Eurus and Sherlock’s Relationship and The Game 

 (Sherlock meta by strawberrypatty)

I am fascinated by the character of Eurus. I’ve seen a lot of disparaging comments about her, but I think she’s incredibly interesting. She changed what we know about Sherlock, Mycroft and the Holmes family. I think this is part of why people are so resistant to the idea of her. We don’t like when the status quo is changed. But the introduction of Eurus does explain quite a few things and deepens our understanding of the characters.

(NOTE: I am not a psychologist. I have tried to leave psychoanalysis out of this. I am just trying to read the text provided to us by the episode)

Many Holmes pastiches have tried to explain the cause of Sherlock Holmes shunning interpersonal relationships. This is often done by having him with a tragic romance as a young man. He lost the woman he loved and thus has shut himself off from feelings for anyone. This is being reflected in Sherlock’s childhood trauma as the cause in Sherlock. This makes a lot of sense. In fact, having childhood trauma being the cause makes even more sense than a tragic romance as it is a far more scarring experience for him. Not only does Sherlock lose his best friend, it is because of the sister who tormented him. When he blocked the memories out, instead of getting Sherlock proper help to deal with his trauma, Mycroft just reinforced it for what he felt was Sherlock’s own safety.

I use the word “tormented” to describe Sherlock’s interactions with Eurus. While Eurus wanted to play with Sherlock, we don’t know HOW she wanted to play with Sherlock. She doesn’t understand what pain is. She wanted to make Sherlock laugh, but she doesn’t understand the concept of pain so instead she took screaming as laughter. She lacks the ability to recognize the difference between negative and positive stimuli.

To her, giving him the mystery of what happened to Victor Trevor is a gift to Sherlock. She’s giving him a puzzle to figure out. She understands that Sherlock has an attachment to him which will spur him to search. Only, Eurus doesn’t understand that Victor is a living, breathing human being. We see even as an adult that Eurus can’t grasp that other people are anything more than unconscious bags of meat, as witnessed by her “jet” and calling the governor a prisoner of his own meat. There is of course also an element of jealousy. Sherlock and Victor were inseparable. Eurus wanted to play, but she didn’t know how to.

Sherlock was described as an emotional child. I think this was something intriguing to Eurus. It is why she focused on him rather than Mycroft. During the entire Final Problem, Mycroft is as much collateral damage as John or Molly or the Governor. To Eurus, emotions are a puzzle that she has to figure out. All of the tests she sets are psychological and focused on Sherlock.

There is no need for Eurus to spend the night with Sherlock after giving him the Culverton Smith mystery. I believe this is a mix of wanting to understand how he treats a normal person and also a need to be around him. It is the first time in her life she is treated as normal, even if she is in disguise at the time.

When she talks to Sherlock in her cell, she looks betrayed when he doesn’t remember that she taught him to play the violin. She also wants to hear him when he’s playing violin. Eurus is trying to figure out who Sherlock is. He is not to her level, because no one is, but there is still a connection. Sherlock understand the things that she can’t— emotions.

Mycroft can understand Eurus on an intellectual level for the most part (she says if she went a bit slow he would get it). But Sherlock is still her favourite brother. There are think a few reasons for this:

(1) I know they say it’s never twins, but Sherlock and Eurus are [twins]. The only reason they had them a year apart (“Irish Twins”) is because Moffat and Gatiss I’m SURE didn’t want to read “Sherlock’s evil twin” in every single review, but every interaction between them is written as if they were twins. There is a deep connection between them that comes from being close siblings.

(2) While Sherlock is the “idiot”, Eurus doesn’t completely understand him. While she is incredibly intelligent, intelligence can’t help someone understand emotion since emotion and logic often work independently. Eurus’ understanding of emotion comes experimenting on Sherlock and examining him.

She speaks of emotional context, but Eurus doesn’t understand what emotional context truly is herself. There is no way she could. She is “beyond Newton” in terms of intellect, but she has been locked up in isolation since childhood. The most she has interacted with people has been to be used as a tool by Mycroft (this might also explain some of her coldness towards Mycroft. Since he used her as a tool, she will use him as the same).

