Desperately Unspoken: The Ongoing Relationship between Sherlock and John

 (Sherlock Meta by ivyblossom)

Sherlock assumes John is hitting on him shortly after they first meet, as we know. But Sherlock can be a bit hit and miss about people when it comes to how they feel. He was right about Mary’s ex, but wrong (hilariously wrong) about people disliking John. (Is he jealous of John’s other friends, tinging his perception of their interactions?) Sherlock is right Irene, both right and wrong about Molly, and then right again about many of the wedding guests. He seems to be more often right then wrong about people’s inner motivations when he’s more objective and reading people in the context of a case. But after a fairly long and intimate friendship, Sherlock failed to understand how much John loved him. Sherlock is both a master of subtext and a complete failure at interpreting it, depending.

So is he right about John’s latent interest in him when they first meet? I think he probably is. It’s probably Sherlock at his most objective about John, after all. It’s not difficult to argue that Sherlock awakens John in a variety of ways at the very start; John is low, dark, and depressed before he meets Sherlock, and the moment he does it seems as though his libido suddenly fires back up, because he immediately starts flirting with every woman he meets, and steadfastly pointing out that he’s not gay.

That suggestion is mostly coming from the outside as an assumption; the world has assumed that he’s interested in Sherlock (including from Sherlock himself). He denies this very vehemently. Perhaps a little too vehemently. I believe him that he doesn’t identify as gay, which makes absolute perfect sense, but he never entirely dodges the accusation that he’s attracted to Sherlock.

But it doesn’t matter at that point. Sherlock isn’t interested in John, or anyone, and John is an incorrigible flirt and likes the ladies. So everything works. It doesn’t actually matter where the spark in their relationship comes from. They can happily enjoy their sexual tension without either of them having to alter their plans or their identity. Sherlock has sort of let him off the hook by being resolutely disinterested in sexual or romantic relationships. John is safe to feel whatever he likes, essentially. Sherlock will remain unthreatening to John’s self-perception, because if John does feel something for Sherlock, it can be safely channeled into their work and their unorthodox friendship.

As we go along, things get complicated. Sherlock becomes far more attached to John. It becomes obvious that John’s relationships with women are half-hearted at best. The major emotional relationship of his life is with Sherlock. When the innkeeper in The Hounds of Baskerville assumes that John and Sherlock are a couple because they are two men apparently on holiday together who have booked just one room, John considers clarifying, but opts not to. Not because they are necessarily an item at this point, but John has begun to recognize that they are anyway. In an odd sort of way. Just not the way people are imagining.

I feel for John at this point. He sees it happening, and while he’s made a decision, this isn’t really the relationship he was after in his life. It’s a deep friendship, but it is neither romantic nor sexual. But there isn’t room for anyone else, and he’s not seeking anyone else out anymore. Sherlock’s right: John is a romantic, and he appears to make the decision that his love for Sherlock transcends any absences in their relationship. He made his choice. I don’t think he’s actively unhappy with the arrangement. He’s fairly content in series two. But it’s not an entirely ideal situation for him.

I think this is where that unspokenness at it’s most obvious; Sherlock and John adore each other and have placed each other first in their hearts, but neither of them have expressed that in any way. They have never discussed it at all. I think at this point Sherlock had some secrets to share with John (that he’s not quite as immune to emotional entanglements and possibly to sexuality generally) and John has secrets to share with Sherlock that would blow his mind (that he loves him, which John thinks is staggeringly obvious). Irene lays it out for him in series two in a way I suspect he had been wrestling with: they are a couple, just not the kind he imagined he’d be part of.

Then Sherlock dies. Everyone treats John as the widower, and it was entirely apt. The core tragedy of it, I’d say, is that John never actually told Sherlock anything he ought to have said. They kept it utterly unspoken, and while that was reassuring and comfortable at the time, it must leave John with a terrible sense of confusion and regret on some level. His feelings for Sherlock ran incredibly deep and on many levels, and I think John is self-aware enough to recognize that. And Sherlock, well. There were no drugs involved in the fall, as we now know. That means his tears on the roof were real.

When John says he’s moved on, and now he’s seeing Mary, he goes back to being irritated with the suggestion that he had a romantic/sexual relationship with Sherlock and points out, again, that he’s not gay, and Sherlock wasn’t his boyfriend. Because everyone moves on from a close friendship by getting engaged to someone else, right? He’s retracted some of it. I think he had to, really. He had to look at it in the face and call it what it was, not what it felt like while he was in it. Sherlock is gone and isn’t there to tell him that they loved each other. It wasn’t just John.

One of the beautiful things about series three so far is that John repeatedly puts his relationship with Mary and his relationship with Sherlock on the same shelf. I think that’s incredibly significant. So when he denies that Sherlock was his boyfriend in series three, it’s really hard for me not to see it without a tinge of regret on John’s part. Because that’s a lot of love and mutual attraction going unacknowledged. But what else can he do? They never talked about it. He can’t really be sure what was going on with Sherlock. It must be incredibly difficult for him to entirely come to grips with that relationship in retrospect.

Now we have series three Sherlock, who has had to confront John’s feelings for him head on. Finally: something of their relationship has become overt rather than desperately unspoken. While we have Sherlock’s cleaned-up, public-presentation perspective on his mental shut down when John told him he loved him, we don’t have the actual contents of those thoughts to inspect. They must have been big and extremely overwhelming for him.

There were things Sherlock did not know about his relationship with John, and series three seems to be, in part, his coming to terms with what those things are. Sherlock must have assumed he held the greater share of affection. He didn’t know John loved him. He didn’t even know John considered him his best friend.

When the client explains her single date with the Mayfly Man, Sherlock sees his relationship with John in her story. He doesn’t date much either (at all, apparently), and John was so nice, and they just clicked, and he sort of wished it had gone further. But this was special, so he wanted to take it slowly. At this point in the story, Sherlock is nodding. Is he trying to find a way to understand the explosion of things that went through his head when John admitted to loving him? He is intensely sad in that scene. John keeps assuring him that nothing will change, but Sherlock thinks he’s lying. Even if he weren’t, Sherlock is certainly a different man now, with a different outlook on relationships generally (as we see in his discussion with Mycroft about being different and being lonely). Maybe his old relationship with John wouldn’t have been enough anymore.

And Sherlock does essentially marry John in The Sign of the Three. They don’t exactly exchange vows, but Sherlock very clearly makes one. He wouldn’t have done that in series two. He was far too oblivious to his relationship with John.

While it’s always been fun to read the subtext of this show from start to finish, and I’ve always been of the opinion that, prior to the fall, if Sherlock had leaned in and started making out with John, John would have gone with it without a question or a fight. Because while he isn’t gay, I don’t think he would turn down a romantic and sexual relationship with Sherlock. In series three I think John arguably confirms that. But they can’t all three dance together, and it seems that Sherlock lost his chance, just when he might be starting to come to terms with the fact that he had one, or wanted one in the first place.

And so it remains so desperately unspoken, and now, apparently, desperately impossible.

Delicious, isn’t it?

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On Mrs. Hudson’s Assumption

 (Sherlock Meta by norwegianpornfaerie)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the “I’m not gay” scene between John and Mrs. Hudson. It bothered me from the get-go, because it didn’t make sense. Yes, the show is soaked in queerbating to the eyeteeth, but even in that context it didn’t make sense - it simply doesn’t work as a joke. We know for a fact that Mrs. Hudson knows John and Sherlock were not a couple. We know that she’s known about John’s girlfriends - she set out food for John and Sarah on their date, invited girlfriends to Christmas parties, etc. etc. In A Scandal in Belgravia, she and John have a discussion about Sherlock’s relationship to Irene, wondering about the nature thereof, and pondering Sherlock’s past relationships and orientation. She knows all of these things, and she’s not portrayed as an idiot. Nor is the scene played like ‘ditzy old woman is a bit batty’ - Una Stubbs plays the scene very (sorry) straight; if anything, she seems concerned for John. There is a hint of nervousness about her, as though she’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. She’s careful, and tries to make light of things. Why? What’s going on?

Here’s my theory: Mrs. Hudson genuinely thinks John and Sherlock are closeted queer men.

Note: Not OPENLY gay; closeted. And queer, not gay. Someone will have to correct me if I’m wrong here, but throughout the show, Mrs. Hudson never uses the word ‘gay’ to refer to John or Sherlock. Mrs. Hudson lives in the world we see portrayed in the show. She sees the exact same things we see, and her conclusion is that John and Sherlock are in love. This is significant: What Gatiss, inadvertently or not, is saying here, is that a sensible person who lives with John and Sherlock for years, naturally assumes they are queer, and in love.

