"You're suicidal, you're allowed chips"

 (Sherlock meta by anarfea and notagarroter)

anarfea:

Also consider that we see Sherlock eating chips by himself in The Empty Hearse when Mary comes to him with the skip code.

notagarroter:

True, but I’m hesitant to read *too* much into that.

I mean, there’s a lot of exciting stuff one could draw from it, if so inclined – that sherlock is suicidal because John isn’t speaking to him, for one. Or, since the previous scene was Sherlock and Molly coming to some understanding about her engagement, maybe Sherlock is suicidal about that! Or, since he invited Molly out for chips in the first place, maybe he thought she was suicidal.

None of those possibilities particularly rings true for me in that scene. And I think, in the grand scheme of things, even if you generally avoid chips because they are bad for you/you’re watching your figure, everyone is entitled to indulge now and then without being put on suicide watch. ;)

Just my personal read on it, ymmv.

anarfea:

I agree that Sherlock asking Molly for chips is unlikely to mean he thinks she’s suicidal. But it does suggest that he was maybe feeling down. I’ve always seen Sherlock’s day solving cases with Molly during The Empty Hearse as one of the saddest sequences in the show. It’s not just that John isn’t speaking to him. It’s that when he makes his deductions, he hears John’s voice in his head making fun of him. It’s a real turning point in John and Sherlock’s relationship, IMO. John goes from being the one person who thinks his deductions make him brilliant instead of a freak to just another one of the chorus of voices saying he’s an arsehole.

As for Molly, she tries to do her part and be John. And Sherlock doesn’t want her to feel like a John substitute and tries to tell Molly that she isn’t John, she’s herself. But he fucks up and calls her John anyway, which hurts her feelings. And then he asks her out for chips, she turns him down, and they agree that Molly isn’t going to go out solving cases with him again because she’s engaged. And I’m not arguing that Sherlock is suicidal about Molly’s engagement in and of itself. But John’s engagement, Molly’s engagement, these are both reminders that his friends moved on while he was away, and he’s not the most important person in their lives (or possibly he doesn’t even have a place in their lives) anymore.

Anyway, I’m just saying that Sherlock’s comment to Faith had me re-think the scene where he’s eating chips when Mary comes looking for him, because I read that as a point in his life where he was probably especially low. It would not surprise me at all if he were contemplating suicide at that point. Especially because people who have had long term depression/suicidal ideation (which I think Sherlock absolutely does; that’s established in A Study in Pink when he considers taking Jefferson Hope’s pill because he’s bored), tend to think about suicide a lot. So yeah, I absolutely think that Guy Fawkes night was a Danger Night for Sherlock. And I’m happy to know that sometimes he got chips instead of taking drugs.

Why is Sherlock mummy's favorite?

 (Sherlock meta by thediogenes, harriet-spy and anarfea)

Q: Why do you think Sherlock is mummy's favorite son? (she favors him) Beside his drug addiction, he doesn't make an effort to please his mother. On the other hand, Mycroft is the non problematic son with a stable and respectable job.

thediogenes:

I’m an elder sibling with a similar age gap between me and my brother and my educated guess is I think it’s down to the following reasons:

• Mycroft is considerably older than the other two so is almost certainly held to higher standard of maturity and behaviour from the get go. 
• Mycroft is emotionally closed off, secretive, cold, snarky, pragmatic to the point of moral ambiguity, all that good stuff which makes having a nice warm relationship with him a bit of a challenge. Sherlock, for all he can be similar isn’t anywhere near as bad imo. 
• Mycroft is not ‘non problematic’ - your fave is very much problematic, especially when viewed through the eyes of the parents. He’s hidden the fact their youngest child is alive from them for years. He’s always on the periphery of Sherlock’s little transgressions with drugs and danger, and I’d put money on him being blamed for them every time. “You should have kept a better eye on him” etc etc. He also gives the impression he has to be dragged kicking and screaming to family events (such as Christmas in His Last Vow, and Les Mis in The Empty Hearse). I’d guess that for all he tries to do the right thing and do his best his parents - especially Mummy - know he’s just going through the motions to try to please them. 
• We actually know next to nothing about what Mycroft was like as a child or teenager. The flashbacks and information we’re given in The Final Problem about their childhood are very much from Mycroft’s perspective, and we know he’s willing to censor or re-tell past events with a different spin. Pretty much all we have to go on is his own version of what happened. For all we know he could have been an absolute nightmare child who drove his parents up the wall. I highly doubt he was, or that he’d be the type to act out for the sake of it, but given his snark and harshness now I can only imagine what a hormone-riddled teenage version would be like. I could imagine him being outright nasty with his tongue at times without even really meaning it – can you imagine the “everybody dies, caring is not an advantage” stuff coming from the mouth of a puberty-raging 12/13 year old? I bet he really did upset Mummy. Several times.
• (Did I mention he’s the eldest and we get blamed for literally everything.)

