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thewatsonbeekeepers · 4 years ago

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Chapter 2 – Look up here, I’m in Heaven: the height metaphor

[The chapter title comes from David Bowie’s Lazarus. Lazarus is a cracking song, and you should listen to it. X CN: death, disturbing imagery]

It’s worth stating here that this whole meta has a cn for death and suicide – this one is analysing the literal peaks and troughs (height is important in this episode) that Sherlock goes through in order to look at how close he is to dying throughout.

In my reading, EMP theory begins once Mary shoots Sherlock in HLV – I’ve linked the reasons for this in Chapter 1 X, so I’m not going to run through them again here. I think Sherlock comes the closest to death that we see him in the EMP at the end of HLV – if you remember, he’s been put on a plane in ‘exile’ by Mycroft, but in reality is being sent to his death. This plane/height image is really important. In the Christian tradition (and therefore majority Western tradition that the writers are writing in), the sky is associated with heaven – Sherlock’s plane taking off being synonymous with his death seems a pretty straightforward metaphor in that regard. (It’s even one that’s used in Cats, though I don’t know if that’s a good thing.) Further to that – it ties in nicely with Sherlock being ‘high’ through a lot of s4, which represents the moments in which he is most repressed and his repression is most tied to self-harm. We have further ideas to buttress the height/aeroplane metaphor with, however – do you remember the plane in ASiB?

Sure, as I recall it never gets off the ground. But everybody on it is dead. Aeroplanes have an association with death already in this show, and the choice to put Sherlock on a plane rather than lock him up for four minutes or anything equivalent – and probably less expensive to shoot – suggests a deliberate throwback. We’re supposed to think of it as a kind of metal coffin.

[Obviously, there’s another, more notable use of an aeroplane in the programme – you can see where I’m going here. But bear with me – there’s more first.]

I want to quickly talk about what grounds Sherlock’s aeroplane. Moriarty appears on screens everywhere, and then we have the following exchange between Sherlock and Mycroft. I’ve already made a post about this that’s done the rounds on tumblr X, so if you already know this bit you’re ahead of the game.

As far as I can tell, nobody ever tells Sherlock that Moriarty is back. It’s possible Mycroft tells him offscreen, or that he googles it from his phone, given that he’s already breaking flight rules, but given that it’s the entire trigger for TAB, it seems a pretty odd thing to leave out. In EMP theory, it’s also the thing that downs his plane – in terms of the plane metaphor as well as literally, it stops him from dying. It’s pivotal, but we don’t see it. I therefore want to hypothesise – what does it mean if Sherlock is never told that Moriarty is back?

The first thing it tells us is that Sherlock is in his Mind Palace, because he knows that Moriarty is back without needing to be told. But the second is that Mycroft, the brain, is waking Sherlock from his dying stupor to tell him that England needs him, meaning that Sherlock’s brain equates Moriarty coming back with the word ‘England’ in some way. Perhaps this is a tenuous link, but the seed is planted back from ASiP, when we’re taught to associate John with his armchair.

Don’t mind me, I’m just crying. Basically, Sherlock knows that John is in danger and that’s what pulls him back from the brink – and we know it’s serious, because Mycroft, the brain, is warning him. Via call.

The fear of Moriarty coming back might sound like a tenuous symbol for John being in danger, but when we probe deeper the two are actually quite obviously equivalent. The only threat that Moriarty has ever posed to Sherlock is a threat to John’s life – the Semtex, burning the heart out of him, John Watson is definitely in danger, the sniper at the fall. This is Sherlock’s pressure point, and by getting rid of Moriarty, he’s getting rid of any danger to John – we know from his drug abuse etc. that his regard for himself is much lower. So Sherlock being woken from the dead to save John makes complete sense. He died for him, and now he’ll resurrect himself for him.

There are several layers to how John is in danger – the bottom one, which for me s4 is about getting to the heart of, is that without Sherlock John is suicidal. This was established in ASiP, and I believe is the metaphorical plot of TLD (see Chapter 9 X). However, there’s also the problem of Mary, newly discovered as an assassin, and Sherlock trying to work out who she is and where she comes from – more on that later, but there’s certainly a chance she’s linked to Moriarty, given the Morstan/Moran connections. ‘Did you miss me?’ works for both of those layers – the danger John is in from criminals is something that was really apparent in s1 and 2, but John’s endangerment from suicide is also something that was there at the beginning of the series. Sherlock changed these things – and didn’t realise he was the changing factor, but something in his subconscious is telling him that with him gone, John Watson is once again in danger.

So, his plane comes back to the runway – still in his mind palace, of course, but coming down. TAB – of which more on later – seems to be about the return of Moriarty, and Sherlock puzzling through it, which is jarringly absent from TST and TLD if you’re reading it on a surface level – it takes TAB for Sherlock to puzzle through this and to pull him down from death, as he comes to understand the Moriarty threat. This all sounds pretty vague – the TAB chapter will deal with it in more detail. For now, let’s move on to the other places where the height/heaven metaphor comes into s4.

One thing that several meta-writers have pointed out is that Ella’s office is… fucky. It’s not the same office as John repeatedly visits outside the MP – it’s possible that Ella has moved premises, but it’s a weird thing to draw such obvious attention to by the weirdness of the room. This isn’t a subtle change, like John and Mary’s place, it’s a really dissonant one, and the oddness of the room pulls our attention towards a character and space that by rights belong in the background of the story. It’s a really odd move – and that’s why I’m so convinced that it’s important.

It looks like Heaven, for want of a better description. The window with the light streaming through looks like the very top of a church window, and the beams suggest that the ceiling is like a kind of spire – and the spire in a church is meant to be closer to heaven, that’s part of the imagery. So there’s that side of things, and I really don’t think that’s a coincidence. However, the even weirder part is the partitioning of the room, for want of a better word. The wall ends at about chair height, and from there to the floor is – nothing? These aren’t mirrors because the chairs aren’t reflected. I have never seen a room partitioned like this, and nor has anyone I’ve shown the image to – again, it draws attention to itself. If the creative team had wanted us to take this scene at face value, they would have put Ella in an office. This is not a psychiatrist’s office. The partitions mean that it isn’t even private.

I don’t know if I’m right about the partitions, but there’s only one thing they remind me of, and that’s a closing door. It’s a trope in an adventure film – I first saw it in Indiana Jones, but it’s in many a movie. It also features in Doctor Who on multiple occasions.

It’s the moment when the door is coming down and you only have a few seconds to get under it, otherwise you die. Indiana Jones famously goes back for his hat. That one. That’s what the space under the partition looks like. Sherlock, thinking he’s solved the case of Norbury and therefore Mary (more in Chapter 7 X) is ready to pop off – he’s nearly gone. But in a moment of self-interrogation – making sure he got everything right, that John’s safe now – he realises he isn’t, and so he comes down. That sinking downwards is represented by the water imagery, as he sinks deep into his subconscious – LSiT has written a fantastic meta on water in S4 which you can read here X, as I’m loath to take credit for this idea!

I’m going to talk about water a lot more in the chapters on TFP, because of John in the well and pirates and so much, but the obvious thing to talk about now is the plane in TFP.

This is a point where surface level plot breaks down – because this cannot be in Eurus’s mind. When we watch film/tv, we make one of two assumptions – either we have the omnipotent view, like in most films, where we’re guided by the director but everything we see is ultimately objectively true, or we see through somebody else’s eyes (rarer). These can be played with – think of a film like The Usual Suspects (please skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen this film because it’s fantastic) where the film lets the viewer rest on their laurels and slip into normal, objective viewing patterns when of course it’s a subjective, flashback narrative, which Kevin Spacey is deliberately obscuring to trick an audience. This rug pull can be fantastic, but we don’t have such a rug pull here. Either it’s a poor man’s version, or there’s something else going on. Mug drop.

New paragraph – spoilers gone. Moments where the perspective was actually subjective and we missed it or forgot it are great rug pulls, because the clues are there but we don’t spot them. We love a good unreliable narrator. This isn’t the case here. The plane scene, as visualised, exists only inside Eurus’s head. Eurus is emphatically not our narrator during TFP, so when it comes out that the girl on the plane isn’t real, we just feel lied to.

If we accept that s4 takes place inside Sherlock’s MP, this makes more sense, because all of the characters are manifestations of different parts of Sherlock’s psyche and so he can jump between perspectives. It also means that the terror of being on a crashing plane that Eurus has felt ever since she was a child is not hers – it’s Sherlock’s. If we remember that planes are synonymous with dying in this show, an association that’s reinforced because of the “sleeping” people on the plane, a clear throwback to the dead passengers in ASiB, the climax of S4, when Sherlock is trying to save John and work out his repressed memories, is all fuelled by a child’s nightmare of dying, a terror that has resurfaced.

I think Eurus represents Sherlock’s queer trauma, and I’ll explain that in more detail in Chapter 5 X, which is completely devoted to Eurus. Her representing trauma, though, makes a great deal of sense in this situation. The problem of the plane, the threat that she hinges on, is one that has been repeating and repeating, though repressed, inside Sherlock’s consciousness, and he breaks through it with not only kindness, but the recognition that it is all in Eurus’s (and by extension his) head.

This doesn’t diminish the trauma that Sherlock experiences – one of the things I begrudgingly like about the ending of TFP. Sherlock can’t get rid of the problem and possible danger that is his trauma – but he can stop it from careering to the point of destruction by recognising it, he can learn to live in harmony (see the violin duet) with it, he can accept its existence. Pushing through that trauma is what makes him able to abandon the plane and (we hope) return to the real world.

The positioning of the aeroplane problem in relation to the John-trapped-in-a-well problem is also pretty important. I’m of the firm belief that Eurus represents queer trauma, and this is the trauma that throughout the entirety of series 4 is both pushing him towards John and blocking him from him. Sherlock needs to wake up to save John, and has to push through the trauma to recognise this – but the trauma is blocking his way. She’s stopping him from helping John – it’s a terrible moment when Sherlock is telling John that he’s busy whilst John is drowning in the well – but it’s also pushing through the aeroplane moment that allows him to save John in the MP. This is the paradox of queer repression, right, and the paradox in Eurus’s behaviour – she’s simultaneously blocking Sherlock and leading him on to the solution.

When Sherlock finally reaches Eurus’s room, he tells her that he’s on the ground and he can bring her down too – and what is most striking is the way Eurus is sitting. She’s actually incredibly grounded, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and given that the house is burned it’s likely that this is the ground floor as well. The dark room is a far cry from the bright lighting of the plane – everything suggests that she’s been pulled back. And of course, the lovely touch that all she needs to do is open her eyes. That’s all the creators have ever been asking people to do – open their eyes to what is hiding in plain sight – and Eurus is allowing Sherlock to see things afresh for the first time. But also, this final breakthrough is what’s going to allow Sherlock to open his own eyes, right? So that phrase is doubly powerful.

And there was me hating on TFP for three years. That’s a brief journey through the highs and lows of series 4, though if anyone can explain the planes in TST to me that would be wonderful! The next chapter will do a run through of HLV before we move onto TAB and series 4.

#chapter two #look up here i'm in heaven: the height metaphor #thewatsonbeekeepers #emp theory #on we go!#tjlc #meta #my meta #mine #johnlock #bbc sherlock #bbc johnlock

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inevitably-johnlocked · 5 years ago

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hi steph! know of any fics where sherlock dates someone else and john gets jealous and confesses his feelings?

Hi Nonny!

AHHHHHHH Okay, so I have this weird thing where I have a hard time reading fics where Sherlock is dating someone else, LOL, because I’m garbage. I dunno why… the closest I can get is fics with Victor Trevor in them as a “replacement” or “past bf” D: I’m so sorry I’m useless in this regard… Methinks these lists may help you out a bit? :)

MY FIC LISTS:

Jealous John

Jealous John Pt. 2 and Jealous Sherlock Pt 2

Jealous John Pt 3 and Jealous Sherlock Pt 3

Jealous John and Sherlock Pt. 4

ALEXX’S LISTS

John is Jealous of Victor Trevor

Victor Trevor Appears

MORE Victor Trevor/Sherlock (Part 2)

Jealous John

Sherlock with Other Men

John thinks of Sherlock with Other Men

EDIT: ACTUALLY NONNY, I just found an offline list in my folders that I think you will like; I’ve been waiting to post it anyway :P I hope this is good :D

VICTOR TREVOR / VICTOR IS SHERLOCK’S PAST FRIEND (S4)

Unforgiven by 221b_hound (M, 4,721 w., 1 Ch. || Marriage Proposal, Victor Trevor, Jealous / Protective John, Jealous Sherlock, Sherlock’s Past) – Sherlock’s latest case is for his ex boyfriend, the brilliant and handsome Professor Victor Trevor. John is not too happy about that. But things aren’t what they seem, an old friend of John’s is involved in the case, and John has a few surprises up his sleeve. Also - a proposal! Part 16 of Unkissed

Laid Bare by esplanade (T, 6,529 w., 1 Ch. || Romance, Fluff, Pining, Angst) – “I suppose it comes as no surprise that I always rather detested grand romantic gestures. They struck me as unnecessary and contrived, feeble attempts at desperately holding together relationships, most of which should have been allowed to fall apart.”

I can’t pretend by Salambo06 (E, 7,692 w., 1 Ch. || Fake Relationship, Victor Trevor, Jealous John, Miscommunications, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, First Kiss/Time, Anal, BJs) – They had arrived more than a hour ago, and the moment they had walked inside the hotel reception, John had understood why Sherlock hadn’t wanted to come. Two men, posh suits and expensive watches on their wrists, had come to greet them with sharp remarks and badly hidden mockery, and John had seen red. Sherlock hadn’t said anything, mostly ignoring the two men entirely, and without thinking twice about it, John had slid an arm around Sherlock’s waist and introduced himself as his husband.

My Life for His by QuinnAnderson (E, 8,816 w., 1 Ch. || Guardian/Protector, Greek Mythology || Growing Up, Sex, Religious Themes, Suicide, Minor Character Death) – It began when Sherlock was eight, and he attempted to climb all the way up to the highest branch in the old willow tree in his back garden. He’d thought he was still small enough that it could support him, but the second he’d grabbed hold of it to pull himself up, the branch snapped, and down he went, plummeting a solid twenty metres. The odd thing was, he never actually hit the ground.

Illogical, even. by magikspell (E, 9,119 w., 1 Ch. || Grey-Ace Sherlock, Character Study, Growing Up, Victor Trevor, Romance, First Time/Kiss, Sherlock-centric) – Five reasons Sherlock never believed in love and one reason he does now.

I’m content as we are (but) by inqui (The_Circus) (E, 13,086 w., 1 Ch. || Jealous John, UST/RST, Pining, Victor Trevor, Minor Whump, First Kiss / Time, Misunderstandings) – In which John Watson sees something unusual, becomes jealous, and makes too much of a small thing as an old friend of Sherlock’s shows up in the middle of a case.

Say For Me, Love by MirabileLectu (T, 13,147 w., 1 Ch. || UST, First Kiss, Drama, Pining John, Victor Trevor) – If you had asked John this morning what the result of his quiet afternoon at home would be, discovering a truth about Sherlock’s past startling enough to shift the foundations of their friendship would not have been his first guess. So naturally, that was what was bound to happen.

Let’s Make a Bed Out in the Rain by theimprobable1 (M, 17,664 w., 11 Ch. || Pining Sherlock, Angst & Fluff, First Kiss, Unrequited, Jealous Sherlock, Protective Sherlock) – John is devastated after his long-term girlfriend leaves him. Sherlock helps him through it.

That Partitioning of the Things of Youth by wearitcounts (E, 35,353 w., 7 Ch. || Humour and Angst, Post-TRF, Fake Relationship, UST / RST, Friends to Lovers, Jealous John) – Victor Trevor is in town, and nobody’s happy.

(Never) Turn Your Back to the Sea by DiscordantWords (M, 39,968 w., 7 Ch. || Post S4 Fix It || Grief / Mourning, Victor Trevor, Friendship, Sherlock is Not Okay, Nightmares/Flashbacks/Panic Attacks, Parentlock, Pining Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, John Comes Home) – Baker Street is very much the same. Only different. And Sherlock is just trying not to drown.

Resistivity and Relative Charge by liriodendron (E, 41,750 w., 8 Ch. || Synesthesia, Angst, Case Fic, Romance, Est. Rel., Homophobia, Religious Content, Victor Trevor, Mild Jealous John, Mild John Whump) – In which Sherlock Holmes meets an old acquaintance, John Watson doesn’t enjoy a trip to the country quite as much as he thought he would, and the past absolutely refuses to stay where it belongs. Part 3 of Conductivity

Sacré Coeur by Mamaorion (M, 95,236 w., 27 Ch. || S4 Fix It Rewrite, First Kiss, UST / RST, Eventual Happy Ending, Coming Out, Holmes Family, Marriage Proposal, Husbands, Healing, Evil Mary, Beekeeping, Caretaker Sherlock, Mind Palace, Alzheimer’s Disease, Protective / Big Brother Mycroft, TD-12) – In this s4 fixit, John must piece together the gaps in his altered memory if he and Sherlock are to face the terror that has plagued Sherlock since childhood. As they untangle the web, seven years of hidden love ignite. (TO READ)

A Further Sea by i_ship_an_armada & ShinySherlock (E, 125,492 w., 23 Ch. || Historical Pirates AU || Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Doctor John / Pirate Captain Sherlock, Sailing, UST / RST, Masturbation, Action / Adventure, Mild Angst & Peril, Romance, Shaving, Molly/Janine, Bottomlock, Hand / Blow Jobs, Past Drug Use, Slow Burn, Mild Violence, Happy Ending) – Here be a tale of adventure for both body and soul, but beware if ye be not of stout heart, for this be piratelock, ya savvy? Luckless ship’s surgeon John Watson takes a chance, and finds himself eye to eye with The Ghost, the scourge of the seven seas and a definite thorn in the side of the blaggard, James Moriarty. But when John finds there’s more to this most cunning pirate than be meetin’ the eye, he has to choose… is it a pirate’s life for him?

Colors by Quesarasara (E, 140,537 w., 17 Ch. || Pleasantville-Inspired AU || Soulmates, Colour Bonds, Alternating POV, Angst, Fluff, Pining, Case Fic, Medical Procedures) – Everyone on earth is born with eyes that see in black, white, and an endless series of greys. When you meet your soulmate, you finally see the world in color. We’re all searching for the person who brings color to our lives. John and Sherlock are no exception. Part 1 of The Colors ‘Verse

SHERLOCK AND OTHER MEN

Nothing to Make a Song About by emmagrant01 (E, 36,833 w., 10 Ch. || Post-TRF, First Time, Reunion, Jealous John, Pining Sherlock, Romance, Angst with Happy Ending) – When Sherlock returned from his faked death, John could not forgive him for the deception and broke off their friendship. Ten years later, John returns to London in search of yet another new beginning. Sherlock, not surprisingly, is waiting.

Drawn to Stars by Silvergirl (E, 66,392 + w., 42/56 Ch. || WiP || S4 Compliant to TLD / TFP Doesn’t Exist, Sherlock’s Italian Adventure, Jealous John, Mutual Pining, Misunderstandings, First Kiss/Time, Idiots in Love, Angst with Happy Ending) – After the Culverton Smith case Sherlock is clean, working, and looking for a romantic partner—since John has told him that’s what he needs. Shame John didn’t mention he was interested in that role himself, before Sherlock went off to Rome with a gorgeous Italian copper to try to fall in love and become a complete human being. (MARKED FOR LATER / TO READ)

#steph replies #johnlock fic recs #victor trevor #my fic recs #Anonymous #jealous john #johnlock and other people #fic rec sunday

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loopyhoopywrites · 4 years ago

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WIP Song Tag

Thanks @ryryvsthepen and @kure-writes for tagging me :) Tagging @birdywrites @writingamongthecoloredroses @chauceryfairytales if you want to.

