The violin scene at the end of The Final Problem is truly one of the most impactful moments (if not the most) in all of BBC Sherlock. I honestly am still speechless that Moftiss wrote something so profound. Eurus was beyond communication with the outside world after the events of this episode, back to the untouchable genius in her glass cage. But Sherlock. Sherlock, this incredible and kind man, who had lost so much to this woman, understood her and still reached out to help. He wasn’t encouraging her to play her own song, he was initiating a duet–so she wasn’t alone, even in her music. It was a conversation, it was understanding, it was connection. This man went beyond words, where others had failed and stopped trying, and showed her that she wasn’t alone. Sherlock has become- or perhaps he always was- one of the best men I’ve ever seen.
I completely agree. The beauty of it made me cry, it shows what a great heart Sherlock has.
One of the reasons I’m sad a lot of TJLC keep on considering S4 only dream, is that by doing it they fail to appreciate how pivotal TFP is for Sherlock, how much it tell us about the man he has become.
That’s one of the many reasons I loved S4 more than S3 – I feel like it gave us more unexpectedly profound moments like that. I mean, TFP was OTT and weird – but it has such a bizarre jagged beauty to it for all that, and the violin duet scenes are some of the most gorgeous in the whole series. I like the way they kept showing him arriving – like, he didn’t just go once or twice. He persists. He’s committed. And he’s starting to heal the gigantic rifts in his whole fucked-up family because of it, in a way only he could do.
“Love conquers all”: absolutely, that was total truth in advertising. There’s a LOT of love in S4. It’s primarily family love – family of blood and family of choice. And that’s what the resolution is all about, Sherlock with all his family members – not just his biological relations but also John and Rosie and Molly and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson, this weird loving cluster of people who’ve coalesced around a frustrating but remarkable man, and the way he’s learned to love them back.
I love reading everyone’s thoughts on this! I like hearing other perspectives on things, and I have adjusted my own thinking accordingly. I’ve found new things to appreciate, but of course new things to be perturbed over as well, lol.
Of course I had disappointments with this episode and other parts of the series. But I tell you what. The Final Problem made me cry, and that doesn’t happen often for me. That tells me something, about myself if nothing else.
you were named after two of the most disappointing, misogynistic and nonsensical plot lines in sherlock s4, sister edgelord i love you scene potter
While Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes exist within a vaguely plausible spectrum of human intelligence, their sister is essentially an X-Men villain. Her intellectual powers are tantamount to magic, including the ability to hypnotize the entire staff of a high-security prison.
In a fascinating example of ‘Sherlock’ being more Victorian than its Victorian origins, Eurus also ticks every box for the kind of madwoman who gets locked up in an asylum in a 19th century melodrama: pale skin, unkempt hair, unpleasant sexual appetites (she’s implied to have raped and mutilated a prison guard), unspecified mental illness, and hints of supernatural powers. And, of course, all her crimes were motivated by a desire for male attention.
The X-Men villain comparison here is telling of what has always been one of Steven Moffat’s creative failures: his inability to imagine how such a thing as a female genius might actually exist. Here, he can only conceive of her by rendering her essentially supernatural, at the same time as he suggests she is unnatural due to her failure to correctly perform the social and emotional labor expected of women. (This is also often the root cause of the 19th century imprisonments noted above, which can frequently be read as a policing of women’s emotional performance.) Irene Adler, the other female genius of Sherlock, was a similarly “unnatural” woman whose deviance manifested itself as a failure to be correctly perform “womanliness”— most notably through a lack of appropriate interest in men that was then “corrected” so that she could be ultimately redeemed. (Irene was also, of course, as unrealistic as Eurus in her way: female giftedness imagined as sexual fantasy.) The implicit message in both cases is that high intelligence is itself unnatural for women. Here, it not only leads to hints of sexual perversion, but also to the destruction of the heteronormative family’s “natural” bonds— and to suffering and mental ill-health for the female genius herself, a literally prodigious creature who appears straight from the very Victorian obsession with medical monsters (particularly given her hospitalization since childhood).
