Friday 9 January 2015


How HLV Hides John’s Feelings
 (Sherlock Meta by archipelagoarchaea and recentlyfolded)

archipelagoarchaea:

Okay! So I wrote in the tags of this post by rebootingcheesecake that I really think John’s emotions were deliberately obscured in HLV. I thought I’d mentioned it before in my HLV breakdown, but apparently not. So I thought hey, why not write a post just about that.

To clarify, here’s what I think: Martin Freeman played John as being desperately in love with and protective of Sherlock, but the director, DP, and writers (mostly Moffat, but he says Gatiss always has a hand in writing) made sure we saw as little of that as possible. From a writing perspective, this meant leaving out scenes that would be pretty standard in an episode that includes a main character who gets gravely injured, e.g. the scene in which John finds out that Sherlock will be okay (replaced by the scene where he transmutes his feelings for Sherlock into feelings for his wife), and the scene in which he spends time at Sherlock’s bedside. These would be normal for any depiction of platonic friendship, yet we don’t get so much as a second of this. There’s also the several months between confrontation and Christmas, which could have been a gold mine of characterization, and yet there’s nothing. No John helping Sherlock in his recovery (which almost certainly happened). No Mary asking after Sherlock and being apologetic about his condition (inconsistent with rest of episode, but would make the reconciliation more plausible). No John twisting his wedding ring between his fingers while watching Sherlock sleep. No John contemplating his choice (which absolutely should have happened if the reconciliation is real — it’d be a narrative crime not to). No John trying to play the Rizla game with Sherlock in the hospital while Sherlock tries to remind John of what he loves about Mary. Nothing. Then, from a production standpoint, when John is in a situation to show serious concern it’s filmed either from a distance or a weird angle, or with a shaky camera, or with John obscured in some way by the lighting. Every. Single. Time. Images behind the cut. Lots of them.

Just to be absolutely clear, I’m not suggesting that the only reason for filming a particular way is to conceal John’s feelings. I’m not a photographer, and I’m not going to try to look at this from a cinematographer’s point of view. For example, there’s not much to conceal here, though do take a look at the incredibly phallic flowers in the corner. Then again, if John were only concealed in scenes where he’s falling apart over Sherlock, the technique would be a little too obvious.

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In moments where John would be most likely to show his desperation and love for Sherlock, the show makes it very difficult for us to see, and you don’t have to be a cinematographer to notice that. For example, here’s John checking Sherlock’s breathing. So easy to see his face, isn’t it?

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Distance and funky shadows when asking who shot Sherlock.

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Yes, John’s here, watching Sherlock. What, you didn’t notice on first watch?

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This bit was quick, and filmed with an overlay of flashing lights. This is probably the clearest frame in terms of showing his concern — though it’s natural he would be in ‘army doctor’ mode while trying to save Sherlock — and it’s literally the last one.

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John’s mouth is open here, I swear.

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Lestrade was filmed unclearly during the search as well, but it’s convenient that John is somewhat difficult to read.

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Slight tangent, as John’s worry is concealed somewhat by confusion, here, but I’m very interested in how this scene was lit. If you check the mirror, you’ll note that it’s completely dark: the moon lamp isn’t lit. Yet it seems nearly every other light in the entire flat is — including the lights in Sherlock’s bedroom. In the confrontation scene, by contrast, the moon lamp is definitely lit and shows up in the mirror. If someone who understands this stuff wants to explain that, please do.

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You’ll note that in contrast to scenes where John is interacting with Sherlock, he’s pretty easy to read when looking at Mary.

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Again, slight tangent. This is John reacting to Mrs. Hudson before he goes into anger-mode, and he looks like he’s falling apart. It’s also an example of how the flat is lit for this scene, which makes a difference between when he’s looking at Sherlock and when he’s looking at Mary.

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Being angry at Mary, fairly well-lit and close-shot.

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Telling Sherlock to shut up, higher contrast and slightly pulled out (latter probably meaningless), with one eye in deep shadow. I don’t know about you, but I feel these shadows make him more difficult to read.

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Again, angry with Mary.

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Then Sherlock, asking ‘why is she like that?’ Wow he’s hard to see here.

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Slight tangent again. Including this so you can see that he’s definitely looking at Mary when he kicks the table (re-watch the clip if you’re unsure), even though it’s Sherlock’s words that set him off. Again, though, shadows make this a bit difficult to see.

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Immediately afterward is the only time he looks sad when looking at Mary. I think he really is blaming himself, here, which is pretty heartbreaking.

