On my bullshit again

Still simping for Mofftiss in the year of our lord 2026

[loudest-subtext-in-tv]

I'm going elsewhere

Many years ago I used to be able to come on Tumblr and have fun and be inspired. Unfortunately, it's steadily degenerated into a relentlessly negative and extremist sludge, such that any enthusiasm I have is drained within seconds of opening my dash. This has paralyzed me artistically to a point I just can't ignore or blame on anything else anymore. Unfollowing tons of people hasn't made the site worth using, and given that I've had to unfollow people I know in real life, some explanation is in order. I know some other people have felt similarly.

The trigger for this is the mass jubilation over political violence. 

This isn’t the first time it’s happened, so I can’t pretend there are things left to try to escape it. It’s just the predictable culmination of many other soul-draining dynamics that have calcified here for about a decade now. 

I'm going to try to be as compassionate as my frustration and sadness will allow here, and explain to anyone who still cares where I'm going and why. I'll tell you some stories of other people I’ve known who justified choosing their lower nature so you understand why I’m worried about where some of you are headed. Finally, I’ll do my best to make you see the damage you do to the causes you want to advance.

Where I’m going

I’m getting this out of the way first so anyone who already feels similarly doesn’t have to read any further. I’ve made a completely free and entirely public Substack to see if there’s even any real interest in talking about Sherlock anymore. I work on my fanfic substantially more when I have people to talk to about the show, and I’m more likely to write meta. You don’t have to be subscribed to read, but you do have to be subscribed to comment or send me messages, or to get e-mails when I post. 

Anything I post will be substantive and infrequent, not frivolous, so you won’t get spammed. I will not have a posting schedule or anything else that subjects you to stupid filler posts. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would ever charge money. I will actually answer asks there, unlike Tumblr, because I will not have to hold my nose to open Substack like I do Tumblr.

Realistically however, I suspect there is not significant interest. I can guess that some fandom inactivity reflects many of my own reservations about the climate of Tumblr, but I have no idea as to the scale; surely the determining factor is the stagnation of the show itself. In all likelihood I will continue to rely on the crumbs of motivation I get from the infrequent ocassions my real life friend and I find time to meet up.

So if the Substack doesn’t pan out I will write my fanfic considerably more slowly, but either way you can follow me on AO3 for updates to A Study in Fate, and its eventual sequel that is an imagined series 5. I will probably not post meta there, except whatever relates to my fanfic.

If you’ve noticed that I’ve unfollowed you, you are absolutely allowed to follow my Substack, reply to it, whatever. I didn’t unfollow anyone because I hate them. Rather, I’ve unfollowed people to make it easier to imagine they will snap out of this phase, and to prevent myself from banking negative memories of anyone. But if you can’t behave yourself and bring politics into everything, I will ban you after one warning. There should be no pressing need to discuss politics around this show anymore and it sucks the fun out of it. I was telling you guys back in 2014 that it’s blinkered and paranoid to think gay characters/romance can’t be on television, and I was resoundingly proven right to the point where gay characters are now shoehorned into everything. It was a boring conversation then, and it’s beyond exhausting now. You can have that conversation on Tumblr as many times as you want without involving people who have moved beyond it.

Nor do I intend to talk about politics myself. I don’t think another blog talking about politics is especially helpful, whereas spaces to escape politics are increasingly valuable. If I were ever to change my mind, I would make a separate blog. 

I hope this is one of the last times I ever have to talk about politics, honestly. But here we go.

Where I’m coming from politically

This is both a transparent attempt to limit common motives you might project upon me, and to demonstrate why you might consider taking my perspective seriously.

I was out as bisexual in high school in the late 1990s. No one cared. I did four years of policy debate in high school and served as novice captain and vice president. I got my degree in government and a minor in history. Over the course of college I had several political internships and paying jobs, including recording details from committee hearings at the Texas Capitol for a legislative tracking agency, updating news links on the website for the Texas Democratic Party, helping elect a Democratic state rep to a seat that had been gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, and then responding to constituent correspondence at the capitol afterward. During that campaign I spoke with Republican voters one-on-one, to their face. I had to drop out of an internship at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in Washington D.C. partway through because my health declined for a long time after I got mono – and anyway, I did not like the national crowd, which is another story – but I was doing opposition research before I left. 

The theme here is that I have always been deeply interested in policy, both on a substantive and strategic level. Over time I have read hundreds of nonfiction books on policy, politics, history, and philosophy from many ideological perspectives. I have a good grasp of how complicated policy issues can get, both socially and practically. I came to understand both how to attack and persuade Republicans, and how do to both at once. I liked teaching other people how to analyze and argue productively; you can probably see some of that impulse in my old fandom presence.

More broadly, I have always taken a lot of pride in getting to know and understand difficult people, and people with strange ideas. They are way more interesting than normal people. The people who frustrate me on this website are such people, and I have silently and repeatedly extended you grace whenever I’ve been aware of specific circumstances influencing your behavior, and assumed such factors must exist when I don’t know of any. I do not find it threatening in the least to hear differing ideas and actively seek them out. 

Why? Because attempts at change fail when they are not persuasive. Persuasion is not possible when you do not listen to what people actually believe, or fail to consider the social pressures and practical constraints they’re under. I’m so comfortable with conflict that when I first got to college I intended to become a diplomat, but I liked the precision of English too much to have any passion for achieving fluency in any other languages I studied. And anyway, I don’t enjoy exerting power over others. 

My personal philosophy is just to expose people to ideas, and understand they’re going to get whatever they get out of them. However, I do consider that as something like a sacred responsibility. I can’t stomach that someone should remain stuck, anxious, confused, or unhappy simply because they haven’t heard a different idea. So here I am, as miserable as such an impulse has become, not because I’m certain I have those ideas for some of you, but because I might. It’s much easier to hear these things from me instead of a fraught conversation with someone who matters to you in real life.

Finally, I have always voted for Democrats. I have no plans to change that in response to current levels of extremism. For anything to overwrite my policy priorities, it would have to be normal for Democratic candidates to condone violence, which it isn’t, and anyway, the far-right has its own serious problems, like ruining Sherlock Holmes’s birthday. I still have tons of reasons to vote for Democrats. I moved back to Texas in recent years, where abortion is now illegal. We’ve had cases of women needlessly dying from miscarriages from pregnancies they intended to keep, and there are no abortion exceptions for victims of assault. We’re subject by law to others’ religious beliefs, whereas I have no religious affiliation and never have. For years I have taken care of my mother, who is bedbound and has dementia, so cuts to Medicaid or Medicare would impact us directly. I watched my dad slowly die over a decade back when pre-existing conditions made it impossible to get health insurance. He died with hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt, and the direct cause of his death was a drug that was manufactured to be double the dose it should have been. For most of my life I was unable to get any tests done for my own debilitating health problems: Even once I got health insurance through my husband, healthcare was too expensive. Accordingly, I lost years of my life to chronic illness. I had a back tooth that was completely broken in half for all of high school and college. I chewed on the other side like a patriot. I pretended it built character.

In short, I get that ideas and elections lead to literal life-and-death outcomes. No one can call me sheltered, privileged, or naive. I firmly believe ideas are the most powerful force on earth. I understand that so deeply that I worked in politics for as long as I could! The power of ideas is the only reason I’m even trotting myself out in front of the firing squad with this post. You don’t need to explain to me how others’ ideas have a material impact on your life. That is a defensive tic that is not serving you. That’s not what is in dispute.

You don’t fully understand why people are reacting to you the way they do

I don’t expect everyone to outright mourn the assassination of political opponents – though I’ll be honest that I admire the people who have that capacity, and worry for those who don’t. Rather, I’m going to do my best to spell out several reasons why at minimum you should reconsider celebrating it or, yes, even making jokes about it. Many of these reasons I have not seen explicated anywhere else.

Please understand: To most people, political violence is beyond the pale and it worries them. Celebrating death in general is perceived as ghoulish. At most, people may make exceptions if the deceased physically murdered or sexually assaulted people themselves; they do not make exceptions for tenuous indirect “violence,” e.g. influencing public policy. 

You don’t have to feel that way, but you must accept that for everyone else, it isn’t actually a political matter in the way you insist it is. It’s more foundational to us than that. It’s pre-political, and simply not celebrating it is considered an incredibly low bar to clear. When you not only fail to clear that bar, but also come across as unrepentant or oblivious as to the transgression you’ve committed, you become a totally different sort of entity in others’ minds. You creep them out. They rethink everything they thought they knew about you. Despite themselves, they stop being glad to see you. They withdraw, but pretend they aren’t. 

Things snowball from there in ways you don’t anticipate.

Now, if that sounds okay with you, that is your right and your choice. But if you want to lead a fulfilling life, you need to understand what switches you flip in other people and in yourself. In my observation, bloodthirsty people are severely shortsighted when it comes to the downstream effects they suppose their outlook will have on their life. They expect to lose some relationships, and in today’s political climate perhaps lose a job, but it goes so far beyond that. The path you’re on will reshape everything around you and inside you, and worse yet, you won’t understand what’s happened until you’ve paid a much steeper price than you intended.

I’m not here to choose your life path or politics for you. You can do stuff that makes me sad and disturbed all day; managing my feelings is easy for me compared to micromanaging another person. But recognize it’s also your choice to either operate blindly, or to hear me out.

I understand it’s not fun to hear what others think of your behavior. But if you defensively tar everyone who’s disturbed by the the celebration of political violence as some sort of secret conservative or bigot, you’re fooling yourself and grossly misjudging how people feel about you. If it doesn’t yet seem the people around are judging you, read on and you’ll understand how you got that mistaken impression. That’s one of the first things people miss.

Now, I’m about as tolerant of you guys as anyone you will ever find. I don’t hate anyone. I will make excuses for people to the ends of the earth. I won’t say much until someone misses or disregards repeated signs of my exasperation and starts being insulting toward me, and then I start to increasingly treat them like they treat other people to see if they catch on and learn anything from it. When I have conflict with people, in the end I make sure to spend some time imagining good things for them. 

My metaphysical beliefs are not particularly important, but suffice it to say that I'm certain I would believe and behave exactly as any other person does if I were born in their shoes. That includes you, whoever you are. It's fine if you think that's strange or stupid. All you need to understand is that I really believe that, and it guides everything I do. It’s the reason I try to expose people to different ideas. This is coming from a place distinct from disgust or judgment. The core issue is this:

Being around y’all makes me feel so incredibly sad it’s psychologically debilitating.

Let me explain how you come across to someone like myself, then we’ll explore how you come across to those who don’t practice any particular charity of spirit toward you.

What I tried and why it didn’t work

Before you guys were bloodthirsty, you were instead just very tiring. Venial stuff in comparison to today. It was diluted across so many people that few individual people stood out, and it was easier to understand because everyone was reacting to a new and rapidly changing political and technological landscape. I wasn’t immune to it myself by any means, though not so much on this platform. The first time Trump won was alarming to me because he demonstrated such poor character across the board. He behaved in ways that were beneath the dignity of his office to say the least, and repeatedly attempted to overstep its limits. Worse still, people who once stood up to him stopped doing so.

So I get feeling unsettled. And anyway, people process stuff at different paces. It’s fine. Not every individual is all these things, but in aggregate the words I would use to describe the political soup here have been “impressionable,” “overly credulous,” “obsessive,” “histrionic,” “controlling,” “punitive,” “exclusionary,” “blinkered,” “internally incoherent,” “needlessly belligerant,” “proudly incurious,” and “snotty.”

Unpleasant stuff, but classic people stuff. From the moment consciousness incarnates it’s assailed by more stimuli than it could ever process, but it does its best at an impossible task. It careens all over like a clown, and the show it puts on is whatever we make of it. The most liveable strategy I’ve found is to interpret things compassionately and dispassionately and hope others extend me the same courtesy.

In that spirit, I’ve made sure to first consider the ideas y’all express. I’m naturally curious about these things. But that phase has shortened considerably over the years. Now you all just think and say whatever everyone else is thinking and saying, often expressing pride that you don’t know or care what opponents of your ideas say. If someone asks you to explain or justify something, the answer is some variation of “how dare you” or “it’s not my job to educate you” or you just laugh at them. Frequently, you ignore criticism altogether.

In other words, there is not much substance to keep up with. Yet there is a lot of politicizing. It’s close to the only show in town.

Over time the same ideas just get expressed in cruder, cattier ways. There is typically a repeated rallying around a strawman of an opposing view. This is predictable because purity spirals socially reward ignorance and punish anything else. Sometimes surreal attempts are made to splice two sacred ideas together and milk some novelty and self-congratulations out of that, but it doesn’t hit like it used to. Instead it tends to reveal cracks of contradictions in the consensus worldview, so fewer people share posts like that anymore. In the outside world, criticisms and real world consequences of your views evolve, but in here, it may as well be North Korea.

These dynamics are not unique to Tumblr or leftists. Later I’ll tell you some stories about right-wing extremists, and similar dynamics in non-political contexts. When social circles oversimplify complexities and block out new ideas, it’s like they lose oxygen. Ideas stagnate and everyone figuratively descends into hypoxic hallucinations based on the same tired shit. 

The best case scenario is when people get tired and tap out. The worst case scenario is when people accomplish a lot of destruction first, including merely wrecking their relationships and personality. Outright violence is still thankfully rare because (in my opinion) people are fundamentally decent at their core, or failing that, too squeamish or out of shape. 

But mostly this other thing happens where people become aimless ideological zombies. The purity spiral is the only evolutionary pressure in an echo chamber, so once it has pulverized most dissent, you can only spin your wheels and wait for outsider transgressions to react to. It’s a stale and negative way to live. I’m not saying this from a place of judgment, but personal experience. I’m well aware that I just found it easier to snap out of it than the people still doing it, and it’s just the luck of my background.

It’s a common human trap, but I don’t like seeing you guys that way. You inevitably act like you’re a decade or more younger than you are, because that’s all maturity is: choosing your higher nature over your lower nature. When you don’t make an effort to chose your higher nature, you begin to diverge from your peers significantly. Most seem blind to this process: As people their age drift away, they instead assume they’re cool for having younger friends, especially if those friends look up to them. They don’t usually ask why they have few friends their own age – or few friends at all. It can be very difficult to distinguish that from the natural drift of relationships that comes with age, because usually people won’t say anything to you.

People who give in to their lower natures become mean, boring, and exhausting. You may protest that you’re right about your pet topics, that you have a right to express yourself, that you have a moral imperative actually, and furthermore that you’re funny about it. Okay. I mean, sometimes I laugh with you, though not about violence. I’ll laugh at most things phrased in a clever way; it’s no big accomplishment. But you’re still mean, boring, and exhausting. That has consequences for your enjoyment of life and your ability to connect with others. It determines whether you’re an asset or a liability to the causes you profess to care about. But we’ll get more deeply into that later.

For years I’ve tried muting every loaded political term I could. It's made logging in to Tumblr pretty stupid: I also mute posts from fandoms I don’t care about, so 90% of my dash is muted. But hey, I know people accrue their political beliefs for reasons that are compelling to them, and I don't have any delusions that I'll overcome all the experiences and social incentives that motive them by commanding them to express my thoughts instead. It's even pretty obnoxious to ask people to tag things a certain way instead of just unfollowing them. Anyway, I follow people because I like them. They don’t need to be flawless.

So I just considered it my problem to navigate, and tried to hobble along. But it's a very different experience once you're resistant to engaging even with friends. Plus I’m morbidly curious enough to unmute posts. I’m constitutionally incapable of just telling myself y’all still think the same things; I have to actually check. Gotta be fair.

For years, I didn’t get what was going on with me when I didn’t want to write. I thought it was just my own health holding me back… until it wasn’t. Then I thought it was an attention span thing… but I fixed that too. Then I thought it was just the stress of taking care of my mom… but we made a lot of adjustments and greatly alleviated that. I thought maybe I had just lost my interest in the show and the story. But when I’d read over what I’d written, I was still interested. It was puzzling. I usually understand myself. 

Like any modern person, I considered ayahuasca. But it didn’t come to that. Over the course of the past year or so, it finally clicked.

I started a rewatch of the show with a real life friend. She is endearingly offline. I was relieved to notice how intensely inspired and motivated I felt when I got to talk about the show. That feeling wasn’t lost! But because we both have many responsibilities, there have been long gaps between episodes. 

That turned out to be the key: Right after an episode, I would write like crazy for a week or two. Then I’d lose the spark for weeks, until the next meet-up. 

The pattern has repeated many times now. It’s highlighted how much discussion feeds my drive to write. It turns out I’m not as introverted as I thought; I’m more like a pendulum that comes to a stop if I’m not pushed now and then. I’m a social creature just like everyone else. Gross!

I’ve come to understand that’s what Tumblr did for me years ago. I was so prolific back then because I liked being around everyone. I thought maybe I could just do that again. But in the present day, logging in to Tumblr snuffs out any spark of inspiration immediately.

I found myself complaining a lot to this friend, bless her. Always the same tiresome stuff about the atmosphere here, the culture. I likened it to the pre-S3 fandom, which was also negative in a political way, except about the show itself. She barely knows what that means, but she knows I did what I could back then to make it socially acceptable to simply log in and have a good time. In retrospect, it feels like a miracle that even worked. 

But back then people hadn’t yet swallowed so much poison. They were still convincing themselves they liked the taste. Now people are addicted to it. It’s a sport to squeeze drops of poison out of everything and pass it around for purity clout. And it’s not just art that’s mined for poison, it’s every facet of life. What’s going on today is so much more pervasive than it was back then, and has nothing to do with the show. It’s beyond me, or any one person. So I didn’t say anything.

That was before anyone got assassinated.

Now it’s impossible to even use technology to filter you guys anymore. I’ve been trying to do it since Luigi Mangione, and I promise it’s not possible. Movies and shows get "shot." So do characters. Characters "die" or get "murdered" or "assassinated." One of the main characters on this very show is a "sniper" and "assassin." There are "killer"s and "culprit"s. 

And a lot of you think it's funny to phrase things in a coy way, so now no one can block it even if they want to. You’re unwittingly forcing people to unfollow you, when they would have otherwise tried to find a way to overlook the worst part of you. 

Get ready: You’re solidly on the path.

Now people like me can either log in and be reminded of the worst impulses of humanity, or we have to go elsewhere. What sucks is just about every single place on the internet where someone can go to discuss art is overrun by this nihilistic worldview, even when the people espousing it are in the minority. It’s quite easy to understand how this happens: When people see nutcases yelling violent things on the street corner, they know better to engage and quietly hurry away. Meanwhile, you guys look up and down the newly emptied street, observe only other nutcases yelling similar things, and develop the illusion that most people think like you do. They do not! Poll after poll shows they do not! All that happens is you scare or disgust people. If there is anything like a common enemy most of the population can agree upon, it is people who behave like you do. 

I can say with absolute conviction that y’all are not my people even if we believe some of the same things and vote the same way. Tons of people are coming out of the woodwork to express this very sentiment lately. Many of them you’ve driven to stop voting with us. Congratulations. Moreover, those of us who are still voting with you largely resent you. We have no reason to take you seriously ever again. You’re a huge liability. 

What did you get out of it? Likes? Cheap laughs you probably don’t remember by the time of this posting?

So I weigh the situation. On the one hand, people can absolutely post whatever they want on their blogs. They don't have to care about how it affects anyone, least of all me. I don't like cutting ties with people over their beliefs, nor do I like getting in people's faces about their beliefs if they’re not accosting me with theirs. That just funnels people further toward extremism. When I’ve had people accost me directly, I have always been firm but make sure they understand I am not condemning them. I want people to feel they can always come back from where they’re at, and they can’t do that if no one sees the best in them, exercises patience, and forgives them.

In short, just abandoning this sort of situation doesn’t sit well with me.

But when it comes to this platform, I've tried all the practical things I can. It's just not realistic of me to think I'll ever want to share my writing here again. I don't like it here. I know that 90% or more of my audience is not doing this stuff, they’re just quiet and well-adjusted. But they’re invisible, whereas vocal violence enthusiasts are everywhere. After I unfollowed people, there was almost no one left. 

Look: I love you guys, but I do not like you. I just don’t, and I haven’t for a long time. The past week has forced me to finally accept there's no escaping y’all’s bloodthirst, and nothing more I can do about it. 

I tried so hard to make some sort of room in my psyche for y’all, but this stuff is beyond corrosive. The downsides are too heavy. In the end, our time here is finite. I want to be around people who remind me of the best of humanity. I want to be around people I admire, people who inspire me. Failing that, I want to be around people who hold themselves to basic standards and don’t find excuses for doing otherwise. 

I have enough stress in real life; I don’t need to spend my leisure time wading through vitriol. The atmosphere you've created sucks the fun out of sharing things with you.

What people don’t say to you

No one enjoys courting the attention of psychologically dysregulated people. Depending on how much you venture outside your bubble, you may have noticed many left-of-center figures online expressing genuine sorrow and alarm over Kirk’s death even though their audience punishes them for it. Do you know why people try repeatedly to pull you guys back from the brink? 

It’s not just because it’s the right thing to do. It’s not just because we saw what happened when the right did not marginalize its own extremists. It’s not just because you have noxious vibes that ruin communities and scare the hoes. 

It’s because we have a bird’s eye view of how you guys obsess over rigid political ideas and then splinter into infighting witch hunts. This is in line with a rich historical record of leftists massacring those who were once their allies right along with enormous numbers of normies minding their own business. 

How do you think things get to that point? People start justifying their bloodthirst and cheering it on in others! Only an idiot thinks they’ll never be on the chopping block. The purity spiral isn’t won by good people, it’s won by the most violent sociopaths. 

I urge you to internalize that.

Anyone who is capable of original thought or research is never going to completely align with any one political faction. No one is keen to have our potential deaths celebrated when our views later differ from the favored sociopath of the day. We don’t think the loved ones we disagree with deserve to be murdered if they open their mouths either. You’re stupid if you think you’ll always be safe. A recent poll showed that 88% of college students pretend to have more “progressive” views than they actually do. They do that because y’all have been bullying people into ideological compliance for years now, and it’s entirely predictable: You have panic attacks and outbursts and public shamings if anyone explores counter-arguments, so you destroy anyone who cultivates the character and traits needed to persuade people. 

We can only guess what the numbers are amongst older adults who smile and nod to your face while secretly thinking you’re scary and you suck, but the dynamic definitely exists there as well. I personally have a strongly negative physiological reaction to seeing the stereotypically leftist aesthetic coming at me nowadays, and I’m supposed to be your ally. That’s not from ignorance like a lot of prejudice is, that’s pavlovian. I learned that from repeated exposure, despite personally knowing many exceptions to the stereotype and politely not starting conflict with anyone.

There are a lot of people like me. And there are a lot of people who got there much faster than I did because they had no reason to make excuses for you. 

Consider those numbers. 88% of one of the most progressive cohorts in the United States already knows they aren’t pure enough for y’all. Recall the 87% of people I linked earlier who are concerned by political violence. Sure seems like as many as almost 9 out of 10 people think there’s something wrong with you. More generous estimates I could come up with are still about 7 out of 10 people. Bleak stuff either way.

Now: When you guys choreograph to everyone that you’d love to have some dumb shoot-out with your mirrors on the right, do you think any of us think you’re a sane judge of who ought to live or die? No! Instead, we regret trying to respectfully navigate your psychological struggles for as long as we have. You make your enemies look more human, and make yourselves look inhuman. 

People have wasted so much effort on compassion for your grievances despite political differences, but you don’t return it to anyone else! You’re constantly demanding your feelings be at the forefront of everyone else’s thoughts and decisions, constantly wailing about petty nonviolent “traumas” and contorting yourselves to relabel them as “violence,” constantly changing the definition of terms and berating people who don’t keep up, constantly saying people have to “just listen” to people with your superficial traits even when polls show those people don’t actually agree with you, constantly patronizing others to “just be a good person!” 

But babes, murder gives you the giggles! You can’t “do better?”

You guys like to call it a “mask off moment” when someone shows even mild sympathy for something you disagree with, the idea being they were pretending to be a good person but – gasp! – they were secretly bad the whole time. Well, in the eyes of the vast majority of people, this was your “mask off moment.”

I don’t think you’re ever coming back from this, personally. You look morally bankrupt, laughably self-centered and entitled, petty, short-sighted, ignorant, and frightening. No one is ever going to care about how “unsafe” anything makes you feel when you want us to live on a PvP server. Next time you complain about anything, we're rolling our eyes and moving on.

But okay. Let’s say you don’t care how it looks, or whether it ruins the causes you claim to care about. It’s worth it to you purely for the freedom of self-expression; you just love the glee you feel when someone you dislike dies. If it pushes people away, then good, because they don’t like the real you. You only want to associate with other murder enthusiasts.

Surely you’ve already considered that your behavior inspires retaliative attacks. The right is practiced with firearms and has more of them. I trust I won’t ever see you numb with grief that your fave got murdered in cold blood. You’re gonna take it like a champ, right? Of course.

Do you also think it’s a good idea to demonstrate to psychos that they’ll be beloved if they start shooting in crowded areas? Recall that the guy who tried to get Trump ended up killing other people instead. But I’m guessing if you’re this far gone, you think anyone at a Trump rally deserves that. Well, what about Kirk? He was at a bipartisan event on a college campus. It was very crowded; hundreds of people went running. It’s a miracle the shooter didn’t hit anyone else. Mangione killed his victim outside a major hotel on the street in NYC. (Do you care that healthcare CEOs have little to do with the broken state of our healthcare system? I have to assume you didn’t look into it.)

Do you imagine everyone is going to be a good shot, or are you intelligent? 

You’re intelligent, so how many bystanders is it worth it to you for someone to kill one political opponent? I mean, by your warped calculus, their words and ideas are causing literal violence, right? 

What do you think about the people who have to witness seeing someone killed in front of them, regardless of their political affiliations? Many of the people who saw Kirk shot have posted about how terrifying it was and how they’re still dealing with panic attacks. It’s not just your opponents who were fucked up by it. You guys can be driven to “crying and shaking” by mere internet posts, so imagine how bad violent trauma is! Then there’s all the people online who had to see it; that’s a enormous cloud of darkness you’re egging on. 

His wife and young children had to witness it too, but I’m guessing you don’t care. He should have “just been a good person,” like you, right? 

If everyone was like you society would have collapsed a long time ago. You guys sound like some of your opponents who ask why we need to get vaccines for all these diseases we’ve never heard of: You have no awareness or appreciation for why your life is as safe as it is right now. We don’t take people like you as intellectual or moral authorities because we’ve already gone through this and decided to be better. People react with horror to your behavior because you’re an atavistic reminder that we can never let our guard down.

These internet-rotted shooters are getting younger and younger, too. How do you feel about the example you’re setting for the younger people who follow you? Do any of you have children? Do you want them growing up in a world where they’ll get accolades from sick adults online for committing sick acts? Lots of kids rebel against their parents’ political ideas, too. You think you’re going to be able to prevent your kid from shooting someone you admire? 

You’re stoked that people throw their life away? Why? All that happens is the other side rallies. The shooter ends up dead or in jail forever.

But wait, there’s more!

You guys want people to trust you’re a good judge of who gets to live or die, right? But why do you trust you’re a good judge? Y’all are always belaboring the crippling weight of the psychological disorders you live under, whether it’s as common as depression or anxiety or PTSD, or things that have clinical labels, psychotic disorders, personality disorders, attachment disorders. Most of these disorders are associated with rigid obsessive thinking, catastrophic thinking, skewed perspectives, lack of perspective, emotional outbursts, misperceiving social cues.

You understand that all kinds of trauma predispose people to seeing overwrought stakes at play in situations where they actually aren’t, right? That’s a big reason it’s tragic!

It must be hell trusting that the darkest parts of you are the most accurate and authentic. That’s heart-breaking.

It’s like clockwork when I click through to someone’s Tumblr page: Most bios are a list of identity traits and diagnoses, and sometimes even an exhortation that some group or other should die. No joke! There’s like, three or four groups of people y’all want to drop dead. One day earlier this year I clicked through to anyone who was in the notes of a mundane fandom post as an experiment. Very few people strayed from that structure, and I was floored by how common death wishes were. 

The first thing many of you want others to know about you is this: “I get my self-worth from traits I have no control over, I struggle with my emotions, and I think entire groups of people should die.”

Noted. We believe you. We don’t trust your judgment. 

These labels seem to be a point of pride and bonding for many of you. Okay. I don’t think anyone should hate themselves, and having a psychological disorder doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions. I’ve gone through spells where I wanted to kill myself. I get that would be a very restrictive and paranoid way to live. 

But you guys seem to direct that paranoia at other people, and resent others beyond all proportion. If you took responsibility for your psychological struggles, you would question your perceptions a lot more instead of just using them for social media attention. You’d settle for simply disliking people and thinking they’re harmful. You certainly wouldn’t trust that your violent glee is healthy or accurate. Most people without diagnoses don’t think they’re qualified to be judge, jury, and executioner.

Why shouldn’t others flee from you? You come across as irresponsible!

Have you considered how poorly it reflects on you that the murderers whose actions you celebrate are the type to sit there doing Etsy shit like engraving memes on bullets? Do you feel any cognitive dissonance that the one thing most people can agree on is that these murderers have “brainrot?”

If you want to have brainrot, then continue to derive your joy from brainrotted people.

The path to isolation

There’s a pattern to these things when people justify their lower nature, “the path” I talked about earlier. It happened to my mom.

For most of my life my mom was the most soft-hearted and generous person ever. We had a very close relationship; almost all my capacity for love, compassion, and forgiveness came from her. She could get along with anyone. She was self-sacrificing to a fault, and gave people infinite chances to the point of enabling them. She was always doing elaborate thoughtful things for people. She was also an incredible visual artist. She could have made a living doing it, but she kept giving things away and lowering her prices because she loved to see people happy. Her entire life she was incredibly well-liked. She was not especially political, but she voted Democrat. 

Then my dad died. 

She temporarily moved in with some relatives who were not normie right-wingers, but rather very negative people. They were constantly wishing harm on others and celebrating harm befalling people in general, not just political figures. One of them would brag about trying to hex people they disliked, with zero self-awareness for how that reflected upon them. They didn’t really have friends because they were a headache to be around; now and then they’d make a friend, but it would end in some dramatic blow-up. They were addicted to the daily cable news outrage cycle long before smartphones, so my mom got a similar dose while she was living with them.

My mom’s personality started to warp, then her political ideas warped too. This seems to happen to people who want to fit in with the people who are giving them social support. Even after she moved into her own place, she lived near these relatives and saw them often. She didn’t celebrate violence yet, but it got increasingly difficult to have a conversation without her turning the topic to some strange and ugly political grievance none of us had even heard of. She always spoke as if everyone already knew about these things, which was even weirder. But of course it seemed that way to her, right? There wasn’t an “algorithm” yet, but she nevertheless didn’t get exposed to other views.

That’s how you guys come across to a lot of people. You just can’t help bringing political tics and jargon into everything. It starts off awkward and people try to skirt around it. The similarities don’t end there, so pay attention.

Like most people, I had to pick my battles. Thankfully I could sometimes push back against her because I knew she would never disown me or anything. I know others aren’t so lucky. It didn’t do much, though. I was and still am her favorite person, but I didn’t even live in the same city. And because of how difficult it was to talk to her, well… I talked to her less and less.

That’s how it starts. It wasn’t that she merely had different political beliefs – I would have gladly debated anything – it was that she expressed them in such a nasty, out of character way. It was very Jekyll and Hyde. I felt like I didn’t know her anymore. It was jarring to bring up innocent topics to bond, only to have them politicized.

I went from calling her a few times a week, to months without calling. I said I was “just busy.” No matter how much she repelled me, I couldn’t bring myself to outright tell her I didn’t like talking to her anymore. She couldn’t piece it together from the times I pushed back, either. She was in such a bubble it never occurred to her that other people don’t want to hear a political diatribe every time others open their mouth. Instead she would tell me she missed talking to me, that her coworkers’ children called them frequently, why couldn’t I? Ultimately I resorted to emails.

First, it's important to accept that most people are not going to say anything to you if they start finding your behavior disturbing and draining. This is a completely separate issue from whether their perception is fair, or whether it's worth it to you socially or politically to behave a certain way. The point is that your behavior motives others to be dishonest toward you.

Moreover, many of you also choreograph to your friends and family that you will cut ties with them if they disagree with you. Sometimes you do this directly, but more often you do it without realizing it: They witness you saying strident and hostile things about other people. They see that you are very difficult, if not impossible, to engage in a calm, rational discussion.

Now they witness you saying that people who disagree with you deserve to be shot in public. Would you hang out with someone who dehumanizes you to that extent? Or would you make excuses when they invite you to things, and barely respond to their messages?

Some of you bemoan your social anxiety. It sucks to think people secretly dislike or judge you, doesn’t it? Yet when you behave like a maniac, you ensure they will do just that.

The only people who respect emotionally dysregulated people are other emotionally dysregulated people. Everyone else is just handling you. Is that how you want to live your life? Everyone gets tense when you show up, and immediately starts talking about you when you leave? Perhaps it’s worth it to you.

Social media made things with my mom much worse. She got into QAnon through the left-leaning conspiratuality path and eventually absorbed all the right-wing tenants: weird faith in Trump to expose the Epstein files, the belief that Democrats drink blood (this made it hell to convince her to get labwork done as her health declined), the belief that all of Trump’s political opponents should be publicly executed, etc.

She also quit doing any artwork. She had lost her job and couldn’t get a new one, so my husband and I were paying all her expenses. Despite how difficult she’d gotten, I genuinely didn’t mind doing that. She had been the best mom in the world when I was growing up. But she felt awful about needing anything. She’d always been very independent, and had supported us all the years my dad was sick. I tried to encourage her to sell her artwork, even told her all she needed to do was pick a few paintings or crafts and price them, and I would figure out the rest. I figured it would make her feel better.

But she just couldn’t seem to do even that much. She had endless attention for QAnon videos though. She would listen to them, no exaggeration, 24/7. They would play while she slept. Extremists love to psychologically terrorize themselves and I implore you guys to look for the same impulse in yourselves, even if the material you’re consuming isn’t as silly as QAnon. I would argue that such an impulse is a warning sign of extremism, especially if it’s replacing activities and talents that used to bring you joy, or even just if it’s something you tend to do most days. 

You tell yourselves it’s important to society to consume stuff that upsets you, but my mom told herself that too. You get mad when other people don’t react with your same fervor because you’re overcome with the idea of others’ suffering, but so did she. QAnon had a kernel of truth in that sometimes people like Epstein exist and it’s bad when things like that happen to kids. And some of you won’t like hearing this, but a lot of the things that freak you out have roughly the same amount of truth in them: the scale of the problem is much less than you believe, and you’re fed a similar amount of impossible nonsense and irrational political scapegoating. 

My mom would say she can’t believe that “people don’t care what is happening to these kids.” But of course people did, to the extent that it was real. It’s usually not that people "don’t care" about things, it’s that they’re skeptical of spurious reasoning or think there’s important context. Are you telling yourself that you’re superior to others because you’re always upset about some topic? Do you ever try to debunk the ideas that are freaking you out?

I know for a fact that some of you never read nonfiction books. No one is saying you have to be the sort of person who does, or that you can’t have an opinion if you don’t. But you cannot get the bulk of your information from social media and have any faith that you know who deserves to die – even and especially if you’re very worried about others, because that’s how people manipulate you. That is a recipe for disaster!

Unregulated empathy can make you very stupid, and very hostile. You’ll think you’re a good person the whole time, and that everyone else is apathetic.

One day the friend I talked about earlier came over, and my mom was showing us some old paintings. She suddenly started talking about how she hoped some Democratic politicians would get publicly executed, and that Democrats in general should be executed. My friend looked at me in complete shock. It’s such an insane thing for anyone to say, even if there had been a more solid reason for it. I was shocked too. I had gotten used to her saying things to me, but I had no idea she would feel comfortable saying it outside the family.

My mom knew I worked for Democrats in the past and voted for Democrats, mind. It just didn’t click for her.

It’s hard to say what came first, the extremism or the brain damage, but the bloodthirst corresponded with the other big signs. My mom has vascular dementia, which is caused by high blood pressure, not prions like Alzheimer’s. She would consistently get blood pressure readings well over 200/130 even on her early medications. She certainly had anxiety for many other reasons, namely her drug addict brother, but here are some compelling reasons to presume the extremism did significant damage:

First, in 2019 she had a car wreck and her brain scan showed only a tiny spot of damage. That confined her to bed, so she suddenly had nothing but the internet to distract her. After a few years of nonstop online extremism, I ultimately had some success deprogramming her from QAnon. But by then, it was too late: her brain scans showed “moderate to severe damage.” It was a mercy when she couldn’t understand how to use her computer or even a TV remote anymore: Suddenly blood pressure medications made a bigger difference. 

Second, benzodiazepines (a common class of anti-anxiety medications) usually lower people’s blood pressure, if anything. My mom had an uncommon reaction where they raised hers, especially in a dose dependent manner. Since I was there full time to see it happen, my read was that a poorer grasp on rationality made it much easier for extremist materials to frighten her. She’d lost the capacity to ask questions and talk herself out of absurd things. 

