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possiblyimbiassed · 7 years

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John’s wedding is a crime scene and Sherlock is the victim

What is BBC Sherlock actually about, and why were HLV and Series 4 so weird? I know there are lots and lots of different theories and alternative explanations at this point, but as far as I can see, there are two principal, recurring themes that are referred to in every part of this show: drugs and suicide. In fact, there’s not a single episode without references to self-inflicted deaths and drug problems:

• ASiP: A serial killer drives people to commit suicide. The victims are threatened and manipulated to take a dangerous pill. Scotland Yard makes a drug-bust in Sherlock’s flat (but finds nothing). • TBB: Killings occur in rooms locked from the inside, suspected to be suicides. A criminal network is dealing in drugs and stolen antiquities. Perpetrator literally falls on his own sword. • TGG: Three victims are wrapped up in explosives like suicide bombers. One victim is slowly killed by repeated injections with Botox which she has agreed to on a limited scale (John refers to this as ‘overdosing’ on his blog). A drug dealer (accidentally) kills his sister’s boyfriend and gets rid of the body. • ASiB: A man is killed by his own returning boomerang. Sherlock is drugged with an injection in the neck. Mycroft and John suspects a “danger night” for Sherlock as a drug user, after Irene Adler is found ‘dead’. • THoB: Henry Knight becomes suicidal when he’s harassed by visions of a monster dog. A hallucinatory drug, which instils fear, causes the visions. Sherlock and John are both affected by it. • TRF: Moriarty drugs a guardian with a spray, in order to steel the crown jewels. Kidnapped children are poisoned with candy. Sherlock is forced to jump from a rooftop in a fake suicide. The villain blows his brains out with a gun. • TEH: Sherlock’s ‘suicide’ has gravely affected John, who seems depressed and almost suicidal himself. John is drugged with an injection in the neck. • ASoT: Mrs Hudson tells John about her husband who was running a drug cartel. Major Sholto, who is stabbed in the back in an injection-like manner, threatens to kill himself at John’s wedding. • HLV: John finds Sherlock in a drug den, high on drugs. Sherlock is shot, and under his recovery attached to IV morphine. Sherlock drugs his family and John’s wife. After killing Magnussen, Sherlock is sent to Eastern Europe on a suicide mission. • TAB: Sherlock overdoses a mortal cocktail of drugs on the aeroplane. In Sherlock’s Victorian Mind Palace he takes a 7% solution of cocaine and Moriarty blows his brains out (again). A bride commits fake suicide, disguises as a ghost, murders her husband and then kills herself. • T6T: Sherlock is drugged by sniffing on a poisonous note from ‘Mary’. A young man dies trapped inside his own car (=classical method of suicide). ‘Mary’ throws herself in front of a bullet. • TLD: The whole episode is about suicide and drug use. TD12 is a drug used to make people forget things. 221B is converted to a drug lab. Sherlock, who is constantly high, deduces that Euros/Faith has been cutting her own wrists lately, and is suicidal (wears a gun in her handbag). Sherlock hangs on the railings of a bridge, but doesn’t jump. He tells Culverton Smith that he wants Smith to kill him. • TFP: Euros cut her own wrists when she was a kid “to see how my muscles work”. The parents thought it was a suicide attempt. John and Sherlock are drugged with tranquilizers.

These are far too many references to the same two themes, in order to be just a coincidence! Why so much talk of suicide, if these are detective stories about murder cases? And what’s with the constant nagging about drugs? In my opinion, whatever the answers are to the greatest enigmas of BBC Sherlock, they have to do with drugs and they have to do with suicide. And I also think TSoT is a turning point, parting from which the show displays an increasing weirdness from HLV and onwards throughout Series 4, because John’s wedding is a crime scene and Sherlock is the victim. And from HLV most of the plot takes place inside Sherlock’s Extended Mind Palace (EMP theory).

