Sherlock is actually a girl’s name.

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

Can we talk about this moment a bit? I mean, really? I just finished watching my way through the entire series for the umpteenth time (really fifth, I think), and every time this scene makes me a little angrier.

I know the usual fandom reading. Everyone focuses on the previous line, “John, there’s something … I should say; I-I’ve meant to say always and then never have. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again, I might as well say it now.”

And they get their hopes up in whatever way suits them. I love you, I yearn for you, you complete me, you had me at “here, use mine.” Whatever they are picturing, it is not “Sherlock is actually a girl’s name." And so that statement is read as a joke and as a disappointment. And all the focus is on what Sherlock really meant to say.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s a joke. And that makes this scene so much more heartbreaking for me.

In some sense, of course it’s a bit of a joke. But it’s not one Sherlock’s been planning for ages. It’s a response to what John said only moments earlier.

SHERLOCK: William Sherlock Scott Holmes.
JOHN: Sorry?
SHERLOCK: That’s the whole of it – if you’re looking for baby names.
(John chuckles.)
JOHN: No, we’ve had a scan. We’re pretty sure it’s a girl. (x)

Sherlock asked John to name his baby after him. And John said no, on an extremely flimsy excuse. So Sherlock asked again. And John laughed.

I don’t want to know what Sherlock "really” meant to say. I want to know, what was so damn funny about Sherlock’s request?

Of course we, the audience, know that Sherlock’s exile will only last five minutes, and he and John will be reunited shortly. But Sherlock doesn’t know that. Sherlock believes he is being sent to his certain death. And even if John doesn’t know that, Sherlock explicitly tells him “it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again." Doesn’t that mean anything to John?

Sherlock has no children, and (there’s reason to believe) he never will. John is supposed to be the closest person in the world to him, and he has a baby on the way. Would it kill him to name this child after the most important man in his life? The man who sacrificed everything – up to and including his very life – to protect John, his wife, and his child?

Surely everyone knows that the gender argument is bullshit. My sister Karen was named for my mother’s uncle Charlie, who died in WWII. This happens ALL THE TIME. Especially after a war, many girl babies are named for recently deceased male loved ones, to honor their memory. Usually they are given feminine versions of the name – Georgina, Patricia, Josephine – but it’s not unheard of for parents to just flat out give a girl a traditionally male name, for rememberance.

And that’s not even to mention how many traditional boys’ names have been used for girls just out of fashion or whim. Paris, Dylan, Ashley. Nor to mention that "Sherlock”, being extravagantly rare as a name for any human, can’t seriously be said to have a strongly gendered association.

And then there’s Sheryl, Sherla, Sherleen, etc. if you insist on being REALLY gendered about it. Or take William and do the traditional Wilhelmina. There were LOTS of options.

Why won’t John give Sherlock this one thing? Forget the passionate kisses and grandiose declarations of undying love. This is what Sherlock asked for, and there’s every reason to believe it would mean a great deal to him. To be remembered, in a significant way, by the person he cares about the most. To have a small piece of him passed down to the next generation.

Goddammit, John. What’s the matter with you? Why won’t you name your daughter Sherlock?

I can’t even wrap my head around how wounded Sherlock must be that John laughs off his suggestion.

Naming the baby

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

Q: Mary told John she gets to name their baby. Maybe he already suggested Sherlock and Mary vetoed it? That's why he's trying to play it off?

A: I assume this is a response to my earlier meta, Sherlock Is Actually a Girl’s Name.

What you suggest is possible, but… I don’t see any evidence for it on the show. Why would Mary veto the name? And why wouldn’t John just tell Sherlock that, if it were the case? It’s not that I can’t imagine plausible answers to these questions, it’s just that they aren’t in the show – it would be pure speculation.

It’s true that there is a scene in this very episode where John asks Mary for naming rights to the baby and is denied. So it’s not unreasonable to point to this as an explanation for why John laughs off Sherlock’s proposal in the tarmac scene – maybe John has no say in naming the baby.

But let’s look again at the dialogue between John and Mary.

image

JOHN: I choose the baby’s name.
MARY: Not a chance.
JOHN: Okay.

I’d say there’s more than one possible interpretation of this exchange. (Please indulge me in a bit of sarcastic hyperbole here.) Some fans read John’s line to mean, “I want a fair and equal part in raising our child,” and they read Mary’s response to John as meaning, “I hate you and am basically evil, and am therefore denying you any parental role at all. Also btw the baby isn’t yours, and I’m probably not even human, but an odious abomination released from the depths of hell for the sole purpose of thwarting pure, true, holy love such as that between you and Sherlock.” :P

There is another possible reading, however. Given the context of their relationship, and assuming neither person is angel or demon, but are complex, imperfect humans, we might conclude that what John means is, “I’m still really angry about your deception, so as payback, I’m demanding the right to name our child without consulting you at all, because I know that will hurt you.”

To which Mary quite reasonably responds, “Not a chance, we will name the baby together, and we both retain veto-rights over truly objectionable names. Your anger is fair, but it’s no reason to let our kid go through life with a name like Horsefeathers McMonkey just to spite me.” And John agrees to this.

If we assume the second scenario is more likely than the first, then the polite, grown-up response to Sherlock would have been, “I’ll talk to Mary about it.” Of course John shouldn’t unilaterally decide on a name without discussing it with the kid’s mother, but Sherlock wasn’t demanding a yes or no on the spot – he was just offering his name up as a suggestion. And given the precise situation (Sherlock sacrificing his freedom and possibly his life for their well-being), it seems likely to me that Mary would have agreed.

As it happens, I don’t believe Mary is the reason for John’s refusal to name the baby after Sherlock. I’m more inclined to believe (as many have suggested) that John simply isn’t comfortable with the larger implications, i.e. that Sherlock isn’t coming back (supposedly). It’s an emotionally-charged situation, and John isn’t handling it well. He is giggling and joking and relying on humor to get him through a difficult conversation, just as he did at the scene of his own murder. Sherlock, for his part, knows that’s all John is capable of at the moment, so he’s playing along with it.

Also it’s worth noting that Sherlock’s line (“That’s the whole of it, if you’re looking for baby names”) is a clear call-back to ASiB, when John offers up his whole name as a sardonic commentary on Sherlock and Irene’s flirting. Since the original line was a joke (albeit with an emotionally-charged undercurrent), it’s not surprising that John assumes Sherlock also intends the same line in a joking way. And I think Sherlock sort of does intend John to read it that way – he’s deliberately trying to keep the conversation light, and avoiding the kind of sentimentality that would make both of them uncomfortable.

