I’ve seen a lot of anti-EMP-people argue that EMP doesn’t make any sense because it wasn’t in the original ACD!stories:
“Why would Mofftiss even go for this? Just because they like ‘Inception’? Isn’t BBC ‘Sherlock’ supposed to be read on a meta level, as well? As more than just an adaptation of the original ACD!stories, as a commentary on all the other adaptations that have been done before, as a commentary on the relationship between author, audience, and the Sherlock Holmes character that has existed for more than 120 years?”
Well, I think I just had a little epiphany about that.
EMP actually makes a lot of sense not just in-universe, but also on a meta level!
But first of all, let’s remember how they foreshadowed EMP right at the very start of the show in ASiP in that very first scene that establishes Sherlock as a character for us:
In this screenshot Sherlock visually becomes one with the dead body lying on the slab. And that’s no coincidence. That dead body represents Sherlock Holmes (the man who, as Molly points out, “used to work here”).
So, we have a dead body who represents Sherlock Holmes, and a Sherlock who peers down on ‘himself’ from above.
You know…like in a near-death experience! (Thank you @monikakrasnorada, for this idea. This wouldn’t have occurred to me if you hadn’t pointed out how much TFP is like a near-death experience in our recent collaborative creative ‘shouting match’: here.:))
So, this is some nice foreshadowing of a near-death experience right there.
It tells us that Sherlock will, at some point in the show, be in two places at once: lying somewhere unconscious/in a coma (almost dead), yet also experiencing a lot of things outside his own body at the same time (or rather deep inside his own brain, as near-death experiences go).
He will be lying down, near dead, but also be very alive in his mind palace. Just like in the ASiP screenshot above.
In s4, people will try to wake Sherlock up. (As has been said before, this is probably what John beating Sherlock up in TLD and screaming, “Wake up!” is all about.) People will literally try to get a reaction out of his unconscious body.
Which again was foreshadowed in the same ASiP scene when Sherlock is literally trying to ‘get a reaction’ out of the body that’s lying there. (On the surface level of the text, Sherlock beats this dead body with a riding crop to see if bruises will form after death. But on a metaphorical level, he is trying to get a reaction out of himself, the ‘dead’ body. Just like John is when John is beating him in TLD. John, too, will be trying to get a reaction out of Sherlock in s4: He will try to wake him up.)
I’m actually astounded by how well the foreshadowing works here: Molly (the John mirror No. 1) is looking at Sherlock beating himself from outside of the room.
This means that this ASiP scene can read like this:
The room=Sherlock being trapped by walls, ie, trapped inside his own body (in a coma)
Both Sherlock and the dead body=two different aspects of Sherlock (the awake one in his mind palace and the unconscious one lying there)
Molly=John who is forced to look at coma!Sherlock from the outside, but can’t actually interfere with what’s going on inside the ‘room’, ie, inside Sherlock
Nice.
So, now that we have established that this scene neatly foreshadows Sherlock’s EMP, let’s go one step further.
We have now looked at two levels expressed in this scene: 1) the literal (textual) surface level and 2) the metaphorical/symbolic (foreshadowing) level of this scene.
But we haven’t looked at the third level yet.
3) The third level is the overarching meta level: the level that examines the relationship between author, audience, adaptations and the Sherlock Holmes character that has existed for more than 120 years.
I’m sure I’m telling you nothing new when I say that the dead body in this ASiP scene represents the Sherlock Holmes character that we’ve known for more than a 120 years.
What are we shown in this ASiP scene? Sherlock (who represents our BBC-Mofftiss-Sherlock show) beating that ‘dead horse’ (with a riding crop:)) that is the 120 year-old Sherlock Holmes character.
This is actually quite a nice commentary on what Mofftiss, in their usual sarcastic way, think the Sherlock Holmes character has become over the last 120 years: dead! A dead body.
That’s their verdict.
‘Sherlock Holmes’ as a sujet has been done to death. There have been more than 200 adaptations all over the world. The character has literally become a dead body with no pulse.
He has been shown with his typical attributes so often that we can’t think of him as a living human being anymore.
Sherlock Holmes has become the pipe and the hat and the horse carriages and the gas lamps and the cases, the man who frowns on love and/or falls in love with Irene Adler, the man who says, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson,’ even though he never did that in the books.