She wants to understand emotional context, which for all of her talk about it turning the third test she does NOT understand. That is the purpose of the tests, so she can find out what Sherlock’s emotional reactions will be. Witness the people she uses in her test: the three people who are most likely to evoke an emotional responce from Sherlock, save for Mrs Hudson (however, I wonder if Eurus has meant for Mrs Hudson to have been killed in the blast on 221B, it’s just that Mycroft was able to rescue her).

There is one thing that is important to keep in mind through all of The Final Problem: The “idiot” Holmes sibling is able to predict the movements of his friends weeks in advance. We also get hints of this from Eurus, being told she spent an hour on Twitter and predicted terrorist attacks. There is an element of this in everything Eurus does. She is attempting to predict what Sherlock will do and what those around him will as well.

The first test is who Sherlock will choose to turn into a murderer (or multiple murderer). She is interested to know how everyone in the room is reacting. She asks for updates on their anxiety levels and suggests she should have fit them for cardiographs. This is how Eurus sees emotion, as physical responces.

Eurus is also completely and utterly in control of the test. I didn’t realize this until my third viewing. She said she’s providing a countdown, but it’s not verbal. Then I realized… The Governor himself is the countdown. Eurus has used her hypnotic suggestion on the Governor to take over Sherrinford. It is completely plausible that she would also set him to kill himself if John or Mycroft fail to kill him within the allotted timespan. That way, the Governor is out of the way for the next tests and John (and Sherlock) culpable of murder by proxy for their inaction.

Eurus says that the Governor is as interesting dead as he was alive. There is the same cavalier attitude towards anyone who is not Sherlock. The interest in John and Mycroft is still focused on Sherlock, as it will tie into Eurus’ finale. She gets into this during The Three Garridebs: “Make use of your friends. I want to see you interact with people you’re close to. Also, you may have to choose which one to keep.”.

In the first test, Eurus is instructing Sherlock to murder someone using either John or Mycroft as a murder weapon. She will be aware of Sherlock’s murder of Magnussen, so she knows that Sherlock is capable of murder. But what she is interested in is which one Sherlock will choose to use. I believe this ties into the final test.

With the Garridebs, Eurus says exactly why she does the test: She wants to see him repress his emotions in order for his reasoning to work. So she gives him the “context” that his actions will condemn someone to die. The Sherlock that Eurus is familiar with was quite emotional. But she’s heard and seen that he has turned himself into a cold, calculating man of logic. Mostly likely Mycroft has told her it is because of her. She wants to test that, see how far it goes, how much influence she has had on him.

In the end, her killing of all three Garridebs is because they don’t matter. What matters is Sherlock.

And now, the scene I have already written SO MUCH about. This is such a fascinating scene to me: the one with Molly Hooper. I will try not to repeat myself too much, but it is bound to happen. It is important to note that Eurus has SEEN Sherlock interact with Molly, albeit briefly. She heard John say that Molly is the one person able to see through Sherlock’s bullshit. We also don’t know what kind of information Eurus has received on Sherlock. However, it is clear to me that Eurus knew Sherlock harboured feelings for Molly. Why is this? Because Molly doesn’t matter to Eurus. She is— like everyone who is not Sherlock— just meat. Sherlock lying to Molly doesn’t make sense because

1. Molly would’ve seen through it.  
2. Guilt over playing with Molly’s affections isn’t enough for Eurus. 

Her previous two tests have been about Sherlock and life and death. Each subsequent test chips away more and more at him emotionally. Just making Sherlock revert back to who he was in Series 1 is not a strong enough test. Eurus is intelligent enough to know that Molly will want Sherlock to say it first and that Sherlock does in fact mean it. He doesn’t know what it means, but that is the reaction she wants.

