Fans have had a lot of issues with alleged inconsistencies in Sherlock Series 4–especially The Final Problem. Some I agree with, many I don’t, and others I’m undecided on or just don’t care about.
But there is one issue that, to my mind, carries more weight than any of the others.
“holmes siblings are machines with 0% heart" factoid actually just statistical error. Eurus Holmes, who lives on an island & has 100% disregard for other people, is an outlier and should not have been counted
Martin, with his unassailable knowledge of aeroplanes, would have figured out within 30
seconds that the girl in the plane couldn’t possibly be real.
Carolyn, who must always be top dog,
would have immdiately disabled the camera and microphones in the cell, leaving Eurus powerless.
Douglas, with his brilliant ability to remain clear-headed when others
are panicking, would have remembered that there is no glass in the cell, and thus
they can all leave at any time.
And if
any guards tried to stop them on the way out, Arthur would simply charm, confuse or
frustrate them into letting them pass.
They’d be sailing out of Sherrinford within half an hour and be home in
time for tea.
Back in
EMP land, Sherlock is dying and Eurus needs to land the plane if she wants to
survive. And while she is rightfully worried and John about to drown, Sherlock
is pulling out of his ass a stupid solution for Eurus’ song. That’s when we
start saying that ‘Eurus’ really had time to lose to grave these tombstones in
order to fit that song.
But,
really, the correct answer is ‘Eurus created that song in a way to explain the
wrong dates’. The song isn’t a puzzle, it’s the solution needed because the
graves are the puzzle that fascinated Sherlock as a child.
A fake
gravestone where Nemo Holmes was ‘buried’. But really, Nemo was no one.
Or
nobody. There was no body.
You
can’t really face your own grave, can you? Unless you have a TARDIS, all you
can do is have a gravestone with your name on it and no date of death. You’re
still not dead so the dates will be necessarily wrong.
Basically,
if you want to survive, you need to figure out the contradiction your
gravestone is telling you. Show the inconsistencies and reveal it as a fake.
Here
starts the puzzle. Now that the inconsistencies are laid bare, you need to find
how that can tell you how to survive.
SHERLOCK:
The wrong dates, she used the wrong dates on the gravestones as the key to the
cipher and the cipher was the song.
Here,
Stupid Sherlock strikes again.
The reverse is what happened.
Do you
know what an Ottendorf code is? You have a set of numbers and they refers to a
word of a page of a very specific book. We are facing a book cipher, not
dissimilar to an Ottendorf.
The cipher is the graveyard, the key is the song.
The
graves represent the number of the stanza and the numbers the words used in said
stanza in ascending order. If you start with a number like 28 and then use 1,
that just means you need to use the last stanza above (word 28).
Grave 1
(Stanza 1): 134-1719 -> 1 3 4 17 19
I AM LOST HELP ME
Here we
can’t do 13 because we have 4 after, nor 34, so 1 3 4, now we are in the two
digits 17 and 19
Grave 2
(Stanza 2): 28.9.1520 -> 28 9 15 20 BROTHER SAVE MY LIFE
We could
have 2, 8, 9, 15 and 20 but then you get NOT SHADE SAVE MY LIFE, so 28 it is.
Grave 3
(Stanza 3): 1818 24 26 -> 1 8 18 24 26 BEFORE MY DOOM I AM
No
choice is there? You can use the last like of the last stanza but that’s is so
no 18. 1 8 and 18
Grave 4
(Stanza 4): Nemo Holmes: 1617-1822 32 -> 16 17 18 22 32 MY SOUL SEEK MY ROOM
If it’s
1, 6 and 17, It’s WITHOUT BEFORE SOUL, so 16 and the rest follows
You’ll notice that there is a part of the final message missing, so there is a grave missing.
GRAVE
4.0.0: LOST WITHOUT YOUR LOVE SAVE
So grave 4.0.0 should be : 28 1 2 3 8 in any combination.
What can
we have then?
2/8/1238?
