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devoursjohnlock · 2 years

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Riddles of the Sphinx

There are a few things in BBC Dracula that I just can’t seem to let go of, and this is one. I’ve tried to write this meta a few times, and never found a particularly satisfying “solution” to it, but I think now it’s time to present it.

In the final episode of BBC Dracula (The Dark Compass), Mark Gatiss plays “Frank”, a modern-day version of Bram Stoker’s Renfield, who eats insects and is enthralled to Count Dracula. The extent to which Frank’s mind has been overtaken by Dracula is demonstrated by his... unique... solution to a cryptic crossword. Like Jonathan Harker’s journal in the first episode (The Rules of the Beast), Frank thinks he is writing rational, intelligible text in his crossword, but it all comes out in Dracula, with a single phrase spilling out over the grid.

“Dracula will be served” | “Dracula is my Lord”

Spoilers under the cut for the Inside No.9 episode The Riddle of the Sphinx, which is among the best episodes of that series (though should probably come with a few trigger warnings); if you’ve been planning to watch it, please do so before reading further.

The crossword Mark is solving in The Dark Compass was set by someone named “Sphinx”, and this is why I find it interesting. Sphinx is a pseudonym for Mark’s longtime League of Gentlemen collaborator Steve Pemberton. This isn’t the first crossword that Pemberton has written; in fact, his first (co-written with cryptic expert Alan Connor) was the central theme of an episode of Inside No.9, which is co-written by and co-stars Pemberton and another League of Gentlemen alum, Reece Shearsmith. For those who are unfamiliar, Inside No.9 is an anthology series, with half-hour episodes that are usually a mixture of horror and comedy.

The Riddle of the Sphinx is about a Cambridge professor who writes cryptic crosswords for the student newspaper; one night, a young woman breaks into his rooms, demanding that he teach her how to solve his puzzles. Together, they work their way through his latest creation, which was quietly published in the real-life Guardian newspaper on the day the episode aired in February 2017.

In the first scene of the episode, Sphinx brandishes a weapon at the intruder, a prop gun from a student performance of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The gun is then safely stowed away until the end of the episode, when we’re told explicitly that Chekhov’s gun cannot simply remain in the drawer:

TYLER: Never show a gun in Act One if you’re not going to fire it in Act Five.

I do hate to have a joke explained, but never fear, they gave us an unexplained joke, too. The intruder goes by the name Nina. When we meet her, Nina appears not to understand the workings of the cryptic crossword, but soon we learn that she’s actually an expert. Not enough of an expert, however, to have noticed a hidden clue in the crossword that could have saved her life.

I S W A P P E D C U P S

The unexplained joke is that in a cryptic crossword, a hidden clue of this sort is called a “Nina”.

Sphinx takes his own pseudonym from the same mythic figure that gives the sphinx cat (like Sekhmet, who was blamed for murder in Sherlock’s The Great Game) its name. The riddle of the sphinx is well known to everyone: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? The three stages of the riddle describe the ageing process, such that the answer is “a man”. According to the myth, the sphinx asphyxiated and consumed anyone who could not answer the riddle correctly; when finally the riddle was answered by Oedipus, the sphinx destroyed itself. Most of these beats are also hit in this Inside No.9 episode.

So, as you can see, The Riddle of the Sphinx is all rather meta; as his first lesson for Nina, Sphinx creates a hypothetical 7-word clue that is meant to be solved as “ARCHITECTURE”...

... but which is actually a half decent summary of the night’s events. This, in itself, is fitting, because a cryptic crossword clue is typically composed of two parts: the definition of the word, plus a bit of wordplay to help you solve it. Ordinary crosswords trade in relatively straightforward definitions; the cryptic crossword requires creativity, it requires looking at the clues from different angles, and I would say it also requires a sense of humour.

So, to hammer that metaphor home: Nina is asking Sphinx to teach her how to read his subtext, so that she can win the game.

Steve Pemberton has published a few other cryptic crosswords as Sphinx since The Riddle of the Sphinx aired, one in January 2018, when the subsequent series of Inside No.9 aired, and one in August 2020, which was solved on the YT series Cracking the Cryptic, if you’d like to see how an expert tackled it.

Like the crossword in The Riddle of the Sphinx, the Dracula crossword was also published in the Guardian on the day that The Dark Compass aired, in January 2020. And while the solution Mark’s character “Frank” offers is Dracula-focused but, well, insane, the actual solution to the crossword is a bloody, vampiric thing in its own right, as shown in these highlighted examples in the solved crossword below.

You may notice that I’m trying to be conservative here; I might also have included “DOOM”, “NOVEL”, “PSYCHIATRIST”, and perhaps a few others (”IBEX” is particularly tempting, for its devil horns) as Dracula-related. There are also a few treats among the clues, including:

20A Mountain dweller to be found in 9 (4)

...which has a clue “inside no. 9″ (9 = IX, and “BE” is found within it), such that there’s an Inside No.9 reference in each episode of Dracula, which is pleasing.

So, when I first heard that the Dracula crossword was set by Sphinx, what I wanted from it was a Nina... the potentially life-saving clue, hidden in plain sight. I haven’t been able to find one in it; in fact, I don’t think any of Sphinx’s cryptic crosswords since the original have included Ninas, which strikes me as odd, given their prominence in Riddle of the Sphinx (in the end, there were two in that crossword alone) and the value of hidden clues in Moffat and Gatiss’s work.

And for that reason, I might not have written up this meta if it weren’t for @victorianpining‘s reading of BBC Dracula, which casts Dracula as a stand-in for the writers. In this adaptation of Dracula, we are told repeatedly: blood is lives, and more specifically, blood is stories. Agatha tells Jonathan this as she holds his indecipherable manuscript in her hands: “Perhaps stories flow in our veins, if you know how to read them”. In the novel, Jonathan, as a diarist enthralled to Dracula, is a self-insert for Bram Stoker, just as John Watson the chronicler was a self-insert for Arthur Conan Doyle, writing stories in both text and subtext. In BBC Dracula, Moffat and Gatiss appear to have boldly claimed Dracula himself as their self-insert. And look how well this works... in their universe, blood is stories, and their thirst is insatiable. Stories grant them immortality, but what keeps them young is the game. It’s being understood by a present-day audience. It’s Jonathan. It’s Lucy. It’s us. It may be intellectually satisfying to sit in one’s room setting puzzles, but if no one else can understand them, what’s that worth? Sphinx persuades Nina to keep playing after she threatens to leave, for exactly this reason. Genius needs an audience. Artists always wish to be understood.

I briefly mentioned a third character in Riddle of the Sphinx above (he’s also the ‘mystery guest’, 12 Across, in that crossword). As he says to his host,

TYLER: I always hated cryptic crosswords. Why can’t people say what they mean, rather than trying to trick you all the time?

And from 2017, that’s a familiar sentiment. In Riddle of the Sphinx, both Nina and Sphinx have a go at murdering each other—through the game—but they would both have survived if it weren’t for the interference of this outsider, who insists that the prop gun be used for real. Tyler ends the game, and cuts short Sphinx’s immortality, ensuring that he fulfills his namesake’s destiny by destroying himself.

