Season 4, the case of the missing Watson, and why BBC John doesn’t love Sherlock
thepurplewombat:
So yesterday I was reading @silentauroriamthereal‘s Best of Three, again (it’s a really good story!). And I realised that the John in that story is pretty much a total dick. He’s incredibly patronising and self-congratulatory about being such a wonderful friend to Sherlock etc etc etc, all the while being actually unimaginably cruel to Sherlock.
And I left a comment to the effect that I loved the story but hated John, and she very kindly replied that she thought it was pretty in character and I had this absolute oh my god moment because she’s bloody right, isn’t she?
And somewhere between Season 4 and Best of Three and SilentAuror’s comment, I think the scales sort of fell from my eyes with regards to John and the show. It’s not that Season 4 ruined John. Season 4 was the logical continuation of where they had taken the character, arguably from the second episode. Go back and look at the way John talks about and treats Sherlock, all the way back to The Blind Banker. Try to reconcile the way John talks to and about Sherlock with the way Watson talks to and about Holmes.
Season 4 John is not out of character. Not for BBC John. It’s extreme, but it’s not actually out of character. We think it is, but I think that we have good reason for that. In my specific case, I knew and loved the canon long before BBC Sherlock came on the scene. I know Watson, and I know how he feels about Holmes. So when John acted the way he did in Season 4, I thought it was awful, and terrible, and it came as a shock to me. Before Season 4, when John acted in ways that Watson would not have, I was like “well, maybe he’s just having a bad day’, but Season 4 made me realise that Watson hasn’t been having bad days, Watson has never been here at all.
We think that John is better and wiser and kinder than he is because we spend more time with the wiser, kinder versions of John Watson that we see in the canon and in fanfiction. We’ve been blinded by those Watsons to the truth of John’s character in the show.
And that leads me to another conclusion. BBC’s John doesn’t love Sherlock. We think he does, because Watson loves Holmes, and whether you think that it’s platonic or romantic or sexual or whatever, you can’t deny that there is love there, but John? He doesn’t love Sherlock.
I think he wants Sherlock. I think he’s addicted to Sherlock. To the cases and the life they lead and the danger and all of it. And I think that, like any addict, he hates Sherlock and everything that comes with him, and hates that he needs him. And that’s why the morgue scene happens. Because John, unlike practically every other Watson in history, does not love Sherlock Holmes. Because John wishes that he had never met him and wishes that he could live without him, and knows that as long as Sherlock is alive, he will never, ever be able to leave him for good.
Which means that yes, they really did do TPLoSH all over again, with a gay Holmes desperately in love with Watson, who doesn’t love him back. Except they dialled it up to 11, because everything has to be bigger and louder and hurt more, and instead of a straight Watson who still loves his Holmes, they have given us a John Watson of ambiguous sexuality who not only does not love Sherlock, but actively despises him.
(I also have some thoughts about how Sherlock has been moving toward becoming Holmes over the course of the series, while John moves further and further away from being Watson, but I’ll save that for another time.)
addignisherlock:
Why do you hurt me???
I mean, especially after s4, I felt more or less convinced that John doesn’t love Sherlock back, certainly not in the way Sherlock loves John so selflessly and unconditionally.
But to see you spell it out so well and dial it up some more….. oh my heart….. oh my poor Sherlock…. it makes this scene THAT much more painful to watch:
lawyermargo:
I believe you are absolutely right and I think that’s why S4 has been so difficult for me. I had clearly conflated BBC John with all the permutations of John that are fan created. The fan fic and fan art Johns that love Sherlock; that nurture and protect Sherlock from that place of genuine love for Sherlock. S4 John’s character arc is divergent from those fic Johns I have read and I’m starting to see that is on me, not the BBC writers. I now have to figure out if I can go back to the fan created Johns and enjoy them for what they are, and leave BBC John behind. I’m still trying to decide.
thepurplewombat:
@lawyermargo we all did, I think. But the good thing is that fanon John is much closer to canon Watson than John is! I’m not sure if that’s a comfort to you or not, but we are not, and we were not, wrong. The John Watson we see is the real John Watson. It’s the BBC version that’s out of character.
Also, there are other Johns. Try Granada! Granada John is beautiful.
Or read canon and just imagine Martin’s face on it.
lawyermargo:
@high5sandchocolate, I think this is good analysis of why we’ve been struggling with S4.
conversationswithjohnlock:
I’m so glad someone is saying this and not getting bashed for it. Before S4 I rewatched all of S1, S2, and S3 with my kids. And to be honest, I hadn’t rewatched it all for at least a year, and had been thoroughly and happily buried in fic adaptations of Sherlock and John.
I remember saying to my best fandom friend (not tagging in case this post makes her sad) at the time that seeing it all again after some time and distance made me realize that John wasn’t actually very nice to Sherlock. He was a bit of a dick.
