Why did Sherlock hand the gun to Mycroft first?
notagarroter:
In the scene where Eurus wants them to kill the Governor, I mean. Just curious about people’s headcanons, since Sherlock doesn’t explain his reasoning.
anarfea:
Sherlock has built Mycroft into an almost god-like figure: omniscient, omnipotent, not-quite benevolent. He’s the Voice of Authority in Sherlock’s mind palace, where he appears with what look like a halo and angel wings.
And while Sherlock resents Mycroft’s meddling and intrusion, he also relies on him. Whenever he OD’s, he makes a list for Mycroft. When he shoots Magnussen in the head, he expects Mycroft to get him a pardon “like a proper big brother,” (and Mycroft does him one better by making it look like it never happened). And even though Sherlock and Euros spell out “fuck off” when they’re wandering the streets, I think Sherlock takes comfort in knowing that Big Brother is watching over him.
Mycroft has cultivated this image, probably from a pretty young age. The Final Problem shows us how quickly Mycroft grew up; he watched his sister kill his brother’s best friend, threaten his brother’s life, and burn down the family home when he was 12-13. The more we learn about Mycroft, it’s clear that “caring is not an advantage,” is something he says because he knows the pain of caring too much. So he buried his heart deep, and cultivated his Ice Man persona. And it appears to have worked–his code-name is Antarctica, which shows his colleagues, at least, believe it.
I think Sherlock believes it, too. He thinks that Mycroft has succeeded in entirely suppressing sentiment–a behavior he initially tries to emulate in S1. By S3, he’s learned that there are advantages to having friends, and he tries to encourage Mycroft to find himself a goldfish. But while Sherlock transitions from wanting to be like Mycroft to wanting Mycroft to be like him, his belief that Mycroft doesn’t form attachments is constant.
I think over time, because of whatever resentments and feuds and unsettled scores lie between them, Sherlock has come to believe Mycroft doesn’t care for him, either. His comment, “then why didn’t you want me to take it?” re the suicide mission to Eastern Europe is only half-jesting. And Mycroft realizes that he’s made a mistake by guarding his heart so closely even Sherlock has come to suspect he doesn’t have one. So he tells him, “Also, your loss would break my heart.” And Sherlock chokes on his cigarette; he’s that unaccustomed to sentiment from Mycroft. But Mycroft continues to let Sherlock see through the facade. At the end of The Abominable Bride, he tells him, “I was there for you before, I’ll be there for you again, I’ll always be there for you.” I think, even though Sherlock brushes him off, it’s gotten it through his thick skull that Mycroft cares about him. But the goldfish? Not a chance.
So he hands Mycroft the gun because he thinks it should be easy for Mycroft to do this for him. Mycroft has always fixed all his other problems, and anyway what’s one more dead goldfish to The British Government? I think he’s shocked when Mycroft refuses. (So was I, and I’m still not entirely convinced that that moment was in character). If I try to defer to the fact that Mark Gatiss is writing a character and playing a character he knows well, the best explanation I can come up with for Mycroft’s behavior is that he’s already seeing how this is going to end–he knows how Euros thinks, and he’s terrified that Sherlock and/or John is going to die and it’s all his fault. And I also think having to kill the Governor in particular hits him especially hard because of the threat he makes when they first arrive to Sherrinford: “I find any indication my sister has left this island at any time, I swear to you, you will not.” I’m not saying that was an idle threat, but I don’t think Mycroft can deal with being forced to carry it out. While I suspect that Mycroft has, even if he’s never murdered anyone himself, at least sanctioned murder before, I don’t think he can deal with getting blood on his hands when he’s not the one making the decisions.
Anyway, he can’t do it. And Sherlock is surprised, I think, because it doesn’t fit with the image of Mycroft that he has. I think a huge part of The Final Problem is about Sherlock remaking his image of Mycroft, realizing he is not a demigod but a man. Mycroft if fallible, Mycroft isn’t always clever, in short, Mycroft isn’t as strong as he thinks he is. Or as strong as Sherlock thought he was.