harriet-spy:

Three other thoughts:

* Parents can take respectable, successful children for granted, especially when there is a more troubled child to focus on. This can cause tensions on all sides. Especially because, unfortunately, people do tend to attribute a higher “value” to the things they’ve been denied, so the child who doesn’t show up just seems more valuable than the child who does. This is a story so old it’s actually Biblical.

* I suspect that Mycroft was a child unresponsive to affection, solitary, self-sufficient in an eerie way. That is genuinely hard on a parent, who ordinarily invests so much of their own love and care in a child and naturally hopes for the child to return it. It takes a particular kindness and strength of character to keep offering that love when it doesn’t seem to be returned, and not everyone has it. (Thinking about it like this is about the only way I can summon up a scrap of empathy for Mummy Holmes in particular.)

* Neither Sherlock nor Mycroft seems to respect their parents. But it’s far more noticeable in Mycroft because Mycroft actually goes through the motions of family gatherings and such. I’m sure at least Mummy knows, and, while she downplays it, as an ex-successful mathematician her ego must be tied to her intelligence to some degree, so I’m sure she’s visited by the occasional “Who do you think you are, you little shit?” thought when Mycroft is condescending.

anarfea:

This. Sherlock, though he can be an arsehole on occasion, is actually pretty motivated by a desire to please people whose validation he craves. I headcanon him as a really affectionate child who was always clamoring for his parents’ attention, Mummy’s especially. And I suspect they almost lost him on a couple of occasions when he was deep into drug use, so that makes them appreciate him more.

Mycroft, [on the other hand], probably wasn’t much trouble as a child (in part because he couldn’t afford to be–Sherlock and Eurus were such handfuls, and it seems like a lot of the work of wrangling them was foisted on Mycroft). But he doesn’t strike me as someone who ever tried to earn his parents’ approval. If he was well-behaved, it was because he’s naturally fastidious, or because he realized adults would treat him more favorably if he behaved as expected, not because of any genuine desire to be “good.” He almost certainly broke whatever rules he thought were pointless when it suited him and he knew he wouldn’t get caught. And Mummy in particular has to at least have suspected that Mycroft was like that and resented him for being two-faced and secretive. And even though he was probably successful in school and later at work, Mycroft isn’t nice. If we look at the Christmas scene and see Mycroft ad Mummy snarking at each other; he seems continually irritated with her and she knows it.

Also, while Mycroft is “successful” in the sense that he has power and money and isn’t a drug addict or a psychopath, I’m not sure that his parents approve of his career. The Final Problem seems to imply that it was Uncle Rudy who got Mycroft involved in shady government work. Mycroft seems to have had a closer relationship to him than to either of his parents, and it’s possible they disapproved. Even if they don’t actively disapprove of his job, they don’t think much of it (or at least Mummy doesn’t):

MRS HOLMES: Mikey, is this your laptop? (Standing at the end of the table, she points down to a silver-grey laptop on the table, half-obscured by a chopping board on top of it which has several whole peeled potatoes and the peelings on it.) 
MYCROFT: On which depends the security of the free world, yes … (he smiles rather sarcastically up at her) … and you’ve got potatoes on it. (Sherlock glances over towards them.)
MRS HOLMES: (to Mycroft) Well, you shouldn’t leave it lying around if it’s so important. [x]

Also, in that scene, Mycroft continually snarks about how very much he hates spending time with the family, “How can it only be two o’clock? I’m in agony.” He doesn’t exactly come off as a dutiful son. Even if he does take them to see Les Mis. It’s gotta be clear to them there are other places he’d rather be.

Which is not to say that Sherlock does any better. He literally pushes his parents out the door in The Empty Hearse because he’s ashamed of them. But they almost lost Sherlock, multiple times. He’s just come back from exile in The Empty Hearse, and then in His Last Vow he gets shot and has just come home from hospital. Mycroft has always been around, and they take him for granted. Possibly they even blame him for Sherlock’s disappearance (what good is his supposedly powerful government job if he wasn’t able to dispatch Moriarty before he could do Sherlock so much harm). And Mycroft isn’t even pleased Sherlock is back. “Am I happy too? I haven’t checked.”

