I started thinking Mycroft after a random idea popped into my head the other day as to just who or what POV we are in during S4. The idea continued to plague me as I skimmed this amazing meta series by @shamelessmash. Looking into it, I thought I would have a clear a ha! moment that would lead straight to Mary, in spite of my previous questions concerning Mycroft.
It did and it didn’t.
Reading @antisocial-otaku‘s post this morning, I went and looked more closely at the Mary hospital scene. No one is surprised by just how damning that scene is. She’s such a creepy uber villain there, looming over Sherlock’s bed, threatening him. It’s nothing short of assault and you can clearly see the terror in his eyes. Lying there helpless and incapacitated. Which she seems to relish? (shudders)
Between these hypnotic demands we are shown this shot, of the ‘glowing’ IV, front and center:
Knowing what we know now, it would seem a logical assumption that we should definitely pay attention to this. SO, this scene begs the question: Is this our smoking gun? Is this when we can definitively say this is when Mary started influencing him? Did she make Sherlock kill CAM for her only to have th Moriarty video thwart her plan to have Sherlock eliminated once and for all?
I want to shout, ABSOLUTELY!!! Because give me evil nefarious villain killer nurse assasin Mary all day long-
But- then the thought I had earlier reared its ugly head and whispered, “Mycroft”in my ear, so I continued watching HLV and ugh. What have I done??
Mofftiss are cagey SOBs. I know S4, on the surface, looks and feels like a train wreck, but I don’t believe anymore, though immediately after watching I was in the deepest pit of despair and by no means am I stanning them EVER AGAIN, but I will give talent its due they lost their ability to make sense. And this scene kind of proves that point.
During the Christmas smoking scene, Mycroft asks Sherlock do decline the MI6 job offer to Eastern Europe as it would “prove fatal to you in, I think, about six months”. But, as we see above, there is never a mention of what the alternative would be. We assume its the Eastern Europe assignment- and it could very well be- but it wouldn’t have been giving anything away to say it is such, given that 1) it was already mentioned, and 2) the very next scene we are shown Sherlock about to board a plane.
So, we get the ‘farewell’ scene, all Casablanca-esque. We all waited with baited breath and still bawl over the aborted love declaration-
BUT, is it possible there really wasn’t meant to be one???
No, wait, hear me out.
The look on Mycroft’s face always read to me as a sort of “holy shit, brother mine, you’re going to do this now?” UNTIL I started thinking of ‘alternatively’.
Now, is it possible, this is the face of a man that is thinking his plan may not be working?
“All lives end, all hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.”
Mycroft offered that platitude up so succinctly in a ASiB, that it seemed almost like a mantra than a piece of advice to me. It would seem Mycroft would feel as if all his brother’s troubles only started to rear their ugly heads when John Watson waltzed into his life.
So, what to do about that little problem? He had already admitted losing him would break his heart, so does it seem his only alternative would be a fatal mission to Eastern Europe??
Shit got real in TAB. We saw Sherlock’s mind as never before, until S4. Whoa! What a ride that shit was.
So, is it possible that the alternative was TD12?
The very beginning of The Six Thatchers puts it all our there, but was it a double bluff- telling a lie to disguise the truth.
Honestly, wtf? A little video editing and presto change-o! What we see is not what we are seeing???
Ha! Even that is blowing my mind because if something like TD12 is at play here, then what is real?
If Sherlock’s memories have been “interferered” with then that could go a bit in the way of explaining why Johnlock seems to have all but disappeared completely from S4. Because, it wasn’t completely erased. There are glimpses of it now and then. Is that the answer to Sherlock’s question to Smith?
Is Sherlock fighting whatever has been done to him in order to ‘remember’?
I’ve been a steadfast believer in EMP theory. Even as I write this up, my brain is trying to figure out a way to make this ALL piece together. Hell, I don’t know if we can figure out just what is going on in S4 until we get please please please don’t leave us hanging like those fucking Garridebs, either drop us or set us free, Mofftiss a ‘lost special’ or S5. That aside, I can’t help but try.
Food for thought @monikakrasnorada! I really love your thinking outside the box. If we take EMP as an altered state of mind, could this fit with TD 12? Sherlock could be somehow investigating his subconscious to find out what is real (our most beloved hashtag), which memories are true and which were altered, deleted or induced? And that’s why we get the same scenarios in slightly altered versions again and again? Because Sherlock wrecks bis memories to get to the core? He knows something isn’t right but he can’t quite put his finger in it? And Sherlock himself tells us He deleted information (and memories?) from his harddrive…
I thought td12 as a memory erasing drug silly and over the top, but the iv bag from hlv really got me thinking. And it isn’t there when Janine visits in the next scene? There, we just get the impossible morphin drip…
There’s something really troubling to me about the way Moffat wrote Mary and Eurus, and I can’t quite articulate what it is. Why does it bother me so much that Mary shot someone in the chest and this gets excused as “surgery” and Eurus can literally murder children and she gets a hug and dueling violins with big brother???