In another sense, the evocation of Marvel is slightly unfair to Marvel, which has a better track record than Moffat on this issue. (And when Marvel has a better track record than you do, it’s time for self-examination.) At the very least, there are some female geniuses in Marvel who aren’t portrayed as sexually and emotionally unstable, or as rendered dangerously unnatural by their intelligence! Not that many, it’s true, but there are a few…
The best articulation I’ve come across of my issues with Moffat and writing female characters. And Eurus really did seem to be peak Moffat in regards to his issues with writing women.
You may know how much I love looking for parallels and mirrors in “Sherlock”. I am not sure if this has been discussed before but in TAB and S4 we get two women
Wow, I really like this connection! It makes me wonder: if Eurus is a repeat of Emelia, was there an “original” woman on which they were both based?
Dark hair, white dress… there seem to be two candidates for this one:
Hmm… (Does “fake relationship” sound familiar? *cough* bus lady *cough*)
While I love Janine, I can’t remember her ever using a gun, so I’m just going to skip over her for the moment because the other option just fits so darn well:
White dress, dark hair… but a gun? Irene doesn’t– oh, wait:
*I mean, Emelia was involved with a man who had connections to America, too…*
So here’s what we’ve got:
faked death/was assumed dead
names start with and contain lots of vowels (and “i” and “e” are very similar sounds)
presence is announced by a specific noise – not a song in Irene’s case, but a ringtone. It has a similar effect; it’s simple, personalized, and kind of out of place for its surroundings
I’m sure there have been plenty of metas comparing Irene and Emelia, since their appearances really are strikingly similar, so I’ll focus on Irene and Eurus.
First of all, both mention “Christmas presents;” Irene sends Sherlock her gift-wrapped phone for Christmas when she fakes her death, while Eurus talks about getting her violin and Moriarty as gifts.
1. Irene had the Moriarty connection too… and even though it’s kind of assumed that Moriarty is the ultimate boss, maybe Eurus’s mind-control/collaboration with Moriarty was meant to show that Irene actually had more power than she got credit for. I mean, she was the one to go to Moriarty in the first place, and even though she texted him the info about Bond Air, that was mutually beneficial. She didn’t just do his bidding because he’s the villain; it was a business transaction. She had power. The only reason why she didn’t win was because she wanted to have fun with Sherlock, and he figured that out in the end. With Irene, he guessed the passcode because of her interest in him; with Eurus, he solved her riddle and realized that she was calling for help. (Come to think of it – did Irene interact with anyone other than Sherlock, Mycroft and John? Or is this another similarity to Eurus?)
2. The violin connection is interesting, because Sherlock played the violin a lot in ASIB. In fact, one of his two compositions that we hear is “Irene’s theme” (which is probably about his feelings for John), and of course there’s the famous moment from the opening credits montage where he plucks a violin string so sensuously in front of the fire while spacing out thinking about John, before Irene tries to get him to talk about dinner. And then of course he plays “Irene’s theme” for Eurus, when she tells him to play “you.” (My mind just made a “you”/Emelia connection. Gah.)
We also see Sherlock play the violin at the very beginning of TAB, before Lestrade comes in with the Emelia case. Wait, hang on… what day is it….
IT’S CHRISTMAS. Emelia carries out her plan around Christmas time. (I don’t know if it’s the exact date…?) There was literally no other reason for this, since we get zero Christmas festivities, and the holiday isn’t so much as mentioned except for the awkward moment when they all get their “Merry Christmas”es out of the way and get on to interrogating Lestrade about the case.
So… what is the point of this? Why all the similarities?
Well, this is how I see it:
Irene was enormously important to Sherlock. In fact, she was pretty much the only woman of note: she rivaled him in intellect, challenged his assumptions, offered enough of a mystery to feed his curiosity. (Sorry, but Molly and Mrs. Hudson are both side characters, even acknowledged as such: “I don’t count”/“I’m your landlady, not a plot device,” and Janine and Mary are more relevant to Sherlock’s relationship with John than to him personally.) Irene was The Woman, the model upon which Emelia and Eurus are based. (This is even echoed in Emelia’s description as the Bride, and I suppose in Eurus’s “the east wind,” although that wasn’t used so much.)
