there is one outstandingly good thing about s4 and that is that they specifically wrote in a memory altering drug and therefore i can say whatever the fuck i want about anything i want and be like, well you don’t know that that’s not actually true
umbrellaswordgun (mycroft’s obvious jealousy over sherlock’s fieldwork skills resolved in fantasy)
the urge to see 221b blown up (i.e., did they have sex on this piece of furniture? It Must Go)
literally the entire eurus character is “caring is not an advantage” wrapped up in a hideous personified package
which mycroft must then unwrap as he comes to terms with john and sherlock’s new relationship
and then in the end he relinquishes his creepy overbearing possessiveness and allows sherlock his freedom
sherlock got the play the cool travel handy violin while mycroft was stuck learning the extremely inconvenient to travel with piano. more jealousy, of course.
the molly thing, and this actually is serious, could be because mycroft views molly as easily manipulated and therefore a better partner for sherlock – he would be able to manipulate her the way he cannot manipulate john.
see? literally the more you think about this the more sense it makes.
the fade to black/sexy cutaway in tld is because mycroft walks in as they are kissing. it’s perfect timing!! and then mycroft is like, i’ll take that td12 straight to the vein, lads, and he wishes, in order, that he could: cope by eating cake, cope by shooting himself, cope by blowing himself up, cope by throwing himself down some stairs, and then cope by being someone else entirely
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…
ok. i want to talk about this. i think the theory in which our boys are intermittently drugged with TD-12 is very possible. i’ve been on the fringes of this theory for a while, certain that SOMETHING other than the drugs Sherlock is taking (because heroin or cocaine do not cause hallucinations – because whilst withdrawal could cause insomnia, we see that Sherlock doses just before he goes in to meet Culverton. He is not withdrawing here. He’s literally just used, they made a point to include that). We got a really good discussion going over here, my previous meta/theory/whatever on Sherlock and his drug habits – we concluded that he’s probably taking a whole bunch of stuff, but for the sake of this particular meta, I’m going to assume he’s not wandering around London with a myriad of different, incredibly illegal substances. The context of the conversations had point to him needing a ‘top up’, which makes me think heroin (even though he says he feels ‘psychedelic’ which isn’t really… heroin, but I think he’s just referencing the fact that he’s high rather than anything else). He’s also not really “acting” high, which sort of makes sense seeing as heroin users get to a point where they need more just to function normally (and Sherlock’s been off his tits for weeks, so- yep, makes sense).
So, we know that for the morgue room meeting, Sherlock is NOT withdrawing. We know that he is pretty much… in control, or he certainly feels as if he’s in control. He has a plan, he thinks it’s going to work. He’s smug and he’s absolutely certain of his abilities.
Except it sort of… stops working in that morgue room, and Sherlock is suddenly confronted with a crisis of mental clarity via Faith. I think this sudden shift from confidence in his abilities to the realisation that he got it wrong sort of sent him spiralling. This is where the TD-12 shit comes in, because I cannot think of any other way to explain this particular scene away…
Sherlock is hearing auditory hallucinations. His mind begins making connections that are not there. He sees Culverton pick up a scalpel when he is the one to pick the scalpel up, we see him begin to physically lose his grip on reality and he, quite understandably, freaks the fuck out. He feels as if he’s being mocked, moments after Culverton has mentally mocked and derided John and his abilities as a doctor: Culverton has made both of these men question their sanity and their usefulness in the space of minutes. But here’s the important part: I think Sherlock hallucinated more than just the laughing. I think Sherlock hallucinated the severe kicking he got from John, too. Let’s break it down.
Sherlock isn’t just experiencing auditory hallucinations here. He’s seeing Culverton laugh, he’s hearing it and he’s seeing it and it makes him angry, likely because he feels as if his intelligence is being mocked. But check out this screenshot: this is a pretty freaky thing to see, so it’s no wonder Sherlock begins feeling threatened.
This is where it starts to get a bit Nuts. Sherlock brandishes the scalpel and demands Culverton stop laughing – and yet even when Culverton says he’s not laughing, the laughing continues in the background. John is forced to step in, to control the situation and the blatant manic episode Sherlock is going through and he’s forced to punch Sherlock to snap him out of it.