So, even without the pleasure of finding a Nina, the Dracula crossword resonates with these themes, on a micro-scale. We watch Mark, pen in hand, playing a game that requires decoding encrypted clues; the solution he shows us (repeatedly, “Dracula is my lord”) is nonsense, and suggests that he is self-obsessed (a writer of Dracula obsessed with his own self-insert). But if we reject that surface solution, and figure out the cipher for ourselves—if we act as the Nina here—we find blood. We find stories.

Among these crossword clues, the one we hear Mark read aloud as he sits waiting for Dracula in The Dark Compass is the same one he tweeted along with the Guardian story:

A Mark Gatiss character wields a pen while playing a game. #justmofftissthings

The clue for 12 Across is easily recognized as not being about Dracula at all, but a different Victorian story, Frankenstein. This solution is a little too on the nose for even an “&Lit” clue (cryptic-speak for a relatively literal clue). And maybe Mark quoted it in his tweet because an easy clue makes for a better hook for the show. Or maybe he quoted it because he’s a fan of Victorian horror generally. But as someone used to seeing double meanings in both cryptic clues and literary subtext, I can’t help but be reminded of another unscrupulous doctor, who might also be described as a “tanner”. This ‘mystery guest’ doesn’t fit the grid, but... that never stopped Mark, now did it?

And of course...

... you know what they say about a weapon introduced in the first act.

#BBC Dracula #Inside No.9 #Sherlock #The Dark Compass #Riddle of the Sphinx #Steve Pemberton #Mark Gatiss #cryptic crosswords #text and subtext #learning the rules of the game #blood is lives #blood is stories #Chekhov's gun #BBC Dracula meta

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huny-bun · 2 years

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They should do the Sherlock books like their doing Dracula daily though,,, think of how wild this site would go for Good Sherlock content.

#dracula daily #2022 #bbc sherlock #sherlockbbc #tumblr meta #funny #joke #but also seriously #a serialized novel series like this #but its #john watson #wow

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anncanta · 2 years

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‘Dracula’ BBC: the hermeneutics of the transformative text

The 21st century in literature and cinema – an art that combines the features of literature and theatre – has brought us many new ideas, genres and interactions between the reader/viewer and the work. It can already be said with a high degree of certainty that postmodernists' assumptions about the exhaustion of literary and narrative culture have not come true. The more texts appear and are read, watched and interpreted, the more obvious it becomes that what was only outlined in the second half of the twentieth century, but today turns out to be the mainstream.

I'm talking, of course, about the change and, if you like, the narrative shift that occurred at the turn of the century and that brought into popular culture (in the ‘classical’ one it existed for a very long time already) the transformative text.

In order to understand what this is and how it relates to the subject of the article, we will have to start by looking at the text of Dracula in the context of the traditional European hero narrative.

How is Dracula different from other similar stories? Because it is different, and no one has any doubts about it. The question is in what area these differences lie and what they mean.

It seems to me that the peculiarity of this film is mainly in the story and essence of the protagonist.

The authors, followed by the audience and critics, call Dracula an anti-hero and never tire of reminding us that the story is told from his side and shown through his eyes. But I think it's a little more complicated.

The fact is that Dracula is not an anti-hero, but a hero and a villain at the same time. This is the first unusual detail. Second, this text has no antagonist, at least not an antagonist in the usual sense. We cannot, in fact, consider Dracula's enemies and opponents – Jonathan Harker and Agatha Van Helsing – to be antagonists. At the same time, despite the absence of the traditional ‘hero-villain’ opposition (which, as it is believed, gives tension to the story and characters and does not allow them to become flat posters outlining the author’s point of view), the beauty and strength of this story are precisely in the volume, first of all, in the volume image of the main character.

The thing is, Dracula here is not just turned, as Moffat and Gatiss say, into the hero of his own story. That is, Dracula is formally placed in the centre. (Although in storytelling there is no ‘formal’ – any change in structure and form made immediately affects the content. As soon as you put the character in the centre of the story, the story begins to develop in a certain way, and this affects both the character itself and what happens to him or her). So, being turned into the main character of the film, Dracula, with all his questions and answers, with problems of self-identification, with needs from which he cannot escape, becomes at the same time the one who constantly tests him for strength, who confronts him and who fights him.

It is not Agatha or Jonathan that makes Dracula change, although each of them contributes greatly in their own way. Dracula is forced to change first of all by himself.

And this is a completely unique and amazing situation, which is difficult to find analogues in popular culture. The traditional narrative of Western European stories described a thousand times in many manuals for authors and scientific works, presupposes the presence of a protagonist and an antagonist, and the construction of a plot based on their conflict.

But the BBC's Dracula story isn't about how to defeat the villain. It's about how to defeat yourself.

That is why this text is so unique. Being based on the novel, which at the time gave rise to a whole genre, in the twenty-first century, within the framework of another art form, it sets the coordinates in which the transformative text, well known to the generation of Bram Stoker, comes to the viewer at a new level.

But what is a transformative text, why did it become important at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and why is it again important now?

We are little aware of how the literary situation and the general cultural atmosphere in Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries – when Bram Stoker's novel was first published – was saturated with mystical, esoteric and religious-philosophical searches and ideas. In big cities, secret societies were created and gathered, Masonic lodges and esoteric circles gained popularity, and a feeling of the mysterious and unknown was in the air.

The same Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes cycle – the first story comes out in 1887, ten years before Dracula – was a deeply religious person, as well as a philosopher and mystic. Among other things, he was a member of one of the most famous in the European esoteric tradition of secret societies the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The stories about Sherlock Holmes are as much alchemical as they are positivist-rational, or perhaps even more.

And in this situation, around this time, a genre form began to emerge in European literature, which (of course, with a large degree of conventionality) can be called a transformative text.

It is not always a transformative text, as we now see it – a story full of symbolic and philosophical meanings and images, involving the reader in a deep dialogue with the characters, events and – oneself. Often, as in the case of late Romantic works or symbolist-decadent ones – such texts were literary manifestos that proclaimed the onset of a new ‘artistic era’, straightforward and declarative, in general, more or less reducible to the images and metaphors used in them.

The transformative text familiar to us matures and gains strength around the middle of the 20th century, with the emergence and development of mass literature. This is not at all accidental – like any art form that grows from an archetypal root, it retains a direct connection with the basic genre layer – in this case, a fairy tale.

It is important to emphasize here that when I say that the transformative text was most vividly developed in the middle of the 20th century, this does not mean that all of its former types (including those presented in classical literature like O. Wilde`s and E. T. A. Hoffman`s works) were ‘undeveloped’ and ‘primitive’. But at that time it was difficult to talk about the transformative text as a genre. Rather, it was just a matter of single works, to which the authors of the stories of the 20th and 21st century are obviously referred.

Also in the case of a literary work, the social, receptive, reader context is of great importance. With the advent of a mass reader, capable of perceiving and experiencing a text with a strong archetypal background, stories of this kind have an interlocutor. Moreover, the interlocutor is collective and complex, versatile and ambiguous. Along with the situation of the development of literature, which throughout the first half of the 20th century continued to move from the external to the internal, this creates ideal conditions for the development of the genre.