So why the Emelia/Eurus dichotomy? Well, you can see Irene in two different ways:
as Emelia, Irene is involved in a noble cause. She seems a lot
more respected than Eurus; I certainly tear up every time I watch the
scene in the crypt where Sherlock explains that “every great cause has
martyrs; every war has suicide missions” and describes the army of women
“ready to rise up in the best of causes, to put right an injustice as
old as humanity itself.” It’s clear that Sherlock respects Emelia and
her cause. I like the common theory that Sherlock views himself as a
similar martyr; he faked his death for John, and then was forced to
watch him wed another. The bride’s connection to Mary is clear, but she
seems to be meant more as a mirror for Sherlock. Her connection to Irene
is likely due to the fact that Irene was instrumental in helping
Sherlock to puzzle out his heart; she came between him and John,
revealing their feelings for each other. And remember, Irene is also a
mirror for Sherlock. She faked her death as part of the long game (and
hopefully is now happily reunited with Kate); she was strategic, a
“formidable opponent.”
as Eurus, Irene is clever, manipulative, involved with Moriarty. She understands people and likes to play games with them; we even get a horrific allusion to sexual desires (and much as I hate to think about it, maybe Irene’s lesbianism is what inspired Eurus’s comment about not noticing the gender of the nurse she ravaged). She can also be seen as childish. She doesn’t seem to care that people will get hurt (both use tranquilizers/drugs, and refer to people more as playthings with uses, rather than as fellow human beings). At the end of the day, her game is unfulfilling, and she is saved by Sherlock’s mercy.
Irene’s taunts about Sherlock seem to have influenced Eurus’s mocking tone. She asks about sex in a very direct manner, which undoubtedly stuck with him. There’s also some taunts along the lines of “don’t be so boring.” It seems that this version of Irene is much less mature than Irene herself; I would say that either this demonstrates Sherlock’s feelings about sentiment as a silly game, or it serves as an immature mirror for how Sherlock sees himself. (Remember, Irene was a mirror for Sherlock, too.)
the airplane connection is something to think about…
….aaaand this is getting really long so I think I’ll bring it to a close, but I would love to keep talking about this later so please add your thoughts onto this!
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TL; DR: Sherlock is haunted by the memory of Irene, and so she keeps reappearing in his Mind Palace. Emelia represents the noble, intelligent qualities that Sherlock respects about her, and that he likely sees in himself; Eurus represents the more monstrous, childish characteristics that he doesn’t like to confront.
I cannot honestly believe the people who before they found out who Faith-Eurus really was they thought she and Sherlock would make a good romantic couple. Like just let a man and a woman be friends FFS neither of them were even in good mental places for that bullshit, she was suicidal and he was high and depressed and GAY af after being rejected by JOHN, literally all they did was hang out in London walking around and eating, literally he and John do that all the time but sometimes handcuffed together and sometimes while killing people for each other and sometimes with a candle on the table in a romantic restaurant and when Sherlock sees her with a cane all he can think about is John anyways and the night THEY met and ran around London like WTAF
Remember that some setlockers were jumping to that conclusion as they watched the bus stop scene being filmed? Just seeing a man and woman together must mean sexual/romantic interest. And the excuse that the writers are fucking us over didn’t stand, as the one thing I can say for sure, is that nowhere...NOT ONE TIME in BBC Sherlock have the writers ever written Sherlock as straight. Never. All the Irene and Molly scenes are a gay guy dealing with women who have the hots for him and he is intrigued by Irene and fond of Molly. The lady in red was clearly not real, even at setlock we knew it, and was more on a familial basis with Sherlock. And that was a conclusion way before we knew about a sister.
This just proves what we’ve been saying all along. If one of them was a woman, their romantic love wouldn’t even be in question. Eurus is playing fem!John in this scene and suddenly people are willing to see a romance. Shocker.
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