Eurus and Mycroft’s Gambit in The Final Problem 

 (Sherlock meta by mild-lunacy)

I was thinking of the recent @thepurplecarbuncle post about what Mycroft told Sherlock at Baker Street in The Final Problem: “the man you are today is your memory of Eurus”. I agree with her incredulous response, in that I can see how it sounds false, like a pure retcon– it sounds ridiculous– because it *is* ridiculous and it’s meant to be, on one level. Obviously, if it’s taken to be literally about Sherlock’s deepest self, his best self, that can’t be true. Sherlock is a kind man, a ‘good man’, as Lestrade says later in the same episode. So it’s textually not *literally* true. But at the same time, Sherlock’s not *only* that man that he’d become thanks in part to John Watson, is he? As Ivy told me so eloquently, the whole point, whether here or in Mary’s reference to who Sherlock and John 'really are’, is about the *duality* in Sherlock and John’s natures.

Sherlock is kind and good, but that hasn’t always been the persona he’s been inhabiting, is it? Him standing with Moriarty on that rooftop, promising Moriarty that he’s not one of 'the angels’ wasn’t all that long ago, and Sherlock had shot Magnussen while proclaiming himself to be a 'high-functioning sociopath’ just recently. And that persona, including Mycroft’s spiel in A Scandal in Belgravia about heartbreak being inevitable and how 'caring is not an advantage’, had always seemed to be tied to Mycroft and his influence. Still, you can’t just take Mycroft at face value, 'cause he’s playing the role he’s always played. If anything, he’s more obvious about it in The Final Problem than ever before, explicitly taunting John to Sherlock’s face 'cause he knows Sherlock would always choose John– would always choose *sentiment*– and he wants to make it easier on Sherlock. As usual, Mycroft tests and prods both John and Sherlock at Baker Street, rather than being straightforward. Mycroft certainly isn’t simply saying that Sherlock is some kind of Eurus lite™, and he always has been his whole adult life. He’d just called Sherlock a 'dragon slayer’ in His Las Vow; he *knows* Sherlock for real. The point is that he *hasn’t* been like Eurus, but Sherlock’s made some deeply unnatural and unnecessary choices to shut himself off from friendship and emotional intimacy because of trauma from events related to Eurus he cannot remember. Of course… that’s not established text, at least until The Final Problem. We just have clues and foreshadowing. In The Abominable Bride, Sherlock insists 'I made me’ (although he then thinks of Redbeard when there’s a dog barking in his Mind Palace). And indeed, Sherlock’s choices in response to Eurus– at the beginning and the end, in The Final Problem– are shown to be very much his own. He certainly made himself what he is by *choice*, even if he’s not conscious of it afterwards.

The Final Problem has various callbacks and parallels (the big one to The Hounds of Baskerville, for example, that I’ve discussed recently). Besides the differences in the vector (Sherlock’s own mind rather than a hallucinogenic drug with Henry), I think it’s important to note that Sherlock *chose* to forget in a way Henry didn’t. Sherlock isn’t just a victim of a crime, but still the active protagonist. His conversation with Mycroft at Baker Street can also be a callback to A Study in Pink. That’s where we first heard Mycroft say John could be the 'making of’ his brother, 'or make him worse than ever’. As Ivy summarized, The Final Problem works as the resolution of Sherlock’s arc, and so we had to answer the question of why does Sherlock actually say he’s a 'high-functioning sociopath’? Why does he say being alone 'protects’ him? When people dismiss the entirety of The Final Problem, it’s easy to miss the issues of characterization continuity and the sense in which things may actually make sense in unexpected ways.

I should emphasize that I don’t think Sherlock’s trauma is meant to be definitive to his personality. The question of whether Mofftiss always intended this reveal since Series 1 is interesting but ultimately irrelevant in practice. It’s enough to say that Sherlock’s always worn part of his 'Sherlock Holmes’ persona, the 'high-functioning sociopath’ self, as armor. It’s never been natural. It’s not because he’s naturally a misanthropic loner (like Mycroft), who thinks of other humans like goldfish. This doesn’t mean that he’s *not* different in his own way, or that he didn’t mean it when he told Mycroft in The Empty Hearse 'why would anyone mind?’ But unfortunately, Sherlock struggles to fully accept or accommodate his own humanity even after The Empty Hearse (though the process has begun at that point). In His Last Vow, he regressed from his touching, emotionally open wedding speech to tell John that romantic love was 'human error’, and in The Abominable Bride he actually cries, overcome when Watson acknowledged his humanity. John has had a tendency to believe Sherlock could work miracles– in The Reichenbach Fall, he wanted him to not be dead as 'one more miracle’– which had long been an ongoing issue, as @stephisanerd described in her classic meta. So it’s more like this childhood trauma is just the specific trigger to what was always an ill-fitting illusion of all-knowing supremacy that Sherlock put on as a defense mechanism. And *that* is Eurus’s fault (indirectly, at least); essentially, Eurus herself is the DFP personality with nothing underneath, in a much more personal, less metaphorical way than Moriarty had been. If Moriarty is the 'virus in the data’ in The Abominable Bride, Sherlock’s response to Eurus had corrupted his operating system in this metaphor.