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Then back to the angry looks. We’ve escalated to ‘eye-murder’.

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He’s better lit once they sit down and the conversation becomes all about Mary as client and her history, then Sherlock’s excuses for her.

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Then the paramedics arrive and the camera pulls back. Now we shift from Mary to concern for Sherlock, and the cinematography really gets crazy.

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I mean look at this. Shaky camera, lens glare, paramedics getting in the way.

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Seriously? The lens glare is over John’s face far more than anyone else.

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John’s face is deeply shadowed when saying ‘she shot you’.

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This is probably the most visible his concern gets in this scene. His chest is heaving and he’s glaring daggers at Mary, but once again he’s at a distance and the shadows are deep, and the glare passes over or close to him.

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Moving on to Appledore. The lighting’s not as bad as above, but John’s still pretty dark when he’s at his most anguished.

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Then the Tarmac scene. This one is much better lit, clearly, but there’s still lots of little things keeping us distanced from John. Here he’s outright blurry. And yes, he’s doing his hand thing.

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Then distanced and frequently from the back.

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The sun is in his eyes (probably reflected off the plane), which makes him squinty and hard to read.

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He turns away (unsurprisingly) when he’s at his most emotional, and we don’t get a view from the back to see what he looks like when he does this.

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Part of his face is sometimes blocked by Sherlock himself.

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Then the worst part: the handshake goodbye. It’s filmed from a considerable distance and from the wrong side to see John’s hand tremor.

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Sherlock is filmed much more clearly, with less obscuration and fewer cut-aways and no squinty light.

Again, I’m not saying the sole purpose of this design was to conceal John’s feelings. But the way this episode was filmed certainly did a good job of it. This is probably at least in part because Series 3 was primarily from Sherlock’s point of view, and Sherlock fails to see how much John cares for him, but the principle is the same. For some reason, John’s love for Sherlock is being obscured, and Martin Freeman’s fantastic acting with it. And if it has nothing to with Johnlock or the ‘reconciliation’, then what is it about?

And for the record, this is not my desperate attempt to dig for evidence of John’s love. This is just something I perceived the first time I watched HLV. Hopefully the screencaps helped clarify my position. If not, try rewatching HLV with these in mind. It’s a relatively subtle thing, but I think it makes all the difference for this hiatus.

recentlyfolded:

Yeah, this bothered me in the first viewing of the ep and I just assumed at the time that it was to keep us off-balanced, much as the addled timeline seemed intended to do. With further thought about the whole series as well as the ep and with rewatching, I tend to agree: we’re not seeing John because Sherlock doesn’t see John. The lack of seeing (that we perforce share with Sherlock) underscores the lack of his understanding in a lovely way.

And, stylistically, this shooting aesthetic actually ends up fostering wank just because everything is so fractured into glimpses. It’s been oft-repeated, especially by meta critics, that a single screen cap fails to communicate the action in a scene and leads to overly-focused misinterpretations. But with things so hard to see at times in this episode, it’s often only by stopping the action and framing through it that we can figure out what’s going on. I don’t mean to suggest that the crew meant to encourage wank, but just that this is one of the many sorts of uncertainties, of obscuring facades that makes this episode so difficult to come to any consensus about.


Why does Sherlock still trust Mary?
 (Sherlock Meta by Loudest Subtext In Television)

I don’t think he does. Sherlock trusts her until the moment she shoots him, and then no more. We get a lot of indications that Mary shooting Sherlock is The Fall 2.0, and part of that is that Sherlock is feeding John another lie after. I address it in the HLV portion of M-theory in MUCH more detail, including Sherlock’s various possible hypotheses about Mary, but I’ll give a quick summary:

* We get the Bart’s rooftop color shift and fall music when mind palace Molly tells Sherlock “fall now.” (Credit to mid0nz for this, as always.)
* We get Moriarty in Sherlock’s mind palace, quoting directly from when he told Sherlock to jump off Bart’s: “One little push, and off you pop.”
* This time around, Sherlock ACTUALLY gives John his miracle and stops being dead.
* This time around, John is still in danger from a sniper.
* This time around, Sherlock has to sell John another hurtful lie: Mary is trustworthy.

How do we know Sherlock doesn’t trust her? Tons of reasons and tells:

* Sherlock only comes back to life because he believes Mary is definitely a danger to John. Moriarty in his mind palace says, “It’s [John] that I worry about the most. That wife. You’re lettin’ him down, Sherlock. John Watson is definitely in danger.”

