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This thread (which is interesting in its own right, you should read it!) made me reflect for a bit on why I find this scene so damn annoying.

My first instinct is yeah, this is wildly out of character for Mycroft. The man is responsible for many deaths, in the tens of thousands if we’re to believe the jokes about him starting wars. For him to say “I will not have blood on my hands!” is not only hypocritical but silly. And sure, I’ll buy that Mycroft’s a hypocrite – that he avoids legwork precisely because he can’t handle this sort of thing – but I don’t buy that Mycroft’s unaware of his hypocrisy. A truthful response would be “I can’t do it” or, if that’s too vulnerable, “I won’t do it”.  

And this is where the annoyance comes in. Because: why do the writers have him say something so transparently hypocritical? Why do they have him vomit when the Governor ends up killing himself? It seems almost like they’re mocking him. Fucking Mycroft, they want us to think. Willing to order people killed but not willing to kill people himself. They want us to see him as a weak hypocrite.

But where does that leave us? It leaves us rooting for murder, narratively. It leaves us thinking, “If Mycroft were a better man, he’d have killed the Governor.” It leaves us comparing him to John, and esteeming John in comparison, because he comes closer to killing the Governor, because he actually tries to do it, because he doesn’t vomit afterwards. Of course, John can’t do it either. I’m glad of that. Just as I’m glad that Mycroft is being a hypocrite. But I find the whole thing very distasteful.  

The series of moral dilemmas at the heart of TFP is incredibly trite, not just in themselves but also in the context of a show that let’s people kill without consequences or reflection. To be fair, we knew this going in. In the very first episode, John kills a man, the ethical dilemmas resolved with a joke: “He wasn’t a very nice man.” Given that, it’s hard to expect a reckoning for Mary shooting Sherlock, or Sherlock killing Magnussen, or Mycroft starting wars and abusing state power. I mean, we complain about Eurus being forgiven for murdering a bunch of people but at least she ended up back in prison. That’s more consequences than any of the other characters got.

I’m just so sick of plotlines where people commit crimes and we’re meant to approve of them or find them badass. (And oh, the irony of writing this sentence about a Sherlock Holmes adaptation!) I’m sick of fiction where we’re meant to think less of people for not being able to kill. I was willing to ignore it when I first watched BBC Sherlock but I’m over it, I’m done with it. There are too many high-functioning sociopaths in real life for me to want to spend any more time with them in fiction.

It never sat well with me in ASIP that John kills Hope and there is no reckoning, simply because it wasn’t credible IRL that there wouldn’t be a reckoning. Hell, a firearm was discharged: a man died. Of course there’d be an investigation. In retrospect, perhaps that should have been a warning that the show’s moral compass was off.

From then on, things became steadily less credible. As long as the show focused on the developing love and tenderness in the relationship between Sherlock and John, and how they changed for and with each other, it was possible to – and I now regret that I did – ignore some of the loose ends, unaddressed moral issues, and plot holes.

Once that focus shifted and the Mary arc began, the lack of moral focus, the incredibilities, the inconsistencies become more glaring and more intrusive and more jarring until John takes Mary back after she’s killed his best friend – the act of a man with no moral compass whatsoever – and Sherlock shoots Magnusson, becoming a murderer, the very thing he has always fought. At that point, we have been inducted, beguiled into a world where wrong is right, both our beloved characters have walked too far away from themselves to be themselves, and the chaos of Season 4 becomes inevitable.

I feel more than slightly soiled now. “Facile descensus Averni” indeed: easy is the descent into Hell. And I’m not happy that I allowed myself to be led, or willingly walked that ‘primrose path to the eternal bonfire’ without sufficient moral compass of my own to guide my own steps.

Who knew? My inner Puritan, or more likely my inner Catholic, was always out to get me. 🙄

This is so disturbing to consider, the callback to ASiP especially.  Thanks to a number of critical analyses like this, a thought keeps intruding the past few weeks.  It’s the idea that one of the foundational tenets of romantic Johnlock readings of the show – that John killed Hope to save Sherlock’s life the day after they met – is patently false.  The truth is that Sherlock had just gambled his life to beat Hope at his “game” and prove himself clever.  Making that exchange, we get John killing Hope to prove that Sherlock is clever.  And in the end, this is what the creators did repeatedly: murder after murder to prove that their show is (they are) clever.  There seems to be little other purpose to any of it.

You have all expressed thoughts i have had since HLV. I was always kind of disappointed that Hope got turned from a vigilante hero into a minion of moriarty, but at the time i accepted the scene as a piece of the overall story structure. and in the other early episodes, when someone died, there was recognition that this was bad/sad/wrong. But in HLV, that all got turned around, and suddenly we had “mary” shooting sherlock for no reason, and sherlock being manipulated into murdering CAM, which was even worse. Villains shooting people helps mark them as villains, in story logic. But heros shooting people to solve problems is precisely the wrong sort of image to be televising into people’s brains. i had hoped s4 would address that, get us back to a sherlock holmes who solved problems with his brain (and heart), but… no. So my shift from being a fan of the show, to being a fan of the fandom, continues.

I can’t disagree with anything anyone jas posted here. ALL of this is one of the core reasons that there is more to come. I am not a tinhatter, I do not believe there is an ARG, but what I do believe is this story is I am not delusional. I believe I have a little understanding of storytelling as I believe Mofftiss do as well. They are not infallible, but I find it unbelievable that they lost the plot so spectacularly.