Meanwhile, you guys socially prohibit debunking anything that upsets you. Even if you don’t have brain-destroying blood pressure, you are under any number of unnecessary, illusory stressors that you are certain are real, on top of whichever are real. That has a cumulative effect on your physical health, especially when you persist in these patterns for years. Swallowing any ideology whole is asking for health problems. You cannot afford to believe something upsetting without attempting to debunk it and put it in perspective. 

Furthermore, if someone tells you that you’re a bad person for seeing what other people have to say, they are not your friend. They may be well-meaning, but they have their own anxiety disorder that makes them feel the need to control and judge you in order to feel safe and worthwhile. 

And if you’re someone who tells people that, stop! It’s completely incoherent to worry people will get brainwashed, yet somehow conclude the answer is to listen only to a narrow pool of sources. The protection against brainwashing is to listen to what many people have to say. My mom did not go down a dark path from listening to Fox News, she went down a dark path by listening to nothing but Fox News. When I worked at the DCCC, we regularly checked in to see what they were saying. It’s not like getting bitten by a zombie; you don’t start convulsing and switch parties against your will.

When you panic in response to other people exploring different perspectives, it comes across as if you don’t trust your own judgment, that you’ve only experienced defenselessness in the face of ideas – in which case, you might be right! Perhaps that is what has happened to you. Maybe that’s why you’re cheering on murder right now, when you would have never done that a decade ago.

If you care about truth and you care about making reality better, then you have to hear criticisms. Even your dumbest enemy will be right sometimes. If you define yourself in opposition to another person or ideology, you’re guaranteeing that you will be wrong about some things and really obnoxious about it. Having an adversarial relationship with reality is an express ticket to misery.

Be aware that many anti-anxiety medications, sleep medications, muscle relaxers, and controlled substances for pain relief impair your ability to reason. Also be aware that many stimulant medications impair judgment and often make people short-tempered. Finally, I’m not anti-weed (I rather like it myself) and my mom never used any, but its use is widespread nowadays. I want to mention I have never seen anyone mix weed with any of those medications without profound effects on their rationality and personality. I have seen about a half dozen different people end up committed after doing so, and known more who should have been. Others just got weird or shitty. And if you’re on anti-psychotics, well. Is it really a tall order to limit yourself to simply not wishing death on others? People who aren’t on medications do that all the time without even thinking about it.

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking that a lot of you are posting crazy things because you’ve forgotten these things about your medications, but it was a factor with my negative relatives as well. Almost everyone is on something nowadays, but out of all the attention given to side effects, no one thinks about how it impacts their ethics or politics.

About a year before her diagnosis, my mom started losing friends she’d had for years. She would talk to me about it, and I had to tell her it was not actually her friends’ fault. I told her I understood why they left, and that it had ruined our relationship as well. It made her sad and frustrated. I took care of her full time anyway. She started to back off QAnon, though.

By that point, even the aforementioned negative relatives couldn’t stand her. One of them told her, “I just can’t handle some of the stupid shit you believe.” This was someone who had been banned from Twitter multiple times and just kept making new accounts to be shitty to people over political stuff. They’d once tried to choke my mom to death in a drug-induced bipolar episode.

That’s the only person who visits my mom now. That person moved out of the state a few months after my mom got her diagnosis (that’s not a coincidence), so it’s a few times per year. But they’re not as difficult to be around lately. They are generous in ways that they can manage, given their struggles. I don’t hold grudges.

I’ll be the first to admit this is a terribly dramatic story. I don’t expect anything this bad will happen to anyone reading it. But it’s a universal truth that enjoying others’ misfortune will drive people away, and leave you only with people who enjoy others’ misfortune. You may think you’re getting social support from them, but they will not be there for you when you need them. And they’ll think that’s what you deserve, because you’re so stupid and annoying for inevitably thinking something different than they do.

I resented my mom for so long I almost just put her in a nursing home. Taking care of her has severely limited my life: I’m lucky to get out of the house a few times a month, and it’s expensive to hire a caretaker with the required medical expertise for those six hour breaks.

But I keep remembering what a good example she was to me when I was growing up. I’ve had a few people in my life tell me that I taught them what love is, and all of that came from her. Most of my good traits did. I was just lucky to inherit my father’s curiosity and rationality, so my empathy couldn’t easily be weaponized against me like it is for so many people. I’m not infallible, but I’m always asking if things are true before anything else. When he died she lost his balancing influence, even though he sucked in many ways. She also grew up with several mentally ill siblings, so there was no arbiter of what was true and no reward for knowing it; histrionic coercion ruled everything. Extremist materials communicated in a way that felt like home, and then it became the way she communicated, too.

She was too soft-hearted to handle being exposed to all this suffering, all these weird ideas. She never built the cognitive structure to process it. It made her feel like something had to be done, no matter how drastic. She was supposed to be an artist, not an ideologue. I suspect a lot of you are the same.

I hate the idea that her lifetime of kindness wouldn’t be repaid just because she took a confused turn. So, yes, I take care of her. For most of her life she was sweet, happy, and gentle. We’re fortunate the brain damage seems to have knocked out the years she wasn’t, because that’s what she’s like again. There were happier endings available, but this one has its mercies. 

So many people have a much harder time taking care of a parent with dementia; if they were mean their whole life, that doesn’t change. One of her nurses said that people with dementia often think they’re in their late 30s or early 40s. That is true of my mother. What disposition would you revert to, if that were true of you later? Would you be belligerent, searching for offense behind every word and action, and taking glee in others misfortune? Would you be hard on your loved ones to manage? Or would they like having you around? Would there be people who put their life on hold to repay your kindness? Or would they turn their back and say you’re reaping what you sowed?

I worry so much about you guys. Your formative years are almost gone, or are gone already. My mom can’t paint anymore, but she’s surrounded by the paintings she did in the past. Do you have something like that? Or when you look back, have you sacrificed your light to fanaticism?

The company you keep matters

It’s not just politics, you know. The same dynamic happens without politics, without violent glee. The moment two or more people bond over choosing their lower nature, it’s a race to the bottom.

A couple guys in my high school friend group didn’t wish death on anyone, they just kept choosing their lower nature. They’d say shitty things about people, act arrogant, express dehumanizing things like they expected they would cheat on their hypothetical future wives, etc. Their negativity and poor ethics put people off, even at that age, but we’d dismiss things as jokes or posturing. We were too young to have any foresight about it.

Naturally, it got worse.

I ultimately quit talking to them after I saw them loudly debate which of them had gotten into a more prestigious college right next to a homeless guy. They were doing it on purpose. They were the ones who looked pathetic. My other friends were playing frisbee with another homeless guy. It was such a stark contrast it stuck in my mind forever, like one heavy-handed shot in a movie following another.

It was an easy decision to cut ties. I did miss them, though. For some reason, I tend to find people's negative qualities endearing.

I married one of the guys playing frisbee. He’s a successful rocket scientist now. His friend became a successful business man. We all went to a state university.

What about the guys who chose their lower natures? They kept in touch with each other and kept enabling and rewarding each other’s negativity, all while it pushed others away. I don’t think they realized what was happening. While I had been vocal about why I cut ties, I think they thought it was just over that specific incident. 

Over twenty years later, other friends who have checked in with them irregularly are not sure either of them has ever really had a relationship, or even had sex. One of them got his first job just a few years ago; prior to that he’d just been playing video games and living with parents he hated since high school. I’m unsure whether he still lives with them. I was relieved to hear of his progress, though, because he had many sweet qualities before college; he just succumbed to ugly ideas that sent him on the wrong path, egged on by the wrong people. Last I heard the other guy has a job he probably could have gotten with a community college degree.

What wasted potential.

Personality is everything. Character is everything. Poor character will destroy your relationships and render your talents moot. Whatever you’ve got to offer, people can find a well-adjusted person offering the same thing with no downsides. When your hostility and over-sensitivity forces others to conceal aspects of themselves from you, you will never know intimacy and not understand why. No one will want to get to know you better, and you will only know a false version of other people.

Yet some of you take great pride in being angry. Why? For most people, it’s the easiest emotion in the world. It can’t possibly be what makes you special.

Does this make you mad?

I've got to be honest: If despite all my efforts this makes some of you mad, it rolls right off me. Not because I don't still care about you guys – I wouldn't have kept you on my dash to the detriment of my mental health this long if I didn't – but because many of you are seemingly always mad. About everything. I've watched dozens of you for a full decade, and the pattern is clear: If one issue is resolved, you just find another to be mad about. 

You were mad before I showed up, and you'll be mad when I'm long gone. When you're mad all the time, you take away others' incentive to take you seriously. It is very easy to trade your inconsequential anger for the chance of getting even a single person to take a step back from being a vector for darkness.

And anyway, if I make y’all mad, y’all make me cry and you don’t care, so why should I care about your feelings? You make me feel like nothing will be okay again, that it will never be a good world for people to share themselves publicly. You make me feel like we don’t learn from history. If I were a dumber person, I would believe it. 

In the end, I think my ideas are worth a lot more than yours. I think they’re better-informed, come from more humane motives, and lead to better outcomes. I think you like fighting people and telling yourself you’re a good person. I think you need to believe you’re making a positive difference despite all evidence to the contrary. I think poor character has gotten too comfortable and rewarding for you. I think it feels too daunting for you to criticize or regulate yourself, and that you don’t think you’re strong enough to push back against your social circle.

And that’s why I cry, too, because I think you’re wrong about you.

You have more potential than you’ve let yourself develop. So many of you had distinct personalities a decade ago. Now I can’t tell some of you apart from foreign bot campaigns designed to sow social unrest – and no one is even paying you. Muting your political posts has nearly meant muting your entire person. How does that sit with you? You willingly shovel your soul over to chaos, one post at a time. You follow your anxieties to all sorts of unhappiness and destruction. You let petty things paper over your light. 

How many more years are you going to waste on this? You have other things to offer. 

Your whole life could change for the happier in just a week or two. It’s up to you. Just start choosing your higher nature.

Or just keep being like this guy, I guess. Stare into the abyss, as the saying goes…

Don’t know how to change?

I’m guessing you think you have to be this way. “But but but!” is the reflex.

First, remember that I’m not telling you that you can’t dislike people, or you can’t express yourself at all. I’m saying choosing your lower nature is going to sabotage you over time, and that celebrating death especially hurts the causes you associate with. 

If that seems too difficult, you could at least stop celebrating publicly, as a courtesy. Surely you have a person you can say these things to in private? If you don’t, consider that you may have already pushed others away by coming across as negative or misanthropic. And if you do choose to laugh in private, I would still urge you to have the long-term goal of doing that less and less. Many people will let you do it, but still be worn down by it.

Another misguided idea people have is that even if this behavior pushes people away, the other side is too something – evil, stupid, stubborn – to overcome. They have already decided they can’t win the votes. They conclude it’s necessary to cheer on violence, both to make “bad people” scared and to forcibly remove them from the equation. 

Thankfully, that is not true at all:

Derek Black was the son of the founder of Stormfront, an online neo-Nazi community, and his godfather was the infamous KKK grand wizard David Duke. He snapped out of it because the new friends he made at college were patient with him. Derek Black had much worse beliefs than Charlie Kirk, who stridently rejected white nationalists whenever they engaged him at his campus events. If Black could come around, so can many others. 

Mick West wrote an entire book about how to deprogram people from conspiracy theories by treating them with respect. I used some of his tactics to help my mom back off from QAnon. It turns out you don’t have to kill people who believe dumb things!

Deeyah Khan is a Muslim woman who says, “I’ve responded in all sorts of ways — being angry at racists, shouting at them, confronting them, protesting against them, self-righteously shunning them. I’ve done all that, and I’m not sure what difference it made” because it feeds their persecution complex. She made two separate documentaries where she sat down with white supremacists and jihadists respectively. She got some of them to walk away from their movements just by getting to understand them and befriend them!

Daryl Davis is similarly famous, a black man who has gotten dozens of KKK members to snap out of it just by talking to them.

Shirley Chisholm made an ally of the infamous segregationist George Wallace by visiting him in the hospital after he had been shot five times by an assassin! If you read NOTHING else, read that article.

I’m not saying you need to take on difficult tasks like that, though more people should consider it. Instead, reflect on this: That is what an inspiring, effective person looks like. People who are nasty online are a dime a dozen, and they make the work of those rare effective people so much harder. If it’s too much work to behave in a productive way, it’s okay to simply say less. You can allow yourself to feel some relief that the world is not as doomed as you’ve been lead to believe, and that you don’t have to be a hostile person to make it better.

There is a reason why foreign bot campaigns want Americans to resort to violence. They understand the foundation of our stability is that we don’t kill each other over political shit. We achieve great things because we have open dialogue, but we fail to solve problems when we become too tribal and rigid. There are a lot of powerful forces in the world who benefit when you drink poison, but you’re the one who suffers from the anxiety of the skewed perspective. 

In the end, reflect upon your own history: Were you born knowing everything you believe to be true right now? Have you never changed your mind about something? Should someone have killed you when you had your earlier beliefs? Some people grow up in unusual families, with parents who brainwash them into believing awful things like Derek Black’s did. Why should you or anyone else get to decide the pace at which they untangle their ideas? 

I have been keeping up with politics for a few decades, and most public figures have changed some of their views considerably over that time. Some are unrecognizeable compared to where they started! There is a significant political realignment occuring on both the right and the left right now, and it started back when Trump first ran. The person you think deserves to die could be a huge asset to one of your causes a year from now precisely because they’re not on your side. They might be an important swing vote, or otherwise introduce ideas you favor to an audience who would have never listened to someone on your side. You never know who’s starting to doubt their beliefs and alliances. 

Finally, maybe you feel guilt or shame after mulling over these ideas, and you don’t know how to move forward. You don’t need to admit that to me or anyone else, although it can be powerful if you do. If all you can do is quietly change your behavior, that’s enough.

One of the most comforting things I can tell you is that you were wrong that people don’t change, and that means you, too.

Do you agree with me?

Start saying something. Try to have compassion, but say something.

Be aware the odds are stacked against you because people can’t hear this stuff. They’ve spent much of their life criticizing others’ alleged moral impurities in part to prop up their own sense of worth, and they’ve now convinced themselves that morally impure people deserve to be murdered. 

Needless to say, it triggers a lot of complicated processes to suggest they, in fact, are in the bottom 10% of moral purity. Some people literally never had a foundation of self-worth before they found one in misguided “activism.” There are profoundly sympathetic reasons for that. They will be livid and blame you for threatening their ego. You can’t take it personally when you didn’t set up the conditions that made them this way. They’re habitually alienating a lot of people besides you, so how can it be your fault?

Whenever you’re trying to change someone’s mind, you are playing a long game. They never change on the spot, and they rarely come back to admit you were right and thank you later. Leave the door open if you can stomach it, but don’t expect anything or you won’t have the endurance to keep engaging them productively. You will be one of many drops in a bucket; they will be getting all sorts of reactions from other people too, and if they have enough bloodthirsty people in their life to fall back on, they will take the easier, lower path. If people change trajectory, odds are you will hear about it from someone else later. 

You’re not doing this just for you. If you think it has to be a wholly positive experience, then you’ll convince yourself it wasn’t worth the trouble. You’re also doing this for them, and for everyone else who goes on to meet them. If enough of us say something, you’ll benefit from someone else’s hard work later even if you lose some current relationships. 

Anyway, there’s a great deal of relief when rigid people choose to cut ties with you. An enormous weight is lifted. It hurts to lose them, yes, but you get to spend your energy on other things instead of dancing around their sensitivities. You’re no longer subjected to their anxiety- or anger-driven attempts to control your beliefs. You know things can’t continue on the way they are.

And when all else fails, run. Get away from people who are headed nowhere good, one way or another. You’ll make new friends; once you quit defending extremists and their ideas, you can be friends with almost anyone. Even if someone disagrees on most issues, many people are eager to bond with others over shared frustration at extremists. You don’t have to convince them of anything and that shouldn’t be your goal. It is enough to humanize yourself in their mind, and to humanize them in yours. If your positions are compelling, they might come around. But it’s not for you to decide.

At the very least, you will find people who make you feel like you can breathe again. People walk out of hell at different speeds; there’s no bonus points for shackling yourself to the slowest people. Sometimes you’re just not the catalyst someone else needs. But sometimes you are!

I promise you, you can have difficult conversations. You can break free. If you don’t expect a lot of wins, you’ll get more than you expected.

Finally, if you have the strength to cosign this, whether in the replies or in a private message, I would appreciate it. If anyone actually reads it, I anticipate some defensive hatred. Without anything to balance that out, the only silver lining will be that it signal boosts this to people who follow the sorts of people I’m talking about. People don’t speak up about this stuff because it doesn’t feel worth the backlash, so we need to support people who do. It’s absurd that the majority perspective can be bullied into silence, especially on something as basic as this.

Alright. I hope to see some of you on Substack, but I’ll be updating on AO3 eventually either way. I love you even when you’re alarming. Bye.

[skulls-and-tea]

me: [reading some things, far away from tumblr]

me: doot doot doot

book:

[ x ]

me: 

[skulls-and-tea]

uh remember this from July 2015

[loudest-subtext-in-tv]

historical fuckin’ document

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: The Abominable Bride

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

~

TAB offers a Victorian-era retelling of many of the events that have already happened in S1-S3. This gives us additional insight into some of what we’ve seen so far, emphasizes certain ideas that the writers want to make sure that we think about, and highlights a few of the things that are still unresolved—namely, whether Moriarty is dead or alive. TAB also foreshadows some of the developments that I believe the writers initially planned for S4, or perhaps for an unmade S5. In doing so, the episode hints at the ultimate resolution of Sherlock and John’s love story.

TAB does not, however, actually move the story forward in the present day. Everything we see in this episode takes place inside Sherlock’s head while he’s drugged out on the plane; I think the fact that we return to the 1890s for the final scene reveals that even the last modern scene still happens inside Sherlock’s head. None of this is real, but TAB does reveal the things that Sherlock is puzzling over immediately following HLV, some of his beliefs about the other characters, and some of his deepest fears.

So, welcome to Sherlock’s gay Victorian dreamscape. Below, I’ve mapped out its segments. After that, I’ll discuss the parts of the episode that I think are the most important for understanding the romance arc. (I have a bit less to say about this episode, because the goal of this project has never been to analyze every element of the show. But I’ll talk about the parts that jump out at me the most.)

Segments of the episode/Sherlock’s dream:

(1) The first Victorian sequence. This takes up most of the episode, and we can think of it as Level 1 within Sherlock’s dream. 

Nothing that we see in this sequence is new. Instead, the whole thing offers a retelling of many of the elements of S1-S3. As Moriarty says towards the end of this sequence, “Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun.” (And even that line is a revised version of something that we’ve heard before, which makes it pretty much perfect! It reprises what Sherlock said in ASIB while talking about Coventry: “The wheel turns. Nothing is ever new.”)

If there’s one thing that’s “new” here, it’s that Sherlock is now trying to work out how Moriarty could have faked his death in TRF and still survived. He’s using the Emelia Ricoletti case to puzzle through this.

(2) The first modern scene on the plane, where Sherlock imagines himself returning to the present and explaining to Mycroft, John, and Mary that he’s trying to use the Ricoletti case to figure out how Moriarty might have survived. We can think of this as Level 2 within the dream.

(3) The second Victorian sequence. Sherlock seems more conscious of the fact that he’s dreaming during this sequence, but it’s still simply a return to Level 1. We know this because it picks up where the last Victorian sequence left off. This indicates that everything we’re seeing here is still a redux of S1-S3.

(4) The second modern-day sequence. Sherlock wakes up in hospital after overdosing on the plane, convinces everyone to go to the graveyard with him to try to dig up Emelia Ricoletti to see if there’s a second corpse in her grave, and has a fight with John, after which John leaves with Mary. This is a return to Level 2, since it picks up where Sequence 2 ended.

Level 2 still isn’t real, but it’s notable because it illustrates some of Sherlock’s deepest fears. When Mary reveals that Sherlock was reading John’s blog on his phone before he passed out, Sherlock deflects, and then Mycroft says “You really think anyone’s believing you?” This exchange might illustrate Sherlock’s fear that Mary and Mycroft both know that he’s in love with John, but John still doesn’t. (Sherlock doesn’t seem to have realized that John figured it out sometime before the tarmac, if indeed John did.) We also see Sherlock’s fear that he will never be able to escape the threat of Moriarty. Moreover, the fight in the graveyard illustrates Sherlock’s fear that eventually John will become too frustrated with him to put up with him anymore and will abandon him. The confused conclusion of the graveyard scene also gives us yet more evidence that Sherlock feels unable to focus and can’t act rationally without John, something that we’ve seen before in TEH and TSOT.

(5) The Victorian-era scene between Moriarty, Sherlock, and John at the Reichenbach Falls. This is Level 3 of the dream. As @asherlockstudy explains in one of her metas about TAB, this scene doesn’t fit in with the earlier Victorian sequence of events. It’s new! This scene provides a major piece of foreshadowing for where the show is going, so I’ll talk about it in more depth in a bit.

(6) One last modern scene, where Sherlock wakes up on the plane again. We’re probably expected to believe that this scene is real and serves as a transition to the events of S4. Personally, I think it’s still fake because we return to the 1890s again after this, but honestly it doesn’t really matter.

(7) Finally, the episode ends back in the late nineteenth century, with the Victorian Sherlock and John sitting in their chairs in front of the fireplace at 221B and discussing Sherlock’s dreams about what the future might hold. This scene seems to follow from either the last scene in Level 1 (Sequence 3) or maybe the Reichenbach Falls scene (Sequence 5), but it’s not super clear and also doesn’t really matter.

(I labeled the levels 1, 2, and 3, but that’s not meant to be in reference to “depth” within Sherlock’s dream or anything like that. The numbers are just identifiers to tell them apart.)

Now that we have all that mapped out, there are a few main things from TAB that I want to talk about.

First, the Victorian sequences give us more insight into Sherlock’s and John’s differing levels of comfort with their own queer sexualities and their attraction to one another in S1-S3. Because Sherlock is dreaming all of this, these sequences also give us hints at what Sherlock thinks about this.

As I’ve said over and over again, Sherlock is gay and totally at peace with that side of himself. He fell in love with John in S1, recognized those feelings for what they were, and accepted them very quickly. Sherlock experiences a lot of pain and heartbreak because of his love for John, but the same-sex nature of that love is never the part that causes any of that. Meanwhile, for much of the show, John hasn’t been fully comfortable with the same-sex nature of his attraction to Sherlock and what it means for his own sexuality, and in S3 we learned that Sherlock has long been aware of that. The fact that the Victorian sequences repeatedly highlight John’s discomfort demonstrates that even though John seems to have made a lot of progress towards accepting his sexuality and his love for Sherlock in TSOT and HLV, Sherlock hasn’t understood that yet. He’s still worried about John’s reticence.

The Victorian sequences highlight John’s discomfort in several ways. First, the scene between Mycroft, Sherlock, and John at the Diogenes Club emphasizes John’s fear about his sexuality being discovered. When Mycroft describes the “invisible enemy,” John tries to guess who it is. He lists so many possibilities that Mycroft replies sardonically, “Is there any large body of people you’re not concerned about?” and then asks John “Are you aware of recent theories concerning what is known as ‘paranoia’?” Mycroft’s comment is a nod to the way that John has been paranoid about how people perceive his sexuality and his relationship with Sherlock for much of the show.

TAB also returns to the metaphor of homospectrality. The Lady Carmichael/Sir Eustace/ghost case is a retelling of the case from THOB! And just as it did in THOB, in TAB this case illustrates Sherlock’s and John’s differing levels of comfort with their sexualities. @entelecheia has a great meta about this here.

In TAB, the “ghost” of Emelia Ricoletti plays the role of the hound. Sherlock does not believe for one single moment that there is any supernatural explanation for the threat against Sir Eustace, and he never entertains Lestrade’s fear that the bride has risen from the dead to kill off various men. John, however, fears that there actually is a ghost floating around and murdering people. Using the homospectrality metaphor, we see that John falls for the ghost story because he’s frightened of his own bisexuality, but Sherlock holds firm because he understands that there is nothing unnatural or sinister about same-sex attraction and love. As Sherlock says, “there are no ghosts in this world, save those we make for ourselves.” Just like in THOB, people only imagine that homosexuality is threatening.

The night that Sherlock and John investigate at the Carmichaels’ house, Sherlock tells John to stay in one place so that he can catch the murderer, but John becomes frightened and leaves his post. After this and when John insists that he saw the ghost, Sherlock totally loses it and yells at him “THERE ARE NO GHOSTS!” I think this might be the angriest we ever see Sherlock get at John in the entire show. Since all of this is happening inside Sherlock’s head, this shows that Sherlock knows that John has long been uncomfortable with his sexuality, and he knows that it’s one of the things that’s been keeping them apart. Sherlock has been trying to get John to see that there’s nothing to be frightened of, but he thinks that John still isn’t getting it. And after years of this, in his own mind, Sherlock feels frustrated and angry with John over this.

The scene at the desanctified church also gives a nod to John’s difficulties with his own same-sex attraction. In this scene, Sherlock and John are confronted with all the women whom they wronged in S1-S3, and Victorian!John’s cheeky maid Jane is there to give him a little wave. There is an awesome meta chain about Jane here, with great commentary from @sussexbound and @asherlockstudy. I agree with both of their takes, so I think Jane has two purposes.

As sussexbound says, Jane is a mirror for John. In the scene at John’s house earlier in TAB, Jane told John that she was behind in her domestic duties because she was too busy reading up on John and Sherlock’s latest adventure in the Strand. When John gets annoyed at her, this illustrates his frustration with himself. He’s so caught up in his feelings for Sherlock that he’s unable to focus on the other parts of his life that he thinks he’s supposed to care about—his domestic life with Mary—and he’s angry with himself as a result. Jane also looks a bit like Sherlock because she’s a nod to John’s attraction to Sherlock.

At the same time, though, Jane also represents all of John’s past girlfriends. She sees straight through John and can tell that he’s not actually committed to having a heteronormative lifestyle; she tells him to his face that he’s always out of the house with Sherlock and never sees Mary. This is just like how Jeanette could see that John was in love with Sherlock in ASIB and dumped him because of it. John gets annoyed at Jane for this and tells her to go away, demonstrating that John’s relationships never lasted because he, too, knew that his heart wasn’t in them. When Jane shows up in the crowd of women at the church to wave at John, she’s there to remind him that he’s treated many women unfairly while trying to use them to run away from his attraction to Sherlock.

Relatedly, throughout the Victorian sequences, Sherlock imagines John and Mary having marital trouble. Victorian!Mary is annoyed that she never gets to come along on Sherlock and John’s adventures, and she’s upset that John rarely sees her because he’s always off with Sherlock. In a lot of ways, this aspect of TAB is a replay of the beginning of HLV, when Sherlock knew that John wanted to leave Mary to be with him and was itching for casework.

Moreover, in the first Victorian sequence, there’s a moment when Sherlock and Lestrade talk about John’s empty chair at 221B and the fact that John has moved out. Then there’s a transition and we see John staring at an empty chair across from him at the breakfast table at his own house. Right after that, John starts talking to Jane about Mary and about how Mary has gone out, but the transition between these two scenes reveals that he was really thinking about Sherlock when he stared at the empty chair. John is missing Sherlock when he’s at home in the place that represents his unhappy and unfulfilling life with Mary.

This shows that Sherlock knows that John is miserable in his marriage. And the fact that Sherlock imagines all of this after Christmas, when John and Mary have fake-reconciled, might be a hint that Sherlock knows John hasn’t truly forgiven Mary.

The last scene in TAB also gives a nod to Sherlock’s and John’s different relationships with their sexualities. We get this dialogue when Sherlock and John discuss Sherlock’s musings about the modern world.

Sherlock: It was simply my conjecture of what a future world might look like, and how you and I might fit inside it. […] Perhaps I was being a little fanciful, but perhaps such things could come to pass. In any case, I know I would be very much at home in such a world. John: I don’t think I would be. Sherlock: I beg to differ. But then, I’ve always known I was a man out of his time.

This is so gay. On its face, this offers direct commentary on the different ways that Sherlock and John each behave in the modern world. Sherlock is quite comfortable in a world that accepts homosexuality, but John is not.

But what’s really cool about this is the fact that Sherlock contradicts John when he says that he wouldn’t be at home in such a world. Sherlock does believe that John might one day be comfortable with his bisexuality and his love for Sherlock. He’s dreaming about “how you and I might fit inside” a world where they could be in love openly. Sherlock knows that John has the potential to overcome whatever insecurities or discomfort around his sexuality he might have or might have had in the past.

In fact, there’s a very important scene earlier in the episode that gives us more insight into Sherlock’s thoughts on this matter. In the scene where Sherlock and John wait outside the Carmichaels’ house in the glasshouse, Sherlock and John’s dialogue reveals that Sherlock longs for John to finally recognize Sherlock’s love for him and to accept it.

In this scene, Sherlock imagines John questioning him about his sexuality and romantic interests. Then Sherlock imagines himself trying to say that he’s not interested in romance by quoting John’s own writing about him.

Sherlock: If you are referring to romantic entanglement, Watson, which I rather fear you are, as I have often explained before, all emotion is abhorrent to me. It is the grit in a sensitive instrument— Sherlock and John (together): —the crack in the lens. John: Yes. Sherlock: Well, there you are, you see? I’ve said it all before. John: No, I wrote all that. You’re quoting yourself from the Strand magazine. Sherlock: Well, exactly. John: No, those are my words, not yours! That is the version of you that I present to the public: the brain without a heart, the calculating machine. I write all of that, Holmes, and the readers lap it up, but I do not believe it.

When Sherlock quotes John’s own words about what an unfeeling machine he is, this shows that Sherlock thinks he can’t have romance because of what John thinks about him. Sherlock can’t have romance because he wants it with John, but John thinks he’s unfeeling and incapable of love. In S1-S3, John said this over and over again to himself and on his blog when he was trying to protect himself from having his heart broken by Sherlock. As a result, Sherlock fears that John actually believes it’s true. But in this scene, Sherlock then imagines John contradicting him and saying that he doesn’t actually believe in Sherlock’s cold sociopath façade. This imagined conversation therefore shows Sherlock’s deep longing for John to see him as he truly is and for John to understand that he loves him. Or maybe it’s meant to show that Sherlock actually does understand that John sees through his mask, and he just wants John to finally take the last step by accepting Sherlock’s love.

This leads me to the second big thing from TAB that I want to talk about: the Reichenbach Falls scene. In my opinion, this is the most important part of TAB.

As I indicated above, this is the first Victorian sequence that’s original and not just a retelling of what we’ve seen before. This scene portrays three things that are significant and very different from what we saw in S1-S3: (1) Sherlock and John defeat Moriarty together in a situation where it’s not just Sherlock facing down Moriarty alone, (2) John tells Sherlock that he knows Sherlock is in love with him, and (3) John is totally at peace with this and demonstrates that he’s comfortable accepting Sherlock’s love.

First, Sherlock and John defeat Moriarty together in this scene. Despite Sherlock’s initial confidence that he can best Moriarty (“…when it comes to a matter of unarmed combat on the edge of a precipice, you’re going in the water, short-arse”), Sherlock was losing to Moriarty before John showed up. But then John appears, promises that “there’s always two of us,” saves Sherlock, and pushes Moriarty off the ledge.

This is not a repeat of TRF, where Sherlock tried to face Moriarty on the rooftop alone and Moriarty forced his hand by making him jump. Over and over again in S1-S3, Sherlock repeatedly made the mistake of attempting to confront villains on his own without John or without fully confiding his plans in John. In deliberate contrast, here Sherlock and John are finally able to defeat Moriarty only when there’s two of them and they do it together.

Now for points (2) and (3), we get to discuss this wonderful, wonderful dialogue between Sherlock and John.

Sherlock: Thank you, John.  John: Since when do you call me “John”?  Sherlock: (smiling tenderly) You’d be surprised.  John: (smiling back at him) No, I wouldn’t. 

In Victorian England, calling someone by their first name was a sign of intimacy, and Sherlock and John generally don’t call each other by their first names in the Victorian sequences in TAB. So a rough “translation” of this might be something like this: 

Sherlock: Thank you, John. John: How long have you been in love with me?  Sherlock: (smiling tenderly) You’d be surprised.  John: (smiling back at him) No, I wouldn’t. 

(inspired by this)

With this dialogue and their gentle smiles at one another, John reveals that he already knows that Sherlock is in love with him and that he’s completely at peace with that. This is new! This is so important! While I think it’s possible that John figured out that Sherlock was in love with him by the time of the tarmac scene, he didn’t plainly reveal as much to Sherlock, and we’ve never seen a version of John who is anywhere near as comfortable with his and Sherlock’s love for one another as John is in this scene. 

asherlockstudy argues here that this was intended to be foreshadowing for the rest of the show, and I think that’s probably correct. In this scene, the writers hinted to us that Moriarty would return as the central villain in the later series and that Sherlock would finally realize that the only way to defeat Moriarty would be for him and John to do it together. In doing so, Sherlock would fully complete his character arc by realizing that he can’t do everything alone. This is so important, because as I’ve said over and over already, in the denouements of S1, S2, and S3, Sherlock messed up spectacularly three times in a row by trying to face down a villain without confiding his plans in John. When Sherlock finally learns to be fully honest with John, they’ll be able to bring down the show’s central antagonist together. 

Furthermore, in this foreshadowed ending, Sherlock and John finally admitting their love to each other is a crucial part of their defeat of Moriarty. In the Reichenbach Falls scene, it is literally as they are defeating Moriarty once and for all that Sherlock and John are able to confess their love to each other and are both able to accept it. 

This foreshadows one of two possibilities: (1) Sherlock and John will have to admit their love to each other and get together as a couple in order to defeat Moriarty, or (2) only with Moriarty finally defeated will Sherlock and John be able to get together as a couple. Then with Moriarty gone for good, Sherlock will finally be free to love John openly, and John will complete the narrative arc of the romance by getting over his own reservations and coming to accept his and Sherlock’s love for each other. Both of these possibilities fit in very neatly with this scene from TAB and with Moriarty’s role as the central antagonist in the love story.

Right after saying “No, I wouldn’t,” John says “Time you woke up, Sherlock.” This is another clue that all of this is foreshadowing: once Sherlock and John have finally admitted their feelings for each other, the story can be resolved. 

And then, there is one last detail that rounds out this scene beautifully. After John asks how Sherlock plans to wake up, Sherlock steps up to the edge of the waterfall and tosses his deerstalker into the water below. Then he prepares to jump. 

@sapierror pointed out here that this reverses Sherlock’s actions on the rooftop in TRF. There, just before falling, Sherlock threw away his phone after talking to John—threw away his heart. Here, Sherlock throws away his deerstalker—the hat that he wears whenever he needs to play the persona of “Sherlock Holmes”—before voluntarily jumping off the edge of the precipice so that he can wake up. In other words, this time Sherlock throws away his mask. Before, Sherlock wasn’t ready to bare his heart and fully admit his love to John so that they could defeat Moriarty and resolve the love story. But at the show’s conclusion, he will be. This could also be a clue that once Sherlock learns that John knows he’s in love with him, Sherlock will be ready.

Of course, this isn’t the story that we actually got in S4. But I really do believe that the writers initially intended to make on-screen Johnlock the show’s endgame. Either they changed their minds after S3 and when they made S4, or they were planning to finally bring us there in the unmade S5. So to me, interpreting this scene from TAB as foreshadowing for the ending that the writers had initially planned makes perfect sense.

And...that’s it?? That’s all I have for now! If you read to the end of this enormous meta project, then THANK YOU SO MUCH! And I would love to hear your thoughts!

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: His Last Vow

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

~

Thank you to @thegildedbee for the extra beta!

When the events of HLV begin, Sherlock and John haven’t seen each other for a month, presumably not since the wedding. They miss each other intensely, and they’re both struggling and failing to handle it.

Before the wedding, Sherlock was able to cope with the pain of losing John to Mary by channeling his energies into the wedding planning, but now he doesn’t have that as an outlet anymore. Cigarettes aren’t strong enough to help him cope, like in S2, so Sherlock returns to using drugs, after apparently having been clean since before the events of ASIP. Sherlock later tells John that he purposely started using drugs in order to advertise a fake pressure point to Magnussen, but this is an outright lie. In the scene at Appledore, Magnussen tells Sherlock that he never believed the drugs were Sherlock’s pressure point for a moment, and Sherlock doesn’t seem surprised. He even inclines his head and quirks his mouth in agreement when Magnussen adds that Sherlock wouldn’t care if his drug habit were made public, which of course makes it absolutely useless as a pressure point since Magnussen operates by exposing people’s secrets through the media. The real reason Sherlock goes back to drugs in HLV is because of how deeply he’s missing John. Sherlock also apparently picks a drug den near where John lives, even though it’s super far away in the suburbs, perhaps because he wants any excuse to just be physically closer to John.

Meanwhile, John is obviously dissatisfied with his life with Mary and misses everything that he used to have with Sherlock.

The first time we see John in this episode, we learn that John is literally dreaming about Sherlock while he sleeps next to Mary. (*bangs head into a wall*) I still can’t believe they actually put this in the show. As many, many people have pointed out, John’s dream about Sherlock is also strikingly erotic. Sherlock’s voice sounds seductive and his pupils are dilated, and John throws Mary’s hand off of his own as soon as he wakes up. This suggests that he either can’t bear to have Mary touch him, or he feels guilty for emotionally cheating on her (in a sense) by dreaming about Sherlock.

