Indeed. When I first saw this scene, yes, it was kind of funny, but all in all I felt really sorry for him. They break into his house, change his movies, terrorise him in his own home… All of this because they want Mycroft to say it, and instead of, say, snooping in his documents (which is something much more easier to make, and doesn’t instantly give away anything), they decide to go to his own house, interrupt the only leisure moment we see him have in the show, and scare him until he admits it, even reaching to the point of disarming him, leaving him with no bullets, for him to lose almost all of his dignity, and then proceed to laugh about it. And then, instead of listening to his “it’s dangerous, so don’t do anything stupid” advice, they decide to bully him until he admits to ask help from them. And I’ll repeat it. Ask. It’s not like “hey, you’re my big bro, and this is a problem that affects us all, so let’s figure it out”. It’s more of a “hey, you secret keeper, ask us help, and then we’ll help you out.”
So yes, it might seem like a funny scene. But it really isn’t, for me at least.
But what I find interesting is that Sherlock’s charade is a smaller version of Eurus’ head games later in the episode. They both indulge in the idea of terrifying people – family members even – until they reveal the truth to you. (Which makes me think there were some understandable reasons for Mycroft keeping Eurus and Sherlock separated.)
I chose to believe that Sherlock recognised those similarities as he got to experience it from the other side, and it made him regret how he treated Mycroft. (It makes sense given the uncharacteristic concern shown by asking Greg to look after Mycroft and defending Mycroft to their parents.)
“But what I find interesting is that Sherlock’s charade is a smaller version of Eurus’ head games later in the episode.”
I.. I.. I never thought of this way and now I can’t think of it in any other way holy fuck…
This gets really interesting if you accept the mind-bungalow concept that TFP is playing out in John’s subconscious as he lays dying on his therapist’s oddly-striking rug. Because this is the Sherlock John thought he saw after the old woman’s murder in TGG: someone driven by the Game until he’s just plain cruel. And there’s John right behind him, all smug (and uncaring) smiles.
This is John’s nightmare, both of Sherlock and himself.
The thing I really like about TFP, especially working within an EMP theory of some sort, is that Sherlock becomes so human. He is shaken. He struggles, is sometimes wrong. He refuses to make a calculating decision by shooting Mycroft or John. And he’s so empathetic toward Eurus (and if anyone has a right to simply hate her, maybe even more than Mycroft, I think it’s Sherlock.
Here’s the beautiful bit: if this is all in John’s mind, this isn’t about the audience learning Sherlock isn’t some kind of ubermensch who transcends the mere mortals around him.We already know that. It’s about John learning that. It’s in many ways the Garridebs revelation, slightly inverted. And a lot of the time I’m too scared and jaded to really believe in overarching purpose and details that mean that, but when I’m brave enough to go there, this is the bit I love.
I saw a post saying that if Sherlock didn’t mean the ILY, the scene loses all its significance. So here’s the thing: The tests Eurus put them through were supposed to be psychologically traumatizing.
There’s no way this applies if Sherlock really did mean the ILY. Sherlock telling the woman he loves that he loves her is as horrible as being forced to kill someone? Sherlock telling the woman loves that he loves her makes him furious enough to smash a coffin to bits? No.
The whole point of the test was that he didn’t reciprocate her feelings. And realizing that really only takes common sense:
PART 1: CONTEXT
Sherlock knows she has feelings for him. At first he was cruel to her, but around S3, he started being nicer- no longer shutting her down and instead politely ignoring her feelings because she’s useful to him and he owes her after the fall. Over time, he has grown to appreciate her as a trusted friend.
So when Sherlock forces out an ‘I love you’ to save her from being blown up, it hurts. She doesn’t know he’s trying to save her. She probably thinks that this is the only way she’ll ever be able to hear those words from him. Or maybe she thinks he means it, but he knows he’ll have to break her heart later for the umpteenth time. And the worst part is… it was all for nothing. There were no bombs. Sherlock is so furious that he smashes a coffin.
Those aren’t the actions of someone who realized in that moment that he loved Molly. That’s someone who’s had to reject her time and time again, but over the years grew to be kinder, and now just had to throw away all that progress and manipulate her in the most horrible way he ever has.
