What will follow is a very long explanation of why I think BBC Sherlock has become fan fiction in every sense of the word, applying a technique called estrangement effect to achieve as well as envision this. It has been happening since S3 – but came into full force in S4 and especially TFP.
Let me state at first: Sherlock Holmes is dead. He died after jumping off Bart’s. That’s the one thing Mofftisson did that no other adaption has dared to do. Not even ACD did describe Holmes dying. But Mofftisson showed us: Sherlock jumped and hit the pavement. We saw it, and it was never explained how he survived. Because he didn’t. What we watch in TEH is altered footage, like in the beginning of TST. Alienated ficitional reality.
But still Sherlock came back. How is this possible? Because Sherlock Holmes never lived, and so could never die; because Sherlock Holmes as a fictional character has long ago crossed the line between ficiton and reality. He exists in both worlds, the ficitonal and ours. Schödinger’s Sherlock, so to speak.
Mofftiss (and Steve Thompson) have adapted Holmes for the 21st century – with all its consequences. They are the first who allow Holmes to die – as it should have been, in Watson’s arms. This is truly new – like it or not.
But why could he survive? Because of the fans. Fans brought Holmes back in 1903 – and they brought him back in S3 (or even MHR). Whereas S1 and S2 might still be somehow canon compliant if modernised, with S3/MHR the show left the realm of ACD and became something else. It became our story. We are the narrators. Therefore, we appear, for example, as Anderson or the Empty Hearse Club, before we, in TAB, leave this concrete narrator position behind to ascend onto yet another narrative level.
Many commented (and lamented) the change from S2 to S3. The show became a romcom! The cases didn’t matter anymore! All those new characters! All true – because the BBC adaption had detached itself from ACD and started to become its own work of art, it’s very own pastiche. That might be self-referential; and perhaps wasn’t even always well made (TFP!) – but I think we should stop applying real life structures and standards to this work of art – because it simply doesn’t work. (And, as every writer, Mofftiss have the right to fuck their own story up).
The audience and fandom struggle with a lot of twists after S2 because making the distinction between canon compliant fictional verisimilitude and the realm of associative fan fic is especially hard to mark with a figure like Holmes – who seems real and yet never was. On the other hand, he is the perfect character to undergo such a narrative transformation.
If this interests you, please continue under the cut.
@isitandwonder this is incredible, thank you so much for writing such a thoughtful meta. For decades and decades, fan-created Sherlock Holmes stories inevitably follow a similar path – as the canon is over a century old, each fan-creation carries baggage accumulated through different time, space, language, and culture. However, Sherlock Holmes as an icon often overpowers the narrative – today, one doesn’t need to ever read a word of Doyle’s story to know who Sherlock Holmes is: a Victorian-era detective in a funny hat. Following that icon, a myth; or, the same narrative with 130 years worth of baggage.
You’re absolutely correct in saying that a Sherlock Holmes fell to his death in TRF. I believe that’s the icon – the one most familiar, the same Sherlock Holmes that fans continue to fall in love with decade after decade. With series 3 and 4, the assembling of a myth, but this one with a consistent undercurrent of dissonance. The thing is, sometimes the medium is part of the message; and the beauty, as well as the downfall of modern visual media, is its ability to deceit in ways the written text or the theatre simply can not. But audiences are complacent because “it’s always been this way.” For better or worse, I think the creators of Sherlock (and this is everyone, not just Mofftiss) might be taking the estrangement effect beyond the narrative – because in shattering the myth of Sherlock Holmes (by making the romance between Holmes and Watson explicit) there’s no escape of it being political, and the only way to create this necessary distance, the audience has to be aware of the medium, the visual media – not only as a tool used to present the narrative but also part of it. For most of series 4, we were explicitly made aware of the medium, and TFP, the shattering climax that everyone noticed, not by the narrative presented in the traditional sense, but through visual narrative assault (for lack of a better phrase). Where we landed was certainly unexpected, but it served very little purpose – the Mary-the-narrator myth did not travel far from the 130 years worth of baggage, the distance created was for… nothing?