(screencap from here)

The next scene demonstrates that John has been thinking about Sherlock constantly during his waking hours, too. John and Mary’s neighbor Kate Whitney comes over for help, and John assumes she’s looking for Sherlock before she’s barely said anything. Mary looks bitter and annoyed when John brings Sherlock up, as if maybe she’s been hearing a lot about Sherlock over the past month and is sick of having to put up with John blatantly pining for him.

Speaking of, Mary acts far less sweet and charming in this episode than she did in TEH and TSOT. She snaps at John and acts a bit belittling towards him in the early scenes with Kate, when she and John go outside, and when she and John go to the drug den. She’s also rude to and dismissive of Wiggins when he approaches their car, during the lab scene at Bart’s, and then again when she first walks past him at Leinster Gardens. Mary might have felt a need to play nice before the wedding, but not anymore. She thinks that between the wedding and the baby, John is safely hers and the gloves can come off now. It’s also obvious that unlike in TSOT, in HLV Mary hasn’t done anything to encourage John and Sherlock to hang out together since she and John got married and returned from their honeymoon. Mary doesn’t feel like she should have to accommodate John’s relationship with Sherlock anymore.

Later on, Wiggins reveals that John has started cycling to work and that he keeps all his shirts (all his shirts, not just some of them) folded and ready to pack. In TEH, the scene where John and Mary briefly talk and kiss before John tries to visit Sherlock after work implies that John and Mary typically left work together. That, in turn, suggests that they probably used to commute together in the mornings, too. But John has stopped doing that now—he’s pulling away from Mary. Wiggins’s pointed deduction that John keeps his shirts “ready to pack” also suggests that John might be considering leaving Mary—or even if he isn’t seriously considering it, he wants to. After a month of marriage, maybe some of John’s thoughts from the stag night have been creeping up on him again.

In short, after just one month of life in the suburbs with Mary and without Sherlock, John is completely miserable and desperate to escape. He’s extremely tetchy and he’s itching to get out on a case. As Sherlock says later on, John couldn’t even survive one month in the suburbs without storming a drug den and beating someone up. He’s not suited to the life that he’s trying to lead with Mary, and he clearly wants back everything that he used to have with Sherlock: both Sherlock himself and the life that they once shared together.

After John goes to find Isaac Whitney at the drug den, Sherlock and John are reunited once more. After this, there is so much subtext layered into their interactions for the first chunk of the episode.

First off, Sherlock and John treat each other much more coldly and harshly in HLV than in TSOT. The careful equilibrium they had found together before the wedding is gone now. Sherlock is heartbroken that John married someone else and is obviously hurt by John’s practical abandonment of him after the wedding. John, meanwhile, feels guilty for missing Sherlock so intensely when he feels that he’s supposed to be settling into his new life with Mary and preparing for the baby. And maybe he’s seriously thinking about leaving Mary and feeling awful and conflicted about it. For all of these reasons, Sherlock and John both seem to have been avoiding each other for the last month. Their feelings are just too intense to bear, and perhaps they were each unsure of what would happen if they saw each other again. Once they do see each other again, they take their pain and frustration out on each other, each essentially trying to punish the other for their part in preventing them from being together.

This becomes evident in the scene at Bart’s after John and Mary pick Sherlock up from the drug den. When John demands to know why Sherlock is using again, Sherlock hits back by retorting that he might as well ask why John has started cycling to work. Essentially, Sherlock is saying that their reasons are the same: they’re pining for each other. Sherlock is on drugs again because he misses John, and John is cycling to work instead of commuting with Mary because he’s distancing himself from Mary due to his feelings for Sherlock. In classic John fashion, John immediately gets defensive and tries to cut Sherlock off. (A few people have made some of the points that I’m building off of here.)

And Sherlock knows exactly what’s going on here. As I’ve said, I think Sherlock had doubts about John’s feelings for him after he first got back to London, but at this point he seems to be able to read John pretty clearly again. He knows that John is in love with him but has chosen not to act on it, and he’s starting to move on from being just heartbroken about this to being a bit angry about it, too. After a month of radio silence from John—after John promised him his marriage to Mary wouldn’t change anything about their friendship—Sherlock is tired of acting like a totally gracious angel the way he did before the wedding. He’s starting to act bitter and petty towards John instead.

Meanwhile, part of John’s anger towards Sherlock in this scene comes from a sense of shame, because John knows that Sherlock knows he’s in love with him, and he’s angry and embarrassed that Sherlock knows this and will even go so far as to acknowledge it in front of other people. John finds this especially hurtful because he thinks that his feelings are unrequited. From John’s perspective, it looks like Sherlock is just being a total jerk by intentionally using John’s feelings for him to get under his skin, seemingly just to cover his own ass about the drugs and not for any deeper reason. As a result, John is completely unwilling to engage with Sherlock’s comment about the cycling and he’s extremely tense when Wiggins starts deducing him.

Then Wiggins tells everyone that John keeps all his shirts folded and ready to pack, as if he’s considering leaving Mary and moving out. Which is even more humiliating for John.

HLV states on two separate occasions that John is “addicted” to Sherlock and the lifestyle that he provides, and this happens for the first time in this scene. When Wiggins says that “some guy” hurt his wrist, John says that it was probably just “some addict, in need of a fix.” Sherlock agrees, and we can tell from the glances that Sherlock gives Wiggins and John that Sherlock knows it was John. Earlier, when Sherlock first came back to London, John wrote on his blog about Sherlock, “I was hooked. He’s like a drug.” John just can’t keep away, but he feels that he should, because he thinks Sherlock doesn’t love him back. John thinks that chasing after Sherlock any longer is only going to get him hurt, so the powerful pull that he feels to Sherlock is a bad thing, like an addiction.

But John just can’t stay away. When Sherlock and John go back to 221B, Sherlock tries to draw John back to him with a case, just as he always does when there’s any kind of rift between them. And at first, it works. As soon as Sherlock mentions Magnussen and it becomes clear from Mycroft’s reaction that this is an important case, John wants in on it.

John: It’s for a case, you said? Sherlock: Yep. John: What sort of case? Sherlock: Too big and dangerous for any sane individual to get involved in. John: (a bit aggressively) You trying to put me off? Sherlock: God no. (smiles) I’m trying to recruit you.

(gif from here)

This is John at his most lovestruck.

Janine reveals herself, and John cycles through a range of emotions. When he first sees Janine, John looks shocked, lost, and hurt by the idea that Sherlock has started a relationship with someone other than him. Even if John doesn’t know that Sherlock is in love with him, he never expected this.

When Janine leaves to get dressed and Sherlock comes out from his bath, John switches to incredulity. He’s especially hung up on the fact that Sherlock has a girlfriend—apparently, John has at least figured out that Sherlock is gay. (Well done, John! That’s a start!) I also think this scene might offer some evidence that John still doesn’t know about Sherlock’s feelings. John’s incredulous faces are a bit smiley, and I don’t think John would be quite so smiley if he’d figured out that Sherlock was in love with him at the wedding and knew that they’re both avoiding their feelings for each other.

Sherlock keeps trying to explain the Magnussen case to John, but John clearly doesn’t listen to a word that Sherlock says about the case. He just wants to talk about Sherlock and Janine. I think this is the first time we’ve ever seen Sherlock’s strategy of trying to draw John back to him through a case fall flat. John is just so stuck on the apparent Sherlock/Janine situation that he doesn’t respond as he normally would, and even as he did just a few minutes ago. Now that John has realized that he can’t get over Sherlock and can’t focus on his relationship with Mary—and that he’s actually pretty miserable being married to Mary—he’s especially distracted by anything that has to do with Sherlock being in a relationship.

After Janine returns, settles herself on the arm of Sherlock’s chair, and starts flirting with Sherlock, John gets full-on jealous. When Janine gets up again, John even stands up and puffs out his chest like he’s showing off and attempting to reclaim his territory, lol. (I once saw a meta pointing out John’s body language in that particular moment, but unfortunately I don’t have the link.)

Even though John won’t get off the topic of Janine, Sherlock keeps determinedly trying to talk about the case. In essence, Sherlock is trying to establish a professional relationship with John because he thinks that’s the best way to get John back into his life again after his marriage to Mary. Sherlock thinks that John has chosen distance, and he’s willing to give John that distance as long as he can have John back in some way.

Soon afterwards, Magnussen and his goons show up and John does something very interesting indeed. When one of Magnussen’s men searches John for weapons, he finds the tire lever that John tucked into his waistband earlier that morning and that John and Mary both agreed was “sexy.” As Sherlock looks on (in a bit of shock), John leans forward and says to the man suggestively, “Doesn’t mean I’m not pleased to see you,” echoing what Moriarty said to Sherlock at the pool in TGG.

John’s willingness to make a gay sex joke about himself, completely unprompted, indicates that he’s feeling far less defensive of his sexuality than he ever has before. John’s previous jokes about his sexuality have all been more like “no homo” jokes than what he says here; this seems like a shift. With this line, John is giving both the audience and Sherlock a hint that things he once thought were off the table—namely, a relationship and sex with Sherlock—might not be anymore. (My thanks to abrae’s meta for first alerting me to the significance of John’s joke here.)

This is quite an admission from John! He’s not drunk like during the stag night. John is starting to reach his breaking point; he seems to have realized that he’s completely incapable of performing heteronormativity in the suburbs with Mary, and he’s nearly desperate to get back to Sherlock.

But unfortunately, Sherlock and John’s relationship has now become painfully complicated.

After Magnussen and his goons leave, Sherlock acts as if John coming with him on the case can be taken for granted, which is true, of course. This pisses John off though, because to John it just feels like Sherlock takes for granted that John is in love with him and will do anything for him. Sherlock’s behavior really bothers John because it makes him feel like his feelings are just obvious. So that’s why we get the “I’ll text you instructions.” / “Yeah, I’ll text you if I’m available.” / “You are, I checked.” dialogue. Right after this, John is also upset when Sherlock points out that he’s gained weight in his first month of marriage to Mary, because it’s yet one more way that it’s obvious John is miserable with Mary.

Continuing his behavior from the lab scene at Bart’s, Sherlock also takes his anger out on John in the first two scenes with Janine by intentionally using his fake relationship with her to punish John for hurting him by marrying Mary.

As @ivyblossom has pointed out, Sherlock deliberately tries to make John jealous of Janine at 221B. He really lays it on thick with her when John is around because he’s purposely trying to needle him.

Sherlock then takes a dig at John for marrying Mary when he and John are riding the elevator up to Magnussen’s office after Sherlock’s fake proposal. I’m taking this idea from @sussexbound’s and @asherlockstudy’s great commentary here. Here’s the dialogue between Sherlock and John:

John: What are you going to do? Sherlock: Well, not actually marry her, obviously. There’s only so far you can go. John: So what will you tell her? Sherlock: Well, I’ll tell her that our entire relationship was a ruse to break into her boss’s office. I imagine she’ll want to stop seeing me at that point. But you’re the expert on women.

By saying “Well, not actually marry her, obviously. There’s only so far you can go,” Sherlock tells John that he crossed a line when he married Mary to run away from his feelings for Sherlock. Sherlock knows that John wasn’t truly in love with Mary, so here he states that it was dishonest and cruel of John to marry her just because he couldn’t face what he felt for Sherlock. Sherlock’s pointed “But you’re the expert on women” then emphasizes that John has a long history of using relationships with women to avoid the implications of his same-sex attraction to Sherlock. That was never fair to those women, and it’s something that Sherlock himself has never done: he’s never used women as a screen to hide his attraction to John.

This is all so carefully phrased and says so much, both about John’s behavior throughout S1-S3 and about how thoroughly Sherlock understands exactly what John has been doing all this time.

In the meta chain I just linked, asherlockstudy points out that the church scene in TAB shows Sherlock and John coming face to face with all of the women whom they wronged in S1-S3. The inclusion of the feminist plotline in TAB thus serves (among other things) to emphasize what Sherlock said to John in the elevator. And even though Sherlock has always been honest with himself about his attraction to John and has never tried to hide it through heterosexual relationships, he isn’t totally blameless here, either. Victorian!Janine’s pointed comments to Sherlock in the church emphasize that Sherlock treated her unfairly when he pretended to date her and then milked their fake relationship for all it was worth in front of John. Sherlock and John have both treated women unfairly while pining for each other.

Even though Sherlock takes his anger out on John in these early scenes, HLV also shows us over and over again that Sherlock will do anything for John. When it comes down to it, Sherlock’s love for John is something transformative and selfless, and it leads Sherlock to acts of extreme self-sacrifice. HLV also shows us again and again just how thoroughly John trusts Sherlock. John acts bewildered by Sherlock’s plans on several separate occasions in this episode, but he always goes along with what Sherlock wants him to do.

All of this really starts to come out when Sherlock and John go to CAM Tower. When they get there, Sherlock says they’re going to break into Magnussen’s office. John is surprised by this, but he immediately goes along with it anyway.

Sherlock and John go up to Magnussen’s office, and they find that both Janine and the white supremacist security guard have been knocked out. John stays to take care of Janine, and Sherlock goes upstairs and overhears Magnussen cowering in fear while someone threatens him. Before Sherlock has fully stepped into the room, he overhears Magnussen ask this person if they would really take things this far to hide the truth from their husband.

Sherlock enters the room, and Mary’s identity as an assassin is finally revealed. Sherlock is absolutely shocked, and we get this exchange:

Mary: Is John with you? Sherlock: He’s…um…. Mary: Is John here? Sherlock: He’s downstairs.

Sherlock sounds scared when he says this. That’s because as soon as Mary turned around, Sherlock started to fear that Mary is dangerous to John and started panicking internally as a result. If Sherlock seems slow to react to Mary when he first sees her, remember that Sherlock isn’t great at thinking on his feet when John is in danger.

Sherlock offers to help Mary, and Mary shoots him. I’m going to talk about Mary in more detail later, so for now let’s focus on Sherlock and the mind palace scene that unfolds right after Mary shoots him.

The mind palace scene is all about Sherlock being in love with John. As several people have pointed out, the architecture of Sherlock’s mind palace is based on locations from the case in ASIP. The staircase that Sherlock runs down and then later drags himself back up again when he’s coming back to life is from the building in Brixton where Sherlock and John examined Jennifer Wilson’s body (Sherlock and John’s first crime scene together), and the corridor with the large wooden doors is from Roland-Kerr Further Education College (the place where John saved Sherlock’s life by shooting the cabbie). Sherlock literally built his mind palace out of his memories of his and John’s first case together! If he had already developed his mind palace before he met John, which I think is likely, then this means that Sherlock redesigned his mind palace after he met John. Their relationship means absolutely everything to him.

Inside the mind palace, Molly, Anderson, and Mycroft all represent parts Sherlock’s own consciousness. Molly represents Sherlock’s medical knowledge and Anderson reinforces it; Mycroft represents logic. John, however, doesn’t appear in that early sequence alongside these other characters. He can’t show up there, because what he means to Sherlock is too important and complex for a mind palace version of John to represent any one single concept.

When Mycroft tells Sherlock that there must be something in his mind palace that can help calm him down, Sherlock goes running in search of John—but instead of finding John, he finds Mary, who shoots him in the heart while wearing her wedding dress.

(screencap from here)

Then Sherlock falls back screaming in agony.

They weren’t going for subtly with this visual. What more do I need to say?

As Sherlock struggles for control, he runs into a dungeon and finds Moriarty. Sherlock demands of him, “You never felt pain, did you? Why did you never feel pain?” It’s clear from Sherlock’s face that he’s not just talking about physical pain, and Moriarty confirms this when he answers by talking about pain, heartbreak, and loss.

Then Moriarty tries to talk Sherlock into just letting go and allowing himself to die. In that moment, Moriarty represents the part of Sherlock that finds death tempting: the part that believes death will finally offer him relief from the hell that his life has become after John’s marriage and his and John’s near estrangement.

As Moriarty keeps talking, however, he comes to represent Sherlock’s fears about John’s safety. This is quite fitting, since that was Moriarty’s narrative role all throughout S2!

Moriarty says that John is in danger, and that’s the turning point in the mind palace scene. Sherlock realizes that if he dies, he’ll be leaving John in danger from Mary, and that’s what compels him to come back to life after he flatlined on the hospital bed. Sherlock drags himself back up from death so that he can protect John.

Sherlock literally came back to life for John! This is one of the most important moments in the show! This is a love story! Insane stuff.

While this is, like, the most blatantly romantic thing in the whole show, there’s something about this moment that I also find kind of heartbreaking.

When Moriarty is talking about Sherlock dying, he says this:

Moriarty: Mrs. Hudson will cry, and Mummy and Daddy will cry, and the Woman will cry, and John will cry buckets and buckets. It’s him that I worry about the most.

Sherlock is still lying dead on the floor, unresponsive. Then Moriarty goes on:

Moriarty: That wife! You’re letting him down, Sherlock. John Watson is definitely in danger.

This is the moment when Sherlock’s eyes fly open and he starts to struggle to come back to life. It’s not when Moriarty says that John will cry over his death, it’s when he says that John is in danger from Mary. I can’t help but wonder if this means that at this point in the show, Sherlock doesn’t put much stock in his knowledge that John is in love with him. Sherlock has watched John struggle with his feelings for him for years and he knows that John chose to marry someone else, so at this point, maybe he’s concluded that no matter what John feels, John is never going to act on it. John might love him in some capacity and he might cry over his death, but he chose someone else, so clearly he doesn’t care that much and he’ll get over Sherlock’s death again. But the idea that John is in danger matters deeply to Sherlock, and it’s enough to get him to come back to life for John. For Sherlock, then, dragging himself up from death is an entirely selfless act. It’s not about any hope that if he comes back, John will leave his evil assassin wife and he and John can actually be together. It’s about protecting John, even after John rejected him and broke his heart. (*sobs for days*)

The mind palace scene also includes the fall music from the rooftop scene in TRF. As I noted in the ASIB section of this meta, this music first gets introduced in the scene where Mrs. Hudson is held by the CIA agents in 221B, which suggests that we’re supposed to associate it not just with peril, but with one of Sherlock’s loved ones being threatened. This makes sense because the mind palace scene is about Sherlock realizing that John is in danger from Mary and struggling to come back to life so that he can protect him.

Also, when John finally gets upstairs, finds Sherlock lying on the floor, and says his name, the sound of John saying “Sherlock” echoes in Sherlock’s mind palace. Further evidence that this is all about Sherlock’s love for John.

John, however, sees none of this. John stays with Sherlock in the ambulance and then stays with him at the hospital all night; we know that because he’s wearing the same clothes the next morning when Mary arrives. John might have even been in the room when Sherlock came back to life after flatlining. He knows that Sherlock’s first word when he woke up was “Mary,” and Sherlock gasped that out right when he first pulled through—you can hear it in that scene if you’re listening carefully. John isn’t visibly there in the room when that happens, from what we can see, but he might have been there outside the frame. If so, that would mean that John stayed in Sherlock’s room even after Sherlock flatlined and seemed dead. (*continues sobbing*) It’s also possible that John just learned about Sherlock’s first word upon waking up from the doctors or nurses afterwards. Either way, though, John has no idea what just went through Sherlock’s head. He has no idea that Sherlock came back to life for him.

Before we move on, I need to give a little disclaimer. I feel like there’s a shift in the writing after the mind palace scene in HLV, and at that point the characters’ actions get much harder to explain. Personally, I think that for the most part, TEH, TSOT, and the first third or so of HLV mostly make sense. These episodes have some writing choices that I disagree with, sure, but the narrative mostly hangs together and can be explained. (That’s the goal of this meta project, anyway.) After that, though, things get harder to decipher. I think this is probably because either (a) the writers were doing EMP Theory, so nothing that happens after Sherlock gets shot is actually real (although some of it might offer distorted versions of events that are happening in real life), or (b) the writers just got messy. Either way, there are a lot of narrative threads left hanging at the end of S3 that are very hard to explain without knowing what was ultimately supposed to happen in the story. I very firmly believe that the S4 that we got was not the writers’ original plan for how to end the story. Either they changed their minds after S3, or S4 is somehow fake and we never got the reveal because they never made S5. As I explained in the introduction to this stupidly long meta project, for now I’ve decided to write this without EMP Theory, so I’m assuming that everything that happens after Sherlock gets shot is still real—I think it’s useful to at least try to map out what that would mean. After I get this project out into the world, I’m hoping to spend some time reading and thinking about EMP Theory so that I can decide how I feel about it and whether I’m convinced. So! The rest of this meta offers one possible reading of the show, but it’s just one, and I might change my mind about it later. I think that without knowing the real/original ending to the show, we can theorize about what the writers were trying to do in HLV, but it’s hard to know for certain.

So. Sherlock regains consciousness in the hospital. John might be with him when he wakes, since he knew that Sherlock’s first word when he woke up was “Mary,” but he might not be. Either way, at some point John leaves and Mary enters the hospital room and threateningly tells Sherlock not to tell John that she was the one who shot him.

At this point, Sherlock knows a few things. He knows that Mary is a well-trained assassin and that she has a past that she’s actively trying to hide from John. He knows that she came to threaten Magnussen in his office and that she was prepared to kill Magnussen because he has information on her. More than that, Sherlock knows that Mary is committed enough to keeping the truth from John that she chose to shoot him (Sherlock) when he discovered her instead of accepting his help. Now that Mary has threatened Sherlock again in the hospital, Sherlock also knows that he won’t be safe from her if she’s worried that he might tell John what happened.

But of course, Sherlock is scared that Mary is a threat to John, and there’s no way he would ever keep this from John. So, Sherlock decides that he needs to trick Mary into revealing the truth to John herself—after that, he and John can try to figure out what to do. Sherlock comes up with a plan to make this happen and escapes from the hospital to set it in motion.

After Sherlock escapes, John and Lestrade go looking for him while Mary searches separately. It makes sense that Mary would want to confront Sherlock on her own, but it’s sort of interesting that John doesn’t automatically assume that he and Mary should look for Sherlock together, even though he did call her to tell her that Sherlock had escaped. John must be feeling really distant from Mary at this point for it to not occur to him that a life-or-death situation like this should bind them together. He doesn’t think of the two of them as a team.

Strangely, though, John and Lestrade don’t seem very worried and aren’t acting as if finding Sherlock is all that urgent. We later learn from Sherlock that this took place only a week after he was shot, so you’d think John and Lestrade would be freaking out that Sherlock will die if they can’t get him back in hospital quickly. Messy writing, I guess.

John and Lestrade go to 221B, and John says that given where Sherlock was shot in the chest, he must have been facing his killer and must have seen who it was. (John didn’t think to ask Sherlock about this anytime in the past week, apparently?) John then asks why Sherlock didn’t tell them who the shooter was, and Lestrade suggests that Sherlock might be protecting someone. John says “Why would he care? He’s Sherlock. Who would he bother protecting?” and then sits down in his own old armchair in the sitting room.

For God’s. Fucking. Sake. The fact that John doesn’t immediately realize that he is the person Sherlock is trying to protect is what convinces me that John still hasn’t figured out that Sherlock is in love with him and can’t have had a true epiphany at the end of TSOT. It’s incredibly frustrating, because after witnessing Sherlock’s behavior in TSOT and hearing that best man speech, John really should have figured it out by now. He’s not stupid. But the plot requires that he still not know, I suppose, so he doesn’t. (Moffat, when I catch you, etc. etc.)

Although John doesn’t get it immediately, he then rubs the arms of his chair thoughtfully and asks aloud why Sherlock thinks that he’ll be moving back in. Then he sees the Claire-de-la-Lune perfume bottle that Sherlock left for him on the side table next to his chair, and he stares at it for a very long time. At CAM Tower, Sherlock said out loud that he could smell that perfume, so John probably makes the connection and realizes that this is a hint about who the shooter was. I think that in that moment, John might put the pieces together and realize that it was Mary. He might also realize that Sherlock thinks she’s a danger to him, and therefore that John might want to move back to 221B to get away from her. Even if John figures it out then, though, Sherlock wants John to see and hear the truth for himself, so he calls John on his phone and asks him to come to Leinster Gardens.

Before calling John, Sherlock somehow got everything ready for the confrontation with Mary. Presumably he enlisted the help of Wiggins and other members of his homeless network so that he could (1) have someone move John’s chair and its round side table back to their usual places in the 221B sitting room, (2) have someone go to Chiswick Cemetery to find the real Mary Morstan’s grave site, and (3) have someone set up a projector in front of the façade of the empty house that he owns in Leinster Gardens. Lol.

Interestingly, the Leinster Gardens scene subtly hints that Sherlock didn’t fully trust Mary even before she shot him. Before Mary enters the empty house, she and Sherlock talk on the phone about how she correctly identified Leinster Gardens as one of Sherlock’s hiding places.

Mary: How did you know I’d come here? Sherlock: I knew you’d talk to the people no one else would bother with. Mary: I thought I was being clever. Sherlock: You’re always clever, Mary. I was relying on that. I planted the information for you to find.

Mary got the information by talking to Anderson and his friend Benji (I don’t know that we ever hear anyone say her name onscreen, but it’s in the final shooting script). Benji told Mary that Anderson only knew about Leinster Gardens because he stalked/followed Sherlock one night. There’s no way that could have happened between when Sherlock got shot and when Mary talked to Anderson and Benji, so that means Sherlock deliberately planted the information with Anderson at some point before Mary shot him.

When Sherlock first met Mary in TEH, he deduced that she was a liar. For months, though, Sherlock chose not to act on that deduction. He deliberately pushed it aside, since he believed that John had chosen Mary and he wanted John to be happy. Sherlock wasn’t about to pull at any loose threads that could unravel John and Mary’s relationship. This scene shows, though, that Sherlock still never trusted Mary completely. He planted the information about Leinster Gardens for her to find just in case he ever needed to confront her in a discreet location. (What if Sherlock feared she might be a cheater, and that’s why he intimidated David in TSOT? And he thought he might one day have to confront Mary quietly, to try to convince her to go back to John? Absolutely awful. If Sherlock thought that was what “liar” meant, though, it would explain why he didn’t suspect that Mary was an assassin, even after he started to worry that he’d missed part of Moriarty’s network.)

There are several aspects of the Leinster Gardens scene that are extremely important. For one, this scene proves that Mary is absolutely a villain: specifically, she’s Sherlock’s version of the Sebastian Moran character from ACD canon.

In ACD canon, “The Adventure of the Empty House” is the first story set after “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the one where Holmes confronts Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and dies/fakes his death. In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes returns to London after being gone for three years. Holmes enlists Watson’s help in taking down Sebastian Moran, the sniper who was Moriarty’s right-hand man before Moriarty’s death and who is now the last remaining obstacle standing in the way of Holmes being able to reveal himself to the public and fully resume his life with Watson. To take down Moran, Holmes creates a wax statue of himself and positions it in front of 221B’s sitting room window, hoping that Moran will believe the dummy is him and will shoot at it. Moran falls for the trap, and Holmes, Watson, and the London police capture him. With Moran arrested, Watson moves back in with Holmes at 221B and the two of them resume their crime-solving adventures together as best friends and partners.

The Leinster Gardens scene recreates the scene with the dummy, with John taking the place of the wax figure and pretending to be Sherlock. Mary, of course, plays the role of Moran.

By naming TEH “The Empty Hearse” and making Lord Moran the villain in that episode’s central case, the writers created a red herring for Sherlock viewers who had read the original stories and were expecting a Moran plotline upon Sherlock’s return to London at the beginning of S3. With the Leinster Gardens scene in HLV, they reveal that in this show, Mary is actually the Moran character. She’s an assassin who works for Moriarty and who is now a major obstacle to John being able to fully reconcile with Sherlock and move in with him again.

Mary being an assassin who works for Moriarty also makes perfect sense based on everything that we know up to this point. We already know that Moriarty has used snipers twice before, so he has people working for him who have Mary’s skillset. And if Mary works for Moriarty, then her presence in John’s life makes so much more sense than it ever would otherwise. I mean, it’s ridiculous to think that John started dating a nurse at his clinic and then later she just happened to turn out to be an assassin who was totally unconnected to Sherlock and John, because there are just that many hidden assassins running around London. It’s equally ridiculous to believe that John was attracted to her because he’s somehow really good at unconsciously identifying dangerous people. Get real. But the idea that Mary was deliberately planted at John’s clinic and ordered to get close to him, so that she would be in an ideal position to wreak havoc upon him and Sherlock after Sherlock’s return? That makes perfect sense. ALSO, given Moriarty’s plan with the rooftop in TRF, it makes perfect sense to think that Moriarty planted another sniper on John to keep an eye on him long-term, to make sure that Sherlock didn’t contact John! Sherlock actually believed that Moriarty would do something like that, and that’s the whole reason why he thought he had to take down the whole network. It’s just that when Sherlock got back to London, he thought he’d succeeded and didn’t realize that there was still a hidden assassin watching John’s every move. Maybe there actually was another assassin in London who Sherlock took out and who Moriarty had placed there as a red herring, and that’s why Sherlock doesn’t think to suspect Mary.

But Mary isn’t just a hidden sniper, she’s also a love interest for John. And that, too, makes perfect sense for Moriarty’s plan. As we saw in ASIB, Moriarty was absolutely willing to push Irene into Sherlock’s and John’s lives in order to cause problems for them. He probably did the same thing with Mary—he deliberately planted Mary as a love interest for John to make sure that when Sherlock returned, it would be even harder for him and John to have a relationship together. That makes complete sense within the context of Moriarty’s plan to “burn the heart” out of Sherlock. Relatedly, I think it’s likely that Mary doesn’t have genuine feelings for John, and she pursued a relationship with him only because she was ordered to; as I’ll talk about a bit later, there’s a good amount of evidence that Mary was cheating on John with someone else.

So, the Moriarty plotline is still in play and Mary has a key role in it. And I think that given everything we know about how Moriarty operates, we should believe that Mary still works for Moriarty, not that she’s a former assassin genuinely trying to escape her past.

On the topic of Mary being a villain, @221beemine has done an interesting meta about how Mary is lit in HLV. Starting with the scene where she shoots Sherlock, Mary is frequently lit so that her face appears half in shadow, or she’s shown in a dark profile with bright edge lighting. These are unusual methods for lighting female characters, and they make Mary appear both mysterious and sinister. I think this matches perfectly with an interpretation of Mary as a villain whose identity as such has finally been revealed, but who we still don’t know very much about. And I don’t think these lighting choices would make any sense if we were actually meant to forgive Mary for shooting Sherlock and were actually meant to believe that she really has left her past as an assassin behind.

Returning to Leinster Gardens. Mary acts completely unrepentant in this scene, which offers more evidence that she’s a villain. There’s a sneer in her voice and expression when she tells Sherlock “You were very slow.” Mary also threatens to shoot Sherlock again and to actually kill him this time. It’s only when Sherlock reminds her that her face is projected onto the side of the building outside that she backs down from that threat. MARY IS A VILLAIN AND WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO THINK IT’S OKAY THAT SHE SHOT SHERLOCK.

Mary also has one piece of dialogue in this scene that’s very important to Sherlock and John’s love story.

Sherlock: Why didn’t you come to me in the first place? Mary: Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever. And Sherlock, I will never let that happen. Please understand. There is nothing in this world that I would not do to stop that happening.

Sherlock lied to John when he faked his death and it did break John, but Sherlock did not lose John forever. John is still inextricably tied to Sherlock because of how deeply he loves him; they’re still wrapped around each other’s lives. John loves Sherlock in a way that he doesn’t love Mary, and this line shows that Mary knows this. She’s seen all of this happen between Sherlock and John, and she knows that she is replaceable in John’s life in a way that Sherlock is not.

After Mary delivers this line, Sherlock gives her a look that is scorching with contained anger. All of Mary’s actions and dialogue throughout this scene have shown Sherlock that she’s determined to hang on to John while still deceiving him about who she really is and what she’s done. Mary’s version of love for John (if she does have any feelings for him) is selfish and possessive, and it’s not at all like what Sherlock feels for John. Sherlock sees this, and it makes him furious. He’s furious that she, of all people, is the person who got to marry John Watson, and that she’s now acting like she’s entitled to him, especially while Sherlock himself has been acting so selflessly for John this whole time. Sherlock isn’t feeling sympathetic towards Mary in this scene, and it shows.

But as I’ll talk about in just a moment, Sherlock also knows that he can’t abandon Mary, at least not yet. He knows he has to take her case.

Sherlock gives Mary that scorching glare, then flips on the lights to reveal that John was sitting at the end of the passageway the whole time. Mary looks genuinely upset—she seems shocked and devastated that John has found out the truth about her. She’s likely terrified that now that John knows the truth, she won’t be able to continue keeping Sherlock and John apart romantically for Moriarty, and Moriarty will kill her. She’s trapped.

After this, Sherlock, John, and Mary all go to 221B to discuss things further. I think this scene at 221B might be one of the saddest Johnlock scenes in the entire show.

Let’s talk about Sherlock’s side of the story first. In this scene, Sherlock tries to push John back to Mary and insists that John can trust her. Sherlock’s decision to do this is extremely difficult to understand, since the writers changed course after S3 and we never got to learn what they’d originally planned for Mary’s character. I’ll try to explain my best interpretation of Sherlock’s actions, though.

By this point, Sherlock knows that Mary is bad news. But he still doesn’t actually know that much about who she is and what she’s involved in. Sherlock isn’t stupid enough to think that out of all the women in London, John just happened to date and marry a secret assassin. And ever since John got kidnapped and put in the bonfire in November, Sherlock has been worried that he might have missed some part of Moriarty’s network. So, even if Sherlock still believes that Moriarty is dead, he probably suspects that Mary was originally planted by Moriarty or by someone else sinister and that she has some ulterior motive for getting close to John. Furthermore, we should remember that even though he sometimes messes up and jumps to conclusions prematurely, in general Sherlock believes that it’s a mistake to try to act before you have enough information.

As a result, Sherlock thinks that he needs to learn more about Mary before he can figure out what to do about her. That’s one reason why he thinks he needs to keep Mary close and acts accordingly. Remember, Sherlock did something similar with Irene in ASIB when he intentionally misidentified the doppelgänger’s body as hers and then accepted her as a client when she showed up at 221B. Even though he didn’t trust Irene, Sherlock didn’t kick her out because he knew that she was part of something bigger and he wanted to solve the larger case.

Second, Sherlock knows that Mary is extremely dangerous and that she’s fiercely committed to holding onto John. I think that based on that, Sherlock concludes that for the time being, the best thing he and John can do to keep John safe from Mary is to convince her that John has forgiven her and is going to stay with her. If John seems like he’s going to leave her, then there’s no telling what Mary will do. As we’ve seen again and again and again, Sherlock cares about John’s safety above all else. Sherlock will do anything to keep John safe, and that includes lying to him.

Third, if Mary is indeed part of some larger game with other dangerous players, then Sherlock might be thinking that if John stays with her, Mary will work to keep John safe from those other actors, too. Mary just told Sherlock in Leinster Gardens that there is nothing she wouldn’t do to stop herself from losing John. Since Sherlock thinks that Moriarty is dead, he might fear that there are other people who he doesn’t know anything about and who could be a threat to John. He still doesn’t know who put John in the bonfire in TEH—it could be people from a remnant of Moriarty’s network, but it could be someone else entirely. (We don’t know when Sherlock figured out that it was Magnussen, but I doubt it was this early on. It’s even possible that Sherlock didn’t figure that out until Magnussen showed him the video, and he was just faking confidence in front of Magnussen when he acted like he already knew.)

Finally, Mary is carrying John’s child—or, at least, Sherlock thinks she is (more on that in a moment). So Sherlock also probably thinks that he and John can’t do anything that might risk prompting Mary to disappear with John’s baby. They need to keep her close for a few more months, at least.

Put all of that together, and Sherlock knows that he and John can’t just try to drop Mary now that they know she’s evil. They need to keep her close for now so that they can try to learn more about her and what she’s involved in, and so that John and the baby will be safe from her (and perhaps other dangerous actors) in the immediate future.

Sherlock, however, still hasn’t overcome his main character flaw: his inability to be fully honest with John. It’s a repeat of TRF all over again. Here, Sherlock believes that John’s decision to take Mary back won’t be convincing enough to her unless John actually does decide to take her back. So Sherlock tries to manipulate John into doing it.

It gets worse. The revelation that Mary is an assassin and has been lying to John about her identity this whole time gives John the clearest possible chance to leave her that he’s had since Sherlock first came back in TEH. In light of how thoroughly Mary lied to him and the fact that she shot Sherlock, John could absolutely take this as an opportunity to leave her for Sherlock. Sherlock must realize that John might see this as an option, but he doesn’t try to push John in that direction at all. Instead, Sherlock tries to get John to do the exact opposite because he believes that it’s what’s safest for John. Of course, Sherlock should have explained his thinking to John and just been honest with him about why he needed to stay with Mary for the time being. But Sherlock’s decision to try to push John back to Mary still shows that Sherlock cares about John’s safety above all else and will always choose to sacrifice his own feelings to keep John safe.

From John’s perspective, all of this is pure hell.

John’s dialogue in this scene offers perhaps the most important piece of evidence in the entire show that he was never in love with Mary the way he is with Sherlock.