What does John say to Lestrade, in the scenes running intermittently between this morgue scene?
“I really hit him” Odd thing to say, if you’d kicked someone too. Surely you’d say “I really hurt him’ rather than put emphasis on ‘hit’ if he’d actually kicked Sherlock into submission, because that wasn’t just a singular ‘hit’. That was… brutal, honestly.
Here’s the interesting part, the camera zooms in on John’s hands, just before the beating above is shown.
Keep in mind that this beating is so bad that Sherlock spits up blood. This is like, internal organs being kicked to shit bad.
But here’s the thing, in the following scenes, that blood? Completely disappears.
Where’s the blood? Are you telling me that in a show where they physically painted a pub door sign for literally two seconds of footage are going to forget to place the blood down? nope, sorry, not convinced.
So, here’s what I think ACTUALLY happened in handy dandy bulletpoints:
John gets in between Sherlock and Culverton when he sees the scalpel
John crowds Sherlock up against the morgue doors
John punches Sherlock when he realises he’s not snapping out of it
Sherlock falls and hits his head against the morgue doors, which is why he needs stitching on his eyebrow.I literally have no idea where this eyebrow cut came from otherwise.
Sherlock probably gets a concussion here, let’s be real, so anything that happens in between falling to the floor and John apparently being dragged away by goons that show up out of nowhere should be questionable at best, possibly even including the I killed your wife dialogue.
The only other POSSIBLE explanation I can have for John beating Sherlock in this way is if he, too, is drugged, and starts having a massive PTSD freak out but that doesn’t account for the missing blood.
Either way, I don’t think this scene happened the way it’s been set up, because there’s too many inconsistencies. John’s characterisation here is really weird at best: I can’t see him beating the shit out of Sherlock like this without some sort of… trigger? who knows
@worriesconstantly: This is excellent. And you know what it reminds me of? Remember this strange little scene in HLV before they go up to CAM’s office?
SHERLOCK: If I was to use this card on that lift now, what happens? (He gestures towards the lift where an imaginary version of himself is touching his card to the security reader. Alarms immediately begin to sound – at least in Sherlock’s head – and two imaginary security men run towards imaginary-Sherlock standing at the lift.) JOHN (obviously not seeing or hearing anything): Er, the alarms would go off and you’d be dragged away by security. (Over at the lift, imaginary-Sherlock is indeed being seized by the arms by the two men.) REAL-SHERLOCK: Exactly. (He looks towards the lift and watches as imaginary-Sherlock is marched away.) JOHN: Get taken to a small room somewhere and your head kicked in. (Imaginary-Sherlock looks over his shoulder and throws an indignant look towards his real self and his friend. Real-Sherlock looks round at John.) SHERLOCK: Do we really need so much colour? JOHN: It passes the time.
Someone’s imagination running wild, just that time it was John’s. Like with so many things, S4 is supplying us with distorted, overdramatic versions of earlier elements of the show. And this might be another one. Sherlock is drugged and has been under extreme stress for weeks or months of which angry, distant John is the source. So no wonder he might imagine something like this.
HOLMES: A seven percent solution.
Would you care to try it?
WATSON (tightly): No, but I would quite like to find every ounce of the
stuff in your possession and pour it out of the window.
HOLMES (smirking): I should be inclined to stop you.
WATSON: Then you would be reminded … quite forcibly … which of us is
a soldier and which of us a drug addict.
HOLMES: You’re not a soldier. You are a doctor.
WATSON (stepping closer to him): No, an Army doctor, which means
I could break every bone in your body, while naming them.
I think this could be very easily another forshadowing of the beating scene in TLD. And as so often in this show the intensity of similar events increases with every repetition.
talking about someone kicking Sherlock’s head in
talking about John breaking every bone in Sherlock’s body
Faith tries to write down what happened before she forgets, but her note is confiscated by the perpetrator.
