Faith tries to write down what happened before she forgets, but her note is confiscated by the perpetrator.
It also happens during Sherlock’s sequence of deducing Culverton’s “anyone” was the one word of the person he wanted to kill. The transition at the top also has a weirdly ominous tone with Sherlock passing by, and while the episode and series has other transition shots like it, it reminded me specifically of the end of the episode with the shark:
As I explained here, while Magnussen is also compared to a shark in His Last Vow in relation to the Samarra metaphor, the grim figure of death is actually Mary. In an episode filled with shark imagery that very much jumps the shark, beginning the bad reviews of the season, and doesn’t make sense because it’s not real.
Mary is the shark, Mary is death, Mary is Samarra, Mary’s supposed post-humous Retro-Netflix DVD Subscription message is the final shot we see in The Final Problem before the last shot of John and Sherlock being frozen in time. Mary is still alive, somehow altering what we’ve seen with the TD-12 drug.
Immediately afterwards as Vivian Norbury is dragged out like a Scooby-Doo villain with a projector behind her (“that’s not how it happened at all”) we see Mary’s ashes supposedly enveloped by flames.
This satanic imagery links her to Moriarty once again (the I.O.U. apple as Satan offering Eden the apple in The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty in the valley of death in The Hounds of Baskerville), as did the script of His Last Vow, referring to her as “satanic.”
The flames are blue, linking Mary again to the blue visions of water Sherlock keeps having, Mary is the shark again, Sherlock keeps thinking it must be Moriarty. The connection to Eurus and Victor in The Final Problem doesn’t make sense because it’s not real, Sherlock has no reason to connect that to this moment, aside from the incredibly loose “Eurus killed Trevor, Eurus recorded reaction gifs from Moriarty five years ago, I have no way of knowing that tho as I stare at the missing figure of Thatcher which has the AGRA USB inside” which is already discarding the Mary connection.
Mary and Moriarty are the same person. “It’s the gap, it’s wrong.” Blue is fake.
John is seen walking through a graveyard as the shot is out of focus, and he looks like he’s dissociating (that 2017 #mood):
Someone is calling him but he doesn’t answer. He returns to the same dissociative march.
Zooming in and stretching out, the number is private.
This is reminiscent of Molly in The Final Problem, letting us know again that Molly is a mirror for John. Molly/John needs Sherlock to say it first before they can say it back, except with her the phone did say “Sherlock”, and in this instance John literally CAN’T answer because he is being prevented from answering the phone and communicating with Sherlock. Phones are heart metaphors, John can’t answer his heart, they can’t love each other because the the truth is being obscured.
Molly gives Sherlock the letter from John. In the context of how much this miscommunication/last minute confession has been set-up over the course of the show in terms of John and Sherlock confessing their love for each other, which was planned to be and will be the climax, this is the planted seed to uncovering what’s going on as we’ve all been saying, it was left unresolved on purpose.
Also remember that Mary literally did already drug Sherlock in this version of events by bringing and… drugging a fake note, bringing chloroform to a meeting containing information about her past that she had no way of knowing about, designed as part of the alibi to make Mary on the run look as good and redemptive as possible. lmao I don’t think it was a baby thing she was hiding in her fanny pack
Mary isn’t dead, she faked her death, drugged John, and is back for revenge. The ultimate revenge of keeping them apart. Mary and Moriarty are Emelia Ricoletti:
Some of us assumed that John in the well would be the Garridebs moment, but it was faked. There was so much discussion about the hands in the opening, The Lying Detective’s first shot and it’s last not matching I didn’t realize.
Of course, as The Abominable Bride told us, John will be the one to save the day after John and Sherlock admit they love each other. If Mary and Moriarty are the same person but Moriarty is really dead (which seems up in the air, but Mary is definitely alive), John shooting Mary could be the equivalent.
The real Garridebs moment is still out there, frozen in time with the teacup as well as John and Sherlock in the last shot of The Final Problem. Sumatra is still out there, the bomb waiting to explode. It can still be prevented.
Leak the special, you monsters. John’s been bleeding out for almost two months.
