed his victim if they had a prior tolerance to it.
ReplyDeleteI don't buy the whole build-up-a-resistance-to-poison routine. It takes a really long time to build up the resistance, which means it takes a very dedicated type of person, with a long term goal firmly in mind. I don't think our cabbie was that kind of person. And I don't get the significance of the cell phone ringing. I may have to watch it again, just for grins.
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