Sherlock: John, you are addicted to a certain lifestyle. You are abnormally attracted to dangerous situations and people. So is it truly such a surprise that the woman you’ve fallen in love with conforms to that pattern? John: (his voice shaking with barely suppressed tears) But she wasn’t supposed to be like that. Why is she like that? Sherlock: (after a pause, slowly and very sadly) Because…you chose her.

There’s a heartbeat sound right after that, indicating that this is a moment of monumental emotional significance for both Sherlock and John.

In this exchange, Sherlock starts by making a clear reference to John’s attraction to him and the lifestyle that he has tried to provide John with ever since ASIP. John can barely contain his fury and hurt at this, and he immediately insists that Mary wasn’t supposed to be like that. John chose Mary after Sherlock died because he wanted to find someone who wasn’t like Sherlock, someone who wouldn’t remind him of Sherlock, someone he didn’t feel attracted to in the same way. John’s vehement insistence that Mary wasn’t supposed to be like Sherlock reveals that his truest and deepest feelings are for Sherlock and not for Mary. He wanted to find someone he wouldn’t have the same intense feelings for, someone it would be safe to have a relationship with because he wouldn’t be opening himself up to heartbreak with them the way he did with Sherlock by falling so deeply in love.

It absolutely destroys Sherlock to hear this. Remember that I don’t think Sherlock is a very good actor, so his “you chose her” and the way he has to pause and look away from John before he says it aren’t him acting. On one level, this line is a lie. Sherlock knows that John doesn’t have some magic sixth sense for dangerous people, but he tells John that he chose Mary because he hopes it will convince him to go back to her. But on a deeper level, this isn’t a lie at all. In this moment, we can see on Sherlock’s face that he’s honestly expressing his real, genuine heartbreak over the fact that before Mary’s past was revealed, John did choose her over him.

The acting in this scene is absolutely insane.

(gifs from here)

After Sherlock says that John “chose” Mary, John bursts out, “Why is everything always MY FAULT?” And when Sherlock insists that he and John treat Mary like a client, John agrees, but he’s furious about it. He chokes out at Sherlock, “Your way. Always your way.”

John’s dialogue here reveals two crucial things about how he feels at this point in the narrative. First, John’s words express his intense anger at Sherlock for implying that John’s actions are the reason why the two of them aren’t together. John just admitted that he chose Mary as a romantic partner because he was trying to get over Sherlock and everything that Sherlock represented to him. When Sherlock responds by saying that John “chose” Mary, John gets furious at the implication that this is all his fault. From John’s perspective, the only reason why he was ever in a relationship with Mary at all is because Sherlock faked his death and disappeared for almost two years, leaving John to believe he was dead. John accepted Mary into his life because she gave him a way to try to overcome his grief while he mourned Sherlock. Moreover, John thinks that Sherlock has never given him any indication that he’d be interested in a relationship with him. Even worse, he also believes that Sherlock has known about him being in love with him for years, and has always just let John suffer through that without returning his feelings. So when John says “Always your way,” it indicates that John feels that he’s been forced to follow Sherlock’s lead all these years because he’s the one in unrequited love. From John’s perspective, it’s not his fault that he and Sherlock have ended up in the twisted and terrible place where they are now.

I think that with these lines, John is also expressing anger at himself for still being in love with Sherlock when he thinks that Sherlock will never love him back. John probably feels that no matter what he does, he can’t escape his attraction to Sherlock. Even when he deliberately tried to find a romantic partner who wouldn’t be like Sherlock, he failed and somehow ended up with a secret assassin. So when John chokes out “Always your way” at Sherlock, he’s expressing his frustration that no matter what he tries to do, he always finds himself drawn back to Sherlock and everything that he represents. At this point in the show, John seems to resent his love for Sherlock because of how much pain it keeps causing him. And once again, John takes this out on Sherlock.

The next bit of dialogue offers us even more proof that John doesn’t love Mary the way he loves Sherlock.

John: Sit. Mary: Why? John: Because that’s where they sit. The people who come in here with their stories. The clients—that’s all you are now Mary, you’re a client. This is where you sit and talk, and this is where we listen, then we decide if we want you or not.

As @formerprincewille writes here, John makes it clear to Mary “that Sherlock is a permanent fixture in his life and she is not.” He and Sherlock are the inseparable unit. They will be the ones who decide whether or not Mary gets to stay in their lives.

Notably, Mary looked very upset in Leinster Gardens after Sherlock revealed that John had seen and heard everything. But in this scene, she appears entirely unrepentant, both when Sherlock and John are having their argument and when John turns to her and yells at her in anger. At first Mary was shocked and upset that her cover had been blown, but now that she’s regained control of herself, she’s steely once more and she certainly isn’t about to apologize for anything that she’s done.

Mary, John, and Sherlock all sit down. Mary reveals the flash drive and Sherlock tries to relate the events of the night when Mary shot him in a way that will make Mary seem as forgivable as possible.

When John angrily says “Oh, look at you two. You should have gotten married,” Sherlock looks at John like this:

(gif from here)

@ivyblossom has a great meta about this here. There is so much pain and regret in that expression. Since this comes right after they’ve been talking about Sherlock and Mary both deceiving Janine, John has just aligned Sherlock with Mary as someone who has lied. Sherlock deeply regrets that he ever had to do that to John, and he regrets that it’s still what he’s doing right now to try to protect him. I think that in this moment, Sherlock wants more than almost anything to be able to tell John the truth. But that almost is still there, because Sherlock prioritizes John’s safety above everything else.

Then this happens:

Mary: (harshly) People like Magnussen should be killed. That’s why there are people like me. John: Perfect! So that’s what you were, an assassin? How could I not see that? Mary: You did see that. And you married me. (Tilting her head at Sherlock) Because he’s right. It’s what you like.

Sherlock looks deeply uncomfortable and unhappy when Mary says this; just take a look at the gifs here. That’s because Sherlock doesn’t really believe it’s true. When he said the same thing to John a few minutes ago, he was feeding a lie to John. And Sherlock isn’t happy about having to do this.

Mary continues to act unrepentant as they talk. In this scene as a whole, she sometimes casts her eyes down and stands or sits quietly as if ashamed, but she never apologizes for any of her actions—not for being an assassin who killed people, not for lying to John, and not for shooting Sherlock. She’s more than willing to take the opportunity for reconciliation that Sherlock is offering her, because it’s her best chance to stay alive and safe from Moriarty for the time being. But Mary seems to harbor no remorse for her violent past, and she doesn’t make any promises to act differently in the future. Her dialogue to John basically says, “This is who I am, and I think you like it. I don’t intend to change.”

Honestly, Mary is a terrible person, and not the sort of person who Sherlock and John would usually have any sympathy for. Their whole job is to catch people like her. But in this scene, Sherlock keeps lying to try to make Mary seem more palatable so that John will stay with her. Sherlock even lies by saying that Mary saved his life, saying that she shot him in a way that let him live and that she phoned the ambulance.

Both of these are lies. Mary absolutely meant to kill Sherlock, which we know BECAUSE SHE DID. HE FLATLINED, HE DIED. Sherlock only came back to life because of the intense power of his passionate, unbreakable love for John. Also, Magnussen was the one who phoned the ambulance, and Sherlock even saw him do it! Sherlock deliberately lies about both of these things because he’s trying to make Mary seem as forgivable as humanly possible so that John will stay with her for the time being.

Let’s talk some more about how we know that Mary intended to kill Sherlock. I’ve been trying not to get too deep in the weeds about what the minor characters are doing in this meta because I want to stay focused on the romance arc between Sherlock and John, but I think this is worth getting into for a bit here because it’s an important part of Moriarty’s plan for Sherlock.

Moriarty’s plan has always been to break Sherlock’s heart and then kill him. And at this point in the story, Moriarty has very successfully broken Sherlock’s heart. Because of the consequences of Sherlock’s fall, Sherlock has had to watch John marry someone else. He’s learned that Mary is pregnant, which makes him think that there’s truly no chance of him and John getting together now. Given Sherlock’s morals and his behavior in TSOT, I think it’s extremely unlikely that Sherlock has even thought about the possibility of trying to start an affair with John. But if he has, he knows it would be incredibly messy and painful, and they’d both feel guilty and terrible about it. It definitely wouldn’t be the romantic happy ending that he’d once dreamed of. All in all, Sherlock is so distraught that he’s on drugs.

So in Moriarty’s plan, it’s time for Sherlock to die. To make that happen, Moriarty arranges for Sherlock (and John) to go to CAM Tower on the specific night that they do because he knows that Mary is going to go after Magnussen that night and that she’ll intercept them there. Moriarty probably doesn’t actually order Mary to kill Sherlock—he probably doesn’t tell her anything—but he expects her to do it. Then he plans to dispose of Mary himself, because he isn’t the type to leave loose ends lying around.

For an explanation of all of this, you can check out @loudest-subtext-in-tv’s recent meta, “Whether Mary meant to kill Sherlock” here and then our replies to that meta here and here. Here’s a basic summary, though.

At the start of HLV, Mary started to get worried that Sherlock and John were about a hair breadth’s away from finally confessing their feelings to each other. Sherlock was on drugs, and to an outside observer he probably seemed like he was pretty much ready to throw caution to the winds. Meanwhile, John was so anxious and desperate that Mary was literally holding onto him in their sleep to stop him from leaving. At Bart’s, Mary heard Sherlock directly needle John about being in love with him, and even Wiggins could tell that John was thinking about leaving her. Based on all that, Mary realized that she might not be able to keep Sherlock and John apart for much longer, which meant that her usefulness to Moriarty would be at its end. That meant she needed to escape and restart her life again somewhere else. However, Magnussen knows about Mary’s past and can expose her. So, Mary decides that she needs to neutralize him before she can run.

Mary gets information from Janine about when Magnussen will be in his office. Unbeknownst to Mary, however, Janine is also working for Moriarty and is a bit higher up on the totem poll than Mary is. (For more on Janine, see LSIT’s M-Theory.) Janine figures out that Mary intends to go after Magnussen the specific night that she does, so she feeds that information to Moriarty. Moriarty thinks that’s great, since it offers him a prime opportunity to have Sherlock killed now that his heart has been shattered. So, Moriarty tells Janine to tell Sherlock that Magnussen won’t be in his office that night. Moriarty expects Sherlock to walk in on Mary trying to kill Magnussen, and he expects Mary to respond by killing Sherlock.

That’s exactly what happens. And after Sherlock survives through the power of gay love, Moriarty decides that’s fine, and he’ll just keep messing with Sherlock a little bit longer before killing him because for Moriarty that’s a lot of fun.

So, yeah. Mary intended to kill Sherlock. She’s a crack shot, and she was standing six feet away from him. She didn’t miss—she shot him in the chest, in a place where no one expects to survive getting shot, and Sherlock actually did flatline and die. Mary didn’t call the ambulance because she didn’t want Sherlock to survive. Magnussen called the ambulance because he did have a reason for wanting Sherlock to survive—Magnussen needs Sherlock alive so that he can use him in his chain to get to Mycroft. Sherlock only survived getting shot because of his love for John, and because he was in hospital and could receive immediate medical attention when he woke up. 

Before we move on, now is also a good time to talk about the baby and Mary’s implied infidelity. Even before we learned that Mary is an assassin, TSOT offered us a few hints that the baby isn’t John’s. First, that episode went out of its way to introduce David as Mary’s still-attached ex. (@abitnotgood has a nice meta about this here.) Second, as I explained in the TSOT section, Mrs. Hudson’s story about Mr. Hudson indicated that Mr. Hudson cheated on her. This suggests that Mary has cheated on John, because Mr. Hudson is a mirror for Mary. It’s the only piece of Mrs. Hudson’s story about her relationship with Mr. Hudson that we don’t yet have a direct parallel for in John and Mary’s relationship, so it seems likely that this piece maps onto Mary and John, too, and it just hasn’t been explicitly revealed yet. Third, during this scene at 221B in HLV, Mary is shown wearing cuffed jeans with the legs turned up. Back in TGG, Sherlock said that a character on TV couldn’t be “the boy’s father” because of the turn-ups on his jeans. This likely indicates that John isn’t the father of Mary’s child. (This comes from LSIT and @incurablylazydevil here.) Finally, LSIT also recently pointed out to me that Jennifer Wilson (the pink lady from ASIP) is a mirror for Mary. Mary is blonde and clever, like Jennifer, and she wears a bright red coat that looks like the pink one Jennifer wore. We know that Jennifer was cheating on her spouse and had a daughter who was stillborn. The cheating and the daughter’s stillbirth could be clues that the baby either isn’t John’s or isn’t real/won’t survive.

All this seems to indicate that raising Mary’s daughter is not in John’s future. Either the writers decided to go in a different direction when they made S4, or S4 isn’t real.

After Sherlock tries to tell John that Mary saved his life by calling the ambulance, he collapses in pain and tells the paramedics who arrive just then that they might need to restart his heart on the way to the hospital. All of this is literally killing Sherlock.

Frustratingly, we see nothing of Sherlock’s, John’s, or Mary’s lives between this scene at 221B and the events of Christmas Day several months later. If John and Mary’s wedding was in May and HLV started about a month after the wedding, then we’re dealing with a gap of around six months. We only get hints about what the characters were doing and thinking during that time. Mrs. Holmes implies that Sherlock was in hospital for several months and was only released a bit before Christmas. From another scene, we know that Sherlock met with Magnussen at some point before he got out of the hospital. Mary says that she and John haven’t been speaking for “months,” so presumably they weren’t living together between the 221B scene and Christmas. We don’t know what might have been going on between Sherlock and John during that time, though.

I think this is because in HLV, the writers deliberately arranged these scenes so that they would raise new questions for the audience and would leave us with a cliffhanger, just as they always do at the end of a series. We were probably eventually meant to learn more about what happened during that gap, especially between Sherlock and John.

In any event, Christmas arrives and Sherlock invites John and Mary to his parents’ house to spend the holiday with his family. As TEH established, Mrs. Holmes is a mirror for Sherlock and Mr. Holmes is a mirror for John. This comes into play again at Christmas, giving us more information about Sherlock, John, and Mary.

From the Christmas scenes, we learn that Mrs. Holmes is an absolute genius, but she gave up her career in academia to raise her children. If the baby is real, then this might be foreshadowing, demonstrating that Sherlock will be willing to make compromises and to scale back his work to accommodate raising John’s child with him. Alternatively, it could simply be another indication that Sherlock is willing to make monumental sacrifices for the people he loves, which is something that we’ve already seen and are about to see again. (LSIT makes these observations in her M-theory meta.) After all, we saw in TSOT that Sherlock has moved far beyond his initial “married to my work” stance, and that he’s more than willing to scale back his work for John’s happiness. So even without John having a baby, it makes sense that Sherlock’s mirror gave up her career for her family.

On a lighter note, we also learn from Mr. Holmes’s conversation with Mary that Mr. Holmes thinks Mrs. Holmes is “unbelievably hot.” We already knew John thinks Sherlock is hot, but that’s fun.

After Mr. Holmes says this, we get this little exchange that’s very telling:

Mary: Oh my God. You’re the sane one, aren’t you? Mr. Holmes: Aren’t you?

Good on Mr. Holmes for realizing that John is actually insane! But what’s more important here is that when Mr. Holmes says to Mary “Aren’t you?” we as the audience are immediately supposed to scream with one voice “NO!” because we know that Mary is a sociopathic assassin. Mr. Holmes gets this wrong subtextually because Mary is not mirrored by either of the Holmes parents. Attempting to compare her to one of the partners in that relationship is futile, because the Holmes parents are mirrors for Sherlock and John. The Holmes parents have a happy, stable relationship, and Mary is not in this picture as one of the partners in that endgame couple.

John later says to Mary that Sherlock must have brought them there to see “his lovely mum and dad, a fine example of married life.” John is right. That’s exactly why we, the audience, are seeing Sherlock’s parents again in HLV—because they’re a fine example of married life for Sherlock and John, an example that doesn’t include Mary.

For now, though, John decides to “forgive” Mary. He tells her that no matter what she did in the past, he’s ready to move on from it and doesn’t need to know about it. He’s choosing to build a future with her so that they can raise their daughter together.

John’s forgiveness is almost certainly fake. He hasn’t forgiven Mary and he doesn’t trust her, but he’s come around to Sherlock’s way of thinking and decides that he needs Mary to believe that he’s forgiven her for now. Perhaps in the months between the 221B scene and Christmas, John figured out on his own that Mary is part of some larger game and that he needs to keep her close. Maybe he and Sherlock talked about it once they had a chance to talk without Mary in the room with them. Or maybe it’s simply that John has decided to trust Sherlock and to play the role that Sherlock has given him. Shortly after this, we see that John brought his gun to Sherlock’s parents’ house when Sherlock asked him to, even without knowing why. Maybe it’s the same thing—John pretends to take Mary back because he knows Sherlock wants him to, even if he doesn’t understand why.

In any event, at Christmas John pretends to forgive Mary and to take her back. There are multiple reasons to believe that John is pretending here.

First, John’s actual words throughout his and Mary’s conversation don’t communicate real forgiveness. Here’s what he actually says:

John: I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to say to you. These are prepared words, Mary. I’ve chosen these words with care. The problems of your past are your business. The problems of your future are my privilege. It’s all I have to say. It’s all I need to know.

John never says “I forgive you” or something even remotely akin to that. Hey, unlike:

(gif from here)

John’s little speech to Mary is also stiff and rehearsed. He even tells Mary “I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to say to you. These are prepared words, Mary. I’ve chosen these words with care.” This shows that John’s forgiveness and willingness to return to Mary are not genuine. He’s walking a careful line with her; if he’d truly forgiven her, then he wouldn’t feel like he had to be so careful with his words. John is clearly still holding back from Mary, and it’s not because he’s feeling overwhelmed by his emotions, like he did when he spoke to Sherlock in the train car. It’s because he doesn’t trust her and doesn’t want to be open with her. John has had months to figure out what to say to Mary, and he chose his words with such care because he wanted to say something that would make it seem like he was forgiving her and was ready to move forward without actually forgiving her.

Here’s a gif set from @incurablylazydevil that lines up the scene where John forgives Sherlock in TEH and this scene with Mary in HLV. It shows some really important differences. Sherlock begs John for his forgiveness, while Mary starts the conversation by being snarky and rude. John gets emotional and genuine when he speaks to Sherlock, but he’s stilted, practiced, and reserved when he speaks to Mary. John actually tells Sherlock that he forgives him, but he says something far less direct to Mary. And finally, John smiles and laughs along with Sherlock after their conversation, but he still looks extremely unhappy when he hugs Mary.

Indeed, John’s expressions in this scene with Mary don’t communicate forgiveness or acceptance. He barely smiles at all, even after he’s said his piece and Mary starts crying and they hug. Look at his face while they’re hugging. John does not look happy about this. He looks like something just died inside him. This is a task that he has to force himself to get through.

Here’s another reason why I think John’s forgiveness is fake. The forgiveness scene gets interrupted by HLV’s non-linear storytelling, just like how the train car scene and Sherlock’s explanation of the fall to Anderson were mixed together in TEH. In TEH, I think those scenes are scrambled in part to distract us from the fact that Sherlock lied about the snipers to Anderson. Since we’re supposed to be eager to find out what happens in the train car, we’re meant to be a bit distracted during Sherlock’s explanation to Anderson, and therefore less likely to realize that important parts of it are untruthful and that Sherlock is lying to protect his heart. The same thing happens here. Just like how Sherlock lied to Anderson, John is lying to Mary by appearing to take her back, and the structure of the episode is meant to communicate this. The tension and sadness that we see on John’s face are there because he hasn’t truly forgiven Mary and he doesn’t want to have to pretend to. But he pretends anyway, either because he understands that he has to or simply because Sherlock asked him to.

Interestingly, John’s maroon “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan doesn’t make an appearance in this scene. If John had actually given up on Sherlock and decided to take Mary back because he thought she was the best he could do, then this would be the perfect moment for him to be wearing it. (And it wouldn’t even look out of place at Christmas, given the color.) But he’s not wearing it. Maybe at this point, John is actually feeling more hopeful about him and Sherlock. After learning about Mary’s past, John might be starting to think that this will eventually give him the opportunity to leave her once and for all, and in circumstances that will even leave him guilt-free. He just has to get through this nightmare first.

During all of this, Sherlock has decided that the next step to figuring out what the hell to do about Mary is for him and John to get their hands on Magnussen’s files on her. They need more information, and this is one way to get it. Sherlock decides to pretend to sell Magnussen Mycroft’s laptop in exchange for the files, but he doesn’t tell John about this plan. John had no idea that Sherlock was planning anything for Christmas Day, let alone that he intended to set up a fake deal with Magnussen.

Before this, Sherlock and John probably did read Mary’s flash drive but found that Mary had lied about what was on it. The flash drive was probably either blank or contained partial or incomplete information, so of course Sherlock and John still need to learn more. I mean, would a highly-skilled assassin actually carry around an easily-stealable flash drive with “everything about who I was” conveniently stored on it for anyone to access? I mean, she didn’t even give John a password. Come on. That would be even less clever than the British government putting the Bruce-Partington plans on an easily-stealable flash drive...especially because that flash drive actually did get stolen.

Proving just how much he trusts Sherlock, John immediately runs off to Appledore with Sherlock after Sherlock and Wiggins drug everyone else in the Holmes household. John even brought his gun with him to Christmas dinner when Sherlock asked him to, even though that request made no sense to him at the time. (I think John was being a bit stupid on that one, though. He definitely should have realized something was up when Sherlock asked him to bring his gun to Christmas dinner. But maybe John just thought it was because Sherlock didn’t trust Mary, and John brought the gun because he didn’t trust her, either.)

Just as a side note, this is more evidence that John has always cared a lot more about Sherlock than about Mary. John is literally a doctor, but he leaves his drugged pregnant wife for Wiggins to look after and goes running off with Sherlock. Of course he does, lol.

After Sherlock and John go outside the Holmes parents’ house to meet the CAM helicopter, we get this exchange:

Sherlock: Coming? John: Where? Sherlock: Do you want your wife to be safe? John: Yeah, of course I do. Sherlock: Good, because this is going to be incredibly dangerous.

If any of this is real, then this seems to suggest that Sherlock and John probably didn’t have an honest, heart-to-heart conversation about The Mary Situation in the months between the 221B scene and Christmas. Sherlock is operating on the belief that he’s successfully convinced John to take Mary back and to trust her, and John plays into it because he thinks it’s what Sherlock wants. Sherlock actually wants to get the files on Mary so that he and John can figure out what to do about her, but he’s telling John that it’s to protect her because he—very foolishly—doesn’t want to reveal his true plan to John until he has more information to go off of. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Sherlock!

Obviously, a lot of important things happen at Appledore.

First, John learns that it was Magnussen who put him in the bonfire in TEH and sees footage of Sherlock running into the bonfire to save him. This is important because it’s a moment when John comes face to face with visual proof of how much Sherlock cares about him and how willing he is to disregard his own safety in favor of John’s. It’s hard to tell what’s going on in John’s head as he watches that footage, but let’s hold onto that thought for now and come back to it in a bit.

Then Magnussen reveals that there are no vaults; all of his information is simply stored inside his head. Sherlock has made the exact same mistake that he made at the end of S1 and the end of S2. Once again, Sherlock underestimated his opponent and fell into their trap, just as he did when he believed the Bruce-Partington plans were the final pip but didn’t anticipate that Moriarty would take John as a hostage, and just as he did when he believed that Bach’s Partita No. 1 was Moriarty’s secret computer keycode. More importantly, Sherlock once again tried to come up with his own plan for confronting his enemy without confiding that plan in John, and in doing so, he led John straight into danger. Now it looks like Sherlock and John are both going to be arrested for attempting to commit treason by selling government secrets, and Sherlock doesn’t know what to do. Sherlock should have told John the truth!

For several awful minutes, Sherlock just stands there in front of the empty room with no vaults, staring ahead of himself and looking horrified at what he’s done by bringing John into danger like this.

Once the shock wears off, Sherlock realizes that the only way he can get John out of this is if he kills Magnussen himself. It’s the only way to permanently neutralize Magnussen as a threat to Mary, and therefore to John, Sherlock, and Mycroft so that Magnussen won’t have any leverage over any of them. Just as importantly, killing Magnussen gives Sherlock a way to take all of the blame, sparing John from prosecution and prison. Crucially, Sherlock deliberately waits to shoot Magnussen until after Mycroft and the police have arrived, thus ensuring that multiple witnesses see him aim the gun and pull the trigger. Sherlock wants to make sure that there will be no doubt that he was the one who killed Magnussen and John wasn’t responsible.

Sherlock’s decision to shoot Magnussen in full view of witnesses like this is an incredible act of self-sacrifice, and maybe the strongest evidence of all that Sherlock will do absolutely anything for John. Sherlock must have understood then that he would face life imprisonment or exile for this. He knew he was giving up his whole life for John.

Sherlock steeling himself to shoot Magnussen by looking at John:

(gif from here)

I honestly think the expression on Sherlock’s face in this moment might be one of the single strongest pieces of evidence for TJLC.

Before Sherlock shoots Magnussen, he asks Magnussen to confirm that the Appledore vaults exist only in his mind and nowhere else. Magnussen does, and then after Sherlock shoots him, he says to John “Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.” Here’s what I think is going on with that.

When Sherlock realized that there were no paper files at Appledore and that he’d made a terrible mistake by bringing John there, I think he saw that this was the end of the game for him. When Sherlock decided to shoot Magnussen, he chose to sacrifice himself to save John, and he decided that the situation that he’d once hoped would only be temporary will now have to be permanent: John will have to stay with Mary not just temporarily, but permanently, so that he can stay safe from her and won’t be separated from his child. Moreover, since Mary has already proven that she’s willing to take desperate measures to keep John, Sherlock decides that he’ll have to trust that if whatever is going on with her extends beyond Magnussen, then Mary will do her best to keep John safe from any other dangerous actors who might be out there. Sherlock thinks Moriarty is dead and he just saw that it was Magnussen who put John in the bonfire, so Sherlock might now think that he actually did eradicate all of Moriarty’s network. That means that Sherlock probably hasn’t made the Moriarty-Mary connection, or that he’d considered it but has now ruled it out. So Sherlock thinks that if Mary is involved with other unknown dangerous people, he’ll have to count on Mary’s assassin training and her determination to keep John safe to protect John.

This was never what Sherlock wanted for John. Sherlock had hoped that by solving the mystery surrounding Mary with the files from Appledore, he could give John a real choice once they both had full information. But Sherlock failed to solve the mystery. He got outplayed, so this will have to be enough. At least with Magnussen out of the picture, John will have a shot at the future with Mary and their daughter that he’d once wanted, right? And after all, Sherlock might reason, Mary is dangerous and exciting, just like he is. She can keep John safe and happy the way Sherlock used to, and she can even provide John with the heteronormativity that John has always seemed to want, but that Sherlock would never have been able to give him.

And so, Sherlock tries to tell John that this is what has to happen now, in just a few words. “Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.”

On the topic of Sherlock’s undying love for John and his willingness to do absolutely anything for him, by the end of S3, Sherlock has now, in order: (1) agreed to die alongside John at the pool rather than live without him, (2) refrained from telling John that he loved him even when holding back broke his heart, because he believed that saying something would put John in even greater danger from Moriarty, (3) faked his own suicide in order to save John’s life, even though lying to John and hiding his survival from John hurt Sherlock terribly, (4) respected John’s choice to remain with Mary even after Moriarty was gone and he and John could have had a relationship, (5) planned John’s wedding to someone else in order to make him happy, (6) come back to life for John after getting shot in the chest, (7) pushed John back to Mary even when John had an out and could have left her for him, because he believed that doing so would keep John safe, and (8) sacrificed his own life and freedom by killing another man in order to protect John from suffering the same fate.

This is true love.

Now we descend to Tarmac Hell, featuring probably the most devastating scene in the entire show.

At some point before the tarmac, Mycroft convinced his colleagues to give Sherlock the option of accepting the suicide mission in eastern Europe from MI6 as an alternative to spending the rest of his life in prison. Sherlock agreed. Now, Sherlock is preparing to leave the country forever. He knows he won’t survive more than six months and he believes that this is the last conversation he’ll ever have with John.

Sherlock steels himself to finally say “I love you” to John. He’s been through so much for John, he’s given him so much, and now he’s about to leave him forever and then he’s going to die. So he has to say it, he just has to.

It’s obvious that Sherlock is planning to finally make a love confession. Even Mycroft sees it! When Sherlock asks Mycroft if he and John can have a moment alone, Mycroft looks at him in shock, his expression saying, “Now? You’re seriously going to do this now? Well…okay.”

Sherlock and John step aside to have their conversation. It’s halting and terrible and they’re both struggling so much. Finally, Sherlock gets ready to say it. 

(gif from here)

Sherlock: John, there’s something I should say, I’ve meant to say always and then never have. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again, I might as well say it now.

There’s a long pause. Sherlock hesitates and looks down.

Then he draws in a deep breath and raises his eyes to look into John’s face.

Sherlock: Sherlock is actually a girl’s name.

You can see the progression of Sherlock’s expressions before and after here. It’s clear that Sherlock was making a difficult decision about what to do, and in the end he decided not to say what he wanted to. Instead he just tried to make John laugh one last time.

I’m struck by how different Sherlock’s and John’s body language and expressions are in this scene. Sherlock stares straight into John’s face throughout much of their conversation, as if he’s trying to take in everything that he can before they part forever. John, in contrast, keeps averting his eyes and looking off to the side instead of looking Sherlock in the eye. When John does look at Sherlock directly, his expression isn’t at all inviting. Sherlock said to Mycroft in front of John that this is likely the last conversation they’ll ever have together, and he says to John that it’s unlikely they’ll ever meet again. Yet although John must recognize the heavy sense of finality in those words, his body language and tone in this scene are very, very different from what he displayed in the train car when he thought he and Sherlock were about to die. Instead of letting himself be overwhelmed by his emotions, John seems to be intentionally using his body language and facial expressions to signal to Sherlock that he isn’t prepared for an emotional goodbye. He doesn’t want Sherlock to go there. 

John also doesn’t take the initiative to say anything kind or meaningful to Sherlock in this last conversation. That’s very different from how he behaved both during their phone call in front of Bart’s in TRF and in the train car. By opening their conversation with “Actually, I can’t think of a single thing to say,” John is trying to tell Sherlock that he doesn’t want to do this. He just can’t.

Why is John so closed off here? I think it’s because he’s finally figured it out—he has finally realized that Sherlock is in love with him. At Appledore, John saw the recording of Sherlock yelling “John!” and diving into the bonfire to save him. Then right after that, he witnessed Sherlock shoot Magnussen. This gif set shows John’s reaction after Sherlock said “Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.” I think that in those frames, you can see John come to the realization that Sherlock did it for him, not for Mary. Between Appledore and the tarmac, John had at least a week to reflect on everything that happened at Appledore, and he seems to have finally figured it out. (Mycroft says in TAB that Sherlock was held in solitary confinement for a week before the tarmac.)

John gets it now. He knows that Sherlock is in love with him, and now it’s too late. They’re never going to see each other again, and there’s nothing John can do about it. So in these last moments, John can’t bear to hear Sherlock finally say it out loud. That’s too much for him, so he gives Sherlock signal after signal that he doesn’t want him to go there and isn’t prepared for an honest and heartfelt goodbye.

And Sherlock takes the hint. Sherlock wanted to tell John that he loves him, but when John’s posture remains uninviting, Sherlock backs down out of respect for John’s feelings. At the last moment, he decides that telling John that he loves him would be more of a burden to John now than a relief. So Sherlock switches to humor instead—just like he did in the train car when he realized that John felt overwhelmed and wasn’t prepared to say anything more about his feelings.

It must have taken so much courage for Sherlock to finally steel himself to tell John that he loved him, after we’ve seen him back down from showing or telling John this so many, many times before. And Sherlock even said that it’s something “I should say, I’ve meant to say always and then never have.” That he’s meant to say always! ALWAYS! Ahhhhh!! Sherlock’s decision not to say it here is so heartbreaking, but in a way, it’s also very brave and selfless. Once again, Sherlock has chosen to respect and protect John’s feelings, regardless of what he wants for himself.

Sherlock’s parting “to the very best of times” with that stiff, distanced handshake breaks my heart. The way S3 played out, Sherlock and John were never able to go back to what they had together when they were flatmates, never able to go back to those “very best of times” from before Sherlock’s fall. Those times are far in the past for them now, and neither of them ever realized that they weren’t going to last.

It also hurts that Sherlock doesn’t tell John that this is a suicide mission. When John asks him how long the mission will be and what comes after, Sherlock pauses before just saying “who knows” with a little shrug. Sherlock still seems unable to bring himself to tell John how far he’s willing to go for him.

Once Sherlock is on the plane, we see him staring out of the window with one hand raised to his mouth—the same hand he just shook John’s hand with before leaving him behind. Sherlock also looks like he’s been crying.

Then everyone sees Moriarty’s “Miss Me” broadcast. Oh no! Maybe Moriarty isn’t actually dead! Sherlock isn’t going to die in eastern Europe, apparently, and now he will have to figure out how Moriarty could possibly still be alive and what to do about it.

Before moving on to TAB, I want to talk about two other scenes from HLV that I couldn’t find a good place for before this without interrupting the flow too much. In both these scenes, the characters talk about the fact that Sherlock is gay about as directly as is humanly possible without literally saying that he’s gay.

First, Janine and Sherlock implicitly talk about Sherlock being gay during their conversation in Sherlock’s hospital room. This scene really popped out at me when HLV first aired because it’s just so clear.

Janine tells Sherlock “just once would have been nice,” implying that she would have liked to have had sex with him at least once during their fake relationship. Sherlock says “oh” as if he hadn’t even thought of that before, then dodges by replying “I was waiting until after we got married.” Janine laughs disbelievingly and says incredulously, “That was never going to happen.” This exchange tells us that Sherlock and Janine never had sex and that having sex with Janine is something that Sherlock would never have been willing to do.

As Janine is on her way out, she says to Sherlock “You shouldn’t have lied to me. I know what kind of man you are. But we could have been friends” and gives him a soft, slightly sad smile. I’ve always interpreted this as Janine saying to Sherlock, “I know you’re gay. If you hadn’t tried to lie to me, we could have been friends.” Sherlock looks a bit sad and regretful after she leaves, as if he agrees.

The scene where Sherlock and Mycroft talk while smoking behind their parents’ house also jumped out at me when the episode first aired. Mycroft asks Sherlock why he hates Magnussen so much, and Sherlock immediately and vehemently replies, “Because he attacks people who are different and preys on their secrets. Why don’t you?” I always took this to be Sherlock saying that he’s gay. (The hat deduction scene in TEH backs this up, too, because Sherlock talks about “being different” in the context of him missing John.) @nyxneon has a great meta that breaks down Sherlock’s hatred of Magnussen and Sherlock’s comments in this scene in more detail. Because of Magnussen’s role in the story as a master of blackmail, and specifically because of the history of this in the Victorian era, Sherlock’s comments are very queer-coded, and nyxneon’s meta makes some great points about how this is basically Sherlock saying he’s gay.

That’s it for HLV! If anyone read all of this, then thank you so, so much <3 <3

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: The Sign of Three

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

~

There are conflicting dates for John and Mary’s wedding in canon, but I’m going to run with what Mary and Mrs. Hudson say at the end of TEH and go with the idea that it was a spring wedding in May. (Towards the end of TSOT, a wedding invitation is also briefly visible and gives the date of the wedding as May 18.) This means that the events of TSOT take place a few months after Sherlock’s return to London in November.

By this point, it’s apparent that John and Sherlock have reconciled as friends without talking about their deeper feelings for each other. From the flashbacks during Sherlock’s best man speech and the entries on John’s blog, we know that between the end of TEH and the wedding, Sherlock and John solved at least four cases together (plus starting Bainbridge’s case): “The Poison Giant,” “Happily Ever After,” “The Elephant in the Room,” and “The Hollow Client.” They’re back to working as a team again and John is splitting his time between Sherlock and Mary.

Sherlock and John have settled on calling themselves best friends, but it’s an awkward and unstable description of what they are to each other. There’s just too much between them. They both know this, and for that reason, they seem to be purposely keeping a certain amount of distance from each other in TSOT. There’s a new formality to their interactions in this episode and the dynamic between them is very different from the ease that they had around each other back in S2. The park bench scene where Sherlock and John wait for Bainbridge to get off duty is an especially painful example of this.

For both Sherlock and John, though, TSOT seems to be something of a breaking point. Neither of them can truly keep all of their thoughts, emotions, and longing for each other locked up any longer, and some of it starts to bleed out.

TSOT has a lot of non-linear storytelling, so in this section of the meta I’m going to try to talk about events in the order in which they seem to have occurred, rather than the order the episode presents them in.

To start out with, we have to talk about “Happily Ever After,” one of the cases from John’s blog. In this case, Sherlock convinces a married lesbian named Sabrina to leave her evil husband Chris and to come out to her family so that she can be with the woman she truly loves. Chris blackmailed Sabrina into marrying him in the first place; he forced her into the marriage by threatening to tell her family that she was gay, and Sabrina acceded because she thought her family wouldn’t approve if they found out the truth about her sexuality. After Sabrina comes to Sherlock and John for help, Sherlock convinces her that it’s worth taking the risk of coming out to her family so that she can escape Chris and be with the person she’s actually in love with.

