I’ve seen a lot of anti-EMP-people argue that EMP doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t in the original ACD!stories:
“Why would Mofftiss even go for this? Just because they like ‘Inception’? Isn’t BBC ‘Sherlock’ supposed to be read on a meta level, as well? As more than just an adaptation of the original ACD!stories, as a commentary on all the other adaptations that have been done before, as a commentary on the relationship between author, audience, and the Sherlock Holmes character that has existed for more than 120 years?”
Well, I think I just had a little epiphany about that.
EMP actually makes a lot of sense not just in-universe, but also on a meta level!
But first of all, let’s remember how they foreshadowed EMP right at the very start of the show in ASiP in that very first scene that establishes Sherlock as a character for us:
In this screenshot Sherlock visually becomes one with the dead body lying on the slab. And that’s no coincidence. That dead body represents Sherlock Holmes (the man who, as Molly points out, “used to work here”).
So, we have a dead body who represents Sherlock Holmes, and a Sherlock who peers down on ‘himself’ from above.
You know…like in a near-death experience! (Thank you @monikakrasnorada, for this idea. This wouldn’t have occurred to me if you hadn’t pointed out how much TFP is like a near-death experience in our recent collaborative creative ‘shouting match’: here.:))
So, this is some nice foreshadowing of a near-death experience right there.
It tells us that Sherlock will, at some point in the show, be in two places at once: lying somewhere unconscious/in a coma (almost dead), yet also experiencing a lot of things outside his own body at the same time (or rather deep inside his own brain, as near-death experiences go).
He will be lying down, near dead, but also be very alive in his mind palace. Just like in the ASiP screenshot above.
In s4, people will try to wake Sherlock up. (As has been said before, this is probably what John beating Sherlock up in TLD and screaming, “Wake up!” is all about.) People will literally try to get a reaction out of his unconscious body.
Which again was foreshadowed in the same ASiP scene when Sherlock is literally trying to ‘get a reaction’ out of the body that’s lying there. (On the surface level of the text, Sherlock beats this dead body with a riding crop to see if bruises will form after death. But on a metaphorical level, he is trying to get a reaction out of himself, the ‘dead’ body. Just like John is when John is beating him in TLD. John, too, will be trying to get a reaction out of Sherlock in s4: He will try to wake him up.)
I’m actually astounded by how well the foreshadowing works here: Molly (the John mirror No. 1) is looking at Sherlock beating himself from outside of the room.
This means that this ASiP scene can read like this:
The room=Sherlock being trapped by walls, ie, trapped inside his own body (in a coma)
Both Sherlock and the dead body=two different aspects of Sherlock (the awake one in his mind palace and the unconscious one lying there)
Molly=John who is forced to look at coma!Sherlock from the outside, but can’t actually interfere with what’s going on inside the ‘room’, ie, inside Sherlock
Nice.
So, now that we have established that this scene neatly foreshadows Sherlock’s EMP, let’s go one step further.
We have now looked at two levels expressed in this scene: 1) the literal (textual) surface level and 2) the metaphorical/symbolic (foreshadowing) level of this scene.
But we haven’t looked at the third level yet.
3) The third level is the overarching meta level: the level that examines the relationship between author, audience, adaptations and the Sherlock Holmes character that has existed for more than 120 years.
I’m sure I’m telling you nothing new when I say that the dead body in this ASiP scene represents the Sherlock Holmes character that we’ve known for more than a 120 years.
What are we shown in this ASiP scene? Sherlock (who represents our BBC-Mofftiss-Sherlock show) beating that ‘dead horse’ (with a riding crop:)) that is the 120 year-old Sherlock Holmes character.
This is actually quite a nice commentary on what Mofftiss, in their usual sarcastic way, think the Sherlock Holmes character has become over the last 120 years: dead! A dead body.
That’s their verdict.
‘Sherlock Holmes’ as a sujet has been done to death. There have been more than 200 adaptations all over the world. The character has literally become a dead body with no pulse.
He has been shown with his typical attributes so often that we can’t think of him as a living human being anymore.
Sherlock Holmes has become the pipe and the hat and the horse carriages and the gas lamps and the cases, the man who frowns on love and/or falls in love with Irene Adler, the man who says, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ even though he never did that in the books.
