"If I wasn't everything that you think I am"

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter and vulgarweed)

notagarroter:

This is a favorite sherlolly moment for me, because of the contrast with John.

The key to John is that John never doubts Sherlock. Sherlock asks him in The Reichenbach Fall if he is 100%, if he has any doubts at all, but even when Sherlock is on the roof, John never questions for a second that Sherlock is the genius he always claimed he was.

But Molly… Molly doesn’t care. Molly will take care of him, will protect him, even if he *is* a fraud. No questions asked. I think for John, it is at least important that Sherlock be one of the Good Guys. He couldn’t tolerate it if his hero, his idol had actually kidnapped and poisoned children. But Molly… Her loyalty extends even beyond morality.

And that’s why she’s the one who matters.

It’s also why I hate to see this ship dismissed as cute fangirl fluff, as nothing more than the “heterosexual option”.

There is something dark and tragic and a little twisted going on between these two. And I like it.

vulgarweed:

Molly kept Sherlock’s secret. She knew how John was grieving, and probably Mrs. Hudson too. She knew that Lestrade blamed himself and Anderson descended into madness to the point of losing his job. She knew all sorts of fallouts and repercussions of Sherlock’s “death,” including ones that deeply hurt people she knew and liked.

And she kept the secret anyway. No doubt she too played the grieving friend, probably put on a little extra devastation-performance for those in the inner circle who knew how she really felt about Sherlock.

She faked his death certificate. She prepared the lookalike corpse. Whatever witchcraft had to be done with DNA and whatnot to make Sherlock Holmes as “dead” as a living man can be, she did it. She broke so many laws and risked her own career, stone cold, and got away with it even after the truth came out.

She played them all. With her sad little sniffles.

Molly is that ‘best friend’ who REALLY WILL help you hide the body - or the lack of one if the death is your own. Girl is STONE COLD SCARY and it’s all the more effective because she looks mousy and normal and cute. She will be the last one to break at the end of the world.

Shipping aside, how do people not see what a great compelling character she is? I would watch BBC Molly so hard.

The Missing Reichenbach Solution 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

Moftiss et al love a cliffhanger, don’t they? It’s an old trick, beloved to writers and filmmakers since the early days of serial adventure dramas. In its most classic form, the hero is shown hanging off the edge of a literal cliff as the episode comes to a close, leaving the viewer desperate to find out if he will live or die in the next installment. Of course, the sophisticated viewer knows that the hero will almost always live (unless the actor’s contract has been canceled). But that doesn’t necessarily detract from the drama.

The last scene in The Great Game is a good example of this – our heroes are in a deadly situation, snipers behind them, explosives in front, and a semi-suicidal madman presiding over it all. How will they possibly get out of this? Tune in two years hence!

From a distance, the end of The Reichenbach Fall looks like another standard cliffhanger, the viewer breathlessly anticipating the promised resolution. But it’s doing something a bit different.

Contrary to tradition, this cliffhanger doesn’t end with our hero on the cliff. Instead, we get to watch him fall. We watch him hit the ground. And even more remarkably, we watch him come back to life.

Roll credits.

That’s not the usual order of things when creating a cliffhanger, but in this case it was necessary – this was a nod, of course, to the fact that the audience has known for over 100 years that Sherlock Holmes survives the fall. Moftiss have shifted our emotional energy from, “what is going to happen?” to “how did he do that?” That in itself is a neat trick, but that’s not all that’s happening here. Sherlock’s appearance at the end of The Reichenbach Fall marks a shift in the way this story is being told. A shift that was anticipated as early as the first episode, but is only now coming to full fruition. The Reichenbach Fall is a crucial moment not only in the narrative, but in the meta narrative of the show: Moftiss are forcing us to examine what it means to update this hero to our own era.

In the first season, it was possible to watch the show and believe that all you needed was a handful of mobile phones to bring the iconic Victorian detective into the modern age – very little else had to change.