This even shows in his facial expressions. That first pathetic attempt is not the face of someone who’s going to realize he loves her 2 seconds later. She told him to say it like he meant it. The clock was ticking down and she wasn’t responding, so he ups his game and says it normally.
PART 2: AFTERMATH
As soon as it’s over, he’s relieved he saved her. The aftermath is the coffin smashing, because he’s furious he had to hurt her again when he’s grown from doing that… and it was all for nothing. I’d be pissed too.
Where’s the aftermath in his facial expressions or actions if he just realized he loved her? It’s not there. But all we get with Molly in terms of resolution is a split second of her in an ending montage where everyone is back to normal doing their thing. I really don’t think there’s any significance in the fact that she’s smiling. I suppose it just means we can assume she and Sherlock made up off-screen (which I think is an injustice to her.)
All the main characters were in the montage, that includes Molly. I mean, what were they going to do? Close the show with everyone else happy, but she’s over in a corner sobbing? If her importance was bumped up to that of a love interest for Sherlock, they easily could’ve shown that by having her do more than just standing there and walking in.
PART 3: MEANING
So no, if Sherlock didn’t mean the ILY, the scene does not lose all its significance. In fact, I think if meant it, the scene becomes cheap and senseless, and his actions before, during, and afterwards don’t make sense.
It’s because he didn’t mean it the scene is so emotional and heavy. It’s a cruel play on how much he’s manipulated her in the past and how he’s changed, but now had to do it again for no reason.
It’s powerful because at one point in time, Sherlock wouldn’t have cared if he hurt someone as a means to an ends. But he’s grown. He cared when he realized John was hurt by him faking his death. From that, he learned he can’t just fuck with people’s feelings, that includes Molly. And that’s why it hurts so much when he’s forced to play with her heart again.
I find this way more powerful than if he meant it.
This context and meaning is completely lost on Sherl0lly shippers who block everything else out and only focus on the fact that he said ‘I love you’ and she said it back. They believe it made their ship canon, even though if a ship is canon, it would be clear to every viewer, not just shippers on tumblr. And the creators would likely acknowledge it as well, not suggest Molly went and shagged someone.
Part 4: WAS IT WORTH IT?
While it is powerful and tragic and all, all this scene did was hurt Molly for no reason other than to show us that (as we’ve seen before) Sherlock has grown emotionally since S1.
On a totally surface level (which is how most viewers watch the show) Molly only existed in this scene to be a prop for a man’s emotional pain. On a surface level, she wasn’t treated with respect by the writers. The fact that Moftiss went in a room and whipped this out when they were told to change the scene should tell you that. I really feel like they didn’t give two second’s thought to what this would do to Molly.
The problem is that for 4 seasons, Molly’s most definable character trait has been her crush. Yes, we know she’s a pathologist, but she is still known first and foremost as the girl who likes Sherlock. They took that concept, dragged it out for way too long, and then threw it in her face by making her cry into the phone and admit something she wasn’t ready to admit.
I, for one, don’t think showing us Sherlock has grown up was worth emotionally destroying Molly. Especially since we’ve seen his growth demonstrated before, and she didn’t even get a resolution.
Even minor characters don’t deserve to be used as props so blatantly at their expense.
so ever since i’ve watched the lying detective, even more than once, i’ve had trouble understanding the meaning of this dialogue at the end of the episode
SHERLOCK: It’s not a pleasant thought, John, but I have this terrible feeling from time to time that we might all just be human.
JOHN: Even you?
SHERLOCK: No. Even you.
now i recently watched the episode with my mom for like the fourth time or so, and since then, i’ve been endulging myself in video edits, metas, posts, etc. mostly about that episode. but a little while ago as i was watching this brilliant edit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njAhpocOO84 by buckysmyfriend, that part showed up towards the end. and then it hit me like a brick. so to start john says his “even you” because he’s implying the typical ‘sherlock being a machine without a heart scenario,’ (which we know isn’t true of course). BUT. the reason sherlock says that it’s not himself, but john, is because of john’s mistake of cheating. John Watson. making a mistake. doing what humans do, which is making mistakes. but it’s a terrible feeling to sherlock because of how he’d always thought of john.he never really considered john to be ‘human.’ he thought he was the one thing humans weren’t. he thought john wasperfect.