I do believe he cares about Sherlock, and comes to see him as a friend, and I do believe John knows that he owes Sherlock his very life, and he’s absolutely addicted to him as a surrogate for the adventure. But he also blames Sherlock for getting in the way of the happy normal life he thinks he wants. He goes back to Mary because he wants to, because he’s pissed off at both of them, but he wants Mary, and he doesn’t want Sherlock. At least, he doesn’t want to want Sherlock, and he never gets past that. And he hates Sherlock when Mary dies because if there hadn’t been Sherlock, there’d be a Mary. Sherlock is John’s fly in the ointment, his virus in the system.
And I think I went as far as to say that I didn’t think johnlock was endgame, that I would love to see it, because they’re my OTP, but I didn’t think the show had given us a foundation for it. We’d spent so much time in hiatus, consuming fic and seeing subtext in three-second long clips taken out of context, and just simply dreaming and wanting, but I didn’t think it would happen.
I don’t like it. I don’t like having my johnlock-colored glasses ripped off, but John didn’t turn into a dick. He kind of always was one.
And maybe that explains why I’ve found myself drawn more and more to Victorian johnlock lately, and why I don’t really write fixits, preferring AU.
At the end of it all I still find myself shaking my head and asking, “This? This is the story they wanted to tell?”
silentauroriamthereal:
Okay. So I just became aware of this post earlier because I’ve been at work all day, and since it’s my fic that sparked it, I feel I should weigh in.
Here’s the thing – okay, there’s more than one thing here, but here’s one of the things: fanon always goes too far. I love being part of a fandom. It’s wonderful to have a huge number of people to share your interests and passions with! But one thing that inevitably happens is that the fanon view of the characterisations turn into two-dimensional stereotypes really quickly. I loathe the terminology that calls Sherlock a “gay baby penguin” and John a “human trash can”, etc. It happens in every fandom, not just ours! What this practise does is reduce these complex and multi-layered characters into so much less than what they are.
That said, I’ve always been a fan who identified more with Sherlock than with John, and maybe because of that, I’ve always seen and disliked John’s cruelty. I just started watching the Big Bang Theory and I feel the same way about Sheldon, whom I identify with less, but I’m still completely appalled by how his friends treat him sometimes. He’s infuriating, as Sherlock can be, but Sheldon is clearly autistic or somewhere on that spectrum. He’s not insane, yet his friends constantly refer to him as being crazy. He’s eccentric and neurotic and completely frustrating sometimes, but that’s no reason to treat him that way. I feel like this is the popular view, though, to have the show’s “regular person” there as a foil to show how smart/odd/different the special character is, which isn’t at all to say that John and Leonard aren’t special in their own right. We’re meant, I think, to accept John’s regular treatment of Sherlock as normal, and that’s a larger problem than in this show alone.
And THAT said, I still have further issues with how John treats Sherlock, and more than just in series 3 and 4. I’ve found that John regularly assumes the worst of Sherlock intentions without confirming them, and Sherlock is frequently too focused on the larger problem to care to correct John. Far from being the machine John thinks he is, Sherlock is extraordinarily compassionate. If he chooses not to show it, or focuses his response into finding practical solutions, that doesn’t take away from this. Consider their exchange in The Great Game:
John: Try and remember there’s a woman here who might die.
Sherlock: What for? There are hospitals full of people dying, Doctor. Why don’t you go and cry by their bedside and see what good it does them?John took that to mean that Sherlock didn’t care about anyone’s death, whereas Sherlock rather failed to explain that what he was doing was solving the case and thereby far more useful than sitting around expressing sadness. It happens again and again. Later in the same episode, John gets all snarly and furious when Sherlock expresses admiration for the intellectual intricacy of Moriarty’s planning. He doesn’t condone it. It’s just a passing remark, yet John immediately jumps to the conclusion that Sherlock doesn’t care about any of the people involved as potential victims. And yet it’s always been clear that Sherlock cares. His face, upon hearing that the old woman’s building was blown up, is such that even John, despite his views, reaches instinctively out to console him, gripping the back of his chair rather than Sherlock’s actual shoulder. But it still happens over and over again. John clings to this narrative that Sherlock doesn’t care about people. It’s this unfounded bias that makes him only see certain aspects of Sherlock. I mean, to an extent we all do that, but John takes it to special new levels.
Which brings me to my next point: John Watson is incredibly, ridiculously, obnoxiously emotionally repressed.