But already in series 2, Moftiss started showing us the cracks that result from this uneasy melding of the old and the new: something about Sherlock Holmes doesn’t quite fit with our world. Mobile phone in hand, he nonetheless remains a bit of a throwback, not quite in step with the way we tell stories today.

Why is this? Season 1 Sherlock is the very model of the rational, coherent subject. This creature is a fantasy that has been with us since at least the Enlightenment, and was much beloved by Victorians as well. The rational subject may not have achieved complete mastery of the world around him, but he knows it to be possible. He (and he is always, necessarily a white male) believes in science and technology and progress, and that these tools will be enough to eventually unlock every mystery. The rationalist trusts his reason and he trusts his senses, especially vision – to properly see something is to understand it.

JOHN: Yes, how did you know? 
SHERLOCK: I didn’t know, I saw. 

Those who fail to understand have failed to see. The rational subject is also stable – he knows who he is, he understands himself, and he behaves predictably, reasonably, and coherently.

With the development of the Moriarty arc in season 2, we see that rationalist fantasy start to fall apart. We could argue the end of A Scandal in Belgravia marks the beginning:

The first sign of the irrational creeping into Sherlock. Then in The Hounds of Baskerville, we see a Sherlock who no longer understands himself.

He is not in control of his body, and can no longer trust his senses – particularly his eyes. He is becoming fractured, and he doesn’t handle it well. Then in The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty, the imp of the postmodern, steals the show by deconstructing the mythology of Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty robs Sherlock of his good name, but even more damningly, demonstrates to him that his reason and intelligence cannot protect him.

Sherlock saw, but he didn’t hear – his reason failed when up against the clever, unpredictable madness of Moriarty.

Given this deconstructive narrative, what kind of “solution” to The Reichenbach Fall could we possibly have expected? As viewers, we like to imagine that we would have been satisfied with a single, coherent, perfectly explicated solution. But I’m arguing that such a solution would have been a betrayal of the larger critical work the show is doing, and would have been a disappointment in its own right. Many fans wished for a solution that brought us back to S1 Sherlock, perhaps to reassure us that reason will triumph over madness, and Sherlock Holmes may once again be the iconic, crime-solving master. But that was never really possible, nor should we want it to be – any more than we should want to return to the simplistic, dishonest, phony rationalism of the Victorian era.

Instead, Moftiss challenged us with a series overlapping, contradictory and unresolvable explanations for Reichenbach. We are teased with two that seem patently ridiculous before getting a third which *seems* like it will satisfy our yearning for a simple, straightforward “truth”.

And left unexamined, it does – a casual viewer can walk away from The Empty Hearse feeling like he got the answer to the problem.

But anyone who looks more closely will discover that even the third solution, in all its wondrous complexity, simply doesn’t work. The S1 fantasia of a Sherlock who can always explain what happened with perfect, rational precision has been broken down into fractured perspectives, a tension between public and private truths, logic that isn’t logical, mania (in the form of Anderson) that may be quite sane… Everything Moftiss taught us to trust about this universe has been questioned and unsettled.

Which brings us to the fourth Reichenbach solution – the one that was right in front of us all this time, but is rarely recognized or acknowledged:

Of all the solutions, this is the only one that “works”, but it’s anything but rational. And what’s most telling about this solution is something that happens only a few moments earlier:

In this moment, Sherlock is dwelling in undecideability. He doesn’t like it, he tells us he doesn’t like it. Rationalist that he is, he wants there to be answers. And yet, in this moment he is acknowledging that there aren’t always answers. Not merely that he hasn’t figured out the solution yet, but that the truth may not be certain – that there may not even be a single, coherent truth.

And so it’s no surprise that when John finally demands to know what really happened when Sherlock jumped off the roof, the answer is both impossible and inevitable – what we didn’t want to accept and yet knew all along: Sherlock Holmes is indestructible. Even his own creator couldn’t kill him. And writers like Moftiss, and like me, and like you, will keep reviving him until the end of time.

