On Reading Sherlock’s Face
mild-lunacy:
I’m not a fan of metas based on reading faces. I’ve seen other people do it well, but I’ve never liked actually basing conclusions off expressions alone. Everything exists in context, but especially facial expressions. They’re also the easiest thing to project onto– you can read a lot of things into a facial expression, and I’m very wary of that sort of thing in analysis. I am particularly wary when shippers do it and/or there’s an agenda involved (and usually there is an agenda involved, in fandom). My point: I don’t really do facial analysis if I can help it, and certainly not alone. But there’s definitely a point in TFP where the show kinda begs you to look at Sherlock’s face, and I can’t deny it’s interesting.
In a general sense, I’m also kinda going through the things that seem off or are interesting in Series 4 (in no particular order), and of course, I haven’t addressed this yet:
I remember being struck by this when I saw it in the trailer, and analyzing it a bit. It was obvious to me it wasn’t to John, because John is behind Sherlock. In thinking about it before I knew the context, I thought it was weird, because Sherlock looked so unhappy. His whole expression is… tense, disturbed at something. It’s not the kind of face (or set-up) one associates with an ‘I love you’, so I thought something rather dark must be going on.
Now, I agree with the analysis that this isn’t Sherlock’s ‘lying face’, or the over-the-top acting Sherlock was doing with Janine in His Last Vow. This is definitely different. But the only two options aren’t ‘he’s lying’ vs ‘he’s just realized he means it’. The difference between The Final Problem and His Last Vow is context: in His Last Vow, Sherlock went on to dismiss John’s horror at his callousness, and say love was ‘human error’. In The Final Problem, Sherlock no longer thinks so. That is the point.
A lot of people (no matter what they ship) don’t understand this scene– they either seem to think it’s gratuitous emotional torture, bad Molly characterization (because she’s apparently not gotten over her feelings, though as I’ve said, there’s no reason to think she had), or– I suppose– there to show us that Sherlock just loves Molly back, all appearances to the contrary. Of course, many fans essentially believe there doesn’t really need to be a reason for that last option, particularly seeing as it’s about a heterosexual couple, so I’ll just say that no, there actually does need to be a reason, not to mention build-up. Besides, if Sherlock simply… meant it, that would kill the drama (and the intended darkness) of the scene. In general, no matter what Sherlock’s face says, the narrative has to support it or it makes no sense and constitutes bad writing. But for what it’s worth, his face doesn’t really say ‘I love you’. He looks sad and disturbed, but I do believe he also looks like he’s realizing something on some level. It’s a form of his serious deduction face, except we don’t get as much of an inward look as we did the last time this happened, during the wedding speech in The Sign of Three (as I once wrote extensively about).
So what is Sherlock realizing, in context?
That question is closely tied to asking why that scene is there. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of Johnlock shippers sort of riff on the fact that the deduction of the person meant for the casket could have been about John– he too is short and practical, and he loves Sherlock! But I think bringing John into it is a derailment. It’s not about John, but it’s not about Molly, either, not directly. Like I said in my John analysis in The Lying Detective, it’s not about John ‘cause it’s about Sherlock. Obviously, this applies to this scene: we’re focused on Sherlock’s face here, full screen. That certainly suggests that we’re meant to be focusing on him (and his arc).
And yes, that’s what I think it’s about. I realize most people who’re not Johnlockers seem unaware there’s an arc, but even though we’ve been wrong about various things, the one thing I’ve been right about is the importance of Sherlock’s arc. Moffat has explicitly referred to it and its relevance to The Final Problem, too. This is Sherlock’s test, his final test (as administered by Eurus, the embodiment of the ‘high-functioning sociopath’ persona). The Final Problem is becoming human.
So what does that have to do with Molly? He’s already told Eurus that he realizes his life is not his own: “Your own death is something that happens to everybody else.” So he’s learned the lesson of Reichenbach. The ‘human error’ thing is about people like Janine and Molly though, in the show. He doesn’t really have a problem accepting his feelings about John (however you want to read them); as soon as he realized them, around The Empty Hearse and The Sign of Three, he accepted them. John is always the exception. It’s everyone else’s feelings– and feeling in general– that Sherlock hasn’t taken seriously or accepted as valid, as important, as worth empathizing with. So this is the final step: he’d already felt bad for Molly in The Empty Hearse, but he didn’t take her feelings fully seriously, because then there was Janine. Love was still ‘human error’… but then Sherlock kept making that error. You don’t have to read this romantically, though it’s certainly not been about Molly. He’s made the error about John, about Mary, and even about Eurus (in The Lying Detective). That’s what he was telling Mrs Hudson with ‘Norbury’. He knows that ‘human error’ is something he has to take into account. Heartbreak is something Sherlock is now very familiar with. He has to feel it, but he doesn’t have to fear it (as Moriarty said).
