alexxphoenix42:

One of
the things among many that wounded me about series 4 was the death of a
partnership that occurs between Sherlock and John here. People may or may not
ship a romantic entanglement between the two men, but I think most followers of
the Holmes and Watson universe enjoy that camaraderie between Sherlock and his
Boswell, his right hand man. They’ve got each other’s backs, they work as a
team. Until  … suddenly they just don’t.

In TST,
we get some lovely banter between Mary, John and Sherlock in which Mary and
Sherlock gang up on John, call him next to useless and compare him to a dog.
This is not to say that a dog is a bad thing to be equated with, Sherlock likes
dogs, and John apparently as well, but he has no troubles dragging John with Mary for a
larf.

At the
end of TST, John blames Sherlock for Mary’s death in a frankly unbelievable
soap opera-ish kind of way that really doesn’t make any sense. If it were a
heat-of-the-moment thing, there might be a reconciliation later, but no, John
simply give Molly a mysterious letter we may never see to tell Sherlock to  … piss off? We presume.

In TLD, it
takes Hudders kidnapping Sherlock in the boot of her car to get John to even
talk with him. Sherlock manages to pull John along in his orbit on a case, but
later, when Sherlock is falling apart on drugs and self-abuse, John literally attacks
him until he is pulled away by others.  Misplaced
blame and plot complications may be needed to further a story along, but in
what universe does Dr. John H. Watson beat Sherlock Holmes into a bloody pulp
on the floor when he needs him most?

We got a
sweet one-sided hug at the end of TLD, and with the start of TFP, the two men
seem to be working together again as a team, but as soon as they get to Shutter
Island, this all falls by the wayside again.  John gives Sherlock their fail safe code,
their this-means-business phrase, Vatican Cameos, and Sherlock IGNORES him, takes
his earpiece off so John won’t bother him again. Wow, way to bro, bro.

For the
rest of the episode as two of the smartest people in the UK dance through ridiculous
experiments set by their even smarter edgelord mad sister, John becomes almost
background noise. Sherlock and Mycroft dance around each while trying to
placate Eurus, until Sherlock can find his sister to comfort her and make
everything all better with a hug. When Sherlock holds a gun under his jaw and
counts down to his death, John does NOTHING. He barely reacts. When Sherlock
hears that John is in a quickly-filling well, chained to the floor, he says,
cool, dude, try not to drown, be with you in a mo’. True he needs to solve some
weird puzzle involving tombstones and numbers (hell I don’t even know) for
Eurus to magically stop the flow of water into the well, but John has ceased to
be character in the show and has become a damsel in distress to be saved and little
more. Moftiss seems to be saying that Sherlock really can only have one friend
at a time, and for TFP, Eurus needs to take that seat

A moment
that might have had some emotional impact, John being saved from the well, is
reduced to a few seconds of air time as a rope end is thrown down to him. We see
no valiant effort to cut the chains that bind him, the people who hauled him up
out of the hole, or the emotional moment when Sherlock finally lay hands on him
to make sure he was alright. Nope we just flash forward to John wrapped in a
blanket beside Sherlock, and for all we know, he had to leave his feet at the
bottom of the well to escape.

Even if
you put the idea of an actualized homosexual relationship aside, and there are
plenty of people who enjoy other ships alongside the freighter that is
Johnlock, the connection between Sherlock and John remains a necessary component
of the Holmes and Watson franchise. Even the end of TFP, as they try to give us
a “what happened next” montage of images, they do so under the weight of Mary’s
voice running over it as a framing device. Never are John and Sherlock allowed
to just be together, to talk, to work out SOMETHING between them that seems to
have gone seriously awry.

I’m sad
about the poor writing choices of S4 and the plot holes that Jim Moriarty could
fly his helicopter through,  sad about the
loss of meaning in anything in Sherlock beyond enjoying car chases and creepy
clowns, and sad about the twisting of a partnership that has endured for over a
hundred years into something that feels shallow and flat. Also, I can’t help
feeling sad that John had to leave his feet in the bottom of that well.

+++

MY META ON S4

part one – The Laws of Good Writing (the death of BBC Sherlock)

part two – And another thing (the death of meaning)