But he’s not cracking just *any* joke. It’s my contention that Sherlock intends a serious undercurrent to his little joke – he brings up the baby names lightly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sincerely important to him. My best guess is that, however John reacts in the moment, Sherlock hopes that in a couple of weeks, when the baby is born and Sherlock has disappeared, John will think back on this conversation and reconsider whether he might want to honor his friend in this way.

[...]

The Interpretation of Dreams: 

A Freudian reading of The Abominable Bride (Part 1) 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

In The Abominable Bride, Sherlock makes reference to “an Viennese alienist”. "Alienist“ is an archaic word for a doctor who treats the insane, or what we would now call a psychiatrist, which makes this a clear reference to the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, who was busy developing his psychoanalytic practice and theories in the 1890s in Austria. In this scene, Sherlock is complaining about John asking questions that are inappropriate from anyone but one’s psychoanalyst. But is there another reason Sherlock might have Freud on the brain?

Possibly it’s because Freud was notoriously experimenting with cocaine at almost exactly the same time the original Sherlock Holmes was concocting his 7% solution.

Or perhaps because most of The Abominable Bride is an elaborate, extended dream sequence, and one of Freud’s most significant works from this era is called The Interpretation of Dreams.

For Freud, dream interpretation is a way of accessing the unconscious mind. What does Freud mean by the unconscious? According to the theory, the unconscious is a part of the mind kept hidden from us under most circumstances. Freud believed that humans are excellent secret-keepers, and there is no one we are more inclined to deceive than ourselves. The unconscious mind holds all of our darkest desires, fears, and obsessions. It affects our daily lives and the choices we make, and yet we only get occasional glimpses of its workings.

Freud argues that dream analysis is one method of uncovering the secrets of the unconscious. Would Sherlock Holmes agree? It’s tempting to assume that Sherlock would dismiss Freud’s ideas as a lot of untestable, pseudo-scientifc blather (plenty of real humans have!). The Abominable Bride, however, gives us some indications that Sherlock is at least willing to play with Freud’s approach.

Freud’s interest in dreams comes from the idea that in sleep, the mind lets down some of its carefully constructed defenses, and allows usually hidden material to rise to the surface (if only in weirdly altered forms). If we believe Sherlock’s claim that he deliberately self-administered a cocktail of drugs in order to unearth clues and make connections about Moriarty’s death, well… that sounds like a pretty similar approach.

That Sherlock should be interested in navigating the unconscious is itself a bit surprising. In Freud’s understanding, the unconscious mind is totally amoral, irrational, chaotic, and pleasure-focused – in other words, everything Sherlock Holmes consciously abhors. Nevertheless, Sherlock appears to recognize that the key to Moriarty’s return is already contained in his own mind, though inaccessible by normal means. This is what Mycroft means when he says "The Mind Palace is a memory technique.” 

The mind palace is a mnemonic device for accessing memories using the conscious mind. What Sherlock is doing in The Abominable Bride – digging deep into unconscious mind for repressed thoughts and memories – is very different.

In order to understand what Sherlock uncovers in The Abominable Bride, it’s helpful to know a bit about how Freud approaches dream interpretation. For Freud, dreams are incredibly personal and dream imagery is built out of the objects and experiences specific to the patient. There may be symbolic resonances, but they can’t be universalized. It is NOT about simple, generic symbolic readings, i.e. “if you dream about fish that means good luck.” Similarly, he avoids trying to read the whole dream as a coherent narrative and finding meaning in that. It’s more productive to take every object, character, event, and impression in a dream separately than to try to make sense of the whole. This involves talking to a patient and getting to know them well enough to tease out the repressed anxieties and desires that may be represented in altered form in their dream. Since we don’t have Sherlock on the couch in front of us, we can’t exactly pick at his brain to find hidden associations. Instead, we have to rely on what we already know of his character from previous episodes and maybe a dash of ACD canon.

Another caveat: Freud specifically talks about fictional dreams and how little they generally resemble real dreams. Fictional dreams usually contain glaringly obvious symbols because they are the creations of conscious minds, not unconscious, repressed ones. In The Abominable Bride we clearly have a fictional dream constructed by a couple of conscious minds: Sherlock’s dream in The Abominable Bride is WAY more coherent and complete than real dreams normally are. (Necessarily so – if the dream had been as bizarre and incoherent as a real dream, it would have been unwatchable as a story.) So we must be careful of getting carried away with our analysis. That said, the fact that the dream includes a direct reference to Freud suggests that writers were expecting and even encouraging a Freudian-style interpretation of their invented dream. We owe it to them to at least give it a shot! '

In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud puts forward the theory that every dream is the expression of an unconscious wish. This is an extension of his theory of the Pleasure Principle, which states that all human action is governed by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In dreams, we can do whatever we want, so naturally we would seek out pleasures unavailable to us in waking life. While in some cases (sex dreams, food dreams), the dreamer’s pleasurable wish may be obvious, in the case of anxiety dreams and nightmares, the wish has been disguised because our conscious minds find it shameful for some reason. For example, if you have a test tomorrow, you might dream that a million little obstacles prevent you from getting to the test. People normally interpret this as anxiety about getting to the test on time, but Freud claims this dream is really the expression of your wish not to take the test at all.

So going by this theory, what might be the wish at the heart of The Abominable Bride? The Abominable Bride contains a nightmare scenario where Sherlock fails to prevent the murder of a client’s husband.

Read simply, this could be an expression of Sherlock’s anxiety over failing at his profession. Read as the fulfillment of a wish, however, we might conclude that Sherlock actually wants Sir Eustace eliminated because he has repressed desires for Eustace’s wife, Lady Carmichael. And (Johnlockers, cover your eyes!) there is plenty of support for this reading in the dream: Sherlock directly accuses Sir Eustace of being unworthy of his wife, John later suggests that Sherlock has taken a fancy to her, and Sherlock himself – despite all his denials – admits that she has “admirably high arches”.

But all of this is still surface interpretation and doesn’t get us close to the deeper levels of the dream. According to Freud, when the mind has something it feels guilty or uncomfortable about, it will go to extraordinary lengths to bury the idea and keep this repressed material from becoming conscious.

Freud gives the example of what he calls “kettle logic”. This comes from a story about a man who is accused by his neighbor of having broken a borrowed kettle. The man replies that

1) the kettle isn’t broken
2) it was already broken when he borrowed it
3) he never borrowed the kettle at all.

Any one of these justifications might make sense, but together they become absurd. This is the way logic works in dreams: these kinds of excessive, overlapping, and contradictory rationalizations are a sign that there is a submerged idea or desire that the dreamer isn’t ready to face yet. We see this “kettle logic” at various points in the The Abominable Bride  dream, but most frequently it occurs whenever the subject of Moriarty comes up.