Anyway, Sherlock being the Holmes’ parents favorite child I can totally believe. I know a lot of fanfic shows Mycroft as the favorite, model son and Sherlock as the dysfunctional drug-addict who gets disowned. But the canon doesn’t bear that out I don’t think. What I don’t understand is why Mummy tells Sherlock “you were always the grown-up” at the end of The Final Problem. Because that seems to be completely untrue and I’m sure she knows it. Sherlock is clearly the baby of that family, even if Eurus was younger. The only reason I can think of is that she says it to hurt Mycroft. He has just admitted to concealing her daughter’s death from her.

Why did Sherlock hand the gun to Mycroft first?

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter, anarfea, harriet-spy, cumberbatchitis and thecutteralicia)

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).

“I made me” vs. “Eurus made you”: some rambling and likely incoherent thoughts on this apparent contradiction

 (Sherlock meta by unreconstructedfangirl and anarfea)

unreconstructedfangirl:

Something I really liked in the story from The Abominable Bride to The Final Problem is the whole question of what made Sherlock what he is – and indeed, I think it’s the central question in The Final Problem. I’ve read lots of comments on this in people’s meta around here, and wanted to have a go at saying what I liked about the storytelling in this particular regard.

Many have noted the apparent contradiction between Sherlock’s “Nothing made me. I made me” and Mycroft’s saying that everything Sherlock is, ever decision he’s ever made is because of Eurus. I feel like a mistake we make is taking everything the text tells us as a thing we are being told directly by the text, rather than thinking about how reliable what the text is telling us really is, considering the source and the character who says it.

I loved Sherlock’s “I made me” in The Abominable Bride. It was one of my favourite moments. I loved the idea that in his mind, he was able to take responsibility for himself, and know, somewhere deep inside, that he was the one making the decisions that kept him separate and alone. I feel like, if we can realise that WE choose things, then we have some kind of agency, and power over them, and I like the idea of his having that kind of power over his own narrative. So, when this story of Eurus and young Victor comes along, and Mycroft tells us of that this isn’t true – in fact, Eurus made him? If I’m to take that at face value, it’s disappointing – childhood trauma made Sherlock what he is.

Dull – and done to death, right?

The thing I love, though, is that they are both right, and both wrong, and I really enjoyed thinking about what the constellations are in the spaces between them.

What we all do, every day (and I think being in love with and retelling this story is part of this effort for many of us) is tell ourselves the daily story of what we mean and who we are. In the words of Neurologist Oliver Sacks, we “throw bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness” and create ourselves via narrative – the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. This is what makes us human beings – this continual myth-making – and this narrative of who we are and what we mean is a construct of our minds.

So…Sherlock told himself a story – he made himself. It was a defensive mechanism, and it coincided with his emotional withdrawal, a mechanism he used to protect himself from the pain of love, loss, grief, and importantly, horror. Sherlock made himself, and part of making himself was denying the fact that other people have the power to shape us, and reshape our narrative. He radically claimed agency in defiance of pain. But, it’s not quite true, and what’s more he can’t quite stay away from a world full of horror, can he? As a detective and a junkie, he tries to solve the mystery of horror and pain over and over again while keeping emotional reality at a distance.

Mycroft, meanwhile, sees Sherlock from the outside – sees him as a victim of trauma whose subsequent decision not to feel has kept him safe from further trauma, and he encourages it: “…caring is not an advantage … don’t get involved … Redbeard!” Mycroft sees Sherlock as fragile, prone to self-destruction, and in need of protection – as powerless, and he’s not wrong. Sherlock is compulsive, an addict, and a person in denial of his own heart. Mycroft acts out of love in a paternalistic manner towards not only Sherlock, but the whole family, because that’s the story Mycroft told himself… and the story tells us that this is “limited”, and it is. It’s nice that in the end, Sherlock is able to see that Mycroft did his best, though. That’s real progress.

The fact that both of these things “made” Sherlock isn’t a contradiction, it’s two seemingly contradictory things that are both true from different perspectives; two data points that allow us to see what’s happening when Sherlock remembers Victor and opens his heart to his Eurus, and then chooses the path that will allow him to remake himself, having integrated what he knows into a truer version of events. He DID make himself, and also, she made him. We are not impervious to others, but we do choose which way we go. Sherlock chooses love.