Whether Eurus was intended from the start or not, I essentially think she is simply the mechanism. It was always pretty clear that Sherlock was carrying around some pretty toxic ideas about what kind of things he should aspire to for himself. There were some unrealistic standards he held himself to, but he also has some extreme convictions about sentiment and 'romantic entanglement’ leading only to heartbreak. In a sense, we’d always blamed a sibling for this: we’d just blamed *Mycroft*. Mycroft said lots of insensitive things and provided a sense that Sherlock’s family life was cold, or at least complicated (especially pre-S3). Then we met the Holmes parents, and it seemed like Mycroft and Sherlock were actually a product of a 'normal’, happy home… if one with a math genius mother. But Mycroft’s clear resentment at Christmas (and his 'file’ of complaints about his parents) and Sherlock’s avoidance and awkwardness still seemed… a bit odd. Clearly, some kind of issues were not being addressed. A lot of issues, as it turned out, although in some ways the Holmeses really were a supportive, even ordinary family. The parents just really didn’t know what to do with Mycroft and Sherlock, let alone a girl like Eurus, it appears.

I think it’s clear that Mycroft always felt he had to take care of things invisibly, to be 'the adult’ (even if Mummy didn’t appreciate it in the end: another statement there’s no need to simply accept at face value). He couldn’t just tell Sherlock that he thought he wasn’t dealing with the issue properly; if anything, sentiment really isn’t Mycroft’s area, as he said in The Empty Hearse. But he worries about Sherlock… 'constantly’, as he told John from the start. Mycroft has always placed a lot of stock on other people’s potential influence on his little brother. He’s seen how sensitive he is; how deeply he can be hurt. So of course, if he thought John Watson could be 'the making of’ Sherlock after 24 hours, he’s the type to blame Eurus’s bad influence for Sherlock’s unfortunate conviction he was a 'high-functioning sociopath’ (a descriptor he’d be most likely to have heard applied to Eurus, not himself). Mycroft’s gambit in A Study in Pink was that John could break through to him, somehow, though this didn’t mean he’d start suggesting Sherlock open his heart anytime soon. Both brothers had been burned, and Mycroft was very, *very* protective (after Eurus came the drugs, after all). Mycroft always knew how much both John and Sherlock resisted and doubted him and anything he said, so he *couldn’t* be straightforward even if he wanted to. It’s true that even at the wedding, Mycroft still warned Sherlock not to 'get involved’. It’s not that he meant the opposite, necessarily– but he really does worry about Sherlock and his tendency to have 'danger nights’, after all, and this wasn’t baseless, as His Last Vow demonstrated. However, surely Mycroft still believed John to have been a good influence. Even if both of them admired Eurus a little too much, surely Mycroft knew Sherlock would need to choose John, and could be counted on to choose John in The Sign of Three.

In the end, Mycroft asked John to 'take care’ of Sherlock after his overdose in The Abominable Bride: the ultimate sign of trust. He definitely thinks John has fulfilled his early promise in A Study in Pink, and could be trusted with Sherlock’s future– Mycroft’s only pressure point. Even so, in The Final Problem Mycroft suggests Eurus remained a hugely formative influence, primarily in negative ways. And in certain ways, I’m sure that’s true. The man Sherlock is today is a product of his past, just like any other man. However, that’s not *all* he is, and I think that by the end of The Final Problem, Sherlock’s made peace with that.

Eurus and Sherlock’s Relationship and The Game 

 (Sherlock meta by strawberrypatty)

I am fascinated by the character of Eurus. I’ve seen a lot of disparaging comments about her, but I think she’s incredibly interesting. She changed what we know about Sherlock, Mycroft and the Holmes family. I think this is part of why people are so resistant to the idea of her. We don’t like when the status quo is changed. But the introduction of Eurus does explain quite a few things and deepens our understanding of the characters.

(NOTE: I am not a psychologist. I have tried to leave psychoanalysis out of this. I am just trying to read the text provided to us by the episode)

Many Holmes pastiches have tried to explain the cause of Sherlock Holmes shunning interpersonal relationships. This is often done by having him with a tragic romance as a young man. He lost the woman he loved and thus has shut himself off from feelings for anyone. This is being reflected in Sherlock’s childhood trauma as the cause in Sherlock. This makes a lot of sense. In fact, having childhood trauma being the cause makes even more sense than a tragic romance as it is a far more scarring experience for him. Not only does Sherlock lose his best friend, it is because of the sister who tormented him. When he blocked the memories out, instead of getting Sherlock proper help to deal with his trauma, Mycroft just reinforced it for what he felt was Sherlock’s own safety.

I use the word “tormented” to describe Sherlock’s interactions with Eurus. While Eurus wanted to play with Sherlock, we don’t know HOW she wanted to play with Sherlock. She doesn’t understand what pain is. She wanted to make Sherlock laugh, but she doesn’t understand the concept of pain so instead she took screaming as laughter. She lacks the ability to recognize the difference between negative and positive stimuli.

To her, giving him the mystery of what happened to Victor Trevor is a gift to Sherlock. She’s giving him a puzzle to figure out. She understands that Sherlock has an attachment to him which will spur him to search. Only, Eurus doesn’t understand that Victor is a living, breathing human being. We see even as an adult that Eurus can’t grasp that other people are anything more than unconscious bags of meat, as witnessed by her “jet” and calling the governor a prisoner of his own meat. There is of course also an element of jealousy. Sherlock and Victor were inseparable. Eurus wanted to play, but she didn’t know how to.

Sherlock was described as an emotional child. I think this was something intriguing to Eurus. It is why she focused on him rather than Mycroft. During the entire Final Problem, Mycroft is as much collateral damage as John or Molly or the Governor. To Eurus, emotions are a puzzle that she has to figure out. All of the tests she sets are psychological and focused on Sherlock.

There is no need for Eurus to spend the night with Sherlock after giving him the Culverton Smith mystery. I believe this is a mix of wanting to understand how he treats a normal person and also a need to be around him. It is the first time in her life she is treated as normal, even if she is in disguise at the time.