Exactly. I was just thinking about that scene today… and I don’t think about Sherlock much anymore. That’s precisely what Sherlock meant: he realized everyone is human and capable of error… and while he knew that very much about himself, he was just now learning that it was true about John.
I disagree. Yes, the „being human“ is about not being perfect. But this is not a change in perspective for Sherlock, but for John. John was the one hurting because he tried to fulfill a too high standard. John was beating himself up for not being perfect. And Sherlock was reminding him, that he as well is only human, that he‘s allowed to make mistakes and to be forgiven and forgive himself for these mistakes. It‘s a revelation for John, not for Sherlock.
Oh, I can’t believe it! This is amazing, @ebaeschnbliah. You surely remember how I kept going on about the changed layout of the Watson flat which drove me crazy. And now this!
And then of course the box falling open – this is a wonderful discovery.
I can’t remember ever being more frustrated by a TV show episode than I have been after watching The Lying Detective. (The Final Problem left me so numb that I reacted in a totally apathetic way.) What I personally got from this episode is that Steven Moffat decided to kill Johnlock off, not in the mortuary scene, but in the hug scene. I know it’s an unusual viewpoint but I would like to explain why I have this opinion. This hug seems to me like the seal on the ending of their romantic potential. Despite being mad at Steven Moffat for this, I admit one thing: this is an ingenious way to handle a tough issue if you are not sure whether you’ll have the chance to address it later.If.
This is truly a moment of proper, relatively deeper communication between Sherlock and John but I disagree with most fans that this step brings them closer to the notorious “romantic entaglement”. It doesn’t. The only positive attribute is that it heavily implies John was / has been in love with Sherlock and vice versa. This scene works as a subtle confirmation, which is relatively important but it does not work as a promise from the writers. This is clever because a confirmation is needed in case they return for a (better) series 5 but a promise should be avoided in case they don’t and their official ending is the one in The Final Problem.
In short, what happens in this scene is that we get implications that these two are in love but we are also told that both of them have completely given up hoping or expecting things. This for me is the greatest disappointment and the main reason I can’t like an episode that is otherwise mostly good. Sherlock and John are worn out by everything they ‘ve been through and the desire or excitement seems to have faded.
The most alarming sign of John’s fatigue is his controlled absence of jealousy when Sherlock gets a text from Irene, which confuses even Sherlock himself.
Sherlock looks bewildered by John’s uncharacteristic reaction. Sherlock tried to downplay the importance of Irene’s text because he was prepared for the usual jealous outburst, yet what he got was John pushing him to Irene, even being able to almost laugh at Sherlock’s firm abstinence. He frankly looks worried by this change in John’s attitude and I can only agree – all of John’s changes in attitude have been at least worrisome in series 4.
John is visibly tired. He has been for a long while but now he really lets it show. Does this mean he’s not in love with Sherlock anymore? No, I don’t think so. He wants more, doesn’t he? But he has clearly accepted the fact that he stands no chance with Sherlock and decided to sink in this bleak awareness. What’s worse (though justified), he feels he deserves it. He feels he should not have Sherlock after all and he makes it surprisingly clear when, after talking about Irene, this follows:
This is very sad but it makes sense. I think John and Sherlock would stop hoping for something to happen if they realized their relationship would be unhealthy. For both their sake.
In fact, I could believe this to be true, (I wouldn’t forgive the horrible s4 though) and it would make me understand the writers’ intentions, but then I couldn’t understand the whole groundbreaking thing. I mean, the BBC hinted at “making history” and Steven Moffat said once that it’s something never done before, that the other adaptations got wrong but with this show, they got it right.
Adapting into 21st century is not groundbreaking and making history to me. I’m not saying that what you said doesn’t make sense, but if it’s true, then they advertised it wrong.
But thank you for writing this 😊 I think it’s really well explained and it made me understand more what their intentions could be.
