Ever since my tfp rewatch, I’ve been developing a sneaking suspicion that it might turn out to be one of my favourite pieces of media ever. I am not kidding about that.
This is a direct result of my decision, sometime yesterday, to try applying the mind bungalow keycode to the episode, a la @the-7-percent-solution: Eurus is John’s repressed desire; the episode is John’s tab, etc., etc. It works so beautifully, shot for shot, the whole thing becomes a complex machine ticking its way toward one conclusion: John is desperate for Sherlock to save him, in every possible sense of that verb.
But it isn’t only the fact that tfp works so wonderfully in this reading that makes me love it so much: it’s that you have to dig through the rubble of the text itself to find this beauty. I’ve been struck, since yesterday, with the way that mofftiss
somehow
managed to make a thing that is so ugly on the surface, so repellent, so grotesque, nonsensical, ridiculous, that the primary response to it will be to look away, hate it, and never reconsider it.
In the history of storytelling, this is a very weird achievement. The storytelling me wants to sit down and pull it apart, and try to figure out how it was done. (I suspect the real answer to that question involved a lot of giggling and possibly a few dares, alongside, one hopes, some serious talk about the symbolic network the episode meticulously creates on a subtextual level. But, who knows?)
My point is, I hated tfp so much on first viewing that I returned my theatre tickets. (Still don’t regret that–I’m not making any predictions with this reading, and if the whole thing goes to pieces in the coming weeks, and they leave us with the cliffhanger of textual mess / subtextually dying John, well, that’s not something I want to support with actual dollars, however I might admire it as a singular piece of storytelling.) I could never have imagined that I would pull such a hardcore 180 when, yesterday, I sat down, and went through the episode carefully, beat by beat. (I would never have given it another look if it weren’t for this fandom. So grateful for you all.)
My suggestion is, if you can at all stomach it, give the episode another look, and see how the mind bungalow keycode reading works for you.
I’ll close this already too-long post with some thoughts on what re-reading and reinterpretation can do, and why I’m motivated to promote this particular reading (besides that it’s just, you know, neat). I’m not fully tin hatting, although I want tin hattery to be true, and I’m super excited by the possibilities. I started the rewatch from the point of view that tfp did not sit well with me, and the idea that my experience of it certainly couldn’t get worse with a second viewing. I wanted to see if there was indeed anything to the idea that the episode might make some kind of sense. In other words, I wanted to see if I could make myself happier about it.
This from another iteration of the tfp rewatch post, in response to someone who said that they wished the mind bungalow reading were “true:”
Here is my entire point. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.
An interpretation of a literary text has value insofar as it creates meaning and is consistent with that text. This one does, and is, to a shocking degree. I’m quite pleased with it.
Other readings (like the one I had yesterday, that the show is confusing trash), can also create meaning, and be consistent with the text. Fortunately we get to decide which one we like better. We can let ourselves be persuaded by the stronger reading, or, heck, the one that makes us happy.
The really important thing here is to take it for what it’s worth, and use it if you want, to help you reframe the episode for yourself. That’s what I did today, and it helped a lot. That’s how you become an empowered member of the audience.
I love this. I’ve been pondering the rewatch… I haven’t yet. But this makes me want to.
And… look it always was this intricate thing, and I enjoy that kind of thing. Regular tv bores me now. I got nothing to lose, and a lot to gain.
S4 is a tutorial on how NOT to continue SHERLOCK. Maybe that’s the point.
TFP is the only Sherlock’s episode I haven’t re-watched. Even the slightly strange and swiss-cheesed Six Thatchers had that “privilege”! This new reading, that has been gaining weight this week, may be the only reason that I’ll be able to do it.
(Irony: whether this episode is John Watson’s delirium or not, TFP will be for me, either way, the product of a dying brain. :-P)
I think it’s wonderful how due to this fandom’s incredible capability to decipher and find the beauty in Sherlock episodes that TFP for me has turned from the worst, most horrifying and nonsensical episode ever into the most precious and heart-breakingly clever thing in a matter of days. Even if there is no fourth episode, whenever I re-watch TFP i’ll always watch it with this reading in mind.