Reblogging for the interesting discussion, but I don’t think I agree with you, monika. I think it’s entirely possible they had different plans for this show right from the start, but for whatever reason, the production team was allowed to put heavy emphasis on the wrong things. We already know for a fact that Moftiss keep their lead stars in the dark about character arcs, so all those scenes of eye-sex and sexual tension between Ben and Martin are just as likely to have been the actors playing what they thought was appropriate for their characters. “We all saw it as a love story” – except Moftiss. We weren’t the only ones led astray, but they allowed it to happen because they saw the ratings and figured, innacurately, that the audience was simply enjoying their particular brand of queerbaiting.

They ended s4 on such a ‘final’ note with that montage, that for them to do a complete 180 and go “Surprise, that was a fake ending!” now (months/years after TFP aired) would simply confuse and disenchant the majority of their audience. And they’ve already done that. Doing it twice in a row would be complete suicide.

I think they had a chance to do something like that immediately, but they’ve already waited too long.

Not to derail the discussion, but I do want to re-emphasize one of the points of my original post, which is that this “killing people is badass if you’ve got a good enough reason” motif they’ve got going is not new to S3 or S4 – it’s there from literally the first episode.  

I don’t rule out S4 being fake, I’ve been analyzing and appreciating the “you can’t trust stories!” imagery for like six months, so I’m open to it. I really am. But I also think folks downplay how many of the problems of S4 have been there from the beginning. I see this with people pointing out the plot holes in S4 and TFP especially. I get the urge, I mean it’s a terribly written season, but Bond Air and Delayed Action Stabbings and the solution for the Fall are all pretty cracky plotlines too. 

It reminds me a bit of when I used to work as a researcher. Due to publication bias we were always rooting for positive results more than negative ones, despite our attempts to be objective. And so when we got a negative result, we’d go over the study with a fine-tooth comb, wondering if we’d messed up somewhere – mixed up the data, made an error in the code, etc. Sometimes we’d find something, ‘cause we’re human and everyone makes mistakes. But when we got positive results, we wouldn’t be quite that diligent. We’d look for mistakes, but we wouldn’t look as hard. I wonder sometimes if that isn’t what’s happening here. If folks looked for silly plots, incontinuities, bad characterization in S1-S3 with the same energy that we’re (rightfully) tearing apart S4, what would we find?

If I may… I’d like to offer a different perspective for your consideration. 

In all of ACD Sherlock Holmes stories, the crimes were not so much about law and order, but the mystery of human nature – in all its fragility, flaws, absurdity, and promise. Sherlock Holmes may insist his methods were purely scientific to Dr. Watson, but without the ability to observe human heart through the deductions of human behaviors, he couldn’t have been the detective he was. I think Sherlock has been pretty consistent in the portrayal of canon-Holmes-in-progress throughout the entire series.

I railed against TFP for a couple of weeks when it first aired because it was simply too ridiculous and bizarre. But since then, I’ve come to see TFP as self-referential, a Sherlock Holmes parody about Sherlock Holmes parodies (there were simply too many elements of film/screen within a film/screen). Which provided a  very different context in reading the surface narrative as well as subtext. 

In the scene you mentioned above, for me, Mycroft and John were not so much Mycroft and John the characters we know them, but their roles as the British Government and the Soldier (as John kept reminding us). Regardless of one’s interpretation of Eurus, we were told that she was used in aiding British Intelligence at one point. So in this scene, we have an outsourced intelligence agent telling Sherlock Holmes the detective and sometimes MI6 (which is ACD canon compliant btw) that either the British Government or its Soldier must kill the Governor, a civil servant, or risk having his wife, a hostage, killed instead. All this while the trio attempting to rescue a-girl-on-a-plane that very much resembled a failed mission from an earlier episode (Bond Air). Sounds familiar? Western powers refuse to get their hands dirty as they conduct failed missions one after another by deploying their soldiers and outsourced intelligence, but couldn’t stomach the consequences of deaths?

I’ve never thought of Sherlock as overtly political (aside from the potential canon Johnlock and its implications) as imperialism in ACD canon was often fraught with contradictions. After series 4 I did go back to all the previous episodes, and one of the biggest surprises was actually TBB. I didn’t have much to say about the racial stereotypes (being asian and came to the west first as an international student many years ago), I personally didn’t think it was offensive but perhaps just… lazy, as it often happens in the portrayal of poc in Western media. But upon rewatch (and believe me I did multiple times before in the seven years since it aired), I realized the whole black lotus narrative was actually a commentary about Opium Wars and Imperialism. I don’t know if anyone has written about it before, but personally, I could not believe it was sitting there right in front of my face without me seeing it for seven years.

Perhaps I am biased and want to see the best of a show I still love. And being in the creative field myself, I know there is simply no way to predict whether the story you tell will be the same story the audience see. But damn if we don’t try, and to make sure every move has a purpose – rather the audience misses it than not doing our jobs. So I tend to give the creators and the creative team more lead way, and it is the same case here.

So what of all the murders and deaths in Sherlock? Just as ACD canon was filled with allegories and allusions, I suspect the creators of Sherlock has been doing the same; it’s to do with love and desires that meant certain death in the Victorian era. The medium made the allegories and allusions much more difficult to swallow – at the same time, the medium has been a part of the message since day one. I don’t know if it’s been the creators’ intention all along, but by making TAB, this is a conversation they know they will not be able to avoid going forward; one that involves the queer reading of Holmes and Watson in ACD canon. I know TFP doesn’t look it at first glance, but there is simply more than meets the eyes, just as all the other episodes did and especially TAB. But as you’ve written one of my favorite meta in the Sherlock fandom ever @delurkingdetective – you were the one show me where to look, you know?

Love these ideas @darlingtonsubstitution