When Sherlock asks himself, “How could he survive?”, Dream!John immediately replies “She, you mean” – a sign that Sherlock’s mind is trying to paper over the momentary inconsistency and distract Sherlock from the buried content of the dream. And again:

The “miss me” note appears out of nowhere on Sir Eustace’s corpse, and its message bears no relevance to the case at hand.

Then in the Diogenes Club, when Sherlock says, “His body was never recovered”, Dream!Mycroft replies, “To be expected when one pushes a maths professor over a waterfall”, even though that’s not relevant to the modern mystery Sherlock’s actually trying to unravel.

But Sherlock’s dream self participates in this misdirection too. Sherlock says, “He’s trying to distract me, to derail me”, presumably from the “real” case of Mrs Ricoletti. But in fact, Ricoletti doesn’t matter at all. The whole Ricoletti case was only ever intended as a tool to get him closer to Moriarty.

Within the dream, the only one who really gets this game of repression and revelation is Moriarty himself. Sherlock tells Moriarty that he chose to come here, and Moriarty replies, “Not true. You know that’s not true”, suggesting that they both know nothing happens in this dream space without Sherlock wishing for it. Then Moriarty proceeds to lecture Sherlock on what we’ve called “kettle logic”. He points out the logical impossibility of him showing up at the scene of Sir Eustace’s murder. He emphasizes all the points that don’t add up, that don’t make sense. He insistently reminds Sherlock that the whole Ricoletti case is little more than a screen over what really draws Sherlock: Moriarty himself.

But why is Moriarty’s appearance in 221b, in the crypt, and at the waterfall a fulfillment of Sherlock’s unconscious wish?

There are a lot of ways we could take this. The most transparent is that Sherlock needs to solve the mystery of Moriarty’s apparent reappearance, and for that, he needs to consult Moriarty. That makes sense, but it’s a little dull, and it’s not clear why Sherlock’s mind would go to such lengths to disguise this motivation.

The most fannishly appealing explanation is that Sherlock wants Moriarty for ~sex stuff~, but can’t admit it. And hey, let’s not pretend there isn’t a TON of evidence for this reading:

Plus, it would be pretty typical of Freud’s patients to be repressing sexual desires with a very inappropriate person: an arch-enemy, say, or better yet, a corpse. So far, still pretty obvious. But what if we went deeper still… Is there anything else?

Oh, yes. Read more in part 2: The Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive.

The Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive: 

A Freudian Reading of The Abominable Bride (part 2) 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

A continuation of my meta on TAB and The Interpretation of Dreams. 

In my previous meta, I talked about Freud’s theory that every dream is the expression of a wish. If so, what is the unconscious wish hidden in Sherlock’s drug-fueled dream in The Abominable Bride?

Sherlock’s in kind of an unusual situation here, because where most of us dream as an accidental side-effect of sleeping, Sherlock has consciously set out to have this dream to serve a particular purpose. According to Sherlock (when conscious), the purpose of this whole exercise is to figure out whether it’s possible for Moriarty to have survived their encounter on the roof of Barts.

So that’s Sherlock’s conscious wish. But what about his unconscious?

Officially, the question Sherlock is asking in The Abominable Bride is, “How could Moriarty return from the dead?” But underneath that question, I want to suggest a deeper concern of Sherlock’s: “Why did Moriarty kill himself?”

In a way, Sherlock’s world would make more sense if Moriarty did fake his death, just as Sherlock did. We might not know how, but we would certainly understand why. But if Moriarty really and truly did kill himself just to force Sherlock’s hand on that rooftop… the real mystery is, why? What pleasure or satisfaction could Moriarty hope to gain from all his carefully laid plans if he is dead?

As many other meta-writers have eloquently observed, Sherlock has personal reasons to be interested in this question: there have been many indications throughout the show that Sherlock has at times considered suicide.

He might well believe that understanding Moriarty’s motivations could help him better understand his own.

But how could suicide be the fulfillment of an unconscious wish? According to Freud, wishes are supposed to be about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, right?

Well, this is where I need to complicate that idea a little. Because it turns out, Freud didn’t stand by the ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams all his life. Interpretation of Dreams was written early in his career. Years later, towards the end, Freud posited the existence of something he referred to as The Death Drive. He invented this idea to account for the fact that, over the course of his career, he ran into a lot of human behaviors that did not seem to fit his model of pleasure-seeking/pain-avoiding. Why, Freud asked, do people sometimes do things that cannot bring them any pleasure, and actually cause them more harm than good?

In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud guesses (and believe me, this idea remains plenty controversial) that there might be some other drive competing with the Pleasure Principle, and causing us to seek our own destruction. The reason why this might be and the mechanism for how it might work are pretty flimsy, as even Freud acknowledges. He’s really just putting this forward as a hypothesis for discussion. But whether or not this is a real drive that exists, it may nevertheless be of interest to Sherlock as he contemplates Moriarty’s apparent suicide.

And indeed, the conversation between Sherlock and Dream!Moriarty is haunted throughout by the specter of death.

MORIARTY: That’s all people really are, you know: dust waiting to be distributed. 

This idea actually gets very close to Freud’s theory of the death drive – that people are irresistibly drawn to the state that they are destined to become: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

The cannibalism angle just adds a disturbing element of pleasure to the idea of destruction. It suggests that death itself serves a pleasurable purpose—that it can feed our secret urges as much as other physical indulgences.

Dream!Moriarty goes even further than Freud, suggesting that death and pleasure might not be opposing drives at all, but inextricably linked. Death is pleasure… and maybe pleasure is itself a kind of death.

Which brings us to another player in Sherlock’s dream who has something to tell him (and us) about the relationship between pleasure and death:

Dream!Mycroft gives us a few more clues to the mystery at the heart of Sherlock’s unconscious. On a simple level, we get John’s admonition that Mycroft’s gluttonous behavior is unhealthy and, pleasurable though it may be, could result in his early death. This falls in neatly with Freud’s early theory of life as a balance between pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, and could be construed as merely a warning to avoid pleasurable excess.

But what’s particularly interesting is the way Mycroft doesn’t balk at the threat of death, but embraces it. Like dream!Moriarty, Mycroft isn’t interested in avoiding death or even ignoring it. He is actively courting it.

In fact, one gets the idea that chasing death (i.e., the death drive) may actually be the greater motivator for Mycroft than whatever dubious pleasure he receives from devouring three plum puddings in a sitting.

Some readers have read elements of this scene as foreshadowing Mycroft’s death in some future episode, but it’s important to remember that this Mycroft has very little to do with the actual character. Instead, he has everything to do with Sherlock’s repressed desires, anxieties, and fixations.