Aaaaaa those transitions! 😱 omg I love this thank you so much for the tag! 💖
Sherlock never needed a roommate. Either Mrs. Hudson lets him live at 221B for free or Mycroft pays for it. He had already moved in when he asked John, despite “together we can afford it.”
Here’s what happened:
Mike Stamford made friendly conversation with Sherlock in the lab, asking how he was getting on, etc. Sherlock mentioned he had moved to central London.
“Oh really?” Mike said, “How’s the new place?”
“It’s fine, nice enough rooms.”
“Rooms? You get a flatmate?”
“Ha. No. I would be a difficult man to find a flatmate for.”
Then Mike went to the park, saw John, brought John to the lab, Sherlock looked at him for 0.75 seconds and did the slidey, big pupils, toffee eyes thing, realized that Mike had misunderstood, and rolled with it.
if john has erectile dysfunction then it’s unlikely he’d be able to conceive……..
lmao pull the fucking trigger
and again!!!
These are so perplexing! It’s one thing to see ads for sketchy companies that we’re not sure even exist, but Burberry is a real thing, and if BC were doing ads for them, it would be publicized. And he would have his own hair, not Sherlock’s… what even are these ads??
Sherlock: ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
John: Sherlock no
Sherlock: ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
John: *sighs*
John: ᕕ( ಠ_ಠ)ᕗ
you’d THINK Mary would throw herself in front of John when someone was about to shoot him if she was really all that willing to take a bullet for someone, right?
And Sherlock is the one who flips up the table to give John cover!
Yes. It’s the first thing he does when the shooting starts.
GOD
Omfg. He flipped the table? How the fuck sid I not notice that (after watching it 3 times)
OH MY GOD
SHERLOCK DIDN’T EVEN TRY TO HIDE AT FIRST
HE JUST FLIPPED THE TABLE ASAP
OH MY GOD
(I WISH I COULD SCREENSHOT IT BUY MY VOLUME BUTTONS ARE NOT WORKING ANYMORE)
wow what a romantic detail! like, ‘here, baby, this is for you: hide here’,
While Mary does a 180 and literally runs away I’m screAMING
Okay, but she does push him down in the moment, doesn’t she? And what else she can do in that position? Sherlock, at the same time, is hidden behind the wall, Ajay doesn’t see him yet (but he sees Mary and is going to kill Mary, so…)
Break it down with slow-motion gifs and you can see it’s cut so you can’t actually tell if Mary is pushing John to safety or pulling him in front of her as a human shield while she dodges away.
there’s no way of telling exactly what she’s doing here
looks to me like she’s trying to use him as shield since if she were trying to save him she’d just shove him, easier than reaching around and pulling his shoulders imo, but ofc i can be wrong
How does she even see the pointer on John and why does she look to the right of John before taking action?
Sherlock saw the pointer from his position offscreen, and yelled “Get down!” which triggered Mary’s move.
This is John being interrogated by Greg in a tiled room. It reminds me vaguely of a well or a swimming-pool. Is there a guard behind him (who looks a bit like Mycroft)? The whole scene is completely surreal. We have no idea where this is meant to take place. Surely not NSY.
If Greg was just interviewing John for information, there would not be a guard at the door. If John was accused of assault, the lighthearted convo does not make sense. If this was Mycroft in the back, he could not have been at 221b at the same time, conducting a search of the flat.
Which leads me to the conclusion that this is not real. Not the interview, not the preceding scene in the morgue.
@gosherlocked I think this scene was meant to be a hint about Magnussen being still around somehow. But like you said, it feels surreal… and what’s with the voice recorder? Seemed like there should be better technology in the interrogation room these days, like… a camera? Culverton Smith gave me an 80s vibe for some reason… other than his cereal killer commercial, everything else felt… dated?
Since John was the mastermind of Operation Prank Mycroft, he’d have been involved at an executive level in all parts of it.
That means, when deciding where and how in Mycroft’s film noir to splice their interruptions, John and Sherlock sat around watching Holmes family home videos together.
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