The London Underground in The Empty Hearse: Part 1 – Basics of the Underground
I love the tube almost as much as I love Sherlock Holmes, and so the London Underground plot line in TEH is super interesting for me – especially because it’s full of tube-based plot holes and inaccuracies! I’m really excited to combine these two fields of interest in some analytical posts. This series may help non-Londoners if you’re writing fic about the tube, or you may just find it interesting as there’s lots of cool trivia about the tube and London in it, and if that’s not for you, there’s also a lot of pretty screenshots of John and Sherlock coming up. Something for everyone!
I’m going to go through chronologically in a series of posts, pointing out things that people not familiar with the tube system may have missed, some insight into how they filmed these scenes, and a few bits of meta and headcanons we can get from this information, as well as laugh at a couple of silly plot mistakes. Feel free to message me if there’s anything specific you want to know, I love talking about this topic. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform; this hype train is ready to leave!
This first section pre-games may writing on TEH with some basics of the tube system. If you’re familiar with the tube system, you probably don’t need to read this, but feel free to anyway, I’m not gonna tell you what to do, live your dreams, but here’s you’re warning that this section isn’t really focussed on Sherlock.
Lines
The tube network has 11 official lines, but this is hotly debated amongst the TFL (Transport for London) fandom. Yes, there is such a thing. It’s mostly middle aged men. I’m very out of place there. Without going into deep fandom politics, there are other parts of the transport network which are on the tube map which aren’t underground lines, like the Docklands Light Railway (self-driving overground suburban trains), the London Overground (like the underground, but…overground) and the Croydon tram network. Don’t get bogged down with those, they aren’t as fun because they aren’t old and in tunnels.
The actual tube lines all have a line name and colour for identification. Here’s some info and stereotypes about each line:
Bakerloo line – Brown – Harrow and Wealdstone to Elephant and Castle
If your grandpa was a tube line, he’d be the bakerloo. Slow, clunky and old, with lots of war stories. He’s trying his best, but it’s not surprising that he sometimes takes the afternoon off.
Central line – Red – Epping to Ealing Broadway/West Ruislip
In the summer, this line is as hot as satan’s crotch, and just as unpleasant. In winter it can be a pleasant refuge from the cold.
Circle line – Yellow – It’s a circle… almost. More like a spiral since it was extended to Hammersmith.
Tourist line. You can’t get on a circle line train without seeing a London guidebook or someone holding a tube map upside down and looking confused.
District line – Green – Where doesn’t this line go? Upminster to Wimbledon/Richmond/Ealing Broadway/Kensington (Olympia)
Take the district line to go the same places as the circle line but avoid the tourists.
Hammersmith & City line – Pink – Hammersmith to Barking
No one even takes this line, idk. They probably got on it by accident.
Jubilee line – Grey – Stanmore to Stratford
BUSINESS MEN AT BANKS AT CANARY WHARF IN SUITS DOING THEIR SERIOUS BUSINESS COMMUTING TO WORK WHERE THEY DO BUSINESS
Metropolitan line – Purple – Aldgate to Amersham/Chesham/Watford/Uxbridge
This line goes all the way to zone 9, where the fuck. It’s more like a commuter train, not really used to get around London itself.
Northern line – Black – Morden to Edgware/Mill Hill East/High Barnet
Just a line. It’s chill.
Piccadilly line – Dark Blue – Cockfosters (ha) to Uxbridge/Heathrow Terminal 5
If you aren’t a true Londoner you take the tube from Leicester Square to Covent Garden, costing you like £3 for a 5 minute walk. This line is famously unreliable, there was a famous incident a couple of years back where leaves on the track broke all the trains.
Victoria line – Light Blue – Walthamstow Central to Brixton
Fast speedy zoom zoom line!
Waterloo & City line – Turquoise – Waterloo to Bank
This line just shuttles between these two stations. What even is the point.
General Information
Zones are how prices are decided, zone one is central London, the higher the zone number the further into the suburbs.
Station layouts are generally made up of a surface building, a ticket-barrier, and escalators or lifts down to platform level, where there are corridors leading to different platforms and trains.
Fares are paid through contactless card, Oyster card (pre-payment cards, you load them up with money at stations) or occasionally paper tickets, although (contrary to where you might see either use in TBB) most Londoners would use Oyster or contactless.
Trains are different for each line; generally the lines use all the same trains.
The tube network has more overground track than underground; in central London the tube runs underground, but in the outskirts the lines tend to emerge into the open.
Trains usually run every 2-3 minutes, from about 4am to 1am. Some lines run 24 hours on weekends, the Night Tube. Message me if you want more info on that because it’s complicated and unless you need to know about it for an actual reason, it’s not interesting.