My working hypothesis for the moment is this: Sherlock didn’t actually get shot with a bullet; he overdosed drugs shortly after John’s wedding in a suicide attempt caused by heartbreak. John marrying someone else broke Sherlock’s heart. That’s why he imagines ‘Mary’ shooting him in her wedding dress. That’s also why we see him hospitalized so often from HLV and onwards, and why nurse Cornish says in TLD that he has ‘made a mess of himself’. Sherlock is dying from the drugs, but he has to wake up and survive in order to save John from committing suicide.

The villains are basically metaphors. Moriarty is Homophobia and ’Mary’ is Heteronormativity. They work together to keep Sherlock and John from having a relationship and to drive them to suicide. This could be achieved, in Sherlock’s case, by making him realize he has fallen in love, then break his heart and let drugs and self-harm do the rest. In John’s case killing Sherlock (by suicide) could achieve it. Sherlock fears that John would kill himself with his gun; that’s why we see firing guns so often from HLV and onwards. And I do believe this entire part of the show happens inside Sherlock’s mind (EMP theory).

Homophobia (Jim) is there to instil fear, to frighten Sherlock away from John, to have Sherlock believe he’s a monstrous sociopath who isn’t ‘good’ for John and not worthy of him. In most scenes we see Jim, he is extremely sexualized, but in a creepy and frightening way, often flirting with thoughts of suicide:

Sherlock says in ASiB that sex doesn’t alarm him, but he still seems terrified to talk about it even with John in his own mind palace in TAB. John’s love for Sherlock is ridiculed (Jim calls him a ‘pet’) and made to appear as an unhealthy obsession.

Heteronormativity (’Mary’) makes it clear that an ordinary life - according to the norm - is the best for John; marrying a woman and go live in the suburbs with kids, car and a steady, ‘normal’ job. Unfortunately, John seems to have bought into this norm in spite of his own feelings, and Sherlock is made to believe this is the only life that can make John happy. And if he takes any step towards making this same-sex relationship reality, which would imply telling John how he feels about him, ‘Mary’ threatens to kill him.

In HLV, TAB and S4 Sherlock (in his Mind Palace) seems to go out of his way to find excuses for ‘Mary’; to glorify her and try to redeem her. What she has done to him is completely glossed over and never more addressed until Mary’s dying moment (which still happens inside his mind). But I think ‘Mary’s treacherous behaviour and her theatrical, unrealistic death in T6T are signs that Sherlock’s subconscious is aware that the lie of heteronormativity is not what either he or John needs; ‘Mary’ must actually go. But the fact that Sherlock subconsciously wants to get rid of ‘Mary’ makes him feel terrible guilt, fuelled by his low self-esteem:

(I’ve tried to express my ideas about these metaphors in these posts: X, X, X and X)

So – what evidence is there for these wild theories?

In this ‘script’ from ASiP published on BBC’s website, we get this scene, which seems to have been left out in the final version:

(Lestrade and Sherlock are standing on the roof top of Scotland Yard talking about the case of repeated suicides; my bolding):

LESTRADE Okay. What am I getting wrong this time? SHERLOCK No notes. No prior sign. Each of them in a strange location that means nothing to them where they’ve never gone before... That’s not how I’d kill myself. On Lestrade. Glances uneasily at the edge of the roof, where Sherlock is standing. LESTRADE ... So. How are you doing these days?

In other words: Sherlock would kill himself, but in a different way, presumably after a) leaving a note, b) some ‘prior sign’s, and c) he’d do it in a familiar place that means something to him.

In TAB we learn that Sherlock has made a list of all the drugs that he’s taken; a promise to his brother since years ago. That’s a kind of note – isn’t it? A note that could help saving his life after an overdose. In TLD Sherlock makes this deduction about Faith/Euros (Thanks to Ariane De Vere for her amazing work with transcripts); my bolding:

FAITH: Sex. How did you know I wasn’t ... getting any? SHERLOCK: It’s all about the blood. (Close-up of the bloodstain on the paper, which Sherlock now gestures to.) SHERLOCK: This one comes from the very first night. You can see the pen marks over it. I think you discovered that pain stimulated your memory, so you tried it again later. I’m no expert, but I assume that since your lover failed to notice an increasing number of scars over a period of months, that the relationship was no longer intimate.