Sabrina is a mirror for John, Chris is a mirror for Mary, and the woman Sabrina is in love with is a mirror for Sherlock. The comparisons are just so direct! John isn’t really in love with Mary, but things are moving at a fast clip and he may feel as if Mary is railroading him into the marriage. Mary is secretly a villain and certainly does not have John’s best interests at heart, as we will soon learn in HLV. She offers John the veneer of a heteronormative relationship, but staying with her is the wrong decision. Like Sabrina, John needs to decide to leave Mary and to come out to the people in his life so that he can be with Sherlock, the person he’s truly in love with.

Interestingly, in this case Sherlock gives Sabrina the power to make the decision for herself by giving her the photographs that prove her own affair, making it so that Chris will no longer have any control over her. Sherlock tells Sabrina that she should tell her family everything. “What’s the worst that could happen?” John paraphrases on his blog. Even if her family disowns her, “wouldn’t it be worth it to be with the woman she loved?” This tells us that at this point, it’s up to John to make a decision about whether or not to leave Mary, and Sherlock knows it. And deep down, Sherlock believes that what’s most important is getting to be with the person you love. And he’s willing to say that in front of John.

Also, Sherlock only takes the case after he realizes that Sabrina is a lesbian. He took the case because he wanted another queer person to be happy! Meanwhile, John writes about all of this in the most oblivious fashion possible. I hate it!

Moving on to the events of the episode. Let’s assume that the scene where John asks Sherlock to be his best man is the earliest scene from the episode, since it makes sense for that to have happened before Sherlock, John, and Mary got well and truly embroiled in the wedding planning.

Sherlock’s shocked reaction to John asking him to be his best man is meant to be comic relief for the casuals. But for us TJLC believers, of course there’s much more going on here, and I think it’s actually quite sad. That’s really the whole vibe of TSOT, in my opinion: funny on its face, but just really, really sad underneath when you stop to think about it for more than a few seconds.

When John comes to 221B to ask Sherlock to be his best man, he seems very much at ease. He’s pleased to have Sherlock back as a friend, and he’s clearly forgiven him and is on much better terms with him than he was in TEH up until the train car scene. At this point in the narrative, though, John also seems very confident in his decision to marry Mary. He seems to have convinced himself that marrying Mary is truly right the choice, and that he can have Mary as his spouse and Sherlock as his best friend. There’s no hesitance on John’s part when he sits down to ask Sherlock “the big question.” John also tells Sherlock that his wedding day with Mary is going to be “the biggest and most important day of my life,” and when Sherlock contradicts him, John points at him accusingly and sharply insists “No, it is, it is.” Ouch.

I think that in the months after Sherlock returned, John tried to convince himself that pursuing a romantic relationship with Mary was the safe option, and therefore the correct one. He knew he was in love with Sherlock in a way that he wasn’t with Mary, but he didn’t think that Sherlock would ever return his feelings, so he thought it would be pointless to pursue Sherlock. And there’s a lot about Mary that appealed to John—she’s smart, snarky, and funny, and she’s very independent and self-assured. Perhaps most importantly, Mary was different from John’s previous girlfriends because she didn’t appear to resent Sherlock. She actually encourages John to go on cases with him, instead of getting annoyed when John goes off with him the way that Jeanette did. I think John looked at all of that and thought, well, Mary isn’t the person I truly want to be with, but I can make this work. John thought that if he married Mary, he could have a chance at the sort of romantic relationship that he’d always thought he was supposed to have (a wife and a house in the suburbs) with someone who was safe (because she loved him back and wouldn’t break his heart) while still getting to keep Sherlock as his best friend. John probably thought that if Sherlock was never going to love him back, then this was the best he could have ever hoped for.

By the time John asks Sherlock to be his best man, he’s convinced himself that this is the best path for all of them. He’s confident. As Sherlock and John keep talking, John only starts to hesitate when Sherlock doesn’t seem to be getting the message at first, and when he realizes that Sherlock is going to make him say something out loud about how much he cares about him.

John: Look, Sherlock, this is the biggest and most important day of my life. Sherlock: Well…. John: No, it is, it is. And I want to be up there with the two people I love and care about most in the world. Mary Morstan…and you. (Very, very long pause.) Sherlock: So in fact…you mean…I’m your…best…friend?

This is the first time we’ve ever seen John tell Sherlock that he loves him, in any capacity at all. And hearing that stuns Sherlock.

I think that in this scene, Sherlock isn’t necessarily struggling to process the fact that he’s John’s best friend. Sherlock probably already knew that; he and John lived together for a year and a half and did almost everything together during that time, and in the birthday video from MHR, Sherlock claims that all of John’s other friends hate him. He and John don’t even invite anyone else to John’s stag night, and the two other friends Sherlock suggests as potential best men—Greg Lestrade and Mike Stamford—aren’t people John is anywhere near as close to as he is to Sherlock. (Mike didn’t even come to the wedding. But also, of course he didn’t! Mike must have been so upset that after he set Sherlock and John up together years ago, John was stupid enough to marry someone else. Honestly, Mike is quite possibly the most perceptive person on this show. God, I love him.)

Instead, I think Sherlock is struggling with the idea that John counts him and Mary as the two people whom he loves most in the world. Especially because in TEH, Sherlock started to doubt that John may have ever been in love with him. Perhaps as he stood there, frozen and staring, Sherlock was wondering if this means that before Mary came into John’s life, he would have been the person whom John loved and cared about the most. Because that’s certainly the implication. Sherlock might be struggling because he’s coming face to face with the idea that he really could have had a chance with John if he’d made a move before the fall, before Mary. And that John might even know this and have accepted it. Sherlock might be thinking about the life he could have had with John if it hadn’t been for Moriarty.

Back in November, Sherlock heard John forgive him in the train car, but he wasn’t able to wring the love confession out of John that he’d hoped for. After that failure, Sherlock probably continued to doubt his own prior beliefs about how John felt about him, and he might have even started to fear that John is attracted to him but doesn’t truly like him. That’s an awful thought. John’s heartfelt insistence that Sherlock is his best friend should at least put that particular fear to rest.

Importantly, though, John is still holding back. He intentionally tells Sherlock that he loves him only by presenting that love alongside his love for Mary. It’s only in this context that John feels safe stating that he loves them both. John is trying to relegate Mary and Sherlock to well-defined roles in his life that aren’t in conflict with each other: romantic partner and best friend.

Still, John tells Sherlock that he loves him and cares about him, and that of course Sherlock is his best friend. This is about as honest as we’ve ever seen John be about his feelings for Sherlock. And moreover, John is all soft smiles during this conversation. He actually seems comfortable expressing his feelings to Sherlock here. It’s somewhat shocking, actually, that John has finally worked through enough of his own internal conflicts to say all of this out loud to Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s surprise might also be a response to that, too. For a very long time, Sherlock has known that John struggles with his feelings and that his inability to come to terms with his love for Sherlock is one of the major obstacles that has kept them apart. But here John is, willingly telling Sherlock that he loves him. So all in all, it’s not surprising that Sherlock found John’s words very moving. Especially if Sherlock had started to doubt John’s feelings during TEH, as the train car scene seems to prove he had.

After Sherlock agrees to be John’s best man, the events of TSOT vividly illustrate one of the main themes of S3: Sherlock’s unending willingness to sacrifice his own feelings for John’s. Sherlock believes that John has chosen Mary over him, so after John asks him to be his best man, he spends all of TSOT trying to do everything he can to give John the future with Mary that he believes John wants.

Sherlock does this by completely dedicating himself to planning John and Mary’s wedding. The whole episode portrays Sherlock as the person who was truly in charge of pretty much all of the wedding planning and who did the most work for it. Every piece of wedding planning that we see takes place at 221B, never at John and Mary’s flat. It’s Sherlock who picks out the bridesmaids’ dresses, gets Archie to understand his role as the ringbearer, and intimidates interviews other members of the wedding party and guests. He even composes and performs a waltz for John and Mary’s first dance together and teaches John how to waltz so that he’ll be prepared.

God, just imagine how painful dancing with John must have been for Sherlock. Especially given that we see John dip Mary at the end of the dance at the reception. Did Sherlock and John practice that together, with John learning how to do it by dipping Sherlock?

The scene between Sherlock and David (Mary’s ex) is important within this context because it demonstrates the selflessness of Sherlock’s motivations. Sherlock invites David over to 221B ostensibly to talk about David’s duties as an usher, but then he reveals that he’s deduced that David still has feelings for Mary. Sherlock tells David the following: “I think from now on we’ll downgrade you to ‘casual acquaintance.’ No more than three planned social encounters a year, and always in John’s presence.” This shows that Sherlock is really going above and beyond in his best man duties and is actively trying to make sure that David doesn’t mess up John and Mary’s marriage by tempting Mary into an affair. If Sherlock were acting selfishly and prioritizing his own interests in TSOT, then he wouldn’t do this; if Mary were to start cheating on John with David, then that would give Sherlock an ideal opportunity to try to get John to reconsider his relationship with Mary. But Sherlock doesn’t want that to happen. He thinks John has chosen Mary and truly wants a future with her, so he’s doing everything he can to protect that future. Even stuff that John hasn’t asked him to do and that he doesn’t need to do.

Most tellingly of all, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, Sherlock completely pauses his casework. John tells Sherlock that his inbox is “bursting,” but Sherlock ignores all of these potential cases so that he can devote all his time and attention to John’s wedding. And it’s not as if the cases are all just boring; when Sherlock glances at his inbox for just a few seconds, he immediately picks out the case from Bainbridge, which he later describes as “the most ingenious and brilliantly-planned murder—or attempted murder—I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter: the most perfect locked-room mystery of which I am aware.” Like, there was this gem of a case that Sherlock will think is a highlight of his career just waiting in his inbox. So it’s not that the cases aren’t worth trying to solve! It’s that Sherlock is genuinely ignoring them. Various documents related to the wedding have even taken over the wall where Sherlock usually pins up his case notes, visually demonstrating that the wedding has physically replaced Sherlock’s work. By this point in the story, Sherlock is obviously putting John above his work in a way that he never did in S1-S2. “Married to my work” my ass. John is Sherlock’s number one priority now, and Sherlock isn’t even trying to hide it from anyone.

While we’re talking about the wedding planning, let’s discuss some more evidence that John is not in love with Mary the way he is with Sherlock!

Sherlock hands Mary a double-sided list of people who hate her, and John doesn’t even look up from his phone…which he is currently using to search for cases for him and Sherlock to solve together, instead of paying a single drop of attention to the plans for his wedding to Mary. In contrast, when the police superintendent called Sherlock “a weirdo” in TRF, John was immediately like “I am going to punch this guy’s lights out, and I don’t care if I get arrested for it.”

But actually…is John looking at his own phone, or Sherlock’s phone? Either John has access to Sherlock’s email account on his own phone, or he was looking at Sherlock’s phone. Apply the phone equals heart metaphor, and either way, John has access to Sherlock’s heart.

Maddeningly, however, John still seems clueless about Sherlock’s feelings. When Mary tells John that Sherlock is terrified by the prospect of the two of them getting married, John acts completely disbelieving and asks, “Why would he be scared that we’re getting married?” Apparently, the idea that Sherlock could be in love with him still hasn’t entered John’s head.

Meanwhile, Sherlock might actually be trying to give John some subtle hints. Sherlock chooses lilac-colored dresses for the bridesmaids, and when John tells Sherlock that he likes the bridesmaids in “purple,” Sherlock pointedly corrects him by stating that the dresses are lilac. “In Victorian times, giving a lilac meant that the giver is trying to remind the receiver of a first love.” (See here.) By dressing the bridesmaids in lilac, then, Sherlock is trying to remind John of his first love: Sherlock. On the whole, Sherlock appears extremely accepting of John’s choices in this episode. He’s insanely accommodating and never tries to get in the way of John and Mary. But the lilac dresses suggest that maybe, just maybe, Sherlock was holding out some small sliver of hope that John might still back out.

And even without knowing about Sherlock’s feelings, maybe John did consider backing out—that’s one way to interpret the mismatch between the dates for the wedding that are given by the show and John’s blog. The evidence from the show indicates that the wedding was on May 18: at the end of TEH, Mrs. Hudson and Mary talk about the wedding being in May, and when Sherlock, John, and Mary are shown looking at a draft wedding invitation together in TSOT, the invitation says that the wedding is on May 18. But on John’s blog, all the cases from between “The Empty Hearse” and Sherlock’s post about the wedding are timestamped with dates from after May 18, and Sherlock’s post about the wedding is from August 11. It’s possible to reconcile these apparent inconsistencies by saying that John got cold feet about the wedding and purposely pushed it back by three months because he was so reluctant to actually go through with it. (Thanks to @loudest-subtext-in-tv for this idea.)

Back to the wedding planning scene at 221B. Even if John is completely oblivious as to Sherlock’s romantic feelings, he does seem to understand that Sherlock is committed to him as a friend. When John tries to get Sherlock to pick a case, he says “Please, Sherlock, for me,” because he knows it will work on Sherlock. And it does!

After John begs Sherlock to take him out on a case, Sherlock and John end up trying to solve the attempted murder of Private Bainbridge. From their conversation on the park bench, we see that John has been trying to convince himself that even if he marries Mary, he’ll still be able to have Sherlock as his best friend. They’ll still go on cases together. It won’t be everything John wants, but it’s the most he thinks he’s able to have. Sherlock, meanwhile, is, in fact, terrified. And he can’t bear to have to listen to John talk about how Mary turned his life around.

All the while, the writers keep dropping hints that John and Sherlock are the real relationship on this show. I mean, first, there’s the fact that this episode, the one that ostensibly centers around John and Mary’s wedding, is entirely about Sherlock and John’s relationship. It opens with Sherlock struggling to write his best man speech and talking to Mrs. Hudson about the wedding. It ends with Sherlock leaving the wedding early. Everything in between is about Sherlock and John. There’s, like, almost nothing about Mary in this episode. John and Mary barely interact on screen, and John and Mary’s relationship is pretty much explored through just a few passing lines from John to Sherlock or from John to Mrs. Hudson about how important Mary is to him. Sure, John. SURE.

During the Bainbridge case, Sherlock is absolutely amazed by John. Sherlock thought they were solving a murder, but once John realizes that Bainbridge is still alive, John shifts gears in order to save a life and completely takes control of the situation with a level of skill and confidence that Sherlock deeply admires. During his best man speech, Sherlock says that for him, John was the most remarkable thing about the entire case. He even says that it’s always like that for him: that John is always the thing that he finds most interesting about a case. I think this is a really beautiful testament to the fact that Sherlock loves John because he truly understands and appreciates who he is as a person, and especially because he values John’s unique qualities and skills. What Sherlock and John have together isn’t surface-level, it’s built on mutual understanding and admiration that run very deep.

There’s one moment during the Bainbridge case that offers an absolutely beautiful piece of foreshadowing for when Sherlock and John first have sex. LSIT wrote a great meta about it here. I won’t try to summarize it because I think I’d just repeat what she wrote, so just go read it, it’s very short.

After the Bainbridge case, we get to one of the most important parts of TSOT: the stag night.

By the time the stag night rolls around, John is having serious doubts about the wedding. He knows that he’s in love with Sherlock, and he tries to use the stag night as a last-ditch opportunity to figure out if Sherlock might return his feelings. John’s actions during the stag night even show that he’s actually prepared to cheat on Mary with Sherlock. That’s huge!

Like I said, I think that when John asked Sherlock to be his best man, he felt confident in his decision to relegate Mary to the role of fiancée/spouse and Sherlock to the role of best friend. But as the wedding crept nearer and nearer, John clearly started to have doubts. I think that at the time of the wedding planning scene in 221B, John still hadn’t considered the possibility that Sherlock might be in love with him. But it seems that after that, John might have started to wonder, as his own doubts about the wedding intensified. After all, if after the Bainbridge case John paused to reflect on Sherlock’s recent behavior, there would have been a lot for him to observe. Perhaps John realized that Sherlock had completely paused casework for him, that Sherlock was devoting all of his attention to the wedding planning, and that Sherlock was genuinely trying to make everything perfect for him. Remember, in TEH Sherlock said that weddings were “not really my thing,” and when John asked Sherlock to be his best man, Sherlock expressed skepticism that the wedding would really be the most important day of John’s life. But after John insisted that it was, Sherlock started acting as if he’d taken John’s wishes to heart. Maybe John noticed that switch in Sherlock’s behavior, because he seems to have become more uncertain about his decision to relegate Sherlock to the role of best friend and more anxious to find out how Sherlock feels by the time of the stag night. Or maybe John just got desperate.

As he prepares for the stag night, Sherlock sets out to carefully calibrate his and John’s blood alcohol levels throughout the evening. He even develops his own phone app for the task and consults Molly about it in order to make sure that he gets everything right. (Sherlock also shows Molly that he keeps a thick file on John, which includes a page where he cut and pasted a picture of John’s face onto Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the ideal man. We get it, Sherlock, we get it.)

Sherlock was so careful about keeping track of his and John’s alcohol intake that evening because he was desperate to make sure that he and John didn’t overstep the boundaries that they’ve been skirting together. Sherlock knows that he and John are attracted to each other, but he believes that John has chosen Mary. He doesn’t want to mess this up for John. By trying to keep him and John from getting into a situation where all the guardrails might come off, Sherlock is actually being incredibly selfless and very respectful of what he believes to be John’s final decision about him vs. Mary.

In sharp contrast, John wants to let something happen between him and Sherlock during the stag night. In a bar with bisexual pride lighting—because the show creators really, truly, could not bring themselves to be subtle in this episode—John purposely tries to bring his and Sherlock’s defenses down by taking an extra shot at the bar and spiking Sherlock’s drink with a shot when Sherlock isn’t looking. John wants them both to lose control, because he thinks that with their defenses down, he might be able to try to see if Sherlock would be receptive to having sex with him. If he is, then John thinks this will give him an answer about how Sherlock feels. This is exactly what Sherlock is trying to avoid happening by watching their alcohol intake so carefully.

Remember in the ASIB section when I said that John often drinks right before he thinks he’s about to make himself emotionally vulnerable? This is that again. John doesn’t know how Sherlock feels, but he wants to find out. And to me, he seems to have planned this ahead of time—he saw the stag night as his chance to make a move on Sherlock.

When John and Sherlock are back at 221B and well and truly drunk, John does exactly that with the (in)famous knee touch. John’s actions here make no sense within the context of the forehead detectives game that he and Sherlock are playing, so clearly John has something else on his mind when he abruptly leans out of his chair, positions himself between Sherlock’s legs, and touches Sherlock’s knee.

After doing this, John raises his arms up theatrically and announces “I don’t mind,” to which Sherlock softly replies “Anytime.” John’s “I don’t mind” might seem like an odd thing to say, since he was the one who touched Sherlock, but it makes a lot of sense within the broader context of the show. John has been insisting for two and a half series now that he isn’t gay. When he says “I don’t mind” after touching Sherlock in an obviously sexual way, what he’s really saying is: “I know I’ve said I’m not gay, but I don’t mind touching you. Actually, I want to.” (I didn’t come up with this myself and I’ve seen others float this idea before. Unfortunately I didn’t take good notes whenever I first saw it, so I can’t link to wherever I originally read it to give the op credit. I’m sorry :/)

Combine this with the bisexual pride lighting in the bar at the moment when John started to put his plan for the evening in motion, and voilà, we have evidence that John has finally started to get over whatever internal hangups he may have once had about his sexuality or his attraction to Sherlock. John has fully admitted to himself that he’s sexually attracted to Sherlock, and his actions show that he’s now ready to have sex with Sherlock if Sherlock is willing. And this happens a few weeks after John told Sherlock that he loves him. Put all that together, and it seems like John is making real progress. John actually seems to be willing to pursue things with Sherlock in a way that I don’t think he’s ever been comfortable with before.

Sherlock is loose and relaxed in this scene. He has his legs spread wide for John, and after the knee touch he sits back in his chair comfortably while smiling at John warmly. But as we saw back in ASIB, John is very cautious of Sherlock’s boundaries and will never try to push Sherlock to go further than Sherlock wants to. So even though Sherlock doesn’t try to move away and says “Anytime,” implying that he’d always be open to John touching him, John doesn’t seem to take this as an affirmative go-ahead for anything further, and he backs down.

After Sherlock fails to tell John that he’s pretty, John leans back in his chair and says “You’re not really getting the hang of this game, are you, Sherlock?” John is ostensibly talking about the forehead detectives game, since Sherlock just told him that he picked a name out of the papers without knowing who it was. But subtextually, John is talking about flirting and sex. John tried to make a move, but Sherlock didn’t respond—at least not in a way that John took as enthusiastic consent. So John is saying that he’s trying to come onto Sherlock, but Sherlock doesn’t seem to be catching on. John wants to cheat on Mary with Sherlock, but Sherlock doesn’t get it. (Maybe because, you know, John spiked his drink and got him super drunk. Just a thought.)

John takes this quite calmly, but I think this scene shows just how desperate he’s become. It’s hard to know what John expected or hoped would happen during the stag night, but maybe he saw this as a sort of last chance. If Sherlock had been more enthusiastic and they’d kissed or had sex, I think John might have actually left Mary for Sherlock.

Basically, I see the 221B scene during the stag night as John’s version of the train car scene. John deliberately manipulated Sherlock by getting him drunk in the hopes that he would get a hint as to whether Sherlock was attracted to him, and probably even in the hopes that something might finally happen between the two of them. But in the end, this scene plays out just like a reversed version of the one from the train car, with Sherlock and John having switched places. Sherlock doesn’t go quite as far as John was hoping for, so John backs down and things return to their unsteady equilibrium. It’s yet another instance where Sherlock and John came very close to admitting their feelings or to letting something physical happen between them, but didn’t.

As desperate as John is at this point, though, he still isn’t willing to speak to Sherlock honestly about what he wants and how he feels. It took a hell of a lot of alcohol for John to get close to acting on his feelings, and he still didn’t use his words. And after the stag night, when they’re both sober again, John completely drops the idea of cheating on Mary with Sherlock. He thinks he got his answer from Sherlock, and that it was a no—that Sherlock simply isn’t interested.

I also have to say here that John’s behavior during the stag night is totally unacceptable. He spiked Sherlock’s drink when Sherlock wasn’t looking specifically so that he could try to have sex with him. NO. THAT IS BAD. It’s true that John was still looking for a “yes” from Sherlock when they were back at the flat, and that he backed down when he felt he didn’t get it. But John started from a point that is not okay when he spiked Sherlock’s drink. Sherlock can’t give consent when he’s drunk—it’s not like Sherlock and John all already in a sexual relationship with each other, so that John already knows what Sherlock’s personal boundaries are for mixing sex and alcohol. So John wasn’t in a position to be able to judge what Sherlock wanted or didn’t want. Ugh. And I really do think that Sherlock was trying to prevent them from getting super drunk because he didn’t want them to have sex.

Overall, I think John’s actions during the stag night were very selfish. He purposely tried to take advantage of Sherlock’s trust in him specifically because he, John, didn’t feel comfortable being honest with Sherlock and just talking to him directly when they were both sober. That’s so unfair to Sherlock.

So…yeah. I know everyone loves the stag night scene and the knee-touch. And I think this scene is incredibly important because it tells us so much about John’s state of mind and how desperate he is, as well as the fact that he’s still feeling incredibly conflicted and scared. But I think we need to be able to recognize all of that while also remembering that John’s actions weren’t okay.

Tessa the client shows up and subtext hell continues. As this gif set makes clear, Tessa’s story about her date with the Mayfly Man is a retelling of Sherlock and John’s first evening together in ASIP. Tessa serves as a mirror for Sherlock in particular. Like Tessa, Sherlock didn’t date much, but John seemed nice, and they seemed to just automatically connect. They had dinner together and talked. Sherlock thought that maybe he’d like to go further, but this was special. He wasn’t ready yet. He wanted to take things slowly.

When Tessa says “To be honest, I’d love to have gone further,” Sherlock shakes himself and guiltily withdraws an arm from behind John’s shoulders, where it was apparently resting a moment before.

(gifs from here)

As Tessa continues with her story, she shifts from describing her date with a kind of happy awe to becoming really sad and tearful. She explains that after the first date went so well, the guy never got in touch with her again, even though he’d promised he would. “Maybe he wasn’t as keen as I was?” she says as she starts to cry, “but I just thought, at least he’d call to say that we were finished?”

When Tessa says this, Sherlock kind of loses it. His mouth falls open as he looks back at Tessa, and then he looks really upset and wipes his nose.

(gifs from here and here)

The camera focuses on Sherlock’s reaction during this moment, not John’s, emphasizing that Tessa is a mirror for Sherlock. Tessa’s story resonates with Sherlock especially, and this part in particular shows that John hasn’t given Sherlock closure. Even though John has mostly been trying to act like he’s moved on from Sherlock, he’s still trying to keep Sherlock very close to him. John is stringing Sherlock along, just like the Mayfly Man did to Tessa.

I mean, here Sherlock and John are, sitting close together on the couch with Sherlock’s arm around John as they listen to Tessa describe a date that sounds pretty much exactly like their first evening together. This isn’t an easy position for Sherlock to be in! So of course he gets upset when Tessa says her date abandoned her and didn’t even call to say that they were finished.

When Sherlock later attempts to solve the Mayfly Man case inside his mind palace, Tessa shows up, and she and Sherlock are dressed very similarly. They’re both wearing white collared shirts with subtle vertical stripes under a black outer layer—Tessa wears a black cardigan, Sherlock a black suit jacket.

(screencaps from here)

This once again emphasizes Tessa’s status as a Sherlock mirror. The shirt is even very similar to the one that Sherlock was wearing during the lab scene where he and John met for the very first time, providing another callback to ASIP. (That shirt was also white with vertical stripes, but it’s not the exact same shirt, I checked.)

This gives Tessa’s sad “Maybe he wasn’t as keen as I was?” extra bite. Sherlock was really into John from the start, but after Sherlock panicked at Angelo’s and John appeared to reject him in TBB, John never gave Sherlock another indication that he was into him until it was too late. Sherlock only started to catch onto John’s true feelings in ASIB, after Moriarty had revealed himself and threatened them both.

Of course, things also don’t feel great from John’s perspective by this point. John’s conversation with Mrs. Hudson the morning after the stag night gives us even more evidence that John isn’t truly in love with Mary and that their marriage isn’t going to work out.

As casehusbands (now @coldwarfem) explains in this meta, Mr. Hudson is a mirror for Mary and Mrs. Hudson is a mirror for John. Mrs. Hudson tells John that she knew Mr. Hudson was not “the right one” for her even when they got married. “No! It was just a whirlwind thing for us,” she says. “I knew it wouldn’t work, but I just got sort of swept along.” Mrs. Hudson then explains that she eventually found out that Mr. Hudson had lied to her about a lot of really serious stuff; he’d been concealing the fact that he was running an illegal drug cartel and the fact that he was seeing other people. “So, when he was actually arrested for blowing someone’s head off, it was quite a relief, to be honest,” she says.

All of this maps onto John’s relationship with Mary. We’ve already received quite a lot of evidence that John knows Mary isn’t the one for him, because he knows that Sherlock is. John and Mary also haven’t been together very long and are heading into marriage very quickly—John said so during his attempted proposal to Mary in TEH. Based on what we’ve seen of John in TEH and TSOT, “It was just a whirlwind thing for us” and “I just sort of got swept along” feel like pretty accurate descriptions of how John might feel about his relationship with Mary. And of course, in HLV, John will learn that Mary has lied to him just as much as Mr. Hudson did to Mrs. Hudson, if not more. Mary has been hiding her past as an assassin, including the fact that she went rogue and killed people illegally while not working for any government. Similarly, Mr. Hudson was secretly conducting illegal activities in Florida and was eventually arrested and executed for murdering someone. Then there’s the infidelity piece. I’m going to talk about that when we get to HLV, so hold on to that thought.

Since all the rest of this lines up, the first thing that Mrs. Hudson said must, too: just as Mrs. Hudson knew at the time of her wedding that she wasn’t really in love with Mr. Hudson and he wasn’t the one, John knows now that he doesn’t love Mary and she isn’t the one. This conversation’s deliberate comparison of Mrs. Hudson and Mr. Hudson to John and Mary reveals that John doesn’t love Mary in the deep, emotional way that he loves Sherlock. And the more Mrs. Hudson talks, the more uncomfortable John looks—perhaps John is self-aware enough to recognize himself in Mrs. Hudson’s story.

To top it all off, Mrs. Hudson also says that her relationship with Mr. Hudson was “purely physical.” I think this is potentially significant for two reasons. First, it confirms that John has been physically intimate with Mary without being in love with her—John is getting something from his relationship with Mary, but it isn’t true love and romantic fulfillment. More interestingly, though, I think this could be saying that John and Mary’s relationship doesn’t go deeper than physical reality, which hints at the fact that John has stayed with Mary in part because their relationship is heterosexual. By staying with Mary, John has been prioritizing certain physical aspects of their relationship—its heterosexuality—over love. Just a thought.

Anyway, after his unsuccessful attempt to shag Sherlock on his stag night, John puts on his “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan and goes to talk to Sherlock. John really gave it his all during the stag night, it seems, and his wardrobe choice shows that he now feels quite deflated and disappointed that it didn’t work out the way he’d hoped.

(screencap from here)

Sherlock is ignoring his food and trying to solve the Mayfly Man case. In his mind palace, he imagines himself talking to Tessa and the four other women who dated the Mayfly Man while he messages with each of the women online.

When Sherlock asks the women, “Do you have a secret you’ve never told anyone?” John breaks through into his mind palace all of a sudden to quickly ask, “What d’you mean?” As I mentioned back in the ASIP section of this meta, this is a hint that John is bisexual and that it’s a secret he’s never told anyone.

After all the women log off, Sherlock slams down the laptop lids and frustratedly asks “Why would he date all of those women and not return their calls?” To this, John replies that it’s “obvious” that the Mayfly Man is married and wants to cheat on his partner.

Um. John. You’re telling on yourself.

I mean. Just. Damn.

By contrasting Sherlock’s and John’s reactions to the Mayfly Man, this exchange also comments on the state of Sherlock and John’s relationship at this point. Sherlock can’t even contemplate cheating; the thought just doesn’t occur to him at all. Sherlock, after all, has been over here doing everything he can to give John a future with Mary without getting in the way. Sherlock isn’t demanding anything from John, and he’s certainly not suggesting that John cheat on Mary with him. Sherlock doesn’t want that! He actively tried to prevent it during the stag night. And by selflessly trying to do everything that he can to make John happy, Sherlock is also being loyal to the person he loves. In contrast, John’s readiness to suggest that the Mayfly Man is a married man trying to cheat not only references the fact that John has been actively considering cheating on Mary, but also suggests that John essentially is cheating on Sherlock by being with Mary, since Sherlock and John are the real couple on this show.

In any case, John doesn’t try to cheat with Sherlock again, and he doesn’t come clean to anyone about how he feels. The day of the wedding arrives without John having backed out.

On the morning of the wedding, Sherlock wakes up early (Mrs. Hudson says he’s usually not awake when she brings up his tea) to anxiously practice dancing to his waltz one last time, wanting to make sure that everything will be perfect for John and Mary. Then Mrs. Hudson shows up and starts talking about how marriage changes people and this will be “the end of an era” between him and John.

Sherlock clearly wants to avoid hearing what Mrs. Hudson has to say about how she barely saw her best friend after she got married. Mrs. Hudson even suggests that her friend was in love with her, since she left the wedding early. Sherlock is obviously uncomfortable, and pretty soon he all but kicks Mrs. Hudson out.

Before he does, though, we get this very interesting exchange:

Sherlock: Two people who currently live together are about to attend church, have a party, go on a short holiday and then carry on living together. What’s big about that? Mrs. Hudson: It changes people, marriage. Sherlock: Mmm, no it doesn’t. Mrs. Hudson: Well, you wouldn’t understand, you always live alone.

Rude, Mrs. Hudson! You can just see Sherlock biting his tongue and looking pained in response to that. But what’s interesting here is that Mrs. Hudson starts by saying that marriage changes people, but then she says that Sherlock wouldn’t understand because he lives alone. This implies that it’s actually the living together part that matters and that changes people, not marriage itself. And that’s spot-on for Sherlock and John. Sherlock and John have both changed for having lived together and fallen in love with each other. It’s also telling that Sherlock recognizes that it’s not the marriage part that changes things, it’s living together and being a couple.

After Mrs. Hudson leaves, Sherlock gazes over at John’s empty chair. He clenches his jaw before he looks at the chair brokenheartedly, and there’s a really loud heartbeat sound. Gifs here.

And now on to the wedding itself, which in many ways, serves as an extended demonstration that John doesn’t love Mary the way he loves Sherlock.

Throughout S3, we never actually see much of John and Mary’s relationship. We don’t get any flashbacks that show the initial spark of interest between the two of them or any part of them falling in love. We don’t see John’s actual proposal to her after his first botched attempt at the Landmark (if he even made another attempt—maybe he didn’t). Even in TSOT, the episode that ostensibly revolves around John and Mary getting married, we only see parts of the wedding reception and we don’t see any part of the actual ceremony itself. The whole episode is about John and Sherlock’s relationship, not John and Mary’s. This is, of course, because the relationship between Sherlock and John is always the central relationship in this show.

The way they filmed the wedding reception is also very interesting. The montage that shows the guests eating dinner is filmed in a really aggressive manner, and throughout the reception the colors are strangely washed out, with the whites and yellows in the room making the whole thing feel overly intense and bright. To my eye, the whole thing is shot in a way that makes the wedding reception feel artificial, stressful, and uncomfortable, not light and happy.

This is in part because S3, including TSOT, is largely told from Sherlock’s point of view, and Sherlock obviously feels extremely uncomfortable throughout the wedding reception. He acts jealous of Sholto, hurt when Mary teases him, and tense and regretful when Janine casually asks if he has a vacancy for someone to solve crimes with. Sherlock eventually starts to feel so lonely and out of place that he even calls Mycroft to try to get him to make an eleventh-hour appearance so as to keep him company. And of course, Sherlock is also very nervous for his speech.

This treatment of the wedding—giving the actual ceremony no screen time and filming the reception in a way that makes it feel uncomfortable, lonely, and wrong—wouldn’t make any sense at all if John and Mary were right for each other and this episode really were a celebration of their love. Because it’s not. TSOT is all about Sherlock’s heartbreaking love for John and John’s desperation to be with Sherlock even as he feels trapped with Mary. The way the wedding is presented makes complete sense if we’re meant to see it as an obstacle within the narrative of the show, which of course we are.

I’m going to talk about the wedding from Sherlock’s perspective first, then John’s.

Before his best man speech, Sherlock calls Mycroft and Mycroft repeats back at him what Mrs. Hudson said earlier by saying that this is “the end of an era.” This emphasizes that Mrs. Hudson’s best friend Margaret is a mirror for Sherlock. She was in love with Mrs. Hudson and devastated at her wedding, and then the two of them barely saw each other afterwards. That’s exactly what Sherlock fears.

Sherlock gives his speech and it’s basically an outright love confession. He says John is “the bravest and kindest and wisest human being I have ever had the good fortune of knowing” and that he never expected to be the best friend of such an amazing person. Then Sherlock says to John that he and Mary are “the two people who love you most in all this world” and that “we will never let you down, and we have a lifetime ahead to prove that.”

It seems like Sherlock is intentionally mirroring every heartfelt thing that John has said to him since he returned. When Sherlock calls John “the bravest and kindest and wisest human being I have ever had the good fortune of knowing,” he echoes what John said about him in the graveyard and the train car. Sherlock also mirrors John’s statement that Sherlock and Mary are “the two people that I love and care about most in the world” from his best man proposal by saying to John that he and Mary are “the two people who love you most in all this world.” Sherlock seems to have realized that John feels safe admitting that he loves Sherlock if he can group him in with Mary, so Sherlock intentionally does the same thing in his speech. He’s deliberately confessing his love to John in a way that he knows will feel safe for John.

But I have to say, even though Sherlock purposely includes Mary in his promise that “we will never let you down, and we have a lifetime ahead to prove that,” the substance of that statement…sounds a lot like a wedding vow. Oh, Sherlock.

Then Sherlock brings up the Bainbridge case. Sherlock has one purpose and one purpose only in doing so: to praise John. Sherlock insists that “There was one feature, and only one feature, of interest in the whole of this baffling case, and quite frankly, it was the usual: John Watson.” Then he goes on to call the case “the most ingenious and brilliantly-planned murder or attempted murder I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter: the most perfect locked-room mystery of which I am aware.” Sherlock has dedicated his life to being a detective, even inventing his own position as a consulting detective in order to do so. This case was the most perfect locked-room mystery that he has ever come across, so good that he couldn’t even solve it (!), and yet he’s up here insisting that John was the most interesting—even the only interesting—thing about the case. He’s so painfully in love. John matters more to him than literally anything else! Sherlock then explicitly says that the whole point of bringing this up was to compliment John when he attempts to transition to the next part of his speech with this: “However, I’m not just here to praise John, I’m also here to embarrass him, so let’s move on….”