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.

Molly has no idea how important she is to Sherlock

 (Sherlock meta by broomclosetkink)

I’ve always understood Sherlock’s reaction to Molly in this particular scene [at the hospital in TRF] to be him being truly BAFFLED by the fact that she has no idea how important she is to him. Because if you look at their relationship from Sherlock’s point of view: they not only work together in the lab, they work WELL together, which is rare; she is obviously kind to and thinks well of him, which would be equally rare for him; in his own, stunted way, Sherlock does his best to be kind and good to Molly Hooper, though in series 1 and 2 he’s just a raging dick because he can’t get over the fact the world does not, in fact, revolve around him (while simultaneously being filled with self-loathing this man I can’t even); he not only trusts her opinion, he respects her work and intellect; Molly may well have been the closest thing he had to a friend before John came along. We know they had interaction before John showed up and the show started, because of the way they work together.

So when Sherlock just sort of blinks at her you can see his brain going “ERROR ERROR INFORMATION DOES NOT COMPUTE FILE CORRUPTED”, he is truly STUNNED that she has no idea of how highly he thinks of her. Of how far she’s been allowed into his life. Of what, exactly, she means to him. (In truth, I think that at this point in the series, Sherlock himself doesn’t fully understand how much Molly means to him.)

And when she offers him chips but then shoots his stunned agreement down because she knows he doesn’t really want any... [...] He’s trying. He doesn’t try for just anyone. I mean, like, ever. But for Molly Hooper? You bet your sweet ass he will. And it’s for a case. There’s no motive behind it. He just wants to make Molly happy. 

[...] The very first time I watch this scene, I just paused it and cried. I mean like full on gross sobbed, fogged up my glasses, went through God knows how many tissues. Because Molly is fucking heartbroken and she wants so desperately to help, even though she believes Sherlock thinks about as much of her as one might a tolerated pet. She’s just good. And Sherlock can’t believe that she, who sees so very clearly, DOESN’T see what is right in front of her face (to his mind), which would be how he feels about her. That they are friends.

And he’s hurt by it. Look at his eyes. Look at his expression. Go back and watch The Great Game, when Molly storms out. Watch his face crumple and his eyes go all wide and hurt. He was trying to be kind to Molly. And I feel he does that often with her; tries to be kind, fucks up royally, hates himself for hurting her worse.

[...]

A thought: why did Sherlock go to Molly for help in S2?

 (Sherlock meta by therealbucky05, irisang and bassfanimation)

irisang:

I mean, he didn’t go to her because he had to fake his death. According to him later in S3, he and his brother had already been working on that. But he still went to Molly just moments before he jumped off that roof. He didnt go to her because of her profession. Because he and Mycroft must have already arranged everything they needed. So, the question remains.

What did he really mean when he said he needed her?

therealbucky05:

Moffat said in one interview that the emotional display on the rooftop was a show for John, but that the emotions with Molly where real - in my opinion he wanted a reassuring presence during that trial.

irisang:

I agree. He didn’t really need anything technical from her when he faked his death. Molly was about to leave her work place when he went to her. And we know that the building was supposed to be closed for other people when he jumped. But Sherlock wanted her on board.

bassfanimation:

This is probably a good post to talk about something that I thought about at 221B Con, during the Molly Hooper panel.

This gif shows exactly why Molly Hooper is in Sherlock’s mind palace, and why he goes to her for help when there’s no one else to turn to. It also shows why Lestrade, and more specifically John, are not in Sherlock’s mind palace.

“If I wasn’t everything that you think I am, everything that I think I am…” 

Sherlock, for all intents and purposes, appears to be superhuman, almost a magician, to John and Lestrade. You see it in how Lestrade looks at him, and how John looks at him. They really do think it’s all magic, that Sherlock alone has this amazing ability to dodge death and figure out every single problem on Earth with little or no assistance. They think he alone can rid the world of every evil. They truly ‘believe’ he is more than what he really is. Sherlock himself, as stated by Irene Adler, believes he is a higher power. Lestrade and John believe this as well, whether they admit it or not.