Anyone would worry about John getting married so soon after Sherlock’s death, no matter what they thought about his sexual orientation and relationship to Sherlock - John suffered a massive trauma, which is not exactly an ideal time in which to form a long term relationship. If we suppose that Mrs. Hudson thinks John had a romantic and/or sexual attachment to Sherlock, again, her actions make sense: She tries to make light of things. Put yourself in her situation - wouldn’t it be easy to assume that John has panicked and is diving head-first into a relationship that won’t make him happy?

(Do I think this is the intended reading? Probably not. But it’s not impossible. And beyond anything else, it’s a very plausible reading, as I say, regardless of what is intended. And an important one, IMO.)

Mary, Redemption, and the Long Game or:

 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Series 3

 (Sherlock Meta by archipelagoarchaea)

Every time I hear someone say that Mary was redeemed by the end of His Last Vow, the writer in me wants to gnaw my arm off. I wondered if I was conflating the narrative trope of redemption too much with the actual definition of redemption, so I looked it up.



Nope. Turns out I was right. Let’s make this clear: regardless of whether or not John and Sherlock truly forgave Mary, she was not redeemed. Forgiveness and consequences come from without. Redemption comes from within. Redemption may occur before, after, or entirely independently of forgiveness. It requires conscious action on the part of the person being redeemed, and that action must be sacrificial or at the very least difficult. If we look at His Last Vow, we see nothing of the sort. Mary gets a new family? That’s a prize, not redemption. It’s something she wants. This may be confusing to people who’ve seen a lot of stories about characters redeemed by families, but there’s a very important component to those stories: the character must make sacrifices on behalf of that family. Mary lies to John continually and then shoots Sherlock to keep her secret. Sherlock is not a sacrifice to her. He’s a sacrifice to John. No redemption. Mary’s husband doesn’t talk to her for months? Those are consequences, and rather mild ones at that, for actions she never intended him to know about. She did not choose to risk her husband’s ire by telling the truth — that was Sherlock’s doing — therefore his anger does not even begin to redeem her. In fact, aside from the months of estrangement, Mary gets everything she wants in His Last Vow — often at the expense of Sherlock. This is the very opposite of redemption.

So is it possible that Moffat and Gatiss truly intended for Mary’s past to be taken care of, and her actions redeemed? Technically, yes. However, this is a show that just spent 4 1/2 hours painfully redeeming the main character for an arguably lesser sin. Redeeming Mary this easily requires a level of cognitive dissonance I cannot ascribe to writers on their level.

[...]

Sherlock is based on a series of short stories and novels that were written over a hundred years ago. There is a limited stock of available references. In addition, I believe that Moffat and Gatiss had an overall narrative planned from the very beginning. Following this arc in a well-balanced way is much easier with a planned end point than when trying to wedge it into an Möbius strip of infinite possible stories.

Whether you believe in TJLC or not, it’s clear that this show has a goal. Lestrade told us in the first episode: Sherlock was a great man. Maybe someday he’d be a good one. Mycroft gives us a possible expansion on that arc in the first episode of series 2 when he describes the romantic fiction that Irene offered: the promise of love, the pain of loss, the joy of redemption. (See darlingbenny’s brilliant gif set, though she had to fudge a couple of gifs since the arc isn’t actually over). Now, the most obvious interpretation of this is romantic (hello again TJLC), but a sort of platonic romance could also work. A romantic/pseudo-romantic arc would intertwine rather neatly with Sherlock’s character growth, and frankly, that looks like what we’re getting.

I will be honest. When I first watched His Last Vow I ended the show with a sense of sickening horror. Was this really where we were going? John and Sherlock partially estranged? John callous to Sherlock’s feelings? The woman who shot Sherlock sleeping in John’s bed — and him knowing it — without even the slightest hint of remorse? After I’d had time to calm down a bit, I remembered what I’d been hearing going into Series 3: how Moffat assured us that the next hiatus we would be even more frustrated than we were with Reichenbach. And when I look at His Last Vow, I can see absolutely nothing that fits that description, save the state of John and Sherlock’s relationship. It’s not Moriarty: he’s a tease, not a serious frustration. It’s not Sherlock’s murder of Magnussen: We have time to deal with that, and given that his only witnesses were John and the police, there’s potential that his actions will never be publicly known. So in a sense, Moffat reassured us before Series 3 even happened. He knows we hate what has happened to John and Sherlock, and he has no intention of leaving it there.

Let me point out a few patterns in His Last Vow. One: after Sherlock is shot and Mary confronted, we are consistently distanced from John’s feelings on the matter by both the narrative and the camera. This suggests intent, and intent suggests planning. So what’s the plan? Two: we are manipulated in the most effective possible way into trusting Mary (first two episodes) and then feeling unbelievably betrayed. Mary didn’t just shoot Sherlock. She shot him after he offered to help her and demonstrated a frankly ridiculous level of trust in her. We are given a remorseless Mary who’s ‘forgiven’ in absolutely the most jarringly quick way possible. The editing cuts to John ‘forgiving’ her before we’re even given the scene in 221B. There is no faster possible cut. This is not the pattern of redemption. This is the pattern of writers who want us to be angry and off balance. Three: we’re given several months that we know absolutely nothing about save that John didn’t talk to Mary. Where have we seen this kind of absence before? In The Reichenbach Fall, when Sherlock was setting up his fake suicide. Conclusion: something else is being set up. What and by whom is still up in the air.

Everyone has a right to deal with this uncertainty in their own way. Personally, I find it easier to be relatively optimistic. I can start panicking when we get closer to Series 4, but until then I’d rather play with the possibilities. I understand that other people find it easier to deal with possible heartbreak by keeping their expectations low, and that’s fine. But if that’s not what works for you, if you do prefer optimism, then keep heart. This the third act of five parts. This is the great misunderstanding before everything comes together. This is a romance, platonic or otherwise. It has to hurt before it can feel better.

Finally, let me just say that as an aspiring author, little gives me more glee than the idea of making my imaginary fans suffer through the suffering of my characters. I will write happy endings, but I’ll make them hurt first. And I’m a nice person. Do you really think Moffat and Gatiss would miss the chance to make a love story painful? Estranging John and Sherlock like this is basically proof to me that they’re going to be closer in the long run.

No, we don’t know how Series 4 is going to go, but that’s a good thing. It means we have something to actually watch. There are plot holes that appear unfillable. This could be bad, or it could be a sign that we’re missing something important but brilliant. We won’t know until Series 4 airs, so until then: keep analyzing. Keep reading into things. Keep theorizing before you have all the facts. It’s fun. It builds your skills as a writer and consumer of fiction. It forces you to confront how you judge people and their actions. It brings fans together (well, mostly). But most of all, don’t lose heart. For all its flaws, this is not a show that will ever lose sight of its central premise: John and Sherlock as two halves of a whole, a friendship — or romance — so powerful it’s one of the most enduring and iconic in fiction.

The problem with Mary and her storyline in 

His Last Wow

 (Sherlock Meta by wingsoutstretched) *

Okay, so here’s my problem with the way this episode handled Mary and her storyline.

Mary, as it turns out, is another in Moffat’s long line of Super Special Fantasy Women which, given the wonderfully comic book-like quality of this show is fine. Great, even. Almost certainly meant to be this adaptation’s version of or nod to col. Moran, she’s a crack shot, an international assassin who went ‘freelance,’ who gave it all up for a future and would kill to protect her new life with her husband and baby on the way. I’ve got no issue with any of that; in fact, I think it’s pretty terrific on the spectrum of things they could have done with Mary.

The problem is what happens starting from the very moment Mary pulls the trigger and shoots Sherlock Holmes. At that moment her story — and her redemption — is lifted out of her hands and placed into the hands of the men around her, and she never gets it back.

Sherlock leads Mary to the empty houses at Leinster Gardens (even though she thought she was acting under her own power, Sherlock was leading her on all along), where after being asked to prove her skill with a gun (and thus unwittingly absolving herself of guilt in Sherlock’s eyes, but that comes later), she pleads for him to understand her resolve to keep john from learning her true identity, but to no avail. Sherlock has already exposed her — or, should I say, he manipulated her into exposing herself — to John Watson, who was lurking in the shadows spying on her the whole time (and yes, given the voyeuristic nature of the whole episode when it comes to Mary, it’s more than a little disconcerting.)

