Pools and death wishes (and aliens as well)

 (Sherlock Meta by thenorwoodbuilder)

As I’ve threatened anticipated some time ago, I’m going to address the topic of Sherlock’s possible “death wish” (and, of course, also of Mycroft’s reaction to it).

This whole set of speculations was firstly raised by a discussion with a friend of mine (no, not all my friends are sherlockians/holmesians, albeit I recently succeeded in converting two more of them to the True Religion…; but yes, all my friends are strange in a way or another…), and the most heated debate concerned how to read Sherlock’s (and John’s) decision to blow up the whole pool, Moriarty and themselves included, at the end of The Great Game: so a part of this post will try expressly to answer this question.

As usual, let’s start with the Canon: could we find the traces of an unconscious death wish in Sherlock Holmes (or is this a feature which – if present at all – was autonomously introduced by the Mofftiss in our modern Sherlock)?



Albeit many apocryphals – and particularly the ones which stressed Holmes’ addiction, like Meyer’s The Seven-percent Solution and Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story – seem to assume a certain death wish in Sherlock Holmes, I’d not be so sure of this, if I had to ground my assumptions only in the Canon. Yes, it’s true, canonical Holmes quite certainly suffered from a form of depression, in his youth: when he had no cases, no interesting puzzles to keep his remarkable brain busy (when, in other words, his mind was free to wander to thoughts and – probably – memories he found difficult to bear), he could “get in the dumps at times, and don’t open his mouth for days on end” (his words, STUD), as well as utter quite gloomy remarks such as “Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? […] Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth” (SIGN). Yet, I don’t think he can be really labelled a reckless, or even careless, person, when it comes to his personal safety.

Since his first meeting with Watson in A Study in Scarlet he displays, instead, a certain care in avoiding useless and unnecessary risks: he puts a plaster on a small cut on his finger because he acknowledges that he “has to be careful, for he dabbles with poisons a good deal”. It’s true that, in the same chapter, Stamford says to Watson that he could take “a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid” (or give it to a friend), but that would be just “out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects”: that was just the spirit of the time, when science was still moving its first steps and it was a very common thing for physicians and researchers to test medications, vaccines, etc., upon themselves. And the only time we see Holmes actually doing an “experiment” of this kind is in The Devil’s Foot (which probably partly inspired Gatiss for The Hounds of Baskerville), when he decides to personally test the poisonous substance found on Tregennis’s lamp. Even then, nonetheless, he takes all the precautions he thinks are necessary and sufficient: an open window in the immediate vicinity, another person (Watson) to monitor the effects of the drug, and a very small amount of the substance on the flame: it is more a miscalculation of the actual risk, than a hazard, and anyway he soon after apologizes to Watson for it. When on a case, he generally appears to take reasonable precautions to safeguard himself: from disguises to “safe houses” disseminated through London, from riding crops to guns (when needed), not to mention the faithful Watson as a bodyguard. Even in The Final Problem, him letting Watson go back to Meiringen, knowing that there was a trap laid down for himself at Reichenbach, appears more the outcome of a decision to keep his friend safe and have a chance to confront Moriarty in person, than a reckless run into danger; even more so because through the whole story we see him taking every possible precaution to avoid the attempts on his life coming from Moriarty and his minions – and he appears certainly more cautious, when it comes to trust cabbies, than his modern counterpart! Out of choosing a profession which implies per se an element of danger, he doesn’t appear to be particularly prone to risk, and certainly he is not reckless in handling such risks when they present themselves. Even his use of drugs, albeit being certainly unhealthy and therefore denoting to some extent a self-harm attitude, doesn’t seem to me the symptom of a true death whish, mainly because, as I’ve observed before, the canonical Sherlock Holmes always managed to contain this habit, also thanks to his chemistry knowledge.