I need to understand what is going on in Moffat’s head so I can pin point the exact brand of misogyny that created this trope that appears repeatedly in his work.
I’ve actually been thinking about this because of S4 gif sets that somehow ended up on my dash this afternoon…
I honestly think that Moffat thinks that abusive = strong. Also, that a woman who is dom in unhealthy ways is sexy. Moffat’s ultimate wank fantasy was his Irene Adler who was literally a dominatrix who drugged the protag against his will, broke into his flat twice, once to return his coat and kiss him while he was drugged, and a second time to sleep in his bed and wear his clothes without his permission, but the audience were meant to read that those actions as evidence of cleverness, strength, and love for Sherlock (and yes, I’ve heard all the arguments against that reading, but given Moffat’s track record writing women, I do really think that was writer intent).
This extends to Mary, who constantly belittles both John and Sherlock, low key turns them against one another while trying to build up her own individual alliances, shoots Sherlock when he offers to help her, threatens him while he’s still barely conscious in the hospital, threatens to kill him again in the empty house, compares her husband to a dog, calls Sherlock a pig, drugs Sherlock when he offers to help her, denies her husband any say in naming their child and then gives their baby the name she was known by when she was up to no good, essentially painting a target on her baby’s back, runs out on her husband and baby rather than stay and accept help from two men who are pretty qualified to offer it. She does all this and it’s meant to be ‘cute’, the strong, sassy assassin, who is Sherlock’s pal, and John’s angel wife who makes him and Sherlock want to be better men (even though John openly admitted that he barely liked her when they finally caught up with her in TST, so inconsistent much?!).
You see this in milder ways with Sarah Sawyer in TGG and Mrs. Hudson in TFP. The women offering to do something nice and then withholding which is meant to be ‘cute’, or somehow demonstrates they are a strong woman with boundaries. So you have Sarah asking John if he’d like breakfast, and when he says yes, telling him he’ll have to get it himself, or Mrs. Hudson in TFP offering a clearly shaken Mycroft tea, and when he says he would like some, she says ‘teapot’s over there’. That’s cute to Moffat. To me it just reads as rude. Mrs. Hudson’s ‘Not your Housekeeper’ in ASiP was more what I would consider healthy boundary setting. And both actresses sort of managed to salvage it from coming off as really awful with their delivery, but yeah–not really ‘cute’.
Eurus was a bit of a different thing. A wild, feral, damaged creature who needed to be tamed by the love, forgiveness and acceptance of the male protag. She was the mad girl in the attic. She murdered Sherlock’s childhood best friend, tortured Sherlock as a child, drove a wedge in the family dynamic, burnt the family home down, put Sherlock through years of torment as an adult, as it seems she was behind some of Moriarty’s machinations (and was apparently a murderous rapist to boot). But in her case it was because she was just born bad. She deserves pity because she was born too intelligent for her own good, so smart she was wholly without empathy, and totally mad (don’t even get me started on the ableism here, that’s a post for another day). And she existed only to be the catalyst to Sherlock’s emotional growth. He must forgive her, and love her back to life.
I mean all of these are pretty common misogynistic traits. Moffat’s writing is essentially a misogyny grab-bag. Pick your misogynistic trope. If it exists, you’ll probably find it somewhere in his writing history.
I think what bothers me, specifically, is that this aspect of Mary and eurus in particular makes them feel like props rather than people.
I’d be hard pressed to find a male character who could kill as many people as eurus did and come out the other side as simply misunderstood – but with the ladies of Sherlock moffat is just interested in getting from point A to point D. Need to have Sherlock dying in an ambulance in his mind palace for dramatic effect? Have Mary shoot him! But she’s still good ol’ Mary in the end, of course, because women don’t have internal lives and therefore don’t get character arcs.
The idea of this being a wank fantasy of moffat’s seems pretty on the money tho.
The writers modelled the inner lives of their female characters after male behaviour patterns. It seems they thought: “Well, a real man would say ‘I take my wife home’, therefore a feminist woman will say ‘I take my husband home’ (like Marydid in TAB).” But exchanging the gender of the character uttering those lines doesn’t turn male oppressive patriarchal machismo into feminist self-assertion. That is a mistake many male writers make: They think, in short that, a strong woman will act like an alpha male. Except we don’t.