And I think this is where I disagree. Yes, you can kill the idea of Sherlock Holmes as the mainstream media/audience know it – first by killing the icon (check), then the myth (not quite) – right now we are one tiny step short, and both my heart and my brain tell me this is an interruption rather than a conclusion. However, at the end of the day, Sherlock is a commercial product, the creators are free to do whatever they like, or necessary. It’d be a shame, though, to have it end this way, don’t you think?
Tag: the reichenbach fall
I’ve often wondered if John’s easy forgiveness of Sherlock after being drugged in Baskerville ended up hurting them both more than helping.
Sherlock drugged John. A man with PTSD. A man that could have easily hurt himself or others while he was under the influence of the drug. John was terrified. And yet? He forgives him without even a moment’s hesitation.
If John had been more livid, more upset, asked Sherlock “why would you ever think that is okay to do that to me?” and stayed angry for some stretch of time, Sherlock would have not come back from TRF thinking all would be forgiven in a moment’s notice.
Sherlock would have known that jumping off the roof at St. Bart’s in front of John, and staying dead for two years, is not something easily forgivable. John was betrayed. Yet Sherlock comes back expecting the easy forgiveness he saw in Grimpen.
John does forgive Sherlock in TEH but marries Mary because he knows he can’t trust his heart to Sherlock.
What would have happened if the forgiveness after Baskerville wasn’t as easy? I think the entire jump and aftermath would have changed.
Their play with one another, and the affects that has on their mutual trust does interest me a great deal (yes I have a half finished meta on it). I think that HoB, was the first instance of Sherlock pushing John almost beyond what he could bear, and you can see that Sherlock is angry at himself for it.
In HoB John told Sherlock, “Get me out, Sherlock. You have got to get me out!” But Sherlock kept pushing, and pushing, when he really should have dropped it right there, should have just comforted John and been done with it. But he didn’t. John told him to stop, and he pushed through anyway. He knew he’d done wrong the minute he saw John’s face, but it was too late to take it back, and Sherlock, being Sherlock, didn’t quite know how to fix it, so he just turned that anger on himself and the situation.
I think his anger in the lab, when he throws the microscope slide against the wall, is as much anger and frustration at himself, for where he took things with John earlier, just to prove a point, as it is frustration over not finding any trace of a drug in the sugar (which further underscored the fact that he pushed john that far for absolutely no reason at all).
But, I agree with you that John needs to learn to speak up for himself, or that dynamic can go south fast. Part of John not doing so may come down to his (I suspect) abusive upbringing. He’s used to just taking the kind of treatment that undermines trust, and is used to making himself small, and to brushing things off and just getting on with it. But he can’t keep doing that. He really should have said, “That was not in any way okay! Don’t you ever push me that far again, do you understand!”
For lack of a better term, I don’t think that they have ever really set a ‘safe word’ with one another in this game they play (john doesn’t know his limits or when to say stop, he just let’s sherlock push him, even when it goes past what is bearable), and that is going to lead to trouble.
TRF DEFINITELY broke trust, almost irreparably. I do think that John felt he forgave Sherlock in TEH after the train car thing, and as weird as it may be to most people, the thing with the bomb really was a smart thing on Sherlock’s part. He pushed John to the edge again, right to the edge, almost too far, but then he had that big ‘ta-dah!’ moment where he revealed that he had been in control all along, that he had a plan, that he had called the police. It was Sherlock’s way of saying, “See, you can trust me. I do have a plan. We can go back to our play, I’ll give you the danger, the adrenaline rush, but I won’t ever push you that far, too far, again. I will never make you feel that your trust in me was misplaced. I’ve got you, John. You’re safe with me.”