* Moriarty put a sniper on John. Somehow, in Sherlock’s absence, John ended up with a sniper. And Sherlock knows what we say about coincidences: the universe is rarely so lazy. To believe that Sherlock genuinely trusts Mary, we have to think he’s beyond stupid. (In M-theory I also talk about the fact that Sherlock was nervous about that sniper, which is why he lied to Anderson about how John was totally safe the whole time. Of course John wasn’t safe. If John had been safe, Sherlock would have contacted him; he missed John like crazy and admits he thought about contacting him a lot. Mary isn’t the same sniper, but Sherlock doesn’t know that; he doesn’t know who any of the snipers were or where they were. If he’d known about them beforehand, he wouldn’t have sent John out into the open, he’d have had John hide deep indoors somewhere.)

* Here is the mind palace clip right before Sherlock flees the hospital. Mary does not look sweet and sympathetic in his mind: she looks cold, guarded, and calculating. He knows she shot him with the precision to merely incapacitate him him, and makes the sniper connection. If Sherlock genuinely trusted her, and just thought, “Oh, she only shot me because she loves John so much!” he would have just stayed in the hospital. After all, Mary could have killed him in the hospital and she didn’t, so Sherlock is safe there. Sherlock flees because he needs to ensure John is safe; after all, if Sherlock wasn’t supposed to find out about Mary’s cover, then for all Sherlock knows she has no reason to keep John alive now that the cat’s out of the bag.

* Sherlock has to act like he forgives Mary or Mary will kill him. She makes that very clear, to his face, before they head to Baker Street. I’m frankly shocked that anyone takes Sherlock’s forgiveness at face value when he’s under that kind of duress.

* Sherlock knows that Mary has had her current identity for five years, and it wouldn’t be lost on him that’s within the time frame of Moriarty messing with him. He doesn’t need to know Moriarty is alive to find that suspicious.

* Sherlock is clearly angry with Mary here, not sympathetic. When she says her selfish bit about lying to John so she won’t lose him, Sherlock looks like he can hardly conceal his loathing. He isn’t moved by her depth of devotion or something.

* Sherlock has to pretend to trust Mary for the sake of the baby, and to hide the fact that he’s on to her while he tries to figure out who she’s working for and why. He doesn’t want Magnussen’s documents merely to protect the baby, he also wants to know everything about Mary’s past. When Mary puts the USB drive down on the table, Sherlock fixates on it, which the camera makes very obvious. He’s not cool with the assassin thing, and he doesn’t trust Mary to give them all the information he wants.

* We get a clue that Sherlock is carefully controlling his emotions and reactions to John and Mary when he snaps at Mrs. Hudson, “Then what exactly is the point of you?” Poor Mrs. Hudson is the only person he can take his anger out on.

I’ll quote a longer bit from M-theory here:

Sherlock is going to go on to make excuses for Mary, but we keep getting these hints that he’s absolutely livid. Sherlock has no reason to be that angry at Mrs. Hudson or John. Sherlock is angry at Mary. Remember, even if this had nothing to do with John, Sherlock has a very particular moral code. This is the guy who won’t work for Mycroft because people like Mycroft start wars. We have never seen Sherlock kill anyone before this episode, and he only almost killed Moriarty when he thought it was necessary to save lives. But Sherlock ensured Mrs. Hudson’s husband was executed (and it’s worth remembering Mr. Hudson was used as a mirror for Mary last episode). Sherlock went all the way to Minsk only to gladly turn down an unsympathetic case and send a murderer to his death. Sherlock didn’t care about the guard in Magnussen’s office because he was a white supremacist. Sherlock stepped on the cabbie’s wound when he was bleeding to death and demanded to be given a name. In short, Sherlock would never approve of contract killing unless he could be certain Mary only killed bad people, and Sherlock has never cared if murderers die. If Mary weren’t carrying John’s child, she would be the kind of person Sherlock would leave to die without a second thought. She’s no better than the Golem, and Sherlock did try to kill him: he shot at the Golem repeatedly when he ran away, and was frustrated he missed.

Past that, Sherlock is angry Mary shot him in the heart instead of fessing up and asking for his help like a mature person. Sherlock is angry Mary pursued a relationship with John knowing it would be based on lies. Sherlock is angry that he has to convince John to stay with someone who has lied to John and isn’t worthy of him — Sherlock hardly considers himself truly worthy of John, so of course Sherlock doesn’t approve of what Mary’s done, and of course Sherlock would rather John be in a happier relationship than this.

