Eurus and Mycroft’s Gambit in The Final Problem 

 (Sherlock meta by mild-lunacy)

I was thinking of the recent @thepurplecarbuncle post about what Mycroft told Sherlock at Baker Street in The Final Problem: “the man you are today is your memory of Eurus”. I agree with her incredulous response, in that I can see how it sounds false, like a pure retcon– it sounds ridiculous– because it *is* ridiculous and it’s meant to be, on one level. Obviously, if it’s taken to be literally about Sherlock’s deepest self, his best self, that can’t be true. Sherlock is a kind man, a ‘good man’, as Lestrade says later in the same episode. So it’s textually not *literally* true. But at the same time, Sherlock’s not *only* that man that he’d become thanks in part to John Watson, is he? As Ivy told me so eloquently, the whole point, whether here or in Mary’s reference to who Sherlock and John 'really are’, is about the *duality* in Sherlock and John’s natures.

Sherlock is kind and good, but that hasn’t always been the persona he’s been inhabiting, is it? Him standing with Moriarty on that rooftop, promising Moriarty that he’s not one of 'the angels’ wasn’t all that long ago, and Sherlock had shot Magnussen while proclaiming himself to be a 'high-functioning sociopath’ just recently. And that persona, including Mycroft’s spiel in A Scandal in Belgravia about heartbreak being inevitable and how 'caring is not an advantage’, had always seemed to be tied to Mycroft and his influence. Still, you can’t just take Mycroft at face value, 'cause he’s playing the role he’s always played. If anything, he’s more obvious about it in The Final Problem than ever before, explicitly taunting John to Sherlock’s face 'cause he knows Sherlock would always choose John– would always choose *sentiment*– and he wants to make it easier on Sherlock. As usual, Mycroft tests and prods both John and Sherlock at Baker Street, rather than being straightforward. Mycroft certainly isn’t simply saying that Sherlock is some kind of Eurus lite™, and he always has been his whole adult life. He’d just called Sherlock a 'dragon slayer’ in His Las Vow; he *knows* Sherlock for real. The point is that he *hasn’t* been like Eurus, but Sherlock’s made some deeply unnatural and unnecessary choices to shut himself off from friendship and emotional intimacy because of trauma from events related to Eurus he cannot remember. Of course… that’s not established text, at least until The Final Problem. We just have clues and foreshadowing. In The Abominable Bride, Sherlock insists 'I made me’ (although he then thinks of Redbeard when there’s a dog barking in his Mind Palace). And indeed, Sherlock’s choices in response to Eurus– at the beginning and the end, in The Final Problem– are shown to be very much his own. He certainly made himself what he is by *choice*, even if he’s not conscious of it afterwards.

The Final Problem has various callbacks and parallels (the big one to The Hounds of Baskerville, for example, that I’ve discussed recently). Besides the differences in the vector (Sherlock’s own mind rather than a hallucinogenic drug with Henry), I think it’s important to note that Sherlock *chose* to forget in a way Henry didn’t. Sherlock isn’t just a victim of a crime, but still the active protagonist. His conversation with Mycroft at Baker Street can also be a callback to A Study in Pink. That’s where we first heard Mycroft say John could be the 'making of’ his brother, 'or make him worse than ever’. As Ivy summarized, The Final Problem works as the resolution of Sherlock’s arc, and so we had to answer the question of why does Sherlock actually say he’s a 'high-functioning sociopath’? Why does he say being alone 'protects’ him? When people dismiss the entirety of The Final Problem, it’s easy to miss the issues of characterization continuity and the sense in which things may actually make sense in unexpected ways.