The most striking and widely known representative of this genre in the 20th century is, of course, The Lord of the Rings. This text has become not only beloved and significant for many people, but in a certain way ‘attracted’ readers, thinkers, philosophers, teachers, and yes, mystics of several generations. It unfolded before the astonished viewer a huge panorama of mythological meanings, contexts and multi-level complex stories. And eventually, it becomes one of the most famous texts, whose inner reality ‘splashed’ into the external reader's world – by role-playing games, fan communities etc., influencing all those involved in the metaphysical reality, the centre of which is Tolkien`s work.

Knowing this, you at all can`t be surprised by the success of Harry Potter, a book of the new turn of the century, which has absorbed both the features of the transformative text of the early 20th century (symbolic images, the central character is the saviour of the world, a disappointed dark character forced to atone for many years of enduring guilt, the struggle between good and evil, the saturation of the story with mythological, symbolic, and alchemical details, etc.) and elements specific to the new time. The latter is especially interesting since it is in Harry Potter for the first time began to emerge what will be fully manifested in the audiovisual texts of the first two decades of the 21st century – Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Dracula – the inseparability of the basic logic of the archetypal, fabulous, and casual.

In particular, it was Harry Potter that actually removed the principle of ‘dual world’ – the former basic plot and content law of stories of this type. Before, no matter how unusual, complex, magical and special the world was, into which – with the help of a certain spell or object – the main characters fell, it was always separated from the world of everyday life by an impenetrable high wall. To the extent that the characters living on our, human, side of this wall turned out to be unsure of the reality of the magical world, being forced to prove to themselves and others the authenticity of their unusual experience.

And only in Harry Potter did the boundaries of the worlds become permeable, and the world of wizards and Muggles appeared to the reader as two parallel realities, neither of which has priority over the other and is more or less authentic. These are just two ways of being in the world. Obviously – with a considerable amount of irony says Joanne Rowling – that each of the inhabitants of these worlds considers his own way to be universal and the only correct one, which does not mean, however, that this is the case.

Such a structure shows exactly what happens not only within such stories at the level of the plot but also with the genre itself. Starting with Harry Potter, in this genre, became possible to organically coexist and work the archetypal, the fabulous, and the mystical elements and forms. At the same time, in a particular text, the archetypal can be ‘divided’ into the archetypal-fairy tale (symbols, elements, and tropes of a fairy tale) and the archetypal-religious-mystical (Christian symbols and symbols of alchemy).

A typical example is the appearance of Euros Holmes in the fourth season of Sherlock. As a woman, she symbolizes the feminine, mysterious, mystical, lunar beginning in the structure of the story and the relationship between the brothers. At the same time, both in terms of the plot and from the point of view of the fabula, having arisen unexpectedly, she seems to be ‘wedged’ into the story and is placed literally between the Holmes brothers, disrupting and changing their usual dynamics.

In this sense, Euros is felt not like a younger, but rather like a middle sister, which, together with her feminine nature, refers to the image of the middle path, no man's land, terra incognita, and – a connective tissue, whose function is to support and maintain form. Not the creation of the world – the masculine forces are in charge of creation – but the preservation of the world`s unity and ensuring development. At the same time, development and preservation do not promise an idyllic ‘feminine’ – as it was seen in a reduced form in the Victorian era, to which the secret sister motif refers – the name Eurus recalls the deity of the east wind, capricious, restless, furious, and anxious. And with the image of Eurus, the strange, incomprehensible and psychotic enters Sherlock, disturbing the peace and triggering the creative potential.

Such details and structural elements can be traced in great numbers in all the texts I have listed. Already in Sherlock and Doctor Who appeared what in Dracula will flourish.

The transformative text stops pretending to be something else.

You see, after all, every time we read or listen to, or watch such a story, we somehow relate to its character or characters. And even if the main goal of the story is not this, at one of the levels it always invites us to focus on it, to compare ourselves with the hero, to identify with him or her, as well as with his or her values and decisions. This is its absolute norm – to create a screen, projected onto which, our own experiences and states can be realized and – thanks to correlation with a ‘positive’ example, rethought and changed.

Already in Harry Potter, it happens differently. Not to mention the fact that Rowling's novel does not contain an unambiguously positive example and some indicated right path (in one of the episodes Dumbledore directly says, ‘The world is not divided into good people and Death Eaters, Harry’), at the very beginning, in the first book, the text literally parodies this practice. Yes, I'm talking about the Mirror of Erised episode. Remember – the mirror of Erised shows the people`s most secret desires but does not give either knowledge or truth? This moment directly models the situation of the reader's collision with the transformative text. And it says: here you will not find what you need. Search elsewhere. As we learn already at the end of the first book, search within yourself.

But if in Harry Potter traces of the traditional connection between the reader and the text, albeit in a modified form, are preserved, then Sherlock seriously tests this connection for strength, and Dracula completely discards it.

First of all, as I have already said, this is due to the absence of an antagonist and the placement of Dracula at the centre of the story.

Dracula is by definition a ‘dark’ character. In Stoker's novel, he acts as a metaphor for the incomprehensible, mysterious, cruel, strange – and yes, close to the unconscious and psychotic. Such Euros Holmes, hidden in the closet. Oh, sorry, was it literally the closet where she was? The BBC's Dracula brings a shadowy figure out of a closet and sees what happens.

At the same time, what is important, it is not a hero ‘with his own truth’, a misunderstood sufferer or a rejected youngest son, emerging from the darkness of the scenes (this archetypal image instantly levels out the properties of a dark character and does not add anything new to the story, simply changing the poles). The thing is, he is exactly a dark character.

And this is what happens.

It is impossible to associate oneself with a dark character, to identify oneself with him or her, and even more so to ‘equalize’ with him or her. The ‘hotbeds’ of falling in love with James Moriarty, Gregory House and Draco Malfoy that flare up in different fandoms are nothing more than forms of teenage protest. The Mirror of Erised shows deep desires but does not give knowledge and truth. (Yes, Gregory House is not the main character. He is an antagonist, considered up close. And the whole story about a brilliant and psychopathic diagnostician is an experiment, the purpose of which is to see what will happen if the wishes of the antagonist and his fans come true, and he sits in the crown and royal regalia for more than five minutes. Not that it inspires much).

At the same time, being the hero of his own story, the dark character, like the classic solar hero, goes a long way toward development, but, unlike the first one, he does not have such luxury as a good enemy and a magical sword.

And this is the key point. There is no external antagonist and no ‘great mission’ – no coming-of-age story that underlies all goodie stories. Instead, there is a story about how to understand yourself.

And there is no better genre for such a story than a transformative text.

Before, we have already considered how the imagery component works in Dracula. Now I propose to look at how three key narratives – Christian, Jungian and fairy tale – manifest themselves in it and how they form the narrative framework of a transformative text in the new century, using old and modern artistic means.

Christian narrative. Man in a nightgown

I don't think it will come as a surprise to most readers if I say that Christian optics in Dracula is one of the key parts. There is nothing surprising in this, given how densely and deeply the Christian context is embedded in European culture. But in this case, it is important for us to see not only how Christian references and metaphors work in the film, but how the entire narrative landscape here turns out to be, in a certain sense, conditioned by Christian logic.