For example, a truly self-confident feminist character in the TAB graveyard scene could have said. “I don’t want to watch Sherlock do these things I find strange and disturbing. I decide to go home. No one has to take me. But he’s your friend, John, and obviously needs you, so I propose you stay and help him. You don’t need me for this, and I don’t need you to take me home.” How about something like that – if Mary was to be presented as a strong, funny, confident, feminist hero (with flaws to make her more interesting)?
But I have come to the conclusion that many male writers just can’t fathom how biased they are by their own gender. They think they can write strong women, because they somewhat see them as strong men with tits and a bit more emotions. Sorry, that’s not how it works.
Same goes for all the violence applied to solve problems – all those shootings, explosions and killings. A very male kind of conflict resolution. Just because a woman shoots a man that doesn’t make her strong or feminist – it just makes her a killer.
Perhaps a female co-writer could have helped… but that’s unheard of at Sherlock.
Redbeard/Yellowbeard, Vernet, & Time Travel: Various Ways HoB & T6T Are Connected
Gatiss: To be honest, I put [an explanation of Redbeard] into the
first draft of episode two, and actually explained it – the reason that
Sherlock was behaving like a child was because he’d once upon a time
fallen for that story that your bunny rabbit has gone to live on a farm
somewhere. And then we thought, ‘No, let’s hold it back because we can
tease it a bit.’ And we genuinely thought, ‘We can keep this running for
years.’ But then actually…
Moffat: It’s nice to have resolved it.
Gatiss: So the truth is that when he was little – and obviously
Mycroft tormented him about it – is that his dog died, and he totally
fell for the idea that Redbeard had gone to live in a happy valley
somewhere.
Yes, we’re back to the rabbit idea…as in HoB and time travel…mentioned here. (Read that meta, because otherwise, the rest of this won’t make sense.)
Moriarty
Is he not the celebrated author of The
Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights
of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the
scientific press capable of criticizing it?
— Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear
This
topic had been covered by *Newcomb about 20 years before, and it may
have been him that inspired the character of Moriarty.
Mary reading Dynamics of Combustion, and 221B is blown up in TFP, but she alsomanages to jump in front of a bullet in T6T before Sherlock even really has time to react.
The book that Moriarty wrote involves chaos theory.
Remember in the meta about the blog entries being recycled in S3 and S4? It’s related to that, due to the butterfly effect
Simple actions and events can alter history, especially if your memory isn’t reliable.
“The butterfly effect is exhibited by very simple systems. For example, the randomness of the outcomes of throwing dice
depends on this characteristic to amplify small differences in initial
conditions—the precise direction, thrust, and orientation of the
throw—into significantly different dice paths and outcomes, which makes
it virtually impossible to throw dice exactly the same way twice.“
First a few background notes: I have not been following EMP theory. I read 2 posts before s4 aired and it just wasn’t hitting home for me. I discussed this with two of the primary EMP bloggers, and respectfully agreed to disagree. I just didn’t read anything more on the idea after that, I avoided EMP posts. I found it all unsettling. Then s4 occurred, and on Jan 20th rambling around in the theory that TST was Sherlock’s perception of real time events, I decided that I would revisit EMP but as an independent study. To really look at it and see if I reached the same conclusions on it’s validity as others, even though I was very skeptical about the premise. I kept a draft of all my ideas, and two months of arguing with myself ensued. But I am at the stage where I need to post my progress. So here it all is with the chains of thought I experienced and explanations of how I reached certain conclusions.
First it was the sharks that got me. They hammered those sharks into our heads prior to s4. The whole Rachel’s-crew-tee-shirt-thing, the shark graffiti, and the Mark and Amanda tweets, all appeared rather ‘lame’ after watching TST. All our pre s4 speculation fizzled out and we were left with the only real thread being s3 and the most obvious clue to sharks with it’s clear depiction and reference to CAM. He’s identified as the shark. In TST we see water haunting Sherlock, but not JUST water, it’s illuminated water, it’s tank water. Shark tank water. And Sherlock, by the end of the episode, ends up in a building with shark tanks.
Oh and look at his clothes:
He’s in a white shirt which is the same shirt as he was wearing when he broke into CAM Towers and got shot: CAM’s office – shark tank – aquarium. Could they be one and the same but in a dream reference of Sherlock’s subconscious. Yes. They could and it would be a very good one at that.