Rules: Share some songs that have inspired your WIP or characters, then tag some people to play!

(Side note: I wouldn’t say any of these inspired TLD or the Dumbass Squad, but they do make me think of them. Also, apologies for the long post!)

I See The Light - Tangled (Timrix)

And the world has somehow shifted / All at once everything looks different / Now that I see you

Might As Well Dance - Jason Mraz (Timrix)

We got nothing to lose / Might as well hold hands / Yeah, we're already fools / So we might as well dance

I put your loving arms around me once more / And we'll go crashing into folks on the dance floor / And you can walk all over my shoes if you want to

Colourblind - Darius (Timrix)

Nobody told me you'd feel so good / Nobody said you'd be so beautiful / Nobody warned me about your smile

Confident - & Juliet (If)

But you had me underrated / What's wrong with being, what's wrong with being / What's wrong with being confident?

I’m A Knight - Horrible Histories (Sir Swordasome)

I’m a knight, I’m a knight and I’m a knight / And our only aim in life is to fight / I’m a knight, I’m a knight and I’m a knight / We fight by day, and when it’s not so bright / We’re not so bright!

We like to beat and chop and stab our wicked enemy / But all the time we try to stick to rules of chivalry

#tag game #tld #dumbass squad

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afishlearningpoetry · 6 years ago

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Looking Closer at How The Abominable Bride Foreshadowed and Can Be Used to Chronologically Decode Series 4:

In TAB –– right as Sherlock is experiencing the absolute worst part of his nightmare –– Sherlock imagines John showing up to save the day, as Sherlock realizes that the only way he’s able to defeat Moriarty is if he opens up to John and lets him in. For the entire episode, Sherlock has been so afraid to communicate with John in order to protect him, which has just been repeating his mistakes of the past and putting him in danger. Here, finally, at the end of the road, Sherlock imagines a brighter future. By openly letting himself love John here, Sherlock has won.

In TFP –– right as John is in the middle of the worst part of his nightmare story scenario –– John writes a scene where Sherlock has to lie to his self-insert Molly about loving her and manipulate her into confessing it back in order to save her life (which was never in any danger). For the entire series and episode John has been torn between whether or not Sherlock is truly capable of romantic feeling or not. By letting himself love Sherlock, and letting Sherlock lie about loving him back, they’ve lost, and succeeded in nothing but hurting each other.

[Continue below the cut for more ➤]

See also: 10 Revealing Things From The Six Thatchers That Haunt You Late At Night, 10 Revealing Things From The Lying Detective That Haunt You Late At Night, and 10 Revealing Things From The Final Problem That Haunt You Late At Night. (#tw suicide)

Bonus: Regression.

“He doesn't have friends. So who are you?”

“I'm... I'm nobody. I just met him.”

"Okay, bit of advice then: stay away from that guy.”

“Why?”

“You know why he's here? He's not paid or anything. He likes it. He gets off on it. The weirder the crime, the more he gets off. And you know what? One day just showing up won't be enough. One day we'll be standing round a body and Sherlock Holmes'll be the one that put it there.”

If this didn’t make John question his attraction to Sherlock the day they met, then hearing it from his own mouth did the trick. Once the idea exists, it cannot be killed.

“I'm not a psychopath, Anderson. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.”

This scene in TFP is the realization of John’s greatest fear. John, who is in remarkably similar circumstances when we met him in the opening of the show; unmarried, practical about death, and alone, as Sherlock deduces from the coffin in TFP.

John, who only married someone as a comfort and escape after the love of his life died, whose entire relationship was built on a lie and a facade, who he emotionally cheated on and invented a storyline to cover it, who tried to kill his spouse after it turned out her love for him was part of an ulterior motive, and who’s being haunted by her.

John, who was considering suicide before he met Sherlock, who kept a gun in his desk drawer but found a purpose for it by saving his life at the end of ASIP (“I mean, suicide is pretty common among city boys,” John suggests during a case in TBB), and who’s now being haunted by the ghost of his wife and is shot at the end of TLD.

John, who’s lived his entire life alone and isolated from loving other people, whose affection for Sholto didn’t go anywhere because he was too closed off, who couldn’t even admit to his therapist that the love of his life died, much less say the words out loud, and who truly believes it to be absolutely impossible for Sherlock to love him back, if he’s even capable of that at all.

John does not really know. He has no idea that he means the world to Sherlock. He has no idea how deeply Sherlock is in love with him. He has no idea what Sherlock has done to protect him. He almost had an idea; during the ending of TSOT, they both knew, and they knew that the other knew too. But when HLV rolled around, Sherlock resorted to his old habits; he lied to John about what happened in Magnussen’s office in order to protect him from Mary, like he lied to him in order to protect him from Moriarty. In John Yorke’s 3-D Roadmap of Change, part of his Five Act Structure, this is called “Experimenting Post-Knowledge”.

This is what Sherlock learns from at the end of TAB; by not communicating with John, he put both of them in danger of the bride. By allowing John in, by letting both of them love each other, even calling him handsome, Sherlock is able to envision a brighter future for the two of them, which is only possible if they not only work together but admit how they feel to each other. Sherlock knows what to do now, which is why Sherlock and John are working together in series 4 to take down Mary, but he still hasn’t told John his biggest secret.

By lying to John in HLV and isolating them from each other again, with John taking back Mary (in order to take her down) the show entered act four, the act of doubt, growing reluctance, regression, and the crisis point. Acts one and four John are in a similar place; after all the time he’s spent with Sherlock, after everything they’ve gone through together, John is going to go through hell through one simple dilemma, the same one he’s been faced with since the beginning: does Sherlock love anyone, or not? Could he love me?

John is the author of series 4. John’s story is a dark mirror and denial of the future that Sherlock’s dream offers. Eurus, the overseer of the “I love you” test, is also John’s dark mirror.

“Professor, if you wouldn’t mind stepping away from my friend, I believe he finds your attention a shade annoying,” John says at the end of TFP. “It’s for somebody who loves Sherlock. This is all about you, everything here,” Mycroft says about the coffin in TFP. Sherlock’s dream, John’s story –– they are both about each other. They are both all about trying to understand each other. All of this, this entire relationship, all the years they’ve wasted pining after each other, could have been changed by resolving a miscommunication they had in ASIP. “Girlfriend? No, not really my area.”

In TAB, John retorts Moriarty by saying, “There’s always two of us. Haven’t you read the strand?” In ASIP, John says, “You’re unattached. Like me. Fine. Good.” These are both echoed in John’s depiction of Sherlock deducing the coffin in TFP: unmarried, practical about death, alone. John tries to deflect more of his jealousy of Irene here (and subsequently, through his association of her and him being sociopaths, his jealousy of Mary and Sherlock), but instead pulls from someone he knows is in the same boat as him: Molly Hooper. In a sequence already full of emotional callbacks, John is recalling what happened to him just two episodes ago and applying it to Molly; when he was marching around his own house while ignoring Sherlock’s calls.

“Thank you John,” Sherlock says to John for saving him from Moriarty. “Since when do you call me John?” His John asks. In this dream, in this time period, when gay love had to be hidden and private, first names are personal. First names are used for loved ones and spouses. Sherlock is really imagining John asking, since when have you felt that way about me? Since when have you loved me? “You’d be surprised,” Sherlock says. Since the night they met. “No, I wouldn’t,” John responds, because Sherlock knows John has loved him since then too. This is Sherlock’s love confession to John, in his own mind, and it’s only in this moment are they safe from Moriarty.

But John could not be more completely opposite of where Sherlock is emotionally. John has no idea. He wouldn’t just be surprised; he would be shocked and devastated Sherlock has known for so long. He can’t believe it, even though he knows after TSOT. Rather then John confessing that he loves Sherlock in his story, he writes his scenario as an experiment, a callback to multiple instances of Sherlock toying with John’s emotions. “Oh God. It was you. You locked me in that bloody lab.” “I had to, it was an experiment.” “An experiment?!” This was also after John had accepted Sherlock’s invitation to continue working together earlier in the episode. Every time that Sherlock seems to show genuine emotion to John, he does something that makes him question that again. “Listen, what I said before, John. I meant. I don’t have friends. I’ve just got one,” Sherlock says in THOB. “No, I know you're not an experiment, you're my friend,” he says to Molly in TFP.

John’s self-insert Molly is furious and humiliated at Sherlock asking her to say those words to him. “Leave me alone. Why are you doing this to me?! Why are you making fun of me?!” When Sherlock says its part of an experiment without thinking (because he’s busy trying to save her life, or John’s life, as so often their miscommunication goes), Molly bitterly replies, “I’m not an experiment, Sherlock.”

This is John talking. This is John talking to Sherlock, through Molly.

Sherlock’s love for John continues to shine through after he confesses he loves him like a husband. “Time you woke up Sherlock. I’m a storyteller, I know when I’m in one.” “Of course. Of course you do, John.” Sherlock is imagining a John that’s on the same page as him, who understands why he’s made all of the decisions he’s made, why Sherlock devised this convoluted dream scenario to work out his own fears and desires, and a John who’s aware enough of Sherlock’s feelings to talk to him like this. Again, this John is only able to exist after Sherlock lets him in and confesses he loves him. For most of the episode, John and his blog are not on the same page as how Sherlock feels. This is him dealing with his guilt post-Reichenbach.

“Two years. Two years. I thought... you were dead. Hmm? Now, you let me grieve, hmm? How could you do that? How?” John asks him in TEH. This guilt and anger are echoed in Sherlock’s dream and John’s story, as Sherlock suffers a relapse in both of them. “No, I just said that in one of your stories.” Sherlock is afraid that John won’t love him if Sherlock doesn’t live up to the image that John has of him. “You lie all the time, it’s like your mission!” John yells at Sherlock in TLD. This line on its face doesn’t really make any sense, and John’s Sherlock thinks he’s just talking about Reichenbach, but John is talking about everything: every emotion that Sherlock feels and performs, his relationship with John, all of which John fears is one big lie. He’s afraid that he really is a sociopath. In TEH, Sherlock is speechless and unable to provide an answer to John, because he was so in denial about the decision he made, he was repressing his own emotions in order to keep John safe. In TFP, John’s Sherlock insists that Molly can tell him anything as a flashing red Moriarty flares up in his face. To Sherlock in this scenario, Molly can’t really tell him. John can’t really tell him. And if they do, it’s only because Sherlock is manipulating them into doing so, even if its for unselfish reasons, and in the end, Sherlock doesn’t get why he just can’t tell him.

“Please don’t do this. Just… just… don’t do it. I can’t say that, I can’t… I can’t say that to you.”

After beating Moriarty in TAB, Sherlock and John are just flirting in front of him. They’re sweet and affectionate with each other in a way that the present day hasn’t caught up to yet. But in TEH, Sherlock mocked John for talking about how he felt, and notes there’s an off switch for the bomb. If we understand the subway bomb, found on Sumatra road, the alternate retelling of the tragic tale of Samarra where the merchant is actually able to escape death, as the love confession, both of their confessions, it’s reiterated that Sherlock is the one in control, he has to say it first, because John has no off switch. “I find it difficult, this sort of stuff.” “You were the best and the wisest man... that I have ever known. Yes, of course I forgive you.” This is also something that’s echoed in series 4, most notably with Culverton. “What is the very worst thing you can do to your very best friends? Tell them your darkest secret. Because if you tell them and they decide they'd rather not know, you can't take it back. You can't unsay it. Once you've opened your heart, you can't close it again.” This is also reiterated later in the episode, “I never realized confessing would be so enjoyable. I should have done it sooner,” and “Apparently he can’t stop confessing.”

When Sherlock says there’s an off-switch on the bomb, he’s unintentionally signaling to John that he has an off-switch for his emotions because he faked his performance in the subway car, because he doesn’t feel things that way, because he really might be a sociopath –– so it’s fitting that the entire scenario in which John imagines Sherlock manipulating Molly into confessing the truth is based around a bomb, and not just that, but a bomb that wasn’t going to go off. Molly is even wearing her cardigan from TEH, and the scene where Sherlock accidentally called her John. “Please, John, forgive me,” Sherlock begs John in TEH. “Please, just say it,” Sherlock begs Molly in TFP. I can’t, because, it’s true, because it’s always been true, John says through Molly. I can’t say it. It has to be a trick –– so you have to say it to me first before I can believe you, and know it’s not a trick. “Go on. You say it first.” All of this while the counter to bombs that aren’t going to go off depletes (and in John’s dream, funnily enough, don’t even exist, it doesn’t make sense because it’s not real). But it still is a trick.

“You see, as long as there’s people, there’s always a weak spot,” Sherlock tells John when manipulating Janine to get into Magnussen’s office, surprising her with a proposal ring. John is completely devastated –– already confused after thinking Sherlock loved him at the end of TSOT, after seeing him with Janine a month into his unhappy marriage, and now seeing him lie to her face –– staring at him utterly heartbroken. “Sherlock, she loves you,” John pleads. I love you. Would you do that to me? Would you trick me into thinking that you love me? Do you even feel love at all? “Yes. As I said, human error.” Sherlock’s pressure point is named as John later in the episode, and John almost believes Sherlock cares about him again... but when Sherlock shoots Magnussen at the end of HLV, he says, “Give my love to Mary,” and John isn’t just back to square one for the 100000000th time, he’s regressing. “But why would he care? He’s Sherlock. Who would he bother protecting?”

While in TAB, Sherlock is progressing further than John could ever dream. John simply kicks Moriarty over the water like it was barely a concern, and John and Sherlock are together at last. The danger of Moriarty is gone. They can finally be together.

John is still on the opposite end of the spectrum, and in more complicated ways than we’ve seen thus far. John himself is seen in a shot with the coffin in the background as he watches Sherlock and Molly play out his tragic dream scenario –– John will take his secret to his grave. He would quite literally rather die than tell Sherlock that he loves him, as evidenced by his only halfway-confession in TEH. But as Sherlock and Molly tell each other, “I love you,” and the counter stops, Eurus tells Sherlock that he didn’t really win her test. There were no explosives in her home; there was never any danger, no danger beyond the damage that they just did to each other.

This feels so wrong because it is wrong; this should be the moment where John and Sherlock confess to each other. It feels so torturous because John is pulling deeply from his own experiences as the author; this should be a cathartic and transcendent moment with Sherlock facing John, but instead they’re 180 degrees apart again. This makes no sense because it’s not real, because we had to see just how wrong the wrong solution was before we were presented with the right one... which is ironic considering series 4 is the show’s own dark mirror of itself, and John is only able to tell himself all of this through talking through a mirror and through Sherlock talking to a mirror.

John has always wanted to face Moriarty with Sherlock, which is something Sherlock has never really understood, not even by the end of TAB. John was willing to die with him at the end of TGG if it meant taking Moriarty out. John wanted to be in on the secret that Sherlock was still alive, he wanted to know. He wanted to act. John does not see the danger in him and Sherlock working together against Moriarty as a deterrent, because he’s willing to face it together. Sherlock is not, or was not –– Sherlock wanted to defeat Moriarty on his own without letting John know how he felt and coordinating with him. Even after coming to his realization in TAB, we know from the real events of series 4 that while John and Sherlock are working together, Sherlock hasn’t let John in on his final secret, and the one that really matters to John. In this scenario in TFP, John is acknowledging that Sherlock has been acting in series 1-3, to a degree, under the threat of danger towards himself through his self-insert Molly, but ultimately concludes that that danger was never really there in the first place, and that Sherlock could have told him what was going on all along and he would’ve been fine. But by not doing that, Sherlock has hurt John, over and over again in the callbacks present in this scene, more than John thinks Moriarty ever could have. Sherlock wanted to protect John by isolating himself, but John wanted to face the danger together. Sherlock knows that John loves him, but John doesn’t know Sherlock loves him back. “You didn't win, you lost. Look what you did to her. Look what you did to yourself. All those complicated little emotions, I lost count.”

Sherlock will never love him back. John will remain in the same boat as Molly. John feels that for certain now. That’s why right after this scene John suddenly imagines a scenario where he needs to know why Sherlock is the way he is and why he’s so closed off, offering his own explanation. This final confirmation sends John on a nosedive, as TFP begins its last downwards, death spiral, preceded only by John writing about how much he wants to die.

“Now, for once in your life, do the right thing. Put this stupid little man out of all our misery. Shoot him!”

“Stop it.”

“Look at him. What is he? Nothing more than a distraction, a little scrap of ordinariness for you to impress, to dazzle with your cleverness. You'll find another.” (But then people do get so sentimental about their pets) After this, Sherlock holds the gun to his own head, in an episode already containing suicide references, in act four of the show, in act four of series, as John is back to the same place he was in act one, unmarried, practical about death, and alone, before falling into complete darkness.

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heart-of-vecna · 5 years ago

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Tell me about Vecna and your D&D character!

INHALES i’m sorry i’m going to info dump because I love my AWFUL SON

Stuff about awful terrible Haothahvun Greyless and his equally awful patron Vecna

(art by the wonderful @42point195kilometres )

Haothahvun Greyless is a... humorously mislead man.

[Basic Info: Haothahvun Greyless - (Trans)Male Human Neutral Evil Cleric, ~28, 5′07″ / 124 lbs]

He grew up under the name Lili Greyless in a small village to a retired adventurer and his wife, and lived a relatively mundane life as a small rural farm village girl until the age of 9, when a wizard Haothahvun’s father had thwarted in his humble adventures came back to try to find revenge on about the only member of the party who he could find. This wizard wasn’t anyone really noteworthy, but in trying to get to Haothahvun’s father he did manage to get his hands on Haothahvun and his younger brother - leading to his brother’s death, and to the magical scar on the right side of his body that left him mostly blind in his right eye. Needless to say, the whole event was severely traumatizing, and Haothahvun holed himself up in his house until he was in his late teens and his parents managed to find him a apprenticeship with a traveling bookbinder.

Haothahvun spent maybe two years with this man before hopping from one magic or scholarly-related apprenticeship to another, eventually going by his father’s name of Haothahvun and naming himself Haothahvun Greyless II. Through this, he wound up in a decent sized city as the apprentice of a alchemist who, upon seeing Haothahvun’s interest and dedication to learning, introduced him to a little ‘group’ he was a part of. For the first four-five years in this little ‘group’, Greyless was simply told it was a cult or group dedicated to learning and to old, forgotten knowledge. It wasn’t until he committed his first sacrifice as his initiation that he found out that there was a deeper layer to the cult, and that that cult worshiped Vecna. The cult had become somewhat of a family for Haothahvun, and having nowhere else to go and really nothing else to do he accepted his initiation.

And thus began Haothahvun’s spiraling journey into obsession. Haothahvun took his duties as a cultist very seriously, as he did his other jobs, but the further he learned and researched his patron the more curious and interested he became. After the death of the previous priest-in-training, Haothahvun managed to secure the position for himself, and with his very devoted nature to the task was given the chance to become one of few more ‘permanent’ priests to the city’s hidden temple. Inevitably, being the sort of dumbass he is, his infatuation with Vecna was uncovered because he was playing chicken with some other cultists with a Circle of Truth, and through a series of questions about Haothahvun’s probably non-existent love life his fellow cultists awkwardly came to the understanding that Haothahvun definitely has the hots for their lich god. A great secret to learn if using it also wasn’t going to possibly evoke your god’s wrath. Nobody teased him about it again out of fear of being smited and Haothahvun definitely was 3 seconds from lighting himself on fire.