Sherlock fake-smiled when he proposed to Janine because he was dissociating, essentially. Here, he wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean he was confessing his love. It means he was fully feeling the awfulness of what he was doing to Molly, and that he was aware he was using his real feelings– because he really does care about her as a friend– to hurt her, essentially. This is the realization he started to have at the end of The Abominable Bride, about how many women he’d hurt. This is the consequence: it hurts. It burns. It aches, being human. But it allows him to reach his sister, in the end, so the point is not about avoiding the pain but embracing it.
leapingcat:
So basically you are reducing Molly into nothing more than a plot device.
There are several ways to read this and they don’t all lead to the same conclusion. You also negate the concept of Platonic love. Love doesn’t come in just one flavor and yet you always go for romantic love as being that between John and Sherlock. This is too simplistic an explanation and it’s clear to me anyway, that your endgame is no matter what, Johnlock. Yet the truth of the matter is that a lot of what happened in this show, have two and three meanings, if not more. When you put it all together, how do you know that you went down the “right path”? Before The Final Problem, its really is clear as mud. The things that are stumbling blocks to Johnlock being the end game, are many, and many which have been conveniently brushed away, ignored taken out of context, or thrown, under the proverbial carpet..
It doesn’t explain why or how Anderson “knew” before Sherlock ever told him that Molly was involved in his fake suicide. There are things in this show that seem to “happen” completely off screen. Even Louise Brealey in her interview with Masterpiece said as much. Yes, the actress who plays that part. You’d think she’d know more than us “out here”, yes? Anyway, these things aren’t shown, only subtly hinted at, blink and you’ve missed it; if we are to believe that nothing happens in a vacuum, that idea that Molly and Sherlock shared a kiss must have come from some where. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t real. The foundation for that idea exists “somewhere”. Anderson didn’t just pull it out of thin air. He saw or heard something, maybe the “grapevine”?
The whole episode of A Scandal In Belgravia, say what you will, generally also gets the once over. Yet there is something to be said for the grieving that Sherlock apparently undergoes… John describes it as doesn’t eat, doesn’t talk, writes/plays sad music. Sounds like situational depression to me. It took up a large part of the episode. If he was “in love with John” why would he travel a long distance, risk life and limb to rescue Irene from the executioner’s sword? That’s a lot of work for someone he couldn’t care less about. Not only that, he kept her phone as a memento. If John is his one and only true love, what would he want with her phone. Yep sure give it back to Mycroft.
Now, the stairwell scene with Molly, the expression on his face, on spotting her engagement ring. Why the forlorn expression? He wished she would be happy, but he really didn’t look happy or do you think he’s just given to bouts of melancholia for no reason? And there’s the business with the bolthole and who knows how that arrangement came about or what happened behind closed doors? Again it’s all off screen. Much of their “relationship” how ever you want to characterize it, is off screen.
So you see, why so many people read this differently?
I don’t feel Molly was simply a plot device and nothing more. The “I love you” scene. Much has been written about this, but simply the second time he says is significant. It’s how he said it, and the fact he did not have to say it twice to just to get the job done. Oh sure why not, that’s what men do, they are goal oriented and they get the job done. But the thing no one in this fandom pays any attention to is male conversational styles even though there whole books written on the subject. When men say things there is no subtext, unless they are blatantly trying to get away with something. Generally, they mean what they say. When John says he’s not gay, he’s telling you the truth; you don’t need to question it. When the second ''I love you'' came freely flowing out of Sherlock’s mouth, he wasn’t dissembling. He meant it. That was the point behind the supposed genius of all geniuses, Eurus’ wanted to get across or did you not get the meaning behind her words, “It will be a tragedy, so many days un-lived, so many words unsaid…”. On Molly suddenly turning the tables on Sherlock’s request; how do you extract an “I love you” from someone who is nothing more than a friend? Most people would not go there. If there’s nothing there and you did that, they’d laugh in your face… unless, there was something more that happened between them that we were not privy to… again, off screen stuff.
Molly is key to what I think is a “hero’s journey” type of story, Love in all its forms is the elixir that the hero emerges at end of his ordeal/cycle… The last scene with her walking into 221B with that wide sunny smile. Open to interpretation, yes, but maybe the more likely explanation is that she’s with him. Or as Moffat said, "she got over it". Oh give me a break! She was in love with the man. You don’t get over that just like nothing…
renniejoy:
How insulting to say that only Johnlockers realize that Sherlock has a character arc. No shit he has an arc, that’s the whole point of the entire show!
Why can’t that scene be about Sherlock *and* Molly? That is how it’s shown, a conversation between (and therefore about) *two* people. Oh right, you have decided that Molly doesn’t count. Well, the story has told us the opposite since S2.
There is no in-text reason to believe that it is not romantic. Declarations that Sherlock couldn’t possibly love Molly in that way are based on pre-conceived notions that dismiss an awful lot of textual evidence that Sherlock does take her seriously (including the agreement between John and Sherlock that Molly sees through *all* Sherlock’s bullshit).
But yes, once you’ve decided that Sherlock doesn’t mean that he’s in love with Molly, because he’s in love with someone else or he’ll never be in love with anyone, then you can find all kinds of reasons to back up your opinion.
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