In this scene, Sherlock is effectively lifting the veil for someone he trusts. He’s showing Molly Hooper (and the audience) that he isn’t the Wizard of Oz…he’s just a man who needs help. Despite everything he has built around his reputation, his facade, his image, he is simply still a man, and he can’t do it all on his own. He is showing Molly, “This is actually something I can’t do, because I’m not a higher power…and I want to know if you are ok with that. Will you still care for me? Will you still help me even though I’m showing you what I am behind the curtain?” The funny thing is, Molly already saw what was behind the curtain…he is simply saying she was right.

Molly accepts Sherlock, without the magic, without the curtain, just as we, the audience have.

John and Lestrade are not allowed to see how the sausage is made (sorry, people said not to use that analogy for obvious reasons, but it’s so apt here). They can’t see behind the curtain. Sherlock is quite addicted to the feeling of people thinking he’s super human. John and Lestrade’s opinion of him, and what he can do, means more to him than logic at this point. He needs at least someone to believe he’s special, that he’s THE genius, THE BEST. We saw in His Last Vow that Mycroft constantly taunted Sherlock, calling him stupid, making him second guess himself. John and Lestrade believe Sherlock is not only not-intelligent, but they truly see him as the very pinnacle of the best. He must preserve that for them. For himself…and even for them. (It’s actually hugely selfish of all three of them to feed into this, but that’s another discussion.)

Lestrade and John, both having been in services that show the worst of humanity, need to believe in something good. Something far, far better than the humanity they’ve come to know. Sherlock is that answer for them.

For Molly Hooper, she’s also seen death, but it’s the aftermath. Because of her natural optimism, she doesn’t need all this reassurance that humanity is amazing or magical. She sees beneath the curtain all the time, in a very odd way. Her job is to see to what other people miss. To see inside. She does this with living human beings as well, and she’s not afraid of it. Sherlock, I think, notices this about her very slowly, but it becomes something very special to him later. This scene marks the real turn. He is allowing her to see inside him, because he trusts her to see inside him and not hate what she sees, as so many others have before.

This is why Molly, Mycroft, and even Anderson are in Sherlock’s mind palace. Most importantly, Molly is the only one who consistently encourages him. She’s the one who he trusts every time.

You. 

 (Sherlock meta by mae-jones)

Molly asks, “What do you need?”

Sherlock Answers, “You.”

Not, ‘your help’. Not, ‘help’. Not anything else.

Sherlock needed Molly, not just her assistance. I would argue there were agents Mycroft could have employed better than Molly. She was actually a huge liability and potentially detrimental to his plan. She’s not experienced in subterfuge. In fact, she wears her heart on her sleeve. I tend to doubt very much that she flitted around acting all cool and collected that day. Also, she would have been exhausted after pulling a double shift. Molly Hooper’s activities should have raised some serious red flags regardless of how ‘important’ anyone thought she was to Sherlock.

So, why did he risk it? He told us.

“You.”

He needed Molly Hooper. He wanted to be in the company of someone who loved him absolutely unreservedly in what might be the final hours of his life. He needed her emotional strength and support. He needed someone to save him while he saved others. No one else would do.

Rewatching Sherlolly: The Reichenbach Fall (part 1)

 (Sherlock meta by justanotherfangirls)

(Note: I split this into two parts because the whole Sherlolly in this episode just overwhelmed me. In a good way.)

This is the episode that changed everything for me. I was pretty much comfortable with Sherlock and Molly’s setup in the past five episodes. It’s cute, sweet, and Not Happening, and I was okay with that. Until they made Molly much, much more than a fangirl with a crush. Here we come full circle from episode one of season 2, when he had believed that caring is not an advantage, love is a dangerous disadvantage, and sentiment is a chemical defect found on the losing side. Molly became the key that made him realize just how wrong he is. She had saved him, not only from Moriarty’s intricate, diabolical plan, but perhaps more importantly, from himself. With the caring, sentiment, and love that he had loathed so much.

