In A Study in Pink in the BBC series Sherlock, what's the puzzle with the pills?

Question

**Spoiler alert**

At the end of A Study in Pink, the cab driver offers Sherlock the choice of two pills - the one near Sherlock and the one near the cabbie. Sherlock takes the one near the cabbie. Was he right? Did he pick the safe pill? Why did the cabbie defeat the first 4 victims? Is this a well-known puzzle/paradox/psychological trick?

Thanks :)

Answer 1

I think the point is that Sherlock and the audience are both left wondering whether he chose correctly. As the Cabbie says, it is like a game of chess with one move.

Many fans of the movie The Princess Bride will point out that this little game is similar to the one that Wesley and Vizzini play in which Wesley poison one of two wine glasses and makes Vizzini choose- he will drink the other glass. The trick in that film was that Wesley had built up an immunity to the poison (the fictional iocane powder) and both glasses were poisoned.

Some suggest that may be the Cabbie's trick as well, but I guess we'll never know. It's more interesting and ups the stakes of the game if this man really has been playing the odds, allowing himself to possibly be poisoned. In the Doyle story it was based on, a Study in Scarlet, there was one poison pill and one safe pill.

Answer 2

It won't be known, but that's the point. The idea that you would be playing the Cabbie means that there is an element on psychology involved, and it is not a real puzzle per se, like he says, what he was doing could be a bluff, or a double bluff or even a triple bluff, and like he says he knows how people think and how they think he thinks, so he knows how to play people. Would he expect people to go for the one further away from the cabbie because they would believe his bluff would put the good pill nearer to him, in which he'd use the poison? or is Sherlock right in that it really is chance.



Or it could be that both of the pills are poison and the Cabbie merely plays the victims need to prove themselves by getting them perked up so they take it first.

Answer 3

Sherlock Study In Pink