Reblobbing for the people who weren’t up in the middle of the night, and to gather this thread together with this comment by @rowanthestrange:
Honestly, with the ‘emotional context’ that this is John, it’s doesn’t just make sense, it is genius. Once you explain it it’s so simple.And it’s not instinctual – I meta’d the idea that this was all in John’s head after TLD, but somehow, on watching TFP I doubted it, even though it made more sense not less. It really showed to me the effect our community can have, and that if we hadn’t powered through it, we wouldn’t have this excellent reading.I don’t know about anyone else, but I needed…
(Or: Things that everybody thinks make Sherlock canonically straight but they really really really don’t and why don’t you see that, because it’s so beautiful!!!)
Apologies to my Doctor-Who followers for this ongoing Sherlock intermezzo, but I just need to vent a little longer: I. Loved. Series. Four!!!
In particular, I loved The Final Problem. I loved Sherlock calling John family, I loved the smashing of the casket, the touching of non-existent glass, the air plane metaphor, Mycroft outside his comfort zone, etcetera etcetera etcetera. I loved the whole bloody thing.
But my favourite, favourite moment was the one when Eurus asks Sherlock to “play you”. And he plays the theme of The Woman.
Because it is the bravest thing Sherlock has ever done. And it makes this moment incredibly powerful.
This sounds crazy, but hear me out because this would make for a great fix-it fic even if none of this is real and I’d love to read it.
So. Remember the beginning of His Last Vow? We see John dreaming and Sherlock doping again? These two ideas hold a lot of weight in the narrative of series 4 and TAB. I believe we’re seeing alternate realities converge into one to create a mind palace sequence that doesn’t belong to any character, but belongs instead to the viewer.
Remember when Molly said “Forward or Backward?” as Sherlock got shot? The answer was backward. I think everything shown from that moment on has been something either Sherlock or John has fantasized before that moment – in the month of their separation. We saw the narrative as going forward, when really we were being filled in as to what happened “backward”.
This started out with a little distortion I noticed on some of the pictures, but the holy mother of subtext that I found turned this into a full meta.
We’ve analyzed the unreal quality, distortions, and strange darkness present in specific promos, but there’s a connecting theme here that we’ve hardly touched on.
In this meta, I’ll analyze how the major overarching theme of this season will be the devaluation of truth until it is indistinguishable from lies.
Introduction: The Twisted Smiley
Something is wrong with the smiley face in the new promos.
Here’s the original smiley from TGG and the Series 2 promos.
This is not a happy face. This is a derp face crossed with a grimace. It’s some twisted version of the original.
And even we didn’t notice that the smiley had
changed! Why didn’t we notice that something familiar had gone wrong? Keep that
in mind—it will be important later.
So why has the smiley
gone from a quirky happy face to a twisted grimace? And what does that mean for
the show?
The Promos: Blurring Reality, Distorting the
Familiar
There have been two
major trends in the promotional materials for this season: taking familiar elements and presenting them in a distorted way, and blurring fiction and reality.
Distortions
What was safe—such as the happy
smiley—is now a
twisted mirror of itself. And it gets worse:
remember how the original smiley, the one painted in 221B, was the happy one?
So what is this in the mirror?
WHAT IS THE TWISTED
SMILEY DOING IN 221B???
Why isn’t the original, “uncorrupted” version there? What has intruded into 221B to change it?
It’s okay. Don’t
panic. Nothing could ever compromise the safety of 221B. Nothing could happen
to it—
Between 221B and the
smiley, there’s a trend of what was once familiar and safe becoming
compromised, distorted, “wrong.”
Blurring Fiction and Reality
Promos such as the
baby’s birth announcement, the advertisements in cities throughout Europe, and
the Amazon trailer blur the line between the world of the show and our world. We are never shown the baby’s face, to the point
that it’s still up for debate whether it even exists.