The trio then return to Baker Street, where they pause for a nice bit of psychoanalysis of John Watson with Mary as a component of his danger-seeking psyche. It’s important to notice that this exchange is between Sherlock and John, not John and Mary. Mary stands there silently while Sherlock tells John all about why he would be attracted to Mary.

And then John asks Sherlock, ‘why’s she like that?’ — referring to Mary but not looking at her — and Sherlock replies ‘because you chose her.’ It is literally constructed as ‘everything that is relevant or important about Mary’s character is contained in the fact that John Watson picked her.’ If it hasn’t been clear by now that Mary isn’t actually about Mary at all, it’s really apparent now.

And then. And then. Sherlock asks John ‘What is she?’ Not who. What. He repeats the question. Twice. The answer, of course, is a client — ‘That’s all you are now, Mary,’ John tells her. He stands in front of a chair and orders her to sit. He tells her, ‘This is where you sit and talk, and this is where we sit and listen, then we decide if we want you or not.’ Working in tandem, John and Sherlock have completely stripped Mary of her own authority, telling her that they are judge and jury, that they will decide if she is ~worthy~ of being wanted, accepted or redeemed. 

And then things take a little meta twist, because we quickly discover that Mary’s actual story apparently isn’t worth devoting screen time to. Instead of learning about Mary’s background (aside from what Sherlock tells us he’s deduced) and any depth to a justification for her actions beyond must protect John!, we get the cleverly canon-referenced ‘A.G.R.A’ data stick. I cannot stress enough that Mary’s story, her past, her foregrounding as a character, is literally placed in John’s hands. And he, you know, tosses it away. Doesn’t matter. Past is the past, etc. Because John Watson loves her despite whatever-it-was-that-made-her-who-she-is and because Sherlock said it was okay she shot him because actually she wasn’t trying to kill him.

(And I’ll pause to point out here the other person who literally holds Mary’s untold story in his hands: Magnussen. He sits exhibition style in a chair, mentally fondling Mary’s files with with his sweaty hands while chuckling about what a ~bad girl~ she is — it’s a tactic to trigger John’s pressure point, yes, but it’s also a pretty goddamn repulsive appropriation of Mary’s power and backstory as well. That was obviously an intentional aspect of making Magnussen even more abhorrent, but it also serves as another time that Mary’s story is reduced to a passive object handled, used, or discarded by the men on the show.)

So, back to Christmas: John forgives Mary, all is well, the two men sat in their chairs and decided they wanted Mary and so therefore we want her, too. Only problem is, they didn’t hear her story. And neither did we.

I’m not saying John shouldn’t have been angry — hell, furious — at Mary. I’m not even saying I think he should have forgiven her. And this is not a critique of John or Sherlock’s reactions, but of the frame within which Mary’s story was constructed and presented to the audience. I’m saying that Mary’s power in the process of her redemption was completely stripped away, that the story arc told us that all we need to know is whether John and Sherlock forgive her. Her character is reduced to signifiers and objects while she stands by and waits to be absolved. Her story is all flash and no substance, and to me, she deserves a hell of a lot better. Faux housedressing, indeed.

(* This text is moderated by the blog author. Original text found here.)

I am so ready for Harry Watson

 (Sherlock Meta by Loudest Subtext in Television)

Anonymous said: Do you think Harry Watson's ever going to appear on the show? I sorta kinda desperately want her to be the Sassy Gay Friend and run around telling John and Sherlock what stupid bitches they've been.

Loudest Subtext in Television:

LOL, I am so ready for Harry Watson. I REALLY want more backstory about John because all we have is Sholto, which is still left so vague. We know nothing about John’s childhood or parents or Harry. We got a decent amount of Sherlock backstory this series so I’m guessing we’re going to get more of John’s backstory next series.

I want Harry to read Mary to filth.

I want to see what Harry’s like when she’s drunk and when she’s sober. I want to know all about Harry’s teenage years and how she came out and how she handled it and how their parents handled it. I want to know if their parents were accepting or not. If they weren’t, it could explain John’s secretiveness about his sexuality to some extent… but then, he’s not close to his parents if they’re still alive — they weren’t at the wedding — so if they weren’t accepting, it would have had to have affected him pretty deeply for him to still care. But it absolutely could have! That wouldn’t be very unusual, really! People cut their parents out of their life all the time and still feel compelled to conform to what their parents wanted them to be.

I mean, the writers chose to give John a queer sister for a reason, right? There’s some reason for her drinking problem, and some reason John and Harry aren’t close to their parents. Is it because their parents rejected Harry when she came out?

Does John have some strained, tenuous relationship with them he hopes to keep intact by maintaining a heterosexual lifestyle? That would actually be pretty common for a bisexual person. My mom is weird about bisexual people, so I figured I would avoid the drama and just tell her if I ever ended up in a serious same sex relationship… but then I married into a heterosexual relationship, so it’s never come up. It can be difficult for gay or straight people to understand, but you just don’t think to yourself, hey, I’m going to go start a needless argument with my parents and come out even though I don’t have a pressing reason at the moment. You think you’ll do it when you have a same-sex partner and it matters. There’s also the common reaction parents have where they’ll tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about — especially when you’re younger — so you wait to have the same sex partner as proof. Then once you’re older, it just gets weird to bring it up for no reason. Everyone else knew when I was 14 and I didn’t hide it at all otherwise, and I never felt ashamed of it, but parents are a sticking point for people. My mom would get over it, but if John knew his parents wouldn’t, that’d be all the more reason to sweep it under the rug until there was a pressing reason to bring it up.

Or has John seen that Harry’s life has gone poorly, perhaps in part to her being openly queer? Was she targeted for bullying or something? When Harry goes on her drinking binges and John has to clean up after her, does she cry a lot about queer-related stuff? Does she present as very obviously queer and get shit for it? Have shitty things happened to her when she goes out with girlfriends? Society, on average, tends to be a bit more accepting of queer women than queer men, so does John see that and think it’s best to just keep it on the down low until/unless he gets a boyfriend? Again, that’s a very common thing for pan- and bisexual people to do. We can adopt heterosexual privilege to avoid trouble, and it generally doesn’t cause us the same inner turmoil as it would a gay person, so it’s sometimes paradoxically the best decision for one’s well-being. Even gay people have to do this sometimes. John may feel he’s just avoiding needless trouble by presenting himself as heterosexual. I think if Sherlock made it clear he was interested John wouldn’t hide it anymore, but until then, John doesn’t have much to gain by being openly bisexual.

I also want to know if Harry is older or younger than John. I’ve always assumed she was older, but do we ever have that confirmed? It would have an impression on John if she were older and he had to watch her struggle with her sexuality. He would have reason to embrace heterosexual urges and deny homosexual ones. That could also be the case if she were younger, but it may be more dramatic if he had seen that drama before he dealt with puberty himself.

I also wonder who they’ll cast as Harry.

It would make sense that we don’t see John’s queer sister until the show is ready to take on John’s orientation more in-depth. Aaargh, I can’t wait.

On playing Rizla in The Sign of Three

 (Sherlock Meta by beautifulfic and oldgrimalkin)

beautifulfic:

All right, so I know they’ve both had far too much to drink, and the context of these lines was, superficially at least, to do with the game of 20 questions, but I think it’s a brilliant choice of games to play (both logically, it doesn’t require much thought or even sitting up straight when inebriated, it’s comfortable and intimate, and for the storyline.)

It’s a game about trying to figure out your own identity through the medium of another. You’re relying on their image of the character you’re supposed to be to give you an accurate portrayal.

John chose Sherlock himself. Why? Because it’s easier? Because it’s one person he knows well enough to answer questions about when he’s drunk? Or because he doesn’t know Sherlock as well as he thought did and he’s hoping to find some answers in the questions Sherlock asks and the guesses he makes?

It seems like a reflection of both John’s certainty of Sherlock from before and the uncertainty over the man who came back to him. It almost seems like “I know who you are, or at least who you were. Do you?”

Sherlock’s not used to playing games at all and picks someone at random, because it doesn’t matter. That’s not the mystery to him (and us) throughout this series. The biggest case of all in the whole show is John. John’s reactions and behaviour. It’s about the cracks that Sherlock helped narrow when John got back from Afghanistan and split open again when he jumped off Bart’s. It’s about how everything John thought he ever wanted (domestic life and a family) wasn’t ever going to be enough - even at this point, before the wedding, we suspected as much, and I believe Sherlock did too.

And Sherlock can see all those differences, and he’s confused. A man so easily deduced when he met him in a lab at Bart’s is now clouded by Sherlock’s own sentiment and perceptions, and he doesn’t know what to do for the best.

