On John’s violence to Sherlock in TLD

 (Sherlock meta by materialofonebeing and mild-lunacy)

The scene of John’s battery of Sherlock was plausible but disappointing.

Before S4 I praised the update of John as a badass because it adjusted the old sidekick-to-hero power difference. What we got in The Lying Detective was the reduction to absurdity of that stance. Seconds before we witnessed John’s violence, John told Greg about Sherlock – and not about Sherlock – “We did see it coming. We always saw it coming, but it was fun.” We saw John’s violence coming; he shot a man in the first episode. Except for the head butt in The Empty Hearse, I, for one, didn’t bat an eye.

The violence expressed John’s rudderless distress but was not the only way to show us this; he already was hallucinating. It was, though, a conventional choice. Given both the prevalence of intimate partner violence and our acculturation, my need to explain John’s crime with PTSD, or in any way, might seem even a bit naïve.

Can we consider any Watson beating Holmes? I respect that others find it beyond the pale. I, however, can imagine a violent crisis between the men – one high and skilled in boxing and baritsu and one otherwise mentally faltering – which could have resulted in the rift Watson described in "The Final Problem" and Watson’s leaving 221B for the second time, as some interpret. I’ll think of this when reading Watson, about a year later, tended to the bloody fist of a frightened Holmes in the same story.

So, John’s battery of Sherlock existed within the realm of possibility. Still, there were other possibilities, and the creators’ choice was disappointing. First, the scene of John’s violence screwed up something beautiful, maybe motivated by a modern, jaded impulse about what’s smart. (x) Intelligent earnestness, characteristic of the relationship in S1-3 (and not warm paste), is what I expected instead.

Second, making love too difficult to work echoed a sad tradition. In treating John’s crime seriously, The Lying Detective left us with a version of John and Sherlock who should not have gotten together as things stood. Graham Robb, on literature of the 1800s and early 1900s, wrote of the “wretched end of most homosexual heroes,” attributing this to writers’ moralizing, self-censorship, and suffering. A happy ending today still would be (will be?) subversive.

In the end, my mulling over all this fails. I irrationally love the characters of John Watson and Sherlock Holmes and want them to be happy.

mild-lunacy:

[...] My own view is probably closest to Ivy’s, in that I can’t think they’re ‘making love too difficult to work’ because even in this, John and Sherlock parallel each other. In their difficulty, their brokenness, their painfully sharp edges. I mean, we definitely love their idealized selves in fandom, and create new legends around them as much as we psychoanalyze and decide when something is 'too much’. But it’s the characters who could really tell you when it’s too much, and I think that finally, in The Lying Detective we see that Sherlock and John see and accept all of one another. You could say that *theoretically* this should break them, but in fact it makes them stronger. If nothing else, by the end of The Final Problem, it seems they’re happy. It’s not a tragedy, after all. It’s just a brutal thing to watch, they’re definitely both traumatized, by this and many other things. Their brokenness is supposed to be something they can use, though. As Ivy said, John’s flaws are part of what Sherlock needs and can use. The violence is part and parcel of how it works, because Sherlock knows how to help John channel it, how to make London into John’s warzone. And sometimes it’s all too much, but that’s been true for Sherlock, too. Sometimes Sherlock himself is way, way too much. But somehow they’re exactly what the other needs and can handle. That’s the secret of their dynamic.

Of course, I agree, it didn’t have to explore this possibility, even if it always existed in the realm of the possible for this or any Holmes and Watson. But at the same time, this started in Series 3, 'cause they kept not dealing with the old traumas enough, ever since Reichenbach, and then piling on complications. John was set on a collision course with himself as soon as he married Mary and she turned out to be the worst possible option. It was a bad decision compounded by her pregnancy and further exacerbated by the ensuing series of events– that unfortunate vow, the shooting, Sherlock back on drugs and saying he killed Magnussen 'cause he’s a sociopath, Sherlock pushing them back together and John choosing to do it without dealing with any of their problems. Everything kept being swept under the rug, with the only explanation being that John 'chose her’ and he should just deal with it. So he let it go, and let it go, and controlled himself and held back. And then (as Martin Freeman said), he just needed an excuse when he failed again (this time to protect Mary). In John’s mind, someone has to be in control: usually that’s Sherlock 'cause as Ivy said earlier, Sherlock can do anything. Sherlock is his superhero; his 'commander’. Alternatively, of course, John *himself* expects to be in control, or it’s a personal failure. Remember how he took it in His Last Vow, with Sherlock telling him (ruthlessly, from John’s perspective) that he chose Mary: it’s his 'fault’. John automatically jumps to the question of whose *fault* it was that Mary was the way she was, and he wasn’t ready to take responsibility and accept this, but Sherlock pushed and so he did. Then, when another traumatic event happens, John doesn’t have any reserve left, I guess.

What I’m saying is, I think many of us knew that some kind of reckoning had to be coming for John in S4. But all the talk about John’s arc was mostly supposed to be about John getting better, not worse. And if he got worse, we expected to see him recover, step by step. And that didn’t happen. We got a hint, a first step, and I understand why that’s not enough for many people. At the very least, though, I don’t think it’s the same as the 'tragic gays’ trope would have it. In The Lying Detective, even if they didn’t show us everything, they showed enough that it’s clear they do always save each other, even if it’s not in the ways that Mary or anyone else would expect. Even if John can’t see it anymore, or thinks he’s not that person, he’s still the person who makes Sherlock better. And when John stumbles, Sherlock would believe it enough for the both of them. And I do think, in the end, that it is enough.