Sherlock bringing back the ‘if you’re looking for baby names’ in hlv ON THE TARMAC is so important, like, in s3 we learn how significant this one comment John made in asib really way because he hates his middle name and he knows that Sherlock was obsessed with it, so he blurts it out to get back Sherlock’s attention because he’s SO jealous and Sherlock doesn’t get it at that time but in tsot he realises what it meant and then in hlv he uses it to tell John that he understands now, that he feels the same way, but John probably forgot about the comment so Sherlock tries to tell him again that he’s in love with him but this time he tries to say it straight out but then in the last second he reconsiders because what’s the point of telling him what could have been if the chance is lost forever now any way? brnging this phrase back in s3 in its full extend is so important, take my heart
I hate this.
yep.
wow yes why do i have to suffer now fuck this shit
Ever since john’s “anyone but you” note plus his previous proclivity to
violence, i had always suspected that it was only a matter of time until
sherlock became his victim. the harsh truth is: THIS is how
martin’s/bbc’s john is like. flawed, violent, angry, imperfect. he’s NOT
the perfect saint that fandom has often very mistakenly characterize
him as in their fics
Not that I ever cared for the perfect saint but the thing is that John is such an OTT repulsive, violent idiot that it’s impossible to believe anyone would want to marry him or have him in their life as a friend. But we’re supposed to believe that both Mary and Sherlock predicted that this was how John would react if she died, and they thought it was okay.
Well, maybe they all deserve each other but I think it’s understandable when people who ship Johnlock don’t want him to be like that. Maybe if you want to read/write non-con and such but for an ordinary romance it’s hardly common to want violence and anger. Not that there aren’t countless fics where Sherlock is afraid of doing/saying something that doesn’t please saint John and he’ll leave. Never knew people found that sort of thing desirable but whatever. Many Johnlockers are weird that way, wanting Sherlock to worship saint John, no matter what. In fact, I believe the perfect John isn’t so much a misinterpretation of canon as it is a desire to have Sherlock worship John. I blame TJLCers, most of whom favoured John and wrote accordingly, and got others to write the same thing too, for which the conspirators of course can’t be blamed.
I don’t really understand this need to say that John’s actions in TLD were in character. So what? I mean, do people honestly believe that kicking Sherlock was good writing? Necessary for the episode? Making Johnlock better in fics? The show more enjoyable? Why did you ship it if you thought the next thing, judging by John’s character, was going to be him trying to kill Sherlock? And most importantly, why didn’t he ever hit and kick all those other characters far more deserving his anger and violence than Sherlock. Like Mary or Mycroft. If you can choose when and who you kick, you are not a predictably violent and angry person. You just choose your victim especially, rationally.
Don’t know if any of you “John’s violent and angry; this was only to expect” people were those who also believed he didn’t forgive Mary for shooting Sherlock and had a plan with Mycroft because he’s such a BAMF and great friend, but in case you are: LOL
This has come across my dash a couple of times the last few days, and I keep having the same reaction –
Right now I’m working on a show about heroin addiction, and a dominant point in almost every scene is how the addicts physically need to take a minimum amount of heroin just to keep from getting violently ill – they “maintain” to not get “dope sick.” That’s the part of addiction where the drug takes over the body and it almost doesn’t matter how badly you want to get off it – the alternative is, in the moment, worse.
Which is where Sherlock is in the first gif. John’s comment at first feels justifiably derisive and angry, but understanding that Sherlock is feeling not just a craving for a high but a real physical distress, real physical pain, the comment becomes insensitive and blind because yes, Sherlock really does need another hit right now. And it’s all there on his face and it rips my heart up each time I see it.
May I politely offer a counter perspective? I think John’s angry comment is not so much about Sherlock needing a hit in that moment, but rather that Sherlock has gotten himself into this situation by taking drugs in the first place. So, I don’t consider the derisive “need another hit, do you” to be an ignorant comment (as a doctor, John knows what Sherlock is going through and knows that he needs another hit to avoid painful withdrawal symptoms), but rather frustration and disappointment that Sherlock has let it get to this point.
Loving your alternate take @notesoflore. I think it’s so easy to forget that John’s had a history of dealing with addicts. He’s possibly even speaking as an addict himself.
All of this is exactly why this little scene is so painful and laden with so much repressed, bottled up anger and tension between them
Plus, I think John is ambivalent and angry that he’s being dragged along once again on one of Sherlock’s ridiculous adventures. He’s angry at himself for going along with it, and he’s angry with Sherlock for enticing him, so he lashes out with a passive aggressive snarky comment.