From almost the moment he came back, he can see things are not how they were, and he’s poorly equipped to deal with that. So he relies on Mary to smooth the way (and she does, for a while at least) He never challenges her. Whether he loves John platonically or more, even Sherlock Holmes knows that creating a rift between Mary and John in the aim of returning him and John to their old life will only alienate John further, and that’s not what he wants. He doesn’t want to be any more to blame for where they now stand than he already is.

He doesn’t know that man that John has become, and maybe he even questions the image he’d built up of John over their friendship. Is he now wondering if that man he thought he knew, who shared Baker Street with him and was by his side from A Study In Pink to the Reichenbach Fall was a mask or an illusion?

It’s certainly always been his blindspot (remember John stepping out in the bomb jacket at the pool, and the look on Sherlock’s face? He believed, just for a moment, that John had fooled him all along.)

There are echoes of that now, in this scene. It’s got nothing to do with Madonna, and everything to do with John and Sherlock.

"I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who you’re supposed to be."

oldgrimalkin:

Ah, but Sherlock does nothing but play games: chess, Operation, deduction, even Cluedo. His whole life revolves around solving puzzles. The game goes ever on and on.

The great lacuna in his understanding—that John takes strategic advantage of in this particular game—is that Sherlock doesn’t know himself.

And that’s his quest (though he doesn’t even know that yet): Who is Sherlock Holmes? What does it mean to put on the deerstalker and assume the mantle? What qualities does he possess, positive and negative?

In the mini episode, he wasn’t even clear about what are his qualities and what are John’s. (“All his friends hate him.”) He’s so self-blind that he conflates himself and John.

During this game, he misidentifies himself as John, and then tells John “I don’t know who you’re supposed to be.” (Reading this on a different level than simply identifying Madonna.) I think I’m you, but then who is left for you to be? His own identity doesn’t enter his (inebriated) calculation.

By the time of the wedding he is indeed able to separate John from himself—at least John’s positive qualities and his own negative ones. It’s not a complete picture, but it’s a start.

Does Sherlock improve his self-comprehension in TLV? I’m not sure. I don’t think this is an Achilles’ heel for adversaries to take advantage of (like John does in the game), but maybe I’m overlooking something? I suppose there’s something of a Joseph Campbell heroes quest here, but will it ever be explored further in future eps?

Brother Mine

 (Sherlock Meta by earlgreytea68)

You know, a lot has been made of Sherlock killing Magnussen to keep Mary (and therefore John) safe, but I feel like there’s more to it than that. I think Sherlock did it on Mycroft’s behalf, too.

In TEH Sherlock makes some comments to Mycroft during their game of deductions essentially saying, it’s okay to be different. Mycroft says, “Maybe he just doesn’t mind being different; he doesn’t necessarily have to be isolated,” to which Sherlock replies, “Exactly. He’s different, so what, why would he mind?” Sherlock could be partially talking about himself, but in the moment he’s talking about Mycroft. This is after Sherlock has asked Mycroft if he’s found a “goldfish” while Sherlock’s been away. He is concerned for his brother’s isolation, and fears Mycroft has allowed his different-ness to make him isolated.

In TSoT Sherlock tries to get Mycroft to come to the wedding, as his “plus one” of sorts. It could be for Sherlock’s sake (and that’s how I originally read it), so that he didn’t have to be alone; but perhaps he also didn’t want his brother to be, again, so isolated.

Then finally, in HLV, when Mycroft asks Sherlock why he hates Magnussen so much, Sherlock says, very vehemently, it’s because, “He attacks PEOPLE WHO ARE DIFFERENT and prays on their secrets.” That line should remind us of TEH. And by the end of the episode, of course, we know that everything Magnussen as done is to get to Mycroft; he doesn’t care about ruining Mary and John’s lives—he wants to get at Mycroft. And in the end, Sherlock stops him from being able to do that.

Sherlock looks out for Mycroft just like Mycroft has always looked out for Sherlock.

***

I…Oh, my God, I love this SO MUCH.

And I’d been seeing the CAM as being about John, but to see it as also being about Mycroft is just so *wonderful.*

Because you’re right, that Sherlock is clearly worried about Mycroft in TEH, wants desperately for him to find friends, be happy. Sherlock comes back from his hiatus *loving,* loving all the people in his life, every single one of them, and Mycroft is included. And just as much as HLV is about Mycroft seeing Sherlock as the little boy he was, it’s as much as Sherlock *being* that little boy, the little brother who loved his big brother and believed him at his word when he talked about Redbeard at a farm and east winds coming. That moment where Sherlock says why he hates CAM, it’s such a great moment, because it’s Sherlock standing up for himself and, you’re right, for Mycroft. Mycroft has one pressure point, and it’s Sherlock, and Mycroft is the one who doesn’t let himself care about anyone because it’s such a disadvantage, and there’s one person in the world of goldfish he cares about, and CAM had taken that and twisted it into a weakness, and I love the idea that Sherlock, the avenging angel of LET PEOPLE INTO YOUR HEART, refuses to let CAM do it.

The thing about Sherlock this series is that he’s my perfect counterpoint to Mary: The more I think about Mary, the more I dislike her. And the more I think about Sherlock, the more I want to bundle him up and cuddle him forever.

I just want to know why you like Sally Donovan

 (Sherlock Meta by sylviatietjens)

Anonymous asked: Hello! I just wanted to know why you like Sally Donovan. I thought people didn't like her because she kept calling Sherlock a freak and putting him down. And she asked John to keep away from him. She also accused Sherlock of being fake in the last episode of series 2. I didn't like her at all because of all of this but I just wanted to know why you liked her just in case I've been missing something. Thanks!

sylviatietjens:

I love Sally.

What you have to remember is that Sally does not have the access to Sherlock’s character that the audience has. Prior to season 3 (and even during it), Sherlock rarely exhibits kindness and consideration to anyone but John, and even that is often subtle. To everyone else, he comes across as rude, arrogant and unfeeling.

Sally is a professional. She holds a high position in Scotland Yard, which is something that she would have worked very hard for, particularly considering that she is a woman of colour (and there’s a lot of institutionalised sexism and racism in the police force). Then an amateur (Sherlock has a degree in chemistry, he’s not a qualified police officer) comes along and is given control even though it’s not his job. Whilst doing so, he behaves in an insulting and intrusive manner by making completely unnecessary commentary about her sex life in a professional setting (“I assume she scrubbed your floors, going by the state of her knees”) and belittles professionals for their efforts.

Then let’s look at telling John to keep away and series 2. Sherlock has told people that he is a sociopath. We have seen him in various suspicious situations (e.g. having the suitcase in his possession, which he said would be in the possession of the murderer [of course he obtained it from the dump, but Sally had no reason to know or presume that]), and there was no logical explanation to the girl screaming upon entering the room other than Sherlock having been involved. Sally is paid to look at the facts and analyse them, and presuming Sherlock to be guilty was the most logical analysis. I’d also be the first to warn someone to stay away from a self-confessed sociopath with an appearance of psychopathy who knows an awful lot about murder, assists on cases for free (“He likes it. He gets off on it.”) and appears to have no friends by choice.

Sally is very good at what she does. If she wasn’t, Lestrade wouldn’t put so much faith in her. As to the calling Sherlock ‘freak’, of course I don’t agree with that, but I don’t condemn her for it, either. Sherlock, after all, has done much worse, e.g. prioritising his curiosity over human lives (see the conversation between him and Jeff Hope outside 221b in A Study in Pink) and was probably the initial antagonist going by their comparative behaviour around other characters. Besides, she’s a character mostly defined by her professionalism, and ‘freak’ just doesn’t fit in with that. It feels like a quick means to get the audience to side against her even though she’s arguably a morally better person than Sherlock is.

Sally is not perfect, no. But she is intelligent, sensible, hard-working and logical, and aren’t those the precise traits for which we value Sherlock? In fact, doesn’t she often exhibit them to a greater degree than Sherlock?

Smiling Sally

 (Sherlock Meta by consultingpiskies)

Q: Am I the only one who finds it strange to see Donovan actually smiling for once, instead of looking grumpily constipated?

A: No. It’s not strange to see Sally smiling. Because she loves her job, and she’s good at it, and she and Lestrade are finally going to bust a gang of criminals after working on the case for more than 15 months. Of course she’d be smiling. (And oh Vinette, what an absolutely radiant smile you have. Really your face is just perfect.)