I should emphasize that I don’t think Sherlock’s trauma is meant to be definitive to his personality. The question of whether Mofftiss always intended this reveal since Series 1 is interesting but ultimately irrelevant in practice. It’s enough to say that Sherlock’s always worn part of his 'Sherlock Holmes’ persona, the 'high-functioning sociopath’ self, as armor. It’s never been natural. It’s not because he’s naturally a misanthropic loner (like Mycroft), who thinks of other humans like goldfish. This doesn’t mean that he’s *not* different in his own way, or that he didn’t mean it when he told Mycroft in The Empty Hearse 'why would anyone mind?’ But unfortunately, Sherlock struggles to fully accept or accommodate his own humanity even after The Empty Hearse (though the process has begun at that point). In His Last Vow, he regressed from his touching, emotionally open wedding speech to tell John that romantic love was 'human error’, and in The Abominable Bride he actually cries, overcome when Watson acknowledged his humanity. John has had a tendency to believe Sherlock could work miracles– in The Reichenbach Fall, he wanted him to not be dead as 'one more miracle’– which had long been an ongoing issue, as @stephisanerd described in her classic meta. So it’s more like this childhood trauma is just the specific trigger to what was always an ill-fitting illusion of all-knowing supremacy that Sherlock put on as a defense mechanism. And *that* is Eurus’s fault (indirectly, at least); essentially, Eurus herself is the DFP personality with nothing underneath, in a much more personal, less metaphorical way than Moriarty had been. If Moriarty is the 'virus in the data’ in The Abominable Bride, Sherlock’s response to Eurus had corrupted his operating system in this metaphor.

Whether Eurus was intended from the start or not, I essentially think she is simply the mechanism. It was always pretty clear that Sherlock was carrying around some pretty toxic ideas about what kind of things he should aspire to for himself. There were some unrealistic standards he held himself to, but he also has some extreme convictions about sentiment and 'romantic entanglement’ leading only to heartbreak. In a sense, we’d always blamed a sibling for this: we’d just blamed *Mycroft*. Mycroft said lots of insensitive things and provided a sense that Sherlock’s family life was cold, or at least complicated (especially pre-S3). Then we met the Holmes parents, and it seemed like Mycroft and Sherlock were actually a product of a 'normal’, happy home… if one with a math genius mother. But Mycroft’s clear resentment at Christmas (and his 'file’ of complaints about his parents) and Sherlock’s avoidance and awkwardness still seemed… a bit odd. Clearly, some kind of issues were not being addressed. A lot of issues, as it turned out, although in some ways the Holmeses really were a supportive, even ordinary family. The parents just really didn’t know what to do with Mycroft and Sherlock, let alone a girl like Eurus, it appears.

I think it’s clear that Mycroft always felt he had to take care of things invisibly, to be 'the adult’ (even if Mummy didn’t appreciate it in the end: another statement there’s no need to simply accept at face value). He couldn’t just tell Sherlock that he thought he wasn’t dealing with the issue properly; if anything, sentiment really isn’t Mycroft’s area, as he said in The Empty Hearse. But he worries about Sherlock… 'constantly’, as he told John from the start. Mycroft has always placed a lot of stock on other people’s potential influence on his little brother. He’s seen how sensitive he is; how deeply he can be hurt. So of course, if he thought John Watson could be 'the making of’ Sherlock after 24 hours, he’s the type to blame Eurus’s bad influence for Sherlock’s unfortunate conviction he was a 'high-functioning sociopath’ (a descriptor he’d be most likely to have heard applied to Eurus, not himself). Mycroft’s gambit in A Study in Pink was that John could break through to him, somehow, though this didn’t mean he’d start suggesting Sherlock open his heart anytime soon. Both brothers had been burned, and Mycroft was very, *very* protective (after Eurus came the drugs, after all). Mycroft always knew how much both John and Sherlock resisted and doubted him and anything he said, so he *couldn’t* be straightforward even if he wanted to. It’s true that even at the wedding, Mycroft still warned Sherlock not to 'get involved’. It’s not that he meant the opposite, necessarily– but he really does worry about Sherlock and his tendency to have 'danger nights’, after all, and this wasn’t baseless, as His Last Vow demonstrated. However, surely Mycroft still believed John to have been a good influence. Even if both of them admired Eurus a little too much, surely Mycroft knew Sherlock would need to choose John, and could be counted on to choose John in The Sign of Three.

In the end, Mycroft asked John to 'take care’ of Sherlock after his overdose in The Abominable Bride: the ultimate sign of trust. He definitely thinks John has fulfilled his early promise in A Study in Pink, and could be trusted with Sherlock’s future– Mycroft’s only pressure point. Even so, in The Final Problem Mycroft suggests Eurus remained a hugely formative influence, primarily in negative ways. And in certain ways, I’m sure that’s true. The man Sherlock is today is a product of his past, just like any other man. However, that’s not *all* he is, and I think that by the end of The Final Problem, Sherlock’s made peace with that.