Let’s first take a look at the scene with Kitty Riley, which had some Molly references. Sherlock classifies his fans into two types: Catch me before I kill again, and Your bedroom’s just a taxi ride away. Molly had always been labeled as a representation of the fans, but Sherlock himself doesn’t see her as a fan at all, as we would later see.

Kitty tries to seduce him into agreeing to an interview, and Sherlock then decides to beat her at her own game. He becomes so mouthwateringly seductive and dangerously sexy, taunting her just to say at the end, to her face, that she is never getting an interview - or him. He is being deliberately cruel. He never does try that trick with Molly, their flirting was always so gentle and innocent. Never cruel or dangerous. We also see Sherlock judge Kitty as someone who tries hard to be noticed, keeping up appearances with the posh skirt and polished nails, and a hunger for something, attention or money or fame. He emphasized two traits he found her severely lacking: being smart and being trustworthy, with the latter stressed more. It could be coincidence, but it’s as if in his mind, he was comparing Kitty to Molly. Molly who is content to stay in the background while he focuses on his work, who dresses with cherry blouses and baggy pants, and who never, ever asks or demands for anything. Who is awfully smart he elicits her help in cases. Who he had always trusted. He even treats them opposite. It looked a lot like Molly was his gold standard and he may not even realize it. The complete opposite of what repels him. (And I don’t know about Sherlock, but don’t people usually compare the person coming on to them to that one person they set apart from the rest?)

The first actual scene with Molly was when she was on her way to a lunch date. She is apparently trying to move on from Sherlock, who never does notice her. Only Sherlock then barges in, Molly says she has a lunch date, and he says easily, cancel it, you’re having lunch with me. He even spins her around and it seems familiar he might have done it several times in the past. He had technically offered that she have a lunch date with him. He didn’t say us even if John was there. And remember, his idea of a date is two people who like each other would go out and have fun, by solving a case. And he brought crisps, he doesn’t eat, and he wouldn’t carry John’s food in his pocket. He had planned this. And he was oh so very sure, he knows that Molly would always choose him, would rather be with him even if she would just have crisps in the lab, than a real meal in a restaurant with anyone else. He knows what she was trying to do - get over him, and he consciously prevents it. He wouldn’t do that if he also intends for her to do so. He would have some other clever way to make or trick her into helping him.

Sherlock knows how Molly feels about him, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t outright reject her, in his words to save her time. He also seems to make her feel that he doesn’t notice her. I remember his line in THoB, when he said that he had always divorced himself from feelings, therefore acknowledging that he had them. I wonder if this would be one of the cases he does that, where he pretends there’s absolutely nothing between them, only for the truth to resurface at the mention of a lunch date.

Molly’s confused what? made Sherlock show more of his cards. One of her old boyfriends, he says with such spite. Interesting that he uses the plural form. Oh he is jealous. And he even knows that Jim wasn’t her boyfriend, they went out three times, and she ended it. She looks at John when she says that last bit. Because Sherlock knows all of that already. As I said before, he just maybe liked her to correct him and to say it all again. And then he becomes unbelievable. He actually blames Jim’s crimes on her dumping him, implying that the consulting criminal psychopath was too heartbroken that he decides to terrorize London. He never believed that, Molly would never believe that. But he uses this as reason for her to avoid all future attempts at a relationship, “for the sake of law and order”. Sherlock is nothing if not logical, and even with his insults, manipulation, and lies he always manages to make sense. Except here. He wanted her to avoid relationships - all of them. But he uses a silly argument for that. And the only logical reason for that is something he cannot say aloud. Of course, although she looks so very confused at his mixed signals, Molly could not say no. But it still makes me happy watching him try to win her.

