Fridge / A Study in Emerald

Fridge Brilliance

• It might seem strange that the one who was so good at writing the plays was Dr. Watson, a person you wouldn't immediately think of as a great writer. But when you think about Holmes canon, he was the one who in-universe made Holmes so famous through tales of their adventures. For extra points, one of the very first lines of the story is the narrator i.e. the "Fake Watson" commenting to the reader that he's not a literary man.
• The detective's papers get a couple of mentions in the story. They aren't Holmes' omnidisciplinary ones, but Moriarty's mathematical papers.
• "The Tall Man" and "the Limping Doctor". Holmes doesn't usually give similar nicknames to suspects. Moriarty, however, comes from a mathematical background, so he's used to naming his variables.
• It might seem odd that a human/Old One hybrid could be killed by simple humans until you remember that in The Dunwich Horror, the offspring of a woman and Yog-Soggoth was killed by a dog. This is nicely Lampshaded when the narrator notes that the killer's chosen moniker 'Rache' is an old name for a hunting dog.
• The story draws heavily upon the meta knowledge fans have of Holmes moreso than of Lovecraft. Most visibly, "Rache" meant one thing in A Study in Scarlet, something else in the Sherlock episode "A Study in Pink", and here has a third definition. This isn't merely Neil Gaiman showing off, but a bit of foreshadowing — it's common to change up the nature of characters in adaptations, so the audience might not realize how significant it is the narrator's wound is in his shoulder, not his leg, as is tradition for Watson.
• We get several mentions from the narrator about how his shoulder injury has taken everything from him and now he just lives on a pension. While one might think this is to make Watson's injury much more serious and relevant to his life, at the end one realizes that it's because unlike Watson, Moran's fortunes were entirely based on his ability to fire a rifle. He even comments about how he was a crack-shot, something that Watson doesn't really get associated with.