Rush hour/busiest times are approximately 7:30-9:00am and 5:00-6:30pm.
The key etiquette rule of the tube: never make eye contact and never speak to people if it can be avoided at any cost.
Next time: John takes the tube to Baker Street. Can we work out where abouts in London John lives with Mary?
Tag stash: tagging a few people who have shown interest in this topic in the past, message me if you want in/out. There’s about 5 more posts on this to come, because I didn’t want it to be one ridiculously long thing…
There’s so much s4/s5 foreshadowing in TEH, it’s ridiculous. “so the whole thing was a fake” “why would someone go to all that trouble…why indeed” “do you honestly believe that if you have enough stupid theories it’s gonna change what really happened?” ***what really happened, changes***
bonus: **i would have told you i was coming back but i was worried you might let the cat out of the bag**
bond is trying to stop the bomb before it blows and he doesn’t know how so he’s about to pull the wires the bomb specialist shows up and just hits the fucking off switch
and stops it on 0:07 lol
i’m laughing
i’m also upset tho because as we know john and sherlock had a bond night and when they’re in the damned train car in TEH he’s all “there’s always an off switch”
BITCH YOU LEARNED THAT BECAUSE JOHN MADE YOU FUCKING WATCH GOLDFINGER I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS
and also like
you can’t tell me the number sherlock stopped the bomb on wasn’t supposed to have significance
I believe Holmes was into Classicism, in another form. “Classicism is a force which is often present in post-medieval European and European influenced traditions; however, some periods felt themselves more connected to the classical ideals than others, particularly the Age of Enlightenment, when Neoclassicism was an important movement in the visual arts.” Now, we know Doyle was heavily involved with the Enlightenment. “In general, classicism can be defined as a style in literature, visual art, music, or architecture that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome, especially fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. Athens and late Republican Augustan Rome.” Arthur Conan Doyle was a serious student of Greece and it’s history, and during the time of Augustus, there was the famous Romantic poet, Ovid, a huge influence on Shakespeare. I know Holmes is familiar with Shakespeare but I wanted quotes, and found these. “When Doyle himself wrote a play featuring Holmes he first approached two leading Shakespearian actors, Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving (who both turned it down) before allowing American actor William Gillette to adapt the play…So did Conan Doyle have Shakespeare in mind when he wrote the character of Holmes? According to Ted Friedman, “Sherlock Holmes is familiar with the writings of William Shakespeare … Holmes quoted Shakespeare from 14 of his plays in various cases”. The most famous Shakespeare quote spoken by Holmes, though, is the brief sentence “The game is afoot” which comes in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, and is from Henry V. It hardly indicates that Shakespeare provided a lot of obvious inspiration for Conan Doyle. Robert Fleissner, though, wrote a serious study that finds many connections between Doyle and Shakespeare in 2003 with Shakespearean and Other Literary investigations with the Master Sleuth (and Conan Doyle) Homing in on Holmes.”
Fantastic commentary. Thanks for the addition! Of course, my own favorite Shakespearean quote Holmes uses is from Twelfth Night, on his return to Watson, though ostensibly addressed to Moran: “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.”
@marsannay quite right! More classics! Pocket editions needn’t be poetry. I prefer the sonnets because that’s more romantic, but Holmes calls himself an “omnivorous” reader, so it could be either.
Also re: the initial discussion of Mycroft and the Diogenes, club culture wasn’t particularly gay, only very middle/upper class—straight, gay or otherwise. And everyone liked naming things after Greek things. The educated Victorians thought of themselves as the second Roman Empire, which wasn’t too far off the mark. Gay culture drew on majority culture’s love of the classics, not vice versa. The Diogenes COULD have been a gay club—they did exist—but it isn’t obviously one.
@ghislainem70 re: TEH, I never stopped to wonder where he got those books. Do you think they were his or might he have bought them off a corner bookstand on the way to the murder scene? I can imagine he’d enjoy Catullus, but “British Birds” and “The Holy War” sound rather unlike him, “omnivorous” taste in books notwithstanding.
@a-candle-for-sherlock I think it’s a question of why ACD chose those titles. Adding the random “British Birds” and “The Holy War” makes it seem the titles could be random, not something he carried on the hiatus. And yet, Catullus is, and was in ACD’s day, infamous as an explicitly gay, even pornographic text, amongst well-educated Victorian men such as ACD, and Holmes. So it’s a case, in my view, of ACD either deliberately or unconsciously throwing camouflage over an otherwise clearly stated suggestion by Holmes to Watson in TEH that Watson has an empty space (on his bookshelf) that needs filling— with gay pornographic Latin verses.