When she talks to Sherlock in her cell, she looks betrayed when he doesn’t remember that she taught him to play the violin. She also wants to hear him when he’s playing violin. Eurus is trying to figure out who Sherlock is. He is not to her level, because no one is, but there is still a connection. Sherlock understand the things that she can’t— emotions.

Mycroft can understand Eurus on an intellectual level for the most part (she says if she went a bit slow he would get it). But Sherlock is still her favourite brother. There are think a few reasons for this:

(1) I know they say it’s never twins, but Sherlock and Eurus are [twins]. The only reason they had them a year apart (“Irish Twins”) is because Moffat and Gatiss I’m SURE didn’t want to read “Sherlock’s evil twin” in every single review, but every interaction between them is written as if they were twins. There is a deep connection between them that comes from being close siblings.

(2) While Sherlock is the “idiot”, Eurus doesn’t completely understand him. While she is incredibly intelligent, intelligence can’t help someone understand emotion since emotion and logic often work independently. Eurus’ understanding of emotion comes experimenting on Sherlock and examining him.

She speaks of emotional context, but Eurus doesn’t understand what emotional context truly is herself. There is no way she could. She is “beyond Newton” in terms of intellect, but she has been locked up in isolation since childhood. The most she has interacted with people has been to be used as a tool by Mycroft (this might also explain some of her coldness towards Mycroft. Since he used her as a tool, she will use him as the same).

She wants to understand emotional context, which for all of her talk about it turning the third test she does NOT understand. That is the purpose of the tests, so she can find out what Sherlock’s emotional reactions will be. Witness the people she uses in her test: the three people who are most likely to evoke an emotional responce from Sherlock, save for Mrs Hudson (however, I wonder if Eurus has meant for Mrs Hudson to have been killed in the blast on 221B, it’s just that Mycroft was able to rescue her).

There is one thing that is important to keep in mind through all of The Final Problem: The “idiot” Holmes sibling is able to predict the movements of his friends weeks in advance. We also get hints of this from Eurus, being told she spent an hour on Twitter and predicted terrorist attacks. There is an element of this in everything Eurus does. She is attempting to predict what Sherlock will do and what those around him will as well.

The first test is who Sherlock will choose to turn into a murderer (or multiple murderer). She is interested to know how everyone in the room is reacting. She asks for updates on their anxiety levels and suggests she should have fit them for cardiographs. This is how Eurus sees emotion, as physical responces.

Eurus is also completely and utterly in control of the test. I didn’t realize this until my third viewing. She said she’s providing a countdown, but it’s not verbal. Then I realized… The Governor himself is the countdown. Eurus has used her hypnotic suggestion on the Governor to take over Sherrinford. It is completely plausible that she would also set him to kill himself if John or Mycroft fail to kill him within the allotted timespan. That way, the Governor is out of the way for the next tests and John (and Sherlock) culpable of murder by proxy for their inaction.

Eurus says that the Governor is as interesting dead as he was alive. There is the same cavalier attitude towards anyone who is not Sherlock. The interest in John and Mycroft is still focused on Sherlock, as it will tie into Eurus’ finale. She gets into this during The Three Garridebs: “Make use of your friends. I want to see you interact with people you’re close to. Also, you may have to choose which one to keep.”.

In the first test, Eurus is instructing Sherlock to murder someone using either John or Mycroft as a murder weapon. She will be aware of Sherlock’s murder of Magnussen, so she knows that Sherlock is capable of murder. But what she is interested in is which one Sherlock will choose to use. I believe this ties into the final test.

With the Garridebs, Eurus says exactly why she does the test: She wants to see him repress his emotions in order for his reasoning to work. So she gives him the “context” that his actions will condemn someone to die. The Sherlock that Eurus is familiar with was quite emotional. But she’s heard and seen that he has turned himself into a cold, calculating man of logic. Mostly likely Mycroft has told her it is because of her. She wants to test that, see how far it goes, how much influence she has had on him.

In the end, her killing of all three Garridebs is because they don’t matter. What matters is Sherlock.

And now, the scene I have already written SO MUCH about. This is such a fascinating scene to me: the one with Molly Hooper. I will try not to repeat myself too much, but it is bound to happen. It is important to note that Eurus has SEEN Sherlock interact with Molly, albeit briefly. She heard John say that Molly is the one person able to see through Sherlock’s bullshit. We also don’t know what kind of information Eurus has received on Sherlock. However, it is clear to me that Eurus knew Sherlock harboured feelings for Molly. Why is this? Because Molly doesn’t matter to Eurus. She is— like everyone who is not Sherlock— just meat. Sherlock lying to Molly doesn’t make sense because

1. Molly would’ve seen through it.  
2. Guilt over playing with Molly’s affections isn’t enough for Eurus. 

Her previous two tests have been about Sherlock and life and death. Each subsequent test chips away more and more at him emotionally. Just making Sherlock revert back to who he was in Series 1 is not a strong enough test. Eurus is intelligent enough to know that Molly will want Sherlock to say it first and that Sherlock does in fact mean it. He doesn’t know what it means, but that is the reaction she wants.

Eurus claims a victory, because Sherlock has failed to figure out that she wouldn’t have wired Molly’s house with explosives. He was too blinded with panic to think logically, because someone he absolutely loved was in danger. He fails because he couldn’t come up with a way to get Molly to say the words without admitting his own feelings. (“Look what you did to yourself. All of those complicated little emotions.”)

