When we think of farewell scenes in BBC Sherlock, two things come to mind: The Roof and The Tarmac. Both times it is Sherlock who is going away, leaving John behind. The fall’s echoes resonate throughout the show.
However, there is another pattern as well – John going away and leaving Sherlock behind, even rejecting him. In every single episode after Sherlock’s return this theme is explored, either in the reality of the show or in Sherlock’s mind (no matter what you think happens in EMP and what does not).
TEH
For me this has always been one of the saddest scenes in the show. In spite of the violence preceding this moment, John talked at least to Sherlock. After the head butt, however, he drives off with Mary, leaving Sherlock behind, injured and alone.
This post essentially sums up the one thing I hate the most about the entire show: John keeps leaving Sherlock. I also agree that the one redeeming feature of TFP is that John didn’t leave him and that they were a united team throughout. (That and Sherlock’s cute, slouchy walk, hehe!) But yes, this is so painful. The cane scene is almost the worst for me: that John’s final leaving was done in such a cowardly way, rejecting everything Sherlock ever was to him, down to healing his limp, and without even doing it face to face. Leaving Sherlock while he was unconscious and dying. Ouch.
The transition after the entire ‘John affair reveal’ is Lady Smallwood saying ‘This is absolutely ridiculous and you know it!’ after being falsely accused of treason, so do with that what you will.
I still don’t understand how on earth John supposedly subconsciously knew Mary was an assassin or had a dangerous life or whatever. I still don’t think he chose her. She chose him because he was her assignment from Moriarty.
i’m watching teh and in yet another case of things you already know but holy shit they slap you in the face anyway, there’s a reporter in the background talking about how sherlock didn’t leave a note when he died, which means john didn’t tell anybody about that call [this phone call–it’s my note] and just carried that weight alone for two years. carried sherlock’s lies and his truth and all those nameless things in the silence between. carried all his own guilt and regret, his anger and his grief, all of it heavy on his back but john completely unwilling to part with the burden of it because its his to bear. because he couldn’t stop him. because he thinks he deserves it. because it’s the only bit of sherlock he has left for just himself.
Sherlock talking about Howard Garrideb in The Final Problem:
SHERLOCK (quick fire): Howard’s a lifelong drunk. Pallor of his skin, terminal gin blossoms on his red nose … (he zooms in on the man’s face and then lowers his gaze to his hands) … and – terror notwithstanding – a bad case of the DTs. [Delirium tremens.] (x)
The picture of Mary holding a pink elephant mixes two idioms: “the elephant in the room” and “seeing pink elephants.”
The elephant in the room= the obvious problem no-one wants to talk about. We’ve seen this referenced already- the literal “elephant in the room” Sherlock brings up at John’s wedding. We already know the metaphorical meaning is: John and Sherlock are in love with each other.
But, what happens when we combine “the elephant in the room” with the saying “to see pink elephants”, a drunken hallucination?
The elephant in the room now is the fact that the ‘elephant’… is a hallucination.
In Sherlock Series 4, the ‘pink’ elephant in the room is… that the events portrayed are not real.
This is not to say that everything is literally a hallucination, just that the events presented are unreliable. And the fact that John is strongly linked with alcohol, once again strengthens the concept of John as an unreliable narrator. He is the one creating these “pink elephants.”
I was reading Sherlock’s post on John’s blog – which also is the very last post on that blog – when I realized something in the comments section that I probably should have noticed ages ago:
Does this ring any bell? ANYONE!?
Talking about elephants in the room, but this has been there since Series 3, hiding in plain sight. Three things stand out to me:
1. Sherlock is hinting heavily about John’s wedding as a crime scene and what happened there. He seems very lonely and desperate for some attention; he has been leaving comments for two days, but no-one cares. John and ‘Mary’ have apparently read his post, but they both merely tell him to shut up.
2. Finally, when John no longer responds at all, Sherlock allows himself to be distracted by Mrs Hudson, and they’re about to play CLUEDO. As in “clue”.
This is very sad and very good, @possiblyimbiassed. I never really got it how ANYONE that is stressed so much in TLD and TST was just meant to point to Culverton Smith’s choice of victims. Because we get the ANYONE at a very crucial point in Sherlock’s life, one of the most crucial of all. He realises he has lost John for good. So he gets obsessed with the word but it is about him and John, not about some cereal killer.
In connection with the blog, however, it gets even more heartbreaking. Imagine Sherlock leaving the wedding with no one noticing or caring – we get the look from Molly but she goes on dancing – and then sitting at home and not even getting answers to his blog comments.