So then my mind takes me to that magic bullet and the ladies firing the gun, one in CAM/Shark Tower and one in the aquarium:
Two women with secret identities, both mistaken for Lady Smallwood. Sherlock thought Mary was Lady Smallwood in CAM/Shark Towers, Sherlock and Mycroft think Lady Smallwood was the leak that led to the AGRA debacle when it was actually Vivianne Norbury. Mirror events. Then we have Mary jumping in to take the bullet for Sherlock. Mary SUBSTITUTING herself for Sherlock. Wonder when she began to be a substitute herself for Sherlock? Oh yes, when John thought Sherlock was dead, when John was the grieving widower, devastated and very angry. An anger that balloons out of all proportion in Sherlock’s mind as it’s John directing anger at him for killing himself and disappearing for two years. He accepts John’s beating in atonement in TEH but in his mind it is far more violent, graphic and sadly justified by Sherlock, as we learn in TLD. But it’s Sherlock beating himself up. In essence Sherlock did kill John’s spouse, he made John believe that he had killed himself. And Sherlock knows John is not over that event:
Sherlock underestimates John’s grief, he sees only the anger phase, displayed on his return, but he didn’t consider the deep depression, the many regrets, and John’s inability to ever recover fully. Mary’s letter during her hiatus is everything Sherlock wanted to say and didn’t. Mary’s journey in TST looking for AJ is Sherlock’s hiatus twisted down to involve an ending where John is with him on that journey. That suicide mission to Eastern Europe Sherlock was being sent on? Well he’s already been on it and died on his return. Mycroft brought him home into heartbreak. His life, as Sherlock knew it, and the hopes he had for his future were dashed, and Sherlock’s heart broke.
The post Mary shooting Sherlock scenes in HLV now take on a sad twist, as they are in Sherlock’s mind. He imagines that he reveals to John the truth about the person who shot him, and John is furious at Mary, rejects her and relegates her to client. It’s probably not far from the truth of real events. He says a goodbye to Janine and assigns his dream retirement cottage to her, in an offering of repentance. He’ll revisit this theme in his Victorian MP in TAB. But I digress. Back to my chain of thought, as I need to leave the rest of HLV and TAB out of this for now. I came to the conclusion that Sherlock isn’t still on that plane, he’s not in the hospital. Sherlock is still on the floor in CAM’s office. And they PLANTED a trigger in that scene to tell us. The plant moved.This is all on repeat. Everything is being replayed. Twisted and convoluted, and nothing is new. Rest under cut:
I’m in a happy daze after reading this. I intensely agree with so many details here it’s ridiculous. I too started out a major sceptic (the best place to start, really). I love that you pin point Sherlock lying on the floor in CAM tower as the point that EMP began, because I’m leaning more this way recently (rather than, say, Sherlock dreaming while in hospital after he’s shot). There’s a draft decaying in my drafts folder that takes the dream theory and mingles it with @impatient14′s space-time continuum theory. Like you say – Sherlock is still right there on the floor, so while dream symbolism and imagery is used and while dialogue hints at it being a literal dream, or a coma drug induced hallucination or whatever, I suspect that what is actually happening is that time is standing still – we are frozen in a single moment. And to move that moment you’ve pin pointed just 3 seconds earlier, my newest fave idea is that Mary’s fake-ass death scene featured a big clue – the slo-mo bullet. I think we are frozen in time as the bullet sails through the air out of Mary’s gun towards Sherlock (and the slo-mo effect is quite accurate because my time research tells me that theoretically time could never be stopped, but it could be slowed right down).
The reason I think the bullet is in the air, is because well…then he still has a chance to live. And it’s symbolic of the importance of choice – something that can go two ways – the bullet buries in his chest and kills him….or it doesn’t. It represents how a decision effects all of the future. S4 is symbolic of “all of the future”, which also includes “all of the future of Sherlock Holmes”, because S4 shows how the love story is recognized but ignored and the no-homo ending of TFP represents the heteronormative future of the character….UNLESS. Unless a different choice is made in a single moment which will change the course of the future. And the poignancy of “the course of the future” wouldn’t be there without us actually having watched it play out. But really, the “future” of S4 is really the past. The old version of Holmes and Watson, the one we’ve seen before (the wheel turns…).
The significance of Vivian Norbury getting that role in T6T ties back into CAM tower and the idea of a choice that effects the whole rest of your future, and which is to do with over-confidence. Sherlock got cocky with deducing Vivian and got shot for it. In HLV, Sherlock was cocky with Mary, thinking he could so easily talk her down (”No, Mrs Watson, you won’t”), and he got shot for it. “Norbury” is really about how he handled that moment of confrontation with Mary in CAM tower, and how it changed the future (it got him killed, and because #sherlocklives means #johnwatson lives, it kills John too). I keep trying to imagine how over-the-top the EMP reveal could be, and a return to Mary firing the gun seems to be dramatic enough for Moftiss. I’m only spewing this idea on to your lovely post because I haven’t written it anywhere else yet, and because you also recognized the possibility of a frozen-in-time type of scenario where we return to a moment in that room in CAM tower. I might possibly spew more ideas onto another reblog, lol. Because I really love the way you’ve explained EMP here.