Before Eurus mocks Sherlock, she has a fascinating reaction to Sherlock and Molly admitting their love. I’ve provided a screencap because of how important I believe this is.

That is not the look of an cold, removed scientist. In trying to evoke an emotional responce out of Sherlock using Molly, Eurus I believe has felt something herself. Eurus said that she liked to make Sherlock “laugh”. She has now gotten another emotional reaction from him.

The final test is whether or not Sherlock will kill John or Mycroft. This is Eurus’ true test, because she doesn’t actually know what Sherlock’s reaction is going to be. When Sherlock makes his choice, she says that is was Jim who predicted Sherlock would kill Mycroft. If she had thought that was the case, wouldn’t she say that herself?

I think Eurus thought that Sherlock would kill John, because Mycroft is family. Deep down, what Eurus is looking for is familial affection and she believed that Sherlock would choose family. He would choose HER in the end.

But Sherlock has been put through so much by this point that he’s managed to deduce enough about Eurus. He knows she still wants— needs— him alive. So he decides to kill himself. Rather than just doing it straight off, he gives her a verbal countdown, the thing she robbed them of when killing the Governor and his wife. He knows Eurus will stop him and thus both Mycroft and John will be saved.

Either way, someone was going to end up in the well. Eurus has stripped Sherlock down emotionally and mentally for two purposes:

1. Getting him to really remember her and her game. 
2. Motivate him to finish it.

 And in the end, her game is for Sherlock to come to her. Because she needs Sherlock. She is the girl in the jet with unconscious people around her. She is crashing, because she doesn’t understand her feelings. She has been locked away since she was five years old, just used as a pawn for Mycroft. Mycroft hasn’t had any interest in her emotional wellbeing. He has written her off. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, just like he believed the answer to Sherlock’s problems were to let him forget his childhood trauma rather than work through it.

In the end, I think the relationship of Eurus and Sherlock comes down to the fact that Sherlock is a bridge between Eurus and everyone else. Sherlock is in essence Eurus’ John. It is through John that Sherlock really learns how to form interpersonal relationships. When we meet him in A Study in Pink, he’s not able to find a flatmate, he can’t tell when a girl is asking him out for coffee. But it is through his relationship with John that he has managed to get to this point, where he calls Mary and Molly is friends, where he is able to admit his love for Molly, where he can talk to Mycroft without snarking. Sherlock is the only person who can speak on Eurus’ level, but teach her about the parts of life that she doesn’t understand, emotions and how to be able to live in the world.

Unfortunately, Eurus has done so much that she will have to remain locked up. But we see at the end that Sherlock and Eurus finally play together, this time with their violins. The Holmes family comes together, finally able to start to mend themselves after so many years of heartache.

And Sherlock himself has come to a new place in his life. He has subconsciously tried to make himself into Eurus, albeit a much more controlled one. He cuts himself off from people. He uses his intelligence as an excuse to not socialize with people because they bore him. He has even done experiments on his friends. He drugs John with terror toxin to see his reaction, he has drugged him in the past. He has even done the exact same thing Eurus did, threatening John with a bomb to get him to reveal his true feelings about Sherlock’s faked death, with Eurus does to Sherlock by threatening Molly with an explosive. As Mycroft said, the man Sherlock is comes from his hidden memory of Eurus. The emotional trauma of losing his friend, his home and his sister was too much for him to bear and he cut himself off, instead forming himself into a less version of Eurus.

But that’s not who he is. He’s Sherlock Holmes, the detective in the funny hat. He is a man with friends, with emotions. By the end montage we see him smiling, happy. He has accepted who he really is. He can still be the detective in the silly hat, but he had been able to let go of the things that have held him back from being who he truly is.

“I made me” vs. “Eurus made you”: some rambling and likely incoherent thoughts on this apparent contradiction

 (Sherlock meta by unreconstructedfangirl and anarfea)

unreconstructedfangirl:

Something I really liked in the story from The Abominable Bride to The Final Problem is the whole question of what made Sherlock what he is – and indeed, I think it’s the central question in The Final Problem. I’ve read lots of comments on this in people’s meta around here, and wanted to have a go at saying what I liked about the storytelling in this particular regard.

Many have noted the apparent contradiction between Sherlock’s “Nothing made me. I made me” and Mycroft’s saying that everything Sherlock is, ever decision he’s ever made is because of Eurus. I feel like a mistake we make is taking everything the text tells us as a thing we are being told directly by the text, rather than thinking about how reliable what the text is telling us really is, considering the source and the character who says it.

I loved Sherlock’s “I made me” in The Abominable Bride. It was one of my favourite moments. I loved the idea that in his mind, he was able to take responsibility for himself, and know, somewhere deep inside, that he was the one making the decisions that kept him separate and alone. I feel like, if we can realise that WE choose things, then we have some kind of agency, and power over them, and I like the idea of his having that kind of power over his own narrative. So, when this story of Eurus and young Victor comes along, and Mycroft tells us of that this isn’t true – in fact, Eurus made him? If I’m to take that at face value, it’s disappointing – childhood trauma made Sherlock what he is.

Dull – and done to death, right?

The thing I love, though, is that they are both right, and both wrong, and I really enjoyed thinking about what the constellations are in the spaces between them.

What we all do, every day (and I think being in love with and retelling this story is part of this effort for many of us) is tell ourselves the daily story of what we mean and who we are. In the words of Neurologist Oliver Sacks, we “throw bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness” and create ourselves via narrative – the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. This is what makes us human beings – this continual myth-making – and this narrative of who we are and what we mean is a construct of our minds.