It also happens during Sherlock’s sequence of deducing Culverton’s “anyone” was the one word of the person he wanted to kill. The transition at the top also has a weirdly ominous tone with Sherlock passing by, and while the episode and series has other transition shots like it, it reminded me specifically of the end of the episode with the shark:
As I explained here, while Magnussen is also compared to a shark in His Last Vow in relation to the Samarra metaphor, the grim figure of death is actually Mary. In an episode filled with shark imagery that very much jumps the shark, beginning the bad reviews of the season, and doesn’t make sense because it’s not real.
Mary is the shark, Mary is death, Mary is Samarra, Mary’s supposed post-humous Retro-Netflix DVD Subscription message is the final shot we see in The Final Problem before the last shot of John and Sherlock being frozen in time. Mary is still alive, somehow altering what we’ve seen with the TD-12 drug.
Immediately afterwards as Vivian Norbury is dragged out like a Scooby-Doo villain with a projector behind her (“that’s not how it happened at all”) we see Mary’s ashes supposedly enveloped by flames.
This satanic imagery links her to Moriarty once again (the I.O.U. apple as Satan offering Eden the apple in The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty in the valley of death in The Hounds of Baskerville), as did the script of His Last Vow, referring to her as “satanic.”
The flames are blue, linking Mary again to the blue visions of water Sherlock keeps having, Mary is the shark again, Sherlock keeps thinking it must be Moriarty. The connection to Eurus and Victor in The Final Problem doesn’t make sense because it’s not real, Sherlock has no reason to connect that to this moment, aside from the incredibly loose “Eurus killed Trevor, Eurus recorded reaction gifs from Moriarty five years ago, I have no way of knowing that tho as I stare at the missing figure of Thatcher which has the AGRA USB inside” which is already discarding the Mary connection.
Mary and Moriarty are the same person. “It’s the gap, it’s wrong.” Blue is fake.
John is seen walking through a graveyard as the shot is out of focus, and he looks like he’s dissociating (that 2017 #mood):
Someone is calling him but he doesn’t answer. He returns to the same dissociative march.
Zooming in and stretching out, the number is private.
This is reminiscent of Molly in The Final Problem, letting us know again that Molly is a mirror for John. Molly/John needs Sherlock to say it first before they can say it back, except with her the phone did say “Sherlock”, and in this instance John literally CAN’T answer because he is being prevented from answering the phone and communicating with Sherlock. Phones are heart metaphors, John can’t answer his heart, they can’t love each other because the the truth is being obscured.
Molly gives Sherlock the letter from John. In the context of how much this miscommunication/last minute confession has been set-up over the course of the show in terms of John and Sherlock confessing their love for each other, which was planned to be and will be the climax, this is the planted seed to uncovering what’s going on as we’ve all been saying, it was left unresolved on purpose.
Also remember that Mary literally did already drug Sherlock in this version of events by bringing and… drugging a fake note, bringing chloroform to a meeting containing information about her past that she had no way of knowing about, designed as part of the alibi to make Mary on the run look as good and redemptive as possible. lmao I don’t think it was a baby thing she was hiding in her fanny pack
Mary isn’t dead, she faked her death, drugged John, and is back for revenge. The ultimate revenge of keeping them apart. Mary and Moriarty are Emelia Ricoletti:
Some of us assumed that John in the well would be the Garridebs moment, but it was faked. There was so much discussion about the hands in the opening, The Lying Detective’s first shot and it’s last not matching I didn’t realize.
Of course, as The Abominable Bride told us, John will be the one to save the day after John and Sherlock admit they love each other. If Mary and Moriarty are the same person but Moriarty is really dead (which seems up in the air, but Mary is definitely alive), John shooting Mary could be the equivalent.
The real Garridebs moment is still out there, frozen in time with the teacup as well as John and Sherlock in the last shot of The Final Problem. Sumatra is still out there, the bomb waiting to explode. It can still be prevented.
Leak the special, you monsters. John’s been bleeding out for almost two months.
Aaaaaa those transitions! 😱 omg I love this thank you so much for the tag! 💖
i’m suddenly convinced of mary alive and manipulating them via td12 based solely on the line “hypnotizing, mesmerizing me, she was everything i dreamed she’d be”
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