In short, Sherlock Holmes, the 120-year-old character, has become a dead body stuffed with all sorts of attributes that make it impossible for us to see him as an interesting, living human being. He has literally been done to death.
And (I’m sure I’m telling you nothing new here) this BBC Sherlock adaptation turns up and beats the shit out of this dead body to see if it can maybe, maybe still get a reaction out of this dead body, if it can make that dead body react like a living, breathing thing.
This has all been discussed amongst fans before, and it’s all shown to us in that one ASiP scene: Sherlock (representing the BBC Sherlock show) is trying to get a reaction out of Sherlock Holmes, the dead body (the character that has been done to death).
But what has this got to do with EMP?
Well, if this ASiP scene foreshadows Sherlock in an EMP at some point in the show, then the meta reading of this ASiP scene has to extend to EMP, as well.
So, what Mofftiss are telling us is that Sherlock, in a coma, represents the 200 or so adaptationsthat have been done over the past century.
It’s quite cheeky and self confident. But that’s how Mofftiss are, after all.
Sherlock in a coma/unconscious/almost dead Sherlock is a Sherlock without a pulse, a Sherlock who isn’t living up to the potential of his character anymore.
EMP!Sherlock represents the 200 adaptations that have been done before this one.
If Mofftiss manage, in s5, to wake Sherlock up, then this is a general commentary on how they have ‘woken up’ the Sherlock Holmes character after his 120-year-long, Zombie-like state of being near-dead.
They (Mofftiss) are the ones to breathe new life into the Sherlock Holmes character. That’s what the waking up of Sherlock, in s5, will mean.
(Note that, for this meta reading, it is totally irrelevant when EMP started. The starting point could be HLV or TRF or the pool or even the pilot.)
The point Mofftiss are trying to make is that at the beginning of the show, Sherlock (read: BBC Sherlock, the show) was trying to get a reaction out of a dead body (read: the Sherlock Holmes character).
And at the end of the show (s5), Mofftiss will do more than just that: They won’t just get a few reactions out of the character. They will bring him back to life. They will give him a beating heart again.
And since I’m almost certain that John Watson will be the one to wake Sherlock up in s5 (or to be involved in his waking up somehow), this will also mean that this new awakening of THE ‘Sherlock Holmes character’ will happen through love, through gay love, to be precise!
In short, what Mofftiss are telling us is that Sherlock Holmes without his gay identity and without the love for John that comes with it is an almost dead, comatose Sherlock Holmes.
The Sherlock Holmes character that has been adapted on screen (and on stage) more than 200 times across the world is a zombie, a dead body, a comatose entity BECAUSE HE IS DEVOID OF HIS GAY IDENTITY as represented by his love for John Watson!
That’s what EMP means. That’s why it’s there.
Coma!Sherlock is the 200 adaptations. Because these adaptations took away his reason to live (his gay identity, ie, his love for John).
In short: Anti-Emp-fans are right in a sense: Because, yes, EMP was never in the ACD!canon.
But that’s not the point!
EMP has nothing to do with Arthur Conan Doyle.
EMP is a commentary on what has been done to Sherlock Holmes for the last 120 years in adaptation after adaptation after adaptation.
All of these adaptations have turned Sherlock into a dead character that can only be gay on the inside (in his mind palace), torturing himself on the inside, but being dead, comatose and without a pulse on the outside.
That’s what EMP is.
The Mofftiss adaptation, however, will bring this character back to life. They will wake him up! By giving him his gay identity, his heart, his John back.
@sagestreet, let me love you. This. All of this. I mean, what is there to say?? I love absolutely every word.
For EMPers here from the beginning, it’s been a long hard year and a half of ridicule and dismissal. I really never have understood exactly why EMP theory has been so derided. It was never a theory to dismiss or excuse what we didn’t like about anything in the show. It was literally what we saw happening.
BBC ‘Sherlock’ supposed to be read on a meta level, as well?
