It is ludicrous says pride It is foolish says caution It is impossible says experience It is what it is says love
IM SORRY IM INVADING UR POST BRUNA BUT FUCK ME UP BUT IF THIS ISNT A DESCRIPTION FOR EVERY SEASON
It is ludicrous says pride
sherlock knows he’s falling in love but he can’t let himself feel these so long repressed emotions, he tries to hold himself over everyone, it’s absurd because he had been hurt before and he wont let himself do that again
It is foolish says caution
he has accepted that he loves him but the concept of him and john is foolish at the moment because of the danger moriarty is, he is very cautious because he doesn’t want to risk john’s life because of his feeling for him
It is impossible says experience
sherlock thinks it’s impossible for him to be with john, he believes he has lost every chance with him and there’s no way he can be with him because of mary too
It is what it is says love
and holy shit s4 was him accepting what it is and letting himself love john freely but we barely get any romance in s4 (except the embrace)??? sorry to tinhat but oh god if this isnt in ep4
the fact that they didn’t only say ‘john watson won’t be uploading this blog’ they also linked the bbc programme website for ‘more sherlock content’, which makes sense that while the blog in-universe is being ‘updated’ we have no traces of that in our world…. meaning that s4 is john writing the official, clean version of what happened post-tarmac, plus details of embellishments here and there (the gay hairstyle he wishes he could pull off for example that doesn’t make sense in the show timeline but john wants it anyway)
Like is it just me or are the red walls in the Garridebs room strangely reminiscent of the walls in the building where John and Sherlock solved their first case?
@jenna221b did a meta about Eurus’s cell looking like the morgue from TLD, but there is this element as well. The furniture is the same design as from Sherlock’s fight scene with Ajay.
There was foreshadowing about this in TBB.
The same visual memories are being recycled. So far, I’ve written or contributed to six metas on this topic, but it just keeps popping up. This links to a few of them. ( x ) @teaandqueerbaiting@may-shepard
To clear the air: I’m not just talking about Moftiss. But I’m also talking about Moftiss.
The thing about plot holes is that there are two types: ones which are unresolved plot threads, and things wherein the writers failed to show us something and assumed we would fill it in ourselves. An example of the first type would be John’s letter to Sherlock at the end of TST. Why introduce the letter if it was never going to be shown, read, or referred to again? An example of the second type is how John got out of the well and still had feet in later scenes. There, the writers could have showed us John realising that only his shoes were chained and showed him removing them and climbing up the rope, or they could have showed someone climbing down to cut through the chains. But it feels like a hole because they didn’t.
Eurus *could* have used all of her brainwashed fellow inmates/patients to make all of those arrangements, but without seeing any of it, it feels difficult to swallow. If they’d shown even one scene of her doing some of this, we might have been more willing to extend some benefit of the doubt, some extrapolation of “oh, I guess there was more of that, then, ok”, but we didn’t see any of it. There was nothing there to explain how supposedly-dead Mary kept sending posthumous home videos.
Then again, most Bond/spy movies do the same thing, honestly. If Bond’s credit cards were cut off, how did he rent that Aston Martin? Where did he get that new suit? Last time we saw him, he was wearing jeans and a ripped t-shirt and had no luggage with him. Has he been wearing the same underwear for the entire movie? Does he ever brush his teeth? Personally, I’m one of those irritating watchers who always wants to be shown the parts that make it feel real. I suspect that screen writers leave this stuff out deliberately for three reasons:
1) They think it will be dull. They figure audiences don’t want to see Bond trying on shirts or going to the bank to take out cash or maxing out on a credit card. Better put in some more car chases!
2) They’re already trying to edit things down to fit into a prescribed run time. Therefore Bond doing cardio to keep fit for all those foot chases gets cut.
3) They actually don’t want the protagonist (or villain, as the case may be) to seem human; they want us to see them as almost super-human, so Bond clipping his toenails never gets written.
The thing is, the day and age of willing suspension of disbelief is over. Audiences are more analytical than they used to be. We’re used to getting explanations when we want them, because information is so widely available now. When things don’t add up or make sense, we find it irritating, not artistic. I honestly think that Moffat and Gatiss think they’re being artistic by not explaining things fully (though that doesn’t excuse them by a mile for constantly underplaying the realistic emotional fall-out of the things their characters suffer), but the fact is that their audience simply finds it underwhelming and sloppy. I think it may be partly a question of generations, too, but I also know fans of Sherlock who are their age and older, who find their plot holes as irritating as fans in their teens do. Personally, the more realistic something is, the more it will draw me in. I want to know where Bond got those dry socks from to replace the ones that got wet in the rain. I want to see him jet-lagged after flying halfway around the world. I want to know how he paid to get to that island or that city without any working credit cards or debit cards. You can’t book a flight with cash, not a commercial one, at least. “He took a charter,” the screen writer says, shrugging it off in an interview. Sure, fine: then show it.