Or not.:)
OH. Well, that’s notably more interesting than I’d expected.
@a-candle-for-sherlock I’m assuming when discussing ACD’s choice to mention Catullus we’ve all read the pornographic Catullus 16. But there is also the beautiful Catullus 65, “Shall I never see you again, brother dearer to me than life?” Which seems something that Holmes might well have dwelt upon during the Hiatus.
IMO, the queercoding is not in any particular style that Holmes (or Watson) might have preferred, but in a combination of the titles, themes, authors, etc. Rather than use an “atmosphere”, he makes various singular references. The Catullus is so clear an example of this that even Samuel Rosenberg noticed it.
In BBC Sherlock, instead of greeting John with a work by Catullus, Sherlock quotes gay writer Edmund White’s autobiographical novel The Beautiful Room is Empty:
That’s very true, though I wouldn’t say Holmes shows no interest in the classics at all—he does compare Horace and Hafiz, with noticeable appreciation. I’m of the school that believes Doyle wrote Holmes as gay just by recording the traits of men he’d known and loved who were queer (or who he wished were uninterested in any intimacy but his friendship) rather than deliberately queercoding him, and we’re left to fill in the blanks of what he could be. I read Holmes as intersex and gay and mycroft as asexual, but the reading could easily be reversed.
“But for me, the tuxedos (which depersonalize waiters and lend distinction to friends), the banquet, and the toasts all permitted me for two minutes at a stretch to imagine we were a club of lovers…” [x]
… which is slightly more reasonable in 2014 than an armful of Catullus.
*unprintable language aimed at The Empty Hearse’s ability to break my heart again*
That moment when you’re rewatching The Empty Hearse and hear that the Jubilee line lost the entire seventh car between Westminster and St James Park that nobody but the guy who binge-watches footage noticed, and then realize that there are six episodes after that moment and all these fans who relentlessly binge-watch think something is wrong because the 7th could be missing….
The huge subtextual significance of The Empty Hearse and everything that happens in it is either the most brilliant piece of television or the craziest, most-bizarre coincidence in modern storytelling.
For a little more explanation, realize that the story is about an insider who planted a “bomb” in a missing “carriage” in order to set chaos to the political status quo; a bomb hidden in a cavity, a bomb with four chambers with red and blue veins, a bomb beneath Sumatra Rd, a tube station that was almost completed but couldn’t be open to the public because of the **laws of the time**, a bomb that wasn’t deactivated but simply paused, a threat that no one realized was possible except for that loser who binge watches the footage….
Ouch, Gatiss, that last one stings a little, but we’ll survive
I had promised @ebaeschnbliah to write this meta sometime before Christmas when we were chatting about a few more of the infamous rainbows we had discovered on the show. So here goes…
Is there a metaphor for the closet on the show that’s more excruciatingly painful to watch than the bonfire scene in TEH? I don’t think so.
Because that bonfire is a giant closet metaphor: The whole thing goes up in flames (=John’s in love), John is writhing in pain (=heartbreak) and yet he just can’t speak out, no matter how hard he tries.
It’s very painful to watch.
And it’s more than just a metaphor for the closet; it’s a metaphor for what it’s like to FALL IN LOVE while you’re still in the closet.
Because being deeply in love while still trapped in the closet is absolutely horrible, and Gatiss knows exactly what he’s talking about in this episode here.
Wanna take a look at the bonfire (=closet) scene step by step? Come along.
The whole scene starts by giving us…the moon. The ‘moon’ is Mary, remember (x)?
The moon is watching the bonfire scene from above right from the start.
This tells us…
a) textually: that there’s no doubt that Mary has known right from the start that John’s in that bonfire.
b) subtextually: that Mary has known right from the start that John’s closeted (=in love with a man and not out about his same-sex feelings)!!!
The ‘moon’ (=Mary) is watching all of what’s going on. (And you will see in a minute that that moon shot is no coincidence and not just an establishing shot to tell us what time of day the scene is taking place at. The whole scene is perfectly framed between the moon at the beginning and the sun at the end. So, the moon here is definitely a metaphor, ie, subtext.)
Then we see John coming to. He is trapped (literally and subtextually). Because subtextually John is trapped in the closet now that he is about to marry a woman:
And surprise, surprise…John looks miserable about the whole situation he is trapped in.
How do we know, though, that this bonfire is supposed to be read as a metaphor for the closet? Well…I give you…THE RAINBOW!