The experiments Eurus runs to try to find out who Sherlock is – what he will do given the choices she gives him all lead to this question of what he will do with her when he knows the truth – and she needs him to know, or she can never come down from her metaphorical plane. She loves him and she needs his love, so she is trying to find out how his love works throughout the episode. Because, Eurus did something terribly damaging, and she needs her brother to know it. She also loves him, and needs him to love her. I love that Sherlock, because of everything that he has been through and felt and experienced is able to have the empathetic response that he has. That he realises that he has a role in healing something in her, as she has healed something in him by finally helping him to see that he is not, never has been, and can never be an island.

And I love, at the end, seeing Sherlock embrace the fact that who we are is a co-creation – a relationship between the people we love and our responses to them. We are not islands of independent myth-making. Sherlock Holmes is not an isolated freakish genius – he is a person of some experience and the wisdom that came from it – he has a past, he lived a life.

The final scenes, in which John and Sherlock embrace what they can be together, and rebuild their home and their hearts to include all that they have experienced and become because of love, and they are surrounded by their village of loved ones were really moving to me. In fact, when I watched it again, I didn’t even hate Mary’s voice over – she was an important part of their shared story, she loved them both, and she belongs there. I really like this as the beginning of them BEING WHAT THEY ARE in legend – a brilliant, humane detective and his astute storyteller who is smarter than he looks, and now the myth they are making is their partnership. It’s a story with both horror and love, and the only way it is what it is, is in partnership. I mean… I loved that! [...]

anarfea:

So, I agree with your analysis but one of the things that always got me about the line, “you do remember her, in a way. Every choice you ever made, every path you’ve ever taken, the man you are today: is your memory of Eurus.” is how true this is –of Mycroft. 

Mycroft says, “what Uncle Rudi began, I thought it best to continue.” Locking Eurus up wasn’t Mycroft’s choice. If we decide that they took Eurus away when she was five (which I’m basing solely on child Eurus’ apparent age and Mycroft’s comment to the governor that “she’s been capable of [enslaving people] since she was five”), then Mycroft was thirteen. He was a child. Rudi decided to lock Eurus up in Sherrinford with the “uncontainables” and lie to Mr and Mrs Holmes about the fate of their daughter. Mycroft simply carried on the lie. Again, he was thirteen and presumably traumatized by knowing that his sister killed his brother’s best friend and his brother no longer remembered her. Presumably he thought it would be best if his parents could also, if not forget that Eurus existed, then move on with their lives thinking she was gone.

But that decision irrevocably changed Mycroft’s relationship with his parents, and with Sherlock. It isolated him from his entire family (ironically, except for Eurus, the only one in on his secret). Mycroft spent Christmas with Eurus and Jim Moriarty and then went home to drink alone while Sherlock celebrated at 221b surrounded by friends.

Uncle Rudi also seems to have set Mycroft on his career path. He seems to have been some kind of shadowy government spook, and put Mycroft on the path to shadowy government spook. Who knows who or what he might have been if he hadn’t spent his entire life protecting this secret.

So yes, Mycroft is the man he is today because of Eurus. And IMO, he’s projecting when he says that about Sherlock. It’s true for him, so he thinks it’s true for his brother. And on some level, it is. Someone on my dash (i think @themissadventurer?) was saying that when Sherlock says “I made me,” in The Abominable Bride, we hear a dog barking in the background and he says “Redbeard,” immediately after. Of course his childhood trauma influenced him. We are all shaped by our childhood traumas (or at least I know I was). So Eurus having shaped them is the truth.

But the truth, as Oscar Wilde said, and The Final Problem keeps reminding us, is rarely pure, and never simple.

“Moriarty slipped up, he made a mistake…”

 (Sherlock meta by eugeniebatch and anarfea)

eugeniebatch:

Oh, no. He didn’t.
He told Eurus about Molly.

In those 5 minutes, he told her about the things that would drive Sherlock out of his mind. And of course, he also told her about the person who mattered the most, giving her the opportunity to play with Sherlock’s emotions.

Thus, even after death, Moriarty managed to “burn the heart out of him”.

anarfea:

I thought that Eurus deduced this herself. Sherlock made the mistake of having Molly show up at John’s therapy session to diagnose him. And John refers to her as “the one person who can see through your bullshit.” Eurus watches the whole exchange after she examines him where Molly says “I’m stressed; you’re dying.” She sees what they mean to each other, when they exchange those dark, meaningful looks at the ambulance.