28/12/38? 2812 age 38? Age 28 1238? 2812-38? 28.1.238?
The
grave stones aren’t real, the numbers are wrong, but at minimum they give for a
second an illusion of reality. Yes, there are two centuries of difference, but
you won’t have many graves stones starting
in the 29th century. Also we can’t start with the age of the
dead Holmes, this comes only at the end.
You can
have 2/8/1238, or even something like 28/12/38 or 28/1/238 but there is another
option I want to point out.
2/8/12,
Age 38.
Here
lies Mr. Holmes, born on the 6th of January 1974 who died the 2nd
of August 2012 at 38.
I admit,
I’m not using John’s blog to estimate Sherlock’s “deathday” because, mainly,
Watson was always shit at keeping track of dates.
But we need another Holmes grave, one that is
the fakest fake to have ever faked the word. Also, it’s the only things that makes sense. Why wouldn’t they show the
final grave needed if the numbers used were so pointless?
They
gave us a solution that is missing a fifth of the answer, and not the least
important because this is where we get the answer ‘LOST WITHOUT YOUR LOVE SAVE’.
So, the
secret behind Sherlock’s grave, the one thing that turned his own grave into a
pure architectural joke and not a genuine thing, the one thing that made sure that Sherlock is still alive is Love.
By solving these fake deaths, Sherlock found the answer to save the plane before it crashes and creates a far more genuine grave.
SHERLOCK: Help me, brother, save my life, before my doom. I am lost without your love, save my soul, seek my room.
Without Sherlock’s love, Eurus won’t be able to find her way home, back to London and the ground.
Twice already Sherlock tricked death in two finale, twice love is what gave Sherlok the means to survive. He just needs to do it again.
Love conquers all, even death.
Mofftiss can suck it because the Sherlock fandom is so much smarter and cleverer than they could ever hope to be. This is amazing, @impossibleleaf!!!!! I don’t know how you did it, but this is just fascinating! Figuring this out like this renews my faith that we aren’t just a collection of deluded little misfits. That what we are seeing, deciphering, decoding IS real and true. Because, honestly, how could it not be at this point??
They gave us a solution that is missing a fifth of the answer, and not the least important because this is where we get the answer ‘LOST WITHOUT YOUR LOVE SAVE’.
Let’s just take a moment to think about that^^^^^ and what it potentially means.
I that am lost, oh who will find me? Deep down below the old beech tree Help succor me now the east winds blow Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go!
Be not afraid to walk in the shade Save one, save all, come try! My steps five by seven Life is closer to Heaven Look down, with dark gaze, from on high.
Before he was gone right back over my hill Who now will find him? Why, nobody will Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen Lost forever, nine by nineteen.
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.
This is the full version of Eurus’ song. If you follow correctly, Grave 1=Stanza 1, Grave 2=Stanza 2 and Grave 3=Stanza 3.
But, I hope you realize that the missing grave is actually the fourth part of the solution, not the fifth.
It so goes like this:
Grave 1 -> Stanza 1 (I AM LOST HELP ME)
Grave 2 -> Stanza 2 (BROTHER SAVE MY LIFE)
Grave 3 -> Stanza 3 (BEFORE MY DOOM I AM)
Secret Grave -> Stanza 4 (LOST WITHOUT YOUR LOVE SAVE)
Grave 4 -> Stanza 4 (MY SOUL SEEK MY ROOM)
And for the five graves we need, Mofftiss decided to be lazy enough to recycle the fourth stanza.
It may be seen as overthinking and perhaps I’m wrong, but if you link the graves and the riddle with what is happening with the show’s seasons, you realize that the secret grave is actually between Season 3 and Season 4, or another version of the fourth grave.
So, if grave and stanza=1 season, we have two Seasons 4 (or 1 Season 4 and 1 Lost Special that happened before S4).