Rewatching Sherlolly: The Reichenbach Fall (part 2)

 (Sherlock meta by justanotherfangirls)

I loved this episode so much, but I could never find the words to fully explain myself. The Sherlolly during these next parts have evolved from more than just cute and sweet and something the story could probably survive without, to something so strong it had penetrated the core of Sherlock’s heart, and quite a few viewers’ as well.

Let’s talk about the lab scene. Sherlock is a man claiming to be married to his work, and that is why the lab is his home away from home. It is thus interesting that he regularly keeps Molly there, is perfectly comfortable with and often even requires her presence. He calls her John and was unfazed when she corrects him, because he was as comfortable to her as to John, and John is his bestfriend, roommate, who probably knows his quirks, his toilet habits, how he looks without the suits or the coat or the hat.

Molly proceeds to try speaking to him, but as he is busy with his microscope tries to shut her down. He doesn’t however, drive her away even if he was at the midst of a case. He tells her not to feel the need to make conversation as it’s not really her area. He actually found better words to say to her than to stop disturbing his work. His tone is even kind and gentle and so unlike him. A real effort, remember he is on a case. Molly pushes on, and he gives a gentle warning, saying her name. No rolling of eyes and rapid fire deductions. But Molly has something really important to tell him, something he needed to hear even more than solving the case in front of him.

Molly deducing Sherlock is definitely a direct reference to Sherlock’s initial challenge to Kitty. She surprises him so much he actually gets distracted. He stares at her like he was seeing her for the first time. And he could very well be given that he always pushes any and all emotions aside. This time he couldn’t, he was forced to really look at her, and I could just feel all these emotions come pouring in into him despite himself. His guard was definitely at its lowest with Molly, letting her hear his mental notes and uncertainty, and see him when he’s sad. He had to look strong and in control in front of everyone, even in front of his bestfriend. Molly thinks this is because she doesn’t count, but I think it’s because Sherlock is not as immune as he likes to believe, he is subconsciously aware of her unconditional love and unwavering faith, and based on his succeeding actions had accepted them. He is only now being aware of that. Explains his reaction when Molly tells him she doesn’t count, his surprise when he thanks her and he realizes how much he actually meant it, and his effort to be kind to her to accept her offer of food even with the risk of digestion slowing him down. Long after Molly was gone, he still was processing everything until John had snapped him out of his thoughts and he finally returned to the case.

I loved that Molly’s point was not to ask him why he’s sad, or how she was able to see that, or how she thinks she doesn’t count. She even pushes all these unimportant details out of their conversation. Her point was that she will always be there for him and help him with anything he needed. He can, in every sense of the word, have her. It doesn’t even matter if she or Sherlock could not figure out how she could, because she had laid out everything she had to offer for the man she loved. And Sherlock, bless him, finally sees that.

In his encounter with Kitty, Sherlock realizes something. Moriarty has been sowing doubt in people’s minds, and there’s only one thing he needs to do to complete the game. Somehow his mind goes straight to Molly. And in this moment he decides to consciously accept her help and love and caring, to tell her how much she actually meant to him, which means he had to listen to his emotions for once. It is just so beautiful and moving and the most that we have seen of Sherlock’s heart. Even the most skeptical of viewers can’t not see that he is sincere, when he gave her an out. He isn’t forcing her, blackmailing, or lying to her. He probably figured if she would not help him, at least she knew that she counted and always had. Which makes this my favorite line, if I wasn’t everything you think I am, everything that I think I am, would you still want to help me? He most probably gave her the choice whether he would win or lose, live or die. He who had lived his entire life proving he’s clever and brilliant and had equated it to his worth, and he wanted her to base her choice on whether she’d still love him, willingly help him, even if he thinks he’s now not worth anything. He put her first before himself. And if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

If I wasn’t everything that you think I am – everything that I think I am – would you still want to help me?

