THE CRUNCH - A Little Deduction...

The game is afoot!
We are still a year away from the third series of BBC's Sherlock, but we already have some clues as to what the show's next season will entail; Rat, Wedding and Bow.
So I've been doing a little detective work of my own, trawling through the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, and this is my final report on the case.

Rat
This is probably the hardest of the three words to figure, as none of the original Sherlock Holmes stories include a Rat. Doyle uses dogs, snakes and even seaweed as murder weapons, but on no story does a rat bare any relevance.
Of course, there are a few obscure references. In The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, Holmes refers to another case involving "the giant rat of Sumatra". Could this tangent be the source of the first episode?
Or, it could be possible that this will be a completely new story. In series 1 we had The Blind Banker, which wasn't linked to any particular short story or novel. Maybe we're going to see a return to this form. But this seems unlikely considering we know that the story will be based at least partly on The Adventure of the Empty House.
To be honest, I'm bluffing. This clue has got me completely stumped.

Wedding
Ah ha! This ones a bit easier. There are three main stories that stand out for weddings:
In A Case of Identity, a wedding is aborted at the last minute when the groom mysteriously disappears. In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor it is the bride who disappears, this time after the ceremony. And in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist, a woman is nearly forced to make her vows.
While any of these could be the source for the second episode, I think there is a much more likely candidate.
Each series has had one episode based on one of Doyle's epic novels. Series 1 opened with A Study In Pink (An interpretation of A Study In Scarlet) and in Series 2 we were treated to The Hounds of Baskerville (inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles). So, I'm hedging my bets on an adaptation of The Sign Of Four, the story in which Watson meets his future wife and becomes engaged.
Steven Moffat has said ever since the first series of Sherlock that he has wanted to explore Watson's marriage and his emigration from 221B. This theme has already been explored satirically and successfully by Guy Richie's film adaptation Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game Of Shadows, and could this have prompted the Moff to bring this story arc to his modern-day interpretation?

Bow
The obvious piece of Sherlock Holmes history that this points to is Doyle's penultimate short story collection, His Last Bow, at the end of which Holmes retires from detective-work all together. Moffat has already confirmed that this series will end in another cliff-hanger that will top the fall of Series 2. Maybe Holmes' retirement is linked to this cliff-hanger in some way.
His Last Bow is also the title of one of the short stories from this anthology. Unlike most of the other Sherlock Holmes stories, it is written in the 3rd person, and not from the point of view of John Watson. Bow is also unlike other Sherlock Holmes stories in that it is a spy story, and not a murder mystery. Could the season finale revolve around an espionage story more suited James Bond or Jason Bourne?

Those are my predictions for the next series of Sherlock. What do you guys make of the clues? Let us know in the comments.
Tom :)