The blood-stained paper Sherlock is talking about is Faith/Euros’ annotations – a note -, which she scribbled in a drug-induced state because she wanted to remember something important. If Faith/Euros is actually a part of Sherlock, what he says here is that he did leave an increasing number of ‘prior signs’ – ‘scars’ - for months before his suicide attempt. Problem is that no-one noticed his self-harm, because Sherlock never talks about his feelings. If Sherlock did suffer torture in Serbia (I’m not sure if the Serbian scene is real though; it seems over-dramatized to me and the guardian’s uniform is unrealistic), he would have had fresh scars on his back when John beat him three times after his return, but he didn’t even try to protect himself. And John didn’t know, because they no longer lived together. Sherlock’s heart (heart-shaped bomb in the subway) was nearly exploding in TEH, but he switched it off.

I think Sherlock’s maniacal wedding planning when John was marrying another person is also a form of self-harm, which was difficult for John to realize.

And the drugs are, of course, also self-harm, which Molly points out in HLV when she berates him about throwing away his gifts. In TLD we see Sherlock in a miserable state caused by the drugs he takes. 221B, which is probably the place that means most to him, is converted into a drug lab. Molly examines him and gets to the conclusion that he is dying from the drugs.

Holmes’ drug use in ACD’s Canon I think it’s interesting to compare BBC Sherlock with what happens to Holmes’ private life in Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories.

When Watson marries Mary Morstan and moves out from 221B, Holmes resorts to drug use (my bolding):

The Sign of the Four: “The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you”? “For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

A Scandal in Bohemia: “I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other”. “Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature”.

The Final Problem: “It may be remembered that after my marriage, and my subsequent start in private practice, the very intimate relations which had existed between Holmes and myself became to some extent modified”.

Before Holmes ’falls’ with Moriarty in The Reichenbach Fall (The Final Problem) he leaves a note to Watson (= a classic reference to suicide). It’s known that the storyteller’s (Doyle’s, which could also be seen as Watson’s) intention was to let him die and end the story with Watson living an ordinary life with his wife and only nostalgic memories left from his time with Holmes. But the audience insisted until ACD/Watson resurrected Holmes and published new stories. By the time Holmes comes back, however, Mary has died. Eventually, Watson moves back to Baker Street.

As ACD’s stories continue and the two men keep on solving crimes together, Watson seems to still be worried about Holmes drug use.

The Devil’s Foot: “It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own”.

In this adventure Watson has taken Holmes on vacation to Cornwall, after another doctor’s recommendation that he must rest. But they soon get involved in a case where a mystic drug makes people insane. Holmes experiments with the drug during their investigation, and nearly has them both killed. But when Watson has saved them and Holmes realizes what he’s done, he gets a bit emotional:

“Slowly it rose from our souls like the mists from a landscape until peace and reason had returned, and we were sitting upon the grass, wiping our clammy foreheads, and looking with apprehension at each other to mark the last traces of that terrific experience which we had undergone”.

“Upon my word, Watson!” said Holmes at last with an unsteady voice, “I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.” “You know,” I answered with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes’s heart before, “that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.”

The Missing Three Quarter: “For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career”.

This makes me believe that Watson is the actual reason why Holmes eventually abstains from drug use. After Watson married, Holmes nearly killed himself. But when he got his Watson back he eventually managed to leave the drugs for Watson’s sake. In BBC Sherlock’s Victorian episode TAB we can also see how upset Watson is by Holmes’ drug use:

In canon, considering the time it was written, a romantic relationship between Holmes and Watson could not be even hinted at. I believe Holmes’ heartbreak is implied in the subtext, however, by the mention of his drug use in relation to Watson’s marriage.

Another observation that I think is important in comparison with BBC Sherlock is that in canon Holmes never gets shot – certainly not by Watson’s wife - and he never murders anyone. These events in HLV stray so far away from canon, that it seems like we’re entering a totally different story. Which is one of the reasons I think it’s actually not happening; instead, we enter into Sherlock’s Extended Mind Palace (EMP theory).