Jim thought that John was Sherlock’s heart, IMO. He connected John to Victor via Redbeard (hence the referring to John as a ‘pet.’ as does Eurus). He thought John is the person who matters the most to Sherlock, and he thought that Sherlock would kill Mycroft to save John, and that he would suffer terribly.

Eurus says that “Moriarty thought you would make this choice.” I think she was hoping that Sherlock would kill John to save Mycroft, because she wanted him to chose his family over his friend. The way she wanted him to chose her over Victor when they were children.

I think that Jim and Eurus had a post-mortem bet going on, about who Sherlock would kill. And I think they both lost, because in the end Sherlock chose to kill himself before he’d kill either Mycroft or Sherlock.

And as for Molly. I like to think that Jim didn’t realize that Molly mattered, and that Eurus did. But the real catch of course, is that neither of them succeeded in burning Sherlock’s heart out in the end. He came to the realization that he loves her. And you can see at the end of The Final Problem that she knows it. If anything, they help Sherlock find his heart again, after it was broken in The Lying Detective by his grief over Mary’s death and John’s cruelty towards him.

The Fall and Water

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter and anarfea)

notagarroter:

Mycroft: fills a plane with dead people.
Sherlock: deliberately overdoses on a plane, nearly dies.
Eurus: invents imaginary planes full of sleeping people who are about to crash.

Forget Victor Trevor and the well. What the hell happened to these kids at a formative age to turn them against aviation? 

No wonder Mummy and Daddy started leaving them home when they went line dancing in Oklahoma.

anarfea:

Looking back on A Scandal in Belgravia post The Final Problem, I’m wondering if Eurus didn’t either suggest the idea of The Flight of the Dead to Mycroft, or if she wasn’t otherwise aware it was happening. Because it seems that the whole meeting with Jim happened at around the same time as the events of A Scandlal in Belgravia, no? Anyway, Eurus’s metaphor/dream/hallucination of being alone in the sky in a plane filled with sleeping people seems to be connected somehow with Mycroft filling a plane with dead people.

As for Sherlock, he would have OD’d on a train or a bus or whatever vehicle they put him on to send him to Eastern Europe to die, methinks.

notagarroter:

I don’t necessarily disagree with you about Sherlock – certainly, that’s how I interpreted it the first time around, and I think that interpretation is still valid.

But I’m open to the idea that the plane is significant to Sherlock and the general narrative mostly because of the scene with Moriarty telling him “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s never the fall – it’s the landing.” And then the plane lands. So… it’s kind of an almost-pun that seems to point to something larger – Sherlock’s general angst around falling and landing and dying, etc.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be anything more than the dream retrofitting itself around a real-world stimulis – an experience I’ve had myself, whether on a plane or hearing a phone ring or what have you.

Mostly I’m just making this observation because I’m (mildly! it’s not a big thing) annoyed at the retroactive imposition of the water motif over Sherlock’s whole life. Yeah, there was the pool and there was the waterfall and there was the aquarium, but water is a SUPER COMMON THING in everyone’s life, and you just *know* they didn’t have this thread in mind before S4.

Particularly it annoys me because they already *had* a very resonant, meaningful motif working throughout the narrative, and that’s the motif of falling. The Fall is important not just in this incarnation of Sherlock, but arguably in *every* incarnation going back to ACD and that incredibly powerful moment when Sherlock and Moriarty go together over the Reichenbach Falls.

The point of the Reichenbach is not that it’s WET.

The point is, it’s a very tall, dangerous place where Sherlock Holmes died, heroically and tragically. (And Moriarty as well, less heroically but perhaps just as tragically, to some of us.)

This version of Sherlock jumping off of Barts was a re-imagining of that mythic moment (*without* water), and MP!Moriarty was of course making reference to this in TAB when he talks about the fall and the landing. And then we jump-cut to the plane: a landing that does not, in fact, kill Sherlock, just as his Reichenbach landing did not.

And then The Abominable Bride takes us (in Sherlock’s mind) to the actual waterfall, again, not because it’s wet, but because Sherlock still hasn’t fully processed what his fall meant to him. That’s the trauma that he is working through – that we all are.

And I’d argue that MP!Molly teaching him how to fall in His Last Vow is another oblique reference. And there are others dotted throughout the text. For over a hundred years, Sherlock Holmes’s fall and death and rebirth have been the traumatic break that we are all, always, working through and trying to accomodate and process and understand.

