Today’s topic: Dates in Sherlock and why we probably must ignore all of them (hint: cause they’re all wrong)
Seriously, it’s a mess. I am afraid that we will never figure out which year we’re currently in because we can’t. We don’t have the correct data. Because they’ve made a couple of mistakes. It happens that writers mess up from time to time. Sometimes, what looks like mistakes actually are mistakes and not hints or clues that have a deeper meaning.
What we know, for sure and it’s the only thing we know for sure is that John and Sherlock met on January 29th 2010. But what happens after then? Makes little to no sense. (Warning: this post is a bit long cause there are pics)
I have removed duplicate scenes. As before, scenes that are illustrations of what someone in the show is talking about are not included (for example the death of Charlie Welsborough).
I have added the cremation, thank you to @writinginthewoods for mentioning that I had missed it!
This is another quickly made visualisation, in order to get it out there before the next episode. It is very rough and badly proof read, so please keep in mind that I might have missed someting.
Enjoy! (And again, please remember to tag reblogs for spoilers)
Tagging those of you that commented on the last post
If you want to see the whole flowchart in one image, download it here.
Creating this flowchart has required me choose what to include and what to leave out. If you think that I have missed something, I’d be happy to hear from you, but please read the comments first, in case I had excluded that information for a reason.
I have completely lost track of who is discussing what in the aftermath of s4, but I’ll tag a few people under the cut anyway, hoping that you are interested. Let me know if you don’t want to be tagged in the future!
IS NOBODY GOING TO MENTION THE FACT THAT MORIARTY WAS A PATIENT AT SHERRINFORD!?!?!
wait what the hell? someone explain!
During the TFP flashback to when Moriarty was in Mycroft’s office at Sherrinford:
MYCROFT: You know what this place is, of course? JIM (quietly): Of course. (He fiddles with some of the animals on the table as he speaks.) So am I under arrest again?
Implying that he had been held under arrest at Sherrinford, referring to this scene at the end of THoB:
Actually, the scene in THoB is an arrest afterhis first encounter with Eurus.
Sherlock and John met at January 29, 2010.
The Christmas in ASIB was in 2010.
Moriarty died and Sherlock “died” before June 16, 2011 via John’s post.
As stated by John’s therapist: 18 months since your last appointment—John’s last appointment was in January 2010 via his blog where Ella Thompson had commented on his January 25 and 31 posts saying “Is that why you missed your appointment? I tried to call.” “Please answer your phone.” respectively. Her next comment was in April 20, 2013 after John’s post about moving on.
Sherlock comes back from the dead on November 3, 2013 with his name finally cleared and him visiting all his friends immediately after being rescued.
John and Mary get married on 2014.
Sherlock kills Magnussen on Christmas 2014.
The tarmac scene happened on January 2015.
Mary died around 2015.
The ending of TLD happened in January 6, 2016 (Sherlock’s bday)
TFP
A few days after Sherlock’s bday, John got shot by Eurus.
A few days after, they go to Mycroft.
The next day, Mycroft goes to 221B to talk about all this.
A few days after, everyone thought Mycroft was still being attended to in hospital which im assuming takes days, especially since they haven’t replaced Mycroft yet to take care of everything—if it took a week, Mycroft would have had a temporary replacement…
So everything that happened in TFP happened about a week or two after Sherlock’s birthday. This is consistent with Sherlock’s eye haemorrhage he got in TLD—either from John’s beating or being asphyxiated by Culverton.
From my observation, since it’s still around January, Christmas 2015 is still in mind… so Christmas five years ago, in the mindset of everyone, would be Christmas of 2010.
So basically, what I’m saying is that this:
Was on the same day as this:
And that Mycroft being alone in ASIB, thinking here:
Happened in the evening after this, which is probs why he was thinking so hard in the dark at night on Christmas Day cos this thing just happened:
Which means that this:
Happened months after this:
Which is probably why Moriarty was much more interested with Sherlock’s life story as pointed out by John here, saying “…in return you had to offer him Sherlock’s life story”:
Because Moriarty had met Eurus but they had only talked in 5 minutes, and probably only talked about how to successfully destroy Sherlock by threatening to kill his best friends since Eurus had witnessed it happen before… and he probably wanted more info about Sherlock regarding that…
We also know that Eurus didn’t know that Sherlock had forgotten her completely.
EURUS: Interesting. Mycroft told me you’d rewritten your memories; he didn’t tell me you’d written me out completely.
So to them, they thought that Sherlock had made up his own story about his best friend dying…
Eurus probably didn’t know that Sherlock had rewritten Redbeard as a dog. The only time we ever really know for certain that Eurus was told that Sherlock thinks Redbeard is a dog was Sherlock telling her himself in this scene:
Before that, when Sherlock mentioned Redbeard, he only said, “I know what happened to Redbeard.” and Eurus was like “Do you now?” HAHA fooled u, u idiot… u probs got it wrong…
But after Sherlock says, “Redbeard was my dog.”
Eurus was softer, but her smirk was larger. And that’s probs why Eurus was much more smug at that point with that particular tone of hers, “Ohhh, Sherlock… You know nothing.” as if she’s just seeing how deeply the scars really went… as if she’s saying something like oh jfc srsly sherl dafuq happened to u daz wayyy worse than i hoped…
The point is that, THOB interrogation happened after Moriarty met Eurus, and before that, Moriarty was already arrested before… probably immediately after that first scene in ASIB.