I’ve included who I consider the six ‘main’ villains above. There’s others you could argue for – Hope, Shan, Norbury, etc – but I think these six are relatively uncontroversial picks. Some of them have multi-episode arcs (Moriarty, Mary, Magnussen, Eurus) while Irene is mentioned several times after her appearance and Smith, while only a single-episode villain like Hope or Shan, seems to loom somewhat larger. Anyway, y’all are welcome to consider other villains. I’m going to look for patterns in these six.
Here’s what I’ve got:
Male villains on BBC Sherlock are the heads of organizations. Female villains on BBC Sherlock are lone wolves.
Magnussen and Smith have business empires. They own physical buildings and have visible entourages. Moriarty’s got a criminal empire. His resources are a bit less visible but we know he’s got half a dozen snipers at the swimming pool, and we meet several members of his network. Moriarty, Magnussen and Smith display their power not just by threatening but by dominating other dangerous and powerful people. They have many people “under their thumb”.
What about our female villains? Irene has a network of clients which she uses to protect herself. Mary used to have a small team of agents she considered her peers, and that team would take on clients together. Eurus has (ugh) an indeterminate number of people brainwashed into obeying her every whim. It’s worth noting here that even though Irene is a dominatrix, she exercises her power not by dominating but by manipulating (”I know what he likes”). Eurus does the same: she convinces people to do her will. Mary, too, exercises power by manipulating, although it’s not clear how much she did so as an active assassin (as opposed to manipulating Sherlock and John in order to maintain her cover).
We can tell that our female villains are qualitatively less powerful than our male villains by the fact the latter can frequently be found threatening the former. Moriarty threatens to turn Irene into shoes, and gives her instructions on how to manipulate Sherlock. Magnussen threatens Mary convincingly enough that she resorts to using force to answer him. And although Eurus is actually (magically!) more powerful than anyone else, in TLD we see her pretending to be a character under grave threat from Smith.
By making their female villains qualitatively less powerful, the writers open the door for another gendered pattern.
Male villains on BBC Sherlock cannot be forgiven for their crimes. Female villains on BBC Sherlock are always forgiven.
Sherlock shoots Magnussen because he can see no other way to end the threat he poses. Culverton Smith is arrested and presumably imprisoned. Moriarty is put on trial, escapes, and kills himself later on the rooftop at Bart’s. All three end up imprisoned or dead.
Now, Mary ends up dead just like Moriarty. But unlike Moriarty, Sherlock’s doing everything he can to protect her, and there’s no discussion of her going on trial for her crimes. And like Culverton Smith, Eurus ends up imprisoned. But Eurus started the show imprisoned, and so it doesn’t actually pose a meaningful barrier to her freedom, or the threat she poses if she decides that a hug from Sherlock hasn’t actually Quieted Her Forever.
On a surface level, Mary and Eurus have the same ends as Moriarty and Smith. But on a character level, it’s entirely different: Mary and Eurus are fundamentally forgiven for the people they’ve killed and the wrongs they’ve done, where Moriarty and Smith aren’t.
Irene, obviously, is forgiven too. Sherlock saves her from execution, but he executes Magnussen himself. Quite a difference.
Male villains on BBC Sherlock do not have personal relationships with Sherlock and John. Female villains on BBC Sherlock do have personal relationships with Sherlock and John.
This one is less universally true. If we say that Irene has a relationship with Sherlock because she’s allegedly in love with him, then we must say the same for Moriarty as well – even moreso, since Moriarty seems even more obsessed.
But the other four villains bear out the pattern well. Mary is John’s wife, Eurus is Sherlock’s sister. Neither Magnussen nor Smith have any relationship to Sherlock or John at all – in fact, Sherlock has to fake a relationship to Magnussen’s secretary to get close to him.
The personalization of female villains on BBC Sherlock can also be seen in how they’re referred to: Moriarty, Magnussen, Smith; Irene, Mary, Eurus.
This ties into the previous two observations. It’s easier to tell a story about forgiveness when the villain in question has a personal relationship with the protagonist. And that personal relationship can be a real source of threat, in the absence of the drama that being ‘the most dangerous, the most despicable human being’ can provide.