But you know why if might feel strange? Because prior to The Sign of Three, we have NEVER seen Sally outside the context of being an antagonist for Sherlock. We see her interact with Sherlock (and John) at crime scenes, and we see her question Sherlock’s motivations. I’m not going to even get into who started it or who’s more at fault (because it’s not the point), but it’s obvious that their animosity didn’t start during A Study in Pink when Sally called him a freak and Sherlock publicly aired her affair with Anderson. That was a spat in an ongoing feud. And guess what? Sally is completely justified in being grumpy about a privileged, white man ignoring police procedure. But here’s the thing. We want to root for Sherlock, and more importantly, the writers want you to root for Sherlock, so Sally gets pigeonholed into grumpy, disenfranchised woman who just doesn’t get Sherlock’s brilliance.

But the opening minutes of The Sign of Three? This is Sally Donovan through an independent lens. And we get to see her as competent, snarky, determined, and joyous. Because she is a person and not just a device for us to view Sherlock’s greatness through. And people get to be three dimensional. Thompson has written some pretty shitty things about WoC on this show, but I will be forever grateful for this gift of Sally.

Sherlock, Sally and Otherness

 (Sherlock Meta by pennypaperbrain)

I keep thinking about this subject. Recently there have been fandom discussions about race and exclusion, with a lot of good points made. What a lot of us would like most is a world where it is just as likely that we’d have Vinette Robinson playing Sherlock Holmes, and Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sgt Donovan. We don’t have such a world, although people are working to change the status quo.

Still, there’s something about Sally that consistently interests me, without me having to consciously decide that today I am going to find a female character to identify with. Far more meaningfully than any of the show’s villains are, Sally is Sherlock’s polar opposite – to the extent that the extremity of their defensive posturing reveals a common humanity. I doubt this symbolism was intended by the show runners, but it works for me.

On the surface, the show presents us with the idea that Sally is ordinary and Sherlock is extraordinary, and we’re invited to identify with Sherlock (we all want to be the special hero, and apparently that means being a white man). But scratching the surface makes the tension between them look much more interesting. Their first encounter neatly sets up the antagonism: Sally thinks Sherlock’s extraordinariness makes him irresponsible and possibly dangerous; Sherlock thinks Sally’s ordinariness make her a pettifogging irritant.

Where do these attitudes come from? There is of course the immediate context of a crime scene (and to some extent each of them is right) but the attitudes on display are more deeply rooted in these characters’ experience of being outsiders, and the different level and kind of risk involved for each of them.

Sally is a black woman in the Met. We don’t see this onscreen, but it would be remarkable if she hadn’t spent her career fending off, and fighting not to internalize, sexism and racism. She must know all about being seen as Other, and all about the price that you risk paying for it. Being ‘ordinary’ is both a survival skill (she’s just one of the lads, so why pick on her) and a triumph (her foremothers might have been slaves in this land, but here she is administering the law). Then along comes Sherlock, laden with every privilege you can think of, but under the impression that Sally’s ordinariness (aka protective colouration) is nothing but a brainless reflex that gets in his way.

Fitting in can be a life or death question for immigrants and minorities, but Sherlock acts like it’s just a default state for idiots. With his flamboyant performance of Otherness, he’s flaunting what Sally cannot afford (whether or not she wants it – and in the name of survival she’s probably suppressed that question so far that it never gets asked) and abusing her for not having it. It’s no surprise her defensive reaction is to lash out with ‘I never wanted that anyway; it’s shitty and weird’. Hence Sally’s whole vicious routine with ‘freak’.

She’s identifying the fact that Sherlock is doing something wrong/unfair, but (being ordinary) she doesn’t go digging around inside herself for the full extent of the pain, and instead settles on an approximation of the truth: that Sherlock is just an arsehole. This is why I love Vinette Robinson’s performance. The equivalent character in the pilot was quite neutral, but Robinson creates space for interpretations of her character that are far more interesting than what I suspect the script intended, i.e. a convenient foil for Sherlock.

When Sally calls Sherlock a freak, she’s indirectly treating him as human in a way nobody else but John does. In calling him to account for his behaviour, she implies that he should be judged by human standards, and therefore is human. The people who accept the idea of Sherlock as a trans-human phenomenon, good or bad, don’t do that. And I just like any on-screen woman who responds to an arrogant man with a variant of ‘fuck off’!

Like John, if less sympathetically, Sally has on some level picked up the elements of pretence, pain and falseness in Sherlock’s persona. His embrace of Otherness and her avoidance of it have the same roots; fear/experience of being outcast. Sally has chosen one strategy  - assimilation – probably because the historical and to an extent the contemporary risks of doing otherwise for a black woman are just too high. Sherlock chosen another – defiance – in part because the character is clearly fuelled by some kind of internal fire that exceeds the norm, but also because he’s got the resources to pull it off and live.

They both have to decide: who and what can I be, and how much will it cost me? Sally has more to lose and is in a more vulnerable position. Sherlock is less personally well-adapted to bear the cost of compromise. They make opposite choices, Sally for stability and Sherlock for risk. Can either of them bear the spectacle of unmade choice that the other represents?

I rather think Sally may have offered her friendship to Sherlock on that basis – ‘Hey, we both stick out a bit round here, don’t we?’ – once, and got slapped down for her troubles. Hence her very personal resentment. These two know each others’ weaknesses intimately, because each one represents the other’s silent fears.

Also, Sherlock, emotionally stunted muppet that he is (and I say this as an adoring fan) can’t behave sensibly for shit. He runs off from everyone useful towards Moriarty who – ooh, ego-stroke – is just like him. Far more interesting!

Unfortunately, BBC Moriarty is actually a cardboard man. Assuming the script writers didn’t just cock him up (another question entirely) he chooses to present himself as a grab bag of cliches about mad  genius with no consistent substance. He is ultimately a massive distraction, if a compelling one.

In my interpretation of the underlying narrative structure, just as Sherlock’s match is not the overtly fannish Moriarty but the steadily supportive John, his nemesis is not the overtly hostile Moriarty but the righteously affronted Sally. Sherlock’s relationship with the Met has always been weird. Moriarty turned up and raised the stakes but there was always going to be a day when the highly bureaucratic Met asked itself ‘What’s this guy actually doing?’ Whenever that day came it wasn’t going to be Lestrade, who is too dependent on Sherlock, or Anderson, who is too blindly hostile, who decided the way the wind blew, but Sally, with her scrupulous moral authority. You don’t even have to step far outside convention for that: even in heavily patriarchal society women are sometimes given a sort of mysticised safety-valve authority as oracles, i.e. moral arbiters outside normal structures.

Sherlock’s downfall pivots on Sally. If he had made intelligent use of what common ground he might have with her, she might have been speaking up for him. Instead, he used their differing outsider statuses as a weapon against her, a means of trying to prove that unlike her he’s brave enough to be overtly different, ignoring why Sally might have made the choices she has and anything else he might have learnt from her. In return, in defence, she shuts her heart and mind to what is genuinely extraordinary about Sherlock, denies him the way he refused to see her, and gives her blessing to his demise.

That’s my interpretation of their relationship, possibly blending canon and supposition by this point, but your mileage may vary.

And P.S.… what if Sally was like Sherlock? Imagine a working class black British woman with Sherlock’s mind, a woman given all the depth of characterisation which  Irene does not have screen time for. What would happen to her? I honestly don’t know (though I really want that story, a modern update of Woolf’s Shakespeare’s sister with hopefully a less bleak ending). She would be broken in innumerable extra ways, but the question is how, and how far she would fix herself, and what the result would be, and how much she would illuminate.

Somewhere, in the back of Sally’s mind, I think she’s longing for this woman too.

 ***

This ramble was inspired by discussion around some Sally fic:

Monochrome by aderyn

Sally and the Genius by me

What we learn in the conversation with Janine in the hospital

 (Sherlock Meta by sylviatietjens)

Anonymous asked: Hey! IMO your blog is the best for johnlock discussion so I wanted to ask what you thought of the hospital convo between Jeanine and Sherlock! In that moment I came to realise that I think he's in fact gay and he realises it himself. I mean they talk about 'waiting til marriage' and she tells him he's 'that kind of guy' (she could only mean one thing loll) then mentions John! SH doesn't say anything of course but to me he's literally screaming it with his eyes! His expressions say it all if you ask me.

sylviatietjens:

Hello!