The “unreal” released scenes—the one with the dog and the one in 221B—seem more like nightmare scenarios than real events. Even the fandom is questioning what is Mind Palace and what isn’t.
On many levels, it’s getting harder and harder to tell what
is reality and what is fiction.
Note: In addition, mirroring in Doctor Who continues the theme of combining fiction and reality. @tjlcisthenewsexy discusses it here.
Finally, the rainbow glitches
in the videos combine both of these approaches: They call to mind something
being hacked (a distortion) and imply that villains within the show can access PBS footage (blurring fiction
and reality).
Revisiting the Past…With Consequences
The promos have shown the
distortion and confusion of familiar elements from the show. But what might
those familiar elements be?
We know the new season will revisit aspects of past seasons. They’ve
even told us that they will retro-engineer events to make trends more clear (x).
Past elements that we know will be revisited are:
The Fall. They foreshadowed this in TAB with the sort-of-Moriarty case;
moreover, “The Final Problem” is named for the original Reichenbach story.
The Six Thatchers.It’s
already a case on John’s blog, but there’s a nearly-identical one in the new
series.
The smiley. It’s a callback to TGG.
Sherlock’s past. They laid the foundation with Redbeard and “the
other one”; now, it’s time to see how Sherlock became the quasi-sociopath of
the first series.
John’s past. We’ve seen his parents in the footage of the christening. Major Barrymore,
who had books on Thatcher, mirrors his father. How did he become so repressed? (More here.)
However, Series 4 will
do more than just revisit the past. It will revisit the past gone wrong, just as the promos corrupted
familiar elements. They’ve told us series 4 is about consequences. They even
began this process in TAB, with Sherlock discovering the secrets of literal and
metaphorical ghosts. Series 4 will
revisit cases and themes that we already knew, but revealing the darker links
that were originally unexplored.
How might they do
this?
M-Theory. To explore the idea of Mycroft and other characters being under Moriarty’s
thumb, they could revisit previous cases and show extra scenes. That would make
it clear how Mycroft knew about threats to Sherlock and was powerless to stop
them.
The smiley as a mask. There’s a possibility, discussed by
@shawleyleyeres here and here, that the
smiley has grown to represent Mary’s façade; @tendergingergirl discusses the
idea of it being Sherlock’s façade instead here. Regardless
of whose mask this is, keeping secrets could turn out to have severe
consequences.
Other consequences. The creators have said that there are some
themes that no one seems to have picked up on, which makes me suspect that they
have other consequences in store. What consequences, exactly? I’m not sure, but
I welcome anyone’s speculation.
An Ongoing Theme: The Corruption of Truth
We’ve established the
role of consequences and distortions of what we already know in the new series.
But how does this connect to ongoing themes in the show?
@delurkingdetectives
made an excellent post discussing the treatment of truth and lies on the show. We go from outright lies
about Sherlock in TRF, to exploited secrets in HLV (i.e., stretching the
truth), and therefore, we’ll progress to “the devaluation of truth” itself in Series 4.
So how can we combine
all these elements in the show and the promos to predict the themes of Series
4?
In the new series, we’ll start out knowing what’s
true and what isn’t. But over the course of the series, the truth will be
devalued, distorted, until characters can no longer tell the difference between
fiction and reality, truth and lies.
Speculation
So, if truth is
indistinguishable from lies, and someone had to make a choice with that
distorted information, then they’d have two identical choices…a good one and a
bad one…why does this sound familiar?
Oh.
Someone’s meta (link me, please; I’ve gone and lost it)
mentioned the need to revisit ASIP, because we never learned which was the
right bottle. Similarly, we’ve never fully addressed Sherlock’s choice between
his brain and his heart, nor John’s choice between a calm, domestic life and a
dangerous, adventurous one.
Revisiting these
themes, Sherlock, John, or both will need to make a choice in this season.