Why does the story get so weird after TSoT? I firmly believe that John’s wedding is a crime scene and Sherlock is the victim; it’s a description of delayed stabbing where the wound inflicted on the victim eventually makes him commit suicide.

Two cases of intended murder are referred to during the’ wedding reception, and even John’s stag night before the wedding has ‘murder scenes’ as a theme. The idea of the wedding as Sherlock’s crime scene is, in my opinion, supported by a series of factors:

1. The intensive attention Sherlock pays to minute planning details like who is sitting with whom, the colour of the bride’s maid’s dresses and how the serviettes are folded seems like a desperate burst of OCD. Sherlock normally hates social gatherings and he particularly despises weddings, which he doesn’t fail to point out several times in his Best Man’s speech. And yet he shows this complete dedication to wedding details – just like he’d pay close attention to the minute details on a real crime scene.

2. It’s also supported by Sherlock’s deductions about what kind of person could only be killed at a wedding and why:

This description fits with Sherlock himself. It’s even spelled out by Mrs Hudson:

3. Major Sholto – who seems to be a mirror for Sherlock – is stabbed in the back (delayed murder), but even after he’s made aware of this, he threatens to kill himself inside a locked room by opening the wounds already inflicted on him by the Mayfly Man (a mirror for John). Sherlock agrees with Sholto that one should embrace the proper time to die when it comes – just not at John’s wedding!

4. Sherlock seems heartbroken (probably almost suicidal) already at the wedding, and his utter self-loathing shows in the speech, where he calls himself the most horrible things. He’s on the verge of tears when he says he can now congratulate John on his choice of new companion. When he talks about the new story about to begin as replacement to his and John’s ‘frankly ridiculous adventures’, he seems to write himself out of their story completely. But I think he loves John too much to ruin his big day, so he ‘soldiers on’ (both Sherlock and Major Sholto were preparing for ‘battle’ in the morning of the wedding day). Sherlock even leaves a note - the sheet music with the notes of the song he has composed for John - and disappears early from the wedding.

5. After John’s wedding in TSoT, John stops updating his blog. Sherlock takes over and posts some pics from the wedding makes one last post (a note?) when John is on honeymoon with Mary. After this there are no more posts on John’s blog.

To me the moment when John’s blog ceases to update is an important point in the story arc; it’s testimony that the show passes from ‘truth’ to ‘poetry’. I think we should read the blog thoroughly and watch out for sequences in the show that are not referenced in John’s blog; any ‘adventure’ that is not described by John looks suspicious to me. After TSoT we no longer have any reference or ‘second opinion’ to check what’s going on, and from now on the narrative gets more and more incoherent, fantastical and bizarre. As if someone on crack has dreamt it up… ;)

The derailing story arc by S. Holmes In HLV we see Sherlock resorting to drugs after the wedding, just like in canon. Later, when ‘Mary’ shoots him in the chest, Sherlock’s MP!Moriarty talks about heartbreak and loss. His MP!Molly talks about the pain that’s going to kill him if he can’t supress it. But wait – how can Sherlock feel the pain of the gunshot if he’s unconscious after three seconds? That doesn’t make sense to me. And what has heartbreak and loss to do with a gunshot? Furthermore: the whole story of Sherlock Holmes getting shot isn’t even mentioned on John’s blog, in spite of the repercussion such an event must have had in the media. But by then the blog is no longer being updated (and yet we see John typing and typing on it in T6T)...

In his mind palace Sherlock sees ‘Mary’ shooting him when she is dressed as a bride. In the Victorian setting of TAB, Sherlock tries to solve a case where a bride murders her husband after he leaves a drug den. She has faked her own suicide, and then she re-appears as a vindictive ghost (hmm, that sounds familiar...) Sherlock wakes up on a plane, after having overdosed on a mortal mix of drugs. What if the shooting in HLV is merely Sherlock’s drugged brain’s interpretation of the heartbreak of loosing John? What if Sherlock OD:d already early in HLV, and the rest happens in his imagination?