This has always been the sort of point where my intention has always been to leave the actual relationship / etc with Vecna up to the DM but since he’s not IN a campaign we’ll just slap down my shitty HCs

It has always been my idea at this point that while Vecna was fully aware of Haothahvun (of course, as a actual priest of his), he had never paid a ton of attention - why would he? But that fact undoubtably was rather surprising, and for the better or the worse drew Vecna’s attention. Haothahvun’s patron wasn’t pleased, but despite berating him (more for letting people discover that than anything), he didn’t tell Haothahvun to stop, or not to, or really anything along those lines. So, in true perhaps overly optimistic and/or naive fashion, Haothahvun absolutely just let his infatuation run rampant. Because nothing is safer than being madly in love with your evil undead god.

Haothahvun goes out of his way to dig up bits of magic and important political secrets to give Vecna as sort of ‘gifts’, along with various things that remind Haothahvun of his patron (bits of rare black stones, a snake skull made of gold, etc.) Vecna isn’t... pleased, but is curious, because it’s not very often someone comes to him with what seems like actual, genuine interest or infatuation. Not looking for power, not playing games, not sidling up just for benefits, not. Haothahvun genuinely, stupidly, foolishly, seems to actually be in love with him. And Vecna is fucking baffled by how absolutely out of his mind Haothahvun seems to be, but at the same time is mildly entertained by how doggedly loyal Haothahvun is.

I have always imagined, because I can do whatever I want and nobody can stop me, that Vecna entertains Haothahvun’s rather pitiful attempts at courting him. He’s rather curious how far this mortal will go to try to win his actual affections. Maybe part of him is curious what, if anything, could even work - besides, it’s not like he ever had any sort of romantic affairs when he’d been alive. His one attempt at marriage ended when the woman refused him and he slaughtered her whole family in front of her (canonically). And Haothahvun keeps trying, and keeps his attention, and keeps making his way further along in the priest hierarchy while he’s at it on his own accord, maybe in hopes of showing his devotion.

Vecna is the one who calls him Greyless, which becomes the name Haothahvun holds most dear to himself, even if all his other acquaintances still call him ‘Haothahvun’.

The ultimate fate of Greyless and his infatuation I haven’t decided on. On one hand, I would like to imagine a story where Greyless manages to win his patron’s interest to any degree. Greyless, though somewhat of a optimistic idiot at times, is a very bright man, and a undyingly loyal servant, and while Vecna is no stranger to backstabbing whoever he needs to when they’ve lost their use and keeping people at arm’s length, Greyless is a peculiar anomaly that he perhaps, to his own chagrin, finds interesting. I would also like to imagine Vecna as sometimes that overly exuberant villain who is a bit over-the-top with how he appreciates his consorts, where Greyless ends up stationed out at one of his fortresses and is doted on in the secret privacy of Vecna’s domains.

I also absolutely accept the world where Vecna just pushes Greyless around, because no matter how cruel he is to him Greyless will come back with the same stupid, foolish adoration and love as he did before. There is probably nothing that will steer Greyless away, because he’s hopelessly and very unhealthily obsessed and has no idea of how to cope with it.

Or maybe a mix of both of those.

Regardless, the TLD i’m so sorry for the info dump is -

Haothathvun is a big dumb gay idiot who really wants his god to notice him and maybe love/sleep with him, and Vecna is really, really baffled at what the ever loving fuck is wrong with this kid but entertained enough to see how many hoops Haothahvun is willing to jump through for him.

#haothahvun greyless #reply #dnd #dungeons and dragons #tabletop #Greyless is v self indulgent leave me be #let me live my sad Vecna/Character dreams #rook-the-painter

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thewul · 5 years ago

Text

Predictive Dialer

Here we are again boys and girls, I will let the rest of my resume answer for itself for now. This book is not so much an admission of guilt but to answer for the many challenges that face intelligence agencies around the world to keep the place manageable. Like I said we needed to make it tidy so lets jump right to Newscorp.

One of the first things I told many people that they themselves knew about is bringing the press industry and the media in check. Better than that to assimilate them same as we gobbled the arms industry with army intelligence agencies. And they had the stomach for it, all we needed was the money which started pouring by distributing a string of armament budgets and contracts.

It was a global rapid succession of purchases by regional branches. Newscorp accounts today for almost all of it, print, TV, and the internet. It has regional policies which its staff our staff coming from different intelligence agencies respects to the letter, we have gotten to the point where we can make someone vanish from public interest, for good. Agents do a fine work as journalists, they go to select journalism schools, journalism is a career they can pursue for years even decades and it makes for a nice cover, well paid too. They practice being synthetic and accurate from their reporting and articles they write, we know way before the public does, its all pluses.

Newscorp brought us much more peace of mind, for example it allowed different, many in fact, governments to work on solving issues rather than having an irresponsible press pour more negative public opinions over it, we now have responsible people who answer to a chain of command. Its quite soulless too, if someone has to bounce from politics, business or otherwise not only that person gets blanketed from the media globally but even its past coverage gets deprecated over time to account in a decade or two, tree even so for nothing at all. Meanwhile people have other preoccupations they moved with.

Hundreds of billions went through the banking system for this operation which was swift and ruthless. The government was now entitled to it all, I convinced it and sent it tumbling down on stock markets. Its one big bully when it wants something and I used that, they are all the same pretty much. People who didn’t buy out, well they died of the usual causes of death. Businesses kept rolling and ownerships changed.

There is something to holding a press concern that is akin to holding state power which frankly I wanted for myself, to shield myself and Nakashimura from public scrutiny to start with. Its not tomorrow I am appearing in a tabloid or in a front column branded as a mass consumption victim. It’s bad enough that I left the love of my life in some city. It’s not good enough for me, since I been with you I’m gonna sip on this drink, when I’m fucked up I should know how to pick up I’m gonna catch the rhythm while she push up against me Ooh, and she tipsy I had enough convo for 24 I peep’d you from across the room Pretty little body, dancing like GoGo But you are unforgettable I need to get you alone Why not? A fucking good time, never hurt nobody I got a little drink but it’s not Bacardi If you loved your girl then I’m so, so sorry I got to give it to her like we in a marriage Oh, like we in a hurry No, no I won’t tell nobody You’re on your level too Try'in do what lovers do. Maybe someone is reading this who knows at least there goes my effort. I know those other types are, everyone is curious as to how I framed them. I gave them what they wanted, and when they had it I was the only one who could use it.

Maybe they knew all along. I am only telling because I made it legal. I studied law, and I found out that executive powers gave all of the needed leeway inasmuch as they were in the right hands. Which you can take them from those hands if you know how even if it is better to put your people there to start with which is the way to go about it.

And then there are special powers which you are learning about. Put them with military and intelligence services cut the ball in two with politics by subtracting the press. Legal authorities can only smile at that they distributed the powers not the suits. Everything I do is constitutional.

Hey wow new material for this book and for people who purchased the book, if not you can read it online. I should start to look into a book cover. So yes there is an information war going on, and abuse of power that need to be looked into. And we are.

And it points in the direction of a strong ICANN, way more powerful than it is to protect everyone’s interests mine included. More centrally located too, yes I also work at ICANN.

We are indeed going towards producing national, meaning TLD based and regional versions of the internet, meaning firewalled. Where the different countries that are party to ICANN can themselves set their versions of ICANN’s domains database, and chose which sites or even TLD’s are served and which are not. And its a variety of issues ranging from porn to malware, satanism, racism, hate talk, immigration and visa frauds. Counterfeited goods and drugs. Its a free for all.

So we and its a large we of people who are concerned, need to address those issues because it affects the daily lives and morals of generations around the globe.

Also in our firewalled regional subnets the FDA can suspend all it wants, such an infrastructure implies that services, any services and all services that are live such as Tumblr be run regionally, meaning present in the region and not serviced from out of region based servers.

The free world is also the internet, in the wealth of knowledge that it has to offer, and the people that maybe don’t know each others, maybe never will, but keep an eye on what others are doing.

We built this thing its all hacker stuff that you’re using everyday, you think you’re going to own it now? Hackers built your cellphone, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun its all hackers, hackers wrote the code that you think you can come bother us with.

Hackers wrote the hacker Manifesto that we go by everyday while you take the people’s money and will not even respect your constitutional duty to protect their civil rights. You say you live in the free world ain’t the free world. This is the free world.

This is the free world that tells all of you that are concerned to do your job as regards the people before you come knocking at our door. Its the free world that knows no distinction of gender or income or nationality or race, all we’re looking at all day long is the internet.

While you was after me I was maturing as a hacker, pleased to meet you I hack life in general same as I hack computers. Its what got you interested in the first place and here we are, I hack organizations, administrations, governments do you copy. I hack and I engineer, re engineer them.

People are reading this because it is valuable to them. They value the free speech of a free citizen of the free world. Unlike not being able to say what’s on your mind, hierarchy, bla bla blah hey we know you.

And your bosses, well hey its the big boys they know wassup they know what to do. That they’re not doing because the punk above them didn’t say nothing plus he can say all he wants and after that its the politicians. You’re Mr Clean living with Greasy.

All of you who don’t live for a pat on the back reading this, ie hackers, from all walks of life and from law enforcement. I know you’re out there and you know that I know. Hackers don’t live for a pat on the back, hackers don’t want to be known its years of jail if you get caught stealing state secrets if only to know what’s up fuck that pat on the back.

Fuck that pat on the back and do your jobs, say it like it is your duty as regards the rights of people to a decent life and future not to be abused online by scumbags.

This here is the free world. The indomitable world, the world that will not bow down nor cease to overcome. And we can tell all the difference in the world with what you are proposing.

The day after

And you ought too to rise up with your hacking skills see its not about tricking dummy into thinking you’re a network node or stealing SSL certificates from your nearest multinational, life is there waiting to be hacked, life itself and that means change for billions towards that which we want to build, a fair and free, open, transparent, prosperous, society. Its not what we have. We got to hack what we have into it.

Yes we’re back, freedom not an empty word, freedom is when everyone is free from the invisible chains of bondage and slavery. Society offers a vast panorama of resources that are over exploited, under exploited or plainly neglected and untapped by the people themselves who’s business it is to discover their potentialities and express them. Freedom is a vast project when everyone can fulfill their potential and express it, freedom is the expression of potential.

And that potential has to be constructive and positive to be of value. Freedom is not what you make it, freedom is what it makes you.

#GITS #TPM

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monikakrasnorada · 7 years ago

Text

This was my fault.

Since S4 aired, I’ve had Mycroft on the brain. I’m not sure why but there has been something about him and his role in the wonkiness of the series that I can’t shake. I’ve made some passing, rather rambly remarks about him in the past few months, but hadn’t taken the time to go back and watch to really see if I was perhaps onto something. I’m still not certain I am, but by re-watching and paying close attention, it feels as if my misgivings about him and his part in it all may not have been unfounded.

Naive as it is to admit, I was- all the way up to the airing of T6T- staunchly in the pro-Mycroft / over-protective big brother / means well / isn’t a baddie camp. Wellllll, yeah. I’m not so sure of that reading any longer. Something’s rotten in Denmark and I think that something occupies a minor position in the British government. This is my incoherent attempt to work through some of what is bothering me about Mycroft and hope that by the end, something of it all makes a bit of sense.

*I’m sure a lot of this has been brought up / discussed before by many others. This is in no way an attempt to claim these ideas as my own. Just trying to work through the thoughts as they come. Apologies in advance.*

Loads of pics and rambling word-vomit below the cut.

Mycroft

Living in a world of goldfish can’t be easy for the arch enemy of Sherlock Holmes.

I love Mycroft. I’ve been a staunch advocate of his since the beginning. Naively touting that he really does have Sherlock’s best interests at heart. That his machinations couldn’t possibly be nefarious. Just a meddling, overbearing, too-deeply invested big brother that wants to be the hero of his baby bro. I still believe that to some degree. I don’t know why? I just can’t find it in my heart to accept he knowingly / wittingly played Moriarty’s game. Or, worse yet- that the game was all him and Moriarty happened to be a pawn as well.

I think a lot of my misgivings and willingness to excuse Mycroft’s actions up until now had a bit of a personal aspect for me. I have the kind of older brother that would (and has) done terrible awful things to me in order to make himself look good or to win the attention of other memebers of the family and make it a me vs him sort of deal. That’s not fun. It’s super harmful and I just wasn’t willing to accept the show I loved as my ‘get away’ from the nastiness that can be rl, would be the show that could kind of (if I squint my eyes just right) resemble a bit of my own family dynamic.

But, I digress.

What was his fault?

MYCROFT: This was my fault

SHERLOCK: This had nothing to do with you.

MYCROFT: A week in a prison cell and I should have realised.

SHERLOCK: Realised what?

MYCROFT: That in your case, solitary confinement is locking you up with your worst enemy.

This exchange from TAB was interesting. At the time it aired, it seemed only relevant to what had happened in that ep. Sherlock had used again to either figure out the reason Moriarty had returned via the Ricoletti case or he intended to die before his exile could begin.

S4 changed all that. To me, this seemed to become a much bigger admission of guilt on Mycroft’s part. But, what of it?

MYCROFT: Nobody deceives like an addict.

Throughout the entirety of the series, we’ve never witnessed Sherlock ‘the addict’. I think he may have been using off and on-

But only for the reasons he said:

SHERLOCK: I’m not an addict. I’m a user. I alleviate boredom and occasionally heighten my thought processes.

(though, I would add alleviating a broken heart to that list as well. Poor lamb.)

A disguise is always a self-portrait

Mycroft calling Sherlock out on his addiction in TAB, for me, is a bit of a pot / kettle situation. Sherlock isn’t ‘technically’ an addict, but there does seem to be a Holmes brother with an addiction problem- . Mycroft and his addiction to power and need to control every aspect of Sherlock’s life.

MYCROFT: I was there for you before.

SHERLOCK: Before what?

MYCROFT: I’ll be there for you again. I’ll always be there for you.

Mycroft admits in TAB, that it was his fault. They- he and Sherlock- have an agreement. Ever since that day. Which we are then led to believe was some random moment in the past that Sherlock had ODed and Mycroft had come to the rescue. None of which correlates to the true reason Sherlock is the man he is if any of TFP is to be taken at face-value.

If Mycroft’s vow was that he would always be there for him. (Oh, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?)

Then where was Mycroft when Sherlock needed him after Mary’s death? As Sherlock spiralled out of control and went straight to hell??

More to the point, where was the infamous list in TLD? Mycroft was miffed to have been called out of a meeting with the Prime Minister but it was clearly evident he was aware of Sherlock’s using during the intervening time since Mary’s ‘death’ but didn’t do anything about it. Didn’t demand the ‘list’. Just brought his spooks in when Sherlock was practically dead to find out what ‘triggered’ his time ‘back on the sauce’. Hmmm.

Wow, so much for being the smart one there, Myc.

So, what exactly was Mycroft admitting fault to? The levels of that admission in TAB are staggering: Sherlock’s isolation in solitary confinement, his drug use, the reason for his drug use.

However, in TFP we get the real reason™ for Mycroft’s confession of guilt: the re-writing of Sherlock’s memories. The list of Mycroft’s misdeeds regarding his brother (nevermind Eurus at the mo, that’s a whole other can of worms) now seems endless and a little much to swallow from a normal human being. I’m sorry but Mycroft is no Svengali in any literal sense of the word. If he were capable of all of this- to be responsible for all of Sherlock’s trials and tribulations- then Mycroft’s influence is beyond compare.

Oh, but wait- No it isn’t.

That is one hell of a family trait!

I’ll be mother.

@gosherlocked wrote an interesting post about the Holmes family recently. In it she points out this line from the show:

“Every choice you ever made; every path you’ve ever taken – the man you are today … is your memory of Eurus.”

Which she then refutes beautifully with this comment:

Sorry, but no, Mycroft. This is not true. Sherlock may have been influenced by a lot of things but he cannot have become the man he is today just because of a non-existent memory. If he did not remember Eurus for decades, it is not possible that she has completely shaped his life.

Can you hear me screaming “THIS!” in response as I read that. Because that’s it right there in a nutshell, isn’t it? The whole reason nothing of this series makes a lick of sense because it completely edits and erases what came before it in the show.

And- HA! Isn’t that fucking hilarious because it’s exactly what Mycroft tells us at the beginning of T6T:

So, everything is up to Mycroft’s discretion. Interesting. Stick a pin in that thought because we will come back to it in a bit.

Alternatively

There are two instances where this word comes into play and is the main reason I am now compelled to write all this down (and hope that much smarter minds than mine can make the connection a lot clearer). It feels as if this word is pivotal to what has happened in the show since HLV.

Immediately following TAB, during the convos that brought @gosherlocked and @the-7-percent-solution and I together in order to birth EMP theory, I made a random post about this word appearing in the opening sequence of TAB:

noun:

1.a choice limited to one of two or more possibilities, as of things,propositions, or courses of action, the selection of which precludes any other possibility

adjective:

1.(of two things, propositions, or courses) mutually exclusive so that if one is chosen the other must be rejected

2.employing or following nontraditional or unconventional ideas,methods, etc.; existing outside the establishment

At that time, I merely found the word intriguing, in relation to what we were shown in TAB. The opening montage of what came before in the show up until the airing of TAB was a bit mind boggling. Not only was the timeline questionable, but the things which they decidedly omitted was a head-scratcher.

What happens once the alternative is introduced?

Immediately following his exchange with Lady S and Sir Edwin, where the alternative was first discussed:

MYCROFT: In any event, there is no prison in which we could incarcerate Sherlock without causing a riot on a daily basis. The alternative, however ... would require your approval.

LADY SMALLWOOD: Hardly merciful, Mr Holmes.

Which really, Mycroft? Really?

We are meant to believe the only alternative for Sherlock having killed CAM was a six-month suicide mission? When Sherrinford exists for the ‘uncontainables’?

The alternative is a turning point.

Nothing is ever the same in this show once that word is introduced. It immediately cuts to the tarmac scene and what do we get?

The first inkling that something is fishy with Mary’s characterisation:

No one expected this turnaround, did they? What’s a little fatal shooting between besties, right?

Then we have this painful exchange. The last words between two men that have thought the sun rose and set on one another. The best and wisest and bravest man the other has ever known and they have nothing of importance to say to each other as Sherlock goes off (if not to John’s knowledge of certain death, clearly you would think Sherlock having killed a man to save his family) John could nut up and say THANK YOU, AT LEAST????

AN ABORTED LOVE CONFESSION FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!!!!

But (and here I’m shootting myself in my own EMP foot) isn’t this how all of this might have played out through the lens of an emotionally-constipated, not-good-with-humans person?

Perhaps this is Mycroft’s alternative tale. Editing. TD 12. Eurus’ influence. There’s no surprise that something has changed in the way this story is told. Maybe it’s the narrator. Maybe it’s simply Sherlock imagining the alternative because he knows Mycroft is at the heart of the problem, so he has put him front and center. I don’t know and I’m not sure any of us can really know until we get more (please, let us get more and answers to all of this)

What I am saying is that I don’t believe alternative was an accident.

Previously

In both TAB and T6T, we get this sort of thing at the beginning ^^. A montage of highlights to get us back up to speed. Again, something is fuuuuucky, because in neither one is there ever a callback to Mary shooting Sherlock.

From the moment we get the alternative, we get the retcon of Mary Morstan. Why? They solidly built her character to be the most amazing villain of the show. I daresay, capable of surpassing Moriarty in good old-fashioned nastiness.