You will have to start from the very beginning.

Let's take a look at what we are shown in the very first scene of the film, where this whole story begins.

The prologue of the first episode shows us a person of indeterminate gender and age sitting in a closed cramped room resembling a prison. This man is dressed in a strange long robe of off-white colour, similar to a dress or a nightgown. The person is clearly confused and is in a state of either delirium or half asleep. After that, the camera abruptly moves ‘inside’ the character, and we see through his eyes what seems to be a giant fly, completely blocking the view.

Already in the next scene, we learn that this man is Jonathan Harker, who miraculously escaped from the castle of Count Dracula and found shelter in a monastery in Budapest.

From Jonathan we learn about what is happening in Dracula's castle, Jonathan will become the one for whom Dracula will leave this castle, thanks to him Dracula will first penetrate the monastery, and then inside the space separated by sacred bread, in which Agatha and Mina will hide, and, finally, we will meet him in the 21st century – already as a name for a centre that accumulates the efforts of healers and warriors (and has an ambiguous reputation) and a person who looks at visitors and employees from a portrait in which he is depicted young, healthy and strong, as it was before entering Dracula's house.

I think you have already guessed what image he represents here.

I have already spoken in detail about how the interaction between Jonathan and Dracula takes place and what it means, including in a Christian context as the first real collision of the Count with the manifestation of the divine, in my other article.

Here I will only note that the climactic scene on the roof, in which Dracula falls to the floor, feeling the sunlight reflected from the cross around Harker's neck flood his face, is completely repeated in the 21st century – when in the centre of Jonathan Harker, before leaving, Dracula approaches Jonathan`s portrait, the Count's face, in the same way, is illuminated by light, and in the same way, this light is reflected. Only now Dracula is not afraid, and he does not notice it. The next time (I think it is no coincidence the third) he will face direct sunlight, and then he will finally be able to look at it. Already this set of visual metaphors shows that it was the relationship with Jonathan and his image that made it possible for the Count to walk this path.

However, not all so simple. Let's return to Harker himself, to the way he is shown in the monastery, and to the visual metaphors used in this part of the story.

The image of a person dressed in something that looks like a nightgown (either a shroud or tattered diapers, or literally ‘garments of skin’*), of indeterminate gender and age, extremely emaciated, in a viscous state of consciousness, absorbed by nightmarish visions, when everything seems to him mired in the material to the limit – this is the Christian image of man as such, a man after falling into the material world, who completely ‘disconnected’ himself from communion with the divine. And he is also the image of Christ, Who took upon Himself the lot and oppression of the human.

The incarnation of Christ in the Christian narrative is not only birth in a human body, not only ‘The Word became flesh’, that is, the good news and the promise that if God was incarnated in a human, then a human can open up to the state of divinity – this is a restriction of infinite to the limits of the narrow consciousness of a single ordinary person. That`s why we see the fly on full screen at the beginning, as a symbol of the ultimate ‘density’ and the impossibility of seeing anything other than the physical world. This symbolic context is confirmed by Dracula, saying, ‘Where there is flesh, there are flies.’

Thus, at the beginning of the story, we literally see a man who is ‘at the bottom of himself’, frightened, wandering in the dark. According to Christian tradition and logic, this is the person that the Savior, first of all, enters into a relationship with, the person whose level He descends to. ‘For it is not the healthy ones who need a doctor, but the sick ones.’

Jonathan's conversation with the nuns is a clear allusion to the meeting of Jesus with the myrrh-bearing women, who, by the way, did not recognize Christ. An interesting inversion of this situation is the story of Mina, whose face Harker does not remember, but who remembers him perfectly and is ready to accept him in any guise and remain faithful. Unlike Agatha, who knows Harker and studies him closely, while bluntly stating that she considers Jonathan's talk about God and Mina`s about faith naive, and instead of relying on faith, inviting them to make a plan.

And finally, the Jonathan Harker Foundation, which I have already mentioned, created by Mina, is undoubtedly a reference to the church as an institution, with all its sometimes not the most simple aspects. In this sense, Dracula`s phrase about it sounds incredibly ironic, ‘Johnny was a good person. How is this place related to him?’

In closing, let's revisit Harker's first appearance in the story and his significance to Dracula.

Dracula ordered a brilliant lawyer from London (a lawyer is the one who justifies, who defends you in court and who is always on your side, even if you are guilty), who was to become his guide to the world of people, a guide to the light. Dracula, in fact, was counting on his help to heal his infirmity. And his saviour turned out to be a tormented man in rags, who in the face of death and pain, refused darkness.

And since, despite everything, Dracula's intentions were sincere, feeding on the flesh and blood of this man, he returned humanity to himself. And therefore he was able to go further along the path chosen by him – albeit unconsciously.

Part 2.

Part 3.

*'The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.' — Genesis 3:21 — The New International Version (NIV)

#harry potter #sherlock bbc #house md #dracula 2020 #bbc dracula #dracula bbc #count dracula #agatha van helsing #jonathan harker #meta

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belles-magnetic-violin · 2 years

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youtube

Why would they do this to us, it makes no sense UNLESS.....

#bbc sherlock #tjlc #sherlock meta #asib #bbc dracula #cherchez le bébé #Youtube

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sophyanderson221 · 2 years

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If I LOVE YOU was a name

Remember the I love you coffin and Mycroft saying it wasn’t a name.

What if it was parts of a name?

There is a name containing the I love you letters in the Mofftiss-verse:

Captain Sokolov Yuri.

I, Sokolov Yuri.

For this captain (unnamed in Stoker’s Dracula iirc), this ghost driver (found dead with his arms tied to the wheel) they came up with a name that says I love you.

Will this come up in S5 ?

#sherlock meta #S5 speculation #bbc dracula #parallels #M.C.BF

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victorianpining · 1 month

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Hello,

I hope you're doing great!

I've been watching bbc dracula recently but I can't find your meta with bbc sherlock and bbc dracula parallels - tumblr doesn't want me to brainrot maybe aha

Is there a post you made with all of your meta?

Thanks a lot!!

Hello! You probably aren't finding that because I don't think I made a written meta along those lines. A lot of the parallels I noticed get mentioned in the Dracula episode of the retrospective I did a couple years ago, or come out in some way in my self indulgent Dracula!AU Johnlock fic. Sorry to not have a list for you! But I think with as in-the-weeds as I got in planning that fic, trying to make a coherent, concise list would be more or less impossible.

#asks

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redscharlach · 5 years

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Then quite unexpectedly, some Dracula meta appeared

While rewatching Dracula (again, ahem), I had a few thoughts about how the ending of episode 3 is foreshadowed by ideas from episode 1, and thought I’d cobble them into a semi-coherent post in case anyone was interested. So below the cut, you’ll find a brief bit of Dracula meta about sunlight, symbolism and sex.

(By the way, I mention a couple of things from the BBC’s Obsessed With Dracula podcast, which is a fascinating listen if you want to hear Messrs Gatiss and Moffat talk more about the ideas and imagery behind the series.)

