Amo

 (Sherlock Meta by sussexbound)

Question: Hello! I don't understand anything about the codeword ammo/amo. It was first ammo then amo? When they (Sherlock?) said it means "I love you" I immediately thought about the trailer and Sherlocks "I love you". I'm very confused and afraid he talked about the codeword in the trailer... Can you maybe explain? Thank you!

Answer: The code word was ‘amo’, which is Latin for ‘I love’. When Sherlock mentions it to Mary, she tells him that it was ‘ammo’. She only heard it over the phone during a job. She jumped to the conclusion that the word ‘amo’ (I love) was really ‘ammo’ like ammunition, because that was her frame of reference, and first association as an assassin and contract killer. This contrasts Sherlock and Mary. Sherlock’s first association is love related. Mary’s first association is death related.

Of course in the plot it also helped lead them to assume that Lady Smallwood was the person who ordered the disastrous action, and was the traitor, because her code name (as we learned at the beginning of the episode) was ‘Love’. This was proven incorrect. I don’t remember if they ever explained why Norbury decided to use the code word ‘amo’. Sorry, I’ve only watched it twice so far, and the first time my livestream kept cutting out. So, if anyone wants to add to that, then please do.

I thought about the trailer and Sherlock’s I love you, too. It was an interesting tie between ‘amo’ - I love, and the ‘IOU’ of TRF and Emelia/Moriarty’s ‘YOU’ in TAB. You put ‘amo’ - I love, together with Emelia/Moriarty’s ‘YOU’ in TAB and you get “I love you”. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

In TRF Moriarty’s IOU seems like a death threat. But we also know that in TGG Moriarty promised to burn Sherlock’s heart out, which suggests using Sherlock’s love of others to hurt him the most. Sherlock has always seen love as a weakness. And Moriarty is playing to that.

It’s really hard to know how this will all play out at this point, but I feel like there is a long game linking love and death here, and that it is linked to Sherlock’s past as well as his present, and that that is all going to come to a head in some pretty cataclysmic ways in Episode 3, because in this adaptation Love has always been The Final Problem.