First, falling from a cliff… then a face moving back and forth in the dark, suddenly appearing in another spot… the frozen certainty that something unbearable is about to happen: this dream has haunted nineteen-year-old Meg for ten years, ever since she went to live with her unfeeling English father after her mother’s death. “
This sounds crazy, but hear me out because this would make for a great fix-it fic even if none of this is real and I’d love to read it.
So. Remember the beginning of His Last Vow? We see John dreaming and Sherlock doping again? These two ideas hold a lot of weight in the narrative of series 4 and TAB. I believe we’re seeing alternate realities converge into one to create a mind palace sequence that doesn’t belong to any character, but belongs instead to the viewer.
Remember when Molly said “Forward or Backward?” as Sherlock got shot? The answer was backward. I think everything shown from that moment on has been something either Sherlock or John has fantasized before that moment – in the month of their separation. We saw the narrative as going forward, when really we were being filled in as to what happened “backward”.
Here’s my big write-up on what I think is going on if EMP theory (extended mind palace theory) is correct. I’m not totally sold on it, but I’m even less sold on every other theory I’ve heard, so I’m going to just make the most solid case I can.
Feel free to raise objections, ask questions, contribute additional evidence, or point me toward metas you’ve already written on points I bring up. Please note that I really suck at keeping up with responses and such, though, so anyone who reads this should also trawl the notes.
If EMP theory is real it is integral to the Johnlock reveal, so they would not reveal it in a screening. Same goes for things like Mary being alive, Moriarty possibly being alive, Rosie never having been born; those are all contingent on EMP theory. Any fake version of TFP would have to keep Mary and Moriarty dead, Rosie alive, etc.
I saw the Russian screener and it only makes me feel that EMP theory is more likely.
There was nothing in the version of TFP that was screened that explains any of the weirdness in T6T or TLD via any other competing theory. So you either have to believe that they’ll never explain it at all, or they’re going to reveal some explanation only when it officially airs on Sunday – in which case you may as well consider EMP theory.
If they’re not doing EMP theory, I feel they would have had to have filmed a lot more extra footage to explain things via a different theory, but who knows. The Russian screener contained a lot of scenes that would be great prior to an EMP reveal.
Table of Contents
Background on EMP Theory
Why Our Dads Would Totally Do EMP Even If You Wouldn’t
“Miss me?” is a mind palace invention, right? It appears for the first time at the end of HLV. I wonder if that’s a bleed through from the real world as well – from John, perhaps.
FANTASTIC THOUGHT!!!
Things kind of suck around here so while I am tinhatting for a fourth episode, I’m not really in the mood to write extensive meta. I’ll just get my thoughts down real quick. Everything flows from what I’ve written before so I don’t expect this bit to be compelling or make much sense if you didn’t read the rest of it.
If there’s a fourth episode, I still stand by everything I’ve said in this EMP meta. I think TFP works fairly well as an EMP episode up until Sherlock embraces Euros.
There’s lots of tells in the episode that Sherlock is unconscious and needs to wake up:
– the little girl from ASiB and the airplane scenario similar to ASiB, plus reusing the airplane concept from TAB, are cues from Sherlock’s subconscious telling him to wake up
– so is the use of Moriarty saying “welcome to the final problem” because Moriarty told Sherlock the final problem is “stayin’ alive”
– the insane drama of the whole thing
– the nonsense and plot holes are realistic for someone who has been drugged and dying for a while now
Furthermore, if I’m right the episode is about Sherlock healing and integrating a lost part of himself he imagined as Euros. Dunno if the resolution will keep the exact same Victor Trevor reveal, but because of that “if dog can’t swim, neighbor is the killer” thing from T6T, it seems more likely to me that the following happened:
Sherlock doesn’t have a secret sister. A neighbor killed Victor Trevor and it traumatized him. (I think he probably did tell himself he had a dog that got put down instead because the mirroring between Sherlock and Henry in THoB was pretty hammered in.) Sherlock seems to blame himself for deaths that aren’t his fault, like Mary’s, so that probably started with Victor Trevor. That’s why he gets freaked out by the thought of people dying on his watch and why he is obsessed with catching criminals. He has deep fears of intimacy because as the saying goes, it’s a “fearful thing to love what death can touch.”