Anyway, here’s a relevant quote from episode 1, then those who wish to dive further may do so:

“The castle was a monument to the architect’s lost love and the sunlight to which he would never return. And what else is sunlight but the face of one’s beloved?” – Jonathan Harker, The Rules of the Beast

Ol’ Johnny Blue-Eyes means this metaphorically, but, in episode 1, we hear Dracula talk about the sun as if it’s literally his long-lost love (“I haven’t seen her in hundreds of years. Describe her to me.”). At the start of episode 3, he’s even moved to tears by seeing “her” on TV. We’re shown throughout that sunlight is a source of fear to him, but the sun itself is described using the imagery of romantic longing. “She” is his unattainable beloved, whose touch would mean death to him (or so he thinks).

Now, in Obsessed With Dracula part 3, Moffat and Gatiss talk a bit about the idea of merging or conflating two or more characters. It’s an idea that previous Dracula adaptations have often used, and they openly borrow it: for instance, this show’s version of Jonathan Harker is a conflation of the novel’s Harker with Renfield (even though Renfield appears as a separate character later). But they also use symbolic merging of characters within their own story, most obviously with Agatha and Zoe. In real life, a great niece can’t turn into her great-aunt, even if they look alike, but fiction makes the merging possible, so the same actress can play both roles and both can play the same dramatic role in the story.

Is the woman in the last few scenes of episode 3 Zoe or Agatha? Symbolically, she’s both, connected by family blood and melded via Dracula’s. And Dracula, who was already merging them in his own mind, spots that the merging has begun to actually occur when he spots Agatha’s accent coming out of Zoe’s mouth.

But just as the show conflates Zoe and Agatha, Dracula also conflates Agatha/Zoe with the third unattainable “lady friend” in his life, the sun. The show echoes this idea visually as well, most blatantly in the bloodletting scene, as you can see here.

Yes, two minutes after Zoe has threatened to break Dracula with a sunbeam, she’s shown positively glowing with sunlight. Meanwhile, he stares at her from the shadows with rapt attention, rather in the same way he stared the sun at the TV earlier.

In the same scene, we find out that because Zoe has cancer, her blood would kill him. So it turns out she’s like his beloved sun in two ways: 1) so bright and fascinating that he can’t help but gaze in rapture, and 2) potentially deadly.

The association reaches its peak when the merged Zoe/Agatha exposes him to real sunlight at the end. She basically IS the sun to him, now.

It’s also at this point that Dracula becomes aware that Zoe/Agatha is in pain (it’s Zoe’s cancer, but it’s Agatha’s voice speaking), and thus she acquires another similarity with the sun: 3) something that can provoke Dracula into feeling a genuine goddamn human emotion for once in his 500-year-of-not-really-giving-a-shit-about-anything-much undeath. It’s not OMG TRUE LOVE, but it’s a pulse of compassion from a heart that everyone (including its owner) naturally assumed was long dead, and that makes it real and important. When he drinks her blood at the end, he’s NOT thinking “okay, I might as well just die now and this will kill me, goodbye world” – he’s acting solely on the instinct to take away her pain. And yes, doing so will probably be the death of him too, but he does it in spite of, not because of, that. For once, he’s actually thinking about someone other than himself. It’s not redemption, but it’s a baby step in that direction. And that’s more than he ever realized he could make.

And now, a minor digression into art history:

This is William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (a painting that will be familiar to Hannibal fans, of course). The imagery is taken from the Book of Revelations: the Dragon is the Devil, while the woman is usually associated with the Virgin Mary. The fact that the name “Dracula” comes from the word “dragon” is mentioned in episode 2, and he’s directly referred to as the Devil several times. Meanwhile, if we’re looking for a virginal female figure, a nun would seem to fit the bill pretty well. As for the “clothed with the sun” part, please step into this dream sequence.

In their climactic (pun intended) dream scene, Dracula is on top and Zoe/Agatha is on the bottom, merging with the sun’s surface. And when the camera pulls back, we see that she’s covered by artfully placed modesty bedsheets, so it looks like she’s literally “clothed with the sun”.

In a weird symbolic sense, then, Dracula is finally united in bliss with his long lost love: the sun. And by “united in bliss”, yeah, he is symbolically shagging the sun (now there’s a phrase I never knew I’d ever type). But it’s also an embrace of human life and feeling, of three things vampires aren’t supposed to have access to: sunlight, sex and emotional connection. If what he was doing before was living forever in shame, then now he is choosing to die in a blaze of humanity. Which is, to me at least, what makes those scenes extraordinarily touching.

TL;DR version: Maybe all I’m trying to say is that, in a highly metaphorical sense, “the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one.” Ah well, it’s a classic for a reason.

#dracula #claes bang #dracula 2020 #bbc dracula #zoe van helsing #i wouldn't normally do this kind of thing #but i will if nobody else will #write the slightly pretentious meta you want to see in the world

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hikarinotaisho19 · 5 years

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DRACULA/SHERLOCK MIRRORING

MINA as MARY MORSTAN

JOHNATHAN H. as JOHN WATSON

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yeah-oh-shit · 5 years

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Sherlock S5/Dracula Meta

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve never written any fan theories or meta before (although I have so many), so please bear with me. I know my theory is going to sound a little out there, but I here it is: I think BBC Dracula is actually Sherlock S5, or else that it is somehow going to lead directly into it without warning.

Warning: this is going to be a long piece. I’m going to break this down as follows, because there are many different pieces of evidence to examine:

TFP, the story and the episode

Gothic Horror, HOB, Dracula

Vision, Timing, 20/20

The Final Problem

The first one is a fan theory I read probably 6-9 months ago that sadly I can’t find anymore (if you know who this person is, please please comment so I can give credit!). Basically this person was talking about how the naming of the episodes typically has some tie to what occurs in the original story by that same name, but how TFP has nothing AT ALL to do with the original story. In the original story, Sherlock goes face to face with Moriarty, and we are all lead to believe that both he and Moriarty die over the Richenbach falls. In all reality, ACD had meant to kill off Sherlock in this story, and stopped writing Sherlock Holmes stories for ten years before bringing him back in “The Empty House,” due to the public outrage and demand for more stories. So, the logic follows that maybe the one thing that they have in common is that they are both pitted as the end to Sherlock Holmes (in the story, he is dead; in the show we are given [force fed] an ending, it's made to seem like the final piece). The author of this theory also pointed out the show runners in this way are comparing ending the series with TFP (no canon Johnlock) to ending the show with Sherlock dead. We are left with a straight-washed version of John and Sherlock, with Mary’s voice controlling the narrative and that narrative being: It Doesn’t Matter Who You Are. The chemistry between John and Sherlock has been more or less completely lost throughout S4, and so we are left with this empty, dead-feeling version of them that doesn’t feel true to the characters we know and love. Even casuals thought S4 sucked.. this is why. They metaphorically killed them/killed the show.

Before S4 aired, Mofftiss had said that if they pulled off what they had planned, it would be the biggest thing in television. Well, what we got in TFP doesn’t really fit that at all, does it? What could they be referring to: A secret sister? Not really that epic. Even if we find out that most of S4 didn’t take place (either EMP theory or some other way of explaining it) that isn’t really a new trope. The audience discovering that they have actually been seeing things that are inside the main character’s head the entire time has been done over and over (Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind come to mind off hand). So what could this huge, history making move be? The argument that the meta I read previously made was that the show will come back (from the dead) unexpectedly, with no warning. That it will be a revival and in that revival, we will get canon Johnlock. I can’t remember if OP explicitly theorized that Dracula is actually Sherlock S5, but I think so.