And, it isn’t just Mary that is re-worked. No one since before the tarmac has been in character. I had previously stated my belief that S4 was merely a continuation of TAB- the Victorian personifications brought into the 21st century. It was John’s hair, of all things, that made me realise this as a possibility because it explains the why of John’s hair and Sherlock never bothering to mention it. But, looking at S4 in that vein, really did explain a lot- and make sense of the nonsensical- in a way nothing else had until that point.

I’m not saying I don’t still believe this isn’t all in Sherlock’s head- I do!- I just think that Mycroft has influenced it all much more than anyone originally thought.

Mycroft sees Sherlock as the child he still has to protect and I believe Sherlock subconsciously knows that, hence the exuberant andchild-like actions Sherlock has at the beginning of T6T. All of S4′s characterisations so wrong as to be laughable. Perhaps it’s howSherlock imagines Mycroft imagines them all to be?

Mycroft lied to us.

He told Sherlock and John about Redbeard. He apparently helped arrange their stunt to get onto Sherrinford, so why did he perpetuate the lie? He knew Sherlock was confronting Eurus and she would tell him the truth. Or, no, as a matter of fact, she never said a word about Victor.

Just that they never had a dog. The Victor bit was Sherlock’s own idea. But we saw the dog bowl. If Eurus brought Sherlock to Sherrinford to get emotional context to get to the truth of his repressed memories, why did she perpetuate the Redbeard story? She wanted him to remember “you don’t know about Redbeard”. She had him at Musgrave to reveal the story, but she kept the dog dish. Is this because it is really Mycroft’s mind and he still wanted to keep Sherlock from remembering?

No repercussions for Mycroft after Sherrinford.

All of that planning, plotting, scheming, disguises, setting up an asylum as your own version of Saw- for what? Emotional context? Her oldest brother lied to her parents about her death, kept her locked away and isolated for years. Exploited her abilities for his own gain and she did nothing to him when she had the chance? This woman, who as a 6 year old, killed her brothers best friend because he wouldn’t play with her?

Is Eurus some manifestation of Mycroft? There seems to be a theme here, and I can’t make the connections, so I want to add it and see if anyone else can connect the dots.

Cross-dressing Uncle Rudy and Lady Bracknell. Is Uncle Rudy a ‘codename’ for Mycroft? An invention, like Eurus, to keep Sherlock in line somehow? The East Wind?

Eurus’ song

As I wind down here with this whacked-out non-sense, I just want to leave this here. The last stanza of Eurus’ song and a reference we have seen made by Mycroft many times before:

Without your love he’ll be gone before Save pity for strangers, show love the door My soul seek the shade of my willow’s bloom Inside, brother mine Let Death make a room.

I have loads more about Mycroft I want to share, but I think this is already too long as it is, so I’ll say, if you’ve stuck around this far: stay tuned for part 2.

@loveismyrevolution @gosherlocked @ebaeschnbliah @isitandwonder @tjlcisthenewsexy @the-7-percent-solution @tendergingergirl @yan-yae @impossibleleaf @shadow3214 @shawleyleres @fvkingstraightculture @themanandthemachine @may-shepard @sarahthecoat

#sherlock #mycroft #this was my fault #emp #mk

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asherlockstudy · 7 years ago

Text

John’s choices (from TEH to TLD)

I do not have a lot of sympathy for John after what he did in TLD and I won’t claim that his confession / speech in the end of the episode is evidently confirming Johnlock because it isn’t evidently doing so, however I can’t interpret it in any other way that could possibly make sense.

John starts by blaming himself for not being the man he wants to be - the man who would be brave and strong and would always save his loved ones. He’s right to feel guilt. I haven’t seen people discuss the scene in which Culverton Smith says in the news that he won’t press charges against Sherlock and that he may even take him to his “favourite room”. John already knows that this is the mortuary yet he still chooses to trust Culverton more than Sherlock. Sherlock does not know that but it is another good reason for the severe guilt John feels. Sherlock quickly says that John does a disservice to himself - John was the man who killed Hope to rescue Sherlock, he was nearly killed by the Golem, he chose to sacrifice himself so Sherlock could escape from the pool and he decided to die there although, technically, if he didn’t care about Sherlock, he could perhaps survive.

So, in fact, John is not the man he wants to be but he used to be that man when he lived with Sherlock. Sherlock brings the best out of John just as much as John does the same for Sherlock.

Then John goes on and says that he cheated on Mary and that he wanted more although he knew he shouldn’t. And then he says the most enlighting thing in this baffling conversation:

“I never could be. But that ‘s the point. That’s the whole point.”

The basic qualities that John believes Mary expected him to have according to his speech are two: a) chivalry, altruism and b) loyalty. We just remembered that John had indeed been a brave man, always willing to risk his life to save his loved ones so I think it’s safe to eliminate “brave or altruistic” from the equation of his quote.

So the point of what John says is that he was not as loyal as he should and that he could never be. What does he mean? That John realised he was never a man for the steady, monogamous relationship Mary wanted? Maybe. But what he certainly means is that he could never be the man Mary dreamt him to be because he was never in love with Mary, at least not enough to spend his whole life with her and only her. And since he says “I never could be and that’s the whole point”, this probably means he was deep inside always aware that he never truly wanted that marriage.

John says that this girl just smiled at him and that was all, so he doesn’t really believe the woman in the bus was important to him. He says it clearly; it was just a smile. Yet he wanted more. So, in fact, even a smile could take John away from Mary and John can not forgive himself for this. He wasn’t taken away because he’s still a man of principle but apparently for John it is not enough to be a loyal man just because he knows it’s what he’s supposed to be and not what he truly wants.

But John had decided to propose to Mary before Sherlock returned, when John was completely alone. So why did John always know that this marriage would be a mistake, if there was nobody else in his life? Probably because his heart belonged to the person whom he never expected to come back. He thought Mary was the best available alternative and he was desperate to somehow move on, so a marriage couldn’t harm either him or Mary, since Sherlock was truly dead and Mary had nothing to fear.

Except Sherlock proved to be alive.

Sherlock’s comeback interrupted the proposal and, despite being mad at him, John failed to keep himself away, especially after Sherlock saved his life. John avoided to properly propose to Mary again and Mary implied this with a glare at Sherlock in the end of TEH.

Mary: Yeah. Well, once we’ve actually got engaged. John: Yeah. M: We were interrupted last time. J: Yeah.

Check this scene yourself and you’ll see John looks uncomfortable with this subject. He seems to want Mary to stop. And, you know, it’s also never discussed but John tried in the very next scene to make Sherlock open his heart.

John: I’m still waiting. Sherlock: Hmm? J: Why did they try and kill me? If they knew you were on to them, why go after me – put me in the bonfire?

Someone may think John doesn’t understand why he got attacked but this is not the case in my opinion. John knew why he was kidnapped. He had asked Sherlock before, Sherlock had answered vaguely that he didn’t know, yet John brought up the issue again. Look at his expression:

His expression is playful and subtly teasing. That’s not a man who fears for his life. He knows or suspects he was kidnapped because he’s the most important person in Sherlock’s life but he needs Sherlock to tell him. Badly. Just one word and John would have ended everything he had with Mary. But Sherlock avoided to provide the correct and very much needed answer:

...and left John disappointed. And angry. And desperate.

Yet John didn’t give up immediately this time. He tried again because he had the pressure of the proposal hanging over his head.

When you were dead, I went to your grave. I made a little speech. I actually spoke to you. I asked you for one more miracle. I asked you to stop being dead.

If this is not the most daring John has ever been, then I don’t know what is. John showed nearly all his cards to Sherlock because he was in despair. John has enormous trouble to talk about his feelings which he suppresses in an unbelievable degree, yet he overcomes himself now because it’s his last chance.

Sherlock replies with a meaningful “I heard you” but then changes the subject and leaves him behind. John probably concludes that even if he’s important to Sherlock, Sherlock is determined to not indulge in a romantic confession, let alone relationship. He concludes Sherlock still doesn’t want romantic entanglement and decides that he must not disappoint Mary who, after all, is the next best thing that has happened to him.

As the wedding approaches and John is completely indifferent (check the whole TSOT for real), almost as if he’s not the one who gets married, he tries once more, more boldly than ever before, during the stag night. But he was drunk and when he’s sober again, John goes back to his inhibitions. We should never forget that in addition to all his problems, John still doesn’t feel comfortable with his feelings for Sherlock and what they mean for his sexuality.

During the wedding John was oversensitive to anything that indicated Sherlock cared for him. Sherlock’s announcement that Mary is pregnant visibly panicked him because John realised that changing his mind and getting a divorce would not only affect Mary but would now also affect his own child. At this point he’s clearly in despair and he nearly has a heart attack when he sees the heartbreak in Sherlock’s face. However, he chooses his baby and Mary this time and tries to roll with his choices.

One month later, John hates his life. He hates himself. He tries to cope by inflicting his anger to people who potentially deserve it. He literally provokes Bill to attack him just so that he will have an excuse to beat him. He’s angry at Sherlock because he uses again. John suspects the reason Sherlock is using but can’t bear take the blame for this too, so he blames Sherlock for not caring about his life and his friends. John tries to find all the flaws someone has so that he will be distracted from his own mistakes. By blaming someone for something they truly did, John feels like some of his burden is temporarily relieved. Sherlock understands this and scolds John as much as John scolds everyone else and then John feels even more guilt because he knows Sherlock is right.

When he found out Mary shot Sherlock, believe me, John was hopeful his problem was solved. It was his chance to escape. But both Mary and Sherlock were targets of his wrath. Why poor incapacitated Sherlock? Because he tried to reconcile them. John didn’t want to be reconciled with Mary. This admittedly terrible turn of events gave him the only opportunity to split up with Mary and reunite with Sherlock without feeling guilt for leaving his wife and perhaps not being there for his child. It was his only chance to forgive himself and escape from his self-loathing. In his effort to make Sherlock understand that and let him end this marriage, he becomes daring again:

But she wasn’t supposed to be like that. Why is she like that?

John tells Sherlock that he didn’t want Mary to be like what according to Sherlock attracts him to people - dangerous, risky, mysterious - like Sherlock. In short, John told Sherlock Mary wasn’t really who he could be in love with, attracted to. He chose her to rest assured he wouldn’t fall in love with her. John chose someone unlike Sherlock because he didn’t want a substitute for Sherlock - he wanted to forget, It was a choice driven by self-protection and reason, not love. It’s unclear how much she understood but Mary lowered her head after what John told Sherlock. I think she understood.

And I think Sherlock undestood too. He told John he chose Mary, although John had basically just explained that the only reason he chose her was to move on from him. Sherlock keeps trying to make him return to Mary and this time John snaps:

Why is everything ... MY FAULT?!

This makes so much more sense after TLD. John was struggling with his self-loathing since the beginning of HLV but Mary’s attempt to kill Sherlock made him feel better for himself. He felt he ‘d done wrong things but he wasn’t the worst person in the room after all. And if he did bad things, well, at least Mary deserved it. And if he finally ended this marriage like he always wanted, he’d have every right to. But Sherlock didn’t allow him the chance to feel better for himself, forgive himself. While John tries desperately to free himself, he tells Sherlock he doesn’t truly love Mary yet Sherlock, after some thought, basically tries to convince him that he indeed loves her and that she still is the best choice for him.

I disagree that Sherlock here complains that John chose Mary over him because if that was the case then pretty much the rest of the scene wouldn’t make sense as John and Sherlock would both have the desire to get rid of Mary. I think John’s declaration “She was not supposed to be someone I would love” breaks Sherlock for a moment and he needs some time to find how to respond. He chooses once again not to acknowledge what John means and this time John does not accept it as respectfully as usual.

Sherlock’s insistence to counter-argue John in what John feels and about whom hurts John more than anything. He feels unwanted, misunderstood, unable to communicate to others who he is and what he feels, alone. He screams into the void. No one listens. He feels for the first time that this deep connection he used to have with Sherlock is probably broken.

Sherlock probably understood John’s way of thinking and that’s why he tried to push John back to Mary. He thought that if John finally found out that Mary genuinely cared about him or there were whatever reasons for her actions, his self-loathing would return and would be even worse than before, especially since the child would grow up without a father figure. Also, Sherlock was still afraid to allow romantic entaglement in his life, it seems. However, I hope there were more specific reasons Sherlock wanted to reunite them but we will never know because apparently something went terribly wrong after S3.

The important thing here in short is that John tried to express his love again and Sherlock not only (basically) rejected him for the fourth time, he actually refused to acknowledge what John was telling him. That’s the ultimate heartbreak John has suffered. John has been very respectful of Sherlock’s lifestyle and choices regarding romance but this was a critical hit to his patience. As I’ve said, at this point I am positive John knows Sherlock loves him back or at least likes him this way, therefore Sherlock’s behaviour drives him crazy, he doesn’t understand it and it hurts him. At this moment, Sherlock failed John. John starts doubting again what he means to Sherlock.

This can be seen in John’s next words after Sherlock pushes him to Mary: “Okay. Your way. Always your way.” which make Sherlock turn his face away uncomfortably. That “Always your way” is a statement that John still surrenders and complies to Sherlock’s will, he accepts Sherlock’s refusal to see what’s between them and fulfills Sherlock’s wish that John will at least give Mary a chance to defend herself. He hates doing any of this but it’s Sherlock, thus he does it anyway.

John forgave Mary without wanting to because Sherlock didn’t really leave him another choice. He returned to his marriage, being mad at Mary, being mad at himself and also being mad at Sherlock for pushing him even more to his self-loathing. Let us not forget the Christmas scene in HLV - in which John forgives Mary by looking ominous rather than forgiving. I won’t get into detail again regarding this matter - I still believe John chose his words carefully and basically promised Mary that he would become the source of her future problems.

Now, this is not exactly what we saw in Series 4, is it? We all expected John to work undercover in order to find condemning evidence of Mary’s past (or something of the sort) and we got none of it. But if we think about it, the fact that we didn’t get exactly what we expected does not mean that John’s initial threatening demeanour towards Mary exposed a severe inconsistency between HLV and TST.

John was trapped. Sherlock was protecting Mary and would oppose to any further attempt of John’s to rebel against his wife. John not only feels betrayed and angry at Sherlock for this but he also can’t wrap his head around the absurdity of it; the shot victim becoming best friends with the perpetrator. While this is not obvious in the fourth series, I think we can assume it safely by John’s gradual alienation from Sherlock. I personally think that Sherlock’s weird decision to support Mary was even more destructive for his friendship with John than his two year long absence. So, after a lot of thought that led to the HLV fireplace scene, John perhaps decided he could only take revenge on Mary in a way Sherlock couldn’t intervene. As a husband. If his threat was to be a bad husband to her, perhaps he tried to keep his promise.

I belong to the TJLC community but I always considered Mary a grey character, expecting her to be redeemed in the end, thus I blame John too for a good share of reasons that made this marriage problematic. It was always clear to me that despite her many terrible flaws Mary cared for John much more than John did for her. Just as Mary was manipulative and immature in many cases, John was uncaring and indifferent and basically angry for most of their time together. I can at least thank Moffat for taking the time to show us that John and Mary’s marriage was problematic before the CAM incident. And in my opinion, at that early period, John was mostly the source of the problem but then of course Mary took the lead very easily.

So how did John deal during TST? First of all, despite all his anger, John couldn’t hold it against Sherlock as much. TST makes clear that John was still desperate for some attention from Sherlock. If you watch TST carefully, John looks lowkey ALWAYS angry at Sherlock. Well, he is. John feels suppressed and ignored by the lunatic team of the victim and the killer: Sherlock and Mary. He soon becomes the third wheel, not because Mary and Sherlock genuinely don’t want him around (seriously, they were just teasing him) but because his negativity and sense of being wronged leaves him behind to begrudge and boil with anger which is a very reasonable reaction. If you think John spends too much time with Mary in TST, John will maybe agree with you. It’s not that John wanted this, it’s that Sherlock and Mary both forced her presence much to John’s annoyance.

Before Rosie was born, Sherlock was obsessing over Moriarty and since Mary was obsessing over Sherlock obsessing over Moriarty, John couldn’t find time to spend alone with him. His new status as “reconciled with my heavily pregnant wife” didn’t leave hin many choices. The night Mary gives birth, Sherlock looks more panicked after John found 59 (for real) missed calls. First of all, how do you even miss 59 calls of your wife when she’s through the last month of pregnacy? Then it’s the mystery of the driver: we had seen on setlock that Sherlock was driving while John, the doctor and expectant father, was by Mary’s side. They switched their positions for the scene they kept in. Maybe it was just for laughs, seeing twitter-obsessed Sherlock trying to help Mary through her labour, but it can also indicate that John, who was more like “Oh shit” the whole time since he found the calls, was already in a mild phase of dissociation. He chose to drive and left Sherlock to play the role of the supportive partner.

Surely, Rosie’s arrival softened John. He obviously loves her but this doesn’t bring him any closer to Mary. John spends the next months being exhausted and comparing his baby to Sherlock - until a random girl in the bus happens to smile at him. And apparently that’s all he needs. Getting deeper into John’s mind, it’s important to clarify something: There is a difference between what an angry John plans to do and what John can actually do. This means that John’s desire to hurt Mary and also the lack of romantic love or sexual desire for her urged him to cheat on Mary with “E” but there was so far he could go until the moral rock John Watson stepped in.

This is painful for me but let’s pay some attention:

John has his first moral bells ringing when he sees his photo with Mary and ROSIE. That’s why I said Rosie softened John without changing much though. Rosie didn’t make John forgive and love Mary but made him think twice before acting because any wrong move could hurt his daughter besides Mary. And John doesn’t want that.

But even the Rosie effect faded easily at times. His face here is all “LOL fuck Mary (figuratively)”.

This is very important. Note the expression of euphoric disbelief in John’s face. Don’t forget that John spent the last months being pushed to a marriage, being ignored by Sherlock and feeling the thirld wheel of the gang. Having someone take the initiative to flirt him openly must almost seem like a new experience to him. It’s a boost to his ego. He feels wanted after a LONG time. He feels worthy of somebody’s time.

John’s psychology is in a terrible state. Right before Eurus flirted with him, Sherlock had invited him for a case by mentioning that he took Mary’s permission for their meeting. John huffs a miserable laugh after he sees Sherlock’s text. Sure, it makes sense to ask the wife when you have a newborn and she’s been exhausted all day or has an important job to do but John should be the one to discuss with Mary instead of watching Sherlock and Mary taking decisions for him without him. At this point, John might as well feel as important as the rug on the floor and I think it’s not a coincidence that he flirted back exactly after this incident. In a way, this was a subconscious cheating on Sherlock too. An attempt to protest.

Despite his misery, low self-esteem and anger, John was still trying to get Sherlock’s attention. If exhausted and miserable John still takes the time to buy a balloon and draw his sad but still caring face on it for Sherlock, well this pretty much says it all. He desperately needed Sherlock and he consciously let it show.

As I said earlier, there is a difference between what John says he’ll do and what he actually does. When he got E’s number, he probably felt it was time for his promise aside from the needed confidence boost. However, just like when he took the gun to kill a man in TFP but eventually couldn’t bear to do it, he eventually didn’t manage to cheat on Mary sexually (the emotional cheating remains). Let alone that he was feeling guilty towards E too who, he thought, didn’t deserve such a deception. I believe Rosie is definitely a major factor for his decision to end this affair too.

