I was re-watching the Faith deduction scene the other day, and had a sherlockian moment where the camera zooms in dramatically on your face and your mind flashes back through moments that suddenly all fit together like the last twist on a Rubiks Cube. Someone might have said something similar about Redbeard before, but I’m not gonna wade through meta to go find out. It’s about time I make my own meta, so (moriarty voice) welcome… to my first meta.
Thesis: Assuming that EMP is real, Redbeard represents Sherlock’s attitude towards love, and acceptance of his love for John. When Redbeard is a dog, Sherlock still lives in “sentiment-is-a-quality-of-the-losing-side” land. When Redbeard is a human, Sherlock overcomes his fear of expressing love, and no longer views it as a childish weakness.
Where do we start? ASiB, of course. Cue Sherlock beating Irene Adler at her own game through exploiting her love.
Sherlock’s got it all figured out. “Sentiment”, or love, is nothing but a chemical. And he doesn’t need it. He doesn’t have friends, he doesn’t need people, and he likes it that way. At least, that’s what he’s convinced himself.
In TGG, Sherlock exposes his feelings about love again, this time to Moriarty. The dialogue, because I couldn’t find gifs:
JM: “I’ll burn the heart out of you.”
SH: “I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one.”
JM: “But we both know that’s not quite true.”
Here he is, entangled in a web spun by Moriarty himself, with John Watson at the center of it like bait, and he’s blind to his own sentiment. Even Moriarty has recognized Sherlock’s feelings for John Watson, and yet Sherlock is still in denial. This denial is hurting both him and John, as Moriarty takes advantage of Sherlock’s ignorance. Granted, Moriarty might also see sentiment as a weakness in itself, but either way, Sherlock’s not handling the whole “sentiment-thing” very well.
In fact, in the very next episode (THoB), we see this:
In denial that he emotionally needs John. ‘Nuff said.
I think we could also casually connect John to Redbeard, and to Sherlock’s sentimental side, since the whole reason this conflict with his emotional side has risen is because of John.
Comparing John to a pet, which one gets sentimental about. Subtext = loud.
(Side note: If Redbeard hasn’t been mentioned before season 3, he could be solely a creation of Sherlock’s mind palace, supporting EMP-after-TRF theory…)
Now that we’ve taken a look at Sherlock’s underdeveloped emotional maturity (or shall we just say unhealthy attitude towards/fear of love?), let’s talk about Redbeard. The dog shows up in Sherlock’s mind palace as a way of comforting himself, and calming himself down. That, to me, is pretty solid evidence that Redbeard represents love, sentiment, and Sherlock’s emotional side in general. His emotional side is so suppressed that it’s not even human. He views sentiment as a chemical defect, so far removed from himself that it’s represented by a separate being, a different species. Sentiment, he has decided, is no better than the instinctual behavior of a dog.
The line “they’re putting me down too, now” speaks volumes. He’s buried his sentiment (represented by Redbeard) so deeply that it feels like he’s killed it, aka “put it down”. But if his sentiment was totally dead, he would die too. His subconscious is slowly realizing that living without love is “no fun”.
Next stop: TSoT. Sherlock calls Mycroft during the wedding, as if he’s trying to touch base with the man who represents everything cold and machine-like he tries to be. As if he needs to remind himself to keep his sentimental side on a tighter leash. (Actually, if Sherlock’s in his mind palace right now, then Mycroft could straight-up just represent his cold calculating “I-think-I’m-a-sociopath” side. It’s a battle now, between the judgemental brother and the loving dog. His mind is resisting the possibility that sentiment is important and necessary, since it’s spent so long shunning it.)
To which Sherlock replies, “I’m not a child anymore.”
Ouch. He’s basically saying that the devastation he felt as a child for losing the dog he loved was just stupid sentiment. A chemical defect, which he has grown out of. As a side note, perhaps Mycroft encouraged and/or caused Sherlock’s fear and dismissal of the value of love? He’s certainly using Sherlock’s memory of love to criticize / belittle him. Anyway, even though the deepest crevices of his mindpalace have recognized that suppressing his sentimental side is slowly killing him, Sherlock himself hasn’t figured it out yet. He can’t figure it out, because if he accepts his emotional side – and his feelings for John, how will he make it through John’s wedding day? If love mattered, then his feelings for John would have to matter. If he accepted the love and humanity within himself, he’d fall to pieces at the heartbreak of John choosing someone else.
