I’ve been mulling over this theory more and more, that Mary has been drugging John and Sherlock with TD12. I’ll specifically focus on John here:
So, from possibly the end of The Six Thatchers leading into The Lying Detective, John is starting to ‘see’ Mary. But because of the drug, he is not sure what is real and what isn’t– he doesn’t understand that the real Mary is actually holding him hostage. (See Looks like John’s trapped by @teapotsubtext)
But, like the real Faith, perhaps something started to click before John forgot entirely. We see Faith upset and shaking trying to write out her note:
FAITH (tearfully): I can’t remember. Can’t remember who you’re gonna kill. SMITH: Dear, in five minutes you won’t even remember why you were crying. (x)
Imagine Smith as Mary and John as Faith:
What if John pretty damned smart Watson was fighting the effects of the drug, had started to remember that something was Very Wrong. He needs to leave a message, let Sherlock know-
But Mary is always watching him. She sees John writing the note and:
“Oh, Faith John. Don’t you think I should take that? It’s only going to upset you.”
She can’t have John and Sherlock communicating at all, she needs to keep them isolated from each other, make them feel like all hope is lost. She can’t risk Sherlock reading any sort of sign from John.
So, what does she do? Well, why not amp up the isolation even more? Threaten more people to follow her own game plan?
What if Mary threatened Molly, forcing her to hand Sherlock a note, and to tell him it was from John:
But, it wasn’t. Perhaps it was a deliberately scathing note, designed to keep Sherlock from contacting John, so that he would not reveal to John the DVD Mary sent him.
And meanwhile, Mary destroys the evidence John wrote. Without the note, just like Faith, he forgets that anything was ever amiss.
LOVE THIS THEORY. Makes so much sense. PLUS Mary KNOWS John has hallucinated in the past about dead people in his life (remember TEH and John looking to her to ensure she’s seeing Sherlock too? That to me says that John has hallucinated Sherlock in the past, and that Mary is aware of it), so she thinks she was important enough to John that she could fool him into thinking John would hallucinate her too… until he actually does, with the TD-12 drug. PLUS a lot of the language she uses in T6T and TLD is very “suggestive”, like she’s trying to plant ideas into John’s head (the “letter she wrote” to him while on the run) and is using John’s own sense of poor self worth against him.
How would she have administered the drug? We see it only used through IV.
There was a theory going around here that “Eurus” (read: Mary) intentionally made sure she had a moment alone with Sherlock in The Lying Detective (that the audience hasn’t seen the whole of yet)- more drugs could have been slipped in the water she gave him.
Well John is notoriously easy to poison, Sherlock’s said so himself. He may have even given her the idea, at the wedding. And the easiest way to slip it to Sherlock would be to have his dealer/chemist on your side, someone Mary’s already met… maybe earlier than we’re led to believe.
“Don’t drink Mary’s tea.” IF THEIR TEA WAS POISONED IN REVENGE… ALSO, could that add more to Wiggins just up and leaving when Sherlock starts his Henry V speech? “He’s lost it, he’s totally gone.” Did he know the stuff was kicking in fully and felt guilty?
Wiggins you traitor…
😥 but if this is happening, and obviously Billy Wiggins=William=William Sherlock… then it’s a mirror for Mary manipulating Sherlock…
My latest theory is that Sherlock ignores Vatican Cameos because John thinks he ignored the note (when in fact Mary interfered).
oh. OH. OUCH
oh my god @nottoolateforthegame this is KILLING ME…. John in the opening of TLD bitterly saying he’s not been in contact with Sherlock and Sherlock’s not attempted to make any contact with him;- Eurus Mary taunting him: “How can you be sure? He might have tried.” And John replying: “
No, if Sherlock Holmes wants to get in touch, that’s not something you can fail to notice.”
!!!
So Mary uses Eurus to do stuff or Mary is Eurus? And we say that TFP is John bleeding to death after Mary shot him/ Eurus for Mary? @jenna221b
yeah I see it more as Mary literally is Eurus (see A Case of (Mistaken) Identity) and after she shoots John, she causes the pained hallucinated TFP– she is ‘the grim figure of death’, the one who brings about John’s Garridebs/near death moment.