Despite Sherlock’s grand plan to use this dream to solve a real life mystery, ultimately a dream can only lead the dreamer back to himself. As Dream!Moriarty insistently reminds Sherlock, there is no new information to be gleaned from a dream:

In other words, a dream can only give very limited information about someone else – a regurgitation of what the dreamer already knows. The real revelations are necessarily going to be about Sherlock himself.

Thus, the Mycroft figure in the dream is really just a tool to allow Sherlock to investigate his own repressed urges without admitting to them. It’s not really about Mycroft’s weight or his pleasure or his health, but about Sherlock’s repressed desires and what might happen if he gave into them.

And what are those desires? Drugs? Food? Sex? Love? I’d argue: yes, all of the above. Dream!Mycroft is the literalization of Sherlock’s fears about what might become of him if he lost control and allowed himself to indulge in any or all of his various urges. Sherlock fears he could become something grotesque – too big, too much.

Perhaps even to the point of death.

Or is that death not merely an unfortunate side effect of indulgence, but what Sherlock ultimately desires most of all? Sherlock, who takes drugs that “usually” aren’t fatal, and who fantasizes about jumping into an open grave?

Sherlock, who ends his dream by throwing himself, alone, off of a waterfall:

A triumphant moment within the context of the show, but surely a somewhat morbid one as well.

Why does he do it? Yes, he says he “always survives a fall". But he is also subtly invoking the common superstition that if you die in a dream, you won’t wake up. This is no idle risk for Sherlock, as we know that in real life, he is actually overdosing on a drug cocktail. There is a very real threat that he won’t survive this “fall”.

We don’t get a really firm answer to this “final” problem – indeed, I doubt one is possible. But there may be a hint in Sherlock’s certainty at the end of The Abominable Bride that Moriarty really is dead. That suggests that Sherlock’s unconscious has convinced him death did have a compelling appeal for Moriarty, against all logic. And if for Moriarty, why not for Sherlock too?

"If I wasn't everything that you think I am"

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter and vulgarweed)

notagarroter:

This is a favorite sherlolly moment for me, because of the contrast with John.

The key to John is that John never doubts Sherlock. Sherlock asks him in The Reichenbach Fall if he is 100%, if he has any doubts at all, but even when Sherlock is on the roof, John never questions for a second that Sherlock is the genius he always claimed he was.

But Molly… Molly doesn’t care. Molly will take care of him, will protect him, even if he *is* a fraud. No questions asked. I think for John, it is at least important that Sherlock be one of the Good Guys. He couldn’t tolerate it if his hero, his idol had actually kidnapped and poisoned children. But Molly… Her loyalty extends even beyond morality.

And that’s why she’s the one who matters.

It’s also why I hate to see this ship dismissed as cute fangirl fluff, as nothing more than the “heterosexual option”.

There is something dark and tragic and a little twisted going on between these two. And I like it.

vulgarweed:

Molly kept Sherlock’s secret. She knew how John was grieving, and probably Mrs. Hudson too. She knew that Lestrade blamed himself and Anderson descended into madness to the point of losing his job. She knew all sorts of fallouts and repercussions of Sherlock’s “death,” including ones that deeply hurt people she knew and liked.

And she kept the secret anyway. No doubt she too played the grieving friend, probably put on a little extra devastation-performance for those in the inner circle who knew how she really felt about Sherlock.

She faked his death certificate. She prepared the lookalike corpse. Whatever witchcraft had to be done with DNA and whatnot to make Sherlock Holmes as “dead” as a living man can be, she did it. She broke so many laws and risked her own career, stone cold, and got away with it even after the truth came out.

She played them all. With her sad little sniffles.

Molly is that ‘best friend’ who REALLY WILL help you hide the body - or the lack of one if the death is your own. Girl is STONE COLD SCARY and it’s all the more effective because she looks mousy and normal and cute. She will be the last one to break at the end of the world.

Shipping aside, how do people not see what a great compelling character she is? I would watch BBC Molly so hard.

The Missing Reichenbach Solution 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

Moftiss et al love a cliffhanger, don’t they? It’s an old trick, beloved to writers and filmmakers since the early days of serial adventure dramas. In its most classic form, the hero is shown hanging off the edge of a literal cliff as the episode comes to a close, leaving the viewer desperate to find out if he will live or die in the next installment. Of course, the sophisticated viewer knows that the hero will almost always live (unless the actor’s contract has been canceled). But that doesn’t necessarily detract from the drama.

The last scene in The Great Game is a good example of this – our heroes are in a deadly situation, snipers behind them, explosives in front, and a semi-suicidal madman presiding over it all. How will they possibly get out of this? Tune in two years hence!

From a distance, the end of The Reichenbach Fall looks like another standard cliffhanger, the viewer breathlessly anticipating the promised resolution. But it’s doing something a bit different.

Contrary to tradition, this cliffhanger doesn’t end with our hero on the cliff. Instead, we get to watch him fall. We watch him hit the ground. And even more remarkably, we watch him come back to life.

Roll credits.

That’s not the usual order of things when creating a cliffhanger, but in this case it was necessary – this was a nod, of course, to the fact that the audience has known for over 100 years that Sherlock Holmes survives the fall. Moftiss have shifted our emotional energy from, “what is going to happen?” to “how did he do that?” That in itself is a neat trick, but that’s not all that’s happening here. Sherlock’s appearance at the end of The Reichenbach Fall marks a shift in the way this story is being told. A shift that was anticipated as early as the first episode, but is only now coming to full fruition. The Reichenbach Fall is a crucial moment not only in the narrative, but in the meta narrative of the show: Moftiss are forcing us to examine what it means to update this hero to our own era.

In the first season, it was possible to watch the show and believe that all you needed was a handful of mobile phones to bring the iconic Victorian detective into the modern age – very little else had to change.

But already in series 2, Moftiss started showing us the cracks that result from this uneasy melding of the old and the new: something about Sherlock Holmes doesn’t quite fit with our world. Mobile phone in hand, he nonetheless remains a bit of a throwback, not quite in step with the way we tell stories today.

Why is this? Season 1 Sherlock is the very model of the rational, coherent subject. This creature is a fantasy that has been with us since at least the Enlightenment, and was much beloved by Victorians as well. The rational subject may not have achieved complete mastery of the world around him, but he knows it to be possible. He (and he is always, necessarily a white male) believes in science and technology and progress, and that these tools will be enough to eventually unlock every mystery. The rationalist trusts his reason and he trusts his senses, especially vision – to properly see something is to understand it.