We’ve come a long way from “I consider myself married to my work,” haven’t we?

Sherlock also keeps saying that he wants to talk about “the elephant in the room,” but that John doesn’t want him to. The elephant in the room is the fact that the two of them are in love. Sherlock wanting to talk about it but knowing that John doesn’t want him to reflects the fact that Sherlock has always been comfortable with his own homosexuality and would be ready to pursue a relationship now that Moriarty is gone, except that he thinks John doesn’t want to acknowledge what they feel for each other and doesn’t want a relationship with him.

Before we get to the part where Sherlock tries to solve the Mayfly Man case mid-speech, Sherlock’s speech is pretty much entirely about how great John is and about his and John’s relationship. He doesn’t talk about the bride and groom’s relationship, as I believe would be a point of focus in a typical best man speech. Aside from when Sherlock says that he and Mary love John most in the world, will never let him down, and have a lifetime ahead to prove it, Mary gets, like, one mention—which is when Sherlock says that telling her that she deserves John is the highest compliment he can give her. That’s really a compliment for John, not for Mary. The whole speech is about John. This is a love confession. You get it. We can move on now. Okay.

By the way, Lestrade pretty much always seems to know what’s up between Sherlock and John, and his face during the speech is totally: “Oh my God, Sherlock is so in love. This is so painful to watch.” Yep. You’re right, Greg, it is.

Sherlock also tells the whole reception hall that when he was trying to solve the Mayfly Man case, John helpfully pointed out to him that the Mayfly Man was probably married and was trying to cheat on his spouse. After saying this, Sherlock adds that this “does help to further illustrate how invaluable John is to me. I can read a crime scene the way he can understand a human being.” John, of course, looks mortified that Sherlock would bring this up at the wedding reception. YIKES. It seems that Sherlock was drunk enough during the stag night that afterwards, he didn’t realize that John had actually tried to cheat on Mary with him. Sherlock has no idea how desperate John was to try to figure out his feelings that night.

Sherlock says a few more heartfelt things about John. Then he starts trying to solve the Mayfly Man case, and as he does so, he starts to act a bit unhinged. Sherlock often turns kind of manic when he’s working on a case, but this time it’s different and he behaves far more erratically and appears less focused than he usually does when solving a case. Again, I think this is comic relief for the casuals, but sad for us because we can view Sherlock’s difficulty in solving the case as evidence of just how hard the wedding day is for him and how much he’s struggling emotionally. Having to watch John marry someone else is tearing Sherlock up inside, so much so that he has difficulty doing the very thing that he’s usually best at. Sherlock only regains his composure and manages to figure things out when he purposely pushes Mycroft out of his mind and chooses to focus on John instead. “It’s always you, John Watson, you keep me right,” he says. Here, Sherlock is openly admitting, both to himself and to everyone else watching, that even if John is marrying someone else, Sherlock can’t give up on him. John will always be the most important person in his life, and Sherlock needs John to ground him. He can’t solve cases without John anymore, even though solving cases is what he’s always been best at. John has become that important to who Sherlock is as a person.

Especially in this scene, TSOT drives home a theme that we’ve seen throughout the show: Sherlock and John complete each other. We saw in ASIP that Sherlock was basically able to bring John back to life and saved him from suicide after he returned from Afghanistan, and that John essentially did the same for Sherlock in ASIP, too. Indeed, in this best man speech, Sherlock says that John has saved his life “so many times, and in so many ways.” Sherlock’s insistence that “It’s always you, John Watson. You keep me right” voices out loud that John brings out the best in him. It’s John who keeps him focused in the way that he needs to be to solve cases.

Sherlock, John, and Mary all rush off to try to save Sholto. When the three of them are trying to talk to him while he’s in his hotel room, Sholto seems suicidal. He’s received death threats and escaped them before, but this time he seems to want to give in and just accept death. From John and Sholto’s conversation at the wedding reception earlier, it seems that there was some sort of attraction between the two of them when they were in the army, but neither of them ever acted on it. Based on the way that Sholto and John each behave in that conversation, my read on the situation is that Sholto was more upset by this than John was. Sholto seems to be someone whom John can think about fondly and smile over now, not someone he’s still hung up on. But it seems like Sholto isn’t completely over John and being at John’s wedding is very painful for him.

Sholto is a mirror for Sherlock in this episode: see here. So all the stuff about how Sholto wants to kill himself at John’s wedding is further evidence of how devastated Sherlock feels.

Sherlock tries to get Sholto to get back to the stiff upper lip by insisting that they have to be strong for John. They have to shove their own feelings down, because that’s what John needs from them. They can’t give in to their own pain and let it destroy them, because that would be the selfish choice that would hurt John.

Sholto: Mr. Holmes, you and I are similar, I think. Sherlock: Yes, I think we are. Sholto: There’s a proper time to die, isn’t there? Sherlock: Of course there is. Sholto: And one should embrace it when it comes—like a soldier. Sherlock: Of course one should, but not at John’s wedding. We wouldn’t do that, would we—you and me? We would never do that to John Watson.

They’re both in love with John, and the pain of watching him marry someone else is killing them. But both Sholto and Sherlock resolve to push through that pain, because it’s what John expects of them, and they’re willing to sacrifice their own feelings for John.

This is especially poignant for Sherlock. Sherlock knows, now, what his apparent death did to John. He’s resolved to never do that to John again, no matter how much it hurts him.

Interestingly, after Sherlock says this, John says that he’s going to break down the door and then Mary says “No, wait, wait, you won’t have to.” Mary realizes that what Sherlock has just said will resonate with Sholto. She seems to have an inkling of how much the wedding is hurting Sherlock (and Sholto), hence her mean-spirited teasing of Sherlock earlier at the reception.

After they’ve dealt with Sholto and Jonathan Small the Murderous Photographer, Sherlock finally performs his waltz on the violin as John and Mary dance. Then Sherlock throws his boutonnière at Janine like he’s a bride throwing a bouquet at the bridesmaids. (This episode…kills me.)

Sherlock then continues to pledge his life to John, acting once again as if this wedding is his one chance to say all the things to John that he would say if it were the two of them getting married. Sherlock tells the room the following:

Sherlock: […] today we saw two people make vows. I’ve never made a vow in my life, and after tonight I never will again. So, here in front of you all, my first and last vow. Mary and John: whatever it takes, whatever happens, from now on I swear I will always be there, always, for all three of you.

Sherlock tells the room that since John just married someone else, he knows he’ll never get married and will never make wedding vows. Then he takes the opportunity to make a vow anyway, doing so in a way that groups John and Mary together as the recipients so that his promise will feel safe for John.

Sherlock leaves the podium and tells John and Mary that Mary is pregnant. He cracks a joke about how they won’t be needing him around much anymore and looks genuinely happy for them at first. Then, of course, we see the smile slide right off his face as reality settles in and he watches John dance away with Mary. Gif set of this here.

The episode ends with Sherlock leaving the wedding early, just like Mrs. Hudson’s best friend Margaret did—the friend Mrs. Hudson said cried through the entirety of her wedding and who is a clear mirror for Sherlock. Exiting the wedding venue, Sherlock wraps his coat around himself protectively like it’s armor as he walks off alone. If I ever watch this scene without crying, it will be proof that the horrors of the world have finally turned me dead inside.

So where does this leave us from Sherlock’s perspective? Sherlock and John are back to solving cases together, and Sherlock feels thoroughly enmeshed in John’s life again as his best friend. John has even told Sherlock that he loves him, which is something Sherlock never expected from John, not after the train car. As far as romance goes, though, Sherlock has given up. Sherlock is utterly devoted to John and knows that he’s never going to get over him, and that he’ll never even try to find someone else. But he believes that John has chosen Mary, and he’s resolved to respect that choice. Sherlock puts on a brave face and tries to do everything he can to make John happy by planning the perfect wedding for him and Mary, even though having to do it absolutely breaks his heart.

Meanwhile, John is devastated, too, because this isn’t what he wants, either.

If you watch John’s face during Sherlock’s speech, it’s pretty heartbreaking. John is clearly moved by all the things Sherlock says about him and by Sherlock’s evident devotion.

It starts pretty early on. When Sherlock says that John and Mary are happy, we get this shot of John’s face:

(screencap from here)

I repeat: Sherlock says that John and Mary are happy, and we get this shot of John looking like he regrets everything he’s ever done and wants to die. This is a brief moment and easy to miss, but then Sherlock continues, and things get worse. 

(gifs from here)

John looks like he’s about to cry during Sherlock’s speech, and we hardly ever see John cry. And the camera does linger on these subsequent shots of John, making sure that we see them.

John knew he was making a mistake. He knew he was in love with Sherlock and not Mary. He knew he didn’t want this marriage, but he went ahead with it anyway.

Molly’s character also gives us more hints that John isn’t feeling great about the wedding. As previously established in earlier episodes, Molly is a mirror for John. And throughout the wedding reception, Molly seems pretty much fed up with her fiancé.

Sure, she smiles for the camera when the photographer snaps some photos of her and Tom at the beginning of the reception. But at all other moments, Molly seems annoyed at Tom and totally done with him.

Remember Molly hissing “Sit. Down.” at Tom after he presents his “meat dagger” theory. Just look at her face here, lol.

(screencap from here)

It also looks like she might stab him in the hand with a fork in this shot here. If she’s not stabbing him with a fork, she’s at least slamming her hand down on his to get him to shut up.

Moreover, Molly and Tom often don’t appear in the same frame together. During Sherlock’s speech, we get frequent cuts to their table that show Molly and Lestrade in the same frame side by side with Tom nowhere in sight, even though he’s sitting right there on Molly’s other side. At the very end of the episode, we also get a long shot of Molly dancing and looking over to see Sherlock leaving. There’s a split second where the camera shows us that she was dancing with Tom, but the camera lingers on Molly by herself for much longer; the whole thing is composed so that you can’t tell she’s with Tom unless you’re watching really, really carefully.

In HLV, we learn that Molly and Tom broke up within a month of this, so all of these clues at the wedding are indicative of the fact that their relationship is on its dying legs. Since Molly is a mirror for John, this indicates that at the wedding, John wasn’t truly devoted to Mary, and his relationship with her is about to fail.

In addition to the Molly subtext, even the camera work in TSOT points towards the conclusion that John isn’t truly in love with Mary and that Sherlock is his true partner. As @just-sort-of-happened points out here, during the second half of Sherlock’s best man speech, the shots of Sherlock standing up and walking around the room are composed so that Mary is often excluded from view. Remember what Sherlock told David earlier in the episode: “In all your Facebook photographs of the happy couple, Mary takes center frame, whereas John is always partly or entirely excluded.” During the second part of the speech, then, we have the show creators deliberately composing shots so that Sherlock takes center frame, often with John still visible, while Mary is partly or entirely excluded. This tells us that the showrunners believe that Sherlock and John are the correct and true couple in this show.

John tries to act happy that he’s married Mary, but of course he’s still totally stuck on Sherlock. Towards the end of the episode, John goes looking for Sherlock and finds him with Janine in the room where the two of them were dancing. John is immediately all “Wow, glad you’ve pulled, Sherlock! Look at us, we’re doing such a good job of performing heterosexuality so that I can lock away my feelings for you forever.” But when Janine offers her arm to Sherlock and Sherlock takes it, jealous!John immediately returns. John tenses up and glares into the space ahead of him like he wants to punch something. This is with Mary standing right next to him, by the way.

Then when Sherlock reveals that Mary is pregnant, John goes through the most…fascinating? upsetting? face journey ever. Take a look at this post here for full details. Seriously, when Sherlock says that he thinks Mary should take a pregnancy test, John drops his head and looks devastated, while Mary laughs. John does not seem happy about having just learned that Mary is pregnant. And he shouldn’t be! In that moment, John realizes that this marriage is very, very serious. With a baby on the way, he can’t get out of this easily. I’m not trying to say that I think John actually thought his marriage was going to end immediately, or that he didn’t think he was committing himself to Mary. He probably did. But now that he knows Mary is pregnant, he’s really committed, and I think the reality of it hits John and begins to sink in for him in a way that he wasn’t totally prepared for.

John only cheers up again when he looks at Sherlock after Sherlock has made his little joke. Overall, John is almost totally focused on Sherlock during this whole exchange, not on Mary. And this scene shows just how much more comfortable John is with Sherlock than he is with Mary. After Sherlock makes his joke, John laughs and reaches out and grabs the back of Sherlock’s neck to pull Sherlock nearer to him joyfully and very naturally. Even though John and Sherlock aren’t usually physically affectionate with each other, doing this comes easily to John because he’s very comfortable with Sherlock. In contrast, after that, John reaches out to touch Mary on the shoulder, but he actually hesitates. There’s a moment when his hand just rests in mid-air uncertainly before he touches her. See this post here. It’s Sherlock’s presence and reassurance that matter to John and that make him feel better in this moment, not anything about Mary.

Then there’s the awkward moment when John starts to see Sherlock’s own happy mask slip, and John looks away nervously and gulps.

Some people think this is the moment when John finally realizes that Sherlock is in love with him. I sort of see it, but I’m not fully convinced. As I’ll discuss in the next section, I think John’s actions in HLV show that for much of that episode, he still doesn’t realize that Sherlock is in love with him. But I think that perhaps during the wedding reception—during Sherlock’s heartfelt best man speech and then this moment with Sherlock on the dance floor—John might start to wonder if there’s something more to Sherlock’s feelings for him than he’s ever realized before. I don’t think John had a real read on things during the stag night; at that point he was just hopeful and desperate, more than anything else. At the wedding reception, though, John might start to question whether Sherlock might have feelings for him that go deeper than he’s always assumed. But I don’t think he’s had a true moment of realization yet.

So, to sum things up from John’s perspective. At the end of TEH, John was still reeling from Sherlock’s return and hadn’t had time to process his own feelings properly. In the months that followed, he adjusted to having Sherlock back in his life, fully reconciled with Sherlock as his friend, and became comfortable expressing his love for Sherlock as his best friend. Still, though, at first John felt that marrying Mary was the right choice. He thought that Sherlock didn’t love him back and never would, so it was best for him to pursue a relationship with Mary; that way, he could have a relationship while still getting to keep Sherlock close to him as his best friend. All the while, though, John knew that he wasn’t in love with Mary the way he was with Sherlock. As the wedding drew nearer, John became extremely anxious to see if there was any chance at all that Sherlock might return his feelings, perhaps because he saw how devoted and selfless Sherlock was behaving during the wedding planning and started to suspect something, or perhaps just because he was getting desperate as the wedding approached. Either way, John decided to throw caution to the winds during his stag night, and he deliberately tried to scope out Sherlock’s feelings by trying to see if Sherlock would want to have sex with him. John didn’t think that Sherlock gave him a clear yes, though, so he didn’t do anything, and when he woke up the next morning he concluded that Sherlock had given him his answer and it was a no. Believing that Sherlock isn’t interested in him, and thus that he’s spent all these years pining for someone who doesn’t love him back, John concluded that he should just go ahead and marry Mary. John let himself get caught up in the whirlwind, as Mrs. Hudson said, and he went through with the wedding even though he had major doubts about the marriage. After the actual ceremony—when John has already married Mary and it’s too late—John might start to see that there’s more to Sherlock’s feelings than he’d thought. But John has just learned that Mary is pregnant! He’s stuck.

At the end of the episode, John is left in a position where he must feel bound to Mary even more firmly than ever before. But it’s not what he wants, because he still wants Sherlock desperately.

Next: His Last Vow

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: The Hounds of Baskerville

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

~

The Hounds of Baskerville has a few scenes that show incredible chemistry and romantic tension between Sherlock and John. By this point in the story, Sherlock and John are both in love and aware of how they themselves feel, but they’re both unwilling to make a move, and they’re dancing around each other as a result. THOB also has some of the cleverest queer subtext in the entire show, at least to my eye. Let’s go!

After the intro that shows Henry as a child in Dartmoor, THOB starts off with a scene between Sherlock and John in the sitting room at 221B. After showing up at the flat covered in pig’s blood sometime early in the morning on a Monday, Sherlock waves around a harpoon while basically crawling out of his skin, desperate for cigarettes or a case. John gives Sherlock some tough love when it comes to the smoking, but he also acts very supportive and encouraging of Sherlock’s efforts to quit.

John later writes up his blog post about the Dartmoor case on March 16, just four days after he posted his final notes on Irene after talking to Mycroft and giving Sherlock the camera phone on March 12. The events of THOB span three days, including Sherlock and John’s breakfast together at the inn in Dartmoor before they leave to return to London. This means that the first THOB scene with John and Sherlock in 221B takes place on either March 13 or March 14—the very next day after John talked to Mycroft and gave Sherlock Irene’s phone, or just two days later.

(Side note: I got the timing of this opening scene wrong in the S2 fic that I wrote, so unfortunately I feel a need to awkwardly correct myself here, just in case anyone reading this has also read my fic—a hilarious thought, lol. Anyway, based on this meta, I used to think that the writers intentionally placed this first scene from THOB out of order, as a sort of playful nod to the ACD canon timeline being a complete catastrophe. @loudest-subtext-in-tv disabused me of that notion, however, by pointing out several points of continuity between the first scene with Sherlock and John and the scene with Sherlock, John, and Henry that follows right after. So the opening scenes of THOB do occur in order on a single Monday morning in March, just as we should expect them to.)

At this point, it’s been almost two and a half months since Battersea. And as we see from this opening scene between Sherlock and John, Sherlock is absolutely losing it. It’s been almost two and a half months since he learned that John might return his feelings, and Sherlock is losing his mind over his inability to tell John how he feels. He’s desperate for distractions, and it seems that he and John haven’t had any really good cases since the conclusion of Irene’s case in early January—none that John felt were worthy enough for him to write up on the blog, anyway. Sherlock took on the harpoon case (based on the ACD story “The Adventure of Black Peter”), even though apparently it wasn’t interesting enough to warrant including John, and even though he found the conclusion “tedious.” (And hey, that’s fair. I can imagine that harpooning a dead pig in order to prove a murder method could get a bit tedious, yeah.)

Otherwise, though, the tone of the first scene between Sherlock and John matches the tone of the spring–summer montage from the opening of ASIB very well. The banter, friendship, and domesticity that Sherlock and John share in this scene feels very similar to what we saw unfolding between the two of them several months ago, before Irene. I think it’s beautiful to see that Sherlock and John retained their unique dynamic together as friends, even after Battersea, and even just one or two days after that incredibly tense scene in the kitchen where John gave Sherlock Irene’s phone and held back everything else that he so clearly wanted to ask or say.

It’s especially wonderful to see that just one or two days after that tense scene in the kitchen, John slipped back into his usual role as Sherlock’s best friend: snarky and ready to call Sherlock out on his bullshit, but also very supportive. These are some of the very qualities that Sherlock first saw in John in ASIP and fell in love with him for.

Henry arrives with his case, and Sherlock decides that he and John will go to Dartmoor to investigate. After that, the rest of THOB shows that even though Sherlock and John have still retained their unique dynamic together, there are also real moments of tension between them as they both struggle with their feelings for each other. Their inability to open up to each other also leads to misunderstandings between them.

As always, there’s plenty of evidence of Sherlock’s feelings for John scattered throughout the first half of the episode. Here are a few (certainly non-exhaustive) examples.

When Sherlock and John are interviewing Henry, we learn that Sherlock used to read John’s emails to his girlfriends. Jealous much, Sherlock? I say “used to” because it doesn’t seem like John has tried to date anyone else since Jeanette, who broke up with him almost three months ago. More on that in just a minute, because you’d better bet it’s significant.

Then in this lovely shot that I absolutely adore (it’s my profile pic on here!), Sherlock holds the cab door open for John as they leave for the train station together to go to Dartmoor:

(gif from here)

I just love their body language in this moment. They look so united together as a couple.

And I know that no one in the fandom ever forgot Sherlock’s side-eye and smile at John after John pulls rank at Baskerville.

(gif from here)

Gay.

When Sherlock and John first go over to Henry’s house and John looks impressed that Henry is rich, Sherlock is visibly annoyed by John’s reaction and almost rolls his eyes. Again, jealous. (Later, Sherlock gleefully points out to Henry that part of his house has damp, lol.)

We also get lots of evidence of John’s attraction to Sherlock. When Sherlock and John first get to Dartmoor and get out of the car together, John totally checks Sherlock out as he’s adjusting his coat. I mean, look at John staring at him. Sherlock even notices John watching him and says “It’s cold” defensively. When Sherlock and John go inside the Cross Keys Inn a few moments later, it looks like they both check each other out pretty conspicuously.

There’s also a very important scene for John when John checks the two of them into the inn. @ivyblossom has a wonderful meta about this here. When John checks in, the innkeeper assumes that Sherlock and John are a couple, and this is the first time we’ve seen this happen after Battersea. John starts to correct the innkeeper, but then he changes his mind almost immediately and just breaks off. This is the first time we’ve ever seen John consciously make the decision not to correct someone who assumed that he and Sherlock are a couple, and it’s such an important development in his struggle to come to terms with his feelings for Sherlock. We never hear about John trying to date anyone else in S2 after Jeanette. It seems that after his disastrous breakup with Jeanette and his all-important confrontation with Irene at Battersea, John finally had to admit to himself that there is something important between him and Sherlock: that Sherlock is the single most important person in his life, that his relationship with Sherlock is the one long-term relationship that he’s truly committed to and that he will always choose to prioritize, and that dating other people isn’t compatible with what he has with Sherlock. John is still nervous about saying something to Sherlock, especially after Irene, but it seems that he’s getting closer to being ready to open up to Sherlock about how he feels.

Just a few scenes later, we have John’s famous “Oh, please, can we not do this, this time? You being all mysterious with your cheekbones and turning your coat collar up so you look cool.” John is looking, and he pretty much openly admits to Sherlock in this scene that he finds him attractive. Just look at the frustration and longing in John’s expression, which he’s not even trying to hide from Sherlock. Like, they make eye contact at the start of this gif!

(gif from here)

Sherlock seems a bit taken aback and silently pleased after John compliments his appearance—he pauses and looks a bit startled before replying with a surprised “I don’t do that.”

Right after this exchange, there’s a moment in the car where Sherlock and John spontaneously lock eyes and then quickly turn away again, as if they’re both embarrassed that they were caught looking at each other.

(gif from here)

@bbcjohnlock has a great little write-up about this scene. As they explain, John is really coming into his feelings for Sherlock in S2, and the tension between the two of them in this scene is just so palpable. It seems to me that John is barely trying to hide his feelings from Sherlock anymore, almost as if he’s hoping against hope that Sherlock might make a move. But then there’s the sadness and worry on his face after he and Sherlock turn away from each other, as if John is also convinced that Sherlock will never fall in love with him in return.

So we have all this great chemistry and simmering tension between Sherlock and John in THOB. But we also have their fight in front of the fireplace at the Cross Keys Inn after Sherlock, John, and Henry go out to the moor for the first time, and then the aftermath of that fight the next morning. These two scenes are significant because of what they reveal about what Sherlock and John each want and expect from each other at this point in their relationship. And as per usual for these two, these scenes are rife with miscommunication and misunderstandings that lead to Sherlock and John both getting hurt.

In the scene in front of the fireplace, Sherlock tells John that he saw the hound and then basically has an emotional meltdown over it. Sherlock probably has been “pretty wired lately,” as John says, because after the Irene disaster, he’s scared as shit about Moriarty and whatever he has planned next. In this scene, Sherlock thought it would finally be okay for him to let down a bit more of his façade around John, and to show him that he gets scared and anxious in ways that he can’t control, just like everyone else does. But instead of comforting Sherlock and telling him that his emotions make sense, John attempts to rationalize the situation in a way that dismisses Sherlock’s feelings. The conversation finally ends when Sherlock frustratedly spits out “I don’t have friends” and John replies with a detached “No. Wonder why” before getting up and leaving Sherlock sitting by the fire alone. @asherlockstudy has a great meta that breaks down this scene.

In this scene, Sherlock tries to open up to John by showing him more of his emotional side: and not just his emotional side, but specifically the part of him that can feel scared and vulnerable. But John feels that he doesn’t know how to handle this side of Sherlock, so he tries to get out of dealing with it by dismissing what Sherlock says. This really hurts Sherlock’s feelings.

Most of the time, John is able to see through Sherlock’s tough-guy mask and mysterious-detective persona to see him as he truly is: a flawed and sensitive human being who can often be impatient and abrasive on the outside, but who truly cares about other people and who follows his own moral compass and sense of justice. John loves Sherlock for all of this, and in all of these respects, Sherlock and John are very similar and well-suited to one another. John chose to become a doctor, so he clearly cares about helping other people. We learned in ASIP that John and Sherlock share a similar moral compass, and John’s total dedication to their shared cases since then has borne that out. John is also flawed and sensitive, but he’s rather rude on the outside and doesn’t have a lot of friends because he, ah, tends “to rub people the wrong way.” It makes perfect sense that Sherlock gets the two of them confused during the stag night forehead-detectives game in TSOT!

But even though John understands all of this about Sherlock, in the scene in front of the fireplace he becomes a bit overwhelmed by the intensity of Sherlock’s emotional side, and he fails to see Sherlock the way that Sherlock needs him to in that moment. John doesn’t give Sherlock the acceptance that he’s craving, and he doesn’t affirm for Sherlock that it’s okay for him to show him his vulnerable side. As asherlockstudy points out, John’s parting barb of “No. Wonder why” must have really hurt Sherlock. With that statement, John implies that even he still believes that Sherlock is so cold and callous that he doesn’t deserve to have real friends. Yikes.

John runs out of there, and he’s so upset that he doesn’t even close the door to the inn behind himself. Then he gets distracted by the car lights in the distance and goes off to investigate. Just a few minutes later, though, Sherlock texts John to suggest that he interview Henry’s therapist, Louise Mortimer. With that text, Sherlock tries to draw John back to him by pulling him back into the case—it’s the same strategy that Sherlock has been using ever since TBB whenever John starts to pull away from him.

This is so sad, because it shows that Sherlock worries that John only sticks around because he loves the casework and is impressed by Sherlock as a detective, not Sherlock as a person. After Battersea, Sherlock now suspects and hopes that John may be in love with him, but he seems to fear that John in just in love with his disguise, not with who he really is as a person. He doesn’t fully understand that John truly understands and loves him for who he is. Sherlock even sends John a picture of Louise Mortimer, implying that he thinks John will want to interview her because he’ll think she’s pretty. With that text, Sherlock is basically saying to John, “You don’t have to love me. I just want you to stay.” (*screams internally while writing this*)

This is also the first time we see Sherlock sign off on a text to John with just “S” instead of “SH.” That’s yet another little detail in this episode that’s intended to show that Sherlock and John’s relationship has grown much closer by this point in the show, even if they’re still having huge misunderstandings. God, kill me now.

John goes to interview Louise Mortimer and flirts with her pretty determinedly, apparently very eager to take his mind off Sherlock. But that quickly goes south. As LSIT wrote at one point, Dr. Frankland shows up and “the whole world floods the restaurant with a chorus of, ‘Hey, aren’t you Sherlock Holmes’s pathetically devoted live-in fucktoy?’ and John accepts he is not yet clear for dating.” And interestingly, John is sort of resigned about it. He’s obviously disappointed when Louise assumes that he’s gay and stalks off unhappily, but he doesn’t really try to make excuses for himself, as he once did with Jeanette. John seems to have accepted that he’s thoroughly in love with Sherlock and that he can’t hide it anymore.

Before Frankland interrupts, though, even while John is still trying to chat up Louise, John mentions Sherlock to her and calls Sherlock his friend. So even though Sherlock and John just had this big fight where they both agreed that Sherlock doesn’t have friends, of course John still thinks of Sherlock as his friend. He doesn’t hesitate to describe him as such to someone else not even, like, an hour later. So John got upset at Sherlock in front of the fireplace, sure, but he brushed it off very quickly.

Let’s say it again. Whenever John is feeling especially hopeless and conflicted about being in love with Sherlock, he tries to protect himself by repeating to himself that Sherlock is a cold, uncaring machine who will never love him back. But John doesn’t truly believe this and it’s just a coping mechanism. A terrible coping mechanism, but, hey, John is a flawed person. When Sherlock tried to open up to John about his emotions, John pushed him away and tried to explain things rationally because John still isn’t ready to deal with the possibility that Sherlock might actually love him.

When Sherlock and John see each other in the graveyard the next morning, Sherlock seems nervous and tense. He was deeply hurt by what happened the night before, but he’s desperate to get John back. His face is unguarded and pained when he calls after John, “I don’t have friends. I’ve just got one.”

asherlockstudy makes some very good points about this scene in her meta. Although we see Sherlock looking nervous and pained as he apologizes to John, Sherlock deliberately puts on his mysterious-detective persona for John in an effort to win him back. He approaches John in his swirly, billowing coat and tries to take back what he said the night before by insisting that he didn’t feel fear on the moor, he just doubted his senses and intelligence. And of course, Sherlock insists to John, he shouldn’t have doubted those at all. Those are infallible, super impressive, and totally worth staying for! He did see a hound, so now they just need to figure out how.

John acts upset with Sherlock at first, but he actually forgives Sherlock incredibly quickly and easily. By the time Sherlock and John notice Greg a few minutes later, John has already slipped right back into helping Sherlock with the case. And when Sherlock gives him drugged-fake-apology-coffee, John even tells Sherlock that he doesn’t need to apologize more than once.

Still, John’s conversation with Greg as they walk out of the inn together demonstrates that he’s still not in the right headspace and he’s still trying to tell himself that Sherlock doesn’t feel emotions in the same way that most people do. As John and Greg walk outside, Greg says that Sherlock “likes having all the same faces back together,” and John replies with an off-hand comment about Sherlock having Asperger’s syndrome. With that comment, John seems to be trying to rationalize Sherlock’s behavior. He implies that Sherlock is incapable of relating to other people in a “typical” way, that this is something about Sherlock that isn’t about to change, and that this is why Sherlock likes having him and Greg around, not because he genuinely thinks of them as his friends. (To be clear, I think John uses the term “Asperger’s” pretty flippantly and insensitively here. I’m trying to analyze what John seems to mean when he does this, and this doesn’t reflect my own beliefs about what it does or doesn’t mean to have Asperger’s.)

Unfortunately, Sherlock comes out of the door behind them right at that moment. He obviously hears John’s comment, because he gives John a hurt and bewildered look for a split second and then his eyes linger on John uncomfortably for a moment as he walks up to him and Greg. Sherlock’s reaction shows that he doesn’t agree with John’s assessment. Sherlock really does want to be able to open up to John more, but John keeps pushing him away because of his own conflicted feelings.

After Sherlock runs his experiment on John in the big lab at Baskerville and John thinks he heard and saw the hound, Sherlock, John, and Dr. Stapleton all hang out in one of the smaller labs so that Sherlock can analyze the sugar. In this scene, John has taken off his green field jacket, and we see that he’s been wearing his “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan underneath it all day.

(screencap from here)

Apparently John put that on in the morning after he and Sherlock had their big fight, and we just didn’t see it until now because he was wearing the jacket over it. And as @thegildedbee recently pointed out to me (she stepped in for some extra beta-reading!), this means that John packed it to bring to Dartmoor. He thought he would need it.

Man, the writers and the costume department really knew what they were doing with this cardigan. And my hat is off to LSIT for pointing it out in her analysis of the hiker case in ASIB so that I knew to look for it in other episodes.

Still, THOB does give us one final piece of evidence that John truly does see Sherlock for the deeply caring and empathetic person that he is. When Sherlock, John, Greg, and Henry are out on the moor and encounter the dog again after Sherlock has solved the mystery, Sherlock is determined to explain to Henry what happened to him and his father, to make sure that Henry understands. Great gifs and meta about this here. Sherlock has already solved the mystery, but he cares about Henry as a person and wants to make sure that Henry understands the truth and knows that he doesn’t need to be frightened of the dog. John sees this and understands it. Later, he writes on his blog that this was “one of the most human things I think I’ve ever seen [Sherlock] do.” He also notes that Sherlock “didn’t need to, he’d solved the case but it was as if he knew that the truly important thing was showing Henry what was real and what wasn’t.”

But then, of course, John goes on to speculate that “maybe his experiences with Irene Adler, had humanised him?” Because, you know, can’t let things get too good for these two. 

Ugh, GOD, it must have hurt Sherlock so much to read that.

Before they leave Dartmoor, John realizes that Sherlock attempted to drug him and locked him in the lab to experiment on him. But John is such a little danger freak (affectionate) that he’s not even that mad about it—he seems much more interested in needling Sherlock for having been wrong about the sugar than in actually chewing him out for locking him in the lab. They really are perfect for each other, in such a messed-up (still affectionate) way.

During that conversation over breakfast, Sherlock decides that if he’s going to continue trying to keep John romantically distant in the hopes of protecting him from Moriarty, then he might as well play into John’s weird assumption that he doesn’t understand emotions. So while John is eating breakfast and Sherlock is sipping his coffee, Sherlock pretends to not understand why the innkeepers were reluctant to put down their dog. (LSIT pointed this out here.) Of course, HLV later rubs in our faces that Sherlock absolutely understands why someone wouldn’t want to put down their dog.

Related to this, I want to double back to the two scenes that take place on the moor, since they both give us more evidence that Sherlock is really freaked out about Moriarty.

It’s now been about two and a half months since Sherlock learned that Irene was working for Moriarty, and thus that Moriarty used her to mess up his relationship with John. At this point, Sherlock is probably getting pretty anxious about the fact that they haven’t heard anything new from Moriarty since then—that’s probably part of why he was crawling out of his skin at the start of the episode. Sherlock is terrified for John’s safety and doesn’t know what Moriarty is going to do next.

When Sherlock, John, and Henry go out onto the moor together for the first time, Sherlock and Henry get separated from John and the two of them start talking. Sherlock tries to ask Henry more about his father’s friendship with Dr. Frankland.

Sherlock: But he works at Baskerville. Didn’t your dad have a problem with that? Henry: Well, mates are mates, aren’t they? I mean, look at you and John. Sherlock: What about us? Henry: Well, I mean, he’s a pretty straightforward bloke, and you…. They agreed never to talk about work, Uncle Bob and my dad.

Sherlock says “What about us?” quickly and rather aggressively, as if he’s very anxious, and he continues to look uncomfortable as Henry keeps speaking. I think there are two ways to read this, and both make sense. Sherlock might react this way simply because he’s offended by the idea that he and John are dissimilar and shouldn’t get along. But Sherlock might also react this way because he’s nervous about how other people perceive his and John’s relationship. He’s nervous that Henry might have seen too much, and that it’s obvious to everyone who sees them together that there’s something deeper between him and John. Sherlock doesn’t want that, because he fears that it will put John in even more danger from Moriarty.

Towards the end of the episode, in the scene where Sherlock, John, Greg, and Henry go to the hollow and find Dr. Frankland and the dog, there’s an extended moment when Sherlock thinks that he sees Moriarty’s face behind Frankland’s mask. And when he sees that, Sherlock totally loses his shit. When primed by the drug in the fog to see something terrifying, Sherlock sees Moriarty, because Moriarty is what he’s most afraid of.

That wraps up my main analysis of THOB! But before moving on, I want to pause to talk about some incredibly clever subtext embedded into the central mystery in this episode.

@heimishtheidealhusband explains this in a totally wild meta called Ghost Stories Are Gay Stories, which they wrote in preparation for the airing of TAB. You should definitely go read the whole thing, but I’ll try to recap some of the most important parts of it as it relates to THOB.

In Victorian gothic literature, authors sometimes make use of a literary device called “homospectrality,” which is where queerness is represented through monsters and ghosts. Mark Gatiss is a huge fan of this device, and in THOB he does something really, really cool by inverting it.

In THOB, Sherlock decides to take Henry’s case only after Henry uses the “archaic” (as Sherlock calls it) word “hound” to describe the monstrous dog that he believes killed his father. Throughout the rest of the episode, Sherlock’s job in solving the central mystery is to prove to everyone else that the dog that has been roaming the moor is just an ordinary dog: something that is perfectly natural and nothing to be frightened of. When Sherlock solves the case, he discovers that Henry, John, and even he himself had all been conditioned by an external and artificial agent—the drug that Frankland put into the fog—to see something monstrous and terrifying when they looked at the dog. As Sherlock explains to Henry on the moor:

Sherlock: Yeah, but there was a dog, Henry, leaving footprints, scaring witnesses, but it was nothing more than an ordinary dog. We both saw it—saw it as our drugged minds wanted us to see it. Fear and stimulus, that’s how it works. But there never was any monster.

Just as Victorian gothic literature would often use ghosts and monsters to represent homosexuality, in THOB the dog is a metaphor for homosexuality. Sherlock, as the protagonist in our love story and as a character who is fully comfortable with his own homosexuality, has to prove to all the other characters that homosexuality is nothing to be frightened of. The dog is just an ordinary dog, something entirely natural and unsurprising. It’s not a monster, but many people have been conditioned by something artificial and unnatural to believe that the dog is terrifying and dangerous. The drug is a metaphor for heteronormativity! It’s only because of heteronormativity, something artificial and pernicious, that the dog appears terrifying. This!! Is!! So!! Good!!