Moffat mentioned somewhere that Sherlock delivered Rosie, which is a frankly appalling thought, especially given that there was an actual doctor in the car, and given Sherlock’s horrified face at the thought of an event involving female genitalia unfolding in his very presence, I somehow can’t picture this in the slightest.
Part of the problem is also that their episodes span too much time too rapidly to address the questions of how their day-to-day relationships function, what those dynamics really are, etc. Too much is skipped over for the sake of advancing the plot. I would personally rather see more attention given to detail and less to unbelievable plot arcs. I expect Doctor Who to be wholly unbelievable (and even there I used to snark about dropped plot threads and unsatisfactory resolutions as well as under-handled emotional fall-out, when I still watched it). I expect Sherlock to be believable, though, and there was just so many holes.
All I’m saying is that Sherlock is not the only show that does this. There are a LOT of holes in series 3 and 4, but my larger issue is the emotional fall-out thing and the dropped threads. (Why make such a big deal with the memory altering drug? Why was there a dog bowl that Sherlock recognised? What did that damned letter say??? What did Ella tell Sherlock to do for John? Because I bet it wasn’t “go to hell, Sherlock”, yet that’s the advice he chose to take. Why???) Yeah: we like to be shown these things. It’s not enough to explain it later in an interview or a panel at a conference. Put it right there in the canon as though you meant to all along. That’s what ticks my boxes, at least.
Rambling aside. Back to the current fic. As you were!
THIS!!!!
S4 has so very many plot holes and inexplicable behaviors due to lack of exposition that fans are left stranded on islands of WTF? And we’re really not used to that kind of swiss cheese plotting from Moftiss; we ARE well used to clues and callbacks and promises of future reveals that are tantalizing and brain stimulating. There’s no point to analyzing each episode if the episodes don’t build on what has gone before by way of story arc or characterization. We can’t do our fan job of obsessing over details that are disconnected and irrelevant in the long run–there’s no payoff, and Moftiss should well know about payoff!
Personally, I’m left with all kinds of doubt and disbelief over Mary’s death and supposed “redemption,” which doesn’t work for me at all. Since HLV (and more recently, the script for HLV), I have been firmly in the camp that places Mary as an operative of Moriarty’s, as a psychopathic killer who has little experience of love other than a possessive need to own. Brilliant, cunning, capable of incredible charm, Mary is a perfect arch-villain and wily opponent of Sherlock Holmes…the Sherlock who discovered his heart. And S4 does show, in a circuitous and torturous way, that Mary is the one who ultimately strove to burn the heart out of Sherlock, using John as her torch.
To me, Mary Morstan is the biggest plot hole in S4, and the one I struggle with the most to understand. John’s aberrant behavior (especially with Sherlock) is an outgrowth of the reshaping and redemption of Mary’s character in the scripts, along with the rampant allusions to drugs and hallucinations.
In S4, the “reality” of Sherlock’s world is in question, in all three episodes. So what are we to make of it all???
I appreciate the collection of perspectives, which I myself love perusing. My own view is probably closest to Ivy’s, in that I can’t think they’re ‘making love too difficult to work’ because even in this, John and Sherlock parallel each other. In their difficulty, their brokenness, their painfully sharp edges. I mean, we definitely love their idealized selves in fandom, and create new legends around them as much as we psychoanalyze and decide when something is ‘too much’. But it’s the characters who could really tell you when it’s too much, and I think that finally, in TLD we see that Sherlock and John see and accept all of one another. You could say that *theoretically* this should break them, but in fact it makes them stronger. If nothing else, by the end of TFP, it seems they’re happy. It’s not a tragedy, after all. It’s just a brutal thing to watch, they’re definitely both traumatized, by this and many other things. Their brokenness is supposed to be something they can use, though. As Ivy said, John’s flaws are part of what Sherlock needs and can use. The violence is part and parcel of how it works, because Sherlock knows how to help John channel it, how to make London into John’s warzone. And sometimes it’s all too much, but that’s been true for Sherlock, too. Sometimes Sherlock himself is way, way too much. But somehow they’re exactly what the other needs and can handle. That’s the secret of their dynamic.