It’s a plausible theory if you want to absolve John of some of the problematic characterization in seasons 3 & 4. It paints him as a hapless victim, which means that none of his … unpalatable actions during those seasons were his fault. It’s a reading I would prefer, to be honest. I’m not quite sure there’s enough in canon to bear that out, but it works for fanfiction– which is fine by me…
We already have several ideas what “Mind the gap!“ might be about and I
definitely like them.
For
example, it could be seen as referring to the inconsistencies that point out
the unreality of the plot, or the time we have to wait for The Lost Special, as faithchan said. Then, there’s the train connection as well, which goes
perfectly with the idea of The Lost Special, as Carol said.
But there’s
another concept I want to mention here. It is a term from literary theory that
unfortunately doesn’t have an English Wikipedia page, but I still think it
might be relevant. In German it’s called Leerstelle. That means gap or empty
space. The second one is a more literal translation. Gap is what I’d find
natural if I had to translate Leerstelle (and of course gap basically means
empty space…).
Between two
neighbouring segments of text there’s a gap that the reader has to use their
logic and imagination to fill. That’s a normal process without which texts
wouldn’t work. But some gaps are larger than others.
For example,
I once attended a lecture at uni that was all about the gaps in
Harry Potter and how they make a queer reading possible.
You
probably already know what I’m getting at. The gaps in both ACD canon and BBC
Sherlock.
It seems
fundamentally important that we take a closer look at all the gaps the show
leaves open. The most obvious example of this would be the time between Mary’s
reveal and Christmas in hlv, but there are many others, including when Mary is
travelling across the globe in tst and we have no idea what John and Sherlock
are doing (thanks Ashley for that observation).
There are
many gaps like this in the show, big ones and much much smaller ones. I know we’ve
kind of looked at them before, especially after S3 aired, but “Mind the gap!”
is very firmly pointing us further in that direction.
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…
During the Age of Romance people liked to build artificial ruins. They can be found in parks and castle grounds all over England, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and other countries. In this period such artificially decayed artifacts were regarded as picturesque and suffused with the atmosphere of former times.
Another key feature of the Romantic Age is the Gothic novel as represented by authors like Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and many others.
In TAB Mofftiss keep playing with elements of romance and Gothic novel. Even the cemetery in the 2nd modern scene quickly turns into a Gothic stage design, complete with dramatic gravestones, a rotten coffin, and a decayed body dressed in ragged finery. The scene is clearly not real and is preceded by Moriarty’s comment:
“Is this silly enough for you yet? Gothic enough? Mad enough, even for you? It
doesn’t make sense, Sherlock, because it’s not real. None of it.”
Every time a cemetery is mentioned in the show, it has a very Gothic quality and is connected to something that is fake or unreal.
There’s the blind greenhouse in Kew Gardens and the leaning tomb in Hampstead
Cemetery. (HLV)
Mary Morstan was stillborn in October 1972. Her gravestone is in
Chiswick Cemetery where – five years ago – you acquired her name and date of birth and
thereafter her identity. (HLV)
But what does it mean for TFP? Well, here we get the real ruins of a manor house, surrounded by an artificial cemetery. Can there be anything more Gothic?
MYCROFT: The ancestral home, where there was always honey for tea and Sherlock played among the funny gravestones.
JOHN: Funny how?
MYCROFT: They weren’t real. The dates were all wrong.
SHERLOCK: The wrong dates. She used the wrong dates on the gravestones as the key to the
cipher and the cipher was the
song.
A cipher consisting of wrong dates on gravestones standing on (probably) fake graves next to the ancestral home? This is very Gothic. The same goes for the burnt down house itself which is strongly reminiscent of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre and Manderley in Rebecca, both of which can be regarded as standing in the tradition of the Gothic novel. (Eurus also reflects the Victorian image of the “madwoman in the attic” as discussed by Gilbert and Gubar but this would deserve its own post).
Therefore the house and the cemetery in TFP are echoes of echoes of the Gothic. And as such they are completely in accordance with the atmosphere of TAB. I leave you to your deductions.
Thanks for tagging me, @gosherlocked because Victorian literature is one of my favourite topics, so it’s right up on my street!