So…Sherlock told himself a story – he made himself. It was a defensive mechanism, and it coincided with his emotional withdrawal, a mechanism he used to protect himself from the pain of love, loss, grief, and importantly, horror. Sherlock made himself, and part of making himself was denying the fact that other people have the power to shape us, and reshape our narrative. He radically claimed agency in defiance of pain. But, it’s not quite true, and what’s more he can’t quite stay away from a world full of horror, can he? As a detective and a junkie, he tries to solve the mystery of horror and pain over and over again while keeping emotional reality at a distance.

Mycroft, meanwhile, sees Sherlock from the outside – sees him as a victim of trauma whose subsequent decision not to feel has kept him safe from further trauma, and he encourages it: “…caring is not an advantage … don’t get involved … Redbeard!” Mycroft sees Sherlock as fragile, prone to self-destruction, and in need of protection – as powerless, and he’s not wrong. Sherlock is compulsive, an addict, and a person in denial of his own heart. Mycroft acts out of love in a paternalistic manner towards not only Sherlock, but the whole family, because that’s the story Mycroft told himself… and the story tells us that this is “limited”, and it is. It’s nice that in the end, Sherlock is able to see that Mycroft did his best, though. That’s real progress.

The fact that both of these things “made” Sherlock isn’t a contradiction, it’s two seemingly contradictory things that are both true from different perspectives; two data points that allow us to see what’s happening when Sherlock remembers Victor and opens his heart to his Eurus, and then chooses the path that will allow him to remake himself, having integrated what he knows into a truer version of events. He DID make himself, and also, she made him. We are not impervious to others, but we do choose which way we go. Sherlock chooses love.

The experiments Eurus runs to try to find out who Sherlock is – what he will do given the choices she gives him all lead to this question of what he will do with her when he knows the truth – and she needs him to know, or she can never come down from her metaphorical plane. She loves him and she needs his love, so she is trying to find out how his love works throughout the episode. Because, Eurus did something terribly damaging, and she needs her brother to know it. She also loves him, and needs him to love her. I love that Sherlock, because of everything that he has been through and felt and experienced is able to have the empathetic response that he has. That he realises that he has a role in healing something in her, as she has healed something in him by finally helping him to see that he is not, never has been, and can never be an island.

And I love, at the end, seeing Sherlock embrace the fact that who we are is a co-creation – a relationship between the people we love and our responses to them. We are not islands of independent myth-making. Sherlock Holmes is not an isolated freakish genius – he is a person of some experience and the wisdom that came from it – he has a past, he lived a life.

The final scenes, in which John and Sherlock embrace what they can be together, and rebuild their home and their hearts to include all that they have experienced and become because of love, and they are surrounded by their village of loved ones were really moving to me. In fact, when I watched it again, I didn’t even hate Mary’s voice over – she was an important part of their shared story, she loved them both, and she belongs there. I really like this as the beginning of them BEING WHAT THEY ARE in legend – a brilliant, humane detective and his astute storyteller who is smarter than he looks, and now the myth they are making is their partnership. It’s a story with both horror and love, and the only way it is what it is, is in partnership. I mean… I loved that! [...]

anarfea:

So, I agree with your analysis but one of the things that always got me about the line, “you do remember her, in a way. Every choice you ever made, every path you’ve ever taken, the man you are today: is your memory of Eurus.” is how true this is –of Mycroft. 

Mycroft says, “what Uncle Rudi began, I thought it best to continue.” Locking Eurus up wasn’t Mycroft’s choice. If we decide that they took Eurus away when she was five (which I’m basing solely on child Eurus’ apparent age and Mycroft’s comment to the governor that “she’s been capable of [enslaving people] since she was five”), then Mycroft was thirteen. He was a child. Rudi decided to lock Eurus up in Sherrinford with the “uncontainables” and lie to Mr and Mrs Holmes about the fate of their daughter. Mycroft simply carried on the lie. Again, he was thirteen and presumably traumatized by knowing that his sister killed his brother’s best friend and his brother no longer remembered her. Presumably he thought it would be best if his parents could also, if not forget that Eurus existed, then move on with their lives thinking she was gone.

But that decision irrevocably changed Mycroft’s relationship with his parents, and with Sherlock. It isolated him from his entire family (ironically, except for Eurus, the only one in on his secret). Mycroft spent Christmas with Eurus and Jim Moriarty and then went home to drink alone while Sherlock celebrated at 221b surrounded by friends.

Uncle Rudi also seems to have set Mycroft on his career path. He seems to have been some kind of shadowy government spook, and put Mycroft on the path to shadowy government spook. Who knows who or what he might have been if he hadn’t spent his entire life protecting this secret.

So yes, Mycroft is the man he is today because of Eurus. And IMO, he’s projecting when he says that about Sherlock. It’s true for him, so he thinks it’s true for his brother. And on some level, it is. Someone on my dash (i think @themissadventurer?) was saying that when Sherlock says “I made me,” in The Abominable Bride, we hear a dog barking in the background and he says “Redbeard,” immediately after. Of course his childhood trauma influenced him. We are all shaped by our childhood traumas (or at least I know I was). So Eurus having shaped them is the truth.

But the truth, as Oscar Wilde said, and The Final Problem keeps reminding us, is rarely pure, and never simple.

The Holmes Siblings Quotes

 (Sherlock gifset by theaquarhumbus)

"Don’t be alarmed, it’s to do with sex"

 (Sherlock meta by mae-jones and o0katiekins0o)

[Mycroft: Don't be alarmed, it's to do with sex.
Sherlock: Sex doesn't alarm me.
Mycroft: How would you know?]

mae-jones:

Some took this to mean Sherlock was a virgin, especially with Sherlock being referred to as “the virgin” later. However, one could extrapolate many things from these exchanges.