But he did his best.
harriet-spy:
I have had very similar thoughts about the failure to shoot myself. I would add that the moment seems to have arisen from a tension between the demands of theme and of plot. As we’ve been told, the point of The Final roblem, and of Euros’s tests, was to force Sherlock to choose emotion and human connection over Mycroft and mere reasoning. Which means that, all along, Mycroft should have been advocating for the ruthless/”logical” choice in every test. But if he did so, it wouldn’t have been much of an episode. They had to find some way to avoid his simply short-circuiting every supposedly riveting moment of emotional suspense by killing a bitch or three, and the best they could come up with was to vaguely cripple/sideline the character, regardless of continuity.
Many, many things about the treatment of Mycroft in The Final Problem bothered me, but I do think that, in order for Sherlock to become more mature, he needs to take a more realistic view of Mycroft. His response to Mycroft’s perceived infallibility has always incorporated a large element of childish abdication of responsibility. That’s something he is only likely to get over at this late stage in his life by recognizing that the infallibility has its limits. To me, this is the most legitimate of what I will (in extremely petty fashion) refer to as the attacks on Mycroft in this episode, the one that is most psychologically sound generally, and most consistent with prior episodes. And yet, to be honest, I’m not sure that the writers fully thought it out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if any S5 showed regression on this point.
(now if only they could’ve bothered to construct their plot so it supported their conclusions, rather than having a lot of random loud! exciting! stuff! happen and then informing us that it meant this or that…)
anarfea:
I do agree with you that The Final Problem has a lot of tension between plot and theme, and also between plot and character. I find the reading of The Final Problem that I like best is to look at it as almost an allegory about the show rather than an actual episode (not sure if that makes sense). All of the characters feel symbolic on pretty much every level. I do agree with you that while there were some moments in The Final Problem which I loved and which gave me lots of Mycroft feels (the whole flashback sequence where adult Mycroft is interacting with the Holmes children, for example, and the bits about Lady Bracknell, and of course the Holmes killing Holmes sequence) I was upset about a couple of decisions they made, particularly the clown sequence. I can come up with satisfactory (to me, at least) explanations for why Mycroft couldn’t shoot the Governor.
I cannot reconcile the version of Mycroft we see in Serbia, who clearly has field experience and trusted himself enough to go in and get Sherlock out of there, with the Mycroft who is apparently incapable of dispatching an intruder in his own home. Much the way I cannot reconcile the idea that the Holmes’ family had an ancestral home in the countryside with the version of Mummy and Daddy Holmes we see in The Empty Hearse. I was arguing in my multi-shipping meta that I almost think of the different series of Sherlock as existing in parallel universes or something. Up until now, all my longer fics have been canon compliant, but I now feel like there are too many inconsistencies for me to come up with a coherent narrative. At this point I’m just going to use the parts of canon that I like and ignore the bits that don’t make sense.
cumberbatchitis:
I have always thought he simply considered Mycroft responsible for the whole mess, so in his eyes he was supposed to be the one to deal with it. And also he did not want John to face such a task. But yeah, all points mentioned are very reasonable.
thecutteralicia:
I must say, I’m surprised that so many people have a hard time with Mycroft being unable to shoot the governor. Serbia was different, as Mycroft had control of the situation and also no one died (that we know of) - if he had, for example, been forced to kill the man beating Sherlock, it would have been in defense of his brother (and himself). Being prepared to shoot a home invader is self-defense. Should I find it disturbing that so many people can’t see a difference between those situations and being forced to murder an innocent person with one’s own hands???
John is a soldier. In the first episode, he killed Jeff Hope with zero remorse. Yet no one seemingly had a problem with his inability in The Final Problem to carry out the murder of the governor. In his case, people seem to realize that just because someone is a soldier - and prepared to shoot a person who is actively a danger to others - doesn’t mean they’re automatically okay with the willy-nilly murder of innocents. Why isn’t the same extended to Mycroft?
We know Mycroft is in intelligence and probably his orders have resulted in the deaths of others. However, every indication in the show is that Mycroft specializes in counter-terrorism and homeland protection. His goal is to protect as many people as possible - we see that in The Final Problem, too, with his thought that they should have the girl crash the plane into water or away from civilization, so more people don’t get hurt. His job is to have pragmatic thoughts like that - if the girl and the plane’s passengers can’t be saved, then obviously the next best option is to have the plane crash in a place where people on the ground won’t be at risk.