I like referencing to Edgar Allan Poe whenever I come to this area because his works are the Alpha and the Omega of Victorian literature for me. He even invented “the modern detective” and in my opinion ACD copied the characteristics of Poe’s detective to create Sherlock Holmes whatever he claimed in ASiS. So, it’s not surprising that we also have some Poe reference in BBC Sherlock.
We see this picture of Poe after Sherlock gets drugged up. What a coincidence!
The whole series is very Gothic indeed, even before TAB. The term doppelganger appeared first in Victorian literature, and it means that a character has a dark mirror who represents their suppressed fears, phobias, secrets etc. We a have a few of this character type in Sherlock.
My current favourite example for the doppelganger Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher or Henry James’s The Jolly Corner. But in this case, TFotHoU is a better example because we have:
an old family house in ruins
an ethereal looking male main character
who plays on an instrument (guitar)
he has an ordinary friend who we do not know much about
he has a mad twin sister who appears and disappears randomly
and she’s mad
and she’s the male character’s doppelganger
also, she’s a ghost
and she attacks the main character after she escapes her tomb
the family home starts falling apart while the sister gets her revenge on her brother
Sounds familiar?
We have everything in S4 from the list. It’s a proper Gothic story with Gothic props, scenes and characters. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Mary also fulfills the characteristics of a ghost. “She’s a dead woman walking.” She emerged from the grave to haunt the living, twice:
She stole the identity of Mary Morstan to haunt the living,
she started sending her posthomous DVDs after she supposedly gets killed in TST.
And I didn’t even started to analyze TAB because I would be rambling for a while here, and if I wouldn’t be that lazy, I’d write more about my ideas in this topic.
I hope that my brief introduction to Poe’s works helped us to confuse us a little bit more. 😀
Now that some time has passed, I was taking a look back
through the promotional materials for Season 4, and I noticed something.
I apologize if someone has already mentioned this stuff! I looked around for a
meta with this topic, but I didn’t find one, so here we go!
I recall that when the promotional materials for Season 4
were released we all sort of commented on how dark everything in the photos
appears, what the hair looked like, how the burned out flat photo with just
Sherlock and John in it looks like a heart, and how the smiley doesn’t show up
in the reflection in the flooded photo. I also recall intense discussion about
the three photos in the chess themed set, and how the leak of the final photo
drew so much attention from The Powers That Be. All of these are valid catches, but I noticed a few other
things relating to the promos.
I’m not sure what they all mean, to be honest, but I do know
that everything on this show is deliberate, so…
1.
There are still no photos of Eurus/Sian Brooke in
the official photos on the BBC One Sherlock site. Surely by now it would be ok
to release some. I mean, Sian Brooke is attractive and well known enough to
warrant some photos! They have certainly included her in some of the post
season videos. But if you’re looking for a lovely, composed, high resolution
shot of Eurus or any of her personalities, you’re going to be disappointed. I
think this is weird, especially given that we see both Culverton Smith and Jim
Moriarty (and he was a big secret) in the photos.
2. This photo is NOT of 221B. Look closely.
The smiley is different than the original! It’s tilted wrong and aligns with the wallpaper differently.It’s just not the same. I know I have seen a meta on the Miss Me Smiley from this image:
The burned out smiley almost looks like a mirrored version of this one, doesn’t it?
So what about this bumped out area in the wall in our 221b? Not there in the burned out flat.
Where are the windows on either side of the
room? Again, not there.
And what about that trim high up on the burned out
left wall? Not there in 221b.
The people in this show KNOW their set.
This can’t be a mistake or something where they thought, hey…that’s close
enough.
So what does it mean?
3.
Now on to the seven images that they released
the week before the season started. One a day, a right? Burned out flat in the
background. I noticed a few things about these images.
But first, this image for reference:
Every one of these characters is wearing the same clothing as the group shot, but with a
coat/jacket added in the individual photos, with one exception.
Take a look:
(Greg’s photo is missing from the BBC One Sherlock site. A little odd, given the wind-up they gave these each day…but anyway.)
Molly.
Molly is the exception. Her clothing is completely different under her lab coat.
To me, it seems like this singles her out in some way. Just like they single Mycroft out in another way.
Can you see it?