And The Fall works on so many interesting levels – it’s a waterfall, it’s a painting, it’s an actual plunge to one’s (potential) death, it’s the metaphor of “falling” in love, but it’s also the Fall of Man, the moment when we gain knowledge we can never unknow, and thus become doomed. It’s just a *hugely* resonant cultural trope.

So no, I’m not entirely serious about the plane thing. I was mostly sort of crankily observing that, once you start imposing patterns on the text, the airplane motif strikes me as at least as resonant as the water one, or in fact more so.

But neither is as compelling to me as The Fall.

anarfea:

Yeah, I totally agree now that you’ve mentioned it that the Fall is a more compelling motif than water. I just for whatever reason wasn’t connecting the plane with falling before. That said, the water motif in The Reichenbach Fall did reasonate with me. I feel like water is sort of a metaphor for the unconscious regardless of context. Also for emotion. Also birth and beginnings. All of us spend the first nine months of our lives sloshing around in water. So I feel the whole thing in The Reichenbach Fall isn’t so much about Victor or drowning in the literal sense as much as it’s about deep emotion and repressed feeling.

The Fall, like you said, is about a fall from grace, a leap of faith, etc. But water is birth, to me. And descent. And regression. We’re going back to the beginning. Or maybe I just like Sherlock sinking into a pool of black goo.

Why did Eurus flirt with John?

 (Sherlock meta by theleftpill and anarfea)

Q: Hi! Why do you think Eurus flirted with John? I mean... if she wanted to know more about him or his relationship with Sherlock she just needed to read John's blog, right?

theleftpill:

I don’t know, really. I haven’t let myself delve too much into Eurus’ storyline, because I’m not really resolved to embrace it yet. (I’m not really a fan of the retconning required.) But to explore it a bit -

Reading the blog gets you only so far in knowing John. It’s clear that there’s a lot that John is leaving out: whether out of privacy or laziness or forgetfulness, the blog entries are not the whole picture. And when you’re writing for an audience, you write with a “persona”, you present a picture of yourself to the world which may not be entirely genuine. You don’t see interactions, body language, emotion, etc. So reading the blog wouldn’t necessarily give Eurus a complete picture of John, or his relationship with Sherlock.

A big question about why she flirted with John is WHY? Was she trying to understand him, and for his own sake or Sherlock’s? Was she looking for material for her game? Did she just want to know her brother’s best friend? Was she testing his loyalty in his marriage? I think this is one of the major elements that suffered in (my imagined) compression of the stories into S4. As it stands now, for me, the flirting has no reason, doesn’t really go anywhere (except to make John guilty), and just serves no purpose. At least to my mind.

I’d like to hear others’ opinions on this - I know a lot of you have been exploring Eurus’ storyline and motivations a lot more than I have. Thoughts?

anarfea:

@drinkingcocoa-tpp had an excellent answer to this question on the most recent episode of 3 Patch Podcast during the S4 reaction roundtable. In a nutshell, Eurus understands that Sherlock’s friendship with John is the thing that separates him from her and Mycroft (and also Moriarty). John is what grounds Sherlock (not saying I agree, but I think that’s the point the creators are trying to make) and Eurus is alone in the sky with nowhere to land.

So I think on some level she’s trying to figure out what’s so special about John, and if it will work for her, too. Like, if she seduces him, if she can be close to him, can she get something like what Sherlock has with John? And the answer is no, because Eurus isn’t actually capable of connecting with people because she sees them all as unconscious bags of meat.

But it’s Sherlock’s ability to connect with John that convinces her of his ability to help her. Sherlock functions as a bridge between Eurus (the sky) and ordinary people (the ground). John is what makes Eurus think that Sherlock will be able to talk her down. And I think this is why she shows up as “Faith” with the cane and the gun in her handbag and is basically re-creating the circumstances under which Sherlock met John, in a way. And Sherlock is nice to her. Like, he reaches out with such genuine kindness, and I do think that she genuinely does like him. She got what she was looking for–the goal of her game wasn’t actually for Sherlock to kill Mycroft (that was a test that she hoped he would pass and that Jim thought he would fail). She wants him to find her room. She wants him to talk her down. And John is what convinces her that’s possible.

Blaming Mycroft, blaming the parents...