*
When I look at these patterns, I see an inability to conceive of women as being powerful or threatening in the ways traditionally reserved for men. I was so excited when for a hot second I thought we were getting a Lady Smallwood villain reveal, because Lady Smallwood has that type of traditionally male power. But instead she remains a nonthreatening bit player, and the villain is Norbury – another lone wolf ushered quickly off the stage.
I actually don’t fault the writers that much for falling into these patterns. A lot of writers do. What bothers me is when they try to pass themselves off as feminist visionaries for having made the ‘Holmes brother’ into a sister or turning Mary Morstan into an assassin. No, sorry, your work is a bog-standard reflection of the sexist culture from which you come – as exemplified by your villains.
“Listen to the tape. Do it now, listen. Just listen!”
Because John tells us to pay attention to the tape–and we really should. So I put it all together,
isolated the audio, tried to tune my ear to hear what they say, and transcribed it for you guys. Maybe you can decipher the bits I couldn’t understand? But I think this is enough to get the idea.
If you follow me you probably already know I read this episode as being a product of John’s unconscious mind. With that in mind, paying attention to this conversation is truly revealing, since it’s John himself who comes up with this dialogue. The Governor is John’s mirror. Eurus deduces that he doesn’t trust his wife, that she’s selling him a fake image of her while hiding something, that he’s struggling with his feelings towards her, that he is sad, and that he has a secret.That secret possibly being his bisexuality(and his love for Sherlock). John also really seems to be rethinking his morals/ethics –which is actually a running theme in this episode. He keeps questioning himself what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, in the scenarios he imagines, and relates them to his wife. Since he’s also figuring out Mary’s true nature in his hallucination (just like Sherlock was able to figure out a lot of things at the same time in TAB) I just think John might be reconsidering if it’s bad to feel the way he does about Mary, when he’s supposed to be mourning her. Notice the Governor saying “I like my wife”, as if that’s what he knows he HAS to say–but it’s not what he truly feels and Eurus knows he’s lying when he says that. Just like John, he never truly trusted his wife.
Also, I just clutch my chest seeing how the incredibly repressed Capt. John Watson tells himself he doesn’t need to cry–while actually knowing it’s okay to do it. Clear callback to that scene in TLD. Being embraced by Sherlock was just so important for him, because Sherlock let him know without a word that it’s okay to cry. God, my feels.
There’s something really troubling to me about the way Moffat wrote Mary and Eurus, and I can’t quite articulate what it is. Why does it bother me so much that Mary shot someone in the chest and this gets excused as “surgery” and Eurus can literally murder children and she gets a hug and dueling violins with big brother???
I need to understand what is going on in Moffat’s head so I can pin point the exact brand of misogyny that created this trope that appears repeatedly in his work.
I’ve actually been thinking about this because of S4 gif sets that somehow ended up on my dash this afternoon…
I honestly think that Moffat thinks that abusive = strong. Also, that a woman who is dom in unhealthy ways is sexy. Moffat’s ultimate wank fantasy was his Irene Adler who was literally a dominatrix who drugged the protag against his will, broke into his flat twice, once to return his coat and kiss him while he was drugged, and a second time to sleep in his bed and wear his clothes without his permission, but the audience were meant to read that those actions as evidence of cleverness, strength, and love for Sherlock (and yes, I’ve heard all the arguments against that reading, but given Moffat’s track record writing women, I do really think that was writer intent).
This extends to Mary, who constantly belittles both John and Sherlock, low key turns them against one another while trying to build up her own individual alliances, shoots Sherlock when he offers to help her, threatens him while he’s still barely conscious in the hospital, threatens to kill him again in the empty house, compares her husband to a dog, calls Sherlock a pig, drugs Sherlock when he offers to help her, denies her husband any say in naming their child and then gives their baby the name she was known by when she was up to no good, essentially painting a target on her baby’s back, runs out on her husband and baby rather than stay and accept help from two men who are pretty qualified to offer it. She does all this and it’s meant to be ‘cute’, the strong, sassy assassin, who is Sherlock’s pal, and John’s angel wife who makes him and Sherlock want to be better men (even though John openly admitted that he barely liked her when they finally caught up with her in TST, so inconsistent much?!).