Now, I was with this theory from the beginning.. there is just something that feels possible to me, despite the fact that it sounds far fetched. Dracula seems like a weird, random thing to do when Sherlock, Moftiss’s mutual obsession, isn’t finished. (Also creating an escape room to keep up hype is odd if the show is over, but I digress.) I just don’t believe Moftiss’s constant claims that they couldn’t get everyone together to film S5 because of schedules, that they wanted to take a break, that they don’t know if they will do more (when Moffatt has talked about wanting a 5 season arc before, not to mention John Yorke). And then there’s the fact that we know they have filmed scenes that we have never seen (Niagara Falls anyone?). All this evidence that S5 is definitely coming, combined with the fact that we haven’t heard anything about it but have heard about Dracula, sort of fell into place for me. Despite me being willing to buy into it, this theory still seemed a little far fetched. But wait, there’s more!

Victorian Gothic Literature, HOB, Dracula

A lot of people have been talking about how gay Dracula is going to be, and citing evidence of the connections between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde (Dracula was written directly after his trial and Dracula is read as having characteristics of Wilde) as evidence. This, along with the extremely homoerotic last clip of the trailer, certain parts of the text that read as queer coded (I haven’t read Dracula, so I don’t know much but have seen some things floating around that seem v gay to me), and what we know about queer coding in Victorian gothic literature in general, all make a convincing argument. Gatiss actually recently confirmed (more or less) that Dracula will be bisexual in the upcoming series. And while I’m all about gay vampires (I am a huge vampire fan, seriously I love Vampire Diaries and True Blood and was one of “those girls” during the middle school Twilight craze), there is something about Dracula being Moftiss’s first cannon gay show that feels both disappointing and incongruous.

I want to bring up the All Ghost Stories are Gay Stories meta by heimishtheidealhusband. Now, this meta was written in 2015, in anticipation of TAB. Its great and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t/don’t remember it. The part I am most interested in is actually the reading of HOB, which I will get to in a bit. The takeaways from the first bit of the meta are that monsters and ghosts (to a different extent) are representations of queer desire in Victorian gothic literature. I’m summarizing drastically here, but as queer desire was obviously unacceptable in Victorian times, writers would obfuscate it by creating an “other,” a monster or ghost, that represented the queer or “inverted” desire and also demonstrated the fear and horror that society had for homosexuality. So the monster becomes the representation of homosexuality (homosexual acts or desires) that is pursuing the protagonists. Oftentimes, the protagonists were originally obsessed with the monsters or the concept of them, before actually confronting them, but are terrified and frightened when it actually occurs (think Dr. Jeckyll or Frankenstein). This meta also specifically talks about Dracula and vampires as the most queerly coded of the Victorian monsters: “Think about your vampire tropes: Dracula sneaks into your bedroom at night, lusting after your bodily fluids. The victim, meanwhile, is paralyzed with fear, but also excitement. (Oh hi phobic enchantment, I see you there!) The tension mounts until there’s a climactic penetration of fangs into flesh. And lots of sucking. Then think about the fact that the one doing the penetrating and the one being penetrated can be - and often are - both male.”

This all seems to bode great for our queer reading of the new BBC Dracula, yay! Vampires are clearly queer coded, and making it explicit makes sense and seems like a no-brainer. But I think it’s important to point out the ways in which this is also potentially (and likely) problematic. In Victorian times, there weren’t really many other options for portraying homosexuality. This is part of what makes what these writers did so brilliant - they were unable to show these desires as normal and healthy, because it was too dangerous and society didn’t see them that way (hence the use of the word “inverts” for homosexuals). Using the horror genre allowed them much more freedom to explore homosexuality, identity, and societal reactions to it, but also obfuscated the difference between reactions to homosexuality and the thing itself. In some of the stories, like Frankenstein, the monsters are actually misunderstood. Frankenstein’s monster only turns evil after experiencing society’s horrified reaction to it. However, in a modern context, I wonder about the message it sends to remake a Victorian story in a modern time and make the monster queer.

To flush this out a bit, I think it would be helpful to take a look at how Moftiss (and particularly Mark Gatiss) have played with this Victorian monster trope already, in Sherlock. Which brings us to HOB. heimishistheidealhusband points out that ACD’s original story “The Hound of the Baskervilles” would definitely fit into the scope of Victorian gothic literature, and their meta “All Ghost Stories are Gay Stories” does a particularly good job of breaking this episode down with the lens of Victorian gothic literature and queer coding. I am going to quote this reading here, and also also want to touch on the reading of this episode by Rebekah of TJLC Explained.

Here is what heimishtheidealhusband has to say about this episode: “Here’s why BBC Sherlock’s treatment of Hound is particularly beautiful. The creature – the hound – is our queer monster. In ACD’s Hound, the hound was indeed physically altered – he was painted in phosphorous to give him a hellish, glowing appearance. And the hound was actually the one to do the killing. In BBC’s Hound, there’s “the hound” – the monster that everyone is afraid of which is actually imaginary, and “the dog” – the real thing that actually exists. In other words, in this version, the “queer creature” in the horror story has been de-monstered. Homospectrality is being flipped on his head – rather than separating the man from the queer, they’re separating the queer from the monster. Because the dog isn’t inherently evil, it’s just the poison in the air that everyone is breathing that makes them fear it, and see a monster instead of an innocent dog. So in this treatment, if the dog/hound represents queerness, heteronormativity becomes a poisonous element in the air we all breathe.”

This is why it is so important that Hounds is plural (as opposed to the original story “The Hound of the Baskervilles”). They are emphasizing the differentiation between the two dogs, the differentiation between the monster and the queer. Rebakah of TJLC Explained also points out that despite all the conspiracy theories, there is actually no monster inside Baskerville, but rather a rabbit that glows “like a fairy,” (let’s all take a moment to remember the skipping dance and sing-song voice Ben does in this scene, in case it wasn’t obviously queerly coded enough). It’s hard to imagine a less-threatening animal than a glowing bunny.

Mark Gatiss has been very open about his love for horror and the gothic. He has studied the gothic writer M.R. James, and was involved with the BBC documentary about James that explored his “repressed sexuality.” He clearly loves and respects the genre, and is familiar with queer readings of Victorian gothic lit. In HOB, he chose to engage with the genre in a modern context, and to separate the monster from the queer. In doing so, he points out the inaccuracy and harm that coupling queerness with monstrosity generates. With this in mind, the choice to make Dracula feels like a step backwards, especially when you bear in mind that Gatiss has actually said that he isn’t really interested in gothic horror anymore. In an interview with Shadows at the Door in 2017, Gatiss stated: “I used to think nothing could exist without waistcoats and bubbling test tubes and now I’m actually more interested in modern horror; the gothic but in a modern context. I don’t think it has to be about the old and obviously I still love it but it doesn’t have to be about candelabra and castles. You can get the same feeling from modern methods, and in a way that is more frightening.”