* During the 221B scene, Sherlock shows impatience toward everyone in this scene from time to time, but John is the only one he ever is the least bit gentle towards. Sherlock is business-like with Mary, and looks at John like his heart is breaking for him. Which it literally is.

* Sherlock sees that Mary has not apologized and does not appear to do anything wrong, so he has to shift the focus on to John’s faults in order to get John to think he can never do better than Mary anyway, and to get on Mary’s good side. (I talk about this in great detail in the M-theory entry.)

Then I’ll just quote this bit from the M-theory entry, too:

Sherlock knows that John chose Mary because she wasn’t like that, and kept choosing her as an alternative to someone like Sherlock: John would have never bothered with things like therapy if he didn’t want to behave differently, if he weren’t struggling, and John always tries to present himself as more normal than he really is. Sherlock has seen that John keeps choosing a domestic life even though he hates it, which John wouldn’t do unless he felt he was supposed to. John was unhappy at the beginning of this episode because married life wasn’t dangerous enough, and that’s exactly what Sherlock had expected to happen. Sherlock was the one who pointed out that John was a danger addict looking for a fix that he hadn’t got from his marriage.

Sherlock knows that this situation is John’s worst nightmare, not something he asked for or should have predicted. Of course it isn’t John’s fault: if Sherlock couldn’t tell Mary was an assassin, John couldn’t have. As far as Sherlock knows, Mycroft and the whole British government couldn’t tell Mary was an assassin.

And even if it were all some sixth sense for danger, Sherlock doesn’t think John deserves something like this. Sherlock thinks John is the “best” and “bravest and kindest and wisest” man he’s ever known. No one could ever convince Sherlock Holmes that John Watson deserves this kind of pain.

Saying all this is literally killing Sherlock.

Moving on:

* When Sherlock says Mary befriended Janine to get close to Magnussen, and Mary says, “You can talk,” Sherlock gives her a weird, eye-twitchy half-smile. It’s very similar to the I’m-going-to-enjoy-ending-you smiles he’ll shower upon Magnussen at Appledore. It is not fondness or sympathy; Sherlock’s fond and sympathetic smiles are absurdly warm. [Clip.]

* In the same clip, when Mary says, “You did see that,” Sherlock looks distinctly uncomfortable. He doesn’t express agreement, he simply lets her say it. If Sherlock genuinely sympathized with her, he’d nod sympathetically — something, anything to back her up. But he doesn’t, because he doesn’t sympathize. Mary continues, “And you married me. Because he’s right.” We get another shot of Sherlock looking even more uncomfortable. This is exactly what Sherlock needs John to believe, and it’s working that Mary is going along with it, but he doesn’t like blaming John. “It’s what you like,” Mary finishes. And Sherlock changes the topic, visibly struggling with the literal pain in his heart as he asks about what Mary wants from Magnussen.

* Sherlock explains what happened at Magnussen’s office in the most sympathetic light possible: Mary really did intentionally incapacitate him, but Sherlock chooses to refer to that as saving his life when we know that Mary could have just accepted Sherlock’s help. Notably, Sherlock leaves out the part where he offered his help, because that would make the story unsympathetic.

* The whole conversation Sherlock just states his story and never once looks like he feels sorry for Mary or likes her at all.

* Sherlock tells us over and over the reason he detests romance is that it’s destructive: people hurt each other, and we’ve seen him be awful to clients who have lied to their spouses. Why would anyone believe Sherlock is suddenly cool with that behavior when it’s taken to the level Mary has taken it?

Also, note that the episode title is a play on the ACD story "His Last Bow." The majority of the episode is actually a retelling of “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” so what elements of “His Last Bow” might be present here? Well, Holmes pretends to be on the side of a spy in order to get the evidence necessary to take him down, and chloroforms the spy in the process. That’s literally the entire story. In HLV, Sherlock pretends to be on Mary’s side so he can get the evidence necessary to take her down, and drugs her unconscious in the process. (I give all the evidence that Mary is Moriarty’s spy in M-theory.)

Then at the end, we get John asserting that Sherlock is the East Wind: Sherlock is the “terrifying force that lays waste to all in its path” and “seeks out the unworthy and plucks them from the earth.” Mary had better wrap up warm.

Hope that covers it. If we were supposed to believe Sherlock genuinely trusts Mary, we wouldn’t get all these hints that he, well, doesn’t trust her at all. And it makes a lot more sense that he wouldn’t trust her.