[NOTE: Speculation on specific events is obsolete as of 1/22/17. Thematic speculation still applies.]
John:
Why are John and
Sherlock estranged at the end of TST? Perhaps because Mary lies to him, forcing
him to make a choice between Mary and Sherlock. Maybe she tells him the baby is
Sherlock’s; maybe she forces Sherlock to lie to John and hurt him. Whatever the
circumstance, John would then have to choose between two near-identical
options, one of whom is a lying villain—but he doesn’t know which. Good bottle
or bad bottle? He will have to decide.
Sherlock:
If Sherlock is drugged or blind in TLD, his ability to determine what is real and
what isn’t will be severely limited. What if he isn’t sure whether Culverton Smith or John is near him?
Is it his friend (the good bottle) or the villain (the bad bottle)? Moreover, if
Culverton Smith is a satire of Trump and/or a conversion therapist stand-in,
he’ll try to get inside Sherlock’s head and cause him to question his own
emotions and decisions. This would also hinder Sherloc’s ability to make clear choices.
Another option is to make Sherlock choose between his heart (John) and his brain (Mycroft) in TFP.
Maybe one has betrayed him and he doesn’t know which; maybe some other plot
device makes the choice difficult. Theories welcome.
In sum: This season, the confusion of fiction
and reality, the distortion of familiar elements, and consequences of past
choices will result in the devaluation of truth until it is indistinguishable
from lies. This will culminate in a character’s difficult choice.
I was genuinely not expecting them to take the idea of confusing reality with falsehood this far. But hey, it’s been fun!
How do the events of Series 4 fit
this theme?
“Real”
events are getting less and less plausible.
That’s why more and more of our theories involve EMP, unreliable narrators, or
hallucinations. They gradually built up the confusion between truth and lies, reality and fiction, up through TFP. The whole season was designed to say, “THIS IS NOT REAL.”
By episode:
TST was
full of plot holes, but the surface reading could still hang together if it was the incomplete truth. That is: all
the events could be true, but other things had to be true as well; or, all the events were partially true, but through a biased lens. That’s why there are so many projectors.
TLD might have had fewer plot holes, but it also
explicitly told us that parts we thought were real actually weren’t. For example,
Faith Smith never existed, even though the audience was shown scenes with her
as thought she was real. That is: we saw
a lie, but we were told it was a lie.
TFP takes this to completion. We’re
shown an episode with so many plot holes and narrative leaps that it’s
literally unbelievable. We saw a lie, but
we were told it was the truth.
After TFP, even observant viewers
doubted the subtext they had seen: reality had been distorted to the point that we confused it with falsehood. Was it
a good bottle episode or a bad bottle episode? We’ve gone all the way back to ASiP.
This completes the arc of distortion of
reality. From the media falsehoods in TRF to the 90 minutes of hallucination in
TFP, we’ve seen the truth get twisted to the breaking point. It’s the thematic climax of the story.
So how does this issue get resolved?
By
revealing the truth. The fourth episode needs to establish, unequivocally, what
was real and what was not real since at least the start of Series 4.
But of course, the truth doesn’t stop at
resolving plot holes. It also means revealing the romantic endgame of the
series: the truth that’s been hidden since day one.
In fact, the romance is why the issue of truth and reality triumphing over falsehood and lies has been so important to the series. The showrunners want everyone cheering for truth over fiction; “who you really are” versus “the legend”.
I didn’t even realised the smiley was different, I guess I just trusted Arwel when he said he was using a stencil because “they all have to be the same”. Turns out he wasn’t, after all? That sounds fucky to me.
for some reason this just hit me like so much harder than any shitpost like this is what I LIVE for is shit like this, technology innovation centered on deeper and truer storytelling. And it was real but it was also a lie.
Found this little gem when re-reading The Importance of Being Earnest, if that’s not an accurate description of Lady B’s entire character than idk what is
Sherlock Fandom Archive 