Sherlock's smoking habit

 (Sherlock Meta by Loudest Subtext In Television)

Anonymous said: 

Would you happen to know why we keep seeing Sherlock's smoking habit fluctuate? In the first series he has quit, in series two it seems like he may have relapsed after A Scandal in Belgravia and is going cold turkey in HoB. Then in series three we have him trying to quit again in The Sign of Three, and smoking with Mycroft in His Last Vow. Is there a deeper meaning or is it just a plot point?

Loudest Subtext In Television:

I’m going to cover in depth in the S&S series, but quickly:

A Study in Pink - Sherlock is on nicotine patches.

The Blind Banker - Sherlock says on his website he’s not smoking even though he’d kill someone for a cigarette.

The Great Game - during the Janus Cars sequence, Sherlock reminds John he’s on nicotine patches.

The Sign of Three lets us know that Sherlock started smoking after the pool scene, and before he ever met Irene Adler: he already knew John’s middle name when John says it to Irene because Sherlock got a copy of John’s birth certificate. So:

John blew Sherlock’s mind when he offered to die for him at the pool, and then Sherlock and John were willing to die together in an explosion before Moriarty got the phone call. Sherlock, unsurprisingly, finds it difficult to maintain his strict “caring is not an advantage” stance in the face of that.

This is when the The Sign of Three footage kicks in. It corresponds perfectly to Sherlock’s obsession with John and John’s blog — and thus his obsession with what John thinks of him — that we see at the beginning of A Scandal in Belgravia. Both montages are supposed to cover months of time as they do other cases together, and this is literally the ONLY point in the show where the The Sign of Three footage fits. And it fits perfectly.

After the pool, Sherlock finds himself rethinking everything he ever thought about sentiment and it’s driving him insane. He’ll tell Irene at the end that he’s “always assumed love is a dangerous disadvantage” and a “chemical defect found in the losing side” so he’s dealing with some pretty heavy stuff. Sherlock sees cases every day where people are in love and do horrible shit to each other because of it.

Before Irene is ever in the picture, Sherlock starts smoking like a maniac and wanting to know everything about John. Stupid shit that you’d think Sherlock would delete or find too tedious to seek out. He “confiscates” John’s laptop because John looks at naked women on it. He reads John’s e-mails to his girlfriends. He gets a copy of John’s birth certificate because John won’t tell him his middle name.

Sherlock has it bad.

By the time Irene shows up and then “dies,” it doesn’t mean anything for Irene when Sherlock takes the cigarette from Mycroft at the morgue. He’s been smoking over John this whole time.

Sherlock constantly has John’s blog open during A Scandal in Belgravia — he doesn’t just look at it over John’s shoulder when he’s writing it, Sherlock keeps it open on his own laptop. When Sherlock first begins composing sad music, it’s nothing to do with Irene: John asks about what he’s composing, Sherlock says it helps him think, and then points to John’s open blog on his laptop. Sherlock was composing that music while reading John’s blog. And which entry specifically? The one where a gay guy kills his boyfriend. A “dangerous disadvantage” indeed.

Meanwhile, this whole time John has been saying some frankly mean things about Sherlock on his blog, which Sherlock has already been bitter about since the beginning of The Great Game. Sherlock knows John thinks he’s a heartless asshole (he tells Moriarty as much at the pool scene). And John is straight — the girlfriends, the straight porn (like John would be stupid enough to look at gay porn with Sherlock always guessing his passwords) — so. There’s no point to even entertaining the idea and Sherlock can never even really face what he’s feeling. But it all comes out in his violin.

Then Irene comes back and he overhears that conversation that breaks his brain, because Irene says they’re a couple and seems to be implying John is in love with him, but John SAYS he’s not gay and that’s what Sherlock has always thought, so. John just isn’t gay. Irene is always trying to mess with them, who knows what she was trying to do. Or she’s just wrong. John writes such awful things about Sherlock, so she can’t be right. And why would someone as wonderful as John be in love with someone as awful as Sherlock? John isn’t. He can’t be.

Then Irene was in love with Sherlock and used him for a deduction and embarrassed him in front of Mycroft. That’s what love is worth.

No wonder Sherlock is screaming for cigarettes by the start of The Hounds of Baskerville, huh?

ETA: I missed the last part of the question. Sherlock is struggling not to smoke in The Sign of Three because he misses John, and he’s smoking again in His Last Vow because he’s pining for John again — and this time he knows it.