And it gets even better, because of how well all of this fits for our characters. At first, Sherlock thinks that Henry’s story about a monstrous dog roaming the moor and killing his father is absolutely ridiculous. He knows that there’s something else going on here, since there can’t be a monster. But once he goes out on the moor for the first time with Henry, Sherlock has a moment of total panic and then suffers an emotional breakdown back at the Cross Keys because he believes that he’s seen the monster. Sherlock later tells John that he’s always been able to trust his own senses, and he was upset because he experienced doubt. So, Sherlock, who has always been perfectly comfortable with his own homosexuality, experiences a terrifying moment of doubt, and his immediate reaction is to be shocked that he of all people could have seen the hound. In the lab, though, John sincerely believes that the monster dog exists. The general idea here is that Sherlock is someone who has always been comfortable with his own sexuality and who doesn’t see himself as susceptible to homophobia, but John may be slightly more susceptible. Through his relationship with Sherlock, however, John will overcome whatever fears he may have.

We could also read this another way. Sherlock’s moment of doubt in THOB could be a nod to the way that Sherlock fears the consequences of his love for John and doesn’t know what to do about it. Even though Sherlock is very comfortable with same-sex desire, he’s terrified that his love for John will put John in danger. If this is also what’s going on in the subtext, then we can read John’s fear in the lab similarly—John is frightened of the consequences of his love for Sherlock, and he’s not yet ready to fully embrace that love. In other words, I think the broader metaphor of the fear-triggering gas in THOB is about heteronormativity and homophobia, but perhaps Sherlock’s and John’s moments of fear are also meant to indicate that they’re scared of or nervous about their love for each other for other reasons, too.

Either way, Sherlock and John both recover from their temporary fear of the dog in THOB. Sherlock solves the mystery and realizes that the gas was the agent that was terrifying everyone, and John confidently shoots the dog in the hollow. This can be read as foreshadowing: as the show progresses, Sherlock and John will realize that their love for each other is not something that they need to be frightened of and will pursue a romantic relationship together. After all, THOB ends on a light note, with order and normality restored to the town after Sherlock and John have solved the mystery and eliminated the threat from Frankland and the fear gas. As heimishtheidealhusband writes, “here, ‘normal’ is a world where queerness is just part of the fabric of everyday life, and nothing to be afraid of.” Victorian gothic stories do not have happy endings for their queer-coded characters, but THOB does, which hints at the broader intentions of the show.

This is just. So clever. The inversion of the homospectrality metaphor is such a brilliant way to adapt the original ACD story in a modern context while also giving us a beautiful metaphor that explains where Sherlock and John each are in their relationships to same-sex desire at this point in the show.

So, to close: in THOB, we’ve seen that Sherlock and John are both in love, but they’re both dancing around this for their own reasons. Sherlock is comfortable with his own homosexuality, but he’s trying to keep his romantic distance from John because he’s worried about Moriarty. John has faced the fact that he’s in love with Sherlock and has accepted that this is something that isn’t about to change, but he’s also still struggling with his fear that Sherlock doesn’t love him, and he isn’t prepared for Sherlock to open up to him emotionally. As a result, John tries to convince himself that Sherlock doesn’t understand emotions and will never love him back, and he should just accept this about Sherlock so they can stay friends. But John isn’t very good at fooling himself, and deep down he really does know that Sherlock understands emotions and feels them deeply.

Throughout all of this, Sherlock and John both show that they can be spectacularly bad at discerning what the other person needs and wants from them, and their misunderstandings lead them to hurt each other. This certainly won’t be the last time that happens, and in future episodes it only gets more serious and more devastating.

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: A Scandal in Belgravia

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

~

Following the events of the pool, A Scandal in Belgravia shows us the evolution of Sherlock and John’s relationship as their friendship strengthens into something unbreakable and as they both truly come into their romantic feelings for one another. It’s an episode where the love story is laced into the subtext of so many of the characters’ lines, and where the mutual pining rises to a level that we haven’t seen before. It’s incredibly sad, because the second half of the episode revolves around everyone—John, Mycroft, Molly, and Irene—believing that Sherlock has fallen in love with Irene when in reality, Sherlock is deeply in love with John and pining for him desperately. Even after he realizes that everyone else has read the situation wrongly, however, Sherlock feels that he can’t say anything. After Moriarty’s threat at the pool, Sherlock believes that he can’t reveal his true feelings without putting John in extreme danger. He remains convinced of this throughout ASIB, even as keeping quiet about his feelings for John and letting everyone believe that he’s fallen for Irene seems to break his heart—and John’s, too.

Right at the beginning of ASIB, we learn that Moriarty decided to send Irene into Sherlock’s and John’s lives. At the pool, Moriarty receives a phone call from someone who indicates that they have something of value, and he then decides to call off the snipers, letting John and Sherlock go. After Moriarty leaves, Sherlock says to John that someone changed Moriarty’s mind about killing them that day, “but the question is, who?” The screen then immediately switches to a shot of Irene hanging up her phone, directly answering that question for the audience.

From what we learn later on, it seems that Irene probably called Moriarty to tell him that she had the Bond Air code but didn’t know what to do with it. She also didn’t really understand what it was at the time, since she didn’t realize it referred to a flight—she and Moriarty will need Sherlock to work that out for them later on. When she called Moriarty, then, Irene just knew that she had something important from the Ministry of Defense, because her client had told her that it would “save the world.” Moriarty promised to help her, so Irene decided to work with him and then immediately secured her photos of the princess as “protection.”

Moriarty decided to send Irene into Sherlock’s and John’s lives for the specific purpose of causing problems in their relationship, and he came up with this plan as soon as Irene called him at the pool—that’s why he let Sherlock and John go. Right before Irene called, Moriarty had just received direct proof of how much Sherlock loves John: he saw that Sherlock made no move to leave when John gave him the chance to do so, and then that Sherlock was prepared to die with John rather than leave him behind. So when Irene called to say that she had something of value, Moriarty probably put the pieces together right then and realized that he could use Irene to hurt Sherlock by disrupting his relationship with John.

Remember, this is what Moriarty literally just threatened to do. He also just told Sherlock that he didn’t want to rush things and wanted to have the chance to burn Sherlock’s heart out before he killed him. So rather than letting Sherlock kill them all right then by shooting the Semtex, having the opportunity to use Irene to disrupt Sherlock and John’s relationship is the “better offer” that Moriarty received over the phone.

The timeline of Sherlock is a mess, but we do know that John and Sherlock met for the first time on January 29 and that the events of TBB and TGG took place in a compressed span of time in late March and early April. After the resolution of the pool scene, ASIB shows us a montage of scenes that cover the rest of the spring and summer of that year, before Sherlock and John’s first encounter with Irene in September (going by the dates on John’s blog). Then we see the hiker case and Sherlock and John’s visit to Buckingham Palace right before they meet Irene.

There is something almost indescribably special about this period of Sherlock and John’s relationship. Sherlock and John have escaped Moriarty after agreeing to die together, and this sparks a definite change in their friendship from what we saw in S1 as their friendship solidifies into one of complete trust and admiration. Sherlock and John now seem to treat each other as true equals, and they’re comfortable around each other in a way that we didn’t see in S1. They’re solving case after case together as a seamless team, and they’re casually hanging out together in 221B like the best friends that they now undoubtedly are. They bicker when they’re out on cases like they’re a couple, but it’s light-hearted banter, not the uncomfortable tension that we often saw between them on the cases in TBB and TGG. John also doesn’t really get angry at Sherlock in ASIB the way he sometimes did in S1. Now, it’s clear that Sherlock and John are at ease around each other and are constantly making each other smile and laugh. They have great chemistry, like a return to what we saw during the chase scene in ASIP when they were first starting to feel drawn to each other. It’s beautiful. I would have loved to have seen more of this throughout the show.

The moment when Sherlock steals the ashtray from Buckingham Palace, just because John made a joke about stealing an ashtray and so Sherlock knew it would make John laugh…it’s just perfect. Perfect.

(gif from here)

In the early parts of this episode, we also see Sherlock casually eating around John in the flat, something that we’ve rarely seen him do before. Sherlock is eating a snack in one of the scenes from the spring-summer montage, when he complains about John’s blog post title “The Speckled Blonde.” Then in the scene between him, John, Mycroft, and Mrs. Hudson the morning after Sherlock and John first meet Irene, Sherlock has a half-eaten plate of food in front of him as he enjoys a leisurely breakfast with John and reads his newspaper.

(screencaps from here)

@asherlockstudy has a great meta about the meaning of food in Sherlock. She explains that food represents emotional intimacy, not sex. As she points out, ASIB is probably the episode in S1-S3 where we see Sherlock eating on-screen the most. He also seems to have put on a bit of weight since S1, which suggests that he’s eating more healthily and regularly than he was before. (I mean, it could be a coincidence if Benedict Cumberbatch gained a bit of weight for unrelated reasons, but reading it this way is more fun.) I really love asherlockstudy’s analysis of this. She explains that Sherlock’s interest in food in ASIB shows that he’s enjoying his newfound domesticity with John and feels emotionally intimate and comfortable with John in a way that we haven’t seen before in the show. Recall that in TGG, Sherlock told Molly that “domestic bliss” with her new boyfriend seemed to suit her because she’d gained a bit of weight. Here we see that Sherlock’s gained a bit of weight, too, so we can take it as evidence that he’s enjoying domestic bliss with John.

Overall, Sherlock is in a fairly good place during these months between the pool and Irene. Thanks to John’s blog, he has a steady stream of cases coming in and gets to pick the ones that he finds most interesting. His choices are so good that he doesn’t feel the need to leave the flat for anything less than a seven. He’s not desperate for cases and losing his mind over it, he’s eating like a normal human being, and he’s hanging out with John all the time. Bliss indeed.

As @thegildedbee pointed out to me, Sherlock and John’s improved caseload also shows that John is truly pulling his weight as a part of their team. John’s blog is what launches Sherlock’s consulting detective career to new heights, so John is contributing in a very real and important way even beyond what he does on the cases themselves. This offers more evidence of just how well Sherlock and John are now capable of working together as a team. Sherlock still directs their work on cases, but they’re operating on a more equal level as far as casework goes than they were before and they’ve successfully smoothed over the rough patches that they experienced in TBB and TGG.

It’s also notable that Sherlock and John’s relationship blossoms like this after John breaks up with Sarah. From John’s blog, we learn that sometime in April—so in the first month after the pool—John and Sarah went on vacation to New Zealand together and then broke up shortly afterwards. @loudest-subtext-in-tv has argued that the subtext of the hiker case indicates that John and Sarah broke up because John was pining after Sherlock…and accidentally said Sherlock’s name during sex. Yikes!  

Idk, that might be stretching things a bit too far, but it’s certainly a fun thought. In any event, it seems clear to me that after the pool, John had to face his feelings for Sherlock and realized that he had fallen in love with him. Because throughout ASIB, we get more evidence than ever before that John has fallen in love with Sherlock in earnest.

John writes about his breakup with Sarah on his blog on May 1 and even tells the whole world “Not sure my life with Sherlock is compatible with long-term relationships.” John now understands that for him, Sherlock will always come first. Sherlock sees this post and buys John beer as a nice little gesture to try to make him feel better about his breakup. And it’s then, after John has broken up with his girlfriend and recognized that he’s always going to put Sherlock first, that Sherlock and John’s relationship really takes off. The time stamps on John’s blog indicate that all the scenes from the opening montage of ASIB took place after John posted this.

John still tries to date women in the months that follow. We hear about two unnamed women (“the one with the spots” and “the one with the nose”), and then there’s Jeanette. But all of these relationships are fleeting. It’s clear that after Sarah, John decided to prioritize his life with Sherlock over his attempts to date other people because he knew that he cared more about Sherlock than any of these women. John is probably trying to date women in a half-hearted attempt to try to see if he can stop pining after Sherlock. He might also be feeling uncomfortable about the same-sex nature of his love for Sherlock and trying to hide from that, and perhaps he’s seeking a sexual outlet. But John really isn’t trying that hard. From his breakup with Jeanette at Christmas, we learn that John couldn’t even keep his five-minute girlfriends straight in his own head, and he was putting so little effort into his relationships that he was brought up short when Jeanette said “you’re a great boyfriend.” Even Jeanette can tell that John is really in love with Sherlock. So, John is dating these women only because he feels he has no chance with Sherlock, but Sherlock is always where his heart is.

Sometimes I wonder if in the months between the pool and Irene, Sherlock might have thought that this was the closest he could get to his ideal relationship with John as long as Moriarty’s threat was still hanging over them. John is still trying to date other people and he and Sherlock don’t share physical affection, but otherwise they’re almost able to act like a couple. Sherlock might have really treasured this.

Still, we also have evidence that Sherlock is pining for John during these months and feels frustrated that he can’t try to take their relationship further, especially now that John’s actions at the pool have given him a hint that John might care about him very deeply, too.

First, the motorist/hiker case shows that Sherlock imagines John is at home with him in 221B even when he isn’t. When the motorist comes in as a potential client, we get a shot of him sitting in the client chair while Sherlock stands in front of him and commands him to tell “us” his story. Over the client’s left shoulder, out of focus, we can see John sitting on the couch in the background:

(screencap from here)

But John isn’t actually there. In the next scene, we learn that John was in Dublin the day before, and it seems like he wasn’t back that morning for when the motorist showed up at the flat. Also, in all of the previous scenes where Sherlock and John interviewed potential clients together, John always sat in his red armchair in front of the clients, not on the sofa behind them, so his position in this scene gives us another hint that he isn’t actually there. Sherlock misses John so much when he’s gone and is so used to John being around that he imagines John is still there with him in 221B even when he’s not. (I first noticed this in ASIB because of this post by @asherlockstudy here, which is also where I got the screencap.) Sherlock is majorly attached.

(A very small note—John appears to be wearing what LSIT calls his “I’m-in-love-with-Sherlock-and-feel-hopeless-about-it cardigan,” which I’ll talk about more later. But just for now, this could be a small clue meant to reflect Sherlock’s desire for John to love him back—or a sign that John has been wearing it a lot recently.)

TSOT also contains a montage of flashback scenes that fit perfectly within these spring and summer months and that give us more information about Sherlock’s feelings during this period.

First, the flashback scenes from TSOT show Sherlock obsessing over John’s middle name. It really bothers him that he can’t figure out what it is, so much so that he actually steals John’s birth certificate to discover it. The opening montage in ASIB also indicates that Sherlock has been paying obsessively close attention to John’s blog (this, after the blog really annoyed him in TGG). Put those two together, and we know that at this point in the narrative, Sherlock has become obsessed with John and wants to learn everything about him that he possibly can.

The flashback scenes from TSOT also reveal that Sherlock started smoking again sometime after the pool, since we know that Sherlock was still on nicotine patches in TGG. LSIT has a meta that explains how Sherlock always takes up smoking when he’s pining for John especially intensely. In the months after the pool, then, Sherlock must be trying to figure out what it meant that John was willing to die for him. For Sherlock, offering to die with John at the pool was an expression of love, but Sherlock might doubt that it meant the same thing for John. After all, John was in the army, so perhaps Sherlock wonders if John’s willingness to die at the pool was a noble act of self-sacrifice similar to one that John might have been prepared to make in Afghanistan. If Sherlock isn’t sure, then his uncertainty must be driving him crazy, and he must be feeling immensely frustrated that he can’t just ask John and tell him how he feels. So he turns to cigarettes as a coping mechanism—and as we’ll see, when things get much worse for Sherlock in S3, he’ll turn to harder substances.

I have two more quick things to note about the opening montage and the months between the pool scene and the beginning of the case with Irene.

First, “The Speckled Blonde” case from John’s blog provides us with a bit of information about John’s past from before the start of the show. LSIT has a meta about this case here, which I recommend reading. In “The Speckled Blonde,” a homophobic stepfather attempts to poison and kill his two stepdaughters, Julia Stoner and Helen Stoner, because they’re both queer. The stepfather succeeds in murdering Julia, but Helen survives. Julia is a mirror for John and Helen is a mirror for Harry. So, this case tells us that John and Harry grew up with a homophobic father. Their father’s disapproval of queerness hurt both of them when they were younger, but John was hurt worse than Harry, because Julia died but Helen survived. Harry came out much earlier in life and has been able to pursue same-sex relationships, but John has stayed in the closet. The subtext in this case thus helps explain why John doesn’t have a history of male partners and why people who knew him before Sherlock always thought he was straight. Basically, John was held back more than Harry was. This case might also suggest that John continued to struggle with his sexuality longer than Harry did, but there are some details hinting that John will eventually stop caring what his father thinks/thought and will overcome that negative influence.

Second, the comic book case drops a hint that the subtext woven in throughout Sherlock is going to start “coming true,” and that conspiracy theories (read: TJLC) are sometimes real. In the episodes to follow, the writers will drop similar hints again and again.

All of that brings us up to speed on what’s been going on with Sherlock and John before Mycroft gives them the Irene Adler case in September.

In September, Sherlock and John go to Buckingham Palace and giggle together adorably. John makes a joke about stealing an ashtray, so Sherlock subtly steals one so that he can show it to John later to make him laugh again.

Mycroft shows up and tries to enlist Sherlock and John’s help with the Irene Adler case. There are a few fun things about this scene. First, we get a neat little hint that Mycroft has decided that he trusts John—specifically, that he trusts him with Sherlock.

Mycroft: This is a matter of the highest security, and therefore of trust. John: You don’t trust your own Secret Service? Mycroft: Naturally not. They all spy on people for money.

John gives Mycroft a slight smile at that, because he knows exactly what Mycroft has really just said. As we and John both know, Mycroft tried to get John to spy on Sherlock for money in ASIP, and John passed the test by refusing. So Mycroft knows that he can trust John around Sherlock. Keep this in mind, because it’s going to come up again at the end of the episode. (Here’s the post that first made me realize this. Thanks to @bbcsherlockgifs for that!)

Mycroft starts telling Sherlock and John about Irene’s photographs of the princess, and when Mycroft says that the photographs are of a “young female person,” John immediately looks deeply uncomfortable, but Sherlock smiles. A moment later, Sherlock says, “John, you might want to put that cup back in your saucer now.” (Here’s a gif of that second moment.)

John is immediately alarmed that they’ve started talking about lesbian porn, and to me, John’s discomfort in this scene reads like fear of being caught out. John is nervous about discussing homosexuality because it’s too close to home and he’s closeted. Sherlock, on the other hand, is totally cool with it and smiles cheekily because he loves the idea of a lesbian getting one over on the monarchy. When he tells John to put his cup back in his saucer, Sherlock is essentially telling John to get over himself and get with the program.

Sherlock and John leave Buckingham Palace, go back to Baker Street, and then head over to Belgravia to see Irene. Before going to Irene’s house, though, they take the opportunity to unnecessarily wrestle with each other in a side alleyway because they are VERY GAY.

Then, Sherlock and John’s first meeting with Irene at her house in Belgravia is…well, it’s also pretty gay. For a lot of reasons.

Sherlock observes Irene closely enough to figure out her measurements, but he doesn’t show any sexual interest in her. He seems genuinely annoyed when Irene stands over him nude, and especially when John walks in. Actually, when John walks in, Sherlock looks away from Irene and his mouth falls open in an absolutely appalled expression that is the exact same look he wore when Moriarty left his phone number for him under the petri dish right in front of Molly in TGG! In both of these situations, Sherlock is so annoyed at all these people trying to seduce him and is just so over it. He has no interest in them and wishes they would leave him alone.

Awesome gifs of the moment in TGG from @darlingbenny here, and of the moment in ASIB from @captainsjm here!

Although Sherlock is annoyed by Irene’s nudity, it doesn’t throw him off because he finds her attractive and therefore finds her nudity distracting. Instead, it bothers him because it prevents him from being able to deduce anything about her. Sherlock stares at Irene intently, but instead of the usual deductions that we’re shown when Sherlock does this, we just see question marks. Sherlock even looks over at John to confirm that he can still deduce things about John. But when he looks back at Irene, he comes up blank again, and that’s when he starts to frown and look troubled.

asherlockstudy has a meta that breaks down some of the dialogue in this scene. I’ll recap what I see as the most important points.

Irene: And somebody loves you. If I had to punch that face, I’d avoid your nose and teeth, too.

The camera immediately switches to John, who looks sideways at Sherlock uncomfortably, gives an extremely forced laugh, and tries to deflect. This show is so not subtle sometimes. 

John: Could you put something on you, please? Anything at all. A napkin?

As soon as John says this, Sherlock rushes to give Irene his coat. Obviously, Sherlock would feel more comfortable if John did not stare at a nude Irene Adler.

Sherlock: I don’t think John knows where to look.

Read: “He’s not interested. Stop trying to flirt with him.” Sherlock is jealous and doesn’t like Irene flirting with John. And hey, as an aside, remember a few scenes ago when Sherlock was near-naked in Buckingham Palace and John very conspicuously leaned over to try to stare at his crotch? John knows where he wants to look when it comes to Sherlock, definitely.

Irene: No, I think he knows exactly where. I’m not sure about you. (Read: “No, I think he’s into women. Maybe you aren’t, though.”) Sherlock: (irritated) If I wanted to look at naked women, I’d borrow John’s laptop. (Read: “I’m not into women. Leave me alone.”) John: (suspicious) You do borrow my laptop. Sherlock: (still irritated) I confiscate it. (“To prevent you from looking at naked women!”) Irene: (“Holy shit, are they seriously having a gay quarrel right in front of me right now? Damn it, showing up nude usually works.”) Oh, never mind.

Irene then quickly changes the subject. Sherlock and John are so focused on each other that they’re getting flustered by each other and not by her as she intended, so she has to try to come up with a way to steer the conversation around so that she can gain the upper hand.

After his initial annoyance, Sherlock remains calm and cool throughout this exchange. He’s confused by Irene because he can’t deduce anything about her, but he’s not impressed by her.

The only moment when Sherlock trips up comes as soon as John starts trying to hit on Irene. Irene and John are sitting next to each other on the couch when Irene says this:

Irene: (looking at John) I like detective stories—and detectives. Brainy’s the new sexy.

John is the one who writes up his and Sherlock’s “detective stories” on the blog, and John might think that Irene knows this, since Lestrade told us in the opening montage that John’s blog recently went viral. So John gives Irene an extremely suggestive smile, and Sherlock immediately panics and tries to draw John’s and Irene’s attention back to him instead. Sherlock garbles something unintelligible, then takes a breath and answers Irene’s earlier question about the hiker case. So although Sherlock was surprised by Irene’s nudity when she entered the room, it didn’t cause him to lose his composure—he only lost his cool when he saw John try to hit on her.

Sherlock gives John their prearranged signal to set off the fire alarm, and they look at each other like this. Before the mutual pining really kicks in in earnest, we sure are getting a lot of mutual flirting!

After John leaves the room to set off the fire alarm, Sherlock starts to explain the hiker case to Irene, and he’s fairly harsh and belittling towards her. There’s disgust in his voice when he says “you cater to the whims of the pathetic and take your clothes off to make an impression. Stop boring me and think.” Again, he isn’t impressed by her and doesn’t have a lot of respect for her based on what he knows about her so far.

Altogether, this scene emphasizes a few key things: (1) Sherlock once again clearly demonstrates that he’s not into women in general, (2) Sherlock shows that he’s jealous of the women whom John expresses interest in and that he’ll sometimes try to stop John from flirting with them, (3) Sherlock has absolutely no romantic or sexual interest in Irene specifically, and (4) within only a few minutes of being in a room with them, Irene can already see that Sherlock and John are hella gay for each other, even if she thinks that John is into women, too.

The rest of the scenes at Irene’s house bear all of this out. The American CIA agents arrive and try to get Sherlock to open Irene’s safe. Sherlock insists that he doesn’t know the code, but the agents don’t believe him. Sherlock continues to insist that he doesn’t know it until they threaten to shoot John. Just like in the pool scene, we can see and hear Sherlock’s demeanor change as soon as John is threatened and he realizes that he has to do something to save him.

Sherlock doesn’t seem to have worked out the code before the Americans threaten John—it’s only when the gun is literally pressed into the back of John’s head that he resolves to do some quick thinking and finally figures it out. I don’t think Sherlock had even processed what Irene’s measurements were beforehand, he’d just looked at her closely enough that he was able to figure them out from memory when pressed to do so. Irene told Sherlock that she had already given him the code; Sherlock knew that the code was a sequence of numbers that started with a 3 and that there was a very limited amount of information that Irene could have possibly given him, since she deliberately showed up nude to avoid giving him information. So, based on that, Sherlock thinks about what he does know about her and figures it out. But we can actually see Sherlock pause and bite his lip as he thinks about it. He wasn’t thinking about Irene’s measurements and wasn’t interested in them before he had to be.

It makes total sense to me that when Sherlock was trying to deduce Irene earlier, he observed her closely enough to be able to get a sense of what her measurements were even though he wasn’t interested in her sexually. After all, we know that Sherlock can assess fluctuations in people’s weights down to a few pounds, and he’s quite capable of viewing human bodies dispassionately for his work.

After they’ve dealt with the agents, Sherlock takes Irene’s camera phone and goes upstairs to check if there are any more Americans up there. Irene says to John “There’s a back door, better check it, Dr. Watson” because bottom!lock, and also to get John out of the way. Then Irene stabs Sherlock in the shoulder with a syringe and drugs him with something disabling so that she can take the phone back. Sherlock hits the floor, totally taken out. By the time John returns to the room, Irene has managed to take the phone back from Sherlock, and Sherlock is struggling to stay conscious. Then Irene asks Sherlock—rather maliciously—if she should tell John what the code to the safe was. From Sherlock’s expression, we can see that he does not want her to tell John. He doesn’t want John to think that he was checking out Irene! But of course, because Irene is a very mean person, she tells John anyway before escaping out of the window.

Later that evening, Irene breaks into 221B and looms over Sherlock threateningly after returning his coat. When Sherlock wakes up and realizes that this wasn’t a hallucination, he panics and immediately calls out for John. Let’s pause for a moment to think about this. In that moment, Sherlock had just been drugged and beaten, then witnessed Irene come back to gloat over him while he was still out of it due to whatever she’d injected him with and he couldn’t defend himself. Sherlock must be feeling incredibly vulnerable, and his first instinct is to call for John! This shows just how much Sherlock has come to trust John and to take comfort from his presence.

From pretty much here on out, things just get tense and sad. The rest of the episode portrays a really difficult period for both Sherlock and John as they both struggle with their feelings for each other, but do so separately.

The next morning, John hears Irene’s text tone for the first time while he and Sherlock are having breakfast together. John asks Sherlock about it persistently, and after this, his jealousy of Irene only intensifies. John is clearly bothered by the idea of Irene hitting on Sherlock, and it’s something he can’t let go. Here’s a gif set of lots of moments of John’s jealousy in ASIB!

Next up, the Christmas party scene is very important because we learn a lot about Sherlock’s state of mind from his interactions with Molly. When Molly first walks in, Sherlock acts exasperated and tries to distract himself from her awkward attempts to make small talk by looking at John’s blog. (Sherlock would rather look at John’s blog than talk to his other friends: obsessed.) Then Molly says, “John, I hear you’re off to your sister’s? Sherlock was complaining.” When she says this, Sherlock gives her a look out of the corner of his eye and then springs out of his chair to start ripping her to shreds with deductions.

This is very telling. First of all, Sherlock was apparently sad enough about John not spending Christmas with him that he complained about it to Molly. Then at the party, Sherlock panics when he thinks that Molly might clumsily reveal something that would demonstrate his feelings to John—that’s when he moves to cut her off. In his anger, Sherlock gets pretty nasty and deliberately tries to embarrass Molly. But once he picks up the gift at the top of Molly’s bag and realizes that it’s for him, Sherlock immediately deflates and appears genuinely sorry. There’s a huge change in his demeanor, and you can see him realize that he’s just been very cruel without even meaning to be—not to that extent, anyway.

(screencap from here)

Sherlock then asks Molly to forgive him, gives her a kiss on the cheek, and says “Merry Christmas, Molly Hooper” in a very gentle voice.

I think this is an important moment in Sherlock’s character development. Over the past few months, Sherlock has come to know what it feels like to be in love, to have other people embarrass you in front of the person you love, and to believe that the person you’re in love with is unattainable. He doesn’t seem to know that John is in love with him yet, so he also feels that he understands what unrequited love feels like. As a result of all that, Sherlock feels horrible for embarrassing Molly in front of everyone by exposing her feelings for him. That’s exactly what he wanted to prevent her from doing to him by revealing his feelings for John! It’s something Sherlock wanted to avoid because he knew it would hurt, so he feels awful when he realizes that he’s just turned around and done it to Molly. (I think that before this, Sherlock had already realized that Molly found him attractive, but he didn’t realize how deep her feelings were.)

Sherlock feels a newfound empathy for Molly after this moment, and he’s much kinder to her in the show after this scene. And in the Christmas party scene, we can see from the other characters’ surprised reactions to Sherlock’s apology—especially John’s—that this is a moment of transition and growth for Sherlock.

We also get more evidence of John’s jealousy in this scene. When Sherlock gets a text from Irene to tell him that she left him her camera phone on the mantelpiece, John says that it’s the fifty-seventh text from Irene that Sherlock has received. This means that for over three months between early September and Christmas, John assiduously counted fifty-seven separate instances of hearing Irene’s text tone. So. Much. Jealousy. John is really focused on this, but he can’t even remember which of his five-minute girlfriends has a dog. That shows where John’s priorities are.

After Sherlock and Mycroft go to Bart’s and Sherlock identifies Irene’s body, for the rest of the episode everyone around Sherlock becomes convinced that Sherlock has fallen in love with Irene.

This starts with the scene between Sherlock and Mycroft outside the morgue. Mycroft offers Sherlock a cigarette and when Sherlock accepts, John and Mycroft both take this as evidence that Sherlock is upset about Irene’s death. They even think Sherlock is upset enough that he might resort to drugs, something that we haven’t known him to do since he met John months ago.

There are several points I want to make about this to show just how terribly wrong everyone is about Sherlock.

1. Sherlock knew Irene wasn’t dead and that the body was a double; he purposely covered for her at the morgue because he knew that she was playing just one part in a much larger game, and he wanted to keep the game in play so that he could solve the case. Remember, Sherlock has known since the Americans showed up that Irene has something far more important than the photos of the princess on her phone. During his argument with Mycroft over breakfast the next day, Sherlock basically told Mycroft that he’s committed to figuring out what Irene has on her phone and why it’s so important. As a result, Sherlock falsely identified the body at the morgue as Irene’s; he knew she was faking her death and he covered for her. I think we know this because (a) Sherlock would have been able to recognize Irene’s real body, and (b) later on at 221B, Irene hints at the fact that Sherlock knew she wasn’t dead and acknowledges that he covered for her (I’ll point that out when we get there).

2. Sherlock takes the cigarette because he’s pining for John, as he pretty much always is at this point. Remember that Sherlock started smoking again months ago, over the summer—we know that from the TSOT flashback scenes—so he’s been smoking as a way to cope with his feelings for John for quite some time now. Moreover, Sherlock came directly to the morgue from the Christmas party, so he’s just had that painful exchange with Molly that left him feeling very raw about his feelings for John. I think that as he stands outside the morgue with Mycroft and watches a family mourn the death of a loved one, Sherlock is thinking about his inability to confess his love to John. He’s thinking about the pain of being separated from someone you love when it feels like they should be so close. So he takes the cigarette from Mycroft.

3. In reference to the grieving family, Sherlock says to Mycroft: “See how much they care. Do you ever think there’s something wrong with us?” Characters on this show lie and obfuscate all the time, and Sherlock is not being genuine with Mycroft here. This is a deliberate attempt at deflection. Sherlock is trying to act cool and detached, but it’s an act. The context for this scene is significant. Again, Sherlock has just been at the Christmas party right before this, where he panicked when he thought Molly was about to reveal something that could hint at his feelings for John. In this scene at the morgue, Sherlock is probably starting to think that he needs to be much more careful about what he lets on if he wants to hide his feelings from John in order to keep John safe. He knows that Mycroft is sharp and might figure things out, so he intentionally tries to appear cool and detached in front of Mycroft by suggesting that the two of them are alike and are both uncaring. This isn’t about hiding feelings for Irene. It’s about hiding feelings for John.

4. I also have to point out how utterly ridiculous it would be for Sherlock to have romantic feelings for Irene. Honestly, it’s kind of incomprehensible to me that John and Mycroft both jump to this conclusion so quickly. They have pretty much no evidence for this besides…heteronormativity, which, as we know from Sherlock’s mistake about Harry in ASIP, is not a particularly good way to make deductions. Sherlock’s interactions with Irene thus far have consisted of (1) the first meeting in her sitting room, where Sherlock was obviously not impressed by Irene or her profession and was worried about John’s reaction to her; (2) the confrontation where Irene viciously stabbed Sherlock with a sedative, whipped him with a riding crop to get him to relinquish her camera phone, gloated that she was “the woman who beat you,” and then told John the code to her safe against Sherlock’s wishes; (3) Irene creepily sneaking into Sherlock’s bedroom while he was still drugged out and standing over him mockingly, after which Sherlock freaked out and called out for John; (4) Irene sending Sherlock flirtatious and sexually suggestive texts that he never responds to. Not really sure which part of this is supposed to endear Irene to Sherlock, especially since much of this can be pretty easily classified as sexual harassment.

When Sherlock arrives back at 221B, we have one of the many, many incredibly sad scenes between Sherlock and John as they both fail to act on their feelings for each other. Having just been dumped by his girlfriend Jeanette because even she can tell that he is hopelessly in love with Sherlock, John is sitting in his chair reading the Holy Bible to try to get over his gay feelings for Sherlock. (Okay, okay, I know that we don’t know for sure that it’s a bible, but it looks like it could be a bible, and it makes sense that John might be feeling especially guilty and conflicted about his feelings for Sherlock around Christmastime if he was raised in a religious and homophobic household. But yes, I admit that he could be reading a different book. Whatever.) Upon entering the sitting room, Sherlock realizes that John and Mrs. Hudson have searched for drugs, and thus that they both think he is in love with Irene and grieving her death. This could have been a moment for Sherlock to explain the situation to John and reveal his true feelings, but Sherlock chooses not to. Instead, incredibly crushed, he just says that he hopes they didn’t mess up his sock index this time and retreats to his bedroom. Sherlock is left feeling hurt and sad that John thinks he’s in love with Irene, and John is left feeling hurt and sad because he thinks Sherlock is in love with Irene. Ack!

The next scene takes place on New Year’s Eve, where we see that Sherlock has become laser-focused on trying to figure out the passcode to Irene’s phone. He’s started composing to help him think, and he isn’t eating. John misinterprets this as evidence that Sherlock is heartbroken over Irene, but this is actually very consistent with all of Sherlock’s normal behavior when he’s working on a case; Sherlock told John in their very first meeting that he plays the violin when he’s thinking, and he told Molly in TBB that he never eats on a case because he thinks it slows him down. As confused as John is, even he admits in the next scene at Battersea that Sherlock usually does all this stuff anyway.

Moreover, Sherlock basically tells John that he’s composing because he’s trying to figure out how to unlock Irene’s phone.

John: You composing? Sherlock: Helps me to think. John: (pained) What are you thinking about? Sherlock: (whirling around and speaking rapidly) The counter on your blog is still stuck at one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five. John: Yeah, it’s faulty. Can’t seem to fix it. Sherlock: (taking out Irene’s camera phone) Faulty—or you’ve been hacked and it’s a message.

John asks Sherlock what he’s thinking about—fearing that he’s thinking about Irene—and Sherlock immediately responds in a way that clearly shows that he’s trying to figure out how to unlock the phone.

John is struggling, though, and his “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan makes an appearance in this scene. That’s what LSIT calls John’s maroon cardigan in her meta about the hiker case, and gosh, it’s so true. John was wearing this cardigan during the pool scene, the turning point that pushed him to realize that he was in love with Sherlock, and now it shows up again on the morning when John has started to believe that Sherlock has fallen in love with someone else and will never love him back. We’ll see this cardigan again in moments when John is feeling particularly hopeless about his feelings for Sherlock.

John isn’t wrong about Sherlock composing because he’s heartsick, though. The theme that the soundtrack calls “Irene’s Theme” and that we just heard Sherlock composing is a love song that Sherlock wrote for and about John because he’s heartbroken and pining for him. We know this not just because it fits with everything else that we’ve learned about Sherlock up until this point, but also because when John steps out of the flat a few moments later and closes the door to 221 behind himself, we can still hear Sherlock playing the violin piece, even though we shouldn’t be able to now that John has left the flat. The music is deliberately overlaid so that we associate this piece with John—Sherlock is writing sad music because he’s thinking about John. (I think I saw a meta once that explained this.) This moment also tells us that when we hear the “SHERlocked” track that contains variations on this theme during the final confrontation with Irene, we should understand that what’s happening on screen is about Sherlock’s love for John. More on that later, but for now, don’t get fooled by all the sad romantic music that appears throughout this episode whenever Irene shows up. The sad romantic music is always about Sherlock and John.

John steps out of the flat, and he’s feeling so sad and hopeless that he’s ready to throw himself at the first woman who looks at him the right way. So John flirts with Irene’s henchwoman, and then he gets embarrassed and frustrated when he thinks she’s one of Mycroft’s employees. Then they go off to Battersea.