I think it’s very possible to take a reading that Sherlock is gay from the conversation in Janine in hospital. He looks visibly uncomfortable when she says “Just once would’ve been nice,” and of course then says “I was waiting until we got married,” to which she replied “That was never going to happen,” which is of course true - when asked by John what he was going to do after marrying Janine, Sherlock said he obviously didn’t plan to marry her. So he’d been avoiding sex with a beautiful woman - and he himself claimed to be “unaware of the beautiful” while looking at her, implying that he is aware that she is beautiful, yet isn’t attracted to her - even going as far as telling her that he “works nights” so that he can visit the drug den and further avoid having to sleep with her. Having a bath while John was in the flat was helpful, too - they’re British, there’s no way she’d initiate sex with him while someone else was in the flat.

Yet Steven Moffat has said that he’s not asexual and “has a past” and Benedict Cumberbatch has said that he “has a sexuality” (notice the ambiguous phrasing), and Mark Gatiss has claimed that he was not attracted to Irene other than intellectually and that “it doesn’t have to be something as mundane as a love story” (not that love and sex are synonymous, but I believe Sherlock to be neither bisexual nor biromantic) so why avoid sex with a woman he knows is beautiful in the knowledge that it would aid his plan unless his attractions lay elsewhere?

There’s also the fact that Sherlock has always been more perceptive to the attention of men than of women. In the beginning of A Study in Pink, Molly is quite obviously asking him out, yet he’s totally ignorant of that fact. He’s also ignorant of the obvious fact that her Christmas gift was for him, bemused by Irene and her overt sexuality (she flirts “at him, he never replies,” despite John insisting that “Sherlock always replies to everything" [he notably doesn’t reply to people presuming they’re a couple]), and shocked when, at the wedding, Janine says “But no sex, okay?” Yet he immediately presumes that John is asking him out in Angelo’s, immediately picks up on ‘Jim from IT’ being gay and interested in him, and doesn’t appear to be bemused by Moriarty’s overt sexuality (“Hello, sexy,”/”The flirting’s over, Sherlock, Daddy’s had enough now,”/”Daddy loves me the best!”/”They all want me. Suddenly, I’m Mr Sex,”/”You have to admit that’s sexier.”). Janine even said it herself: “I wish you weren’t… Whatever it is you are.” (“I know.”) ‘Whatever he is’ isn’t asexual - the writers and cast confirmed that. It isn’t ‘incapable of forming meaningful relationships’, either - just look at his best man’s speech.

[To clear up some confusion, I’d like to note that I didn’t mean that Janine was implying that Sherlock’s gay and just using weird phrasing, I meant that the writers were implying that Sherlock’s gay by having her presume that their relationship wouldn’t work out, and discounting two of the most obvious reasons why that might not be so, the third being homosexuality.]

Sherlock is also much more ‘stereotypically gay’ in series 3 than in series 1 or 2 - he is more flamboyant, more fashion-conscious, he loves dancing (which is a strongly allied with homosexuality in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, aka Mark Gatiss’ favourite film and one of the key influences on the writers) and appears to be using an increasing about of product in his hair, something which he himself equated with homosexuality in The Great Game. I ought to clarify here that I don’t think that these things can be taken as reliably indivative of sexuality in reality, but within a fictional narrative in which stereotypes and associations are utilised to make suggestions about a topic that is not discussed, they’re certainly notable.

Do I even have to mention ‘Happily Ever After’?

Food for thought, isn’t it?

The Pain Of Season 3

 (Sherlock Meta by xistentialangst, Loudest Subtext In Television and mildredandbobbin)

xistentialangst:

I read this post this morning from a Russian fan so disillusioned with Season 3 that they have decided never to watch the show again.

It’s an interesting read and makes some good points about the creator—inspiration vs form, etc. But fortunately, I don’t have the same level of pathos against Season 3 as this writer does, nor am I anything like close to abandoning the series.

Season three is both brilliant and profoundly frustrating. And I think to the casual viewer it can leave a general sense of wrongness or malaise, a sense of ‘not getting it’ or even ‘it’s jumped the shark’. For fans who really love the characters of John and Sherlock, it’s even more disturbing on an emotional level.

We never see in Season 3 the level of absolute intimacy and closeness and ‘two halves of a whole’ between Sherlock and John that we saw in S1 and 2. And we want to see that.  We’ve been waiting two fucking years for more of that. It’s what we love about the show, what feeds our souls.

There are glimpses of it—in the scene where Martin asks Sherlock to be his best man, in the best man speech where Sherlock is so horribly, adorably, complimentary of John.  But ultimately there is a gulf between them throughout S3—both emotionally and in the form of Mary, who redirects John’s loyalty and interest.  Our desire to see John and Sherlock truly reunited after TRF is never satisfied. And the most painful thing is that the gulf only widens by the end of HLV.  Horribly, catastrophically so. At least in TRF, although we knew Sherlock and John were going to be separated for a time, there was no doubt that they loved each other deeply and that they’d eventually be reunited.

At the end of HLV we don’t even have that solace.  We know Sherlock loves John but he seemed resigned to giving him up.  We’re not sure what John feels for Sherlock anymore. He seems distant and prepared to go off with Mary as his new attachment.

After TSoT, I really expected the last episode of season 3 to resolve the John/Sherlock distance and to end with John having truly forgiven Sherlock. But that didn’t happen.  Instead HLV puts even more distance between our guys, in the Janine misunderstanding, in John going back to Mary, and in the end where they are literally saying goodbye to each other, Sherlock leaving John in the hands of Mary (whom we know is dangerous), and John doesn’t even appear that moved.  Forget about meta or whether or not you think Sherlock has a plan (I don’t, personally).  That’s what we get as an ending to the season on a canon/text level.

That is so fucking disturbing.

I suspect that, once we have five seasons under our belt, we will see that there really was nothing wrong with S3.  Angst points, separations, obstacles, and misunderstandings are part and parcel of romances. Crisis/resolution is what makes a good story. What’s wrong with S3 is that it ends on a the worst possible angst point, with John and Sherlock as distant from each other as they have ever been.  After a two year wait, and knowing we have another long hiatus to come, that’s just frustrating as hell.

I think the writers underestimated how much the audience would hate that, how deeply that seems to go against the entire raison d’etre of the show.  The show is John and Sherlock, together.  It’s almost painful to watch it not be that.

If I believed that Sherlock would continue with Mary remaining in the picture, and the three of them solving crimes, maybe with a baby at home, I would absolutely never watch another episode.

Fortunately, I don’t believe that.  I have to believe in S4 they will finally truly reunite Sherlock and John emotionally.  And I’m not talking about johnlock here.  I’m talking about John and Sherlock back in Baker Street with the emotional distance between them gone.

I just hope we don’t have to wait too long to get it and that the writer’s make it worth all they’ve put us through. Because, in so many ways, S3 was just fucking brilliant. They are telling a very complex story here, one that puts the audience through the wringer, but I choose to believe they know what they’re doing.

Please.

XA

Loudest Subtext In Television:

The usual brilliance from XA.  This deserves to be spread around more widely.  I got a few alarming asks from people who said they had given up on Sherlock after watching series 3 until they read my and others’ metas, so I’m concerned that people aren’t picking up on some important things and are abandoning the show just because the writers put up big obstacles for John and Sherlock.  Those obstacles are what has made the show good, in my opinion.  I’m not saying everyone has to like them, just to be aware that putting up obstacles for characters is generally considered an important part of writing a narrative, and it’s something that’s going to happen, and it doesn’t mean John and Sherlock are going to be distant forever.  It actually means that whenever they come back together, they’ll be stronger.

And I mean even if you don’t think about it going as far as Johnlock, it doesn’t matter either way: the writers aren’t going to put a permanent wrench in the biggest dynamic of the show.  I don’t think Moftiss sat around, imagining how their modern adaptation of Sherlock Holmes was going to go, and said, “You know what was really missing in the originals?  Mary Watson helping, or getting in the way of, solving crimes.”  Everyone who adapts Sherlock Holmes is drawn to it in large part by the Holmes-Watson dynamic.  They’ve gone on to make Mary into an excellent, three-dimensional villain instead of a one-dimensional placeholder wife, and that’s to be commended. But they’re not going to disrupt John and Sherlock’s dynamic permanently.

There was a post going around saying something along the lines of remembering that television shows aren’t like fanfics where you get warnings.  I hope people try to keep that in mind.  A good story will rip your heart out in the middle, and you’re not going to have the creators beside you telling you this is just the angsty part and it will all be better soon.  You’re supposed to be heartbroken right now.  If you weren’t, they wouldn’t have been doing their job.  It would be a shame to abandon the show just because it’s well-paced in that regard.  I totally get the frustration of the ending of series 3 — I think XA is right that it was underestimated how upset people would be at the distance between them, and it’s completely understandable — but that’s exactly where you’d want to put a series break.