I believe that HLV, TAB and the whole of S4 happen inside Sherlock’s mind. Sherlock, who now tries to imagine himself through John’s eyes, orchestrates all of this ‘play’. But the detective isn’t good at writing detective stories; he needs his Blogger for that.

While John is a somewhat unreliable narrator who romanticizes some things and twists the truth a bit when he feels the need to make the story more attractive, Sherlock just can’t put together a coherent story. Sherlock has the brain of a scientist, and he tries to be a logical person on the outside, detached from Sentiment. But his inner self is highly emotional, and in his heart he has always wanted to be a pirate; he hates boredom. He’s a ‘drama queen’ who constantly exaggerates mundane events and personalities that John would have described more dutifully, albeit in a romanticized context. But Sherlock takes them, converts them into Drama and lets them play out against each other in different scenarios (=experiments), to see what happens. ‘Euros’ in TLD and TFP, and all her incarnations, are all parts of his experimental self.

HLV, TAB and Series 4 are Sherlock’s Big Drama, and at the same time his inner journey towards understanding his own feelings and ‘what to do about John’. He re-cycles John’s earlier words and descriptions of their ‘adventures’ and puts them together in new, bizarre ways, using his vast source of imagination; his brain. Sherlock adds some dramatic ideas from movies and theater and tries to fit it all into John’s narrative framework, but fails miserably. Which, taken at face value, makes S4 a disaster of doom and gloom, ending in a nightmarish horror story where heteronormativity (’Mary’) is still looming over them. Sherlock is the drug user, not John, and his drug-induced story soon derails into absurdity; he needs John to tell him (and us) a better story.

How can a better story be told? I think John is the man to do this; he’s the best storyteller, but that’s for Series 5. However, I do believe Sherlock has learned a lot about both himself and John in his gloomy and heartbreaking inner scenarios, which gives him a good emotional starting point for the next series. The most important acquired knowledge is probably that he needs to stay alive (= not commit suicide) in order to save John Watson. I believe the one thing that may have left a window open for him surviving his suicide attempt was his ‘last vow’ in TSoT:

Already in HLV he realizes that “John Watson is definitely in danger”. He feels he must stay alive for John’s safety, and later (in TLD) he also realizes that “your life is not your own - take your hands off it!” He promised to be there for John, and he needs to keep his promise so John can trust him, which I believe John reminds him of in his EMP scenario in T6T:

Sherlock has been thinking he can protect John by sacrificing his own life (that’s what the principal villains have told him), but he’s been wrong; he can only save John by staying alive. Staying alive is the solution to The Final Problem.

But to really be there for each other, they both need to work together to defeat the worst villains of the story: homophobia and heteronormativity. It’s also essential that Sherlock learn to embrace his own feelings – especially towards John – and express them clearly.

Sherlock can now defeat Moriarty/Homophobia by acknowledging the value of the very thing Jim tries to frighten him with: his own sexual and romantic attraction to John. Instead of seeing his own love as something dangerous; a weakness, ‘a vicious motivator’ and a culprit that will lead to harm for John, he must recognize and embrace it:

As for ‘Mary’, I think the most important things to remember about her is that she’s a façade used to uphold heteronormativity (and I firmly believe that was her purpose in ACD canon as well), and a liar who’s up to no good.

Thus, she needs to be defeated for the story arc to be complete. To defeat her, Sherlock and John must stop trusting her, stop believing in her lies and ultimately reveal them for what they are. Which means that both John and Sherlock need to come out of their respective closets; John has to stop worrying about that “people might talk” and Sherlock has to drop his ‘sociopath’ façade and give in to some Sentiment. And I think – and hope – that at some point in Series 5 we will finally see them start working together to achieve this.

ETA: This turned out to be a meta series in five parts; you can find the rest here: [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV] [Part V]

#emp #emp theory #tsot #johnlock #TJLC #tfp is fake #tfp #hlv #drugs in sherlock #tld #MARY IS A VILLAIN #mary=heteronormativity #moriarty=homophobia

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