In short, Sherlock Holmes, the 120-year-old character, has become a dead body stuffed with all sorts of attributes that make it impossible for us to see him as an interesting, living human being. He has literally been done to death.
And (I’m sure I’m telling you nothing new here) this BBC Sherlock adaptation turns up and beats the shit out of this dead body to see if it can maybe, maybe still get a reaction out of this dead body, if it can make that dead body react like a living, breathing thing.
This has all been discussed amongst fans before, and it’s all shown to us in that one ASiP scene: Sherlock (representing the BBC Sherlock show) is trying to get a reaction out of Sherlock Holmes, the dead body (the character that has been done to death).
But what has this got to do with EMP?
Well, if this ASiP scene foreshadows Sherlock in an EMP at some point in the show, then the meta reading of this ASiP scene has to extend to EMP, as well.
So, what Mofftiss are telling us is that Sherlock, in a coma, represents the 200 or so adaptationsthat have been done over the past century.
It’s quite cheeky and self confident. But that’s how Mofftiss are, after all.
Sherlock in a coma/unconscious/almost dead Sherlock is a Sherlock without a pulse, a Sherlock who isn’t living up to the potential of his character anymore.
EMP!Sherlock represents the 200 adaptations that have been done before this one.
If Mofftiss manage, in s5, to wake Sherlock up, then this is a general commentary on how they have ‘woken up’ the Sherlock Holmes character after his 120-year-long, Zombie-like state of being near-dead.
They (Mofftiss) are the ones to breathe new life into the Sherlock Holmes character. That’s what the waking up of Sherlock, in s5, will mean.
(Note that, for this meta reading, it is totally irrelevant when EMP started. The starting point could be HLV or TRF or the pool or even the pilot.)
The point Mofftiss are trying to make is that at the beginning of the show, Sherlock (read: BBC Sherlock, the show) was trying to get a reaction out of a dead body (read: the Sherlock Holmes character).
And at the end of the show (s5), Mofftiss will do more than just that: They won’t just get a few reactions out of the character. They will bring him back to life. They will give him a beating heart again.
And since I’m almost certain that John Watson will be the one to wake Sherlock up in s5 (or to be involved in his waking up somehow), this will also mean that this new awakening of THE ‘Sherlock Holmes character’ will happen through love, through gay love, to be precise!
In short, what Mofftiss are telling us is that Sherlock Holmes without his gay identity and without the love for John that comes with it is an almost dead, comatose Sherlock Holmes.
The Sherlock Holmes character that has been adapted on screen (and on stage) more than 200 times across the world is a zombie, a dead body, a comatose entity BECAUSE HE IS DEVOID OF HIS GAY IDENTITY as represented by his love for John Watson!
That’s what EMP means. That’s why it’s there.
Coma!Sherlock is the 200 adaptations. Because these adaptations took away his reason to live (his gay identity, ie, his love for John).
In short: Anti-Emp-fans are right in a sense: Because, yes, EMP was never in the ACD!canon.
But that’s not the point!
EMP has nothing to do with Arthur Conan Doyle.
EMP is a commentary on what has been done to Sherlock Holmes for the last 120 years in adaptation after adaptation after adaptation.
All of these adaptations have turned Sherlock into a dead character that can only be gay on the inside (in his mind palace), torturing himself on the inside, but being dead, comatose and without a pulse on the outside.
That’s what EMP is.
The Mofftiss adaptation, however, will bring this character back to life. They will wake him up! By giving him his gay identity, his heart, his John back.
@sagestreet, let me love you. This. All of this. I mean, what is there to say?? I love absolutely every word.
For EMPers here from the beginning, it’s been a long hard year and a half of ridicule and dismissal. I really never have understood exactly why EMP theory has been so derided. It was never a theory to dismiss or excuse what we didn’t like about anything in the show. It was literally what we saw happening.
BBC ‘Sherlock’ supposed to be read on a meta level, as well?
Why does one exclude the other? Maybe there is something about reading on a meta level that I don’t get because I thought we were reading it through subtext and the ‘meta level’. Through intertextual readings like the film Stay and a theatre of the absurd in order to tell the story of Sherlock’s inner self. Is that not meta enough? Just because you don’t have a phd in English lit or something to even understand this theory, then it isn’t worthy of being considered?
Sometimes I really believe that Moriarty was speaking to this fandom when he told Sherlock he was wrong to want everything to be so clever. The key code was never anything. It was simple daylight robbery.
