The Fall and Water

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter and anarfea)

notagarroter:

Mycroft: fills a plane with dead people.
Sherlock: deliberately overdoses on a plane, nearly dies.
Eurus: invents imaginary planes full of sleeping people who are about to crash.

Forget Victor Trevor and the well. What the hell happened to these kids at a formative age to turn them against aviation? 

No wonder Mummy and Daddy started leaving them home when they went line dancing in Oklahoma.

anarfea:

Looking back on A Scandal in Belgravia post The Final Problem, I’m wondering if Eurus didn’t either suggest the idea of The Flight of the Dead to Mycroft, or if she wasn’t otherwise aware it was happening. Because it seems that the whole meeting with Jim happened at around the same time as the events of A Scandlal in Belgravia, no? Anyway, Eurus’s metaphor/dream/hallucination of being alone in the sky in a plane filled with sleeping people seems to be connected somehow with Mycroft filling a plane with dead people.

As for Sherlock, he would have OD’d on a train or a bus or whatever vehicle they put him on to send him to Eastern Europe to die, methinks.

notagarroter:

I don’t necessarily disagree with you about Sherlock – certainly, that’s how I interpreted it the first time around, and I think that interpretation is still valid.

But I’m open to the idea that the plane is significant to Sherlock and the general narrative mostly because of the scene with Moriarty telling him “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s never the fall – it’s the landing.” And then the plane lands. So… it’s kind of an almost-pun that seems to point to something larger – Sherlock’s general angst around falling and landing and dying, etc.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be anything more than the dream retrofitting itself around a real-world stimulis – an experience I’ve had myself, whether on a plane or hearing a phone ring or what have you.

Mostly I’m just making this observation because I’m (mildly! it’s not a big thing) annoyed at the retroactive imposition of the water motif over Sherlock’s whole life. Yeah, there was the pool and there was the waterfall and there was the aquarium, but water is a SUPER COMMON THING in everyone’s life, and you just *know* they didn’t have this thread in mind before S4.

Particularly it annoys me because they already *had* a very resonant, meaningful motif working throughout the narrative, and that’s the motif of falling. The Fall is important not just in this incarnation of Sherlock, but arguably in *every* incarnation going back to ACD and that incredibly powerful moment when Sherlock and Moriarty go together over the Reichenbach Falls.

The point of the Reichenbach is not that it’s WET.

The point is, it’s a very tall, dangerous place where Sherlock Holmes died, heroically and tragically. (And Moriarty as well, less heroically but perhaps just as tragically, to some of us.)

This version of Sherlock jumping off of Barts was a re-imagining of that mythic moment (*without* water), and MP!Moriarty was of course making reference to this in TAB when he talks about the fall and the landing. And then we jump-cut to the plane: a landing that does not, in fact, kill Sherlock, just as his Reichenbach landing did not.

And then The Abominable Bride takes us (in Sherlock’s mind) to the actual waterfall, again, not because it’s wet, but because Sherlock still hasn’t fully processed what his fall meant to him. That’s the trauma that he is working through – that we all are.

And I’d argue that MP!Molly teaching him how to fall in His Last Vow is another oblique reference. And there are others dotted throughout the text. For over a hundred years, Sherlock Holmes’s fall and death and rebirth have been the traumatic break that we are all, always, working through and trying to accomodate and process and understand.

And The Fall works on so many interesting levels – it’s a waterfall, it’s a painting, it’s an actual plunge to one’s (potential) death, it’s the metaphor of “falling” in love, but it’s also the Fall of Man, the moment when we gain knowledge we can never unknow, and thus become doomed. It’s just a *hugely* resonant cultural trope.

So no, I’m not entirely serious about the plane thing. I was mostly sort of crankily observing that, once you start imposing patterns on the text, the airplane motif strikes me as at least as resonant as the water one, or in fact more so.

But neither is as compelling to me as The Fall.

anarfea:

Yeah, I totally agree now that you’ve mentioned it that the Fall is a more compelling motif than water. I just for whatever reason wasn’t connecting the plane with falling before. That said, the water motif in The Reichenbach Fall did reasonate with me. I feel like water is sort of a metaphor for the unconscious regardless of context. Also for emotion. Also birth and beginnings. All of us spend the first nine months of our lives sloshing around in water. So I feel the whole thing in The Reichenbach Fall isn’t so much about Victor or drowning in the literal sense as much as it’s about deep emotion and repressed feeling.

The Fall, like you said, is about a fall from grace, a leap of faith, etc. But water is birth, to me. And descent. And regression. We’re going back to the beginning. Or maybe I just like Sherlock sinking into a pool of black goo.