Yes, all of the above. Of course he knows, he’s an excellent doctor
There’s a lot been written about a scene in series four of Sherlock. Including how in “The Lying Detective” it was necessary that John Watson beat Sherlock Holmes—punching and kicking him, brutal and relentless.
The scene was thematically necessary, some have said, so that Sherlock would need to forgive John, just as John had to forgive Sherlock for vanishing for two years and la la la blah blah blah no no no NO NO NO.
In storytelling as in real life, in all the all that there bloody well is, tit does not mean tat, balance is not a universal prerequisite, and at no point is horrific physical abuse ‘thematically necessary,’ a fetching plot point, or a necessary evil. Not as part of ‘pay back’ not as part of a process of mutual forgiveness, not as part of storytelling, not as part of anything.
Here’s the thing, here is the absolute unmitigated truth of the thing:
Writing that sort of brutal scene is easy.
It.
is.
easy.
When I first started writing I wrote horrific things, I detailed terrors happening to human bodies. Because I wasn’t very good at writing and so I wrote what was easy to write. Abuse is seductively easy because it’s like a runaway train, it goes headlong of its own accord, it carries the momentum of the story all by itself and you don’t have to be a skilled writer to make people feel. They’ll always feel horrible when a character is beaten or used, you don’t have to have good prose, you do not have to be a good writer.
It’s much harder to tell hard stories without the lush set piece of a beating or a rape (because that’s how they’re so often used, they’re gorgeously framed, framed close close close). Hurt may happen to a character, sure yep, but the suffering pornography, the loving detail of it? It’s lazy writers like Mofftiss who love suffering porn. Why do you think so many women are raped and children killed in films and books? They’re shorthand. Crib notes. No-brainer ways to make us feel, to ‘move the story along,’ to give the hero pain as motivation. They show us the blood of abuse so we excuse the hero who goes on to abuse.
Lovingly detailing suffering isn’t skill. Breathless close-ups on misery are not good story telling. They’re lazy. They’re what we do when we don’t have much else in our writing arsenal.
We must have better arsenals.
— Refinery29 has some thoughts on this, including how rape is used merely as ‘a plot device.’ Share your thoughts with IP.
I never understand when people deem a scene/etc in this show to be “unrealistic” when the characters don’t behave properly, and they extrapolate that to the scene being either a) bad writing, or b) not real (*pick a theory any theory*).
Just because one “should” do something in a certain scenario doesn’t mean it’s unrealistic or bad writing or not real when they don’t. The rationale is always that because Sherlock and John ultimately love each other they’d never do anything to hurt the other. And, sorry, that’s just not realistic.
Absolutely. I hope I’m not hijacking here, but an example that immediately comes to mind is the infamous morgue scene. Now, I don’t know if that scene is real, because I like to keep my options open, but if it is, I don’t think it’s bad writing. I’ve argued since January that John losing his shit in that moment wasn’t unrealistic at *all* given the scenario, and just because someone doesn’t like it == trash. Every time I see “but John would never do that!!! Character assassination!!!” I just shake my head.
yes that scene in particular is one that gets talked about this way very often!! After it aired and there was no discussion about real/fake within s4 yet I think I defended it, not as “good” but as “not necessarily out of character.”
It’s a perfect example of this tendency of some people to demand morality, and when they don’t get it, to call it “bad writing” or use it as a clue that the scene is necessarily fake. I’m inclined to think it is fake* but the idea that “it’s unrealistic for nice John who loves Sherlock to act that way” is not sufficient evidence to prove it’s fake. Maybe John did behave that way. Maybe John felt a lot things because of it, maybe he learned something, maybe he refused to deal with it. We don’t know; what we do know is that we were presented with that scene so the more important question in terms of figuring out this show, is what does that tell us. Like, I don’t wanna try to answer that specifically here, but YEAH that scene is a great example!
*… in a general sense, in that s4 is a fiction that is likely based off certain real (in-universe) events similar to the way that the original ACD stories functioned, so determining it as “real” or “fake” is kind of irrelevant. That’s my take on it atm.