Why does one exclude the other? Maybe there is something about reading on a meta level that I don’t get because I thought we were reading it through subtext and the ‘meta level’. Through intertextual readings like the film Stay and a theatre of the absurd in order to tell the story of Sherlock’s inner self. Is that not meta enough? Just because you don’t have a phd in English lit or something to even understand this theory, then it isn’t worthy of being considered?
Sometimes I really believe that Moriarty was speaking to this fandom when he told Sherlock he was wrong to want everything to be so clever. The key code was never anything. It was simple daylight robbery.
“Sometimes a deception is so audacious, so outrageous that you can’t even see it when it’s staring you in the face.”
It’s hard to imagine a deception more audacious and more outrageous as EMP, and it’s been staring us in the face this whole time. 🙂
What could be more meta than the opportunity to actually see inside the world’s foremost deductive mind. It’s certainly something that’s never been done before.
I, for one, can’t believe i didn’t notice the fact that both ASIP and TLD had similar “corpse-beatings in the morgue” scenes. This is such a good meta, thank you for this
DISCLAIMER: I don’t really write meta and I haven’t read all meta and this may all be hogwash/old news, plus I tend to confuse things and misremember.
BUT.
Ever since I sort-of watched TFP,
I’ve been bothered by what I see as the similarity between Musgrave Hall and Skyfall
in the Bond movie of the same name: the ancestral home, out in the middle of
nowhere, the destruction, the fire…
(That’s the villain watching it burn, btw)
But even though this has been at the back of my mind since then, I haven’t bothered to look into it. Maybe
someone else has. That’s not what this post is about, even though I’m
sure it would be an interesting thread to pull (and someone probably
already did). But it does encourage associating Sherlock with Bond, which is the point of this post. And which, as we all know, Mark Gatiss went out of his way to drive home in that poetic response to a review that complained about Sherlock being too Bond-y.
So anyway, with all these Bond associations floating around in my brain pretty much CONSTANTLY, today as I was out
walking, something struck me. “What other final instalment in a rebooted movie series that I
loved made me grievously disappointed, had glaring plot holes, and introduced a
random super-duper villain from the hero’s childhood who no one had ever heard
of before?” And the answer (for me, personally) is Spectre.
There should always be a spectre at the feast, right?
Well, I know Spectre came out just a half year before Sherlock s4 started
filming, but they could have been “inspired” to cobble together the mess that
is TFP in that time. So what are the plot holes in Spectre? Many people loved the movie, but others saw it as a regression to earlier Bond incarnations with ridiculous gadgets being prioritised above plot. One relevant question comes from http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/43844/why-didnt-the-machine-affect-bond-in-spectre:
“There is a scene where Bond is hooked up to a torture machine. He is told
that the first action will damage his eyesight and the the second action will
cause him to forget all the faces he knew. Both these actions occurred, but he
still remembers everyone’s face, and 5 minutes later he is making precision
shots from a large distance. So it seems like the torture device had literally
no effect on him. Is there a reason for this, or is it just poor movie making?”
Like introducing, say, a memory-altering drug for no reason at all
and not following up on it.
“Bond accidentally shoots a
suitcase filled with explosives, which blows
up half a building. Aaaaand nobody notices….
Seriously: an explosion goes off in a packed city during the busiest day of the
year, and there’s not a single acknowledgement from anybody anywhere. Bond
returns to the street to pursue his target and the festivities are still going
on as normal. Surely somebody would have seen a building collapsing right in
the middle of everything? Nope. It’s just ignored, which makes no sense given
that the explosion happened in plain sight. What gives?“
Yeah, what gives?
Continuing:
“As Bond enters MI6 in an attempt
to track down whatever waits for him inside (it’s Blofeld, by the way), he
realises that the building has been set
up as a kind of “James Bond Funhouse.” Firstly, he sees his name
sprayed onto a wall of deceased secret agents, and arrows have been placed
around the building to guide him towards his goal. Pictures of former Bond villains – Silva, LeChiffre – and former
love Vesper have been pinned to the
walls. And then Bond reaches Blofeld, who is (somehow) concealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass. The
question is, though: how did Blofeld know that Bond would kill those agents and
thus enter the building to see his name, the arrows and the photos of the
deceased? He had no reason to suspect that Bond would be able to free himself
and kill two agents whilst handcuffed, and yet he went to the trouble of drawing arrows and putting up pictures!”