Also on the Johnlock note, it’s worth noting that while hardcore fans are feeling frustrated, some casual viewers think Sherlock is in love with John.  Hardcore fans can invest so much in it that when it doesn’t just happen now now now, and instead more obstacles are put in the way, it can feel like you’ve gotten nothing when this series gave us so much more Johnlock than ever before. I personally love series 3 for that reason, and would have been a bit dissatisfied if they’d shoved John and Sherlock together too hastily.  I can’t tell anyone else not to be frustrated, but I hope that at least XA’s post will convince some people to give series 4 a chance when it comes out.

And I completely agree that once we’ve got series 4 and 5, people will probably like series 3 more.

mildredandbobbin:

Oh yes, wonderfully put. We will have to wait and see if the writers come good on all the emotional turmoil they’ve created in this series.

I know it feels like the emotional place we were left in after series 2 hasn’t changed, but remember at the end of series 2 we were hoping Sherlock did actually care about John, that he would come back and appreciate John? Well he did. Except John’s moved on and series three gave us all that angst in spades and then left us, this time, wondering about John’s emotions and motivations. To me series 3 felt like their estrangement and Sherlock spent the whole series trying to prove his friendship/love to John. And this is a good thing to happen if it’s planned that way. The darkness before the dawn.

I think part of the problem is we all anticipated Mary and we all thought Mary would be resolved by the end of this series, but instead the show is pretty much where a lot of us were at the start of the series - waiting to see what happens with Mary, dreading a distance between our two heroes. If this was a different series, with 12 episodes or even 6 episodes instead of 3, it probably wouldn’t be so bad. It’s just the thought of another 12 months at least before we find out if the writers follow through on the emotional arc they’ve created or if our hopes will be dashed that’s difficult.

We have to trust and after trusting so much for the last hiatus that’s easier said than done. I’m going to try.

John Watson

 (Sherlock Meta by earlgreytea68)

This is John Watson. He’s adorable, right?

He’s also maddeningly tricky to write.

When I started writing Sherlockfic, it was Sherlock who intimidated me, Sherlock I avoided at all costs, for thousands of words, because he seemed like this complex little enigma. But there’s something about Sherlock, once I started writing him, that I found endearingly straightforward. You almost always know where you stand when it comes to Sherlock Holmes.

It’s John who is the tricky one, John who is so maddeningly unpredictable. He seems so dull and unassuming, but, once you’ve written him, it takes roughly two sentences before you realize exactly why Sherlock is so fixated on him. He could be every adjective in the book, really. He is loyal and devoted but he’s also stubborn and independent. He follows Sherlock—as all Watsons must—and he tries to blend into the shadows cast by that overdramatic coat, but if you’ve spent any time at all thinking about him—and Sherlock has—then he’s really the star of the pairing. He is superhumanly tough, cool and calm under pressure, uncowed and unintimidated, but he is also very comfortably human at the same time, friendly and smiling. He likes to laugh and has a good sense of humor and people like him instinctively but he’s essentially a loner at heart and has few close friends, not that any of his acquaintances—other than Sherlock—would ever really stop to consider that, because John is mainly affable and easy-going and can fool anyone into thinking that he’s the most popular person there is.

Almost every time I write John, he manages to have some reaction, some line of dialogue, that surprises me. He’s so very good at rolling with all of Sherlock’s punches, until the moment when he isn’t anymore, and I don’t think I know that line any more than Sherlock does.

He’s with Sherlock because Sherlock attracts him irresistibly, exerts a magnetic pull over him, keeping him in orbit—and, again, that’s how Watsons are—but he’s also with Sherlock because he wants to be with Sherlock. And how Martin Freeman embodies that so beautifully has impressed me more and more and more the more I go back to the canon to check up on my John. Sherlock may be an undeniable hurricane-strength force whirling through John’s life but John also chose him. He wasn’t just pushed around by the fate of it all, he likes Sherlock, he likes his life with him, he’s there because he wants to be.

At least, that’s how I read John Watson. And that’s how I write John Watson. And I like my John, I really do, but it’s taken me several hundred thousand words to figure out what I think Sherlock saw as soon as he looked at him: that it’s John Watson who’s the complicated one.

I guess that’s why Sherlock’s the genius.

How there is no pining!Sherlock and John isn’t picking one person over the other

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

I started here: http://snogandagrope.tumblr.com/post/73218819172/sorion-leandraholmes-sorion-yaycoffee

But then this meta went so far beyond that that I decided to make it its own.

After John found out about Mary’s lies, Sherlock did NOT vehemently make his approval known.  He did something even better than that.

He provided John with all the information he needed to make his choice for himself, and then he offered his support to John in whatever decision he wanted to make, and then he stepped back.

Once Sherlock found out about Mary, he set up a scenario where John would find out everything about Mary without anyone’s emotional baggage weighing in on the issue.  Mary’s truth is presented to John in the form of facts: she is/was a professional killer; she deliberately did not do her best to kill Sherlock; she loves John so much that she would do absolutely ANYTHING to protect him and their relationship.

And then, back at Baker Street, he brought John face to face with his own emotional truth.  He laid out the underpinnings of John’s psychology so that John would be forced to confront his own issues as they affected his decision, so that John’s own hangups would not influence this decision for him.

But he did not attempt to press John back toward Mary.  In fact, exactly the opposite: “What is she, here and now?”  He forced John backwards, away from her and any kind of emotional investment, to accept her as a client—the most objective, neutral thing a person could possibly be to John, who after all has learned Sherlock’s methods of analyzing clients in unemotional objectivity.  He makes John disengage as completely as possible (“Your way, Sherlock, always your way”), which simultaneously allows John to process what he’s learned about Mary from an uninvolved standpoint, AND gives John a solid emotional place to stand after the rug of his life has been yanked out from under him—in solidarity with Sherlock.  If Mary is a client, then by definition John and Sherlock are together.  Sherlock is there.

And then John took MONTHS to think it over.  Sherlock waited with him, on that I think we can be absolutely sure.  Although apparently he saw Mary at points (she refers to him giving her the silent treatment, which implies that they must’ve been around each other enough for it to show), personally I think John probably largely stayed at Baker Street for that time (the chair coming back was meant to insinuate this, as John said himself; “Why does Sherlock think I’ll be moving back…?”).

In keeping with the neutrality with which he presented Mary’s truth to John, I think Sherlock probably approached that entire time period in the same way.  He provided John with every truth, insight, and offer of support that would allow John to make the best, most informed decision.  But he never attempted to push John in the direction of a decision.

HE WANTED JOHN TO HAVE THAT FREEDOM.  It was very important to him that John be able to make his choice on who to have in his life based on full knowledge and disclosure, and based on John’s own needs and reasons.

Sherlock can be a horrible dick, but he can also be a very good friend.

What’s more, I don’t think John ever chose Mary OVER Sherlock.  He didn’t need to; neither Sherlock nor Mary ever made it an either/or proposition.  And they could have, very easily.  Hell, if Mary really wanted Sherlock out of the way, she could have just killed him.  But she asked him to keep his mouth shut, because she knows Sherlock is devastatingly important to John and she would rather throw herself on Sherlock’s dubious mercy and keep him for John than kill him.  And Sherlock…Mary SHOT him.  If Sherlock had wanted to, he had the power and knowledge to influence John and summarily get Mary not only booted out of John’s life, but also probably arrested and extradited.

But neither of them did.  They were so, so, SO very careful to keep John from ever having to choose between them.  They both wanted him to have them both.

And John never does choose between them.  He falls back on the support of one, and then the other, as the situation requires—as is healthy in a functional support network!  Mary is presented to us as John’s pressure point, but Sherlock isn’t.  But why does that necessarily have to do with the amount of his love for either of them?  From John’s perspective, Mary is the one in a vulnerable position.  She is in danger from CAM, she is pregnant, she is his wife (and, let’s face it, John’s got a touch of the old-fashioned sexist chivalry; she’s a woman, and he’s a man, and it’s supposed to be his job to protect her).  Meanwhile, from John’s perspective, Sherlock is basically fucking invincible.  He came back from the damn DEAD; John is convinced he can do ANYTHING.  He does not see Sherlock as being substantially in danger from CAM (probably rightfully so), and therefore Sherlock is not a pressure point.