Things appear a little different when it comes to our modern Sherlock (and particularly in Series 1, when John’s good influence has not yet started to kick in). We could even say that the whole first episode is a sequence of reckless stunts pulled by Sherlock and, in some cases, followed by John: we start with Sherlock almost getting knocked down by a car in his rush to catch the cab; he then proceeds (followed by John) to jump from a roof to another; and then comes the best, that is him following the serial killer cabbie into his car – with a whole horde of policemen within earshot – and, even better, almost taking a pill which had a 50% probability to kill him (or even a 100% probability: it didn’t occur to our genius that the cabbie could have acquired an immunity to any poison there was in the pills…), just for the sake of “the game” – of adrenaline and excitement! And things don’t improve in The Blind Banker: here we see Sherlock running unarmed to chase an armed Chinese mob killer (a short time after having been almost strangled by the same guy, also because he decided to enter a house without John – oh, and I was almost forgetting his previous stunt of jumping from a balcony to another on top of a very high building!) and then, not satisfied with the meagre result this gets him, launching himself ALONE to the rescue of John and Sarah from an entire gang of Chinese assassins (at least John, in A Study in Pink, HAD called the police, even if they didn’t arrive in time to stop the cabbie!). Have I to go on enumerating?



I think we may safely assume that our modern Sherlock is much, much more reckless, and much more an adrenaline addict, than his canonical counterpart. Even Mycroft’s attitude towards his little brother could be intended as a confirmation of Sherlock’s dangerous proclivity to take superfluous risks just for the sake of excitement – for “getting kicks by risking his life”. This, as I’ve already observed, is basically what Mycroft reproaches him for at the end of A Study in Pink. And it’s presumably the main reason why he “worries about him constantly”, and why he shows up at the crime scene in that first episode. Through all the series, Mycroft doesn’t appear worrying just about the possibility of Sherlock relapsing into drugs in a “danger night” (which admittedly would be reason enough for concern…), but more generally about his brother’s carelessness with his own life.



We may see this also in the scene at Baker Street after Sherlock’s unsuccessful attempt at retrieving Irene Adler’s camera phone: again, Mycroft runs to check on his little brother’s wellbeing, and his attitude is quite calm – usual small bickering, and Mrs. Hudson-induced lost temper, apart – until he gets the call that informs him of the reasons of CIA’s involvement and therefore of the link between the case he called Sherlock upon and the “Coventry Project” leakage; once he realizes that the game into which Sherlock has just ended up playing a part is much more dangerous than a “simple” blackmail against the Royal Family, he does his best – including the use of his most significant “big brother look”, which seems the only effective argument in their discussion (at least since Irene sends Sherlock her phone) – to keep Sherlock away from the case, presumably because he knows even too well that, given his brother’s proclivity for placing himself into troubles, he could end up crossing the path of the wrong people (first of all the CIA, upon which Mycroft doesn’t appear to have full control) and getting seriously hurt. Probably for the same reason, later Mycroft, during the conversation at the morgue, decides not to push Sherlock on the subject of the camera phone: he’d presumably rather let Sherlock keep the device (in case he had it), knowing that he would never use it against his Country (and that he probably would give it to him, with a little strutting, once cracked its password), than antagonize him and arouse even more his curiosity and, most of all, his tendency to get into troubles, by trying to force him to surrender the item. Unfortunately, the CIA’s agents don’t share his wisdom in handling Sherlock, and we all know that their break in and their abuse of Mrs. Hudson will only fuel Sherlock stubborn determination to get into the phone and, ultimately, will favour him falling into Moriarty’s and Irene’s trap.



All in all, then, I’m inclined to think that the Mofftiss decided to endow our modern Sherlock with a certain amount of an unconscious “death wish” that was mostly absent in his Victorian counterpart, and which characterizes him as even a more complex figure, in some way; it certainly adds more fuel to the everlasting questions the fans have been and keep posing themselves about Sherlock Holmes’ past and – even more now, with the development of Mycroft’s character in the BBC series – family background. Questions that will never receive a proper answer, but that are a good nourishment for our speculations (and God knows that I personally am even too incline to speculate on these topics…).



This said, as I’ve written above, I happened to get engaged in a discussion regarding whether Sherlock’s decision to blow up the pool, including Moriarty and John and himself, in The Great Game, could be imputed to this “death whish” of his (which my interlocutor agreed upon), or it was instead, given the circumstances, just a rational and necessary decision. I’d like to know also other people’s opinion on the subject, and this is the reason why I enabled answers to this post.