However, he still was the one who trusted Mary the least, the one who instructed Sherlock to trap her with the USB and watch her. John had zero trust for Mary and was inventing ways that hopefully would prove once again that this marriage should be ended. However, he took Mary back after her apology much more easily that you would except because:

He realised Mary was trying to protect them and not involve them into this situation, even in this crazy way

The ever present Sherlock would disapprove (God knows why)

He was feeling guilty for his cheating. John later showed he couldn’t forgive himself for cheating literally in front of Mary’s face as she was looking after their daughter. Because that’s who John is. It doesn’t matter if Mary’s behaviour was problematic or not, John didn’t feel right doing that.

After this John decided they should start over mostly for the child and because of his guilt. But he never had the chance to confess to Mary what he’d done and sort it out. The next thing - Mary was dying after Sherlock had invited them to the aquarium.

Many fans noted that John was far too calm until Mary died and that his reaction was very different to Sherlock’s so it was out of character. The reaction is indeed very different and I have made a comparison of John’s reactions in both death scenes in this post. However, I don’t agree it was out of character. Quite the contrary. I don’t want to repeat myself so I will focus on the most important points.

John didn’t try THAT hard to save Mary although I believe this was partially because he recognised the wound as certainly fatal. Whatever the truth is, he visibly lost his composure only then:

If one thing Mary ever said was true, that’s the one for me. John was the most important person in Mary’s flawed and troubled life. This is when John breaks and I think everyone would, even without loving the dying person. The most notable thing about this scene is that John failed to reciprocate. Even when Mary was dying, he didn’t tell her he loved her or that she was his whole world too. From what we’ve seen all this time in the show, the kindest compliment she ever received from John was that she is the “next best thing” and I know you probably don’t feel sympathy but I’m frankly a bit sad for her.

I analyze this more in the aforementioned post but the reasons John is so different here is because he’s not shocked like in Sherlock’s suicide - he’s angry. And when I say angry, I don’t mean like when he said he was angry above Sherlock’s grave. I mean he’s reached a whole new level of self - loathing. He knows that it was a mistake to marry her. A mistake to bring Sherlock into her life and vice versa. A mistake to make a child (although of course he loves Rosie now). But what he couldn’t forgive himself for the most was that he couldn’t reciprocate - that he never loved her. That they never stood a chance to live happily since the beginning. John is by nature a giving person of low self esteem - he takes 1 and gives gratefully 100 back. Mary’s love confession perhaps changed vastly his whole perception of her. Let’s remember again:

“I never could be. But that ‘s the point. That’s the whole point.”

That’s the problem.That this time he couldn’t reciprocate. And the origin of the problem is: Sherlock. John blames himself for loving Sherlock and for making so many wrong choices because of his suppressed raging feelings for him. John carries too much inside him at this point so the only thing he can do to protect his fragile state of mind is to instictively project all his hate to Sherlock. I believe Sherlock understood exactly what John was doing and this is why he forgave him immediately. I don’t think Sherlock truly believed he was responsible for Mary’s death. He didn’t show signs of guilt before John blamed him, he was initially shocked when John did yet he eventually took John’s accusations without protest. In order to soothe John’s hurt he even inflames these accusations in the mortuary but when later John finally admits that Sherlock was not to blame, Sherlock didn’t show the slightest sign of disbelief, self-loathing or guilt.

John also says to Eurus (the therapist) early in TLD that he doesn’t really blame Sherlock for what happened. Yet he is mad at him, he acts as if he hates him, he accuses him when Sherlock is present, he ends up hitting him brutally. John loathes what Sherlock means to him - the fact that he is so much in love and had probably brought a lot of trouble and misery to himself and others because of his feelings for such a peculiar person with such a dangerous lifestyle. In short, he hates himself and his feelings. He hates himself for not loving Mary back that his only way to deal with his anger is to inflict Mary to his mind and convince himself that he misses her. As Mary is part of his own mind, he gives her the best of his own attributes in another effort to despise himself even more. Mary takes the part of his positive, reasonable, compassionate side as well as his lust for Sherlock (which made me uncomfortable for her character) while John is left with his misery, bitterness, resentment, bad habits, unfriendliness and cruelty. In short, he imagines Mary better than she was alive and forces this image to his mind. He discards his good side by attributing it to Mary’s memory. That’s how guilty he feels for all the wrong choices he made, for loving Sherlock and never daring to confront it or at least managing to leave it behind.

His good side (aka Mary) often challenges the distorted impression John has created for himself and his feelings for Mary or Sherlock. The most important moment is when she asks John playfully whether he still misses her. Well, if even a walk in a mortuary could make John forget Mary, we can safely assume he didn’t love her very much. John thought he deserved to live the rest of his life with the memory of his late wife engraved in his mind as an apology to her and the “unreasonable standard” he has set for himself. Being loyal to her after death - loving her now more than before. Of course this couldn’t possibly be genuine so it’s in fact a self-inflicted punishment for life.

It’s John crying, not Mary. Crying after denying there is something he doesn’t tell the therapist. The equivalent of the rain outside the window when John couldn’t speak it out in front of Ella. The misery he brought in his life after making the mistake to fall in love with Sherlock.

John said he wasn’t blaming Sherlock but he was rather aggressive to the therapist. He dismissed all her efforts to calm him down, to persuade him “it was okay”. And here’s the main problem John has after Mary’s death:

Therapist: That’s understandable.

John: Is it? Why? Why is it understandable? Why does everything have to be understandable? Why can’t some things be unacceptable and we just say that? (Refusing to help himself, self loathing)

T: I only mean it’s okay.

J: I am letting my daughter down, how the hell is that okay?

T: You just lost your wife.

J: And Rosie lost her mother.

T: You are holding yourself to an unreasonable standard.

J: No, I’m failing to.

John deflects Eurus’ explanation of how much he grieves Mary’s loss - his real problem is that now his child is motherless. Rosie is going to miss Mary, not him. He blames himself so much, because of his and Sherlock’s dangerous lifestyle, for choosing to marry Mary of all women, for choosing to marry in general and bring a child in the world without working out all his unresolved issues first. He keeps on hating and hating, this takes all his energy and makes him feel he’s failing as a father even further.

The reason John tries to distance himself from Sherlock is because his obsession with him is in his opinion the root of all evil (not Sherlock himself). John is afraid of acting thoughtlessly again or being hurt again and at this point he really can’t take more of it. When he beats Sherlock in the mortuary, he shouts whether it’s all just a game. John fuels with his hate and guilt his good old frustration of how important he is to Sherlock, of how important it is to Sherlock to save people (or is it just for the kicks). The main reason for John’s behaviour since Sherlock returned to London was that John could never be sure anymore that he actually meant something to Sherlock. He felt manouvered and manipulated and used as a sidekick for as long as Sherlock would please, yet he found himself unable to move on so he kept joining Sherlock in his adventures, hoping that his company meant a little something to Sherlock just as it meant the world to him. His biggest fear is that he wasted the last years of his life making bad choices, frightened and adrift and unaware that Sherlock does not give a damn for what is happening to him. He’s terrified that his child lost his mother as a consequence of years of what he thought was important but perhaps it was just Sherlock’s adrenaline rush in the end.

Let me clarify three things: a) of course John is totally wrong about how important he is to Sherlock but Sherlock didn’t help much with all his backpeddling and support to Mary, b) John deep inside knows he’s wrong but his judgement at this point is clouded and also he tries to abdicate himself from a part of his responsibility in all this mess and c) it is obvious that after the last reconciliation with Mary and especially her love confession before her death, John thought he was wrong for ever thinking he should take the child and leave her or betray her. Whether he had forgiven her for shooting Sherlock or not is unclear but I believe he thought she didn’t deserve to be seperated from Rosie as Rosie didn’t deserve to grow up without a mother. Besides, as John is a giving person with low self-confidence who feels grateful to anyone who likes him back, redeemed and enamoured Mary rose rapidly in his esteem while Sherlock’s inexpicable, baffling, occasionally indifferent demeanour just filled him with doubt, loneliness and thoughts of unworthiness.

All these make sense to me, the thing that is really OOC and unjustifiable in my opinion is that John never apologized to Sherlock for hitting him. This I can’t forgive him for although I believe it’s mostly Moffat to blame because this is definitely incosistent writing. I want to believe something happened off camera but I am not sure because there is still some tension between them in TFP, mostly from John’s side. John still looks rigid and apparently his issues will only be fixed slowly in time. The biggest step was made though. Sherlock finally showed he cares in a conventional way, he showed John he’s there for him, he was tender and compassionate. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that basically what John needed all this time was a hug. I am adamant about this; John is still respectful of Sherlock and his lifestyle, he just feared he was taken in by his romantic silly self, that he acted stupidly due to his raging emotions (which is admittedly true). John did act stupidly for a very long time.

Sherlock: It’s okay.

John: It’s not okay.

S: No... but it is what it is.

In the end, Sherlock agrees that John made many mistakes. But Sherlock saved him from doing the biggest mistake of all; never forgive himself and destroy their and Rosie’s life for good.

John still does not demand anything from Sherlock. He is incredibly low-maintenance especially when it comes to Sherlock. John can be happy with as much as an “Are you okay?” or a simple hug coming from Sherlock because he loves him that much. All he needs is to not feel alone, to not feel tricked by his own self and emotions, to not feel immoral and toxic to others because of his desire. I can’t help but add that Jim Moriarty truly did one hell of a job with them that morning on the rooftop because I always need to add this for some reason.

Eventually, John grew tired of his feelings and his trouble and pain and we can’t really blame him for that. I will analyze this more in the next meta which will focus on their potential after the hug scene. I can’t however stress enough; no matter how exhausted John feels, he can’t escape from his love for Sherlock, a blessing and a curse at the same time. He simply can’t. He may rebel against him, he may try to leave, he may try to find a substitute or forget but he won’t. He would always give his all for something as small as a soothing word or a shared joke or a hug or a ludicrous chase in the night. That’s what he hates but this is who he is and why we love him. He just needed to make his peace with himself. He just needed Sherlock.

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impossibleleaf · 8 years ago

Text

Why there HAS to be a 4th episode or A quick reminder of everything that is fucky

I know that lately it has become difficult to keep believing in the existence of a fourth episode, one the fandom has decided to call the Lost Special. So this post has nothing but the goal to lay down the hard facts that prove not only the existence of that episode but also the necessity of it.

This is a collection of reasons why we believe in a Lost Special, all at the same place. No Arg, no speculations, no hard meta, just the irrefutable evidence we’ve gathered that shows how something is terribly wrong at the moment within the show itself. If someone starts doubting, this is supposed to remind them why we’re still in the expectative.

Tighten your belt, we’re going deep inside the show. It’s going to be long, and frankly not everything will make sense but that’s the point: nothing make sense otherwise.

So many unfired Chekov’s gun, so many loose threads

We were told to read Chekov. The problem is, we have no time if we need to address every Chekov’s guns they haven’t fired. It is very telling that I’m certain the list I’m going to make is very incomplete but here we go:

1. You should put that on a T-Shirt

What was the point of it? We knew by that point that CAM and Mary were connected. Giving both characters the same line implies an intimacy that was never shown, a connection that goes beyond blackmail. This is either a Chekov’s gun or very lazy writing. Can’t Moffat imagine a better line to show CAM’s contempt? We still need to see the depth of these two’s relationship, we need to see how Mary could have heard that line. The little joke Mary has said in the intimacy of their bedroom is outright contempt in CAM’s and was most certainly meant to be one from the beginning.

2. How is your wound, Sherlock?

This is a recurring theme even if it’s not obvious. When Sherlock thinks about Mary, he grimaces and touches his wound. This happened already in TAB where he literally fell in pain right after mentioning Mary to Watson.

Mary’s past is going to come back to haunt her? Why in that line does Sherlock need to touch his wound then? I thought all was nice and forgiven? No hard feeling?

3. Romantic entanglement, while fulfilling for other people would complete Sherlock as a human being

Seriously, what was the point of this? This is firing the canon and realizing after the fact there is nothing inside. When it comes to Sherlock and John’s romantic arc, it’s the hot potato game.

“Do you have a girlfriend? Not my area. Boyfriend? No.” “I’m sure you’d be very happy together. Sorry, what?” “Did he ever have, I don’t know, girlfriend, boyfriend a romantic relationship?” “You’re a great boyfriend, and Sherlock Holmes is a very lucky man.”

I’m not going to finish this one or even develop it. That would take dozens of pages. The point is, TLD finally addressed the elephant in the room. It did for no apparent reason but that was this episode’s advertising point: the whole episode was marketed as Sherlock being in love, John broke down and showed how terribly human he is, Sherlock proved how far he’d go for him. The elephant isn’t in the room anymore, it’s grown so much there is no house left. But TFP? Never. Talks. About. This. If like they’re pretending, they want to end the show there, they never will. This is a black hole inside the show, it sucks everything out of it.

4. So what was inside that letter?

Nobody knows, nobody ever will. The same way, we don’t know what Sherlock’s recurring dream is.

5. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to The Final Problem of horrors

Within the same episode, many Chekov’s gun where loaded, none got fired, a rifle being of one them.

The bloodied wall? Pointless. Molly’s confession? Like I said, romantic arcs are hot potatoes and this one got dropped with the Garridebs.

Ah, the Three Garridebs. That one moment in Sherlock Holmes everyone agrees is vital. It explains Holmes and Watson’s relationship and it was worth a wound to finally have the confirmation Holmes cares. This is that one moment Moffat swore he adores and yet has reduced to nothing. This is the biggest warning we need. A true fan wouldn’t just do that if that wasn’t part of a plan.

I’m going to stop there. I don’t have the patience to search further but, I think I’ve proved my point anyway.

So many words unsaid. So many plots unsolved. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

1. So, what was the point of S4 again?

Each season has an arc: S1 is Sherlock and John finding their footing, the discovery of Moriarty, S2 is the relative peace of the show that hides Moriarty’s “Final Problem”, S3 is about Mary and CAM.

S4? This is a season that needs to be seen with the three episodes at the same time but, and that’s where it hurts, the Eurus revelation destroys whatever deduction you could have made. That’s like when you play rock-paper-scissor and someone screams ‘Bomb! I win!’ What’s the point of the game if you rewrite the rules at the last second?

2. Who was the villain of S4 in the end? Eurus who? Oh, you mean that harpie! Nope, not a worthy final boss for the show

What was the point of TFP? This is an episode long mystery. Eurus can survive being a villain among another but she doesn’t have Moriarty’s presence. We’re told she’s the cleverest person in the universe and yes, she’s barmy, but Jim by far is more chilling. He is the spider in the middle of the web, Magnussen is the blackmailer, the white collar villain who will pee in your fireplace as a power play. Mary is the unknown card, the enemy inside the house and who can serve you a poisoned tea with a sweet smile.

Eurus? She’s grotesque, a joke and while she’s dangerous she can’t compare to these two. Culverton Smith froze my heart and made me throw up but her? Nothing. We’re missing a villain.

The abandon of Sherlock’s main arc: Your life is not your own, keep your hands off it! Off! It!

One of the show’s main theme is that Sherlock and John are suicidal before meeting each other. Their meeting literally saved them. Life is a constant theme inside the show, it is addressed among every episode to varying degrees.

Season 1? John and Sherlock start being suicidal but manage to survive their depression. The bullet John saved for his suicide is used to save Sherlock’s life. they keep saving each other but even then the series ends with both of them seemingly about to kill themselves in order to stop Moriarty. They are better but their lives still have little value.

Season 2 is easy: Ultimately, he fakes his death, he is clever enough to avoid genuinely committing suicide even though we get the feeling he would have, had Moriarty’s plan worked.

Season 3? Sherlock is a mess but this time he fights. HLV’s greatest moment is when Sherlock while flat lining is told how much he’s going to enjoy being dead. And yet, the second he knows John is in danger, he makes the conscious choice of living. He punches the ground and forces his heart to start again. He would enjoy death but he won’t let himself, not as long as John is in danger.

The end of TLD is Sherlock finally realizing he doesn’t want to die. He says that life has a value, it is a currency he doesn’t know how to pay back but he’s not going to risk his life anymore.

So, of course, Sherlock attempts to shoot himself in TFP. There is some logic I won’t explain there but! When will Sherlock enjoy living? When will John stop thinking his death is justifiable? When Mycroft explains why John must die, he’s in. There are still in that mind set at the end of TFP!

So far, we’ve got: I want to die, let’s pretend I’m dead, I can’t die, not yet, you’re not allowed to die and I don’t want to die. Fire that gun and finally say it! Say how this arc must necessarily end: I want to live.

You want to pretend Johnlock is never happening? Fine, let’s play that game. You’re not going to convince me that one arc was always going to end the way it did. You want to try another approach to justify a fourth episode? Use this, the love and the life arcs are intimately connected: sherlocklives means Johnwatsonlives, they’re the reason they’re still alive. You can’t resolve one without the other. By cutting short johnlock, you’re also refusing to let them enjoy life.

The Abominable Bride, a colossal waste of time?

We know the story: a league of furies has decided to fight the statu quo of Vitorian’s values. They fight for the best of causes, they’re being ignored, disregarded even though they are right. They tend to our homes and are vital, we mustn’t take them for granted or abuse their love. Rather that the villains, they’re the victims who’ve decided to fight back. This isn’t the story of a murderous rampage, this was a suicide mission necessary to raise the army needed.

They are the heroes. Watson, the two Holmes, they are the obstacles to overcome. They all agree to this: the fight must go on and they must lose to the conspiracy.

Along the way Sherlock also learns vital lessons: you cannot use women on your whims. Janine, Molly, they are important, they have sentiments and you mustn’t play with them. Stop being a misogynist asshole and ask for their help. They’re not the enemy. At the same time, in the deepest part of his Victorian madness, he goes back to the source: they’re always two of them. John and Sherlock, they’re a set. Alone, he is powerless. Together? They can win and get their happy ending. Why would he need a list? He says as he tears it. He’s got the real thing now.

We even see a passing the torch moment. Mycroft asks for John to look after his brother, the same way one would ask his future brother-in-law to take good care of his baby sibling.

This is a heart-warming message. Sherlock shows such growth in what ultimately was a couple seconds in-universe.

Now read this again: Sherlock has just done the complete opposite all thorough S4.

John and Sherlock, the two of them against the rest of the world? It’s even a miracle when these two are TALKING.

Women fighting for their agency? Molly has been humiliated, even Moffat refuses to give her any depth even though her character development has always lead her to move on from her love for Sherlock. The only woman who raises the standard is Mrs Hudson, one who doesn’t officially belong to the conspiracy and even then she does this despite Sherlock.

Sherlock swearing off drugs? His flat has become a living meth lab.

John looking after Sherlock? He refuses to listen to Mycroft’s plea and Sherlock almost didn’t survive TLD.

As it stands, TAB aka the conspiracy’s decoder ring is useless. Nothing was achieved, no character development for Sherlock, he even makes a point in doing the exact same mistakes TAB calls him out.

This isn’t just a weak episode among a season. This was supposed to be the crowning jewel of this show, the link between the past and the present. The irrefutable proof that modern times are better because Sherlock always was a man out of his time.

As it is? This is a waste of money and time for the actors: nothing was achieved. It is a hindrance, the show is even better if we ignore it. Sherlock was out of his time? TAB is out of this series if S4 stands. TAB and S4 cannot coexist. Why did Mofftiss even bother linking it to the series? It would have been better if that had been an episode with no relevance to the plot. They made a 1h30 long episode outside a series for nothing.

If this is the end, why are they still so tight-lipped?

We have survived enough hiatus to know that’s not their modus operandi. Normally, this is the point they tell us how hard it was to keep the secret, how much they enjoyed watching us dance and lying to our face.

Except they aren’t. They’re still dismissive of us, they’re still acting as if our theories are ridiculous and that’s not how they act after a season, that’s how they are during it while they’re trying not to reveal too much. Even when you look at them during Sherlock events, you notice they’re still stressed. Why? I thought you wanted to end the series? It’s over, right?