[Sorry not done: Molly tells us that Sherlock has 3 seconds of consciousness left to figure out how to live. The answer, they deduce, is forwards or backwards. Backwards into the past, where the love story needed to stay hidden, or forwards into the future where it does not. Sherlock fell backwards, and look where he ended up. I wrote something after T6T aired that predicted that the EMP reveal would involve Sherlock falling forwards instead of backwards….something to do with the mirror shattering….anyway it was a nice idea]
Not sure if we have talked about this. Two men, same hair colour, same hair style, blue jacket, light shirt, sitting to Mary Watson’s left on a plane, both looking at her. Any ideas?
Okay so I know this guy is James Holmes who played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of being Earnest in the west end once and also played Emory, a very camp gay in The Boys in the Band alongside Mark Gatiss last September to November…
Yeah guys, of course that man who’s evidently 1000% done with Mary is a John mirror! The fact that it’s such a lengthy scene makes it evident too. She’s lying, presenting a fake persona – just like she does with everybody– and over-the-top acting – exactly the same she does when she jumps in front of Sherlock to take that bullet. And the things she says to that poor man!
MARY: Pardon me. I can hear a squeaking. Can you hear a squeaking? MAN: No. MARY: Only I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel. MARY: “Why Planes Fail.” Did you see it? MAN: (Politely) Can’t say I did. MARY: Oh, truly terrifying. Swore I would never fly again, yet here I am! FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Everything okay, madam? MARY: No! No, it’s not, but then what’s the use in complaining? I hear a squeaking. Probably the wing will come off, is all. FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Everything’s fine, I promise you. Just relax. MARY: Oh, okay, relax. (Slapping the man’s arm) She said relax! MAN: (Trying his best
though clearly annoyed by her) Um, did you have a nice time? In London? MARY: It was okay, I guess, but did somebody hide the sun? (Laughing and slapping his arm again) Did you lose it in the war?
“Did you lose it in the war?” To John’s mirror, seriously? I hate this. I hate that Mary’s only purpose in this show was HIDING THE SUN that is John (specially from Sherlock) and darken John’s life in general. They even dare to make her poke at the wound of John’s traumatic experience in the War, TWICE. Because she does it again at the end when she says John is “The Doctor who never returned from War”, which is A TOTAL LIE AND A HORRIBLE THING TO SAY. That’s her most effective villanous plan; manipulating the boys into believing they’re still trapped in
what they used to be, using their traumas to keep them in the dark. Erasing their character development is what she wants. It’s like the creators took pains to make her mock the boys’ pain and therefore ours, until the very last second.
Anyway, I wish I was right when interpreting that Mofftiss’ intention in this scene was to show Mary as irritating as she could possibly be, in order to make everyone in the audience feel about Mary just like the annoyed man feels –and therefore
sympathize
with John. Because, otherwise I find this long, exasperating scene pointless. I don’t see another purpose for it.
also the windows….the sun (sherlock) and the woman who allures john (by acting like sherlock) in the same spot lol
John. John Watson. Sherlock Holmes is lost without his blogger. So are we. What’s happening to John? Well, Eurus did tell us, but did we listen?
Three Garridebs. Six Months. Who’s Evans?
The surname Evans is a patronymic surname created from the Welsh personal name Lefan, or Evan, which is a cognate of the personal name John. {x}
John. A dead man walking? When did this supposedly happen?
As I mentioned in a separate post, series 4 consists of events of the past, “5 minutes since Mycroft called” and 10 minutes after Sherlock landed. I may be changing my mind about how close to the present time we got by the end of TFP, but there’s really not much to go on. I think what we saw in series 4 included the missing months between Mary shot Sherlock and Christmas at the Holmes, which all connected back to Moriarty, TRF, and the cause and effect of Redbeard. All of which likely had something to do with Carl Powers,1989, kidnapped siblings (cough Jim and Mary cough), their wicked father, and Hansel and Gretel. Series 4 was not a dream, but we were mostly in Sherlock’s head. As Sherlock sorts through his memory of everything he observed and stored away, pieces from wildly different occurrences were inevitably melted together to represent various aspects of one single story: save John Watson. Not only his life but of his heart and his love – all of which tied to Sherlock’s own.