The situation with the governor is different. For one thing, Mycroft is not in control. They are being manipulated, and the choice is either one person dies or two people die, and really, there’s no guarantee Eurus wouldn’t just kill the governor’s wife anyway. The prospect is to kill a person with his bare hands - something we have zero evidence Mycroft has ever done (and Sherlock has done, FFS). Furthermore, we have the psychological weight of the situation: this is the place (Sherrinford) and the person (Eurus) Mycroft is supposed to be able to control. This is the sister who has haunted him his entire life suddenly having power over him.
Mycroft has spent literally most of his life trying to contain Eurus, and now it’s all gone wrong. As a child, he witnessed his baby sister turn into a psychopath and kill another child, then threaten to kill Mycroft’s adored baby brother. Then she burned down the home with (presumably) the entire family in it, which could have killed them all. Then Mycroft was burdened with the secret of her captivity and pressed by his uncle into being complicit into a huge, groundbreaking lie to this own parents. Mycroft then spent years tending to his drug addict baby brother by himself. The man has more issues than Vogue, and in Sherrinford they all began to collapse in on him.
anarfea:
"if he had, for example, been forced to kill the man beating Sherlock, it would have been in defense of his brother (and himself). Being prepared to shoot a home invader is self-defense. Should I find it disturbing that so many people can’t see a difference between those situations and being forced to murder an innocent person with one’s own hands??? "No one in this thread is arguing that killing a home invader and being forced to kill an innocent person is the same. What I specifically said is that while I think it makes sense that Mycroft was unable to kill the Governor, the bit I really feel was OOC for Mycroft was the clown sequence. Like you said, the clown is an intruder. Killing him would have been self-defense. Serbia!croft would have skewered that clown.
I get that Mycroft was in charge in Serbia and he feels out of control when he thinks Eurus is in his house. Even so, I feel like the reason Mycroft panics and runs down the stairs instead of killing the clown is because that’s what he has to do for the sake of the plot. And I do think that writing Mycroft OOC for plot reasons was a disservice to his character.
Also, when people are talking about Mycroft’s hypocrisy, again, the comparison isn’t really between killing a home invader vs. killing an innocent person. The comparison is between ordering an assassination and pulling the trigger yourself, or between authorizing an operation which will result in people dying and killing someone yourself. We know from The Six Thatchers that Mycroft employed AGRA. We don’t know what exactly he utilized them for, but we do know what kind of work Mary did. We know from The Final Problem that he authorized the purchase of a number of “patience grenades” that will presumably kill a bunch of people.
And yes, you can argue that there’s a difference between ordering the assassination of a terrorist and killing an innocent person. But innocent people die in counter-terrorism operations too, and their deaths are written off as collateral damage. People try to justify the deaths of those innocents by making the utilitarian argument that more deaths may have been prevented, and we see Mycroft employing that argument:
"His goal is to protect as many people as possible - we see that in TFP, too, with his thought that they should have the girl crash the plane into water or away from civilization, so more people don’t get hurt."Quite so. And if you carry that argument through to its logical conclusion, he should have shot the Governor so that just the Governor died instead of the Governor and his wife. Fewer people would have been hurt. That was the utilitarian choice, and presumably when running counter terrorism operations, Mycroft makes utilitarian choices.
But he couldn’t make that choice in The Final Problem because he didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. And the reason people are saying that he’s a hypocrite for that is because his hands are already unclean.
thecutteralicia:
“What I specifically said is that while I think it makes sense that Mycroft was unable to kill the Governor, the bit I really feel was OOC for Mycroft was the clown sequence. Like you said, the clown is an intruder. Killing him would have been self-defense. Serbia!croft would have skewered that clown.”He tried to kill the intruder. He pulled out the gun and pulled the trigger, but Sherlock had removed the bullets in anticipation of that so no one would get hurt. As for skewering him, you can’t stab someone who is many feet away and out of your reach.
As for the rest of your post, the talk of “collateral damage” runs into a philosophical debate about war that I’m not interested in having in this context. I don’t think it’s OOC for Mycroft (nor John, for that matter) to not have wanted to shoot the governor in the head as part of Eurus’ games, no matter their pasts or what they’ve done to protect others (and again, it astounds me how many people forget that we’ve seen John shoot someone already on the show).
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