In fact…let’s revisit the moment when John confronts himself on screen at CAM’s house…and the fact that he is in fact Sherlock’s greatest weakness.  He looks shocked, and almost horrified.  He WANTS Sherlock to be invincible, impervious, and to realize that HE is the lever with which Sherlock can be brought to heel…  He stares, aghast, at Sherlock’s terrified face on that screen as he pulls John from the fire, shouting his name.  He can’t look away.  Until this moment, he did not TRULY understand how deep Sherlock’s feelings ran for him…and when he’s forced to see it, he’s not sure he likes it.

And I think that’s not because John is uncomfortable with Sherlock’s feelings for him—REMEMBER THE DRUNK SCENE FROM TSOT—but because he really, really needs Sherlock to be untouchable right now, for all their sakes.  Remember the Fall?  ”Alone protects me,” Sherlock said, and John rebuked him, “Friends protect each other.”  But they don’t, they don’t, and John is seeing that on screen in front of him.  HE IS SHERLOCK’S DOWNFALL.  He’s horrified at himself, being Sherlock’s pressure point, and he’s staring at the proof.

And then, then, the (near-)fatal goodbye.  Does anybody need reminding of how fiercely stoic John is?  Of how much Sherlock hates being emotional?  Look at their body language!  They have imposed a strict amount of space between them over which they dare not so much as sway—and that happens when people need that physical space to buffer themselves emotionally.  Their hands are kept firmly behind their backs, lest they reach out to one another in an unguarded moment.  They keep looking away from one another, which is a classic sign of being emotionally overwhelmed, especially in repressed people.  When it’s not written anywhere else on your body, it’s in your eyes, and so you hide them.  THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.  Because how can you say goodbye, forever, to the person you love?  John is not untouched.  He’s completely at a loss.  There’s nothing he can do here, and it happened for his sake, and he and Sherlock—neither of them knows how to reach out beyond their emotional walls to address everything that’s between them without completely fucking losing it.

You want a comparison?  Check out John at Sherlock’s grave, before he breaks down because there are no witnesses and at last he can let go.  So private in his grief that even we the viewers can’t see it beyond his darkened reflection and his hand over his face.  THAT is how intensely stoic John Watson is.

You want another comparison?  Check out their conversation at the end of Study in Pink, the way they’re standing, looking at each other (or not), and moving around.  If you don’t believe me, flip through these screencaps to watch it again for yourself: http://crime.grande-caps.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=616&pid=455094#top_display_media

And if you have any further doubts, WHY DO YOU THINK WE GOT THE DRUNK SCENE in The Sign Of Three?  Both of them plastered enough to, for once, let down every guard and wall, and slosh into a happy puddle together with stars in their eyes.  At every moment of every day of his life that John is standing next to Sherlock, under that ferociously British stiff upper lip, THAT is the look John’s heart is directing at Sherlock.  In case you need a reminder:

So yes, it’s a shame the episode didn’t take a bit more time to remind us of John’s perspective on everything, but it is absolutely there.  We already have it.  It’s not just Sherlock, and it’s not hopeless pining!Sherlock, and it’s not uncaring John or John picking Mary over Sherlock or any of that.  Sherlock and John adore the fuck out of each other mutually, and now they both have a thorough understanding of just how deep it goes.

loriliesong:

Thank you for this perspective! I was devastated by the Tarmac scene, partly because it stirred up some very old abandonment issues. More of my issues come from John’s blasé seeming response to Sherlock’s declaration ( twice!) that this will be the last time they will ever see each other. And while I know the scene comes from ACD’s His Last Bow ( hated that story, by the way, for precisely the same reasons) it still seems far too stilted and cold on John’s part to someone who is not only his “one of the two people he loves most in the world” but who knowingly, willingly has just given up his entire life for your family. No matter how “stiff upper lip” one wishes to appear, to say goodbye without acknowledgement or word of thanks is incomprehensible. John Watson has always been the “one fixed mark” for all incarnations of Sherlock Holmes, but this felt like a betrayal of that relationship to me. Everyone needs a Watson in their life to praise, love and admire them for who they are, and in this scene it felt to me that Sherlock lost that just when he had finally made the most selfless, heroic and praiseworthy sacrifice imaginable. So yeah, issues.

Pretty Arbitrary:

That scene is incredibly emotionally constipated.  But we have seen, once and for all, how John looks at Sherlock when his barriers are down. There’s no question about how he feels.

But there’s another key point I think people are overlooking: JOHN DOESN’T KNOW THIS IS GOODBYE FOREVER.  He asks Sherlock how long, and Sherlock doesn’t give him a straight answer.  John is left thinking he will see Sherlock again!

On another level, truthfully, I am a bit incandescently pissed about the decision the writers made here.  That is just too much self-sacrificial Sherlock.  I’m not clear on why it’s ticking me off to this level, and I’m still trying to sort it.  But I think it has something to do with how single-mindedly the narrative focused on Sherlock this season.  It’s his show, of course, but when he is both the subject of the narrative and the central POV…it had the effect of shutting out any of the other characters.  Their actions still made the plot move along, but…there was too much of a sense that they were all there for Sherlock’s benefit.

I’m on to something here, I think.  I should continue this on another post.

The Last Goodbye

 (Sherlock Meta by mildredbobbin)

One last post on this and I’ll let it go, because I enjoyed this episode, a lot, there was so much love from Sherlock, so much emotion and turmoil for John, such clever, twisty writing and wonderful canon references. But the goodbye scene for me was the one sticking point.

And I think it’s because this scene, this restrained, intensely controlled, internalised scene comes on the heels of such an overt, magnificent display of love from Sherlock (and John for Mary, standing there allowing himself to be humiliated), and it’s the contrast that is jarring.

It hurts because John doesn’t seem to acknowledge Sherlock’s sacrifice. He can’t even manage a ‘that thing, that you did, that was good’. It bothered me particularly that in order to see their friendship affirmed in this scene I had to interpret, surmise and yes, look at subtext — stuff I’m fine doing to see the homoerotic but not what I want to do for their friendship, the very lynchpin of the whole show.

I rewatched the whole episode last night with Mr Bobbin. Knowing what was going to happen the emotional impact wasn’t as intense as the first time around and in turn that scene didn’t seem so off. Mr Bobbin’s take was that it was totally appropriate, the sort of goodbye men did before going into battle, stiff upper lipped and ‘goodbye old chap’.

John reveals very, very little, but it is there.

This scene does show John’s feelings for Sherlock, and more overtly Sherlock’s in return. It is uniquely them, it is restrained and repressed, and they say ‘I love you’ in the way they always have, with a joke and a smile.

"You know, actually, I can’t think of a single thing to say."

"No, neither can I."

These lines were painful, and it does seem on the surface, that they’re, well, done, there’s nothing to talk about anymore.

But on reflection what this moment reminds me of those painful interactions when you meet with an ex again, not long after the break up, when there’s been so many feelings and there’s so much to say that in the end you don’t say any of it.

On some levels this is a break up, and this is goodbye.

John tells Sherlock, “The game is over.”

Sherlock has finally done his dash, he murdered a man in plain sight and he can’t come back from that. It’s over, their game is finished. Sherlock has to go away and John has to move on, get on with life.

And Sherlock acknowledges that for them, it is, but there’ll be others because the game will go on without them.

John doesn’t know Sherlock will probably die, but he has been told this is the last time he’s going to see Sherlock ever, he asks in his round about way when will I see you again, Sherlock says in essence: never. This is it.

And then Sherlock seems to be about to say something emotional, his words sound practiced as if he’s been planning them, but really an emotional declaration isn’t them, it never has been, and the consequences of making such a declaration now would not benefit John, so instead he makes a joke (trolling us, trolling John) and John laughs the way Sherlock had hoped, had intended. But then they both grow sober.

Sherlock offers his hand, a mirror of their first meeting outside of Baker Street, and at first John stares at in incredulously before he finally takes it.

For me, the decision to pull back on the handshake, to show it from afar made it harder. It was too distant, too separate, but maybe that was the point, their relationship was private and between them and now it’s over. We are witnesses to their farewell but we are not allowed to see their hearts.

And then Sherlock walks away, and we see, in John’s expression that he’s hurt but for so many reasons he can’t and won’t show it.

I think this scene does show John’s emotions, it shows a man trying to hold it in, to say goodbye and not be hurt again, and it’s a bittersweet moment, the end of something important but they can still make each other laugh, and they part with respect and honour, acknowledging their friendship as the important connection it was.  We can see Sherlock’s feelings of course because over the series he’s come to accept his love of John Watson and everything he’s done in this episode has been because of proper selfless love for the man.