Of course, I agree, it didn’t have to explore this possibility, even if it always existed in the realm of the possible for this or any Holmes and Watson. But at the same time, this started in Series 3, ‘cause they kept not dealing with the old traumas enough, ever since Reichenbach, and then piling on complications. John was set on a collision course with himself as soon as he married Mary and she turned out to be the worst possible option. It was a bad decision compounded by her pregnancy and further exacerbated by the ensuing series of events– that unfortunate vow, the shooting, Sherlock back on drugs and saying he killed Magnussen ’cause he’s a sociopath, Sherlock pushing them back together and John choosing to do it without dealing with any of their problems. Everything kept being swept under the rug, with the only explanation being that John ‘chose her’ and he should just deal with it. So he let it go, and let it go, and controlled himself and held back. And then (as Martin Freeman said), he just needed an excuse when he failed again (this time to protect Mary). In John’s mind, someone has to be in control: usually that’s Sherlock ’cause as Ivy said earlier, Sherlock can do anything. Sherlock is his superhero; his ‘commander’. Alternatively, of course, John *himself* expects to be in control, or it’s a personal failure. Remember how he took it in HLV, with Sherlock telling him (ruthlessly, from John’s perspective) that he chose Mary: it’s his ‘fault’. John automatically jumps to the question of whose *fault* it was that Mary was the way she was, and he wasn’t ready to take responsibility and accept this, but Sherlock pushed and so he did. Then, when another traumatic event happens, John doesn’t have any reserve left, I guess.
What I’m saying is, I think many of us knew that some kind of reckoning had to be coming for John in S4. But all the talk about John’s arc was mostly supposed to be about John getting better, not worse. And if he got worse, we expected to see him recover, step by step. And that didn’t happen. We got a hint, a first step, and I understand why that’s not enough for many people. At the very least, though, I don’t think it’s the same as the ‘tragic gays’ trope would have it. In TLD, even if they didn’t show us everything, they showed enough that it’s clear they do always save each other, even if it’s not in the ways that Mary or anyone else would expect. Even if John can’t see it anymore, or thinks he’s not that person, he’s still the person who makes Sherlock better. And when John stumbles, Sherlock would believe it enough for the both of them. And I do think, in the end, that it is enough.
I haven’t obtained the DVD of BBC Sherlock Season 3 yet so I can view the episode with commentary, but I am wondering if Mark Gatiss obtained some of his inspiration for the case presented in “The Empty Hearse” from a short story written by Conan Doyle called “The Lost Special,” published in 1898. It is implied to be a Sherlock Holmes story, although his name is never used. The story’s narrative mode is third person, subjective, although the narrator is never identified either.
In TEH, Sherlock concludes that the terrorist (Moran) who gets on the train, but never gets off, waylaid one of the cars onto abandoned tracks that no one knew about. In Doyle’s “The Lost Special,” a privately hired train (a special) on its journey from Liverpool to London not only never reaches its destination, but seems to disappear into thin air. A letter sent to The Times by “an amateur reasoner of some celebrity at that date” is excerpted at one point, the style of which suggests that the author is probably Holmes. This “recognized authority upon such matters” suggests that the train and its passengers were destroyed by a mafia-type crime syndicate. He suggests the train was directed onto unused tracks leading to an abandoned mine nearby. The theory meets with heated opposition, although objectors fail to supply any alternative. Authorities do not act on the proposal and the public never shows any interest because a political scandal has distracted their attention.
Eight years later, a criminal mastermind called Herbert de Lernac, scheduled for execution in Marseilles, confesses to the crime, revealing details that vary only slightly from what the amateur sleuth proposed. De Lernac suppresses the names of his employers, but threatens to reveal them if he is not granted a pardon, suggesting that they may be well known public – perhaps even political – figures.
Poster for “The Lost Special” (1932) a Universal movie serial based on the story of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle. This adaptation moves events from England to the American West.
The Sherlock Holmes pastiche series Solar Pons by August Derleth treated this story as canon with its own version, “The Adventure of the Lost Locomotive.”
Sherlock says, ‘Five minutes. It took her just five minutes to do all of this to us’. And then, ‘well, not on my watch’. Now, he means that while he’s in in charge of the situation (to whatever limited extent) he’s not going to let either Mycroft or John die, of course. This has already been said by both the Holmes Brothers in TST.
But, the play on the word, ‘watch’, really struck me and reminded me of Anderson’s version of the fall. At the end of his story, Derren Brown comes and hypnotises John, setting his watch back what looks like five minutes (we cut away near the four minute mark but the hand is still moving).
I thought these two things might be connected or that there might be a reference to TEH and to Anderson’s story. Or a reference to Derren Brown, even.
‘Five minutes: not on my watch’, is what John might say if he knew that Derren Brown hypnotised him; if Anderson’s story were true.
This is interesting to me because a couple of shots in s4 seemed to linger on watches, like we were supposed to notice. There are two that I can think of with John’s watch. Once during the texting scene in his kitchen in TST, and again in the Watson house when John picks up his phone from the bedside table. His watch is sitting there as well.
There was another scene in 221b, I think, with Sherlock’s watch, but I can’t recall which episode right now.
oh yeah! and there’s also that time where a magnifying glass looks like Sherlock’s watch and it’s like O.O ‘what are you trying to tell us here? pay attention to the time? the watch? the what???’
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