But how? Well, Sherlock was doing exactly what Sherlock Holmes does best: solve the murder. Let’s take a look at our timeline.
Six months before the tarmac scene. We know Sherlock spent a week in solitary confinement after the Magnussen incident; since his birthday was mentioned in TLD, it was likely Sherlock spent the day on the tarmac saying goodbye to his love and his life – no wonder Sherlock wanted to leave his name with John. Hahaha, but it’s not a girl’s name. FUUUUUUUUUCK. No, there is no baby, but still. Sherlock didn’t know. I don’t think he did. FUCK either way.
Anyway.
Six months – that put us before John and Mary’s wedding according to John’s blog. End of June, beginning of July. When John posted The Bloody Guardsman and The Hollow Client. I’ve covered the parallels between these cases and series 2 in part 1 but didn’t really think much about it in term of John. I rambled on a paragraph or two about The Poison Giant right after TST because of the six pearls and the Thatcher busts and the black pearl of Borgias; the jellyfish in connection to The Adventure of Lion’s Mane and how Mary’s possible posthumous revenge could work – but I didn’t pursue the idea further. However, after reading Doyle’s The Parasite and s4by @may-shepard I realized perhaps we’ve been given clues about what’s been happening to John, alongside Sherlock and Mycroft’s more distant past.
The sign of three referred not only to Mary (666) and Sherlock’s love (3rd death), it applied to John as well – John is the 3rd Bloody Guardsman. The case of The Poison Giant was likely the “planned and rehearsed”. But by whom?
Six pearls; six Thatcher busts. Swandale’s laptop; Ajay’s memory stick. A trap for Sherlock and John; a noose for Sherlock to put his neck into. A pair of jewel thieves; a pair of assassins. That’s… quite a few coincidences, wouldn’t you agree? Sherlock and John were able to escape The Poison Giant—Sherlock’s good with a sword and John had bought a gun—one of the thieves fell off the roof, and the other ended up in prison. In TST, Ajay ended up dead and then… nothing. Was what we saw on screen really what happened?
There are two not-good scenarios running side by side here, both lead to John being, um, undermined: a) delayed action poisoning (how little Carl died); and b) gun shot. I’m uncertain if they are both life-threatening or one is more symbolic of ACD’s The Three Garridebs:
mary could have been the most despicable villain everyone would have loved to hate but in the end she was just annoying, full of herself and kept hurting everyone trying to achieve her selfish goals. she could have been umbridge but she’s kind of accidentally lockhart now.
Moriarty loves stories, fairytales. He planned everything like one. If we need to understand everything that happened since TRF, we just need to understand Appointment in Samarra. This is the key behind everything.
Sherlock is the merchant trying to outrun/outwit Death. If we consider Moriarty to represent Death (and Mary ultimately taking his title and his place in the narrative), Sherlock must find the one path to survive the Fall.
It begins with Sherlock/the merchant meeting Moriarty/Death and understanding, no, knowing that this person will take his life. So, he runs, he runs from his life in an attempt to escape his fate.
So, in the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock fakes his death, thinking he’s done it. There was just a little problem with that plan:
The tale of Sir Boast-a-Lot, TRF never was the Final Problem, the same way the first meeting between the merchant and Death wasn’t supposed to end with the merchant’s death. Yes, Sherlock managed to escape Moriary’s plan but that was pointless. His appointment wasn’t in St Barthelemy Hospital.
Nor here.
Or even that, whatever that was.
We need to focus on this.
Because, ultimately Sherlock has been warned times and times again. Moriarty said it many times “I owe you a fall.” Not this little magic trick, no, don’t be silly. I’ll burn you, I’ll burn, the heart out of you. Survive this little game and you’ll have the privilege of seeing my real work.
Now, that’s more like it. You’ve got to admit, that’s sexier.
We both know you don’t care about your reputation, about the press slandering you. We both know that’s not your pressure point. But look how you care about John Watson. Well, your little pet, I’m going to take it from you. Let’s see how far you’re willing to go for him. That wife. Such a poor soul, so tragic. I’m sure she didn’t actually want to kill you, you were clearly a threat to her, if only you’ve told her you wanted to help her. Oh you did? Oopsie.
Well, the woman you call Mary? She’s going to take you everything, she will even break your little toy and there is nothing you can do about it. Enjoy the show.
Because John has always been and will always be his heart. He is the reason he decides to restart his, he is the reason he hasn’t killed himself like Jim. Separate them and death will be a kinder fate.
Somewhere, John or Sherlock is in terrible danger, dying and unable to escape his end. The electrocardiogram is still beating in TAB, like a phantom pain the wound still hurts Sherlock, John may or may have not escaped the bullet (no, a fuming gun don’t throw sleeping darts, it just can’t) “Eurus” shot.