Mycroft’s “how would you know?” could be a dig at how Sherlock has utilized sex to get what he wants. Sherlock is the ultimate control freak at this point in time. He has never been in love with a potential partner. He very well could have had sex a million times but I imagine he would have done so for perfunctory reasons. So, of course sex wouldn’t alarm Sherlock if it was always on his terms and he was in complete control of his emotions.

Mycroft’s ‘how would you know?” could very well be, “how would you know what it’s like to be so desperate for someone that you lose your mind with them and get turned inside out by your physical desires?”

As per “the virgin” comment, it could be the same vein of thought. Without being into someone, with having the emotional connection to them, sex would be functional for someone like Sherlock. Sherlock, for all intents and purposes, is a virgin when it comes to romantic love and I think that is the ultimate message they were trying to instill in us as viewers.

In series 3, this comes full circle when Mycroft says, “I’m not lonely!” Sherlock uses his brother’s words against him. Again, it’s a parallel in emotions, not physicality. Sherlock is stepping out of the “virgin” emotional role. It shows how his feelings are developing, how he’s come to recognize the absence of romantic love in other people’s lives.

Sherlock’s physical virginity is ultimately irrelevant (as it really is irl). The sex part of the equation is unimportant, it always has been. ie/ Emotional context.

PS - From a Sherlolly standpoint, it’s kinda cool to think that the creators may have ALWAYS intended for Sherlock to fall in love romantically. These little hints are insights into where they were going with the show, not just opening Sherlock up, but a complete transformation. That’s what the virginity trope has always been about, not the fetishism of the physical, but how love can change us.

o0katiekins0o:

And it was brought up again in The Final Problem when Mycroft said he’d asked Eurus if she felt pain and she said “Which one’s [pain]?”

How would you know if sex alarms you if you have never been able to make the connection between sexual expression and romantic love?

How would you know that you’re lonely if you fail to connect your isolation with your unhappiness?

How do you know what pain is when you feel so intensely that you can’t suss out one emotional state from another?

I have said for a long time that the Holmes weren’t born with the empathic connection of emotional state and cognition.

Sherlock actually tries to make the connection on a very basic level aided by John: X means happy, Y means sad, Z means angry. We watch him learn to form these connections through the progression of the series.

The only emotional-physical state Sherlock seems to inherently understand and respect is fear. In The Hounds of Baskerville he gives his “body betrays me” speech and in The Abominable Bride when he told Lestrade “Fear is Wisdom in the face of danger”.

If you subscribe to the notion that all emotions exist on a spectrum between fear and love, then it starts to look as though the entire show is Sherlock starting at fear and working his way through the entire spectrum leaving “The Final Problem” aka Love.

Blaming Mycroft, blaming the parents...

(Sherlock meta by bbcsassdeadass, anarfea, mollymatterrs, 

introspectivenavelgazer, strawberrypatty and nctanthcaarchive)

bbcsassdeadass: 

This. This made me so angry because she’s blaming him again. She is blaming a poor kid that tried to make everything better for his God damn family and all he gets is this response. Like do you think about what age he was when shit started? When Euros killed Redbeard and he had to comfort and change his brother’s memory. Can you imagine how guilty he felt? Do you think about how stressed this man is about everything and the fact that he is raising your God damn children and makes sure that Euros gets what she wants? Where were you when Sherlock was using drugs? Why aren’t you making a list? Where were you when he searched for his little brother? Do you think about the fact that he is always wearing that gun-sword-umbrella because he is always in a defensive mood because when he took the job he knew the risks it involved? So no lady, he shouldn’t have "done better". You should’ve raised your children. You should’ve done better. You should’ve thought about the brother that raised your other children when you weren’t there.

anarfea:

And this is why Mycroft has a file …..

mollymatterrs:

I feel inclined to remind people that Mycroft continued what their Uncle Rudy had started, that it’s implied Eurus was taken away from the family against their wishes, that Mycroft explicitly told his parents that Eurus was dead, burned in a fire, that Mummy Holmes didn’t have the resources Mycroft has had, and she was just moments earlier told that all of that was a lie and her daughter had actually been alive for years, kept as a prisoner.

She’s mother, who has just learned her daughter’s been locked away and grown up without her in a remote island prison. How do you think she’d react?

“I’m so sorry Mycroft, that you purposely took on this burden and didn’t involve us, didn’t allow us to make the choice when it came to our own child.”

This is a broken family, for lots of reasons, and I am so angry that people are shafting the parents to bolster Mycroft. They made mistakes, Uncle Rudy made mistakes but, hell, let the men suffer concequences too. 

introspectivenavelgazer:

It’s more interesting that he messed up by not telling his parents. Like his attempt to protect backfired SPECTACULARLY.

strawberrypatty:

I feel the need to also mention: Mycroft encouraging Sherlock’s memory suppression is NOT a good thing. Sherlock has had childhood trauma that had impacted his ability to form relationships and most likely contributed to his drug abuse. Repressing that doesn’t make it go away, it just buries it. Mycroft has good intentions, but he does do things he shouldn’t. Sherlock should’ve been able to heal from his problems. Eurus should’ve had human interaction other than solving things for the government.