(Sherlock meta by bbcsassdeadass, anarfea, mollymatterrs, 

introspectivenavelgazer, strawberrypatty and nctanthcaarchive)

bbcsassdeadass: 

This. This made me so angry because she’s blaming him again. She is blaming a poor kid that tried to make everything better for his God damn family and all he gets is this response. Like do you think about what age he was when shit started? When Euros killed Redbeard and he had to comfort and change his brother’s memory. Can you imagine how guilty he felt? Do you think about how stressed this man is about everything and the fact that he is raising your God damn children and makes sure that Euros gets what she wants? Where were you when Sherlock was using drugs? Why aren’t you making a list? Where were you when he searched for his little brother? Do you think about the fact that he is always wearing that gun-sword-umbrella because he is always in a defensive mood because when he took the job he knew the risks it involved? So no lady, he shouldn’t have "done better". You should’ve raised your children. You should’ve done better. You should’ve thought about the brother that raised your other children when you weren’t there.

anarfea:

And this is why Mycroft has a file …..

mollymatterrs:

I feel inclined to remind people that Mycroft continued what their Uncle Rudy had started, that it’s implied Eurus was taken away from the family against their wishes, that Mycroft explicitly told his parents that Eurus was dead, burned in a fire, that Mummy Holmes didn’t have the resources Mycroft has had, and she was just moments earlier told that all of that was a lie and her daughter had actually been alive for years, kept as a prisoner.

She’s mother, who has just learned her daughter’s been locked away and grown up without her in a remote island prison. How do you think she’d react?

“I’m so sorry Mycroft, that you purposely took on this burden and didn’t involve us, didn’t allow us to make the choice when it came to our own child.”

This is a broken family, for lots of reasons, and I am so angry that people are shafting the parents to bolster Mycroft. They made mistakes, Uncle Rudy made mistakes but, hell, let the men suffer concequences too. 

introspectivenavelgazer:

It’s more interesting that he messed up by not telling his parents. Like his attempt to protect backfired SPECTACULARLY.

strawberrypatty:

I feel the need to also mention: Mycroft encouraging Sherlock’s memory suppression is NOT a good thing. Sherlock has had childhood trauma that had impacted his ability to form relationships and most likely contributed to his drug abuse. Repressing that doesn’t make it go away, it just buries it. Mycroft has good intentions, but he does do things he shouldn’t. Sherlock should’ve been able to heal from his problems. Eurus should’ve had human interaction other than solving things for the government.

We know very little about the Holmes family dynamic, but we do know there are three children who from a very young age thought they were smarter than their parents. Uncle Rudy (who I’m guessing is very much like the Holmes children) also thought he was smarter. People made decisions for Mr and Mrs Holmes about the way their children should’ve been raised.

nctanthcaarchive:

[...] This is not okay. As an older sibling myself I can empathize with Mycroft so much. This is not fair to him in the slightest. Also his Uncle is the one that helped him with Eurus. Why is darling Uncle Rudy not in trouble as well?

Mycroft has done everything in his power, practically his whole life, to protect his family. No one, NO ONE, is more dedicated to watching out for them than Mycroft Holmes. So don’t you dare tell him that he could have done better. You are the parent. You could have done better.

I do realize she didn’t know her daughter was alive but even for Sherlock it doesn’t seem as if she has done much to help him since he moved out. She just expects Mycroft to do everything. I understand the fact that parents have to let their children make their own life choices. But you can’t decide that and then decide that it is your other child’s fault for not interfering with his sibling’s downward spiral.

John's physical abuse of Sherlock

 (Sherlock Meta by anarfea)

Q: I've seen a lot of posts lately about John beating up Sherlock in TLD, and I know you've been calling John out as an abuser since S3 at least. But I haven't yet seen anyone discussing Sherlock firing his gun in Mrs Hudson's general direction. Personally I found that scene pretty shocking. Any thoughts?

A: It was absolutely awful, but I don’t think it affected me quite the same way because it just seemed like one more incident in a series of awful incidents showing Sherlock’s appalling disregard of gun safety. While I do not own a gun, I have experience with them, and it is ingrained in me that you never, ever point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot, whether you think it’s loaded or not. Sherlock has pointed a gun at himself, at John, shot the walls, more times than I can’t even count.

So, yes, I agree with you, it’s terrible. He was high out of his mind and totally out of control in that scene and he could have killed her. The fact that Mrs H handles the situation as calmly as she does is a testament to her and an indication that she’s had a gun pulled on her lots of times before. The things she says in that episode “you’re not my first smackhead, Sherlock Holmes,” and also the line about not being a “civilian,” remind us that Mrs Hudson is a creature of the battlefield, too, just like Sherlock and John and Mary. We’ve known that about her for a long time (the first thing we learn about her is that Sherlock helped get her husband executed and she therefore owes him a favor), plus the fact that she took a beating from the CIA goons in A Scandal in Belgravia, show that Mrs Hudson was always a bamf, we just needed reminding.