My personal idea is that, like Holmes’ decision to confront Moriarty even at the risk of perishing with him in The Final Problem (to which also the first season’s finale was inspired), Sherlock’s decision to “draw all the Philistines” with him in the explosion was a reasoned, and not an impulsive, one – even more so considering that also John tacitly agreed upon it.



I mean that, when you are playing chess for your life, and there is no way to achieve a checkmate, second best is to achieve a stalemate – that is, make your end as much costly to your opponent as it is to you. There is no third best. So, when Sherlock realized that there was no way for him and John to get out alive from that situation, he had only two choices left: just accept their inevitable death, or find a way – that he happened to have quite on hand, in the form of a jacket full of explosive within gunshot range – to bring their opponents with them. Considering that neither him nor John struck me as the kind of person who would follow the evangelical rule of turning the other cheek(bone), it’s only logical that they opted for a “kamikaze” solution.



The situation is similar (albeit with some differences) to the one Captain Picard faces in Star Trek – The Next Generation’ s episode Where silence has lease (apologies to the not-trekkers for this parallel…). The Enterprise has been trapped by an alien entity – Nagilum – in a sort of void space, and the creature offers to Picard a deal: he will release the ship and the (remaining) crew unharmed, if they’ll agree to let him perform experiments (of a painful and deadly nature) on a part of the crew ranging from 1/3 to 2/3. Picard discusses the proposals with his officers, and many of them end up, albeit reluctantly, suggesting him to agree; the security officer, Worf, in particular, remarks how in a battle a number of casualties ranging from 1/3 to 2/3 of the crew could be considered normal and, therefore, acceptable. But Picard decides of his own accord, and orders to activate the ship’s self-destruction sequence. After having tried to trick Picard into recalling the order, Nagilum lets the Enterprise go free. Of course there are – at least at first glance – some differences: Picard, here, could have saved a certain amount of lives, if he had agreed to Nagilum’s proposal (assuming that the alien would have kept faith to his word…), while, activating the self-destruction, the whole crew would have perished. But on second thought, the situation is not so different: had Picard agreed to sacrifice a number of his men, he would actually have turned himself and his whole crew into a bunch of laboratory rats - no more human beings, but things – and also the survivors would have been forever marked by this choice. He therefore rejected the possibility to save the lives of the few, in order to keep the possibility to save the dignity of the all: the only way he had to achieve a stalemate, in a situation in which a checkmate in his favour appeared impossible. If this seems quite abstract and/or fanciful an argument to you, please remember that in 2006 the Bundesverfassungsgericht cancelled a German law which allowed to legally shoot down a civil aircraft when hijacked and used as a weapon to threaten the lives of other civilians mainly with the same motivation: it’s not permissible to legally allow the sacrifice of even one single life, just because it could be instrumental to “superior” purposes – even if the superior purpose is to save more lives; and this because human dignity makes each single human life not comparable to any other value – not even another human life.



What is also interesting in the ST-TNG episode is that, at the end, when Nagilum frees the starship, Picard’s first officer, Riker, assumes that Picard was expecting such an outcome since the beginning: that is, that he was just bluffing, when he gave the order to activate the self destruction sequence. But then Picard gives him a meaningful look, and we are made aware that, yes, he did consider this possibility, too, and hoped that Nagilum would have freed the Enterprise, once faced with the alternative of loosing it, but that, such not being the case, he, Picard, would have gone the whole hog and blown up the ship and all its crew.



So – bringing our parallel to its end – maybe even Sherlock and John, in the final scene of The Great Game, were also partly bluffing – that is, were hoping that the prospect of being blown up together with them would have induced Moriarty to change his orders to the snipers; but, knowing that this would have been quite a remote possibility, they were both ready to die in the explosion, in order to be sure to bring with them also Moriarty and his minions. But this, as I’ve said above, given the circumstances was the only rational decision.



(Obligatory question mark:)?