Eurus claims a victory, because Sherlock has failed to figure out that she wouldn’t have wired Molly’s house with explosives. He was too blinded with panic to think logically, because someone he absolutely loved was in danger. He fails because he couldn’t come up with a way to get Molly to say the words without admitting his own feelings. (“Look what you did to yourself. All of those complicated little emotions.”)

Before Eurus mocks Sherlock, she has a fascinating reaction to Sherlock and Molly admitting their love. I’ve provided a screencap because of how important I believe this is.

That is not the look of an cold, removed scientist. In trying to evoke an emotional responce out of Sherlock using Molly, Eurus I believe has felt something herself. Eurus said that she liked to make Sherlock “laugh”. She has now gotten another emotional reaction from him.

The final test is whether or not Sherlock will kill John or Mycroft. This is Eurus’ true test, because she doesn’t actually know what Sherlock’s reaction is going to be. When Sherlock makes his choice, she says that is was Jim who predicted Sherlock would kill Mycroft. If she had thought that was the case, wouldn’t she say that herself?

I think Eurus thought that Sherlock would kill John, because Mycroft is family. Deep down, what Eurus is looking for is familial affection and she believed that Sherlock would choose family. He would choose HER in the end.

But Sherlock has been put through so much by this point that he’s managed to deduce enough about Eurus. He knows she still wants— needs— him alive. So he decides to kill himself. Rather than just doing it straight off, he gives her a verbal countdown, the thing she robbed them of when killing the Governor and his wife. He knows Eurus will stop him and thus both Mycroft and John will be saved.

Either way, someone was going to end up in the well. Eurus has stripped Sherlock down emotionally and mentally for two purposes:

1. Getting him to really remember her and her game. 
2. Motivate him to finish it.

 And in the end, her game is for Sherlock to come to her. Because she needs Sherlock. She is the girl in the jet with unconscious people around her. She is crashing, because she doesn’t understand her feelings. She has been locked away since she was five years old, just used as a pawn for Mycroft. Mycroft hasn’t had any interest in her emotional wellbeing. He has written her off. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, just like he believed the answer to Sherlock’s problems were to let him forget his childhood trauma rather than work through it.

In the end, I think the relationship of Eurus and Sherlock comes down to the fact that Sherlock is a bridge between Eurus and everyone else. Sherlock is in essence Eurus’ John. It is through John that Sherlock really learns how to form interpersonal relationships. When we meet him in A Study in Pink, he’s not able to find a flatmate, he can’t tell when a girl is asking him out for coffee. But it is through his relationship with John that he has managed to get to this point, where he calls Mary and Molly is friends, where he is able to admit his love for Molly, where he can talk to Mycroft without snarking. Sherlock is the only person who can speak on Eurus’ level, but teach her about the parts of life that she doesn’t understand, emotions and how to be able to live in the world.

Unfortunately, Eurus has done so much that she will have to remain locked up. But we see at the end that Sherlock and Eurus finally play together, this time with their violins. The Holmes family comes together, finally able to start to mend themselves after so many years of heartache.

And Sherlock himself has come to a new place in his life. He has subconsciously tried to make himself into Eurus, albeit a much more controlled one. He cuts himself off from people. He uses his intelligence as an excuse to not socialize with people because they bore him. He has even done experiments on his friends. He drugs John with terror toxin to see his reaction, he has drugged him in the past. He has even done the exact same thing Eurus did, threatening John with a bomb to get him to reveal his true feelings about Sherlock’s faked death, with Eurus does to Sherlock by threatening Molly with an explosive. As Mycroft said, the man Sherlock is comes from his hidden memory of Eurus. The emotional trauma of losing his friend, his home and his sister was too much for him to bear and he cut himself off, instead forming himself into a less version of Eurus.

But that’s not who he is. He’s Sherlock Holmes, the detective in the funny hat. He is a man with friends, with emotions. By the end montage we see him smiling, happy. He has accepted who he really is. He can still be the detective in the silly hat, but he had been able to let go of the things that have held him back from being who he truly is.