may-shepard:

pinkellie-phant:

sherlocking-out-loud:

thanangst:

phoenix-rises-1623:

may-shepard:

Ever since my tfp rewatch, I’ve been developing a sneaking suspicion that it might turn out to be one of my favourite pieces of media ever. I am not kidding about that.

This is a direct result of my decision, sometime yesterday, to try applying the mind bungalow keycode to the episode, a la @the-7-percent-solution: Eurus is John’s repressed desire; the episode is John’s tab, etc., etc. It works so beautifully, shot for shot, the whole thing becomes a complex machine ticking its way toward one conclusion: John is desperate for Sherlock to save him, in every possible sense of that verb. 

But it isn’t only the fact that tfp works so wonderfully in this reading that makes me love it so much: it’s that you have to dig through the rubble of the text itself to find this beauty. I’ve been struck, since yesterday, with the way that mofftiss

somehow

managed to make a thing that is so ugly on the surface, so repellent, so grotesque, nonsensical, ridiculous, that the primary response to it will be to look away, hate it, and never reconsider it. 

In the history of storytelling, this is a very weird achievement. The storytelling me wants to sit down and pull it apart, and try to figure out how it was done. (I suspect the real answer to that question involved a lot of giggling and possibly a few dares, alongside, one hopes, some serious talk about the symbolic network the episode meticulously creates on a subtextual level. But, who knows?)

My point is, I hated tfp so much on first viewing that I returned my theatre tickets. (Still don’t regret that–I’m not making any predictions with this reading, and if the whole thing goes to pieces in the coming weeks, and they leave us with the cliffhanger of textual mess / subtextually dying John, well, that’s not something I want to support with actual dollars, however I might admire it as a singular piece of storytelling.) I could never have imagined that I would pull such a hardcore 180 when, yesterday, I sat down, and went through the episode carefully, beat by beat. (I would never have given it another look if it weren’t for this fandom. So grateful for you all.)

My suggestion is, if you can at all stomach it, give the episode another look, and see how the mind bungalow keycode reading works for you. 

I’ll close this already too-long post with some thoughts on what re-reading and reinterpretation can do, and why I’m motivated to promote this particular reading (besides that it’s just, you know, neat). I’m not fully tin hatting, although I want tin hattery to be true, and I’m super excited by the possibilities. I started the rewatch from the point of view that tfp did not sit well with me, and the idea that my experience of it certainly couldn’t get worse with a second viewing. I wanted to see if there was indeed anything to the idea that the episode might make some kind of sense. In other words, I wanted to see if I could make myself happier about it.

This from another iteration of the tfp rewatch post, in response to someone who said that they wished the mind bungalow reading were “true:” 

Here is my entire point. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.

An interpretation of a literary text has value insofar as it creates meaning and is consistent with that text. This one does, and is, to a shocking degree. I’m quite pleased with it.

Other readings (like the one I had yesterday, that the show is confusing trash), can also create meaning, and be consistent with the text. Fortunately we get to decide which one we like better. We can let ourselves be persuaded by the stronger reading, or, heck, the one that makes us happy.

The really important thing here is to take it for what it’s worth, and use it if you want, to help you reframe the episode for yourself. That’s what I did today, and it helped a lot. That’s how you become an empowered member of the audience.

I love this. I’ve been pondering the rewatch… I haven’t yet. But this makes me want to.

And… look it always was this intricate thing, and I enjoy that kind of thing. Regular tv bores me now. I got nothing to lose, and a lot to gain.

S4 is a tutorial on how NOT to continue SHERLOCK. Maybe that’s the point.

TFP is the only Sherlock’s episode I haven’t re-watched. Even the slightly strange and swiss-cheesed Six Thatchers had that “privilege”! This new reading, that has been gaining weight this week, may be the only reason that I’ll be able to do it. 

(Irony: whether this episode is John Watson’s delirium or not, TFP will be for me, either way, the product of a dying brain. :-P)

I think it’s wonderful how due to this fandom’s incredible capability to decipher and find the beauty in Sherlock episodes that TFP for me has turned from the worst, most horrifying and nonsensical episode ever into the most precious and heart-breakingly clever thing in a matter of days. Even if there is no fourth episode, whenever I re-watch TFP i’ll always watch it with this reading in mind.

Reblobbing for the people who weren’t up in the middle of the night, and to gather this thread together with this comment by @rowanthestrange:

Honestly, with the ‘emotional context’ that this is John, it’s doesn’t just make sense, it is genius. Once you explain it it’s so simple.And it’s not instinctual – I meta’d the idea that this was all in John’s head after TLD, but somehow, on watching TFP I doubted it, even though it made more sense not less. It really showed to me the effect our community can have, and that if we hadn’t powered through it, we wouldn’t have this excellent reading.I don’t know about anyone else, but I needed…