He’s driven to actually saying it out loud during the scene in which he forgives Sherlock on the train in The Empty Hearse: "It’s hard for me, this sort of stuff." No shit! This is a man whose partial proposal sounded like the most agonisingly reluctant proposal in the world. I wouldn’t have said yes to someone who proposed to me with that much difficulty! And yet, when John lets himself go and says yes to what he wants, it’s "Oh God, yes!" He has no trouble. What he has trouble with is acknowledging the reality of who he is and what he wants, and this cognitive dissonance between the two is what makes his life so difficult. He wants to believe that he’s a humble, quiet doctor who can live in the suburbs with his wife (not gay!) and child. He wants to be a guy who buttons his shirts up to his throat, literally choking himself in a straight-jacket of lies that do not fit him. What he hates more than anything is people poking at this and trying to show him the truth. He would rather burn a thumb drive that would tell him who and what he married than know the truth, because he already knows that he won’t like it. He’d rather base an entire lifelong relationship on a mountain of lies – and why not; that’s the premise of the rest of his life!
What John wants is the opposite of all that. He wants adventure and adrenaline, he wants violence, he wants to be socially inappropriate, which is one of the things that draws him so immediately to Sherlock. He likes that Sherlock’s more blatant failures to be socially acceptable make him look more normal by comparison. He wants to be awake at times when “normal” people are sleeping; he wants to carry guns and have someone to protect and defend. And just as Sherlock can channel his admiration for the intellectual intricacies of a terrorist’s plans into the practical and useful field of helping people through solving crimes, so John is able to stream his need for action and adrenaline into serving his country both in an active war zone and then beyond, in Sherlock’s work. It’s a complementary relationship – or could be, if whatever that narrative of John’s wasn’t constantly trying to reject it.
He gives in at times, making it more “acceptable” by naming what’s wrong with it (we can’t giggle; it’s a crime scene), yet still does it. When things get emotional or heated, though, it comes too close to pulling away the layer of what John prefers to believe about himself away. The person who most regularly does this is Sherlock, aka the person John would prefer to spend his life with, so Sherlock ends up getting the brunt of John’s lashing out because of it. John’s own psyche tells him to stay and talk at the end of The Lying Detective, but his narrative takes over and starts talking about fatherly responsibilities (because apparently a doctor has no responsibilities to see through his commitment during an intervention??).
I’m from Manitoba, which is part of Canada’s Bible belt, and I have known more closeted men than I can mention. I’m also a classical musician, so I know more openly queer men than I can mention, too. I could name at least eight men who are clearly gay, yet married with children. I’d be willing to bet that most of them are aware of the fact, but would never, ever, ever, ever admit it, possibly not even to themselves. My first openly gay friend was someone I met just after I finished high school. He told me he’d known for years and suppressed it, refused to think about it, dated girl after girl. Then one day, he was sitting on a train and had a bit too much time on his hands, and suddenly out of the blue thought, Oh shit, I’m gay. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. When he finally decided it was time to come out, his mother joined a support group for mothers of gay sons, and my friend didn’t know whether to be happy for her that she was getting whatever kind of support she thought she needed, or insulted by it. It’s so hard. I’m just saying, I’ve seen the behaviour, a LOT. John displays all it with textbook perfection. That come-hither, knees splayed wide open in clear invitation thing on the stag night contradicts his furious “I’m not gay!” statements. That level of fury is always covering for something.
I’m not at all deliberately overlooking Sherlock’s problematic treatment of John here, for the record. It disappoints me that the writers of the show constantly seem to want to allow Sherlock to develop a bit, then yank him back and regress him all over again. But we’re talking about John here. So yeah: I think that a lot of John’s problematic treatment of Sherlock comes from his narrative of believing himself to be all of these things that he really isn’t: a good boyfriend to his parade of girlfriends, someone who likes to sit around at home in beige sweaters and drink tea, fill in at the local clinic, start a family. It’s all a lie. The minute he allows himself to act on his urges and become the person he really is, then all of his more beautiful qualities will be allowed to shine – and don’t forget that we’ve seen those, too! John is NOT a “human trash can”. He has his bad days, absolutely, but he also has moments that are the reason why so many people, myself included, love him so much. Consider him checking on Sherlock during their Christmas party, his worried conversation with Mrs Hudson when it seems like Sherlock is grieving over Irene, asking how he’s feeling once they learn that Irene is still alive, how caring he is about Mrs Hudson after she’s attacked by the CIA. How hard he grieves Sherlock’s seeming death. We never see that side of him when he’s with Mary because he patently does not want to be with her. He needs her in the sense that she’s the prop for that narrative, and he’s never more furious with her than when he learns that she’s a failure in the sense of being this prop. I don’t see him having gone back to her out of any sort of love, because it’s never shown. He doesn’t even express any sort of love when she’s actually dying, and that noise he makes following her death was – speaking personally, at least – both painful and embarrassing to hear. It was a noise that couldn’t make up its mind what it was, and it was consequently rather grotesque.
