Mycroft and The Low Tar Cigarette

 (Sherlock Meta by ibelieveinmycroft and thenorwoodbuilder)

Sherlock: Do you ever wonder if there's something wrong with us?
Mycroft: All lives end, all hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock.
Sherlock: This is low tar!

ibelieveinmycroft:

I love this scene. I love this moment. I love that the cigarettewas low tar.

Imagine Mycroft’s thinking: believing Irene dead, and knowing his brother would be upset, wants to both help and test Sherlock with that cigarette. But, well aware that Sherlock has been trying to quit and uses nicotine patches, and also thinking of his health, Mycroft acquires low tar cigarettes to that ends.

Of course, Sherlock notices.

thenorwoodbuilder:

Ok, folks. As I’ve been recklessly [;-)] encouraged to express a totally crazy speculation of mine about the “low tar cigarette affair”, I’m going to ramble - be warned.

However, I must make a preliminary remark: the saner part of my brain finds ibelieveinmycroft’s explanation of Mycroft’s choice of cigarettes perfectly reasonable and most probable. But the crazier, more bizarre part of my mind feels the need to build upon this simple choice of a low tar cigarette a whole castle of suppositions… which I’m now going to inflict upon you.

First question: does Mycroft himself smoke? Against: John tells him “you don’t smoke” and we actually don’t see him smoking in any other circumstance. For: he not only has cigarettes and lighter in the morgue (where he could well have brought them just to test Sherlock), but we see him smoking in front of Speedy’s in A Scandal in Belgravia. Besides, Sherlock doesn’t appear surprised when his brother produces a cigarette and a lighter, as if he knew that Mycroft, at least occasionally, smokes. Against: when he meets John in front of Speedy’s, Mycroft replies to John’s remark that he “also doesn’t frequent cafes”, meaning - presumably - that he USUALLY doesn’t frequent cafes, as well as he USUALLY doesn’t smoke; he also makes a quite disgusted face when inhaling the smoke from the cigarette, like he was not accustomed to smoking. For: he, after all, sometimes DOES frequent cafes, and therefore maybe he also sometimes smokes (as we see him doing in this case); his disgusted face may be caused by the same aversion to low tar tobacco that his little brother displayed in the morgue. Against: he could have just find in his pocket the same pack of cigarettes and the same lighter that he used to test Sherlock in the morgue and, being nervous or wanting to look nervous in Watson’s eyes, he just followed an impulse to light himself a cigarette. For: since the “test” at the morgue to the meeting at Speedy’s six months have passed, Mycroft doesn’t even wear the same suit and, in any case, a neat and fastidious person like him wouldn’t be still carrying in his pocket cigarettes and lighter from six months before, if he had not use for them, just out of distraction. Finally, and most of all, a friend of mine, a heavy smoker and acquainted with smokers of any sort, ensures me that only a smoker would take the pain to carry upon his person cigarettes and lighter.

So, all “fors” and “againsts” considered, my final assumption is that Mycroft is, after all, a smoker, albeit maybe just an occasional one, or one of those persons who smoke a couple of cigarettes per day.

But here we are still in the realm of (almost) sanity… Now, instead, I’m going to throw myself into more reckless and acrobatic speculations. Because the second question is: what might we deduce about Mycroft’s personality from the fact that he, as a smoker, chooses to smoke low tar cigarettes that he, quite apparently, doesn’t enjoy so much?

Ladies and gentlemen, enter the trapezist!

So, Mycroft - according to assumption N.1 - is a smoker. He’s not a heavy smoker, unlike his brother (we know that Sherlock Holmes is an heavy smoker from the Canon; but also from Sherlock’s attitude towards nicotine patches and cigarettes in the episodes, we can safely assume the same for his modern counterpart). Sherlock is probably the kind of person who either smokes 60 cigarettes per day, or needs to quit completely, because he is no man for half measures; Mycroft is more the kind of person who keeps the number of cigarettes he daily smokes quite low (2-4), but doesn’t even try to quit. He, besides, chooses low tar cigarettes, which he himself doesn’t enjoy any more than his little brother does, but that are - allegedly… - less harmful for the health. So he keeps doing an unhealty thing, but tries to limit the damage by smoking moderately and choosing low tar cigarettes (which he doesn’t like). Put this togheter with him being apparently on a permanent diet - but at the same time being significantly framed twice near a glass of alcohol; with him keeping an umbrella with every kind of weather; with him disliking and rejecting “legwork” - that is, unnecessary human interactions; with him always being the perfect, traditional, even stereotypical English gentleman; and what do you obtain?

I think you obtain the picture of a man who, consciously or (more probably) unconsciously decided to seclude himself from life. He is better at human interaction, on a superficial level, than his younger brother, but all his human relationships (with the only exception of the one with his brother, which is, however, “complicate”) are, actually, quite superficial and, ultimately, meaningless (useful, of course, but humanely meaningless). He retreated from life and he doesn’t ever knows (or doesn’t aknowledge anymore) that a part of him, deeply inside, regrets it. He doesn’t like risks - that is, not risks related to his work, but the kind of risks that life implies, that human relationships imply: the risk of suffering that is always inextricably linked to the pursuing of happiness. “Caring is not an advantage” also because, if you care for someone, you might lose someone, you might be hurt by someone. And Mycroft already cares - and can’t help caring - for one person, his little brother; but he doesn’t want to accord this kind of leverage upon himself to anyone else.

His personality is quite different from Sherlock’s: Sherlock, with all his difficulties in aknowledging his own feelings and emotions (a trait, however, from which Mycroft - the Ice Man - is not immune, even if he is more open about his sentiments when it comes to his concern for his little brother), is an extroverted person by nature: he is curious about persons, about how and why they do the things they do, about how they feel in given situations (he keeps being surprised by people’s different reactions to having just killed a person, for example, and constantly asks John why people should mind this or consider that…); he has chosen a profession which requires a lot of “legwork” - i.e., that implies, fundamentally, human interactions and the study of human interactions; he throws himself at people, like he were saying: “like me or not, this is how I am, and I’m not going to change: take me as I am or leave me” - but, in the end, while, at Christmas, he is surrounded by friends - John, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson and, quite significantly, Molly - Mycroft, instead, is alone in his vast house, staring at the flames in the fireplace like a sort of Redlaw just hopped out of Dicken’s The Haunted Man.

As much as Sherlock is not a man for half measures, Mycroft is a man who, instead, keeps himself equally distanced from anything and anyone (the only exception being his little brother, with whom, anyway, his bound, albeit strong and affectionate, is all but simple and painless, looking quite like a sort of “rubber band”). He wants to be the strong man who needs no one and who can be completely autonomous; even with his brother, he is the one in charge, the one who watches over and protects, the one who cares and help (being his help required or not), the one who takes the weight of responsibilities upon his shoulders. He presents himself to the world (and probably to himself) as a cold, impassive, powerful, independent, totally autonomous man, forgetting that it’s in the nature of the human being to need other human beings, to be in relation to others, to be, at least to some degree, dependant from others; it’s like he were constantly wearing an armour, which, conceived to shield him from the dangers of emotion and sentiment, like every too rigid, too tight armour, ends up blocking his blood circulation and freezing him, without him even being aware of it.

Ok, I know that I’m depicting Mycroft like a sort of cross between Phileas Fogg, Professor Redlaw, and Mr. Stevens from Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day… (I’d say also Spock from Star Trek and Allanon from Terry Brooks’ fantasy books, if it weren’t TOO crazy, even for my standards), but I warned you that this was going to be a completely mental rambling… So, if you’ve kept reading it till now, you just got what you deserved!