Okay, I really want to respond to the posts about Mycroft and how he reacts to violence and guns in TFP.
There is a huge difference between defending yourself and watching a man commit suicide. When Mycroft is in his home, he goes into defense mode. He’s being attacked and, in his mind, that is a good enough reason to pull a gun. Also we don’t know what kind of shock he could have gone through after killing the clown. At that moment, he was in fight or flight mode and he did the first thing that came to mind to protect himself.
At Sherrinford, the man is completely innocent. Mycroft will not shoot a man who has not done anything to hurt him. Watching someone blow their own brains out is an extremely terrible thing to witness. Also, with all of the adrenaline going through his body, he went into shock and began to get sick. We know he doesn’t involve himself much in casework and he’s probably only seen gruesome videos where he is not really involved or emotionally compromised. The combination of terror, horror, and his body’s natural reactions lead him to behave differently in these two scenarios.
I understand that it may not make sense at first, but his reactions are completely valid and are understandable for the different situations.
As with a few of my other posts, the one you screenshotted has a dash of hyperbole and is distinctly shitpost-y. There’s no room for nuance in it.
The thing is I actually agree with all of what you’ve written here.
I guess my issue is, his reaction to what happened in TFP isn’t completely outrageous or “wrong”, it just felt a tad unexpected to me given that in the past he’s kept it together in the face of torture and death. Again, they were very different scenarios though and the scenes in TFP involved prolonged exposure to stress of all kinds – I get that. It’s apples and oranges and no one can predict how someone will react in such a horrifying scenario.
Personally, I just felt on first watch that his reaction came out of left field, it was unexpected to me given what I thought I knew of the character.
But hey, I was wrong (probably in part down to some of my headcanons as well as what occurs in canon) and I’m now attempting to adjust my Mycroft-y world view by making stupid posts about it. I’ll get there in time.
This scene may be my favorite of the whole series. I watched it countless times. Brilliant acting by all of them – you can read Mycroft’s face as soon as Eurus gives Sherlock the ultimatum. He calculates and makes his decision that quickly that there’s no way he’s going to let Sherlock choose this.
Ugh, then Ben! The way he’s stoic but briefly closes his eyes when Mycroft asks him not to shoot him in the face….his brief, sad smile when Mycroft jokes about how small his heart is…the almost imperceptible shake of his hand on the gun….
A round of applause for Sian, too. If you look in the background at the screens, you can see her roll her eyes at Mycroft’s heart comment. You can also see how eager she is looking at the screen. She’s reacting to the things Eurus is supposedly seeing, not just being a blank face on the screen.
I think we can all agree that Martin Freeman is an acting god, yes? Several times throughout the course of the whole series, he’s given me serious meta / plot bunnies from a TOTALLY SILENT reaction to something that another character is saying.
Just a shift in body language, or a facial expression, that makes you think, “wow…there’s a HUGE story here that we’re not being told in the episode.”
And in The Final Problem, he has done it to me again, bless his bastardy boots.
It’s in the scene where John gets tired of all the hot air in the office, and steps outside for some sea air instead:
Now, this could have just been a reminder shot for the audience: they’re alone; they’re isolated; miles and hours from any help.
But look at John’s face.
That’s a really strong reaction. It’s not just discomfort…it’s verging on terror. He flinches away, tries to control his breathing, and all but runs back inside…it’s almost like he’s having a panic attack.
Why would John Watson be so afraid of water?
At first I thought there must have been some childhood trauma that gave him a phobia of water, and that’s why Euros put him in the well. Which would have been great if we’d ever been given any backstory on John Watson at all thanks Mofftiss. (Ahem. Sorry. Personal sore point there.)
This was such an odd line to me… Maybe it was something John said to his patients in Afghanistan who’d suffered interrogations. Maybe he said it to a fellow soldier when they were captured…or maybe it was something he said to himself, over and over, after he was taken prisoner.
The second clue comes from The Six Thatchers:
Again, that’s a really strong reaction. It’s not just ‘oh shit’ or ‘well that’s it, we’re screwed now’…that’s a nearly full fetal position. It’s a duck-and-cover protect-your-head movement, and very uncharacteristic of Captain John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fuiliers, BAMF ex-army doctor.
And he did it when AJ mentioned being tortured. For fun.
As an army doctor, I have no idea if John would have been given RTI training. But would he have needed it? Would he have had any privileged military knowledge at all, ie, what troops were stationed where, or what their next moves were?
In other words: would he have had the kind of information that would be tactically useful to the enemy?
I doubt it.
True, he was an officer, but he was a surgeon…probably stationed at a single military hospital, treating patients who came in from all over the map. The military operates on a pretty strict need-to-know basis, and I don’t imagine a surgeon would need to know anything about the combat units’ inner workings.
So if he was captured and tortured, they wouldn’t have gotten much out of him. And I think they probably knew that: they just wanted to torture someone. For fun.
And how was he probably tortured?
My conclusion: John was a POW in Afghanistan, where he was subjected to some sort of water torture – probably waterboarding – by his captors. And since he didn’t have any sensitive military intelligence, they didn’t do it for information…they just did it for fun.
tl;dr – Damn you, Martin “I can do that with a look” Freeman, and your amazing plot-bunny-giving “acting is reacting, lovey” talent.
No, Lou, it isn’t but that is not what happened to Molly Hooper. She was reduced to the start of her character arch just for the sake of drama and the (gay) male protagonist, who obviously has not once loved her back in the same way she loved him.
Molly Hooper was written poorly and she deserved more!
Can’t agree Lou.. You misunderstood your character. She was not what you thought she was.
She agreed with fans way back thinking the slapping was awesome and badass so she’s had this problem for a while tbh.
Again, patronising. Because it comes from a woman makes it no less demeaning, many of us have read Chekhov. I’ve never been a fan of Loo, she’s said some iffy stuff on Twitter, and especially her take on the slapping as @1895itsallfine points out.
okay i know i already reblogged this but i have something to say now
molly still loving sherlock is not the problem here. molly is human, and so she can’t be expected to get over her feelings like nothing happened. it takes some people years to get over shit like that. that’s not the problem. it’s a relatively human character flaw–and while some of us might believe she should be over it–it doesn’t mean she is.
the problem is [euros and] the writers taking advantage of that part of molly and blowing it out of proportion, making it a plot point to exploit both molly and sherlock. especially when they haven’t touched on molly’s feelings for sherlock explicitly since season 2. that is why we assumed she was over it, because no one brought it up for YEARS.
and so, that is what i am angry about. i don’t think loo is wrong, i think she’s looking at it from a character perspective and not how the writers mistreated molly. there is nothing wrong with molly. what’s wrong is how she was presented in tfp.
^this. I think it comes down to the writers dropping the ball on this one. Big time.
We cannot blame her for any of this. She is not wrong. We are not wrong. End. Full stop.
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