JOHN: Yes, how did you know? 
SHERLOCK: I didn’t know, I saw. 

Those who fail to understand have failed to see. The rational subject is also stable – he knows who he is, he understands himself, and he behaves predictably, reasonably, and coherently.

With the development of the Moriarty arc in season 2, we see that rationalist fantasy start to fall apart. We could argue the end of A Scandal in Belgravia marks the beginning:

The first sign of the irrational creeping into Sherlock. Then in The Hounds of Baskerville, we see a Sherlock who no longer understands himself.

He is not in control of his body, and can no longer trust his senses – particularly his eyes. He is becoming fractured, and he doesn’t handle it well. Then in The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty, the imp of the postmodern, steals the show by deconstructing the mythology of Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty robs Sherlock of his good name, but even more damningly, demonstrates to him that his reason and intelligence cannot protect him.

Sherlock saw, but he didn’t hear – his reason failed when up against the clever, unpredictable madness of Moriarty.

Given this deconstructive narrative, what kind of “solution” to The Reichenbach Fall could we possibly have expected? As viewers, we like to imagine that we would have been satisfied with a single, coherent, perfectly explicated solution. But I’m arguing that such a solution would have been a betrayal of the larger critical work the show is doing, and would have been a disappointment in its own right. Many fans wished for a solution that brought us back to S1 Sherlock, perhaps to reassure us that reason will triumph over madness, and Sherlock Holmes may once again be the iconic, crime-solving master. But that was never really possible, nor should we want it to be – any more than we should want to return to the simplistic, dishonest, phony rationalism of the Victorian era.

Instead, Moftiss challenged us with a series overlapping, contradictory and unresolvable explanations for Reichenbach. We are teased with two that seem patently ridiculous before getting a third which *seems* like it will satisfy our yearning for a simple, straightforward “truth”.

And left unexamined, it does – a casual viewer can walk away from The Empty Hearse feeling like he got the answer to the problem.

But anyone who looks more closely will discover that even the third solution, in all its wondrous complexity, simply doesn’t work. The S1 fantasia of a Sherlock who can always explain what happened with perfect, rational precision has been broken down into fractured perspectives, a tension between public and private truths, logic that isn’t logical, mania (in the form of Anderson) that may be quite sane… Everything Moftiss taught us to trust about this universe has been questioned and unsettled.

Which brings us to the fourth Reichenbach solution – the one that was right in front of us all this time, but is rarely recognized or acknowledged:

Of all the solutions, this is the only one that “works”, but it’s anything but rational. And what’s most telling about this solution is something that happens only a few moments earlier:

In this moment, Sherlock is dwelling in undecideability. He doesn’t like it, he tells us he doesn’t like it. Rationalist that he is, he wants there to be answers. And yet, in this moment he is acknowledging that there aren’t always answers. Not merely that he hasn’t figured out the solution yet, but that the truth may not be certain – that there may not even be a single, coherent truth.

And so it’s no surprise that when John finally demands to know what really happened when Sherlock jumped off the roof, the answer is both impossible and inevitable – what we didn’t want to accept and yet knew all along: Sherlock Holmes is indestructible. Even his own creator couldn’t kill him. And writers like Moftiss, and like me, and like you, will keep reviving him until the end of time.

"You're suicidal, you're allowed chips"

 (Sherlock meta by anarfea and notagarroter)

anarfea:

Also consider that we see Sherlock eating chips by himself in The Empty Hearse when Mary comes to him with the skip code.

notagarroter:

True, but I’m hesitant to read *too* much into that.

I mean, there’s a lot of exciting stuff one could draw from it, if so inclined – that sherlock is suicidal because John isn’t speaking to him, for one. Or, since the previous scene was Sherlock and Molly coming to some understanding about her engagement, maybe Sherlock is suicidal about that! Or, since he invited Molly out for chips in the first place, maybe he thought she was suicidal.

None of those possibilities particularly rings true for me in that scene. And I think, in the grand scheme of things, even if you generally avoid chips because they are bad for you/you’re watching your figure, everyone is entitled to indulge now and then without being put on suicide watch. ;)

Just my personal read on it, ymmv.

anarfea:

I agree that Sherlock asking Molly for chips is unlikely to mean he thinks she’s suicidal. But it does suggest that he was maybe feeling down. I’ve always seen Sherlock’s day solving cases with Molly during The Empty Hearse as one of the saddest sequences in the show. It’s not just that John isn’t speaking to him. It’s that when he makes his deductions, he hears John’s voice in his head making fun of him. It’s a real turning point in John and Sherlock’s relationship, IMO. John goes from being the one person who thinks his deductions make him brilliant instead of a freak to just another one of the chorus of voices saying he’s an arsehole.

As for Molly, she tries to do her part and be John. And Sherlock doesn’t want her to feel like a John substitute and tries to tell Molly that she isn’t John, she’s herself. But he fucks up and calls her John anyway, which hurts her feelings. And then he asks her out for chips, she turns him down, and they agree that Molly isn’t going to go out solving cases with him again because she’s engaged. And I’m not arguing that Sherlock is suicidal about Molly’s engagement in and of itself. But John’s engagement, Molly’s engagement, these are both reminders that his friends moved on while he was away, and he’s not the most important person in their lives (or possibly he doesn’t even have a place in their lives) anymore.

Anyway, I’m just saying that Sherlock’s comment to Faith had me re-think the scene where he’s eating chips when Mary comes looking for him, because I read that as a point in his life where he was probably especially low. It would not surprise me at all if he were contemplating suicide at that point. Especially because people who have had long term depression/suicidal ideation (which I think Sherlock absolutely does; that’s established in A Study in Pink when he considers taking Jefferson Hope’s pill because he’s bored), tend to think about suicide a lot. So yeah, I absolutely think that Guy Fawkes night was a Danger Night for Sherlock. And I’m happy to know that sometimes he got chips instead of taking drugs.

Why did Sherlock hand the gun to Mycroft first?

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter, anarfea, harriet-spy, cumberbatchitis and thecutteralicia)

notagarroter:

In the scene where Eurus wants them to kill the Governor, I mean. Just curious about people’s headcanons, since Sherlock doesn’t explain his reasoning.

anarfea:

Sherlock has built Mycroft into an almost god-like figure: omniscient, omnipotent, not-quite benevolent. He’s the Voice of Authority in Sherlock’s mind palace, where he appears with what look like a halo and angel wings.

And while Sherlock resents Mycroft’s meddling and intrusion, he also relies on him. Whenever he OD’s, he makes a list for Mycroft. When he shoots Magnussen in the head, he expects Mycroft to get him a pardon “like a proper big brother,” (and Mycroft does him one better by making it look like it never happened). And even though Sherlock and Euros spell out “fuck off” when they’re wandering the streets, I think Sherlock takes comfort in knowing that Big Brother is watching over him.