Euros is like the part of Sherlock that tries to drive all emotion away but can’t. A big part of Sherlock realizes how that leads to nothing but being a sociopath and his brain is just proving it to him. He doesn’t want to be a sociopath, he doesn’t even want to be the one flying above everyone else. Deep down, Sherlock has always wanted someone to play with. His brain connects John to the last person who was willing to play with him: Victor Trevor.
In TAB, Moriarty told Sherlock it’s the landing that kills you, and Sherlock reiterated that to John. Meaning: falling in love doesn’t have to be terrible, it’s all about whether you land safely. Mycroft in TFP tried to convince Sherlock and John that the safest thing was to crash the plane, which is of course what Sherlock would imagine Mycroft would say, but Sherlock decides he’ll help Euros land it safely. Sherlock has overcome his issues and is ready to come back to life.
Immediately after Sherlock embraces Euros, he asks her to help him save John. This is because of the parallel to What Dreams May Come I’ve been repeating: John is suicidal because Sherlock won’t come out of his coma, and part of Sherlock knows that and is struggling to regain consciousness.
Sherlock imagines John is down a well and can only be saved by Sherlock coming to terms with his fear of intimacy; he literally tells John that figuring out what happened to Redbeard is *how* he will find John. John feeling suicidal is also why he imagines an “I love you” coffin whose description fits John, and why Sherlock’s brain flips out and bashes it to bits.
There’s other clues that Sherlock is stuck in his head, like Queen’s “I Want to Break Free.” It’s about a man who wants to come out of the closet because he’s fallen in love, and it works nicely as a parallel to Sherlock wanting to come out of his coma. The song cuts off at “I’ve fallen in l–.”
And Moriarty is peppered everywhere because of “the final problem” of staying alive, because Sherlock still recognizes the connection between Moriarty and Mary shooting Sherlock, because Sherlock remembers Carl Powers drowning (not sure that Victor Trevor actually drowned), and because Sherlock doesn’t want to be a sociopath like Moriarty and by connecting him to Euros his brain is making the connection that the show has always made: that Sherlock can either choose to embrace a lack of sentiment like Moriarty, or to embrace sentiment like John.
I also feel like S4 is in line with Sherlock’s mind beginning to realize that Mycroft has to have some connection to Moriarty and Mary, he just can’t come up with anything that makes total sense yet because it’s all been a drugged, dying dream.
Other clues this is in Sherlock’s head: he gets to introduce himself as a pirate, the absurd gravestone cipher that he solves in less than a minute involves a string of numbers like the Bond Air numbers, iirc Mycroft says the patience grenade has a 007 in its name, Sherlock probably knows Wilde if he knows Shakespeare and gay Victorian history (and especially if Mycroft really did perform in the play) but it’s a little stranger for John to know it, Sherlock would imagine John and Mycroft reacting as underwhelmingly as they did to Sherlock deciding to kill himself, etc.
If they decide to do something Clue-like, I’m guessing they rewind back to the point where Sherlock embraces Euros or maybe just before to a slightly different Victor Trevor memory where Sherlock remembers that it’s a neighbor who did it.
I really don’t think Euros ever existed.
YES! Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love all of the meta about what John’s going through if this is his dying dream, but the evidence from the rest of the series just doesn’t support that conclusion. This episode is about how Sherlock is finally choosing love over pure reason.
Yeah, I gave some thought to the possibility that TFP is John’s dream instead but too many things are just about impossible:
John can’t just know what his chair looked like in Sherlock’s mind. If we’re in someone’s head, it’s far more likely to be Shelock’s.
– John has never heard Moriarty utter the words “the final problem” to Sherlock. If we’re in someone’s head, it’s far more likely to be Sherlock’s.
– John can’t remember stuff like the waterfall scene from Sherlock’s mind in TAB. If we’re in someone’s head, it’s far more likely to be Sherlock’s.