All this isn’t to say that gothic horror or vampire stories isn’t still interesting and worthwhile as a concept, or that a canonically queer Dracula wouldn’t/couldn’t be badass. (I for one would love a Vampire Diaries remake wherein Damon’s character is a woman, but I’m off topic..). It doesn’t even mean that there can’t still be something complex or provoking in this representation for a modern audience. But it also feels dangerously close to repeating the queer coded (or even plainly queer) villain that we have all seen a hundred times from horror films and Disney movies. At best, still doesn’t seem particularly new or exciting, and at worst it could reinforce frankly problematic and dangerous stereotypes.

I am now going to analyze the actual trailer for BBC Dracula that was released a few weeks ago, because it is going to help me to illustrate this point. One thing that struck me most when watching it was just how horrific it really is. The 45 second long trailer includes: a fly that crawls into an eye, a bloody fingernail being ripped off, a blood covered hand, something that appears to be being birthed, a scary, old-looking Dracula with a bloody tongue, and bloody flesh that is being carved. There are at least 3 instances of mouths: the fangs at the very beginning, the mouth with bloody tongue, and the frame after the gunshot of a mouth that looks desiccated like a zombie, that only flashes for a split second. All in all, it’s not only scary, it’s quite disgusting. The three bloody or otherwise monstrous mouths that we see relate most strongly to the covert sexual tones of Victorian gothic literature (and also remind me of Moriarty’s oral fixation in TAB). These are some of the most disturbing of the images. While the intro fangs are pretty mild, the clip of Dracula’s frightening face and bloody tongue (which is followed immediately by the bloody flesh being carved) and the decayed mouth are both quite gruesome. If we apply the metaphors that we know from Sherlock, they are making some pretty damning connections. The mouths in-and-of-themselves could be read in a sexual way, but then there is the added fact that the decayed mouth appears directly after a gunshot, which we know has been tied to dicks/gay sex in Sherlock (and generally). The bloody flesh being carved on a table also recalls the food/sex metaphor in Sherlock, specifically reminding me of how disgusting the meal scene is in John’s wedding to Mary. Food and eating can be really disgusting, and this trailer makes a point to show us that. When we connect this back to the sex metaphor again, and give it a queer lens, we are once again being metaphorically told that queer sex is disgusting and horrific.

Whether or not Moftiss are purposefully making these metaphorical statements, they definitely went out of their way to make this variation of Dracula particularly scary, horrifying, and gruesome. It’s always possible that they are just hyping up the goriness in order to get audiences excited. It’s also possible that they are highlighting the disgustingness of Dracula’s monstrosity as a means of engaging with the public perception of homosexuality or that they will complicate the narrative in some other way. But even if we give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume they aren’t trying to paint queerness in a bad light, this highlighting of the disgusting nature of Dracula’s monstrosity doesn’t seem to push forward any kind of unique, modern narrative. We have seen this, this is exactly what Victorian gothic literature is all about. They needed to explore homosexuality through its repression, to make it monstrous, because they lived in a time when there were few alternative ways to explore it (except for maybe the example of our sweet “bohemian” boys - check out this meta from artemisastarte to learn more about bohemianism and queerness in Sherlock Holmes). But in our modern day, is this really that exciting? Is this the kind of queer representation we want and deserve in 2019 (soon to be 2020)? To me, the answer is no, especially in light of the incredible and complex work they have done in Sherlock toward building a queer love story that is normalized, and completely removed from any conflation with monstrosity.

The fact that Dracula is tied so heavily to Sherlock makes this distinction even greater. Gatiss said that they got the idea for Dracula from a still image of Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of Sherlock with his collar up. Supposedly it reminded them of Dracula and the BBC asked them if they wanted to make it. In an interview, when asked about Dracula in relationship to Sherlock, Gatiss called it a “stablemate” of Sherlock Holmes. I’m not really sure how we are supposed to take this, and he doesn’t explain at all (of course), but that would mean that they are in some way similar or connected. I think he doesn’t just mean that they both come from him and Moffatt, as that is rather obvious and was acknowledged in the question itself. Both shows are not only created by Moftiss, but written in the same format, produced by Sue Virtue, and shot at Hartwood Studios. They also really emphasize the connection to Sherlock in the trailer (which isn’t surprising because advertising), and also in the new Netflix description, which states only: “From the makers of ‘Sherlock,’ Claes Bang stars as Dracula in this brand-new miniseries inspired by Bram Stoker’s classic novel.” There isn’t even a background image, only a weird gray distortion on a black background.

Furthermore, there are also elements from Sherlock that point to Dracula, either directly or indirectly. In S4, when John is supposedly texting “E.” He asks “Night Owl?” and the response he gets is “Vampire.” It feels odd and out of place to mention vampires in this offhand way, as we have never really seen anything like this on the show. To be fair, a lot of S4 feels this way, but I believe that it is actually chock-full of symbolic meaning and that almost everything that we see that feels wrong or untrue to the show has a deeper meaning. What, then, is the purpose that this plays? Additionally, in the escape room (Spoiler alert for The Game is Now), there is a television in the first room (Molly’s lab) that is playing what is set to look like British news. In the newsreel at the bottom, they included the announcement that Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt are making BBC’s Dracula. Once again, this feels a little throwaway, or could be explained away as advertising (although the escape room is so fast-paced that having any time at all to look at the television, let alone read it, when it wasn’t explicitly part of the puzzles would seem rare). Once again, there is a subliminal connection made between these two shows that I would argue is purposeful.

The decision to make a gothic show that so completely plays on this horror trope, and then to tie it both explicitly and implicitly to the show that they have already done, which has a very different messaging around the gothic as it relates to conceptions of homosexuality, seems odd. In and of itself, a Gothic exploration of queerness is possible, but feels limited by its very nature. Gothic horror through a queer lens is about queerness and otherness being equated to and embodied by monstrosity. Dracula’s trailer seems to clearly be playing up this monstrousness. I want to reiterate that I don’t think making something like Dracula gay couldn’t be cool or interesting for what it is, or that there isn’t a way to engage with the gothic without it being problematic. But in comparison to what they are doing with Sherlock, it feels unimpressive. And in light of HOB, Dracula seems to go directly against the argument that Gatiss makes so beautifully, that queerness is harmless and very distinct from monstrosity, despite what the fog of homophobia might depict. To build up this narrative in Sherlock, then cut into the middle of it with something that is explicitly connected to it but symbolically making an opposite assertion feels counter-intuitive.

Vision, Timing, 20/20

Even with all this evidence, I don’t know that I would really believe they would go through the trouble to do all of this if not for the timing. Dracula is set to come out “soon,” but people have been speculating for this winter. That would make it the end of 2019 or beginning of 2020. Now I’m going to explain a little bit about my reading of HLV, which happens to coincide nicely with The Game is Now, and ultimately this theory as a whole.

Something that caught my eye in HLV is how much glass there is in its first scene. We open on a shot of CAM’s glasses sitting on the table. We are below them, looking up through glass (although we see later that the table is actually wood). Next we get a shot of lady Elizabeth Smallwood, reflected through glass so as to show her in double (which is particularly interesting given that she is repeatedly called Lady Alicia Smallwood, both by CAM in the text that flashes on the screen during his analysis of her later this episode, and in the S4 scene where she leaves Mycroft her card). Next we see the entire interviewing committee through glass walls (it continues but you get the picture). We are introduced to the concept of lenses, looking through them, and at times the distorted image created by them.