You see this in milder ways with Sarah Sawyer in TGG and Mrs. Hudson in TFP. The women offering to do something nice and then withholding which is meant to be ‘cute’, or somehow demonstrates they are a strong woman with boundaries. So you have Sarah asking John if he’d like breakfast, and when he says yes, telling him he’ll have to get it himself, or Mrs. Hudson in TFP offering a clearly shaken Mycroft tea, and when he says he would like some, she says ‘teapot’s over there’. That’s cute to Moffat. To me it just reads as rude. Mrs. Hudson’s ‘Not your Housekeeper’ in ASiP was more what I would consider healthy boundary setting. And both actresses sort of managed to salvage it from coming off as really awful with their delivery, but yeah–not really ‘cute’.
Eurus was a bit of a different thing. A wild, feral, damaged creature who needed to be tamed by the love, forgiveness and acceptance of the male protag. She was the mad girl in the attic. She murdered Sherlock’s childhood best friend, tortured Sherlock as a child, drove a wedge in the family dynamic, burnt the family home down, put Sherlock through years of torment as an adult, as it seems she was behind some of Moriarty’s machinations (and was apparently a murderous rapist to boot). But in her case it was because she was just born bad. She deserves pity because she was born too intelligent for her own good, so smart she was wholly without empathy, and totally mad (don’t even get me started on the ableism here, that’s a post for another day). And she existed only to be the catalyst to Sherlock’s emotional growth. He must forgive her, and love her back to life.
I mean all of these are pretty common misogynistic traits. Moffat’s writing is essentially a misogyny grab-bag. Pick your misogynistic trope. If it exists, you’ll probably find it somewhere in his writing history.
I think what bothers me, specifically, is that this aspect of Mary and eurus in particular makes them feel like props rather than people.
I’d be hard pressed to find a male character who could kill as many people as eurus did and come out the other side as simply misunderstood – but with the ladies of Sherlock moffat is just interested in getting from point A to point D. Need to have Sherlock dying in an ambulance in his mind palace for dramatic effect? Have Mary shoot him! But she’s still good ol’ Mary in the end, of course, because women don’t have internal lives and therefore don’t get character arcs.
The idea of this being a wank fantasy of moffat’s seems pretty on the money tho.
The writers modelled the inner lives of their female characters after male behaviour patterns. It seems they thought: “Well, a real man would say ‘I take my wife home’, therefore a feminist woman will say ‘I take my husband home’ (like Marydid in TAB).” But exchanging the gender of the character uttering those lines doesn’t turn male oppressive patriarchal machismo into feminist self-assertion. That is a mistake many male writers make: They think, in short that, a strong woman will act like an alpha male. Except we don’t.
For example, a truly self-confident feminist character in the TAB graveyard scene could have said. “I don’t want to watch Sherlock do these things I find strange and disturbing. I decide to go home. No one has to take me. But he’s your friend, John, and obviously needs you, so I propose you stay and help him. You don’t need me for this, and I don’t need you to take me home.” How about something like that – if Mary was to be presented as a strong, funny, confident, feminist hero (with flaws to make her more interesting)?
But I have come to the conclusion that many male writers just can’t fathom how biased they are by their own gender. They think they can write strong women, because they somewhat see them as strong men with tits and a bit more emotions. Sorry, that’s not how it works.
Same goes for all the violence applied to solve problems – all those shootings, explosions and killings. A very male kind of conflict resolution. Just because a woman shoots a man that doesn’t make her strong or feminist – it just makes her a killer.
Perhaps a female co-writer could have helped… but that’s unheard of at Sherlock.
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