Let’s talk about Mycroft, pt1

 (Sherlock meta by earlgreytea68)

So let’s talk about Mycroft for a little while, because this episode was SUCH a great Mycroft episode. I was hopeful we would get a good Mycroft episode when he was so absent from last week’s episode, and this episode was fantastic. Poor Mycroft. No wonder he tries not to believe in attachments. Think of what he went through, as an older sibling, watching these two little ones. Mycroft says that all of Sherlock was defined by what Euros did, but all of Mycroft was, too, and I think by the end of it Sherlock is well aware of that. Like, yes, letting Euros talk to Moriarty was a stupid idea, but Mycroft has always behaved stupidly when it comes to Moriarty. I wrote my very first Sherlock fic to try to explain Mycroft’s actions at the end of “Hounds.” Mycroft never handled the Moriarty thing correctly, and Mycroft also always thought that he had things under control. This whole episode was just such classic, tragic Mycroft hubris.

He gave his little sister a Christmas gift: that’s what everyone kept saying in the episode, and it’s what Mycroft did, and it both is and isn’t his fault that the Christmas gift involved putting together two mentally unstable individual who would then play the world’s longest long game to set up this whole elaborate torture scene. Like, maybe Mycroft should have seen that coming, but I am giving even Mycroft Holmes a pass on that one. As Sherlock himself does at the end. Maybe because Sherlock does the same thing and is kind and indulgent toward Euros at the end. These siblings, with their impossible love, with their too-fierce attachments to each other. Holmes killing Holmes, Moriarty? It could never happen.

It makes sense that that’s where the Moriarty-Euros plan broke down. It’s what Moriarty never fully understood. He was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes’s affection for John Watson but he completely missed Sherlock Holmes’s affection for his brother. Sherlock buried it down deep enough that not even Moriarty caught that one. So we end up with Mycroft. Who, at the end—you can’t tell me he doesn’t—gets Lestrade. I still have no idea why this show had to be annoying last week, but that gorgeous little promise by Lestrade to look after Mycroft at the end? Perfection. What a lovely, wonderful end for Mycroft’s story. Let him be the one looked after for a little while. It’s what the entirety of the Mycroft part of the Scotchverse was about.

(And Mycroft even got to execute part of the adventure. His glee at getting to dress up was so cute.)