So to wind up this long, rambly thought unleashing, I do think that John loves Sherlock, or would if he stopped doing what he thought he should do to maintain this false version of himself that he’d rather believe he is, because when he does, those are the moments in canon when we’ve seen him the happiest. It’s sad, but it’s not unusual, unfortunately. We could talk a lot more about how that unravelled horribly in series 4, leading to John leaping to blaming Sherlock for Mary’s death, which is in no way logical, and the awful stuff that happened as a result of that blame. John was the one who got bored and started actively looking to cheat, preening on that bus like a peacock and actively starting the text conversation. (Gross, John. I mean, yes, Mary, I get it, but then leave! The passive-aggressive cheating thing is so not a good look for you!) So John cheats, or does something very close to it, and Mary dies. Mary dies because her own past catches up with her. When Sherlock tried to fulfill his vow to protect her, she drugged him and ran away, abandoning her infant daughter and John both. Then, when Sherlock did basically the same thing he always does, Norbury was the one to pull the trigger and Mary was the one to defy science and jump in front of the bullet. Sherlock has no responsibility for either of those actions and to claim he did is to remove the agency of both the women involved here. Mary made a choice, and John blaming Sherlock for it took Mary’s very agency out of that choice. Yet I also get it: Sherlock was the closest one, the constant real temptation, the life he left behind, so when John’s attempt at living out his narrative failed, he turned snarling against the very person he most desired all along. That’s how that works. I’ve seen it so many times before.
So I mean, I get it. I get why people feel this way about John or have all along. I sort of have, myself, but seeing his negative qualities isn’t to say that I don’t see his positive qualities or all of the reasons that he absolutely does belong with Sherlock. I’ve always thought so and I likely always will! He’s got some serious apologies to make first, but luckily for him, Sherlock doesn’t seem capable of or interested in holding grudges against any of the people who have wronged him in any way. Mary shot him and he forgave her. Eurus killed Redbeard/Victor, nearly made him kill Mycroft/John/himself, nearly blew up his friend after putting her through emotional torment, nearly drowned his beloved John, etc., yet he forgave all of it in the understanding that she was terribly, terribly mentally ill, and reached out to her later. How much more would he not forgive from John, the person who matters to him more than anything else? Yeah – we could talk about how he should maybe consider not forgiving this stuff, but Sherlock really doesn’t seem to care about keeping a record of wrongs that way – with anyone.
John is flawed and damaged and has some major issues to get his head around, but that doesn’t mean that his lowest and worst is his most real, either. He has bad days. But his good days are rather beautiful, and just as real. He’s complicated, and I think that’s beautiful. Now he just needs to get his head out of his ass once and for all.
addignisherlock:
@silentauroriamthereal Thank you and bless you for articulating so perfectly well especially in terms of the dynamic between (bbc version) John and Sherlock because YES!!!! Everything you said here is exactly how I’ve always felt about John! To be really honest, when I first joined the fandom after s3 and started reading fanfic, I initially thought it was incredibly ooc that the John in fics are always portrayed as perfect human angel saints, I was very confused because as someone who came into fanon with zero bias and a fresh perspective of the show, it was just incredibly far fetched (to me at the time) that John – who refused to call Sherlock a friend in The Blind Banker, who still called him machine in The Reichenbach Fall, who still asked “but it’s Sherlock, who would he bother protecting” in His Last Vow – THAT John is portrayed in fics to be an unconditionally loving and patient and kind and perfect person? It took me a while to adjust my thoughts on order to enjoy fics, I basically had to accept that fanon is basically “AU with possibility of OOC that is deemed as canon even though not really” ….So yeah at this point I’m just so relieved to know that I’m not the only one who feels that way, and that people are starting to realize that fanon bbc John is NOT the same character as canon bbc John
melmey-fanfics:
@addignisherlock @silentauroriamthereal I totally agree and I am glad that I am not the only one with this view of the characters. I joined the fandom just before S3 and even back then I felt that fanfiction addressing John’s crueler sides felt more in character than those who portrayed him as a saint. I see Sherlock also as neurodivergent and while John is more accepting than most people he still doesn’t really accept that Sherlock is different not to annoy people but that he just is that way. And I agree, John is extremely emotionally repressed.
simpleanddestructivechemistry:
I have so much on my mind about this, but all of the above what @silentauroriamthereal wrote speaks from my understanding too, and I am also glad I am not the only one with this view. I came into this fandom very late too and definitely understand things differently, as I saw them from a different perspective and did not have that much fanon or fanfic to see those differentiating sides of the characterisation, as I only started to read fanfic after a while and after I knew the existing bbc canon really well…
And it all doesn’t mean I don’t love John or think he does not love Sherlock. On the contrary, I love them both as one unit two parts of a whole, who cannot exist without each other. They are flawed, they are rubbish at communicating, but they both do love each other unrelentingly.
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