So John forgives him, and is willing to go back to their old dynamic, their old play, but there is still a part of him left bleeding, and that loops back again to the point I think you are trying to make here, that John forgave, truly forgave, but that the trust wasn’t fully repaired, even if they both thought it was. It’s going to take a lot to fix that.
And remember, what does Sherlock turn around and do AGAIN in HLV? He shuts John out, he lies to him to keep him safe, he makes his own plans with Magnussen, and he fails at those plans, and the result is John having to watch Sherlock go to his death all over again, as he is shipped off to Eastern Europe. HLV was just TRF all over again. Even if John had been starting to let himself trust again a little bit between TEH and his wedding, all of that started to unravel again in HLV.
I hate HLV, so much. But then I think that is where Seasons 4 & 5 are going to have to take us, it’s what those seasons will have to address. How on earth do you repair a breech of trust so huge, and especially with a man who came to the table with trust issues in the first place?!
Sherlock and John have their work cut out for them, that’s for sure.
This is why I love HLV though. I think it’s actually a step in the right direction for them both, not a repeat of TRF. Sherlock doesn’t shut John out entirely. He doesn’t go off to confront Mary on his own. He doesn’t show up later and say, oh by the way your wife is the one who shot me, but it’s already been taken care of. He doesn’t put himself in yet another situation that might get him killed (because he knows that Mary isn’t going to shoot him with John there). Instead he asks John to trust him again. He puts John in that chair and says sit and listen, you need to be in on this, I want you to be part of this. John places an awful lot of trust in Sherlock to just sit there quietly while his wife aims a gun at him, a lot more trust than he probably has allowed himself to show since Sherlock came back really, but he does as Sherlock asked because he is allowing that trust between them to start to grow back to where it once was. And in doing so, it allows him to be in on all the secrets for once, to see that Sherlock trusts him, too. When Sherlock came back in TEH, he said he hadn’t been in contact because he was afraid John would let the cat out of the bag, and here in HLV he is literally opening the bag right in front of him and trusting John not to let the metaphorical cat escape. And that is a huge step in the right direction, and John even cements his regained trust in Sherlock in the domestic scene. “Your way. Always your way.”
Now we don’t know a lot about what happened before Christmas and how much of the CAM plan John was or wasn’t in on, so maybe that was a step backwards for them. But either way, I think that while Sherlock shooting CAM and subsequently getting sent off to Eastern Europe was obviously not something John would have wanted him to do, it isn’t really the same as TRF. Even in the midst of things, it was clear to John that whatever plan Sherlock had come in with, whether John was in on it or not, it had gone wrong. He was hoping Sherlock maybe had a backup plan (”Sherlock, do we have a plan?”), but Sherlock just closes his eyes and John knows he doesn’t. And so of course Sherlock improvises and does something drastic to try to get them out of it, to try to save John, but it isn’t the same as TRF because it wasn’t part of the plan. It’s shocking, yes. It’s likely the wrong choice, yes. But it wasn’t the huge betrayal of trust that TRF was because Sherlock didn’t intentionally manipulate him and lie to him about what was happening. Again, a step in the right direction. A small one, but one going the right way nonetheless.
I agree about Sherlock telling John that Mary shot him being a step in the right direction. A huge step in the right direction, actually. But, the only way I can see the Magnussen fiasco as not being another TRF, is if we find out in Season 4 that there was a plan all along, that Sherlock telling John that he could trust Mary during the 221b domestic was part of some deception that the two of them had arranged ahead of time, that John forgiving Mary was also a part of that deception, that there was some sort of mutual arrangement going on there, and that the thing with Magnussen was supposed to be the capping off of the whole plan, but for some reason went wrong.
Thing is, that John seems truly, and sincerely shocked when Sherlock drugs his entire family on Christmas day, and a helicopter shows up to take them to Magnussen’s place. John really seems to not have a clue what Sherlock’s got up his sleeve when they get there. I really think it was all a huge surprise to John. So, I don’t know…
Mark was explaining more than just the TFP explosion scene, this show really is genius
I’m on the floor
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