Mycroft has cultivated this image, probably from a pretty young age. The Final Problem shows us how quickly Mycroft grew up; he watched his sister kill his brother’s best friend, threaten his brother’s life, and burn down the family home when he was 12-13. The more we learn about Mycroft, it’s clear that “caring is not an advantage,” is something he says because he knows the pain of caring too much. So he buried his heart deep, and cultivated his Ice Man persona. And it appears to have worked–his code-name is Antarctica, which shows his colleagues, at least, believe it.

I think Sherlock believes it, too. He thinks that Mycroft has succeeded in entirely suppressing sentiment–a behavior he initially tries to emulate in S1. By S3, he’s learned that there are advantages to having friends, and he tries to encourage Mycroft to find himself a goldfish. But while Sherlock transitions from wanting to be like Mycroft to wanting Mycroft to be like him, his belief that Mycroft doesn’t form attachments is constant.

I think over time, because of whatever resentments and feuds and unsettled scores lie between them, Sherlock has come to believe Mycroft doesn’t care for him, either. His comment, “then why didn’t you want me to take it?” re the suicide mission to Eastern Europe is only half-jesting. And Mycroft realizes that he’s made a mistake by guarding his heart so closely even Sherlock has come to suspect he doesn’t have one. So he tells him, “Also, your loss would break my heart.” And Sherlock chokes on his cigarette; he’s that unaccustomed to sentiment from Mycroft. But Mycroft continues to let Sherlock see through the facade. At the end of The Abominable Bride, he tells him, “I was there for you before, I’ll be there for you again, I’ll always be there for you.” I think, even though Sherlock brushes him off, it’s gotten it through his thick skull that Mycroft cares about him. But the goldfish? Not a chance.

So he hands Mycroft the gun because he thinks it should be easy for Mycroft to do this for him. Mycroft has always fixed all his other problems, and anyway what’s one more dead goldfish to The British Government? I think he’s shocked when Mycroft refuses. (So was I, and I’m still not entirely convinced that that moment was in character). If I try to defer to the fact that Mark Gatiss is writing a character and playing a character he knows well, the best explanation I can come up with for Mycroft’s behavior is that he’s already seeing how this is going to end–he knows how Euros thinks, and he’s terrified that Sherlock and/or John is going to die and it’s all his fault. And I also think having to kill the Governor in particular hits him especially hard because of the threat he makes when they first arrive to Sherrinford: “I find any indication my sister has left this island at any time, I swear to you, you will not.” I’m not saying that was an idle threat, but I don’t think Mycroft can deal with being forced to carry it out. While I suspect that Mycroft has, even if he’s never murdered anyone himself, at least sanctioned murder before, I don’t think he can deal with getting blood on his hands when he’s not the one making the decisions.

Anyway, he can’t do it. And Sherlock is surprised, I think, because it doesn’t fit with the image of Mycroft that he has. I think a huge part of The Final Problem is about Sherlock remaking his image of Mycroft, realizing he is not a demigod but a man. Mycroft if fallible, Mycroft isn’t always clever, in short, Mycroft isn’t as strong as he thinks he is. Or as strong as Sherlock thought he was.

But he did his best.

harriet-spy:

I have had very similar thoughts about the failure to shoot myself. I would add that the moment seems to have arisen from a tension between the demands of theme and of plot. As we’ve been told, the point of The Final roblem, and of Euros’s tests, was to force Sherlock to choose emotion and human connection over Mycroft and mere reasoning. Which means that, all along, Mycroft should have been advocating for the ruthless/”logical” choice in every test. But if he did so, it wouldn’t have been much of an episode. They had to find some way to avoid his simply short-circuiting every supposedly riveting moment of emotional suspense by killing a bitch or three, and the best they could come up with was to vaguely cripple/sideline the character, regardless of continuity.

Many, many things about the treatment of Mycroft in The Final Problem bothered me, but I do think that, in order for Sherlock to become more mature, he needs to take a more realistic view of Mycroft. His response to Mycroft’s perceived infallibility has always incorporated a large element of childish abdication of responsibility. That’s something he is only likely to get over at this late stage in his life by recognizing that the infallibility has its limits. To me, this is the most legitimate of what I will (in extremely petty fashion) refer to as the attacks on Mycroft in this episode, the one that is most psychologically sound generally, and most consistent with prior episodes. And yet, to be honest, I’m not sure that the writers fully thought it out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if any S5 showed regression on this point.

(now if only they could’ve bothered to construct their plot so it supported their conclusions, rather than having a lot of random loud! exciting! stuff! happen and then informing us that it meant this or that…) 

anarfea:

I do agree with you that The Final Problem has a lot of tension between plot and theme, and also between plot and character. I find the reading of The Final Problem that I like best is to look at it as almost an allegory about the show rather than an actual episode (not sure if that makes sense). All of the characters feel symbolic on pretty much every level. I do agree with you that while there were some moments in The Final Problem which I loved and which gave me lots of Mycroft feels (the whole flashback sequence where adult Mycroft is interacting with the Holmes children, for example, and the bits about Lady Bracknell, and of course the Holmes killing Holmes sequence) I was upset about a couple of decisions they made, particularly the clown sequence. I can come up with satisfactory (to me, at least) explanations for why Mycroft couldn’t shoot the Governor.

I cannot reconcile the version of Mycroft we see in Serbia, who clearly has field experience and trusted himself enough to go in and get Sherlock out of there, with the Mycroft who is apparently incapable of dispatching an intruder in his own home. Much the way I cannot reconcile the idea that the Holmes’ family had an ancestral home in the countryside with the version of Mummy and Daddy Holmes we see in The Empty Hearse. I was arguing in my multi-shipping meta that I almost think of the different series of Sherlock as existing in parallel universes or something. Up until now, all my longer fics have been canon compliant, but I now feel like there are too many inconsistencies for me to come up with a coherent narrative. At this point I’m just going to use the parts of canon that I like and ignore the bits that don’t make sense.

cumberbatchitis:

I have always thought he simply considered Mycroft responsible for the whole mess, so in his eyes he was supposed to be the one to deal with it. And also he did not want John to face such a task. But yeah, all points mentioned are very reasonable.

thecutteralicia:

I must say, I’m surprised that so many people have a hard time with Mycroft being unable to shoot the governor. Serbia was different, as Mycroft had control of the situation and also no one died (that we know of) - if he had, for example, been forced to kill the man beating Sherlock, it would have been in defense of his brother (and himself). Being prepared to shoot a home invader is self-defense. Should I find it disturbing that so many people can’t see a difference between those situations and being forced to murder an innocent person with one’s own hands???