Who cares how Sherlock survive the Reichenbah Falls? This wasn’t the point, this never was the Final Problem. Season 3 and Season 4 are the real thing.
Like a throwback to Jim in TRF, ‘Mary’ has become the author, the one calling the shots and stripped John of any narrative power. That is absolutely devastating, how can they survive if the two vilains have taken over the story so completely?
“Sherlock Holmes will now wear the silly hat because Mary liked it. It just felt right.She changed and illuminated the path of the show.”
Now that she is the one calling the shots, both men’s hearts are effectively reduced to ashes. Their identities have been stripped and they have become actors in their own lives.
Who you really are, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures.
This is Appointment in Samarra, you can’t avoid Death, not when the vilains are the one reading the story since TRF. This is predeterminism, all roads were leading to this ending. No matter how much Sherlock’s struggled, the author aka Jim/Mary has always planned this ending. Resistance has always been futile.
And yet… there is one fic that managed to save the merchant. Appointment in Sumatra may be a mere fanfic, Sherlock has succeeded in changing the ending. Mary, the new author, may have stripped John of everything that was him, he remains the first narrator.
The game isn’t over. This is a struggle between the two authors that have decided to destroy the story and the fans who need to find the one path that will save the merchant. Jim/Mary vs Sherlock and John, or if we are very daring between Mofftiss and the fans.
Samarra can be avoided but dear God, that’s going to a hell of a ride to save Sherlock Holmes. We just need to completely rewrite the ending, to let John take back his narrative power and let him lead Sherlock to Sumatra and avoid Samarra.
I can’t bring myself to reblog a post as I don’t want it in my archive due to the video, but this post shows the promo video for s4 that was shown at the BBC Worldwide Showcase in Liverpool at the beginning of February. Have a watch:
Somewhere, maybe on that bus during s3 filming, when the epiphanies started to occur and they obviously changed direction in how they were going to write s4 and 5, the idea sparked that Mary should be the main feature of the story. It could have been sparked by Amanda’s acting? But you know, they had Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch already pulling all the stops out, and with due respect to the competency of Amanda, I just don’t think she’s in their league. Was it the ‘Moffat can’t write women/is a misogynist’ reputation that is rampant out there? Could be, as Steven’s ego fights for dominance even over his own writing projects. It may have been a long felt sorrow for the canon character of poor wifey Mary, villainized for over a century because she came in between Holmes and Watson. A noble try to right the wrong and fix it. Nah….not these two writers on that particular issue, they just keep adding even worse female tropes as is evident in Eurus. So what the fuck went on? Because they did do this.
Mary the narrator, Mary the author God of the action and character development via DVD, ‘Mary’ the name it all came down to at the end [see the video linked above] Mary who could be all things; mother, wife, girlfriend, assassin, friend, liar, catlover, the most brilliant person in the room….Mary who could become Sherlock. Mary who transplanted Sherlock as wife to John, even in canon she only did that in name never reality. Mary who could out detective, out think and out manipulate Sherlock. Mary the Great Detective/Assassin/Woman [sorry Irene, she beat you]
They fucking killed their own show, their chance at history making television, their LGBTQ landmark, for….MARY?
That video is cringe worthy. And so lame. I really don’t know how they thought it would be a good idea to make the show about Mary. And funny thing some people even accept it. And when the other day I posted about the lack of johntent. Someone replied to my post with “Because the show is called sherlock.” So what the fuck is with all the unnecessary mary stuff ?
I agree with the above. But why did they think it a good idea to pimp Mary (the never once named wife in ACD canon, who perishes sometime during the hiatus) like this, to make her narrator, director, a female Sherlock?
As many have said, Gatiss is a gay man who’s formative years might have been the 1980s. Now, writing Mary into the show like this reminds me strongly of what happened to films and tv shows after section 28 came into force. As media wasn’t allowed to ‘promote’ gay relationships (to show them as something good and positive), many filmmakers decided to write a female character into a previously (male) gay film, to kind of un-gay the story. Did Gatiss apply this tactic to wipe out the homoerotic subtext he and Moffat toyed with in S1 and S2? I think they did. They gave John Watson a female love interest that strongly resembled Sherlock – but with a vagina, to make sex acceptable.
And then they played with her character as they went on. Make her an assassin. Let her shoot Sherlock. Make them all great buddies. Give her a baby. Give her a whump back story. Give her a hero death. Then make her a ghost. Make her the director. Give her the last word.