No, he has to squash that part of himself. Alone is what keeps him safe, after all. Except… there’s the fact that Mycroft mentions Redbeard at all. This shows that Sherlock’s too-cool-for-love facade is slipping. Redbeard is slipping through the cracks, and now Mycroft has noticed.
Time to look at season 4.
Redbeard is getting closer and closer to the surface. In what the casual viewer is supposed to think of as “reality”, Sherlock keeps getting flashbacks of Redbeard and Eurus.
One of the interesting things about TST is how much Sherlock lets his emotional side hang out. It’s like he’s experimentally poking his “Redbeard” out, to see if letting it out will ruin everything, or save him. He even admits to using a dog for a case just because he likes it. Imagine the Sherlock of season 1 admitting something so purely sentimental like that!
I’m really distracted by the fact that right after Sherlock compares the dog to John, John’s first thought is that Sherlock likes the dog. (cue middle schooler voice) like, like likes it/him.
Anyway, so much subtext here.
The dog, which lowkey represents his emotional side just as much as Redbeard does, only on a slightly closer-to-the-surface level… is not moving. It must be said that Mofftiss didn’t plan for the dog to not move, but they still kept it in the episode, and chose what dialogue to shape around it.
Here they are, the main characters in Sherlock’s mind palace, standing around staring at his emotional side like “how do we make it move? how do we get the ball rolling on embracing your emotional side?”.
To which Sherlock replies, “slow but steady, not unlike John.” So he’s working on coming to terms with the okay-ness of sentimentality, but it’s not going to happen overnight. Just like his relationship with John is very… slow-burn.
Redbeard is coming to the surface of Sherlock’s mind, little by little. Along with this, we get to see Sherlock acting more and more based on sentiment than on cold, hard reason. He listens to the advice of a dead ex-assassin just because he’s so in love with John that he doesn’t stop to think.He relies on John saving him to survive an otherwise deadly situation with a serial killer. I wouldn’t call those cold-hard-reasoning decisions. I’d call them desperate acts of love. Whether you ship johnlock or not, you gotta admit Sherlock is full of sentiment in TLD. He allows it to consume him. He might even be subconsciously trying to prove himself right about sentiment being a stupid chemical, even if it destroys him. All the while, his memories of Redbeard grow a little bit clearer… but they’re still, in the end, memories of a dog. He doesn’t trust his sentiment yet. In fact, he has the recurring memory of the dog being killed. Like how as a child he repressed his love and emotions in order to be like Mycroft and impress him. It’s becoming clearer (although not anywhere near actually clear) that repressing his emotions like that was as tragic as drowning a dog.
TFP: When Sherlock finally changes his mind.
Enter Eurus stage right. She represents Sherlock’s cold, calculating hard-logic side. Yeah, that used to be Mycroft’s job, but Sherlock’s view of his cold calculating side has changed. It’s no longer the nice business-suited rich guy older brother. It’s an isolated lunatic that hurts people over and over again, because it doesn’t understand love.
In fact, it views love as an irrational, harmful thing. Sound familiar?
Interestingly, Mycroft shows more sentiment in this episode than usual. This episode is definitely EMP, so we can safely say that Mycroft’s change of personality is Sherlock’s mind realizing that even Mycroft is human, and needs to express emotional things that aren’t always perfectly logical and calculated, otherwise he’d be no better than Eurus.
It’s also interesting that Mycroft invited Moriarty to Sherrinford. It’s like all three of these super cold, calculating people are scheming against Sherlock unlocking his loving side. They all represent road blocks on the way to emotional freedom.
Another interesting point is THIS CRAZY (but easily overlooked) MOMENT.
This gif doesn’t have the caption, but they do say redbeard. What the he*l? Here’s my thoughts on the villains saying that word.
Moriarty used Sherlock’s sentiment against him (targeting his friends to get him to kill himself) in TRF, and Eurus uses Sherlock’s sentiment against him in her horror-maze mocking the value of love. So they’re in cahoots to “burn the heart” (aka emotional side?) out of Sherlock. With Moriarty, it worked. But in Sherlock’s mind palace, against Eurus, it doesn’t. More on that later.