Which is why I think that while Sherlock’s behavior towards Mrs H is terrible and I am not excusing it, I would not characterize it as abusive, where I think John’s behavior towards Sherlock absolutely is.

To clarify what I think defines abuse, I think it requires a sustained imbalance of power. Sherlock doesn’t have power over Mrs Hudson. She owns 221b, She could kick him to the curb if she wanted. When he is shooting wildly in her direction, she disarms him, handcuffs him, and hauls him off to John in the boot of her car. She is at her limit, she has decided exactly how much of Sherlock’s shit she is willing to put up with and this has just crossed it.

In other words, she sets boundaries. 

Why did I find John beating Sherlock in the morgue so much more disturbing? Because Sherlock has no boundaries. 

John punches Sherlock so hard it takes the skin off his knuckles and Sherlock is dripping blood from his nose and mouth onto the floor, then kicks him repeatedly, to the point that Culverton Smith, the serial killer, is like, “dude, lay off him,” and Sherlock’s response is “let him, he’s entitled.” What a telling, loaded word: entitled.

John thinks he’s entitled to hurt Sherlock because Sherlock hurt him, and Sherlock lets him, because he believes that he deserves it for having hurt John. The excuse that they both give is that Sherlock “killed his wife,” but John’s anger at Sherlock extends back further than that; he never forgave Sherlock for the fall, and Sherlock knows it. In a way, the scene is sort of a reboot of the reunion scene, where John tackles Sherlock to the ground in the restaurant, and Sherlock, although he is in agony (you can see it on his face and we know that he has just been rescued after being tortured in Serbia), lets John attack him because he thinks he deserves it for having faked his death. And then he lets John do it again and again as they get kicked out of multiple restaurants.

And this dynamic continues throughout S3 and TAB. John belittles him, and threatens him, because he thinks he’s entitled to, and Sherlock takes it and takes it, because he thinks he deserves it. Never once does he raise a hand in self-defense or ask John to stop.

And I know that people have said that Sherlock did shitty things to John, too, and he absolutely did (the train car scene is awful, the non consensual drugging was awful), but it felt different to me because I just saw two co-dependent people doing shitty things to each other where each of them was giving as good as they got. But I felt like since S3, Sherlock has been acutely aware that he could lose John forever. John leaves Baker Street. John marries Mary. John has a baby. And Sherlock is desperate to keep John in his life at any cost. If John wants to use him as a punching bag every now and again because he’s still angry about Sherlock faking his death to save John’s life, then Sherlock will take it. And honestly, at least on screen, it has never been made clear if John even knows that Sherlock did it to save John’s life, or that he was tortured in Serbia. Because Sherlock has never told John those things because to do so would be a form of self-defense. Would be asking for mercy he feels he doesn’t deserve.

So the tldr is:

Sherlock shooting wildly in Mrs Hudson’s general direction was terrible and he could have killed her. It would have been an accident, but it would still have been his fault. And Mrs H expertly defuses a very dangerous situation and gets Sherlock under control so he can’t hurt her or himself (without beating him, I might add).

John could have kicked Sherlock to death on the floor of that morgue and Sherlock would have let him. John kept kicking Sherlock even though he’d already disarmed him and Sherlock wasn’t fighting back.

And the later is far more disturbing to me.

Also, no one is shoving Hudlock down my throat. No one is telling me that if I don’t ship Hudlock I should stop watching the show. I don’t see Hudlock shippers telling other shippers “don’t ship Sherlolly or Sheriarty it’s abusive.” But I see these things and nastier ones from the radical arm of the dread acronym fandom, all the time.

And to make it abundantly clear: I’ve never said and will never say, “don’t ship Jlock because it’s abusive.” I have elsewhere defended people’s right to ship whatever they want. Fiction is not reality. Depiction is not endorsement. But the purity wankers don’t extend rare pair shippers the same courtesy, and I’m just tired of the hypocrisy, honestly. Every time someone calls John Watson a “bamf” for threatening to break every bone in Sherlock’s body while naming them, and then turns around and say that I shouldn’t ship Sherlolly because Sherlock doesn’t respect her, my blood pressure rises.

Honestly, I think the toxicity in Sherlock fandom is why I have pushed back so hard against John as a character and jlock as ship as much as I have. Because people keep telling me it’s beautiful and wonderful and I keep feeling like I’m being gasslit.