For me more or less the whole of S3/TAB/S4 is about Sherlock trying to live without John, coming to terms with having lost the persons that matters most to him. Sure, there is his past as well – do not get me started on this – but the one constant thing that is repeated again and again is Sherlock losing Johnin every conceivable way. @ebaeschnbliah
We begin with one bust missing. It was a bust once proudly at the front. It was on a
shrine, never meant to be touched or handled, only there to collect dust and perhaps get cleaned once in a while but otherwise? Nothing was ever going to happen to it, it’s static.
And yet, someone decided it was their duty to smash it, to discover the secret hidden and reveal it to the world. The statut quo couldn’t stay.
After that beginning that chocked Sherlock because it’s him who noticed the change by the absence of Thatcher, two busts fall
to their death. Different owners, same modus operandi. Bust Two and Bust Three fell, Bust two’s braking was linked with Mycroft after he mentionned a fic where Sherlock avoided death. So, bust 2, avoiding an appointment with death, a fall… hmmm…
As Lestrade
shows Sherlock Bust Three, Sherlock’s face and Thatcher’s are mixed, showing their fate
are one and the same. Both fell and got broken because of it.
Because of
the third statue, we finally have enough evidence the culprits left behind to track the one responsible.
We are like hounds after the one responsible for that mess. Unfortunately, the
one responsible for this hid his traces too well. He’s decided to hide his tree
in a forest. No choice but to wait.
Fourth try,
we think we’ve got it. Except it’s murder this time, something horrible
happened, something wrong happened and we know there is something wrong with the modus operandi. Plus, there was not one but to
busts and both met a hammer.
So far, each owner had one bust, but ower four? He had two.
The process
of elimination is finally at work. We know
we’ll get the answer with the fifth burglary. It’s just time to wait now and
catch themIN THE ACT. Like Lestrade, we’ll have to catch them IN. THE. ACT. and like him, the fifth time will be the charm.
This isn’t silly at all, @fellshish , this is fucking me up.
Miss Orrie Harker? I what sort of name is that. Has a ring of Ormand Sacker about it.
Wait, you’re right! That awfully looks a lot like the name Doyle first gave to John Watson.
But that means, if the murderer, who I strongly suspected based on evidence within TST to be Mary, killed the victim whose name was a reference to John Wtason… then that means…
Oh boy.
John Watson is definitely in danger.
The doubling up of the busts in owner #4 / Act 4 / s4 is messing me up! Two busts = two busted stories? The real plot and the one that we saw onscreen? Idk idk??
DISCLAIMER: I don’t really write meta and I haven’t read all meta and this may all be hogwash/old news, plus I tend to confuse things and misremember.
BUT.
Ever since I sort-of watched TFP,
I’ve been bothered by what I see as the similarity between Musgrave Hall and Skyfall
in the Bond movie of the same name: the ancestral home, out in the middle of
nowhere, the destruction, the fire…
(That’s the villain watching it burn, btw)
But even though this has been at the back of my mind since then, I haven’t bothered to look into it. Maybe
someone else has. That’s not what this post is about, even though I’m
sure it would be an interesting thread to pull (and someone probably
already did). But it does encourage associating Sherlock with Bond, which is the point of this post. And which, as we all know, Mark Gatiss went out of his way to drive home in that poetic response to a review that complained about Sherlock being too Bond-y.
So anyway, with all these Bond associations floating around in my brain pretty much CONSTANTLY, today as I was out
walking, something struck me. “What other final instalment in a rebooted movie series that I
loved made me grievously disappointed, had glaring plot holes, and introduced a
random super-duper villain from the hero’s childhood who no one had ever heard
of before?” And the answer (for me, personally) is Spectre.
There should always be a spectre at the feast, right?
Well, I know Spectre came out just a half year before Sherlock s4 started
filming, but they could have been “inspired” to cobble together the mess that
is TFP in that time. So what are the plot holes in Spectre? Many people loved the movie, but others saw it as a regression to earlier Bond incarnations with ridiculous gadgets being prioritised above plot. One relevant question comes from http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/43844/why-didnt-the-machine-affect-bond-in-spectre:
“There is a scene where Bond is hooked up to a torture machine. He is told
that the first action will damage his eyesight and the the second action will
cause him to forget all the faces he knew. Both these actions occurred, but he
still remembers everyone’s face, and 5 minutes later he is making precision
shots from a large distance. So it seems like the torture device had literally
no effect on him. Is there a reason for this, or is it just poor movie making?”
Like introducing, say, a memory-altering drug for no reason at all
and not following up on it.