Eurus isn’t healthy. Just like suppressing love and humanity isn’t healthy. What she calls “emotional context”, she says, “destroys you every time.” But she’s wrong.
When Eurus… (who used to be a therapist! Sherlock previously viewed his love-suppressing calculating side as something that kept him sane and healthy, like a therapist tries to do!) … Euros shoots John. Pause a second to remember what she represents in this meta. That shot John. And finally, Sherlock’s mind palace realizes it. The part of himself that he has devoted his entire life to constructing, like an iron wall to keep out love, is actually what stopped him and John from going further with their relationship. Now that he’s identified the problem, he can start tearing down that wall.
In fact, this starts a domino-effect of realizations. Living like a heartless machine is so dangerous that John, who represents his love and humanity as well as representing in-real-life John, tries to warn Sherlock about Euros’s “reprogramming” thing. Euros is hurting him and his family and everyone he loves. It’s not protecting them, like he has believed for so long. So the revelation gets crazy and turns into a psycho murder-maze, manipulating Sherlock and John again and again…
Until Sherlock chooses sentiment over cold hard reasoning. The murder-maze is designed so that every single time he has to solve a puzzle, his sentimental side is put at odds with his cold-machine side. To give in to sentiment would be going against who he’s comfortable being, but to go with the “logical” solution would be barbaric. Monstrous. The tables have turned! Now love, code-word Redbeard, is the sane thing to do, while cold-hard-reasoning is the less-than-human chemical defect character flaw.
Fitting, isn’t it, that Mycroft tries to persuade him to shoot him instead, which would represent clinging to his cold calculating side further. But Sherlock’s done with that. He’s arrived at the very heart of Sherrinford, his mindpalace’s way of keeping his sentimental side buried deep down under lock and key, and is ready to bust his sentimental side out of mind-prison forever.
BOOM. His cold-hard-reasoning-protects-me-and-those-I-love side (aka Euros) freaks out. This isn’t who Sherlock is, is it? He can’t just do that! But he does. He actively chooses love and self-sacrifice and other mushy gushy things over logical deductions, with the belief that it will be more useful.
Suddenly, he wakes up in a totally different place. Good. He’s even closer to accepting and embracing his humanity/love as a positive thing. John (remember what he represents?) is still trapped at the bottom of the well, though. He’s not quite there yet.
Eurus mocks his sentimentality, but her power over him has weakened quite a bit. He’s already messed up life and potential relationships too many times due to “Eurus”, aka his obsessively cold-calculating-side. John Watson is too important, and he’s not going to let fear of expressing love hurt the person he loves most.
Until Sherlock’s mind stops pretending his emotional, human, loving side is a stupid dog…
and accepts it as a valid part of being a human being…
Only then does Sherlock’s mind palace make the permanent decision to accept his loving side as good and necessary. In fact, he uses sentiment to save the day.
…by comforting his somewhat shell-shocked, somewhat childish, let’s-be-like-Mycroft-and-supress-our-emotions-in-favor-of-cold-facts side, because that part of him doesn’t go away. It just becomes less all-consuming.
and, of course, by rescuing John in the well, as a way of un-doing the suppression of his loving side in the death of Victor Trevor.
Finally, his two sides can be equally respected.
And Redbeard, the code-word for love, is a human being worthy of equal status to any other aspect of himself. That’s the real reason why Redbeard became a human being. To show that Sherlock has changed, and is ready to love John (helps that Victor Trevor is a John mirror too, right?). All he has to do now is wake up.
P.S: Next up on my meta-writing list is Eurus’s cryptic song, which ties in to Redbeard theory pretty well. This meta post has gotten too long already though, so I’ll save it for next time.
This is my first time tagging people for a meta, so let me know if you do/don’t want to be tagged, and feel free to tag more people! I just tagged anyone I think is interested in tjlc. @marathecactupus @sherlockians-get-bored @goodmythicalmail @the-7-percent-solution @sherlock-overflow-error @loudest-subtext-in-tv
snowghoul
vaporwave
origamiaround
kianamaiart
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