John is a soldier. In the first episode, he killed Jeff Hope with zero remorse. Yet no one seemingly had a problem with his inability in The Final Problem to carry out the murder of the governor. In his case, people seem to realize that just because someone is a soldier - and prepared to shoot a person who is actively a danger to others - doesn’t mean they’re automatically okay with the willy-nilly murder of innocents. Why isn’t the same extended to Mycroft?

We know Mycroft is in intelligence and probably his orders have resulted in the deaths of others. However, every indication in the show is that Mycroft specializes in counter-terrorism and homeland protection. His goal is to protect as many people as possible - we see that in The Final Problem, too, with his thought that they should have the girl crash the plane into water or away from civilization, so more people don’t get hurt. His job is to have pragmatic thoughts like that - if the girl and the plane’s passengers can’t be saved, then obviously the next best option is to have the plane crash in a place where people on the ground won’t be at risk.

The situation with the governor is different. For one thing, Mycroft is not in control. They are being manipulated, and the choice is either one person dies or two people die, and really, there’s no guarantee Eurus wouldn’t just kill the governor’s wife anyway. The prospect is to kill a person with his bare hands - something we have zero evidence Mycroft has ever done (and Sherlock has done, FFS). Furthermore, we have the psychological weight of the situation: this is the place (Sherrinford) and the person (Eurus) Mycroft is supposed to be able to control. This is the sister who has haunted him his entire life suddenly having power over him.

Mycroft has spent literally most of his life trying to contain Eurus, and now it’s all gone wrong. As a child, he witnessed his baby sister turn into a psychopath and kill another child, then threaten to kill Mycroft’s adored baby brother. Then she burned down the home with (presumably) the entire family in it, which could have killed them all. Then Mycroft was burdened with the secret of her captivity and pressed by his uncle into being complicit into a huge, groundbreaking lie to this own parents. Mycroft then spent years tending to his drug addict baby brother by himself. The man has more issues than Vogue, and in Sherrinford they all began to collapse in on him.

anarfea:

"if he had, for example, been forced to kill the man beating Sherlock, it would have been in defense of his brother (and himself). Being prepared to shoot a home invader is self-defense. Should I find it disturbing that so many people can’t see a difference between those situations and being forced to murder an innocent person with one’s own hands??? "

No one in this thread is arguing that killing a home invader and being forced to kill an innocent person is the same. What I specifically said is that while I think it makes sense that Mycroft was unable to kill the Governor, the bit I really feel was OOC for Mycroft was the clown sequence. Like you said, the clown is an intruder. Killing him would have been self-defense. Serbia!croft would have skewered that clown.

I get that Mycroft was in charge in Serbia and he feels out of control when he thinks Eurus is in his house. Even so, I feel like the reason Mycroft panics and runs down the stairs instead of killing the clown is because that’s what he has to do for the sake of the plot. And I do think that writing Mycroft OOC for plot reasons was a disservice to his character.

Also, when people are talking about Mycroft’s hypocrisy, again, the comparison isn’t really between killing a home invader vs. killing an innocent person. The comparison is between ordering an assassination and pulling the trigger yourself, or between authorizing an operation which will result in people dying and killing someone yourself. We know from The Six Thatchers that Mycroft employed AGRA. We don’t know what exactly he utilized them for, but we do know what kind of work Mary did. We know from The Final Problem that he authorized the purchase of a number of “patience grenades” that will presumably kill a bunch of people.

And yes, you can argue that there’s a difference between ordering the assassination of a terrorist and killing an innocent person. But innocent people die in counter-terrorism operations too, and their deaths are written off as collateral damage. People try to justify the deaths of those innocents by making the utilitarian argument that more deaths may have been prevented, and we see Mycroft employing that argument:

"His goal is to protect as many people as possible - we see that in TFP, too, with his thought that they should have the girl crash the plane into water or away from civilization, so more people don’t get hurt."

Quite so. And if you carry that argument through to its logical conclusion, he should have shot the Governor so that just the Governor died instead of the Governor and his wife. Fewer people would have been hurt. That was the utilitarian choice, and presumably when running counter terrorism operations, Mycroft makes utilitarian choices.

But he couldn’t make that choice in The Final Problem because he didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. And the reason people are saying that he’s a hypocrite for that is because his hands are already unclean.

thecutteralicia:

“What I specifically said is that while I think it makes sense that Mycroft was unable to kill the Governor, the bit I really feel was OOC for Mycroft was the clown sequence. Like you said, the clown is an intruder. Killing him would have been self-defense. Serbia!croft would have skewered that clown.” 

He tried to kill the intruder. He pulled out the gun and pulled the trigger, but Sherlock had removed the bullets in anticipation of that so no one would get hurt. As for skewering him, you can’t stab someone who is many feet away and out of your reach.

As for the rest of your post, the talk of “collateral damage” runs into a philosophical debate about war that I’m not interested in having in this context. I don’t think it’s OOC for Mycroft (nor John, for that matter) to not have wanted to shoot the governor in the head as part of Eurus’ games, no matter their pasts or what they’ve done to protect others (and again, it astounds me how many people forget that we’ve seen John shoot someone already on the show).

Molly Hooper and the Science of Attraction 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

There is great variety in sexual behavior and response throughout the mammalian class, and particularly among human animals. Males of the human species are generally considered, in the existing literature, to have a heightened perception of and reception to sexual advances by females, but there exist, of course, many exceptions to this norm. One outlier of particular interest to the Experimenter is the subject of this experimental trial. The Experimenter has designed a series of experiments to investigate the sexual awareness and responsiveness of this male human subject (referred to henceforth as the Subject). Results and conclusions will be reported.

Experiment 1: Lipstick.

Method: The Experimentor left the room to apply some lipstick, then returned to observe the Subject’s response, if any.

Results: The Subject explicitly commented on the lipstick, therefore it can be concluded that it did have some effect on him. However, he does not seem to have interpreted it as a sexual advance.

Conclusion: While the Subject is aware of typical female body-modifications, his response to them is decidely negative.

Follow up to Experiment 1:

At the conclusion of the experiment, the Experimentor removed the lipstick. The Subject responded to this action negatively, and insisted that the Experimentor’s appearance was improved by it. Initial conclusion may need to be revised. Further data to be gathered at a later date.

Experiment 2: Denial of favors. 

Method: In the past, the Experimenter has generally been accommodating of the Subject’s requests. For the purposes of this experiment, the Experimenter denies a request and observes the result.