“Sometimes a deception is so audacious, so outrageous that you can’t even see it when it’s staring you in the face.”
It’s hard to imagine a deception more audacious and more outrageous as EMP, and it’s been staring us in the face this whole time. 🙂
What could be more meta than the opportunity to actually see inside the world’s foremost deductive mind. It’s certainly something that’s never been done before.
I, for one, can’t believe i didn’t notice the fact that both ASIP and TLD had similar “corpse-beatings in the morgue” scenes. This is such a good meta, thank you for this
The Lion’s Mane is the second of only two stories narrated by Sherlock Holmes; the first of these was The Blanched Soldier. Both of these stories were published in 1926 and collected in The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes, which seems to have become a major source for Sherlock S4 (see my related meta here, partially about the erasure of John Watson’s character).
In The Lion’s Mane, Holmes opens by talking about his lonely life in his house on a hill in the Sussex Downs, with his housekeeper and his bees, and relates the story of a case that nearly stumped him.
“At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional week-end visit was the most I ever saw of him. Ah! had he but been with me, how much he might have made of so wonderful a happening and of my eventual triumph against every difficulty!”
Yes, it’s certainly a pity that John is being kept from writing these stories.
As I mentioned in my recent meta on The Blanched Soldier, Mofftiss appear to believe that Doyle removed Watson from that tale in order to tell a story about him in him allegory (this is the only explanation for James Sholto’s character in The Sign of Three). I think he did the same thing in The Lion’s Mane, but it’s difficult to tell, because the story is a bit like a game of musical chairs. In fact, past Sherlockians have observed that lines in The Lion’s Mane appear to have been handed out to the wrong characters.
“Why did you betray us?” (The Six Thatchers)
The only character in The Lion’s Mane that we recognize by name, Sherlock Holmes, isn’t acting like himself at all. John Watson is outright missing. The first manuscript of this story, most of which has survived, included a new and important character who was then cut out of the published version. Can we trust what we see on the page?
“That’s not what happened at all.” (The Six Thatchers)
… Victorian skinny-dipping, secret love notes, and lots of other spoilers for The Lion’s Mane under the cut.
In The Great Game, Moriarty made Sherlock dance by sending coded messages through the pink replica phone. And in “Many Happy Returns”, we see this:
The box of stuff Greg has of Sherlock’s that he’s kept for some reason and decides to give to John. In it are four important pieces of information – one could even say a game.
A yellow mask, a Hornby Train, Nicotine patches, and the pink phone.
At first glance, seeing the pink phone reminds us of “A Study in Pink”, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that phone. In “The Great Game”, Moriarty sends a replica to Scotland Yard to communicate clues. This phone in the box is more than likely Moriarty’s phone to Sherlock, since it was mailed to him in the first place and therefore Sherlock’s legal property.
This box is a signal for the last pip.
The writers have sent the final pip, alongside the phone. The viewers were given hints as to where the series was going. It’s all in that box. And it’s been there this whole time.
“Nicotine patches. Helps me to think”
This box is meant to be decoded. The patches imply focus, brainwork. The phone is the pip. The mask is a reference to “The Adventure of the Yellow Face” while the train is a reference to Doyle’s “The Lost Special”.
The Adventure of the Yellow Face includes a wife with a huge secret regarding her previous life in America, the potential for blackmail, her chickens coming home to roost, her husband who stays with her no matter what the cost, her husband who (upon her request) doesn’t ask questions she does not want to answer, the concept of whether or not she believes her husband is a “good man” (and that he wants to be a good man), and Sherlock Holmes screwing it all up then instructing Watson to use the term “Norbury” whenever he gets too cocky in the future.
Whew. That’s, like, episodes 8-12 right there.
And this was hinted at before episode 7 aired.
Now let’s look at the train.
By now you must have heard the story of Doyle’s “The Lost Special”. In 1893 he published a detective story about a missing traincar (called a ‘special’) that was detached from the original and hidden somewhere else. This is exactly what happens in episode 7, The Empty Hearse, which is also parallel to “V for Vendetta”. Considering V’s hearse was a detached traincar that went on to blow up Parliament, Sherlock having an “empty hearse” coincides perfectly with the empty traincar positioned under Parliament, as well, and now I have a migraine.