Thanks for this discussion. I ended up writing an entire meta that argues that John’s behaviour in that scene might not have been his choice, but I was just following the intertext–reading tld in connection with Doyle’s The Parasite. I don’t need that scene to be fake, but I do think that if we read it as real, or real-ish, it could (and should) cause some reconsideration of past understandings of John’s character, rather than simply making us wring our hands and proclaim it can’t be.
Maybe John isn’t the steady hand that supports Sherlock. Maybe he’s never been. Maybe he’s only ever been hanging on by a thread. Maybe he’s always hated himself. Maybe he’s never been able to manage his feelings. Maybe he still can’t. All of that is consistent with John as I understand him, and consistent with that awful scene, too.
I don’t like that scene. I don’t like how hard it was for people. I think it is textually undermotivated. But I don’t think it’s completely out of character.
Weirdly, I actually was just going through my old fics and I found one where I wrote a scene where John beats Sherlock up in Molly’s morgue after Mary dies. (I know, right?)
When I wrote it, it didn’t feel out of character, but that’s probably because:
1) John was unaware that Sherlock was alive. Plus, he had come to terms with his feelings for Sherlock and learned to love someone else, whom he married; and
2) John was in shock. Mary is brutally murdered (stabbed not shot, tho) and dies in John’s arms. Sherlock is on his way back to protect Mary and John, having just learned of the threat to them…but he is too late. He sees Mary die and does not heed anyone’s advice that this is hardly the time to announce to John that he is alive. He goes to the morgue and, well, you get the idea.
For me, John’s violent reaction felt realistic in this fic because the relationship between John and Mary had some genuine affection–the proportion of his grief had at least some context. He lashes out in fear and horror and probably because of PTSD, but he is immediately remorseful. And then, yeah, there is a cooling off period where he tries to reconcile himself to Sherlock being alive (and his anger about that), his guilt over Mary’s death…and his guilt that he now knows for sure that while he loved his wife, he will always love Sherlock more.
I just feel like genuine emotion was completely missing from the build-up in T6T, so John’s response in TLD seems petulant and petty and cruel.
But maybe that’s just me.
Wow? Wow. That is really interesting.
When I say I think the morgue scene is undermotivated, this is the kind of emotional punch I feel should have been there, but wasn’t. We’re asked to fill in the gaps, as we were with a bunch of other incidents in s4, which is why it felt flat, and was more than a bit of an affront. Fiction writing 101.
What’s the fic?
For me it is not the beating in the morgue that felt unrealistic, or out of character it was the fact that John was never shown to feel or express any real remorse for it. Neither was the damage that it did their relationship addressed. The most that happened was that John told Sherlock that he recognised that Mary’s death wasn’t Sherlock’s fault. The hug was one sided, and was Sherlock comforting John’s grief which was textually due his having cheated on Mary.
I have always written John as deeply troubled, emotionally repressed, and with an ever simmering undercurrent of violence. However, in S1 – S3 I think it is pretty clear that John knows that about himself, and is conflicted. He craves that adrenaline. He gets some sort of hit from the violence, but he is also terrified of it taking over, of deviating too far from the norm, of becoming some dark version of himself that he fights very hard to keep covered up.
So TLD gave us John succumbing to his worst fears, losing control, and beating Sherlock to a pulp, but then what…? There was no satisfying follow through for the audience. Sherlock comforted (even excused) John, but John did nothing in return. And to me THAT is what is bad writing. THAT is what is out of character. Not only was the scene, as @may-shepard says, ‘under-motivated’ (YES!) in the first place, but then the audience was also left to just assume that John and Sherlock somehow sorted it all out prior to TFP. As a viewer that is horribly unsatisfying.
And then, I think that people who just love ACD canon, Granada Holmes, or really any other adaptation that tries to stick close to canon have every right to cry ‘character assassination’. ACD’s Watson never would have done such a thing. And until HLV I don’t think it was really evident just how far these writers were planning to stray from canon.
Finally, in my opinion, if the only way a vast percentage of your most passionate viewers can make sense of your narrative is to assume a great portion of it is fake, then that alone is probably a good indicator that your writing went astray at some point. It’s saying that S4 feels so divergent from everything that came before it that it is jarring and confusing to the audience. They can’t make sense of it, so they have to dismiss it, or explain it away.
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