A grey bunker filled with clues and rooms with pictures of the hero’s past – remind you of anything?
And finally:
“Okay, then: the worst contender.
Actually think about this for a second, because it’s quite insane when you try
to piece it together: a plot hole to end
all plot holes, if you will – and one that only succeeds in spoiling the Bond continuity for absolutely no reason at
all. In the film’s big and
unexpected “twist”, Bond discovers that Blofeld is his half-brother
and that the villain has set out to make his life hell due to some very
undeveloped and frankly ridiculous “daddy [friend] issues.” As a
result, audiences are told that all of
the villains in all of the Daniel Craig Bond movies were working for Spectre
the whole time, which – in itself – makes no sense. Blofeld has been in the shadows the whole time, apparently, watching.
How the hell could Blofeld have masterminded all of Bond’s pain when Bond was
randomly assigned to most of his cases, or stumbled upon them by accident?
Bond got involved with most of the villains as a result of other peoples’
actions. Le Chiffre didn’t plan to meet with Bond; Bond was sent after him.
Dominic Green had other things on his plate long before Bond got involved.
Silva was going after M and wanted revenge on her, Bond aside. Trying to shoehorn all four Bond movies
into one continuity was a huge mistake on the writers’ part because it suggests
that Blofeld somehow manipulated all the events that led Bond to each villain,
which clearly wasn’t the case. But how could he have known that Bond would
be assigned to each and every villain? How could he have even predicted that
Bond would become a secret agent, thus drawing the pair into the scenario that
Blofeld wanted? It’s all very, very tenuous and you could probably spend days
and days combing through the movies, spotting all the moments at which “I
am the author of all your pain” induces another plot hole. It’s retconning
of the worst kind, and it’s crazy that the writers decided to go down a route
that opened them up to relentless plot-based scrutinies.”
There’s nothing to add at this point, because we can all see the parallels with Eurus.
________________________________________________
Alright, just a few bonus details that aren’t plot holes, just… you know, too much:
–
Receiving a posthumous message from the previous M, Bond carries out an unauthorised
mission in Mexico City.
–
Bond asks Moneypenny to
investigate Oberhauser, who was presumed
dead years earlier.
–
At the end, Bond throws his gun into the Thames
and leaves the bridge with Swann.
Ho hum.
_______________________________________________
Oh, bonus fun fact: look, it’s Andrew Scott! Playing E… I mean C! Being all up in arms about surveillance technology, incidentally.
Bonus fun fact 2: main characters apparently not wanting to film anymore
Bonus fun fact 3: “If I risk it all, could you break my fall?” (Spectre song)
Omg did mofftiss and the people of James Bond made a deal or what ?? This is extremely suspicious !
Well…that rung a bell with me so I just looked back and found this– a theory that the writer John Logan and Mark have talked about Bond before…telling timing re: where Bond and Sherlock’s at! @pawsoffmykitty
what the fuck
Holy shit, that last photo explains why mofftiss had such a cow over the alleged early release of their own chess photos! Brilliant theory! After all this I still ask myself: “What did any of this have to do with Sherlock Holmes?” What a Charlie Foxtrot S4 turned out to be.
painting Sherlock. –graphite 10H-8B on Strathmore Bristol 400. Image resource: this behind-the-scenes photo of Benedict Cumberbatch getting his makeup done. 🙂 thank you. Pairs with this drawing of Martin. Open in new tab for higher quality. [my art tag]
The original photograph looks like the makeup artist is
touching up a painting. This takes it to meta level. Thank
you!
John is smart. He’s a doctor, he studied medicine. He was a fucking field surgeon for all those years, performing emergency surgeries under immense pressure. John Watson is one smart cookie
if nothing else like, johnlock and tjlc specifically really stretched the bounds of my own creativity made the idea of “what’s possible” virtually meaningless in terms of crafting layered and multidimensional and relatable and important stories, and even if i didn’t explore that freedom and create stories myself as a result, i think that in and of itself was worth every single minute i’ve spent here. to stop asking what’s possible and instead ask what’s imaginable, and to discuss how i might see my imagination brought to life, has been profoundly powerful.
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