Results: Subject compliments Experimenter on her physical appearance.

Conclusion: Subject understands common human mate-attraction behaviors (“flirting”) and can mimic these behaviors in appropriate circumstances. The sincerity of the sentiment underlying the behavior remains in question, however. Further study required.

Experiment 3: Jealousy. 

Method: Experimenter seeks to incite jealousy in Subject by introducing him to a sexual rival.

Results: Subject is largely unperturbed by the rival. Unforeseen flaw in experimental design: the chosen rival seems more sexually interested in the Subject than the Experimenter, skewing the results.

Conclusion: Despite some experimental error, jealousy does not appear to be a useful motivator for the Subject.

Experiment 4: Glamour.

Method: Seeking clarification from the mixed results of the Lipstick experiment, the Experimenter uses the excuse of a Christmas party to test the effects of sexually provocative clothing on subject.

Result: While other males in the area responded to the display, the subject did not. In fact, subject reacted aggressively to the display. Further observation: Unexpectedly, the Subject reacted positively to being challenged and scolded by the Experimenter.

Conclusion: Visual displays of sexuality are not effective on subject. Surprising, given the subject’s tendency to dress in sexually provocative clothing himself. The Subject’s response to extra-experimental stimulus, however, warrants further study.

Research note: 

Subject appears to have intimate familiarity with the naked body of another woman. This information is unaccountable, based on what the Experimenter knows of the Subject. Further research definitely warranted.

Experiment 5: Bonding and Sympathy

Method: Experimenter initiates intimate conversation, including sharing personal history and offering friendly support.

Result: Subject seems at turns offended and baffled by overtures.

Conclusion: Total failure. No need for further research on this approach.

Edited conclusion: 

Experimenter may have been hasty with initial conclusions. Subject appears to have experienced a delayed reaction to the experiment. Subject returned later with an altogether different response to stimulus.

Experimenter has decided to discontinue experimental trial. Due to the shifting nature of her relationship with the Subject, the Experimenter can no longer maintain adequate objectivity for this study. The trial is on indefinite hiatus.

The Fall and Water

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter and anarfea)

notagarroter:

Mycroft: fills a plane with dead people.
Sherlock: deliberately overdoses on a plane, nearly dies.
Eurus: invents imaginary planes full of sleeping people who are about to crash.

Forget Victor Trevor and the well. What the hell happened to these kids at a formative age to turn them against aviation? 

No wonder Mummy and Daddy started leaving them home when they went line dancing in Oklahoma.

anarfea:

Looking back on A Scandal in Belgravia post The Final Problem, I’m wondering if Eurus didn’t either suggest the idea of The Flight of the Dead to Mycroft, or if she wasn’t otherwise aware it was happening. Because it seems that the whole meeting with Jim happened at around the same time as the events of A Scandlal in Belgravia, no? Anyway, Eurus’s metaphor/dream/hallucination of being alone in the sky in a plane filled with sleeping people seems to be connected somehow with Mycroft filling a plane with dead people.

As for Sherlock, he would have OD’d on a train or a bus or whatever vehicle they put him on to send him to Eastern Europe to die, methinks.

notagarroter:

I don’t necessarily disagree with you about Sherlock – certainly, that’s how I interpreted it the first time around, and I think that interpretation is still valid.

But I’m open to the idea that the plane is significant to Sherlock and the general narrative mostly because of the scene with Moriarty telling him “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s never the fall – it’s the landing.” And then the plane lands. So… it’s kind of an almost-pun that seems to point to something larger – Sherlock’s general angst around falling and landing and dying, etc.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be anything more than the dream retrofitting itself around a real-world stimulis – an experience I’ve had myself, whether on a plane or hearing a phone ring or what have you.

Mostly I’m just making this observation because I’m (mildly! it’s not a big thing) annoyed at the retroactive imposition of the water motif over Sherlock’s whole life. Yeah, there was the pool and there was the waterfall and there was the aquarium, but water is a SUPER COMMON THING in everyone’s life, and you just *know* they didn’t have this thread in mind before S4.

Particularly it annoys me because they already *had* a very resonant, meaningful motif working throughout the narrative, and that’s the motif of falling. The Fall is important not just in this incarnation of Sherlock, but arguably in *every* incarnation going back to ACD and that incredibly powerful moment when Sherlock and Moriarty go together over the Reichenbach Falls.

The point of the Reichenbach is not that it’s WET.

The point is, it’s a very tall, dangerous place where Sherlock Holmes died, heroically and tragically. (And Moriarty as well, less heroically but perhaps just as tragically, to some of us.)

This version of Sherlock jumping off of Barts was a re-imagining of that mythic moment (*without* water), and MP!Moriarty was of course making reference to this in TAB when he talks about the fall and the landing. And then we jump-cut to the plane: a landing that does not, in fact, kill Sherlock, just as his Reichenbach landing did not.

And then The Abominable Bride takes us (in Sherlock’s mind) to the actual waterfall, again, not because it’s wet, but because Sherlock still hasn’t fully processed what his fall meant to him. That’s the trauma that he is working through – that we all are.

And I’d argue that MP!Molly teaching him how to fall in His Last Vow is another oblique reference. And there are others dotted throughout the text. For over a hundred years, Sherlock Holmes’s fall and death and rebirth have been the traumatic break that we are all, always, working through and trying to accomodate and process and understand.

And The Fall works on so many interesting levels – it’s a waterfall, it’s a painting, it’s an actual plunge to one’s (potential) death, it’s the metaphor of “falling” in love, but it’s also the Fall of Man, the moment when we gain knowledge we can never unknow, and thus become doomed. It’s just a *hugely* resonant cultural trope.

So no, I’m not entirely serious about the plane thing. I was mostly sort of crankily observing that, once you start imposing patterns on the text, the airplane motif strikes me as at least as resonant as the water one, or in fact more so.

But neither is as compelling to me as The Fall.

anarfea:

Yeah, I totally agree now that you’ve mentioned it that the Fall is a more compelling motif than water. I just for whatever reason wasn’t connecting the plane with falling before. That said, the water motif in The Reichenbach Fall did reasonate with me. I feel like water is sort of a metaphor for the unconscious regardless of context. Also for emotion. Also birth and beginnings. All of us spend the first nine months of our lives sloshing around in water. So I feel the whole thing in The Reichenbach Fall isn’t so much about Victor or drowning in the literal sense as much as it’s about deep emotion and repressed feeling.

The Fall, like you said, is about a fall from grace, a leap of faith, etc. But water is birth, to me. And descent. And regression. We’re going back to the beginning. Or maybe I just like Sherlock sinking into a pool of black goo.