Let’s take Gatiss for example. The same man who wrote to a journal dismissive of TST refuses to communicate with his fans and automatically blocks them.

You look at the actor’s face and you see they can’t sell what’s they’re saying. Martin explains that John and Mary loved each other very much? He looks dead, as if even uttering these words is killing him. Rather than a fun recap of the series, this seems like a weak defence no one believes in. Mary loves the boys so much she is rather protective of them? She shot Sherlock in a heartbeat and threatened to do it again. Each explanation they give sounds like excuses, very weak excuses.

Actors are complaining about the hell they’re living but Benedict and Martin are not in the Sherlock event, Benedict told us that love is going to conquer all, each actor revealed a part of the show we didn’t see. Everything they know will be tested? We are in hell, true, but if we take Season 4 at face value? There’s nothing that warranted this warning.

I remember seeing a post where Arwel explained that their travel to the Niagara falls was for Sherlock but? There’s nothing? They wasted so much money for nothing? And he can’t tell us anything? Why? Isn’t the season over?

The attitude of the BBC in front of our complaints are dismissive, even to those who weren’t talking about TJLC. The advertising was plainly terrible: it teased a relationship that never appeared and now that we call on their bullshit they act as if they’re the victims? They’re the ones pouring fire on this mess! They had many chances to end this but took none.

And finally, the mentions they make about The Lost Special. They are the ones that started them by making that joke. The Lost Special, the Accidental Special, they use the same vocabulary each time it is mentioned. They joke, they laugh but so did they when they said Moriarty couldn’t have faked his death, when they lied and lied to our faces so many times when we were always absolutely right but they couldn’t afford us to know. They have lied to our face so many times, every time saying they weren’t, not this time. Moffat and Gatiss are compulsive liars. Why on earth would that change today?

The game is not over. Not yet.

#sherlock #sherlock season 4 #my first #meta #and a collection of others #the lost special #tjlc #tfhc #the abominable bride #sherlock arg

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nightingveilxo · 8 years ago

Photo

Sherlock Is Not A Machine or Monster, The Glass Not Being An Impediment At First (But Will Be Later), and How Sebastian Wilkes Is Partially Eurus

TBB

In the supermarket, John has at last got everything scanned and has inserted his credit or debit card into the chip-and-PIN machine. He types in his PIN and waits. AUTOMATED VOICE: Card not authorised. Please use an alternative method of payment. JOHN: Yes, all right! I’ve got it! AUTOMATED VOICE: Card not authorised. Please use an alternative method of payment. (The man in the queue behind him has already picked up his own basket in expectation of getting to the scanner soon. John reaches towards his back pocket but apparently realises that he has no other way of paying.) JOHN: Got nothing. (He points at the machine.) JOHN: Right, keep it. Keep that. (As the man behind him looks on in surprise, John angrily walks away, abandoning his shopping and quite possibly his card as well.) ( x )

Fast forward...

SHERLOCK (not looking up): You took your time. JOHN: Yeah, I didn’t get the shopping. SHERLOCK (looking indignantly over the top of his book): What? Why not? JOHN (tetchily): Because I had a row, in the shop, with a chip-and-PIN machine. SHERLOCK (lowering his book a little): You ... you had a row with a machine? [It won’t be the last time that John argues with a ‘machine,’ Sherlock baby, but let’s not go there right now ...] JOHN: Sort of. It sat there and I shouted abuse. Have you got cash? (Sherlock holds back his amused smile and nods towards the kitchen.) SHERLOCK: Take my card. (John walks towards the kitchen where Sherlock’s wallet is lying on the table, but before he gets there he turns back to his flatmate indignantly.) JOHN: You could always go yourself, you know. You’ve been sitting there all morning. You’ve not even moved since I left. (Sherlock briefly flashes back in his mind to a moment in the fight when he ducked under a swing from the attacker’s sword. [And oh my goodness can you see how the blade cuts right into The Coat hanging on the back of the door?! *cries*] He tries to look nonchalant as he turns the page of his book while John picks up the wallet from the table and rummages through it for a suitable payment card.) JOHN: And what happened about that case you were offered – the Jaria Diamond? SHERLOCK: Not interested. (Just as he won’t be interested in The Black Pearl of the Borgias, until AGRA is involved.) (Using a piece of paper as a bookmark he shuts the book with a loud snap, and only then realises that the attacker’s sword is still lying underneath his chair in plain view. He quickly slams a foot down onto the end and slides his foot and the sword further back to get the weapon out of sight.) SHERLOCK (firmly): I sent them a message. (Flashback to his uppercut that ended the fight.) (John has now found a card he can use, but pauses to bend over to look more closely at the new long narrow gouge in the top of the table. He sighs and runs his finger along the cut, rubbing at it in case it’s just a mark that can be removed.) JOHN (in an exasperated whisper): Ugh, Holmes. (Looking across to his flatmate, he tuts pointedly. Sherlock shakes his head innocently. John turns and leaves the room, trotting down the stairs as Sherlock smirks.)

Fast forward...

Wind & Blue Clothing Before Mycroft’s East Wind or S4

SHERLOCK: So, you’re doing well. You’ve been abroad a lot. SEBASTIAN: Well, some. SHERLOCK: Flying all the way round the world twice in a month? (Mary?) (John frowns in confusion but Sebastian just laughs and points at Sherlock.) SEBASTIAN: Right. You’re doing that thing. (He looks at John.) SEBASTIAN: We were at uni together. This guy here had a trick he used to do. (In ACD’s The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, Victor Trevor was Sherlock’s friend from university, the skip code from TEH pulled from that story, and the characters in S4 are adapted to be likes one in TAotGS, especially Molly.) SHERLOCK (quietly): It’s not a trick. (TLD: It’s a plan.) SEBASTIAN (to John): He could look at you and tell you your whole life story. JOHN: Yes, I’ve seen him do it. SEBASTIAN: Put the wind up everybody. We hated him. (Sherlock turns his head away and looks down, his face momentarily filling with pain.)

Fast forward...

SHERLOCK: I was just chatting with your secretary outside. She told me. (John frowns round at him, confused by such an ‘ordinary’ explanation. Sebastian laughs humourlessly and Sherlock smiles back at him with an equal lack of humour. Sebastian claps his hands together, then becomes more serious.) (Mary will tell you receptionists know everything.) SEBASTIAN: I’m glad you could make it over. We’ve had a break-in. (He leads them across the trading floor towards another door.) SEBASTIAN: Sir William’s office – the bank’s former Chairman. The room’s been left here like a sort of memorial. Someone broke in late last night. JOHN: What did they steal? SEBASTIAN: Nothing. Just left a little message. ( x )

Sherlock’s Reaction

Remember, Nothing is important from TSoT and TAB, Sherlock is not a machine, and Molly is wrong--but John isn’t. ( x )

TAB

HOLMES: Well, exactly. WATSON: No, those are my words, not yours! That is the version of you that I present to the public: the brain without a heart; the calculating machine. I write all of that, Holmes, and the readers lap it up, but I do not believe it. HOLMES: Well, I’ve a good mind to write to your editor. WATSON: You are a living, breathing man. You’ve lived a life; you have a past.

T6T

MOLLY: No idea why people think you’re incapable of human emotion. *sarcasm* (Mrs Hudson clears her throat pointedly.) MOLLY (quietly): Sorry. (She nods her head down to Sherlock’s hands and still speaks quietly.) Phone. (Sherlock lowers the phone and puts his hands behind his back. The vicar is now holding Rosamund, who is grizzling.) VICAR: And now, godparents ... (Behind his back, Sherlock is continuing to type.) (How very Irene of him...) VICAR ... are you ready to help the parents of this child in their duties as Christian parents? MOLLY and MRS HUDSON (simultaneously): We are. (Molly looks across to Sherlock and elbows him. Behind his back, a male SIRI voice speaks from his phone.) SIRI: Sorry, I didn’t catch that. (TBB: Please use an alternative form of payment.) (Stella and Ted make disapproving noises. John closes his eyes and Mary narrows her eyes at Sherlock.) SIRI (beeping): Please repeat the question. (TBB: Please use an alternative form of payment.)

Rewind to TBB

&: The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet. The ampersand is also often shown as a backwards 3 with a vertical line above and below it or a dot above and below it.

When Sherlock Gets Too Close to the Glass, and John Reflects

TRF

SHERLOCK: Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty. (He looks around briefly at his enemy’s grinning body lying behind him. On the ground, John stares up at his friend in disbelief.) JOHN: Why are you saying this? (Sherlock turns back to look down at him. His voice breaks.) SHERLOCK: I’m a fake. JOHN: Sherlock ... SHERLOCK (his voice becoming tearful): The newspapers were right all along. I want you to tell Lestrade; I want you to tell Mrs Hudson, and Molly ... in fact, tell anyone who will listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes. JOHN: Okay, shut up, Sherlock, shut up. The first time we met ... the first time we met, you knew all about my sister, right? SHERLOCK: Nobody could be that clever. JOHN: You could. (Sherlock laughs and gazes down at his friend, a tear dripping from his chin.) SHERLOCK: I researched you. Before we met I discovered everything that I could to impress you. (He sniffs quietly.) It’s a trick. Just a magic trick. (John has his eyes closed and is shaking his head repeatedly.) JOHN: No. All right, stop it now. (He starts to walk towards the hospital entrance.) SHERLOCK (urgently): No, stay exactly where you are. Don’t move. (John stops and backs up, holding up his hand towards Sherlock in capitulation.) JOHN: All right. (Breathing rapidly, Sherlock has his own hand stretched out towards his friend.) SHERLOCK: Keep your eyes fixed on me. (His voice becomes frantic.) Please, will you do this for me? JOHN: Do what? SHERLOCK: This phone call – it’s, er ... it’s my note. It’s what people do, don’t they – leave a note? (John shakes his head, momentarily taking his phone from his ear as the stress of what he’s beginning to understand hits him, then he raises it again, his voice shaky.) JOHN: Leave a note when? ( x )

TEH

1:29 (John turns back towards him, and Sherlock raises his head.) SHERLOCK (softly): I’m sorry. (John screws his eyes closed for a moment, then looks at him again.) JOHN: What? SHERLOCK (softly, his eyes starting to fill with tears): I can’t ... I can’t do it, John. I don’t know how. (He straightens up on his knees.) SHERLOCK: Forgive me? JOHN (tightly, furiously): What? SHERLOCK (bringing his hands up into a praying position): Please, John, forgive me ... for all the hurt that I caused you. JOHN (waving a finger at him): No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a trick. SHERLOCK: No. JOHN: Another one of your bloody tricks. SHERLOCK: No. JOHN: You’re just trying to make me say something nice. (Sherlock chuckles briefly.) SHERLOCK: Not this time. JOHN: It’s just to make you look good even though you behaved like ... (He grimaces, fighting back tears, and turns away as he tries to steady his breathing. Sherlock moves away from the bomb and sits on the edge of one of the nearby seats. John grips one of the handrails, looking down at the floor, then stamps his foot furiously. His voice is low but savage when he speaks.) JOHN: I wanted you not to be dead. SHERLOCK: Yeah, well, be careful what you wish for.

Fast forward...

SHERLOCK: The criminal network Moriarty headed was vast. (Cutaway shot of Sherlock standing beside Mycroft as he sits in his office in the Diogenes Club. Mycroft appears to be reading a report; Sherlock is looking at his phone.) SHERLOCK (voiceover): Its roots were everywhere like a cancer, so we came up with a plan.

Fast forward...

LAZARUS IS GO John gets out of the taxi and heads towards the hospital, taking Sherlock’s phone call as he goes. Unseen by John – whose view is blocked by the ambulance station – the truck full of rubbish bags is in position by the bus stop, several people are waiting by the wall of the ambulance station, and the airbag is inflating at the other side of the station.) SHERLOCK (over phone): It’s a trick. Just a magic trick. JOHN (into phone): All right, stop it now. SHERLOCK: No, stay exactly where you are. Don’t move.

T6T

WATSON HOME. Apparently Sherlock has knocked on the door and then stepped back out of the porch. The door opens and Molly comes out, holding Rosie in her arms. She closes the door and comes out to the porch. Sherlock smiles down at his goddaughter. MOLLY (softly): Hi. (He nods to her. She returns the nod.) SHERLOCK (quietly): I just ... wondered how things were going and ... and if there was anything I could do. (Looking awkward, Molly reaches into the pocket of her trousers and then holds out an envelope.) MOLLY: It’s, uh, it’s from John. SHERLOCK (taking it and looking down at it): Right. MOLLY: You don’t need to read it now. (She pauses for a moment as he looks at her.) MOLLY: I’m sorry, Sherlock. He says ... Jo-John said if you were to come round asking after him, offering to help ... SHERLOCK: Yes? MOLLY (reluctantly): He ... said he’d r... that he’d rather have anyone but you. (Softly) Anyone. (Anyone is also important.) (Sherlock blinks and presses his lips together. Molly, with tears in her eyes, looks down at Rosie and then turns and goes back indoors, closing the door behind her. Sherlock stands there for a few seconds, then turns and walks away, tucking the envelope into his coat pocket.) MARY (voiceover): I’m giving you a case, Sherlock. (Sherlock sits in the back of a black cab, his head lowered. It’s possible that he’s looking at whatever was inside the envelope.) MARY (voiceover): When I’m gone – if I’m ... (she breathes out a shaky breath) ... gone – I need you to do something for me. [That sentence does sound different this second time.] (On the DVD recording, the camera focuses in on Mary’s mouth.) ( x )

TLD

JOHN (to Molly): I thought this was some kind of ... SHERLOCK: What? JOHN (turning to him): ... trick. SHERLOCK: ’Course it’s not a trick. It’s a plan. SMITH (offscreen): Mr Holmes! (John looks past Sherlock’s shoulder to where the voice came from. Smith is coming out of the doors of a building marked VILLAGE STUDIOS. Cornelia is behind him and a man walks alongside filming him as more people come out of the doors behind them.) SHERLOCK (quick fire, not turning round): Thirty feet and closing: the most significant undetected serial killer in British criminal history. (Smiling, Smith walks towards them followed by his entourage.) SHERLOCK (to John): Help me bring him down. JOHN: What ... what plan? SHERLOCK: I’m not telling you. JOHN: Why not? SHERLOCK: Because you won’t like it. ( x )

Fast forward...

THERAPIST: Culverton gave me Faith’s original note. (She stands up.) A mutual friend put us in touch. (She walks across to the French windows and turns the key in the lock of the door, removing the key afterwards before turning back. As she continues talking, her accent slips even more, sometimes sounding German and sometimes veering more towards an English accent.) THERAPIST: Did Sherlock ever tell you about the note? ( x )

And here is what Sherlock thinks John believes him to be...A monster.

TFP

SHERLOCK: Conclusion three: you are terrified of her! MYCROFT (sternly): You have no idea what you’re dealing with. (Angrily) None at all. JOHN (coming out of a corridor on the ground floor): New information: she’s out. MYCROFT: That’s not possible. SHERLOCK: It’s more than possible. She was John’s therapist. JOHN: Shot me during a session. SHERLOCK: Only with a tranquilliser. JOHN: Mm. We still had ten minutes to go. SHERLOCK: Well, we’ll see about a refund. (John smiles. Sherlock starts coming down the stairs and addresses his actors.) SHERLOCK: Right, you two. Wiggins has got your money by the gate.

Fast forward...

SHERLOCK (shifting slightly to face his brother): I don’t know and I don’t care. So there were three of us. I know that now. You, me, and ... Eurus. (Mycroft nods.) SHERLOCK: A sister I can’t remember. Interesting name, Eurus. It’s Greek, isn’t it? JOHN (looking at his notebook, clearly reading notes he has already made): Mm. Yeah, uh, literally ‘the god of the East Wind.’ (Not goddess.) MYCROFT: Yes. SHERLOCK (gazing towards the floor): “The East Wind is coming, Sherlock.” (He looks at his brother.) You used that to scare me. MYCROFT: No. SHERLOCK: You turned my sister into a ghost story. MYCROFT: Of course I didn’t. I monitored you. JOHN: You what? MYCROFT (looking at him): Memories can resurface; wounds can re-open. The roads we walk have demons beneath ... (he turns his gaze to Sherlock) ... and yours have been waiting for a very long time. I never bullied you. I used – at discrete intervals – potential trigger words to update myself as to your mental condition. I was looking after you. SHERLOCK (softly, intensely): Why can’t I remember her? (Mycroft pauses for a moment, glancing in John’s direction but not looking at him.) MYCROFT: This is a private matter. (Keep it behind glass.) SHERLOCK: John stays. (John had been about to get up but now looks across to Sherlock, surprised. Mycroft leans forward in his chair.) MYCROFT (in a harsh whisper): This is family. SHERLOCK (loudly, firmly): That’s why he stays. (The brothers lock eyes for a long moment. John smiles and lowers his head. Eventually Mycroft sits back. John clears his throat.) JOHN: So there were three Holmes kids. (He pulls the lid off his pen and re-opens his notebook.) JOHN: What was the age gap? MYCROFT: Seven years between myself and Sherlock; one year between Sherlock and Eurus. (John nods and points his pen in Sherlock’s direction.) JOHN: Middle child. Explains a lot. (Sherlock throws him a look. John raises his eyebrows at him and then turns his attention back to his notebook.) JOHN (to Mycroft): So did she have it too? MYCROFT: Have what? JOHN: The deduction thing. MYCROFT (sarcastically): “The deduction thing”? JOHN (after a moment): ... Yes.

Maintain a distance of (&) 3 feet.

The Murderous Ghost Before TAB

Hypnosis, Reflections, and Circles That Seem Like /Time/Loops ( x )

There are other instances of Sherlock being compared to a machine, but I figured I used enough to make the point.

@swimmingfeelsinajohnlockianpool @darlingtonsubstitution @may-shepard @sherlockians-get-bored @monikakrasnorada @gosherlocked

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thewatsonbeekeepers · 4 years ago

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Chapter 13 – Out of My Dreams [TFP 3/3]

We’re finally here. I can’t actually believe it. This meta series has exploded over lockdown but we’re finally at the close. The title of this chapter comes from a song in the musical Oklahoma! that you can find here, which has a fantastic dream ballet sequence – weirdly, during lockdown the fantastic film I’m Thinking of Ending Things was released which draws heavily on dreams in Oklahoma!, so maybe that’s my next project. Now, however, onto the end of TFP.

Before jumping into this meta, I really suggest reading this meta by @sagestreet (X) – it breaks down exactly why Redbeard represents homosexuality, and the probability that Sherlock’s repression draw’s on his father’s own repression, which is in turn a metaphor for ACD himself. This is really important in the light of the metatextuality I’ve been plugging through this series, and ties together the 1980s and 1890s themes really nicely – these are the periods of growth for Sherlock and canon!Holmes respectively and their homophobia has to be dealt with.

We left off with about 20 minutes to go, as Sherlock is sinking into the black depths of his mind – the deepest we’re ever going to get as well as the darkest in colour, chiming with the rest of the series. And then – flashes of Eurus, Redbeard and young Sherlock bleeding in through his memory. @sagestreet’s meta argues that Victor Trevor could genuinely have been Sherlock’s first love even at that age, and I don’t dispute the possibility, but I do have an alternate reading for slightly later in age, based on one image alone. Jump back in your mind to TAB, when Mycroft tells Sherlock he was there for him the last time – we get a shot of a teenager in a drug den which is never repeated again, but which has a sense of absolute past trauma attached to it.