CAM owns a newspaper, and he controls people through rumors: it doesn’t matter what the truth is, it matters what people believe (what they see). (This sounds a lot like Mary in S4 to me). So we are introduced again (after TRF) to the concept of fact vs. fiction, truth vs. lie, and this time with the addition of lenses. What lens you view something through matters, has a bearing on how you read something, how clearly you see it (sounds kind of like the fog in HOB). By the end of HLV, we have been removed from the narrative enough, we can’t see completely clearly. We don’t know what has happened during the time between John and Sherlock’s confrontation with Mary and the scene at Christmas. We don’t see if Sherlock and John are on the same page or what Sherlock is planning.

This episode leads into TAB, followed by S4 fuckiness. In S4, there are many things that feel “off” but one of the biggest is that John and Sherlock are distant the entire time. In the beginning we get the indication that John is missing Sherlock, but then we see Sherlock acting as if he is closer to Mary than John, inviting her on cases in his place. She gets inserted between them completely, becomes part of the gang. After Mary’s “death” John blames Sherlock (in a feat of logic that is truly baffling) and we have them at their most distant in TLD. And then, they come back together again in TFP, but the warmth and closeness is missing.

This season makes it clear that Moftiss were writing in all the little things that made their dynamic romantic and their chemistry so clear. They were able to take that out, and they did so with intention. It is if we are seeing the show through a lens: through the lens of straight-washing, the lens or perspective that Mary (John’s wife, the symbol of a straight John Watson, a platonic John and Sherlock) narrates for us so thoroughly at the end of the series. (Also side note, this straight-washed version of the show also fits into the 5 part John Yorke structure with part 4 being the height of the antithesis or the “worst part” - I learned about York from garkgatiss’s meta). The heart of the show is John and Sherlock’s dynamic. This dynamic is clearly intimate and romantic and has been in every iteration of Sherlock Holmes since the original stories, despite never being explicitly canon. S4 really follows through on Moriarty’s promise. The heart of Sherlock Holmes is gone, missing, burned out.

Then we have the escape room [mild spoilers]. The entrance is Doyle’s Opticians; its filled with glasses. (Side note there was definitely a wall displaying glasses that were arranged by color to look like a rainbow). Once again we have the theme of lenses. Being in an optometry office, it’s interesting because the focus is obviously on correct vision. 20/20 vision. Vision is “right” when it’s 2020. (This wasn’t my realization, but someone else went to the escape room as well and wrote about it). So now, we have this idea of being able to see correctly tied to the number 2020. To the YEAR 2020. This is also interesting because one of the signs in Doyle’s Opticians read “You were told but you didn’t listen: coming soon.” Just another indication that we will be getting more (Sherlock) soon.

Now, finally, we come to what I see as some of the most convincing evidence about Sherlock S5 coming in 2020. It has to do with copyright laws.

In England, all of ACD’s stories are in the public domain. However, in the US, this isn’t so. US Copyright laws are different from the UK, so the last of the stories won’t actually enter the public domain until 2023. American copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication. This is important because the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate is extremely protective of how Sherlock Holmes is portrayed in the media. It turns out that despite the fact that most of the stories are already in the public domain, BBC, CBS, and Warner Brothers have all gotten licenses from the Estate in order to make their shows/films. In 2014, the ACD Estate lost a lawsuit in which they were trying to argue that the characters are “complex” and that any use of the character (at all) was still valid under copyright laws (as not every story had entered the public domain) and therefore in need of a license from them. While some of the later stories are still under copyright, they lost the lawsuit and it was ruled that the character (as written in the earlier stories) is in the public domain. They sued Miramax for its production Mr. Holmes, which portrays an elderly Holmes, arguing that it drew from the later stories and therefore violated copyright. Miramax ended up settling to avoid litigation. The Estate is known for being litigious and basically doing its best to stay gatekeeper, hoard ownership, and generally extort money out of anyone who creates anything having to do with Sherlock Holmes. While the BBC has paid them for licenses before, I’m not sure how this clearly conservative group would feel about making Johnlock canon. Even if its not legally in their power to prevent it from happening, it doesn’t sound like that has stopped them in the past from suing basically anyone that has tried to create Sherlock Holmes material without their consent, and if that material in any way seems to come from the later stories, then they might have a case.

Which brings us to the Three Garridebs. Moftiss have said in the past that this is one of their favorite stories due to it being the story where Holmes shows his depth of feeling for Watson. As stated by Watson himself, “It was worth a wound–it was worth many wounds–to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask” Generally speaking, the fandom has posited that a Johnlock reveal may happen in a “Three Garridebs” moment. And do you happen to know the story that directly precedes the Three Garridebs? The Sussex Vampire. A story in which Holmes investigates a supposed vampire only to discover a loving mother who is attempting to save her infant child by sucking poison out from his wound. Kind of sounds familiar huh? A perceived monster, who is in fact nothing dangerous at all. Who in this case is the exact opposite of monstrous, is actually loving and gentle (like the real dog that is tellingly tied to sentiment, or Bluebell the glowing rabbit).

Both the Sussex Vampire and the Three Garridebs are part of The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the last collection of stories. They were both published in 1924, meaning that both their copyrights run out in 2019. It will really only be possible for Moftiss to use material from the Three Garridebs for a queer storyline starting in 2020. And if we assume that this is their plan all along, that they have even potentially set it up in S4 (looking at you John Watson getting shot by “Eurus”), they have HAD TO WAIT until now. But they won’t need to wait any longer, starting in January.

Oh and by the way, here is an interview Martin gave recently in which he tells a story about how he had to literally give up the Hobbit because he was CONTRACTED to Sherlock S2 and they wouldn’t move filming on that. (Thankfully Peter Jackson moved filming around for him, so we still have him as Bilbo). So I would imagine that if S2 was contracted, and they were planning on making a 5 series show all along, that they are probably contracted for all of it. Which means all those claims that its just too difficult to get everyone together for filming are just another means of throwing us off the trail.

If they have been waiting for this copyright to expire, but also unable to tell us that that is why they are waiting, it also makes sense why they have stretched it out so much. It's even possible that they didn’t realize how horrible the ACD Estate was going to be when they first started filming, and had to adjust/drag it out so that they could finally do what they want to do, what they have been planning for from the beginning.

So there you have it: the ending of The Final Problem, an analysis of HOB, Dracula, and Victorian gothic lit, and finally the symbolism of lenses, correct vision, and copyright issues all leading up to 2020. I think S5 of Sherlock is coming. I’ve been feeling it, sensing something for the last few months. I think we can all feel it. And it might just be sooner than we thought.

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Thank you so much to my love @canonicallybisexualjohnwatson who co-developed this theory with me, edited this, helped me with the links, and was also the one to introduce me to Sherlock/TJLC, subsequently changing my life. i love you b.

#tjlc #johnlock #tjlc is real #bbc sherlock #sherlock meta #bbc dracula #sherlock

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