It’s the smiley again. In each of the other six photos, the smiley moves around, but it is the original smiley from 221b. The size, shape, and orientation are correct.
But Mycroft’s smiley is different.
It’s the strange, new smiley from the burned out flat photo, and unlike the other character shots, this smiley isn’t on the 221b wallpaper.
I think it may have been @the-7-percent-solution who commented to the effect that if you want to mess with people’s heads, just mess with their surroundings. Make things a little bit off, and that will make the audience uncomfortable, and they probably won’t even recognize why. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Or maybe there is some deeper meaning.
I don’t know for sure, but I do still believe that these weird details are part of a larger plan. The cast and crew are too attuned to the details of the show to overlook errors or do things half-assed.
Thoughts?
As always, apologies for tagging the unwilling or missing a
tag! Please share with whoever may be interested. Thank you!!
Wow okay these are some really cool points I’m so happy you tagged me @bluebluenova!! ❤ One thing that stuck out to me was your mention of the smiley face being reflected in the burnt down flat photo. That got me thinking…what if the burnt flat photo is a literal reflection from a mirror, possibly the mirror above the mantle? Two reasons why I think this:
1) The skull is on the mantle under the mirror, and we clearly see it by Sherlock’s feet in the burnt flat photo. Also, the first thing I think of when I see that photo is that Sherlock and John are in front of where the fireplace and mirror should be, except there’s a hole where it’s blown out – but what if they are meant to symbolically stand in for the missing mirror?
2) This is the realization that really freaked me out. Do you guys see that weird hallway with stretching into the distance behind John and Sherlock? With occasional rectangular frame/column things? Here I’ll even outline it for you:
When you mentioned the smiley face on that wall being a reflection, i made a connection between those hallway/door frames and mirrors. Because look what happens to the reflection when you place two mirrors parallel to each other:
(Literally just googled parallel mirrors reflection, hope no one sues me)
Infinite mirrors. Infinite reflections.
THE HALLWAY LITERALLY LOOKS LIKE THE FRAMES OF THE REFLECTION OFF ANOTHER MIRROR AS IT GOES INTO INFINITY I’M KIND OF FREAKING OUT.
To make it worse, you also see bits of the infinite frame/mirror/reflection motif in the close-ups of the other characters hahahahahaaaaaaa
What does it all mean? Is everything and everyone in s4 a dream? What’s the metaphorical significance of parallel mirrors? Is the whole season literally a distorted of infinite reflections from the mirror on top of the mantle piece? Can you hear my internal screaming from across the internet?
Of course, some people will look at this parallel and say, “oh, Moftiss are bad writers because they are tonally inconsistent. They can’t decide if violence is funny or serious.” But I think the contrast was totally deliberate on their part. This is precisely the point they are making: not only is John Watson repeatedly inclined toward violence, but we are all implicated by it.
This is, in fact, the story they’ve been telling since the beginning, which I talked about in my meta, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Season 3. From the first episode, we were meant to read John as an Everyman, as relatable, as a basically good guy who is “like us”, compared to inscrutable, morally questionable geniuses like Sherlock, Mycroft, Moriarty, and Adler.
HLV and S4 then deliberately undermined that reading, not just by showing us that John has a dark side, but that we always knew his dark side, but we laughed about it or brushed it off or considered it charming that he killed a man in the first episode and giggled about it. It’s not just that John has a dark side – it’s that anyone who chooses to watch (or write) a show like Sherlock has a bit of darkness in them too.
It’s particularly telling that John’s line I quoted above – “We did
see it coming. We always saw it coming. But it was fun.”
– is meant to be about Sherlock, when really it better describes himself.
Yeah, I was just talking about this yesterday: the ideas/ideals and projections people in fandom have had about John. It was more rampant before Series 3, but there’s been another, greater shock with the violence in TLD ‘cause of course, it’s much less justified.