We know very little about the Holmes family dynamic, but we do know there are three children who from a very young age thought they were smarter than their parents. Uncle Rudy (who I’m guessing is very much like the Holmes children) also thought he was smarter. People made decisions for Mr and Mrs Holmes about the way their children should’ve been raised.

nctanthcaarchive:

[...] This is not okay. As an older sibling myself I can empathize with Mycroft so much. This is not fair to him in the slightest. Also his Uncle is the one that helped him with Eurus. Why is darling Uncle Rudy not in trouble as well?

Mycroft has done everything in his power, practically his whole life, to protect his family. No one, NO ONE, is more dedicated to watching out for them than Mycroft Holmes. So don’t you dare tell him that he could have done better. You are the parent. You could have done better.

I do realize she didn’t know her daughter was alive but even for Sherlock it doesn’t seem as if she has done much to help him since he moved out. She just expects Mycroft to do everything. I understand the fact that parents have to let their children make their own life choices. But you can’t decide that and then decide that it is your other child’s fault for not interfering with his sibling’s downward spiral.

In defence of the Holmes parents

 (Sherlock meta by thelonelybrilliance)

I keep seeing people complaining about the Holmes parents being too normal.

But are they really normal? Did it ever occur to anyone that they were so freaking traumatized by the tragedies that came with having three brilliant children, one so intelligent and emotionally unbalanced that she murdered someone as a small child? That their middle son, the emotional, imaginative one–then repressed his memories and emotions for the next few decades?

That their family home was burnt down and then their daughter was committed and then they thought she died?

At the very least, the Holmes parents must have serious, serious guilt and PTSD. SO maybe the way they coped was by moving to a small, comfortable home, and just finding what little bits of normalcy they could, while they continued to cope with their two remaining very complicated children, one of whom ran the government and the other who struggled with a recurring drug problem and later faked his own death.

And the fact that they were willing to get in touch with Eurus later, and were angry at Mycroft for not telling them, says that they weren’t at all normal. They wanted to love their psycho daughter. Even after all the pain and fear and guilt they’d likely suffered.

The Holmes Siblings

 (Sherlock meta by cogentranting)

So the Holmes parents, two brilliant but relatively normal people, have a son who’s a genius. And Mycroft grows up seeing through the workings of the world, knowing how people think, being able to manipulate and predict etc. etc. He’s acutely aware of the fact that he’s different. Other people aren’t like him, and probably don’t like him, so he’s very isolated and very lonely. He sees food as a comfort and gains weight. But while Mycroft isn’t very good with people, he does understand them. So he becomes very concerned with appearance. It leads to dieting as an adult, and above all a very high sense of propriety. Myrcroft follows the rules. Mycroft does what’s right. Mycroft never has a hair out of place. Mycroft wears the best suits. Mycroft doesn’t care what you think of him. Mycroft is in control.

After Mycroft comes Sherlock, seven years later. And things are different for Sherlock. He’s a genius too, also doesn’t get along well with others. But Sherlock isn’t alone. He has Mycroft. He’s not the only genius- there’s someone else like him, someone he can look up to. So he has the same problem the same isolation, the same feeling of being different from everyone else, the same loneliness. But just a little less.

Mycroft is the oldest, held to the highest standards of behavior. But it’s been seven years and the Holmes parents are a little more lax on the rules with Sherlock. And he’s seen his brother do things, break the path. And on top of that Sherlock and Mycroft have an interesting relationship. There’s a lot of love (despite what they say). Mycroft cares for his brother, wants to protect him and so he looks out for him. But sometimes he does so in odd ways that looks a little more like bullying. And sometimes he resents him a little bit for being that little bit less lonely, that little bit better with people. And Sherlock looks up to his brother. Believes he’s the smartest person in the world (because he’s, of course, the second smartest). So while Sherlock takes after Mycroft in certain ways, he’s very determined not to be like him in a variety of other was. So where Mycroft decides to give the appearance that he doesn’t care what others think by being above reproach, the perfect gentleman, Sherlock decides to show he doesn’t care what others think by spinning out and being different in whatever way he wants. Mycroft is above it all. Sherlock has abandoned it all. Mycroft wants control, Sherlock wants excitement. And Mycroft’s control, his protection and just the fact that he went first, gives Sherlock the room and the safety to be the pirate and the adventurer and the dragon slayer.

And then, a year after Sherlock comes Eurus. So Sherlock not only has a role model, for a time he has a peer. Someone like him, someone close to him. Between this difference, the freedom he has to be himself whatever the consequences and just his natural friendliness, Sherlock manages to make a friend. Little Victor Trevor, his co-pirate. And Sherlock gets to be almost normal for a time at least.

And Eurus might have been more like Sherlock. Except that she was a little bit more than genius. Smarter than Mycroft or Sherlock. And her emotional and interpersonal issues didn’t stem from her situation, being isolated or lonely because of her intelligence. No for Eurus there was actually something off, something not right. And it probably hid a bit behind the fact that something similar had developed in her brothers. So maybe her parents thought at first that it was the same thing but more. Eurus for all her genius couldn’t quite understand the world in some ways that counted. And so instead of adjusting herself to deal with the world the way that Mycroft and Sherlock did, she tried to bend the world to her shape.

Sherlock was her peer, close when they were young, and she wanted to relate to him but couldn’t quite figure out how. She ends up hurting him, and it puts a wedge between them. Then Sherlock manages to do what no other Holmes child was able to- he makes a best friend. And it really drives Sherlock and Eurus apart. Because Victor can bridge the gap for Sherlock and connect. Sherlock isn’t good enough with people, with forming connections, to make up the difference for what Eurus is lacking. But Victor can make up the difference for Sherlock. And Eurus gets jealous. In a regular child this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Hurtful, formative, maybe. But Eurus doesn’t understand people so she tries to change them. She doesn’t understand Victor, so she gets rid of him and in her own way asks Sherlock to come back to her. And she can’t quite understand the reason why he doesn’t. Why he’s so upset. Why he won’t let her replace Victor. And so she gets angry and tries to change Sherlock- she sets the house on fire. Which of course leads to her being locked up and taken away (combined with the fact that the family is pretty sure she’s the reason behind the neighbor boy’s disappearance).