I plump for this to be our key trauma personally, but currently I don’t think we have enough information to go on. However, regardless of which age you read Victor, the outcome is pretty much the same. So – Sherlock plunges into dark and we get memories flash before him, and it’s almost like he’s drowned in his EMP, his life has flashed before his eyes – but there is one thing stopping him from dying still. Eurus, trauma!Eurus, is ever a paradox, as repressed sexuality inherently is. On the one hand it’s constantly pushing down and on the other it’s constantly pushing up – and the sheer mania we see in Eurus is only really explicable as a set of mental contradictory impulses in this way. At the end of TFP, we spend so much time thinking that she is trying to kill Sherlock, but she’s trying to save herself and him. His gay trauma has completely regressed to a child’s fear here in the form of the little girl asking why she has been abandoned. The plane in the girl’s hands, going back to the height metaphor, is symbolic of the final struggle for life – as long as it’s in the air, Sherlock is in danger of death (see Chapter 2 ), but he is still under the impression that keeping going by crashing it, and crushing the queer side of him, is the way to go. We see him walk past images of him and Victor as children on the walls and ignoring them, after all.

It’s pretty important that these images are shown just as Sherlock connects to his heart for the first time, who is still drowning of course. The connection is closer and closer to being made! Under that water are the bones, which is symbolic of them being hidden in the recesses of his mind. We get the fantastically awful lines from John, if read superficially, that the bones are ‘small’ – others have been very good at pointing out John’s sudden inability to be a doctor as evidence for the EMP, and so it’s important for us to recognise here that John is not John, but heart!John.

There are other obvious indicators of the EMP here, most notably in the location. Even being out for a couple of hours, it is not possible that Eurus could have done this to Sherlock and John. Who aided her in getting John down the well, and how did they get out? How did they come to shore and not get stopped? How did nobody notice the construction of the giant cell in the garden of Musgrave Hall, and how does it spontaneously open after Sherlock pushes one wall? This switching from location to location – island, cell, home – is a shifting of perspective common in dreams. Moffat has used the idea of there being no time between location shifts before as a dream indicator in the Doctor Who episode Forest of the Dead, so it’s clearly something he has thought about. The pushing down of the wall is a huge symbolic moment – it couldn’t have just been a secret door! Instead, it ties in with the image of the breaking busts from TST as the idea of breaking down walls in his mind – and the drama of it suggests that we seem to have arrived at our final destination.

Everything unites rather wonderfully as trauma!Eurus threatens to drown heart!John, as though this is the culmination of ‘burning the heart’ – because ‘the heart’, both literally and metaphorically, is John! And so the destruction of Sherlock’s heart is happening inside his mind because of John’s suicidal suffering outside. We see the same kind of projection as is implied at the end of TST in the aquarium scene – this pulls in ideas of artificiality, which are important, but it’s also an important visual link. In the death of Mary, Sherlock tries to rerun his own assassination but imagines that John is devastated by the loss of Mary rather than Sherlock because he cannot cope with the queerness – it’s a way of processing John’s suicidal impulses without fully recognising them. This link of someone dying surrounded by water with the projection light shows that this is the revised (and correct) projection of what is happening to John in the real world – it is connected to Sherlock’s heart.

Sherlock, with the help of his heart, finally works out that Redbeard is not a dog. @sagestreet’s meta is useful in pointing out that Daddy being allergic to dogs doesn’t mean that Daddy didn’t want one, just that he couldn’t – and that’s a pretty good way of thinking about ACD’s inability to represent queerness as he might have wanted to, and so stamping on the character of Sherlock Holmes. The fact that he explicitly cracks one of the symbols in his mind is fantastic, because it calls back to the TLD scene suggesting that tea and coffee is some kind of code – there is a code in his brain, and he’s starting to break it down. Victor Trevor, whether child or teenager in reality, here is a child and is chosen I think to look like I imagine a child Martin Freeman would look like, but that’s bye the bye. What’s more important is that together, they played pirates. Given that Sherlock has been drowning in the repressed queerness of his brain, we’ve talked about piracy before as being symbolic of fielding that (see TST meta) and instead riding the wave, controlling it and refusing to drown. This hints at the love that Sherlock and Victor were able to enact, if only in youthful play, mastery of the high seas as opposed to adult Sherlock drowning in them. And then, gay trauma!Eurus traps Victor down a well – forces Sherlock to drown his love in that repression, and we know it’s love because it’s the same well that heart!John is in – Victor is equated with him.

“You couldn’t face it, so you told yourself a better story.” Ah yes – how convenient that it’s all tied up in ideas of fictionalising. I’m just going to leave that one there.

“Deep waters, Sherlock, in all your life, in all your dreams” – linking the Carl Powers pool, the TAB waterfall with TFP, and the light on his face reflecting TST – all of these links tying up 1890s repression (TAB) with 1980s repression (TGG, TST). And what is trauma!Eurus’s motive for destroying Sherlock’s love? ‘I had no one.’ The most striking thing about this is that before Sherlock meets John in the real world, and even during the beginning of their friendship, this is the recurring theme in how he chooses to portray himself. It’s not something that applies specifically to Eurus – it’s what we all associate with Sherlock, more than anything, pointing to this motive being about him. ‘Alone is what I have; alone protects me.’ Remember that? Trauma has forced that specific characterising of Sherlock onto him – his queer trauma necessitates solitude.

We already have a clue that Eurus is the girl on the plane by looking at the plane in her hands as a child, but it also suggests that even in her undeveloped form, the capacity to destroy him has always been there. It suggests a suicidal impulse in Sherlock that goes a long way back, specifically connected to his queerness – which ties in with the teenage addict in TAB as well as the cut scene from ASiP in which Greg implies that Sherlock has been suicidal.

Solving the code is a lovely moment – we have all of these hallowed graves of the past Holmes ancestry, which we can read as the hallowed adaptations over the years – and it’s nothing. It’s completely empty. We are disregarding the Holmeses of the past except to use them as tools to get to our trauma – which is what metatextual references have been doing throughout this series. However, there’s something else tricky that I want to throw up here.

I found this problem on an Australian site here, and haven’t seen it on tumblr although I may be wrong! The problem is the cipher. When cracked, it’s not what Sherlock says it is. It might just be a mistake, as the linked website theorises. The words missing are:

Lost Without Your Love Save

Although they appear in the song, their numbers aren’t in the cipher. It could fully be a mistake, or something cinematographical in not making the full cipher clear on the screen – it passes in a blur, after all. But I want to postulate something a tiny bit tenuous here. Sherlock’s subconscious has clearly been grappling with his repressed love for a long time, and it’s something he hasn’t been able to deal with, stemming right back to childhood. Up until now, he has never been able to crack the case, so to speak. But let’s jump back to the (slightly flippant) moment in TSoT when Sholto is dying, and John tells Sherlock that he’s a drama queen, there’s a time limit, the game is on, this is when he works best. And it’s true! We see Sherlock work under very specific time pressure a lot – look at the bomb scene in TEH and the bonfire scene, literally everything about TGG – the show is littered with these moments, and now they come to fruition. He could keep going living a half-life, in constant trauma, because it was not a matter of life and death, and it was too painful to try to confront it. But now in the real world, John is dying – as we can see by the heart down the well (note that brain!Mycroft is abandoned here, cementing the importance of the heart to this deduction sequence) and so he has no choice. And that is the missing bit of the code! ‘Lost without your love/Save’ is exactly what has propelled him to finally face his gay trauma – the fact that John Watson loves him, and will kill himself if Sherlock does not wake up. !!!

The girl on the plane is Eurus. This should not be altogether surprising for those of us who have seen HLV, because EMP theory seems to be repeating the same motifs again and again. HLV – it’s the Mind Palace. TAB? It’s also the Mind Palace. Now here. We also notice that Sherlock’s brain is reusing the plane from ASiB and the initial phone tactic used by Jim Moriarty – another link to John being in danger. But when Sherlock finally breaks in to his trauma, the most important thing is that it’s not threatening. She’s frightened. She has a constant urge towards death, represented by the plane, that ties into Sherlock’s suicidal urges. They will always be there, every time she closes her eyes – but Sherlock gets her to open them. I don’t have an answer to eye hell (yet), but my current theory is that this is the key – sightlessness is a link to suicidal urges through Eurus.

To jump past the police scene then, which we’ll get to in a minute, Sherlock’s reconciliation with Eurus rather than treating her as an enemy is perfect. Just like trauma!Eurus can never end her suicidal ideation, Sherlock can never put an end to the trauma inside him. Framing this as a battle was always wrong. He resurfaces by learning to live with her and to treat himself with kindness. Forgive me whilst I get soppy, but that’s beautiful. In that light, Eurus remaining in a kinder, friendlier version of Sherrinford is fantastic – she’s still inside him, not particularly desirable, and will never go away, but Sherlock has made peace with her and is friends with her. The violin was a symbol of desire in ASiB and again in TSoT, a way of Sherlock articulating what he could not say, and early in TFP that articulation was destroyed by Eurus’s discordance – here they have learned to play together. A difficult relationship – awkward, dangerous, unsure of boundaries – but a relationship nevertheless.

Rewinding to the police moment – despite the chains around John’s ankles, he miraculously climbs out of the well. More important in this scene, however, is that Sherlock gets Greg’s name right. This is, for me, one of the most significant sections of the entire show. Sherlock has never got Greg’s name right before – it’s a running joke on the show – and the reason Mofftiss have made such a joke of it is that it ties into ACD’s complete inability to remember names. Much like having Mrs. Turner live next door is a nod to canon inconsistency, as is the John/James parallel which, although a mistake in the initial work, they have exploited remarkably well, ACD famously never named Lestrade, only giving him the initial G. This is why Sherlock comes up with every possible G name for him. This is tied into Sherlock’s inability to move beyond the mistakes of canon – we see this weird inability to stick in modern Sherlock’s universe in other ways too, like the slightly old-fashioned nature of his costume (passed off as ‘timeless’, but clearly belonging to old as much as modern times), the deerstalker situation, thinking England has a king, not knowing the earth goes around the sun, not knowing Madonna, seeming to forget who Thatcher is – the list goes on, but Greg is the most constant one. Calling him Greg is a symbol that Sherlock has broken out of the confines of all of the past Sherlocks and has completely slipped into the modern version – which is exactly where he needs to be. Greg saying that Sherlock might be good as well as great – because the persona doesn’t matter anymore.

We should note in passing, in accordance with @sagestreet’s reading of Daddy Holmes as ACD, his disappointment and clear distress at brain!Mycroft hiding trauma!Eurus for so long because it was ‘for the best’. I’m not certain where Mummy Holmes stands in this, though I’m inclined to equate her with Daddy as ACD here, but I’m open to other suggestions for that.

And then we have the final sequence – who you really are. And I admit, I am thrown by Mary’s words – which is a terrible way to end the meta series! She says: ‘who you really are doesn’t matter’ – which is an awful thing to say, although coming from a still present comphet is inevitable. She also says that it’s all about the legend. But regardless of what comphet!Mary says, she’s not there anymore. The life that is being rebuilt is one of two men in Baker Street. Baker Street is the symbolic home of the heart within the EMP, so the rebuilding of that and the replacing of heart!John inside is lovely. Furthermore, if Daddy Holmes is ACD to Sherlock, the idea of Sherlock and John parenting Rosie feels like the start of a new, freer, queerer chapter in Sherlock Holmes history – authorship has changed, and it’s been handed over to a new generation. The final shot, however, hammers home for me the validity of the metatextual interpretation – Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place.

I mention the significance of this in an earlier chapter – Basil Rathbone is arguably the definitive Holmes interpretation who has defined the character for many years, and so could feasibly represent Holmes’s film/tv status as the most portrayed character of all time. They’re not running into Rathbone Place – they’re leaving it. They’re on their way up and out of all those previous adaptations, as Sherlock builds a new heart with no comphet.

He’s still got to get out to save real!John though – let’s not get too carried away – although we seem to have broken through the bulk of internalised queerphobia at the end of this series. I’ve previously explained on my blog why I don’t think there will ever be a series 5, and sad as that is, it is just life, so this behemoth of a meta series has actually just been an academic exercise more than anything else! Nevertheless, I hope if you’ve made it to the end that you’ve enjoyed it, and if you have any thoughts on tjlc that spring from this I would love to hear them!

#tjlc #bbc sherlock #meta #my meta #phew #done!

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love-y-o-u-3000 · 8 years ago

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Ever since Victor appeared I stopped believing the twitter accts could be anything but fans. I've seen others say that no way fans would waste so much time, be so planned out etc but tbh fans would be the exact type ppl to waste sooo much time on it and be so involved. That's what fans do(a fan made and married johnlock crotchet dolls & documented it all ffs!) Would the BBC pay ppl to role play like all day long? The guy who did the blogs wasn't blogging constantly. Yea it's fans IMO.

I went from “they are definitely just fans“ to “I fucking hope they are just fans“ because what they’re doing now makes me hella uncomfortable for some reason... probably because I hate v*clock and Victor Trevor too and he... is not even in this show? Other than being a little boy from an episode that I don’t consider real anyway? Because when I imagine John and Sherlock, I imagine Martin and Ben, always, and what’s Victor? Annoying faceless man.

Also, it’s funny because if this was “canon“ and run by somebody from BBC then what kind of a universe that would be since Rosie is there but nobody talks about Mary and Redbeard really was a dog so neither TLD nor TFP are real either? So TST or something similar to its contents happened despite being the second most fucked up episode? I think it is much more likely to be fans because it’s sort of a big fan service (I, personally am not fan of any of this but whatever, many people love it for reasons only they are aware of), random parentlock and v*clock.

And yeah, I can see why people want those accounts to be real, but considering that it’s beginning to look like Sherlock might cheat on John any minute, I really would hate that even more than pretty much all of s4. But like I once said already, they do sound like fans, judging from how they write and etc. and why would anyone from BBC use the word smol or why would Victor even be such a huge deal rn? Like, if they weren’t from England, I’d actually make a bet on who is running those accounts but since the people behind them are from London I am clueless.

The only suspicious thing is that Sherlock’s account was created in 2013 but I really do hope that it has nothing to do with BBC, because like I said, it’s getting as awful as s4, for me I mean.

#Anonymous

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3littlemieces · 8 years ago

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My thoughts to S4

Ok, so, a few days ago I was brushing my teeth one evening and this thought came into my head. I hope my explanations make any sense: So, I read about some people thinking about the Mind Palace and that you can not control your dreams or things like that with it. That is mostly correct. The Mind Palace is a memory technique. You can remember things but not influence things with it. However, many people, like my father, can control dreams. This has nothing to do with the Mind Palcae but with other techniques I will not explain here because that would take to long. What I want to say is, that Sherlock could control TAB with ease. I have done such things myself (without taking drugs first;)). So, all in all S probably controled TAB with ease. However, I thing when we look at s4 as a continuing of TAB, we notice, that S thinks, that this is reality and not a dream, so he is not in control at this moment but his subconsciousness, I call it, “the brain“. So, when we see S4 as continuing of TAB, the Fall is the part were it goes over or back (whatever theory you like most) to the reality his brain created (because he is still in a coma from drugs or from the shoot, whatever you like). Now, I read a few days ago, that there was an ARG in the Sherlock Holmes Fandom, that said, that every character knew he or she was just a character in a novel except of SH himself. Nobody could tell him that this all is not real & it all ended only when SH found out, that this was all not real. Until then it all repeated and repeated or so I understood it. Now I think, that S4 is this ARG created from Sherlocks brain. So every character would know that he or she was created from Sˋs brain excluded S himself and only when he realises that he is captured in his own dream world, that he starts to wake up. Until then it all repeats and repeats, or better said, his brain plays the storys he already lived through with only little changes matching things he still does not understand. So, now I want to take a look at Eurus, or like I like to call her E = emotions. I already wrote something to her and her meaning, and i wonˋt go into her too much now. Just a little bit, so you can follow my next few thoughts.I think she represents Sˋs emotions, which he has hidden deep in his brain, behind a glas prison in a highly hidden place. As we know, the glas is know away and she moves free in Sˋs dream. Flirts with John & shoots him, is panicked in a plane, has suicidal thoughts and does everything to get an emotion out of people but mostly S. However, more to her in a few more lines, but first… … imagine S. Just shoot or deep in drugs and he is know in a hospital, in a coma. So, in his brain is everything in red. Panic! We are dying! That is all the brain can think. To calm down and get his job done (healing in any way possible) and not get too much choas and get in shock, the brain starts to create a little dream world of itˋs own.In it he can calm down, get a few answers and all is ok. He starts to recreate the adventures with John, like explained. TST beginns, and all is ok. First, the brain has to follow the previous story, aka TAB and get it a good enough continuing story to be realistic, then he kills of his problems (Mary), who is in his way to get John. Oh, very emotional reaction, donˋt you think? And that is the part were Eurus starts to come. First, the place Mary dies is in an aquarium, a place full of water, and I read somewhere, that Water means emotions. And emotions means Eurus. So here is already Eurus. Not really noticable, but when you know that Eurus is emotions, this means, here is the point E starts to come out of her long time prison. Also, there are sharks. We know sharks represents CAM. CAM = evil (Mirror to M.) And for S, Emotions are evil. They influence his thinking and are not helpfull, so… it would match that his brain would kill Mary in an aquarium full of sharks. However, sharks could also represent Mary in this moment, which the brain conects with Evil. (And I think sharks were easier for Mofftis to get to than spiders in an aquarium ;)) Then there is E who meets J in a bus and later texts with him. She is the flirter part of S. She does what he does not dare. And J responses, a hope S has. He hopes that J will react positive to his flirting and hates life with Mary. Then we have TLD with dear Faith. this episode is the brains solution to Johnˋs reaction. After killing Mary of, the brain came to the conclusion, that John would probably not be too happy about it. So a solution has to be created. What helped in the past? Get S into danger! And this is what happens. I also think that the change of Culvertonˋs killing technique (from poisoning to suffocation) is a sudden move, so I think, S had an attack in real life and the brain symbolised it to this. Also we have dear Faith here. The Frist time we meet Eurus, and she is suicidal. Of course, I mean, who wouldnˋt be, when you are very emotional and your love of your life does not want you! However, S stops her (very rational) and they go out together. During that time we see that those two understand each other very good. They could work together (the brain and the heart). She only vanishes as S tells here that suicide is not the sollution and he has an attack. This attack can be seen as an emotional overflow and so he breaks down, or he has an attack in real life and has to be very drugged after that, so his brain creates something it knows. The tipical world of too much drugs. Also, did you notice that nobody but S sees Faith, even through she stands right next to him. She is not hidden but nobody sees her. Emotions of S are not visible. Now we come to TFP! Yay! So, TFP is all about Eurus aka emotions. You could say that she thinks that after everything is ok with J, Eurus has enough of playing the little parts and wants to have all the attention now. Or how I also like to see it, S canˋt handle his emotions anymore, now that the glas is away. It all starts with Eurus the Therapist shooting John. This is the first sign of Sˋs emotions going crazy. Like a dream does the scenery of TFP start in Mycrofts home and we get an easy explanation for the shoot. There are many possibilities why the brain makes it that simple. Maybe it did not want to get too emotional (get Eurus back into her prison) or it was his best idea. After that we have many such jumps. Maybe to test S if he would notice or to show him (and us) that something is wrong. Eurus is, during her game, all about testing everyone and mostly S of his emotional state and so maybe is the brain about logic. A little though I came up with at this point, was that maybe the little girl on the plane is maybe Sˋs brain who does not know how to handle everything that happens. S is dying and the brain, his emotions, he himself does not know how to handle everything and he canˋt contact his surrounding world, the real world. But that was just me, thinking a little bit too much. One thing I came also up to was that Mycroft told S about the East Wind in such a bad way that as a child S was of course scared of it. Also we know that Mycroft is the one to tell S all the time to control his emotions („itˋs not an advantage“). Maybe Mycroft told S these stories and later made fun of S because of his emotional behaviour. That would explain, why S calls his emotions Eurus and why he hit them in the first place, and why he has to revisite his childhood home to find Eurus and accept her (hug her). After that he can handle J and Rosie better and Lestradeˋs „good man“ comment is the brains way of saying that that (combination of emotions and Sˋs logic) is the best way. Now he can be a good man. From this point onwards we can witness how S learns to handle his emotions (plays with her in harmony). Also, S is called grown up, compared to Mycroft, after he accepts his emotions. It is a siblings way to show of when you do something better and your parents tell you that infront of your sibling. So if Mycroft really is the reason that S hids his emotions, then being called grown up infront of Mycroft after he accepts his emotions is „show of“ from the brains part. (Right now I see S doing a little victory dance) However, the brain is not all mean to M. We can see that in the scene, were S and E play violin together and his parents and M are there. Sˋs mother touches Mˋs knee. A sign for many things but also for encouragement. Maybe encouragement to start to learn and accept his own emotions? Also, during TFP we see M very vulnerable. He shows many emotions. I think it is the brains way of mocking M but also of learning himself. If the person who taught you not to feel, shows emotions,then you can accept your own emotions better. S can accept his own problems, emotions and errors better, if M has them too and shows them too. Now, I told you at the beginning, that I think this whole season is an adaptation of the ARG. So, what happens, if you told the whole story? You have to start again. And here I take a short look at the twitter accounts. For the twitter accounts TFP never happened, so maybe TST and TLD never happenend, too. I donˋt know and I have to say, that one big counter point for this is, that Rosie lives with John and S and Mary is dead. However, maybe the brain just started from the end of TLD anew? I have to say, Iˋm not sure myself, that the accounts are real or not, so I canˋt go there very deep. However, if they are real, I think, they mean, that S is still in a coma, because Rosie is mostly forgotten. I mean, which parent gives his child away for 24/7? They have holidays or go on cases and never once do they take her with them. She is always with someone else. And I also think that is a sign for being in Sˋs dream and not so much in Jˋs, because a father would include his child in things or mention here more and someone who never was a father and is not so much interested in children like S would totally forget a child. So, this is what I have to say to twitter, for now (oooh, threat). And now, for the end, I want to tell you all, what I think will happen in TLS! YAY! So, I think that at the beginning we get something disturbing like in S4. And after time it gets worse, so that at some point S notices that something is wrong. Maybe he also starts to hear voices from the real world, which doesnˋt make sense for him. Then he will maybe talk to J about it all, and because S has noticed it, J as the brain tells him the truth and together they find a way so he can wake up, like jumping again or so. And after he wakes, the real J is there for him. And they hunt down Mary. For those who think the whole sh.t started as Mary has shot him, can imagine, that S tells J the truth. Or S has to stop Mary from killing J and after that, at the end, we get a kiss, or hug or whatever you guys prefer! Now I am at the end of my thoughts and I hope you could follow me and understand this whole mountain of sh.t. Probably everyone has now noticed that English is not my native language, so donˋt hit me for it. If someone wrote that already, please tell me. I really would love to read more. Now, I will tack a few people who may be interested to read this, but of course everyone is allowed to tell me what they think! @impossibleleaf @inevitably-johnlocked