– The only time John has ever heard “Redbeard” was when CAM said it aloud at 221b. For John to make the leap to Redbeard being a childhood dog and not a pirate or a code is one thing. It’s another thing that John would somehow envision the exact same Redbeard that we saw in Sherlock’s mind palace. Then it just gets absurd to imagine John realizing that Redbeard is a psychological cover for a childhood best friend. If we’re in someone’s head, it’s far more likely to be Sherlock’s.
– I find it unlikely John would imagine all the lines and deductions in TFP. We know that Sherlock’s mind is capable of that from TAB, however.
– I don’t think John would imagine himself reacting so blandly to Sherlock going to shoot himself in the head.
– It makes a lot more sense to me that Sherlock would imagine his own childhood than John would imagine Sherlock’s childhood.
– The episode isn’t pointless if it’s in Sherlock’s head because Sherlock works through some old memories related to his fear of intimacy. If the episode was in John’s head, then Sherlock didn’t work through those things and John didn’t learn anything real about Sherlock, so what’s the point?
– What Dreams May Come explains why there’s so much suicide talk in TLD, why Sherlock makes a connection between John and suicide, why Sherlock feels like he needs to save John, why Sherlock feels like he has to go to hell to save John, why Sherlock is saying he doesn’t want to die while lying in a hospital bed, etc. There are too many elements borrowed from WDMC to make me think that’s not intentional. The evidence is even stronger than The Princess Bride (I wrote that meta too) so I’m surprised people take TPB parallels as gospel and are now willing to accept dream episodes, but don’t think the WDMC parallels are meaningful? People agree T6T and TLD make no sense but somehow want to hang on to bits of them? It’s cool and all, I just don’t understand it. It’s very clear to me at least, with the whole concept of John’s blog being ripped from the movie, that they were planning on WDMC from the first episode.
– If TFP was in John’s head then Euros is real, which just seems outrageously stupid to me. imo there’s no way Euros is real; her behavior even before TFP is nonsensical – actually literally logically impossible – and the idea that Sherlock would forget an entire sibling and his whole family would conspire to keep him from remembering her is ridiculous.
– If T6T and TLD aren’t also EMP like I’ve argued, then John’s character makes little sense anymore. His MP character makes sense if it’s Sherlock torturing himself in his head though. (Also, though my personal wishes have no bearing on what they’re choosing to
do, I can in no way get behind their relationship if John actually beat Sherlock like that.) And again, that would be consistent with WDMC.
– There’s no way TLD can be real for all the reasons I discussed in its EMP entry; even Euros being a super genius can’t make her invisible to CCTV, Wiggins, and Mrs. Hudson. Most damningly, Sherlock could only know Mary was telling him to wear the hat if she’s a figment of Sherlock’s imagination instead of John’s. If TLD isn’t real then TFP isn’t either, and it’s way more likely those things are both in Sherlock’s head since there’s continuity between them.
– Occam’s Razor. I think it’s way more likely that the whole series is in Sherlock’s mind given the mounds of evidence than it’s a combination of like, John having a dream plus unreliable narrator and alibi theory, some parts are true and some aren’t, etc. It’s pretty easy to wake Sherlock up at a hospital and have people get that nothing actually happened since Mary shot him; it would take a lot of explanation to explain how one episode was a dream, but the ones before that were only partly true in a few ways, and then they have to reveal why they didn’t just show things as they actually happened, etc. With EMP it makes sense that things weren’t shown in a realistic way because they’re all made up and happening in Sherlock’s head as he imagines them, but I haven’t really heard a compelling explanation for anything else.
It just seems more likely to me that nothing in this series makes sense and all the promo material uses imagery from WDMC and everything revolves around Sherlock’s memories because Sherlock has been trying to come out of a coma in an homage to one of the most romantic stories one of their favorite authors wrote, than it seems likely that Sherlock really does have a crazy secret sister and John is somehow privy to imagery from Sherlock’s Victorian mind palace and things Moriarty never said in front of him, etc. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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