 (Sherlock meta by akajustmerry)

This scene kills me because he thinks he needs to explain himself and justify himself, because he has to do that with everyone else. He thinks he’ll have to manipulate her, or beg her because, even though it’s all a lie, Moriarty did make sure that he cut everyone who would believe in him off.

But not her. Not Molly.

Molly offers help before he even asks, “What do you need?” and he even tries to tempt her out of it, “if I wasn’t everything…” and she still just asks, “what do you need?”

People always applaud Sherlock for being so self aware but he’s so aware of everyone else too. He knows Molly would do anything for him and here he almost wishes she wouldn’t because he’s going to ask her to be a part of this big lie that’s going to hurt the people he cares about most (including her and him) and he knows she’ll say yes.

Don’t let anyone tell you that Sherlock Holmes isn’t aware of how much Molly loves him. Don’t tell me the fall was easy for him, Don’t tell me that when he said he thought he was going to die, that he didn’t believe that at least some of him would.

The importance of Molly's absence in THoB

 (Sherlock meta by kathleenkellly)

There is not much written about THOB that is Sherlolly related, which makes sense since Molly does not appear. I think, however, that Molly’s absence from the episode actually reveals a lot about Sherlock and Molly’s relationship that carries over into TRF.

During the scene in the Baskerville lab, Sherlock is analyzing the sugar looking for the presence of a drug. He gets extremely frustrated. Dr. Stapleton and John are talking to each other and are of no help to Sherlock. He’s all on his own looking for the answer and ends up throwing the slide at the wall in frustration, something I don’t see him doing in Molly’s presence.

Sherlock is missing Molly at this point. He needs his lab partner. Like John, Molly is someone Sherlock needs to test his theories on, someone knowledgable enough to provide feedback. While John is helpful in other areas, chemistry and lab work are not his strengths.

In TRF when he needs to analyze the footprint of the kidnapper, Sherlock immediately goes to Molly. “I’ve got a lunch date.” “Cancel it. You’re having lunch with me.” He simply won’t do the analysis without her. When they start working, they’re a team. Molly keeps him calm and focused.

Sherlock calls her 'John', but John is important to his work. The fact that he confuses her says a lot. In the lab, Molly is his John, his crime-solving partner. Right after this, Molly blows Sherlock’s mind by correctly deducing him, something John has never been able to. Sherlock suddenly looks at Molly in a whole new light. This woman sees right through Sherlock and knows exactly what’s going on. He doesn’t fool her. She asks him what he means when he mumbles “I owe you”. He tries to blow it off, but Molly won’t let him. She proceeds to let him know that she is aware that something is going on and that he should tell her because she can help him. From this point on Sherlock knows that Molly is the one person that matters the most to him, the person he can turn to in his darkest hour.

Molly Hooper and the Reichenbach Fall

 (Sherlock meta by penfairy)

There is something they’re not telling us about Molly Hooper.

In all the theories they showed us of how Sherlock survived The Fall, none of them quite seemed to fit, and the chink in the armour is always Molly.

When Sherlock went to Molly in TRF to ask her for help, he was in a tremendously vulnerable state. His facade had completely crumbled and he was showing her a side of himself not even John had seen. There were tears in his eyes when he said “I’m not okay” and the answer to the question “What do you need?” was “You.” Sherlock needed Molly: he said it. For the conclusion of that highly emotional scene to be Molly faking some paperwork or finding a Sherlock look-alike is absurd.

Just look at how Sherlock treats her when he comes back to London, the way he’s a little nervous around her, the way he actively seeks her company and tries to impress her and make her laugh, the way he thanks her with sincerity and the way he smiles before he kisses her cheek and wishes her happiness. This man adores her. He treats her with an uncharacteristic fondness that is completely at odds with his attitude towards her in S1 and S2. He made a real point of thanking her properly and refused to let her brush it aside. All of this indicates that whatever she did was far more important than they’re letting on.

