It Comes Back To Reichenbach

 (Sherlock meta by Ivy Blossom)

 It seems to me that how you understand S4 comes back to how you understand Sherlock’s fake suicide in The Reichenbach Fall. What actually happened there?

Sherlock prepared a number of different scenarios. He was concerned that he would not survive. He knew John, Lestrade, and Mrs Hudson would be at risk. He knew he had to play along.

He was not required to make John a witness to his fake suicide. He was not required to keep John in the dark about it, either. Not for two years. That was Sherlock’s decision, against the advice of his brother.

This is the point where I think either you agree that Sherlock’s fucked up badly, or you think he sacrificed himself for the greater good and should be praised for it. Either John has a right to be deeply hurt and angry, or John should be thanking Sherlock for his noble sacrifice.

Many fans are deeply invested in Sherlock having been required to lie to John in The Reichenbach Fall because so much depended upon it, including John’s own life. We wanted that hurt to mean something big and emotional, but what we learned from The Empty Hearse is that it meant nothing. It was just a miscalculation.

That’s why Sherlock can arrive back in John’s life making jokes and being jolly. He didn’t understand the hurt he caused; it never crossed his mind that he had torn John to shreds. He had no idea he was loved. It was an emotionally tone deaf, cruel mistake, one Sherlock learns from in S3 and will not make again.

With the perspective of S4, we can say that S2 Sherlock didn’t believe he was capable of having a friend who cared so much about him. He’d believed his whole life that that would be impossible, he was unlovable, only entertainment at best. He constructed a self-image where he wouldn’t and couldn’t have friends who could be taken from him and hurt, and he didn’t know why.

Knowing what we know now, It looks as if he might have deliberately destroyed his extremely close relationship with John out of some kind of subconscious fear of loss and pain, out of fear that someone would take his beloved friend and kill him just to watch Sherlock squirm. But he doesn’t know that he’s reliving a traumatic memory from his past. And that means he doesn’t really understand why he’s crying on the roof before he jumps.

Either you believe Sherlock is emotionally aware and noble at the end of S2, or you think he fucked up. Which side you land on may determine how you read S4.