In Sherlock, the missing piece of the train is hidden beneath Sumatra Road and it’s carrying something so disastrous that it must be stopped, lest it unleash hell.
“The roads we walk have demons beneath, and yours have been waiting for a very long time.”
So the yellow mask in the box was pertinent to five episodes spanning two series and eight plot points, but the train in the box was pertinent to only one episode and one throw-away plot point? I don’t buy it.
So here I wait, patient as ever, for that bomb to go off, the one hidden beneath the surface, tied up in legal disputes, the one that was detached from the rest and stowed away for the perfect time when nobody would know what hit them.
They gave us our pip and told us to think, now it’s just a matter of time.
Nice! I would argue, however, since the moment John shot Jefferson Hope, the “original serial killer,” John had ceased the connection of his narrative from that of the 5 pips, or, the past in America, i.e., the original story of Jefferson Hope in A Study in Scarlet.
TBB sort of followed The Sign of the Four, the game is afoot! But instead of the Agra treasure, the quest has become “cracking the codes.” The first time Sherlock and John followed a train track in search of “the lost special,” they found a wall of ciphers. And instead of recovering the lost treasure in the tramway, we had a case of mistaken identity on all sides. Sherlock and John did crack the “book code” in the end, though, but we didn’t, hence, The Great Game.
The Empty House blew up in pieces in the opening minutes of TGG – which means ACD’s The Final Problem was not at all what it seemed. Since then, we’ve been provided breadcrumbs of where to look, why we must bear witness, and perhaps participate, in solving a 130-year-old problem. 7 years on, we are back at where we started:
Read the books – it wasn’t a comment meant to be patronizing, it was a plea – lots of people read ACD canon in the last 130 years, and yet, here we are.
in tst when sherlock hears the shooting and instead of regarding his safety the first thing he decides to do is flip the table so john can take cover which is according to blog theory john thinking that sherlock is always recklessly risking his life for him
Ever since Sherlock series 4 came out, collectively we were like “what the HELL is this?!?! This doesn’t make any sense!” BUT after many months of tossing ideas around the fandom, we have made theories that could explain the weirdness, but nothing we can all agree on. Now, this meta here may be absolute garbage to you, but I believe, in my heart of hearts, I’ve solved it. Please read it in its entirety with an open mind before you reblog it just to tell me I suck.
Thanks in advance, you da best
Paige
Here’s the short version: Sherlock actually jumped at the end of The Reichenbach Fall, just as Doyle intended him to die. Gatiss and Moffat said they are correcting something in this adaptation that no one else has gotten right before. Many of us assumed the homosexual romance was the one thing they were changing, but we were punched in the face right after The Final Problem came out. Gatiss and Moffat are changing the sacrifice. Holmes was intended to die for his friends but Doyle needed more money and rewrote the series after “The Final Problem”. That turned Holmes’ sacrifice into a cruel joke against Watson. This is what BBC Sherlock is fixing, and we’re about to see it come to fruition.
I know many theorists despise the homosexual reading of Holmes and Watson, while many people in general despise theorists on this site. That’s fine, I don’t care how people feel about gay theories and/or TJLC and its followers. But I’m here to tell you TJLC, at its core as a concept, was right. You may hate Moffat and Gatiss, you may think Sherlock is a piece of shit show, and that’s fine, you do you. But hear this one meta out, please. I think even the hardest skeptic can at least apprectiate the thought and logic behind this.
A few days ago I wrote a BBC Sherlock meta called “His Mind Created the Perfect Metaphor” which basically provides a symbolic look at series 3 and 4, and how they both could be mind palace extensions after Sherlock literally hit the pavement after the fall in episode 6. If you haven’t read that, this might not make as much sense, so I put the link up there in case anyone wants to take a look first.
This meta, however, extends on that theory, and on how the name “Mary Watson” fits with Sherlock’s characterization of her, by examining Lord Douglas’ Victorian poem “Two Loves”, and the homosexual love that dare not speak its name.
an old woman who has no money, has a drinking problem, not spouse and no friends
a middle-aged man, rich and necessary, who has to hide his secret dark impulses about bodies he likes to watch ‘die’ and who desperately wants to confess his acts
a woman trapped in a bunker, who makes no difference between genders, locked behind the glass, desiring to be forgiven and saved by sherlock, even though her actions ‘killed’ sherlock’s best friend
Sherlock Fandom Archive 