Sherlock might have grown up really pretty normal. Nice parents, a protective if somewhat mean older brother, a sister he was close to, a best friend. But then his sister murders his best friend, tries to kill him and is taken away. And Sherlock, naturally, is traumatized. So his mind rewrites his memories to get rid of the trauma- he forgets Eurus and Victor. But he can’t quite write out the pain so his mind creates something new as the source- Redbeard, the dog that he loved that died.

And the pain and the trauma create in him a fear of attachment and affection. His parents are devastated by the loss of their daughter, they feel they’ve failed her. But they also feel incredibly guilty, thinking they allowed her to kill a little boy and allowed her to hurt their son. They don’t know how to help their traumatized son who suddenly can’t remember his own sister. And because now they’re desperate to protect him, they decide maybe it’s best that Sherlock doesn’t remember any of it. So they lie, and let Sherlock believe his mind’s lie. Mycroft does too. Which sets the example for him for some of his later decisions- particularly faking Eurus’s death.

Meanwhile Sherlock gets older and his parents can’t quite bring themselves to keep him in line. Because they feel guilty about what they let happen, because they excuse his behavior as a symptom of his trauma and his intellect. And because he’s their baby and they’ve already lost one.

So Sherlock, wanting to embrace standing out, afraid to form attachments, afraid to love, becomes prouder and ruder and more insensitive and meaner. And wanting excitement and adventure and a challenge he becomes more and more self destructive and more impulsive. He gets into drugs. He becomes fascinated by crime (a subconscious effect of the Victor mystery) and eventually becomes a consulting detective addicted to danger (and heroin).

All this continues until Sherlock stumbles into a group of people (John and Mrs Hudson and Molly and Mary and Lestrade) who love him despite his worst qualities, despite the fact that he’s made himself unlovable and unable to love them. They love him anyway and so he slowly begins to accept that. And he begins to heal and begins to love them. And when he’s healed enough to admit that he is loved and he does love them, then he reaches out to his brother first, then his sister and starts to help them heal too, in what small ways he can help.

So in the end, the Holmes siblings find that, for the first time, none of them are alone in the world.

The Holmes siblings in TFP

 (Sherlock meta by sherlolly through mizjoely)

I was chatting with @sherlolly, who is using her phone, and since this was such a good analysis/discussion of Mycroft and Eurus in The Final Problem, I volunteered to transcribe her thoughts in a post (because we all know what a pain it is to do longish posts on a phone!). 

I hurt for Mycroft in this episode. My heart [aches] for all of them, that scene [when Eurus tries to force Sherlock to shoot either John or Mycroft] was essentially Mycroft saying, I love you enough to die so that you can stay with your friend. John loved Sherlock enough to be the one to die if he thought Sherlock would live. And ultimately, Sherlock loves both of them enough that he would have taken his own life so they could live.

Mycroft has always had his own way of doing what he thought was best, which usually involves doing things that no one sees in the same way that he does.

Sherlock understood that when he told their parents that Mycroft had done his best. For Mycroft, the things he did were his best. I’m not saying that they were THE best, that’s an important distinction. I am saying that with all of his understanding, Mycroft did what he thought was best.

To which I replied: Yup, I see it. But I’ve always been ambivalent about Myke and probably always will be. But I like him way better now than I used to. 

I’m not so sure I would want to tell my parents hey, guess what, my sister and your daughter is alive, but damn, she’s a bat shit crazy murderer. Because he doesn’t process emotions the same way that regular people do, Mycroft makes most of his decisions based on his brain. And what he rationally thinks is better. It’s like when Sherlock told Molly that Jim from IT was gay. He thought that he was "saving her some time", and "wasn’t that kinder". Mycroft however, has never believed that the truth is kinder.

I don’t think either one of them are completely right or completely wrong. For all of the things he has done, Mycroft has aspects of a moral code that Sherlock never has. And Sherlock has a code that Mycroft never has. And I’m not entirely sure if Eurus could have been saved even if 5 year old Sherlock could have figured out the code. Would she have gone as far into the Cuckoo’s Nest as she did? Maybe not. But it would always have been inside her, that desire to hurt, that wanting to kill.

See, Eurus knew that she was already too far gone. But Sherlock knew how to bring her back in a way that Mycroft would not have thought of. He showed her that he had not left her, maybe he couldn’t bring her home, but he could land the plane for her in a safe place. She absolutely freaked out that Sherlock was going to kill himself because if he had killed himself, who was going to land the plane for her?

That is the difference between her and Moriarty. Moriarty just kept wanting more and more and more thrills like a junkie. She had been desperately crying out for love and salvation. When she clings to Sherlock when he finds her, at that moment she is the little girl again, the one desperate for her brother’s love. This extraordinary genius, this ruthless killer, reduced to being a terrified little girl wanting her brother to rescue her. And Sherlock’s heart hurt for her, in spite of everything that she had done and I’m sure that although he realizes he could not have saved her ultimately, he probably also has guilt. She retreated into herself because she did not want to be lost again. Then Sherlock started visiting her regularly and playing the violin, showed her that he was there, and reawakened her.