And then there’s the fact that Sherlock immediately thought of Molly when he was shot. It’s as though “How Not To Die” is now filed under “Molly Hooper.” She’s a safety net for him, ready to catch him the instant he’s about to fall apart. She’s a constant source of comfort and security for him and he quite literally trusts her with his life.

So what exactly did she do to earn this incredible trust?

To bring about such a profound attitude change in Sherlock Holmes, she must have done something truly extraordinary on the day of The Fall. [...] Molly did a lot more than fake some paperwork. The day of The Fall, his life must have been completely in her hands.

When Sherlock said Molly mattered the most

 (Sherlock meta by bassfanimation, strawberrypatty and justanotherfangirls)

bassfanimation: I always thought when Sherlock said Molly mattered the most, he was talking about the plan (Moriarty's failing/Sherlock's succeeding). This is with shipper goggles off, though. I'd love to read it as something more, but I didn't want to read as much into it for fear of my tiny heart crackling to bits. Was it clarified at all in any interviews?

strawberrypatty: A lot of people take that meaning. But I don’t see it making sense. Molly’s part in the plan was actually very minimal. With everything Mycroft and Sherlock did— closing off an entire, busy street in London, bribing assassins— they could have easily found the body and faked the lab results without Molly’s help. But Sherlock got Molly’s help because he wanted her help. He needed to have Molly believe in him.

justanotherfangirls: When he told Molly that she’s the one he needed, I didn’t take it to mean anything else other than he had needed all of Molly, what she had offered earlier, “you can have me”. I don’t think it was ever about the body or the faked documents. He needed her to be on his side when everyone else had lost faith in him, including himself. And maybe he couldn’t believe someone would love him that much without demanding for anything in return, and that is why he was so very grateful he decided to give her her very own special date crime solving day with him, something sweet and thoughtful and sentimental, something he never did to anyone else without any ulterior motives.

Rewatching the "I don't count" scene

 (Sherlock meta by sherlocklock)

I was just watching Reichenbach and I, of course, came across the scene “I don’t count” and I had to pause for like 30 seconds to get my shit back together. Cause I think that Molly just says it offhand, like, “Of course I don’t count. It’s just a fact.” She’s not asking him to refute it, she just accepts it. And it just makes me so sad because even, in the face of that, she still extends her hand of friendship. She is willing to do anything for Sherlock without question, despite the fact that doing so puts her in horrible danger, and she doesn’t ask for anything in return. She just loves him and wants to help.

And while I think that Sherlock is probably incapable of having a relationship with anyone, romantically, if he were to be in a relationship, I think Molly would be the one because over the three seasons, she watches him and begins to understand and accept him. [...] I think that, other than John, Molly is one of the only people who truly loves Sherlock for who he is and doesn’t want him to change and wants the best for him and will throw herself in any position for him (including making herself be the bad guy when she slaps him in order to do what’s best for him).

So in conclusion, Molly is amazing and I love her.

If there’s anything you need

 (Sherlock meta by theleftpill)

Look at that first pair of stills. Remember the scene. Remember how Sherlock said that question: “what could I need from you?” This was in the height of the “I’m Sherlock Holmes the baddest bad-ass around I will wipe the floor with you” Sherlockian arrogance era. And when he asks this question, he does not ask it with arrogance and dismissal: “what could a worthless thing like you possibly offer a god like me?” He asks it with confusion and genuine curiosity. He wants to know what could he need from Molly? She’s thrown him. He thinks about it. He starts to reconsider her.

And then “What do you need? You.” Again - dramatic. Desperate. If he was not genuine here, he would have been all about Business, but he’s in over his head. He needs an anchor, a lifeline. He realizes what he needs and what she can offer (besides the fact that this scene is coded so completely Hollywood cliche romance-time it’s unbelievable).

He absolutely means it when he says “I love you” the second time. The first is Old Sherlock; he’s saying it to get what he wants. The second one is real. He doesn’t understand it yet, he doesn’t know how deep it goes, but this is the first moment he realizes it’s real.

It’s been building for years.