I do think we’re all implicated, on one level. At the same time, I wouldn’t necessarily say the narrative is suggesting all of John’s violence is intentionally portrayed as problematic, because everyone is violent (and it lacks serious consequences), it being part of the genre. Mary shot Sherlock to the point of him flat-lining, but was pretty easily forgiven and faced *no* criminal charges for armed assault of an innocent any more than John did for killing the cabbie to save Sherlock’s life. Needless to say, Sherlock shot Magnussen in cold blood and never faced trial. My point is that it’s odd to point specifically to John’s violence when even Molly slaps Sherlock to make a point, unless you admit this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of and projection onto the character. Everything may not be funny, but it still exists in the context of a universe that condones violence, on some level. And indeed, while John is clearly self-hating and deeply disappointed in himself for his treatment of Sherlock in TLD, he is forgiven and accepted by Sherlock. I doubt the audience is meant to finally hold his behavior against John as a way of ‘taking it seriously’ this time. Not if we’re meant to forgive Mary without anything but that passing apology before her death in TST.
And so, if it’s not about provoking serious moral judgment, what role is John’s violence playing in the narrative? I think Ivyblossom’s post on the subject addressed this pretty well: a way of pushing John to his lowest point, to get to a narrative resolution of his issues and the stuff he kept unspoken or misunderstood with Sherlock.
If we’re implicated with the show’s violence in general, it continues with all the moral dilemmas Sherlock faced in TFP. Eurus kept challenging him to choose, to find the best or most moral solution. We also saw that assumption that violence would come easily enough to John, after Sherlock handed the gun to kill the Governor first and Mycroft couldn’t do it, as we have discussed earlier. The point is that John couldn’t do it either, of course, not in cold blood. John is a soldier, but he is still a good man, after all– as is Mycroft, for that matter. That kind of refusal to kill an individual for the ‘greater good’ or for rational reasons is a classic distinguishing trait of heroes, particularly in action genre films. It’s why Mary’s easy dismissal of the idea of not killing Magnussen in HLV brought her censure from John, who remains the embodiment of the moral principle of BBC Sherlock, flaws and all. Of course, John is flawed and human– that’s the ‘whole point’, even– but he’s the person who taught Sherlock to ‘save the life’ rather than solving the mystery, as he said in TSoT. That’s what allowed Sherlock to defuse the situation with Eurus in TFP, hugging her at the end. Sherlock’s arc resolves with him becoming a forgiving, empathetic human being who accepts the darkness in others as well as embracing the light in himself.
Sherlock imagining himself and John having this conversation:
JOHN: Yes. SHERLOCK: Well, there you are, you see? I’ve said it all before. JOHN: No, I wrote all that. You’re quoting yourself from The Strand Magazine. SHERLOCK: Well, exactly. JOHN: No, those are my words, not yours! That is the version of you that I present to the public: the brain without a heart; the calculating machine. I write all of that, Holmes, and the readers lap it up, but I do not believe it.
Why the conversation continued here in real life?
SHERLOCK: As I think I have explained to you many times before, romantic entanglement, while fulfilling for other people-
JOHN: -would complete you as a human being.
Why didn’t they have this scene stand for itself in the pilot?
Why leave this question unresolved?
JOHN: Listen, has he ever had any kind of… girlfriend, boyfriend, a relationship, ever?
MRS HUDSON: I don’t know.
Why place so much emphasis on Sherlock’s virginity, from here:
To here:
To here:
To here:
To here:
Exactly – why DOES Eurus ask? Why do any of them ask? If the point was that Sherlock was asexual, or entirely “dedicated to [his] work”, they would cover it once, maybe twice, and that would be the end of the discussion. They don’t do that, though. They keep bringing it up.
This is another example of an unfired Chekov’s gun. If Season 4 was meant to be a possible finale for the show, how could they just leave this loose thread here? The prospect of romance (and sex) in relation to Sherlock has been brought up numerous times, but nothing has come of it. At the end of season 4, Sherlock is not in a relationship. Neither is John. One or both of them should be, however, for these scenes to have had any purpose at all.
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.“
If you want to see the whole flowchart in one image, download it here.
Creating this flowchart has required me choose what to include and what to leave out. If you think that I have missed something, I’d be happy to hear from you, but please read the comments first, in case I had excluded that information for a reason.
I have completely lost track of who is discussing what in the aftermath of s4, but I’ll tag a few people under the cut anyway, hoping that you are interested. Let me know if you don’t want to be tagged in the future!
Sherlock Fandom Archive 