So, a situation in which you’re trapped and that’s tagged with a rainbow for our subtextual-interpretation-convenience…Yep, that’s the closet.
Wanna see how horrible it is to be trapped in something like this. Here have a close-up of John trying to scream in horror.
Then we get a shot of Mary which again (visually) connects her to the moon (remember that this happens just a few seconds after the moon shot I showed you above): Over Mary’s right shoulder, there’s a light that’s perfectly round and has the size of the moon as if it were supposed to remind us of that celestial body.
I don’t want to repeat myself, but this tells us that Mary knows that the man she’s about to marry is in the closet.
(Also, note the black gloves that mark her out as a Sherlock!mirror, albeit a quite dark and distorted one. We will see Sherlock wear those same gloves just a few moments later in a rather prominent scene.)
Let’s skip the next part because I’m not too keen on Mary pretending to be innocent, Mrs Hudson pretending to like the idea that John has a female fiancée and Sherlock pretending that he isn’t totally freaking out about John being in danger.
Also, people have already written lots and lots of metas about the John/James distinction, so no need to go into that here.
Here comes the really horrifying part: John’s not only trapped in the closet; he’s trapped in the closet and IN LOVE! Remember how ‘fire’ is a metaphor for love on the show?
This ‘Guy Fawkes’ (who’s dressed exactly like John with his chequered shirt) is being set on fire:
And if ‘burning’ is a metaphor for being in love…look what kind of love John is experiencing right now. Look how huuuuge that fire (=love) is:
And the crowd (=the audience watching this TV show) doesn’t understand what’s going on and is cheering this ‘bonfire’ on.
Yeah, man, just one episode later, the TV audience of this show absolutely did cheer for Mary and John’s wedding, not understanding John’s situation.
In the bonfire (=closet), right at the centre of the metaphorical ‘fire’, John is trying, he is trying so, so hard to speak out, to scream…but he can’t. Because when you’re trapped in a loveless straight relationship with a woman, while actually being in love (=ablaze) with your same-sex best friend, you just CAN’T SPEAK OUT.
Try as he might, he can’t make a move (both literally and figuratively with Sherlock):
John’s in pain (heartbreak), he’s paralyzed, and he’s trapped (in a loveless relationship). But no sound escapes his open mouth…
It’s excruciating to watch. And I betcha Gatiss knew exactly what he was writing about here. Because let me tell you that’s what being in love while also being paralyzed, scared and ‘mute’ in the closet feels like.
Remember that subtextually it’s no coincidence that this bonfire incident happens right after Sherlock returned to John in TEH:
The moment Sherlock returned, John was basically trapped in his loveless relationship with Mary (=the bonfire-closet) while at the same time absolutely burning up because of his love for Sherlock.
Let’s get back to our bonfire.
The only one who can save John Watson from the horrible pain (=heartbreak) of burning alive (=being in love while being trapped, paralyzed and mute in the closet)…the only one who can save John from that horrible fate is Sherlock.
And Sherlock does. As others have pointed out long before me, the little-girl-Sherlock!mirror (with a hat similar to the train-guy!hat Sherlock wore earlier in this episode)…this Sherlock!mirror is the only one who can hear John’s muted screams in the bonfire (=closet). And she’s horrified by it.
And Sherlock (as Sherlock himself) is the one who can bodily drag John out of the bonfire (=closet). They will both get pretty singed doing that, though…because they’re both metaphorically ‘on fire’ for each other.:)
As I pointed out above, the two pairs of black gloves highlight the difference between Sherlock and his dark!mirror Mary in this shot: Sherlock’s gloved hands are tenderly cupping John’s face. Mary’s gloved hands seem to be holding John down (=Sherlock loves John; Mary is just controlling him).
And because John is Sherlock’s metaphorical ‘sun’ (while Mary, as shown above, is nothing but a cold moon watching on), John’s face here morphs into the sun shining above Baker Street (the metaphorical residence of Sherlock’s ‘soul’):
i’m watching teh and in yet another case of things you already know but holy shit they slap you in the face anyway, there’s a reporter in the background talking about how sherlock didn’t leave a note when he died, which means john didn’t tell anybody about that call [this phone call–it’s my note] and just carried that weight alone for two years. carried sherlock’s lies and his truth and all those nameless things in the silence between. carried all his own guilt and regret, his anger and his grief, all of it heavy on his back but john completely unwilling to part with the burden of it because its his to bear. because he couldn’t stop him. because he thinks he deserves it. because it’s the only bit of sherlock he has left for just himself.
I just realised that John on Sherlock’s grave with Mary right before going to Mrs Hudson to tell her he’s getting married means John went to tell Sherlock first.
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