You know how there’s only month/day on John’s blog, but supposedly it was written in the span of three years. BUT. What if that’s not the case? Let’s use ASiP as the fixed anchor because that’s where it begins – I left the before the same, and rearrange the after in chronological order using only month/day. Needless to say, It’s…… fascinating. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but the beginning actually fits ACD canon’s publish date better, and the end certainly feels like where we were in series 4. Sorry to be redundant if this is already been done; if nothing else, it’s kinda entertaining to think about when these cases supposedly have taken place:
1/1 Actually, Happy New Year
12/31 Happy New Year
12/25 Christmas
12/19 The Six Thatchers
11/7 The Empty Hearse
10/5 Many Happy Returns
9/15 By Royal appointment
9/3 The Inexplicable Matchbox
9/2 The Aluminum Crutch
8/12 Hat-man and Robin
8/11 The Sign of Three
8/1 Sherlock Holmes Baffled
7/21 The May Fly Man
7/13 The Speckled Blond
7/2 The Hollow Client
6/29 The Bloody Guardsman
6/17 Murder at the Orient Express
6/16 The Geek Interpreter
6/16 Untitled
6/10 The Elephant in the Room
6/3 Happily Ever After
5/30 Tilly Briggs Cruise of Terror
5/30 Life Goes On
5/27 The Poison Giant
5/23 Death by Twitter
5/12 The Deadly Tealights
5/1 Quick Update
4/26 A Few Pictures
4/20 A New Beginning
4/1 The Great Game
3/28 The Blind Banker
3/27 FYI
3/23 A Rant
3/23 Diamonds are Forever
3/16 Hello Boys
3/16 The Hounds of Baskerville
3/12 The Woman
2/7 A Study in Pink
2/1 Secret Code
1/31 My New Flatmate
1/29 A Strange Meeting
1/28 Serial Suicides
1/25 Drinks
1/21 Happy Now?
1/20 How?
12/15 Pointless
12/14 Nothing
This kind of freaks me out. Wow.
Okay but how does this work… @darlingtonsubstitution could you please explain this to me… thanks
@harryismyfirstname I’m so sorry it took forever to reply… been working way too much and neglecting fandom activities (sob). Anyway… I was kinda half-joking when I made the post, but the more I think about ACD canon, the more… this starting to make sense. Not sure if you read my elephant in the room and the curious incident of the hounds meta, but if what I think happened indeed happened, it is conceivable that TBB occurred after ASiB and THoB. Because… in a twisted way it’s more canon-compliant then the episode chronology presented to us, as the relationship between Holmes and Watson was resolved fairly early on, albeit via subtext.
I can’t find the link right now but pretty sure @the-7-percent-solution wrote a meta about John’s shirt representing his sexuality. As far as I can recall, there were only two occasions where John was wearing “not-straight” shirts – in TBB and ASiB:
Interestingly, John was wearing a not-straight tie in TRF:
The conversation John had with Sherlock in TBB about cracking the “book cipher” was basically… the reason for Sherlock, I believe. The exchange was alluding to the secret codes within ACD canon, and both our Sherlock and John knew the true story all along—they have always been part of it after all. But we’ve been led on this journey because every version of the Holmes and Watson story to-date has been incomplete, and as much as we want to “solve” Sherlock as a stand-alone show, it is an adaptation and the tale of Sherlock and John cannot be complete without ACD’s Holmes and Watson.
In short… it is possible we’ve been feed “doctored footage” longer than we thought; ACD did it via words on the pages, Mofftiss is still doing it via moving images and dialogues on film; playing with chronology has always been part of the Sherlockian game.
So… what is the “true” story? There is a method to this madness and the game… is always afoot 😀
[edit] I meant to include John’s “straight-date” vertical stripe shirt as contrast – since horizontal lines can be read as “straight line” as well, oops. But since John’s checkered pattern shirt represents bisexuality, a vertical line and a horizontal line can only represent one thing each……
There are a lot of posts floating around right now about the timeline wonk of Sherlock. In a previous post, I had tried to make some sense of it (as best I could) but I feel like it maybe deserves its own post and input from everyone as to how to figure out just where we are in the show.
*Disclaimer: I only added the posts that related to each episode.
From John’s blog
January 2010– First meeting
March 2010– TBB
April 2010– TGG
Sept 2010-March 2011– ASiB
March 2011– THoB
June 2011– TRF
April 2012 or 2013– A New Beginning* It is unclear if this post was made in April 2012 following TRF but it would seem more likely it is 2013 as that would make Sherlock returning 2 years and 4 months after TRF.
Nov 2013– TEH
Aug 2014– TSoT
* I took John at his word and believed when he said Sherlock had let him grieve for two years, so I always went with 2013 as the year, until-
This would have to make John and Mary’s wedding having taken place in 2013, not 2014.
Which ultimately means Sherlock was gone barely 14 months during his hiatus. which, ugh. I don’t know what to make of it all.
Well, we know from TLD that they are rather careless and sloppy with dates (that date/day for CS opening his hospital wing isn’t right if it happened 2014 I think)…
They filmed the wedding at Goldney Hall at the end of April 2013. Perhaps someone just got their calendar out and looked up an upcoming Saturday while making this prop? And, of course, on John’s blog, the wedding took place in August… so…
When I did my visualisation of the order of events, I had to treat props as unreliable – and ignore John’s blog – to make it work. I put up a bunch of comments on my website, if you want to know how my reasoning: http://obotligtnyfiken.se/sherlock-order-of-events/
If you want to see the whole flowchart in one image, download it here.
Creating this flowchart has required me choose what to include and what to leave out. If you think that I have missed something, I’d be happy to hear from you, but please read the comments first, in case I had excluded that information for a reason.
I have completely lost track of who is discussing what in the aftermath of s4, but I’ll tag a few people under the cut anyway, hoping that you are interested. Let me know if you don’t want to be tagged in the future!
Sherlock Fandom Archive 