This started way back in TEH. Mary pulled the strings even back then. It was all about her, she’s in all the dramatic scenes (apart from the train carriage, and even there she is mentioned). TSoT is about her wedding. In HLV she first kills Sherlock and then he has to rescue her. In TAB it’s Mary who solves the case. IT’S BEEN ALL ABOUT MARY SINCE S3!
But if we look behind the no homo apporach, I think the decline started way before: with Sherlock jumping. Reichenbach is the ultimate rift. Because they had no plan how to dissolve this. On the surface, it was the question how Sherlock survived – for which they had no answer. We still don’t know. That might be clever story telling for some – but if you hype something that much and then never deliver an explanation, I call it poor.
But if you go deeper, this jump did something with the characters no one was prepared for. Mofftiss have said that they kind of wanted to fix canon, where Holmes returns, Watson faints, and then everything goes back to normal crimesolving. This wouldn’t work in a somewhat realistic show in the 21st century. But in the end, Mofftiss didn’t explore this angle more than ACD did. Because in doing so they would have had their characters to acknowledge what they mean to one another. And that couldn’t be, because the homoeroticism was meant as a joke from the start. Only, characters tend to take a life of their own… The joke wasn’t funny. It didn’t work as a joke. And Mofftiss had no answer to this story line and its implications. Hence entrance Mary Morstan, to gloss all of this over with het love, a wedding and senseless action… and this continued in TAB as well as in S4.
But Mary is only the symptom, not the cause of the series failing. The cause is that they just didn’t want/dare to follow through where their very own story led them.
“Only, characters tend to take a life of their own…
“
and these characters had their own life and have had a life history for 130 years.
Yes i was sick of Mary from pretty early on, she was only bearable if viewed as a part of a ‘villain’ arc, as the centre of a ‘villain’ arc she was pretty well developed, as the ‘author god and narrator ’ she was just intrusive cr*p.
Introducing Mary infected ‘Sherlock’ like Moriarty’s virus. All she ended up doing was dragging John and Sherlock down to her level. Murder, assault, treason, all excused and sadly the only reason seems to be because she was a woman who married John – tell that to her victims and their families.
and yes I’m looking at you too Mycroft Holmes and John Watson, Sherlock is your family. Your loyalties are her victims.
Mary got no real character development, no real redemption arc and still ended up with the last word, how bloody condescending.
Great additional opinions here. A client who became a convenient ‘beard’ in canon became the smokescreen to deflect from their lack of resolution of the fall in BBC Sherlock. ACD at least gave a cogent explanation as to how Holmes survived, Mark and Steven just threw fan theories at the screen, making fun of several that were actually better than their own plan, and tried to make any theorist feel stupid. In retrospect they did this again in s4. They had the TAB Reichenbach and fireside scenes set up John and Sherlock being together romantically and then couldn’t deliver. So they threw a bunch of rehashed movie plots at us and made us feel stupid for expecting johnlock. Seems to be their MO. I now think we predicted things based on a wrong assumption of the writer’s worth. We should have looked at how badly they handled TRF follow through. But MARY? What were they thinking? Not once in the history of Sherlock Holmes canon and pastiche has anyone, including arrogant idiots like Baring Gould, resorted to having Mary transplant Sherlock Holmes out of his own genius, then have her destroy not only Sherlock but John too. Well done Mofftiss.
I agree with all of this. I would argue one point, and that is that they still ‘played gay’ through S3, or rather kept up the ‘jokes’. What was up with Vitruvian John, for example? The knee touch? The ‘anytime’? John making kissy lips at Sherlock? That’s JUST TSOT. Oh, TEH…’does yours rub off, too?’ I want to kick something when I think of all this.
This is all excellent analysis.
I don’t think it’s the fault of the fandom for thinking well of the lack of resolution for Reichenbach–blame mofftiss for that. After all, the lack of answers threw the attention back onto the core relationship of the show. It seemed like a reasonable conclusion that, because an intensification of the focus on John and Sherlock was the effect of TEH, that was also the point.
Likewise, the credit we gave to TSOT. We thought we were looking at something really smart–a plucky textual celebration hiding a subtextual queer tragedy. Like most of s3, it seemed to reward careful viewing and subtle interpretation.
The course correction these writers enacted in s4–throwing Mary into the central position, as this thread asserts–happened too late to erase the queer subtext–especially in light of TAB–and simply made a mess of the text it was trying to redeem, which I guess had something to do with women (???!?!?). If that was their point–seriously, wtf? Insert a Mary Sue who is mostly unlikeable and a classic Victorian Madwoman in the Attic type, stir, half bake, and, instant feminism? Did they really think they were fixing canon with that? Yikes. Yikes!
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