“Bond accidentally shoots a
suitcase filled with explosives, which blows
up half a building. Aaaaand nobody notices….
Seriously: an explosion goes off in a packed city during the busiest day of the
year, and there’s not a single acknowledgement from anybody anywhere. Bond
returns to the street to pursue his target and the festivities are still going
on as normal. Surely somebody would have seen a building collapsing right in
the middle of everything? Nope. It’s just ignored, which makes no sense given
that the explosion happened in plain sight. What gives?“
Yeah, what gives?
Continuing:
“As Bond enters MI6 in an attempt
to track down whatever waits for him inside (it’s Blofeld, by the way), he
realises that the building has been set
up as a kind of “James Bond Funhouse.” Firstly, he sees his name
sprayed onto a wall of deceased secret agents, and arrows have been placed
around the building to guide him towards his goal. Pictures of former Bond villains – Silva, LeChiffre – and former
love Vesper have been pinned to the
walls. And then Bond reaches Blofeld, who is (somehow) concealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass. The
question is, though: how did Blofeld know that Bond would kill those agents and
thus enter the building to see his name, the arrows and the photos of the
deceased? He had no reason to suspect that Bond would be able to free himself
and kill two agents whilst handcuffed, and yet he went to the trouble of drawing arrows and putting up pictures!”
A grey bunker filled with clues and rooms with pictures of the hero’s past – remind you of anything?
And finally:
“Okay, then: the worst contender.
Actually think about this for a second, because it’s quite insane when you try
to piece it together: a plot hole to end
all plot holes, if you will – and one that only succeeds in spoiling the Bond continuity for absolutely no reason at
all. In the film’s big and
unexpected “twist”, Bond discovers that Blofeld is his half-brother
and that the villain has set out to make his life hell due to some very
undeveloped and frankly ridiculous “daddy [friend] issues.” As a
result, audiences are told that all of
the villains in all of the Daniel Craig Bond movies were working for Spectre
the whole time, which – in itself – makes no sense. Blofeld has been in the shadows the whole time, apparently, watching.
How the hell could Blofeld have masterminded all of Bond’s pain when Bond was
randomly assigned to most of his cases, or stumbled upon them by accident?
Bond got involved with most of the villains as a result of other peoples’
actions. Le Chiffre didn’t plan to meet with Bond; Bond was sent after him.
Dominic Green had other things on his plate long before Bond got involved.
Silva was going after M and wanted revenge on her, Bond aside. Trying to shoehorn all four Bond movies
into one continuity was a huge mistake on the writers’ part because it suggests
that Blofeld somehow manipulated all the events that led Bond to each villain,
which clearly wasn’t the case. But how could he have known that Bond would
be assigned to each and every villain? How could he have even predicted that
Bond would become a secret agent, thus drawing the pair into the scenario that
Blofeld wanted? It’s all very, very tenuous and you could probably spend days
and days combing through the movies, spotting all the moments at which “I
am the author of all your pain” induces another plot hole. It’s retconning
of the worst kind, and it’s crazy that the writers decided to go down a route
that opened them up to relentless plot-based scrutinies.”
There’s nothing to add at this point, because we can all see the parallels with Eurus.
________________________________________________
Alright, just a few bonus details that aren’t plot holes, just… you know, too much:
–
Receiving a posthumous message from the previous M, Bond carries out an unauthorised
mission in Mexico City.
–
Bond asks Moneypenny to
investigate Oberhauser, who was presumed
dead years earlier.
–
At the end, Bond throws his gun into the Thames
and leaves the bridge with Swann.
Ho hum.
_______________________________________________
Oh, bonus fun fact: look, it’s Andrew Scott! Playing E… I mean C! Being all up in arms about surveillance technology, incidentally.
Bonus fun fact 2: main characters apparently not wanting to film anymore
Bonus fun fact 3: “If I risk it all, could you break my fall?” (Spectre song)
Omg did mofftiss and the people of James Bond made a deal or what ?? This is extremely suspicious !
Well…that rung a bell with me so I just looked back and found this– a theory that the writer John Logan and Mark have talked about Bond before…telling timing re: where Bond and Sherlock’s at! @pawsoffmykitty
what the fuck
Holy shit, that last photo explains why mofftiss had such a cow over the alleged early release of their own chess photos! Brilliant theory! After all this I still ask myself: “What did any of this have to do with Sherlock Holmes?” What a Charlie Foxtrot S4 turned out to be.
John is smart. He’s a doctor, he studied medicine. He was a fucking field surgeon for all those years, performing emergency surgeries under immense pressure. John Watson is one smart cookie
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