#tjlc #sherlock s4 #just me being silly #johnlock #mind palace #dream

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afishlearningpoetry · 6 years ago

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Looking Closer at How The Abominable Bride Foreshadowed and Can Be Used to Chronologically Decode Series 4:

In TAB, John’s stories are famous for its account of the great Sherlock Holmes and his many adventures with his scribe, Dr. John Watson. As this is in Sherlock’s head, everything about the comparison and contrast of their popular image vs. their personal lives is some expression of how Sherlock feels and thinks, including his insecurities. “I’ve had to grown this mustache just so people will recognize me,” John grumbles shortly after. Sherlock feels that certain things are expected of him and John in the public eye –– and that John’s blog, the closest thing Sherlock has to a confession of how John really feels –– hides Sherlock away from the world, both to protect him, and because John does not pick up on how Sherlock really feels about him, which frustrates him.

In TLD, John’s blog is –– seemingly apropos of nothing –– suddenly famous for being Sherlock’s account of his adventures and that people don’t know who John is. As series 4 is John’s blog, and therefore takes place innately from his own perspective and authorship, everything about the comparison and contrast of his story vs. reality is some expression of how John feels and thinks, including his insecurities. “I have a website.” “In which you enumerate two hundred and fourty types of tobacco ash. Nobody’s reading your website,” John responds to Sherlock in ASIB. John feels that certain things are expected of him and Sherlock in the public eye (such as Mary’s covered up murder) –– and that Sherlock’s on-and-off disdain for his blog, the closest thing John has to a confession of how John really feels about him, and really feels about his portrayal of the two of them together –– is inaccurate gibberish, and that Sherlock holds this view because John’s feelings towards him are not shared.

[Continue below the cut for more ➤]

See also: The Unfinished Act of Series 4, 10 Revealing Things From The Six Thatchers That Haunt You Late At Night, 10 Revealing Things From The Lying Detective That Haunt You Late At Night, and 10 Revealing Things From The Final Problem That Haunt You Late At Night.

Bonus: Filters.

After the opening scene of TAB, the episode transitions from The Strand magazine, establishing right away that we are seeing a filtered story instead of an unfiltered perception of reality. John’s latest story is doing well, as Sherlock’s image in the public eye is thriving, but Sherlock still imagines John protecting (and misunderstanding) Sherlock from further scrutiny, as the eager paper seller hands out further copies of their latest adventure.

After the case starts in TLD, John has a, on the surface text, pointless conversation with a random woman who’s mistaken John’s blog for being Sherlock’s. To be blunt: this scene has literally no other function beyond informing us again, that what we’re seeing is John’s filtered perception and story of the true events behind series 4, and that not only does John feel insecure about his work and the way his representation of his life with Sherlock is seen by everyone else, but also a self-aware jab about how it’s “gone downhill a bit”, a reference to public perception of John’s blog covering recent events, and thus what we are being shown throughout series 4, because this is not the truth. It has no other purpose. This is literally what it’s telling us.

While these two events don’t line up chronologically, they’re the most blatant examples of the way that Sherlock’s dream and John’s story are meant to line up to each other. Also considering that John’s latest story in TAB is not being considered a “proper murder”, and that TLD opens as another chapter in John’s blog after the last entry, which was about Mary’s death, it is fitting in the sense that TLD is meant to be the fallout of the cover-up, and that TST was indeed, meant to be a story told to the masses featuring a tragic death and not an exciting murder mystery.

There are many other examples of how John and Sherlock express their insecurities in their own universes, but John’s blog is the most personal, because it’s part of the continuing conflict and misunderstanding of how the feel about each other. That’s what the blog is to each of them, and that they continue to misunderstand each other, John’s portrayal of Sherlock and inability to pick up on Sherlock’s feelings, and Sherlock’s frustration at this, John’s portrayal of him, and John’s incorrect assumption about this meaning Sherlock must not mean the same way –– dear lord they’re a mess aren’t they –– means that it’s only natural that in their own stories, their portrayals of John’s blog are utterly contradicting each other in almost every way possible. Because their blog is their agreement on their relationship and how they choose to present it, and yet have never been able been able to agree on it. They don’t get it.

Sherlock’s portrayal is arguably closer to reality –– in the most basic sense that John’s blog is both hiding and misunderstanding who Sherlock really is, while John is a confused mess –– but Sherlock still isn’t getting to the heart of how John really feels. And while John’s portrayal is more blatantly incorrect, it’s just as emotionally honest as Sherlock’s. John also feels deeply insecure about the blog, or rather their agreement on their relationship, and himself in context of it. John is literally imagining a world where no one knows who he is. Not just who he really is, but his name and significance period. John is filled with self loathing. In TFP, he reminds us of this:

“Now, for once in your life, do the right thing. Put this stupid little man out of all our misery. Shoot him!” Mycroft says.

“Stop it.” Sherlock responds.

“Look at him. What is he? Nothing more than a distraction, a little scrap of ordinariness for you to impress, to dazzle with your cleverness. You'll find another.”

John thinks he’s boring and disposable. John thinks he’s worthless. John thinks Samarra is unavoidable.

He has no idea how much Sherlock loves him and that he doesn’t think of John that way. “People do get so sensitive about their pets,” Moriarty says to the two of them in TGG. In TST, John barraged himself under the scope of imagining Sherlock and Mary’s perfect relationship, comparing himself to being less than a dog. John feels the same here –– sub-human, nameless, faceless, and that his blog has accomplished nothing but deluding himself and making his inaccurate, romantic portrayal of Sherlock popular in the public eye. Shortly before this scene Sherlock takes drugs in the bathroom, and soon after John says he thinks Sherlock is a monster.

Sherlock resents John’s blog because John has been wrong about him this entire time, ever since they first met. John begins to hate his own blog because he’s so sure he’s been wrong about Sherlock this entire time, ever since he first met him. Both feelings translate to the two of them imagining scenarios where strangers comment on it in a way that pricks all of their insecurities about each other at the same time.

It wouldn’t be the first time. In TAB, as Sherlock is suffering a relapse and Mycroft and John are worried about his livelihood, Mary takes an opportunity to make a jab at Sherlock. “You’ve been reading John’s blog. The story of how you met.” Sherlock evades the truth about how he feels about John’s blog while still commenting it’s an inaccurate portrayal, while John is so surprised by this that he still doesn’t pick up on the truth. Neither of them are getting the full picture –– it’s only when they come together and arrive at their shared truth will their back and forth with the blog will end.

“Oh, my god, I love your blog,” another stranger cheers on Sherlock as John grimaces onwards, feeling forgotten by everyone else, which is just a conduit for him being neglected by Sherlock.

#sherlock bbc #sherlockedit #tjlc #tjlcedit #edits #gifset #gifs #television #series 4 #looking closer at tab timeline #sherlock holmes #john watson #john x sherlock #the six thatchers #the lying detective #the abominable bride #meta #john as the author

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peacockbluecoat · 8 years ago

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Mary/Anyone/Eurus, Pt. 1: The Bride

I don’t know if there are already theories about this, but I think that Mary is Anyone/Eurus because there are many connections between them. In my previous posts about the colour scheme of season 4, I connected the colours red, yellow and blue to Eurus. If the theories about season 4 taking place in the Mind Palace are true, then there is no Eurus, therefore the colours could be connected to someone else in the real world and I think that’s Mary. Firstly, there are a few visual parallels between Eurus and Mary with regard to the colour blue:

Mary is rolling blue dice to chose random places in TST, little Eurus is wearing hair ties with blue dice in TFP.

Another connection between these two is the video messages. Both of their videos sometimes have a blue tinge.

In season 3, the house of John and Mary had red curtains. In season 4, it has new blue curtains which are similar to the blue curtains in the therapist's house where John meets Eurus.

Secondly, we have the colour yellow, which I have also connected to Eurus before. Who could it be associated with if Eurus is not real? When I think of yellow before season 4, there is one moment that immediately comes to mind: the yellow walls at John and Mary's wedding. I don't think it is too far-fetched to connect the use of yellow lights and filters in season 4 to the wedding as there have been other connections to the wedding as well. When Sherlock goes into his Mind Palace in HLV after being shot, he sees Mary in her wedding dress aiming a gun at him and later he projects a wedding picture of Mary onto the house wall. In TST and TLD John and Sherlock talk repeatedly about cake, which might be a reference to wedding cake. TAB is about an unsolved case concerning a bride (who is also shooting guns). We see Mary in front of a yellow wall again in TST when she and Sherlock are talking over the phone, and Ajay looks at her wedding pictures. I would say there is a connection between yellow and wedding/bride/Mary.

The recurrence of the colour yellow in Sherlock's Mind Palace in season 4 might be a warning that Mary is dangerous, and Eurus – who is connected to yellow – could be representing Mary.

There are also several connections between brides and Eurus, i.e. Mary and Eurus: The bride in TAB sings: “Do not forget me”. In season 4 we have on one side little Eurus who sings, and on the other side Sherlock who has forgotten Eurus. This might be a warning for Sherlock: do not forget Mary (who shot you).

Mary/the wedding and Eurus are also connected by white roses:

At the wedding, there are white roses in Mary's bouquet and on the coats of John and Sherlock, Mary names her daughter Rosie, in TST Mary has a basket of white roses on her table in her house, and in TLD Eurus has a bouquet of white roses on a table in the therapist's house.

Another connection between the bride (Mary) and Eurus/E/“Faith” I noticed in TAB was the name of the bride (Emelia Ricoletti) and the engraving on her gravestone: “Faithful beyond death”. In this we have both the initial E in Emelia for E/Eurus and also the name Faith in the word faithful. Mary is the bride, the bride is E and Faith, and E and Faith are Eurus. They are all the same person.

Anyone

There is one quote in TAB that attracted my attention when I rewatched the episode:

Holmes: “Look around you. This room is full of Brides. Once she had risen, anyone could be her.”

Before season 4, this quote might not have seemed very important, but after season 4 the word anyone could be significant. This might be the same anyone we heard of in season 4. Mary is a bride and if anyone can be her, E, “Faith” and Eurus can be her. This is why all three of them are associated with the same colours and have other visual parallels. We also see that Mary can be anyone in TST when she is on the run. She takes on the identity of the woman on the plane, the stewardess, and Gabrielle Ashdown.

Let's have a look at some of the anyone quotes. It's difficult to find all important instances of it since it's just one word and could also be used in normal context. However, there is one instance in HLV where it is connected to Mary, therefore I included it here:

Sherlock: “Only the very front section of the house remains. It's just a façade. Remind you of anyone, Mary? A façade.”

In this sentence anyone is directly connected to Mary.

The next one is from TST:

Mary (to Vivian): “Why did you betray us?” Vivian: “Why does anyone do anything?” Sherlock: “Oh, let me guess. Selling secrets?”

I'm not sure if this one is important, as the word anyone was not emphasized by Vivian, however it might be a hint, especially since Mary is taking part in the conversation. Maybe Sherlock is trying to figure out why anyone/Mary shot him and thereby betrayed him and John.

This one is also from TST:

Molly (about John): “He ... said he'd ... that he'd rather have anyone but you. Anyone.”

If anyone is Mary, then John would rather have Mary than Sherlock. But why is Sherlock thinking about that? Is he jealous or hurt that John chose Mary? Does he think John does not need him any more?

The word is used several times in TLD:

Faith: “You're not what I expected. You're ...” Sherlock: “What ... what am I?” Faith: “Nicer.” Sherlock: “Than who?” Faith: “Anyone.”

I'm not sure about this one since Faith/anyone/Mary are the same person, it doesn't make any sense. But maybe Sherlock is just figuring out that he is nicer than Mary?

Then we have anyone used by Culverton Smith:

Smith: “I need to kill someone.” Faith: “Who?” Sherlock: “Who?” Smith: “Anyone!” Sherlock: “Of course. He doesn't want to kill one person; he wants to kill anyone. He's a serial killer!” Smith: “Anyone.” Sherlock: “He could be.” Smith: “Anyone.” Sherlock: “Why not? Why shouldn't he be?”

This one is even more confusing. Is this about Mary being a serial killer or about someone else who wants to kill Mary? And now we have “he could be – anyone”. Who is he?

John uses the word when talking to Mrs Hudson about Sherlock (TLD):

John: “Have you spoken to Mycroft, uh, Molly, anyone?” Mrs Hudson: “They don't matter. You do.”

Mycroft, Molly and anyone/Mary don't matter, only John matters to Sherlock.

The word is also used several times by Mary in her video message:

Mary: “Save John Watson. Save him, Sherlock. Save him. Don't think anyone else is going to save him, because there isn't anyone. It's up to you. Save him. [...] John Watson never accepts help, not from anyone. Not ever.”

The first part makes clear that Sherlock needs to save John. Maybe he needs to save him from anyone/Mary and Sherlock pictures her as the speaker to remind himself that this is about Mary? Mary might be a threat to John, therefore only Sherlock can help him because he is the only one who knows about her.

Most of these quotes don't really make sense but maybe they are not supposed to because they are just some muddled thoughts by Sherlock. Maybe the meaning of these conversations is not important but the connection between them – anyone/Mary. Sherlock could just be hearing confusing conversations in his mind with the purpose of being reminded of Mary. His subconscious might be trying to remind him that Mary shot him and that he has to do something about that (i.e. figure out why she did it or how to protect John from her).

As a sidenote, if Mary is anyone/E/“Faith”/Eurus that means John never really cheated on Mary (even though he never cheated on her, anyway, if all the events were only happening in Sherlock's Mind Palace). But it could mean that he wants more than Mary can give him (“But I wanted more. And do you know something? I still do.”). Or maybe Sherlock hopes that Mary is not enough for John and that is why he imagined John cheating on Mary in the first place.

No one

Similar to anyone there is also the reoccurring word no one (and nobody). One of the fake gravestones in TFP has the name Nemo Holmes on it, which is translated on-screen as “no one, nobody”. If anyone is Eurus/Mary, then who is no one?

There is one quote from TAB, where no one refers to the bride:

Sir Eustace: “Don't you see her?” Lady Carmichael: “No, no. I see no one.”

Another one in TLD:

Therapist: “So there is no one you talk to, confide in?” John: “No one.”

We know that's a lie. John talks to imaginary Mary and to some extent he also confides in the therapist/Eurus even though he doesn’t tell her everything. So we have two quotes that connect no one to the bride/Mary/Eurus just like anyone. Is this just a hint that Eurus is no one, meaning she does not exist?

There is a similar conversation in TLD between John and Mycroft, where the existence of a person is denied, this time it is directly about Eurus:

John: “You said it didn't the last time and it wouldn't with Sherlock, so who was it the last time? Who were you talking about?” Mycroft: “Nobody. I ... misspoke.”

Instead of naming Eurus, Mycroft claims that there is no one else. Is he just lying or does this really mean that Eurus does not exist and is a made-up character in Sherlock’s mind?

There are also a few more quotes about no one either used by Eurus or someone else who is talking to or about her:

Mycroft: “Eurus took Redbeard and locked him up somewhere no one could find him.”

Man: “Why do you think you're here?” Eurus: “No one ever tells me.”

Mycroft: “I warned you explicitly: no one was to talk to her alone.”

Sherlock: “Is there really no one there that can help you? Have you really, really checked?” Girl on the plane: Everyone's asleep. Will you help me?”

Sherlock: “I dug and dug and dug and dug. Sixteen feet by six; sixteen yards; sixteen metres – and I found nothing. No one.”

Eurus: “I never had a best friend. I had no one.”

Eurus: “Every time I close my eyes, I'm on the plane. I'm lost, lost in the sky and ... no one can hear me.”

No one is another connection between the bride, Mary and Eurus: other people don’t see them, they are invisible. In TAB, it was mentioned that no one except the victim saw the bride. In TLD, only John can see Mary because she is not really there. And no one except Sherlock sees “Faith”. Mycroft did not see her when he was monitoring Sherlock and in the end Sherlock thought that he imagined her.

#sherlock #sherlock meta #sherlock theories #emp theory #mary morstan #eurus #sherlock s4 #the abominable bride #the six thatchers #the lying detective #The Final Problem #tinhatting #tfhc #johnlock #peacockbluecoat

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