The Battersea scene is one of the most important scenes in the entire show, in my opinion. It’s incredibly important for John’s character development and his journey of recognizing his feelings for Sherlock, as well as for Sherlock’s perception of John’s feelings for him.

Let’s walk through several points here.

1. John absolutely treats Irene as a rival. He acts aggressively towards her and almost everything he says to her is dripping with either anger or jealousy. He seems to want to shout at Irene, “Sherlock is mine, and you’ve interfered!”

2. John insists that Irene tell Sherlock she’s alive. This demonstrates that even though John sees Irene as a rival who has come between him and Sherlock, he still wants Sherlock to know that she’s alive because he thinks Sherlock is heartbroken over Irene’s death. Above all, John wants Sherlock to be happy, and he’s willing to sacrifice his own feelings in order to protect Sherlock’s own. John loves Sherlock so much, and it’s a selfless love. This is such a touching thing for us to learn about John.

3. Irene says that Sherlock never replies to her texts, and John immediately and confidently replies by saying that Sherlock always replies to texts. Irene asks if that makes her special. But John is totally wrong here! We saw in TGG that Sherlock habitually ignores texts from Mycroft, and in one of the early scenes in TRF he ignores several text alerts until John finally checks his phone for him. Sherlock’s interactions with Lestrade have also never given me the impression that Sherlock is particularly diligent about keeping other people in the loop, so it makes complete sense to me that Sherlock would often ignore texts if it suited him. What John has really told us in this exchange is that Sherlock always responds to him. It’s John who is special. To really drive this home, after Sherlock overhears this conversation between John and Irene, he texts Irene for the first time that night precisely to prove that she isn’t special.

4. The exchange between John and Irene right after this includes some of the most important dialogue in the entire show.

Irene: Are you jealous? John: We’re not a couple. Irene: Oh yes you are. (Holding up her phone to show John the text she’s about to send) There. “I’m not dead. Let’s have dinner.” John: Who the hell knows about Sherlock Holmes, but, for the record, if there’s anyone out there who still cares, I’m not actually gay. Irene: Well, I am. Look at us both.

READ: “Neither of us is usually into men, but we’ve both fallen for Sherlock.”

What Irene is saying here is that people can experience fluidity in their sexuality: a woman who usually thinks of herself as only attracted to women can fall in love with a man, and man who usually thinks of himself as only attracted to women can fall in love with a man, too. It doesn’t really matter what you think your sexuality is if you meet the right person.

John shakes his head and lets out a sound that’s half a sad laugh and half a sigh. He doesn’t deny it. John’s reaction is one of such genuine sadness and frustration, and it beautifully reveals his agreement with what Irene has just said. Maybe John didn’t think he was usually into men, or maybe he’s long known that he’s attracted to men but still doesn’t think of himself as gay. It doesn’t matter. He’s fallen in love with Sherlock.

Gifs of this moment here and here.

This is a turning point in the audience’s understanding of John’s feelings, and I think there’s a chance that it might be a turning point for John, too. Perhaps it’s during this conversation that John realizes just how true it is that he really has fallen for Sherlock. Or maybe John knew it beforehand, and this is just when it gets revealed to the audience—I think that’s quite likely, based on what we’ve seen from John in this episode so far. But either way, by this point in the show, John certainly knows that he’s in love with Sherlock. John might not have fully come to terms with it and embraced it—his sad little half laugh, half sigh indicates that he’s heartbroken and struggling with it—but he knows that this is what he’s feeling.

Right then, Sherlock’s text alert goes off, and Irene and John realize that Sherlock overheard everything.

John’s face after realizing that Sherlock just heard him admit that he’s in love with him:

(screencap from here)

This moment is so important that it even made it into the updated opening title sequence for S2. The show’s creators wanted to beat us over the head with it so that we would understand its significance for Sherlock and John.

Here it is in the opening title sequence:

(screencap from here)

(Also, Sherlock didn’t put his phone on silent while eavesdropping on John and Irene? Even after Irene said that she was about to text him? What kind of a detective is he? Sherlock must have been fully distracted by his desperation to hear everything that John would say!)

Sherlock has now heard the critical dialogue in the show where John’s feelings for him are revealed. I’ve seen some people argue that this is the moment when Sherlock fully realizes that John is in love with him, and that for the rest of the show Sherlock always knows this. I think this is mostly true, but not entirely. I think that for the rest of S2, Sherlock thinks that John is probably in love with him and desperately hopes that this is true. But after his return to London in S3, Sherlock starts to have real doubts that John still feels that way about him. Stay tuned for more on that later.

Before I move on to Sherlock’s reactions to the Battersea scene, let’s talk about something else that we learn about Sherlock from this scene. On his way to meet with Irene, John told Irene’s minion that Sherlock doesn’t follow him everywhere. But Sherlock actually did follow him to Battersea. Moreover, we learn from Mrs. Hudson that Sherlock left Irene’s camera phone in the pocket of his dressing gown when he left the flat. Sherlock apparently left to follow John in such a hurry that he didn’t even bother to properly secure the all-important camera phone that he knows a bunch of people are after and that he’s been obsessed with unlocking. Um. Sherlock is majorly attached to John! Maybe he was watching John from the sitting room window, saw John get into an unfamiliar car with a woman he didn’t recognize, and was worried that John was getting kidnapped by Moriarty again.

Back to Sherlock struggling with the fact that John might reciprocate his feelings. As Sherlock makes his way back to 221B, we get a close-up shot of his face. Sherlock is lost in thought, but it’s not the intense look of concentration that we usually see on his face when he’s making deductions, the one where his eyes zip around rapidly and he appears clearly focused. Instead, Sherlock seems far more distant, and the shot itself is even unfocused in order to visually emphasize his confusion. He’s so floored by John’s revelation that John seems to have literally broken his brain. Apparently, Sherlock was not prepared for the idea that John might return his feelings. There’s a great gif set of this moment here, which highlights the scene’s transition from John to Sherlock to point out that this transition emphasizes that Sherlock is thinking about John.

Sherlock simply does not know how to handle the emotions that he’s experiencing after learning about John’s feelings, so much so that it unbalances him. In the scene with the American agents at 221B, Sherlock totally loses it and takes out his frustration at not being able to take his relationship with John further—especially now that he knows John returns his feelings!—by throwing the lead American agent out of the window several times. I certainly think that Sherlock is fiercely protective of Mrs. Hudson and was furious at the agents for hurting her, but his behavior seems out of proportion even to that, so it’s probably also in response to his frustration about his situation with John. This is the unhinged behavior of someone who’s just experienced an emotional upheaval.

The scene where Sherlock walks into 221B and realizes that Mrs. Hudson has been hurt also introduces the fall music for the first time, the same music that plays during Sherlock’s showdown with Moriarty on the rooftop and fake suicide in TRF. This seems like a clue that we’re supposed to associate this music not just with peril, but specifically with Sherlock trying to protect someone he cares about.

After the American agents are dealt with and Sherlock and John take care of Mrs. Hudson, John and Sherlock go back upstairs to their sitting room together and we get an absolutely heartbreaking scene between the two of them. John knows that there’s no way he can pretend that he didn’t realize Sherlock was there at Battersea, so he decides that they need to talk about it. He pours himself a drink and tries to steel himself to bring it up, but he’s clearly struggling.

Throughout the show, John often drinks right before he thinks he’s about to make himself vulnerable by revealing his romantic feelings. This is almost always about Sherlock, but John also drinks right before attempting to propose to Mary in TEH. This is one more subtextual clue that serves to emphasize how much John struggles to consciously face and express his feelings.

Here’s a gif of John in this scene. Just, cause, you know. We need to stop and really just sit with the heartbreak here.

(gif from here)

This happens:

John: So she’s alive, then. How are we feeling about that?

John is in so much pain as he says this. There’s a long pause, and then Sherlock takes a deep breath before saying this:

Sherlock: Happy New Year, John.

Perhaps this is Sherlock’s way of saying that this conversation has to wait for later—that although they can’t talk about their feelings for each other now, they have the hope of something else in the future.

In any case, John doesn’t reply to that. Instead, he says this:

John: Do you think you’ll be seeing her again?

Sherlock says nothing. He begins to play his violin as he makes eye contact with John, and then he turns his back on him to face the window. John resigns himself to the fact that Sherlock won’t talk to him about what happened at Battersea and sits down in his chair to quietly listen to Sherlock play. More gifs of this devastating moment here.

John looks so heartbroken when Sherlock decides not to open up to him. Note that he’s wearing his “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan.

(gif from here)

Just like when Sherlock came back to 221B from the morgue, this was a moment when Sherlock could have told John the truth by telling him that he was in love with him. John is clearly searching for some kind of signal from Sherlock—he’s desperate to know what Sherlock is thinking after Battersea, but he also seems terrified of what he might learn and of the possibility that Sherlock might reject him. But Sherlock doesn’t open up. Instead, he remains convinced that he can’t tell John how he feels because of the threat from Moriarty, and he closes himself off from John.

I think this is a pivotal moment in the show, a moment when Sherlock makes a huge mistake in his relationship with John. For the rest of S2, we never see Sherlock and John get as close to talking about their love for one another as they do in this scene. As a result, neither one of them ever tells the other how much they love them before Sherlock is forced to jump in TRF. If one of them had, things could have been so very different after Sherlock’s return.

The thing is, Moriarty already demonstrated at the pool that he was willing to have John killed. So if Moriarty has already threatened to kill John, how much more danger could Sherlock really put John in by trying to move their relationship to something romantic? This is why I think that Sherlock’s decision in this scene is a mistake. I don’t think Sherlock has nearly as much to lose as he thinks he does. And it’s because Sherlock and John never confess their love to one another that Moriarty is able to manipulate the two of them and their feelings so easily. So much of the heartbreak that Moriarty brings upon Sherlock and John in later episodes might have never happened if Sherlock had been brave in ASIB and told John the truth.

It’s so heartbreaking to me that in this scene, Sherlock is clearly hurting, but he believes that he’s actually protecting John by neglecting his own feelings and closing himself off from him. I think Sherlock’s tone and body language in this scene—and the deep breath that he takes before saying “Happy New Year, John”—demonstrate that Sherlock felt the weight of the decision that he was making when he chose not to open up to John. He knew he was making a decision that would be intensely painful for them both, but he thought it was the right one because he was keeping John safe. In reality, though, he’s making a mistake that will ultimately make things far worse for both of them later on.

Whew. I think ASIB is one of the saddest episodes.

The very next day, Irene shows up at 221B to ask for Sherlock’s help. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly when Irene returns, and I’m pretty much convinced that it’s the next day. On New Year’s Day, John posts on his blog that Sherlock has gone to Bart’s to X-ray Irene’s phone, so that must have happened the next day. We see Sherlock scan the phone and talk to Molly at Bart’s, and then when Sherlock returns to the flat to find Irene in his bedroom, he’s wearing the same shirt that he was wearing in the lab scene. So those two scenes are probably meant to take place on the same day. This means that most of the remaining action in ASIB occurs the very next day after Battersea. And that timing fits, because John makes his final post about Irene on March 12, indicating that he had his meeting with Mycroft in Speedy’s around that time. At Speedy’s, Mycroft told John that Irene was captured in Karachi “two months ago,” which places Irene’s capture in mid-January. If Irene came back on New Year’s Day, then that means that after the final confrontation in Mycroft’s study, she was on the run for about two weeks before she got captured. I think that seems plausible.

But wait! Before we talk about Irene coming back, there are, like, three seconds of screen time that are important for Sherlock and John. I’m talking about the few seconds right between the Bart’s scene and when Sherlock sees Irene. My discussion of this scene is indebted to a conversation that I had with LSIT, so thank you to her for talking this through with me 😊

After the New Year’s Eve scene between Sherlock and John, we know that Sherlock went off on his own the next day to scan Irene’s phone at Bart’s. But apparently later that day, Sherlock and John went shopping and returned to the flat together. We know this because Sherlock and John enter the flat at the same time. We don’t literally see them walk through the door together, but Sherlock walks through the flat as if he’s just come in, and then John comes in after him and immediately heads into the kitchen to put a bag of shopping down on the table. They’ve both clearly just come in from being out, and they’re not surprised to see each other, so it seems that they got back to the flat together and Sherlock was just the one who stepped through the door first.

Sherlock twigs that something is wrong, so he goes to investigate and finds Irene in his bedroom. As Sherlock is walking into his room, John calls out for him and starts walking down the hallway towards him while holding a bottle of wine. John seems to be in a really good mood as he does this.

What! This brief scene seems to indicate that Sherlock and John actually bounced back from all the tension of the night before very quickly. After they both had a night to sleep on it, and after Sherlock had taken some time at the lab to work through some of his anxiety, the two of them were apparently back to feeling very comfortable around each other, went shopping together, bought a bottle of wine together, and then returned to the flat in good spirits. John was walking towards Sherlock and holding the bottle of wine right before he saw Irene, so John was probably about to suggest that they drink it together right then. And he seemed confident.

So…it seems like Sherlock and John both loosened up considerably after New Year’s Eve and were quite possibly about to split a romantic bottle of wine together in, like, the middle of the afternoon. (It’s still light out during this scene, and this is January 1 in London, when the sun sets around 4pm.) And they went shopping and bought the bottle of wine together. Maybe after thinking about it a bit longer, they were both almost ready to confess their feelings. Note that the wine offers a return of the John-and-drinking subtext that we just saw the night before; since John drinks when he thinks he’s about to make himself emotionally vulnerable, this gives us an extra push to recognize that John might have been planning to make a move on Sherlock.

God, were they flirting with each other at the grocery store right before this as they picked out the wine?? Also, I love the fact that Sherlock and John apparently go grocery shopping together? That’s actually very sweet.

So, John was heartbroken the night before, but given some time to reflect on it, he became much more confident and was ready to try again at getting Sherlock to open up. As for Sherlock, I really do think that throughout most of S2, Sherlock tries very, very hard to stop himself from making a move on John. But this brief scene on New Year’s Day seems to indicate that there were at least some moments when Sherlock came close to snapping. He just loves John so much, and he wants to have something more with him so badly. So maybe Sherlock’s mistake from the night before really wasn’t so final. Maybe the very next day, Sherlock was considering saying something, or making a move, or just letting the two of them slide into something more.

But then Irene shows up and quickly ruins everything.

Interestingly, John smiles when he sees Irene. (It took me a long time to notice that.) I talked with LSIT about it, and we figure that in that brief moment, John probably felt grateful to Irene for getting his feelings for Sherlock out into the open at Battersea. John is still holding the bottle of wine as he stands next to Sherlock and looks at Irene peacefully asleep (or pretending to be asleep or whatever), so he’s probably still feeling confident—he’s got this. If John thinks that he and Sherlock might be about to have a breakthrough, and that Sherlock overhearing his conversation with Irene at Battersea will be what prompted it, then perhaps for a brief moment he feels grateful to Irene. But unfortunately, John’s confidence doesn’t last (and whatever gratitude he might have felt towards Irene certainly doesn’t, either).

Irene, Sherlock, and John go into the sitting room, and Irene asks for Sherlock’s help. Remember, ever since September, Sherlock has known that there is something more significant than just the photos of the princess stored on Irene’s phone, and he’s been determined to unravel the mystery. That’s why he’s been composing to help him think, and that’s why he just went to Bart’s to scan Irene’s phone before coming back and going grocery shopping with John. So when Irene shows up, of course Sherlock doesn’t send her away. He wants to figure out what’s going on, so he accepts Irene as a sort-of client—even though she’s treated him like absolute shit ever since he met her. 

The first part of the conversation between Irene, Sherlock, and John also demonstrates that Sherlock already knew Irene was alive before Battersea.

Sherlock: So you faked your own death in order to get ahead of them. Irene: It worked for a while. Sherlock: Except you let John know that you were alive, and therefore me. Irene: I knew you’d keep my secret. Sherlock: You couldn’t. Irene: But you did, didn’t you?

That last part indicates that Irene has figured out that Sherlock knew she was alive before Battersea—he kept her secret even when she didn’t.

After this, Irene convinces Sherlock to decipher the email with the Bond Air code for her. Irene thinks she’s achieved this by getting Sherlock to show off for her—but no, of course not. Sherlock is showing off for John, as always. Remember what I said in the TGG section about how Sherlock always explains his deductions in full for John, but is often reluctant to do so for other people? That’s exactly what happens here. When Sherlock starts making his deductions about the plane, his eyes are totally focused on the screen of Irene’s phone until he finishes—then he immediately looks up to lock eyes with John. Please see the excellent gifs of this moment from @thatswhyhestays here.

Sherlock then stands up and tells Irene that there’s no need for her to praise him, because John already has, taking the opportunity to remind us all that it’s John’s praise that he cares about and no one else’s. He was showing off for John, and this show is just not subtle about it sometimes.

As unsubtle as this is, John is not so great at picking up on these kinds of hints from Sherlock. Here is actual footage of John watching Sherlock and Irene interact in the sitting room of 221B. This kind of makes me want to cry. (Also, my thanks to @incurablylazydevil for her truly invaluable gif sets of moments like this from the show.)

(gif from here)

John also gets extremely jealous as he watches Sherlock and Irene, even blurting out his middle name as a suggestion that they name a baby after him. Sherlock looks at John like he is completely and utterly disgusted by the idea of having a baby with a woman, lol.

But John doesn’t catch that, either. As he watches Sherlock and Irene, John slides right back into wrongly fearing that Sherlock is into Irene and not him. John must feel humiliated and devastated about this, because he leaves the flat, unable to stand being around Sherlock and Irene.

Of course it’s true that Sherlock was watching Irene very carefully all throughout their conversation—except for that glaringly obvious moment when he deliberately tried to impress John by working out the Bond Air code. But of course Sherlock watched Irene carefully! She stabbed him with a syringe during their first confrontation and injected him with whatever the hell that sedative was. Of course Sherlock wouldn’t want that to happen again. But John completely misinterprets the attention that Sherlock pays to Irene, and apparently sees it as “evidence” that Sherlock is interested in her romantically or sexually. So there go whatever thoughts John had of trying to get Sherlock relaxed with a bottle of wine and then kissing him, or confessing his feelings, or whatever else John (and Sherlock) had planned.

Sometime before John walks out, Sherlock gets lost in his thoughts ruminating on the case. When he rouses himself from his reverie a few hours later, he seems surprised and unsettled to find Irene sitting across from him and not John. Irene sexually harasses Sherlock some more, which visibly makes Sherlock uncomfortable, but Sherlock is still clear-headed enough to take Irene’s pulse. (You can see him do it in a couple of different shots in this scene, not just in the flashback later. Which is pretty cool.)

Mycroft’s minions show up to take Sherlock away to the Flyaway Airlines (lol) plane with all the dead people. On the plane, Mycroft accuses Sherlock of having fallen for Irene and having deciphered the email to show off for her. In response to this, Sherlock says “Don’t be absurd” and stares at Mycroft in absolute astonishment, apparently shocked that Mycroft could have possibly read him so wrongly. I mean, Sherlock stares at Mycroft like this for, like, a full minute or something while Mycroft is talking, not just a few seconds. He’s genuinely shocked that Mycroft—who is supposed to be so much cleverer and so much better at deductions than he is—could have possibly thought that he had fallen for Irene, and not seen that it’s John he’s been pining for this whole time.

(screencaps from here)

Mycroft is like, “I drove you into her path. I’m sorry. I didn’t know [you were heterosexual].” And Sherlock is like, WHAT.

After leaving the plane, Sherlock, Mycroft, and Irene go to discuss matters in Mycroft’s office/study/sitting room. (Idk what this room is supposed to be. It’s not Mycroft’s chessboard office from S3, so I guess it’s at Mycroft’s residence, or maybe somewhere in the Diogenes Club.) This is the denouement of the episode, where Sherlock finally unlocks Irene’s phone and everything becomes clear.

This scene is so important for understanding Sherlock and John’s love story!

At the start of this scene, Sherlock is sitting in an armchair facing away from Mycroft and Irene with an expression on his face that shows that he’s crushed by all that has happened. Sherlock is devastated by the fact that everyone—everyone!—has somehow convinced themselves that he’s in love with Irene. And he feels like there’s nothing he can do about it, because he doesn’t want them to know the truth. Sherlock also probably feels bad for having accidentally wrecked Mycroft’s Bond Air plans just because he was eager to impress John.

The absolutely crucial switch comes when Irene says that she had help from Moriarty. When Irene reveals that she’s been working with Moriarty, Sherlock’s expression immediately changes and his eyes start to move back and forth rapidly the way they always do when he’s concentrating on figuring something out. Finally, Sherlock realizes the truth—that Moriarty purposely did this to him by sending Irene into his and John’s lives.

Irene then adds that Moriarty didn’t even ask her for anything in return. She’s probably lying, though; Irene paid Moriarty back for his help in blackmailing the British government by manipulating Sherlock and John for him, and she probably knew that that was what Moriarty wanted her to do. I think this fits well with a few of Irene’s actions. For one, it’s possible that Moriarty might have directed Irene to call him at a certain time at the pool; the timing is a bit too good otherwise, and it also would have been strange for Irene to interrupt her session with the princess to call Moriarty unless he’d told her to, since she wasn’t calling him about the photos of the princess. If Moriarty told Irene to call him at a certain time and Irene knew that the call was connected to Moriarty’s dealings with Sherlock and John, then she could have easily figured out that Moriarty was interested in messing with the two of them. (Thanks to @thegildedbee for this idea.) 

Even if the timing of Irene’s call at the pool was a coincidence, though, some of Irene’s other actions are more telling. First, right before she drops into their lives in September, Irene was looking at press clippings about Sherlock and John when she called Moriarty to say “I think it’s time, don’t you?” That pretty clearly indicates that Irene and Moriarty had some plan involving Sherlock and John, and Irene was in on it, not just getting manipulated by Moriarty. Notably, we’re shown a scene of Irene looking at her phone and smiling at photos of Sherlock and John together, so it seems like she knows she’s supposed to mess things up for the two of them; she’s not just supposed to manipulate Sherlock into a position of deciphering the Bond Air code. Second, Irene shows up at 221B the day after Battersea. Although she could have had her own reasons for showing up when she did, she also might have shown up then because she knew that Sherlock had overheard her conversation with John and she inferred that Sherlock and John might confess their feelings to each other after that. If Moriarty had directed her to prevent them from getting together, then it makes sense for her to have turned up right after Battersea to keep messing stuff up. It’s Irene’s appearance that stops whatever was about to happen with the bottle of wine, after all.

thegildedbee made another good point to me: Moriarty threw away quite a lot of money and resources in TGG by letting Sherlock solve his five pips. We know Moriarty blew his cut of the 30 million quid that the fake Vermeer paining was expected to garner at auction, since he directly said as much to Sherlock at the pool. And it would have cost money arrange the bombs and whatever else so that Sherlock could solve the crimes. But more importantly, once thegildedbee reminded me of the money/resources issue, I realized that in addition to whatever money Moriarty directly spent or lost in TGG, Moriarty probably threw away a lot of his credibility as a consulting criminal in TGG by letting Sherlock expose several of the schemes that he’d arranged for his clients. Moriarty even acknowledges that at the pool, too: “I’ve shown you what I can do. I cut loose all those people, all those little problems, even thirty million quid just to get you to come out and play.” I just can’t imagine that any of that made Moriarty look very good to his clients or potential clients. I mean, Ian Monkford’s wife and the people at Janus Cars must have been prosecuted for insurance fraud after Sherlock solved that crime, and of course we saw that Raoul de Santos got arrested for his murder of Connie Prince. The fake Vermeer painting was in the news everywhere in TGG and Raoul’s arrest also got splashed all over the news, so other clients and potential clients would have seen that stuff and known that Moriarty was unreliable. Maybe this is part of why Moriarty went “advertising” in TRF by breaking into the Tower of London, the Bank of England, and Pentonville Prison all at once.

What I’m saying here is that after TGG, Moriarty probably wasn’t in a position to work for free, and Irene wouldn’t have thought that he was. Irene would probably have been very suspicious of Moriarty if he’d tried to offer to help her extort the British government without asking for anything in return. So I think we can assume that Moriarty and Irene both understood that Moriarty wanted something from Irene, and that something was that he told her to cause problems for Sherlock and John’s relationship.

It’s also just easier for Moriarty and Irene to wreck havoc together if they’re on the same page about what they’re trying to do. And if Moriarty gave Irene direct instructions, then that way, he left less to chance—which makes sense given how obsessed he is with destroying Sherlock, and given the fact that he expended a lot of resources and credit on the first stage of his Sherlock masterplan in TGG.

In any case, after Irene reveals that she’s been working with Moriarty, Sherlock seems to finally understand the core of what’s been going on here from the beginning—that Irene was the person who called Moriarty at the pool, and that Moriarty did all of this on purpose to hurt him and John.

It’s at that exact moment that Sherlock turns absolutely savage on Irene. He’s vicious to her in this scene because he’s furious about what she and Moriarty have done to him and John. Sherlock nearly spits out his words at her as he forcefully punches each key on her phone to unlock it. And crucially, Sherlock gives Irene a whole speech about the dangers of sentiment, about how “love is a chemical defect found on the losing side,” and about how she should never have let her heart rule her head. I think Sherlock gave this speech with Moriarty as its intended audience, hoping that it will get back to him through Irene. Sherlock wants to tell Moriarty that he has sworn off love, that he’s above it all, and that Moriarty should stop trying to get to him by hurting John. As I mentioned earlier, this scene is when we hear the “SHERlocked” track, which is a dramatic and emotional variation on the love theme that Sherlock composed for John. This indicates that Sherlock’s actions in this scene are all about his love for John. In this moment, Sherlock isn’t swearing off romance—he’s making an angry and desperate attempt to protect John by spinning a lie for Irene to take back to Moriarty.

At some point after this, Irene gets captured by a terrorist cell in Karachi and Sherlock travels to Pakistan to save her. Sherlock’s decision to save Irene is critical to his character development, and like many of Sherlock’s actions in ASIB, it has everything to do with his love for John and actually very little to do with Irene.

Sherlock’s decision to save Irene reveals that he does not actually believe what he said about love being “a chemical defect found on the losing side.” Sherlock saves Irene because after falling in love with John, he has experienced the pain of unfulfilled love—the pain of being in love with someone who you can’t be with in the way that you want to be. When Sherlock figured out the code for Irene’s phone in Mycroft’s office, he realized that Irene felt that way about him. Even though he was furious at her in the moment for what she did to him and John, once he’d left Mycroft’s office and cooled down a bit, he was actually able to empathize with her. He understood how she felt. Sherlock always wanted to solve the case surrounding Irene, so he was perfectly willing to unlock her phone for Mycroft (especially since there were potentially a great deal of British citizens’ lives at stake), but he didn’t truly believe that she deserved to die or to be destroyed for having fallen in love. That’s exactly what Moriarty wants to do to Sherlock—to use his love for John to destroy him! Sherlock understands what it’s like to fear that, so he doesn’t want it to happen to other people. And so that’s why he decides to save Irene. And Sherlock’s decision to save Irene shows that he does not believe what he said in Mycroft’s office about the danger and futility of love. Sherlock wanted to send a message to Moriarty with that speech, but it was just posturing. His actions reveal what he truly believes, and that’s that people don’t deserve to die or to be destroyed for falling in love.

I think Sherlock probably saw a little of himself in Irene. Irene played everything very well until the very end, when, as Sherlock said, she let her heart rule her head. This is exactly what Sherlock fears will happen to him. He’s terrified that at some point, his love for John will lead him to make a mistake that will end up bringing John into harm’s way.

Sherlock’s decision to save Irene is basically Molly all over again. In both the scene with Molly at Christmas and the final confrontation with Irene, Sherlock hurt someone else by using their love for him against them. But in both situations, Sherlock soon realized that he’d done to someone else the exact same thing that he fears Moriarty will do to him, by using their love against them. As a result, in both situations, Sherlock finds himself empathizing with the person he hurt, and he thus tries to make amends to them.

I think this is so important because it shows the depth of Sherlock’s feelings for John and how his love for John brings out the best in him. Sherlock saves Irene for very meaningful reasons: his deep sense of empathy, his desire to avoid causing harm to someone else (even someone who has done terrible things to him), and his belief that people don’t deserve to be destroyed for falling in love. Because of his love for John, Sherlock is very closely attuned to these aspects of himself and chooses to act on them. This is very moving, really, because it shows that Sherlock is able to learn from his love for John and that he allows it to guide his actions even as he still continues to fear the full implications of that love.

(In response to this, thegildedbee suggested that Sherlock might have even had these moments with Irene and Molly in mind when he said “It’s always you, John Watson, you keep me right” at the wedding reception in TSOT. Which is a neat thought!)

About two months later, Mycroft comes to Baker Street to talk to John. Then John goes up to 221B to talk to Sherlock with Irene’s file and the camera phone in hand. These two scenes are both told from John’s perspective, and they show just how thoroughly Moriarty has managed to mess things up for John.

John’s statements and actions in these two scenes are in conflict with one another. In the scene at Speedy’s, John tells Mycroft that he doesn’t believe Sherlock feels love: “He doesn’t feel things that way…I don’t think.” And yet, when John goes up to 221B to talk to Sherlock, he seems genuinely concerned that Sherlock will be devastated if he learns that Irene is dead. As a result, John chooses to tell Sherlock what he believes is a white lie: that Irene is in a witness protection program in America.

Irene actually is in a witness protection program in America. There’s absolutely no way that Sherlock could have learned that Irene had been captured by terrorists in Karachi, traveled there, infiltrated a terrorist cell, and saved Irene from the terrorists without Mycroft and MI6 knowing. Sherlock probably did all of that with Mycroft and MI6’s help, because seriously, how else would he have managed it? MI6 also seems very eager to recruit Sherlock in HLV, so it makes sense to infer that Sherlock, Mycroft, and MI6 were all involved in Irene’s rescue and were all on the same page about it; since Sherlock helped with that mission, MI6 thought he might work for them again. We also know that Mycroft was working with the CIA agents earlier in the episode. If Mycroft and the British government had a hand in helping save Irene, then it makes sense to imagine that she’s in a witness protection program in America and that Mycroft helped arrange that. Mycroft’s file isn’t wrong, and he lied to John by telling him that Irene had died. And since Sherlock was working with Mycroft and MI6 on this whole operation, Sherlock knows that Irene is safe in America, too. (I first started thinking about this after reading LSIT’s M-theory meta, where she also concludes that Irene is in a witness protection program in America and that Mycroft must have known that Sherlock saved her.)

A side note. As I mentioned in the TBB section of this meta, I headcanon along with LSIT that Sherlock used to work for Mycroft at MI6 before the start of the show, but he quit and decided to set up shop as a consulting detective instead because he was uncomfortable with the morally gray nature of the work. The idea that Sherlock has a history of working for MI6 and that he briefly worked with them again in ASIB to save Irene helps explain why Sherlock had the necessary skills to go after Moriarty’s network after TRF. It seems likely that Sherlock got help from MI6 to do that, so the fact that Sherlock had worked for them before and then teamed up with them again to save Irene in ASIB explains how he was able to secure their help after TRF. All of this also explains why MI6 wanted Sherlock to work for them for that eastern Europe mission in HLV—they wanted him back, basically, and they hoped he might say yes because he’d helped with the Irene mission and they’d helped him out before, even after he’d officially retired. All of this is just kind of funny, too, because John likes James Bond movies and makes Sherlock watch them with him but doesn’t realize (as far as we know) that Sherlock is a former MI6 agent.

Back to John. Even though John claims to Mycroft that Sherlock doesn’t feel love the way most people do, John knows this isn’t true. John doesn’t think Sherlock is asexual and aromantic, because he thinks that Sherlock has fallen in love with Irene: that’s why he’s so reluctant to tell Sherlock that Irene is dead. John really does see through Sherlock’s mask and knows that Sherlock is a deeply emotional and empathetic person, and he believes that he’s capable of falling in love. John tells Mycroft otherwise, though, because he’s falling back into the pattern of behavior that I pointed out in the TGG section. John feels devastated that Sherlock seems to have fallen for Irene, and whenever John is hurting because of his love for Sherlock, he tries to tell himself that Sherlock is a sociopath who will never love him back. He’s not very good at convincing himself of this, though.

Interestingly, by the time of the scene in Speedy’s, Mycroft seems to have figured out that Sherlock is in love with John and not Irene. LSIT analyzes Mycroft’s perspective and motivations in this scene very thoroughly in her M-theory meta. She argues that Mycroft is actively trying to push John to pursue Sherlock romantically, and I agree. Mycroft absolutely knows that Sherlock saved Irene in Karachi, but by telling John that she’s dead and trying to guide John’s reactions to this information, Mycroft hopes to convince John of two things: (1) that Sherlock is capable of love, and (2) that Irene is permanently out of the picture, so John shouldn’t see her as a romantic rival.

Mycroft seems to have realized not just that Sherlock is in love with John, but also that Sherlock’s happiness depends on John and that John is very good for Sherlock. As I noted earlier, in the Buckingham Palace scene, Mycroft subtly told John that he trusts him. So by the end of ASIB, Mycroft wants Sherlock and John to get together because he thinks this will be the best thing for Sherlock, and he trusts John to treat Sherlock well.

When John says “He doesn’t feel things that way…I don’t think,” Mycroft purses his lips, showing that he disagrees. Mycroft then attempts to gently correct John by posing a question: “My brother has the brain of a scientist or a philosopher, yet he elects to be a detective. What might we deduce about his heart?” It’s telling that Mycroft uses the word “heart” here. As I noted in the TGG section, this is Mycroft’s way of telling John that Sherlock has a firm sense of justice and that he wanted to forge a career where he could help other people, not just pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. When John says that he doesn’t know, Mycroft adds, “Initially, he wanted to be a pirate.” Altogether, Mycroft is trying to tell John that Sherlock cares about other people and that he’s a bit (or maybe more than just a bit) of a romantic. In other words, Sherlock definitely feels love. He’s not detached and purely logical.

John, however, doesn’t seem to get this. If John thought about it a little longer, he’d probably realize that he does know what he can deduce about Sherlock’s heart. He really does understand Sherlock, after all. But even so, John doesn’t seem to understand what Mycroft is trying to do in this moment, and he doesn’t get that Sherlock loves him.

The scene between Sherlock and John further illustrates John’s complete misinterpretation of what’s been going on in Sherlock’s heart. When John goes up to the flat to talk to Sherlock, he makes his decision: he tells Sherlock that Irene is in America because he still thinks Sherlock is in love with her and that this will protect Sherlock’s feelings. John’s behavior in this scene is both heartbreaking and incredibly moving, because it’s so similar to his behavior at Battersea, when he demanded that Irene tell Sherlock she was alive. John is willing to sacrifice his own feelings in order to spare Sherlock’s, even though it’s obviously breaking his own heart to do so.

And it’s so very clear that John is feeling torn up and insecure in this scene. Right before he goes down the stairs again to give the file back to Mycroft, John draws a breath as if he’s about to say something, but then he doesn’t. He wants to say more to Sherlock—maybe to ask Sherlock the truth about how he feels, maybe to say something true about his own feelings—but he just can’t bring himself to do it. John is left thinking that everything with Irene just proves that Sherlock will never love him back in the same way that he’s now realized he loves Sherlock.

Maddeningly, Sherlock still keeps quiet about how he feels. If Sherlock worked out the fact that Moriarty purposely sent Irene to him and John to cause problems for them—and I really do think he figured this out in Mycroft’s office—then it seems like he should also realize that he’s playing into Moriarty’s hands by keeping quiet from John. It’s only because Sherlock and John don’t talk to each other about their feelings that Moriarty is able to manipulate them so thoroughly. But Sherlock still seems to believe that revealing his feelings to John would put John in further danger. Sherlock might also be keeping quiet in this scene because he (correctly) suspects that a big confrontation with Moriarty is coming, and therefore (incorrectly) assumes that he’ll soon get a chance to square Moriarty away for good. Maybe Sherlock thinks that a post-Moriarty future is in sight for him and John, so he thinks he just needs to hold out a little longer and that he and John will have time to figure things out once Moriarty is out of the picture. (*thinks about S3 and sobs*)

I also think that Sherlock often becomes very emotional and far less rational when he feels that his loved ones are in danger. We see this in the finale for every series—Sherlock freaks out and loses his cool to varying extents in all three of the pool scene in S1, the rooftop scene in S2, and the Appledore scene in S3. It’s quite possible that Sherlock’s desperation to keep John safe prevents him from thinking about this rationally.

It’s also possible that Sherlock still doesn’t feel ready to take that next step with John for his own reasons, anyway. Sherlock hasn’t had sex and probably hasn’t had a serious relationship with anyone before, so perhaps he would feel quite nervous about trying to take things further with John anyway, even without the threat of Moriarty introducing so much life-or-death danger and stress. Maybe he gained a bit of confidence around New Year’s with the bottle of wine, but that confidence didn’t necessarily last.

In any case, Sherlock decides to keep quiet, and Sherlock and John are both left pining for each other.

John also asks Sherlock if he’d like to look at Irene’s file. Sherlock declines but asks to keep the camera phone. John doesn’t want to give it to him, though. John insists that he can’t give it away—it belongs to the government now, and there are rules about this sort of thing. But Sherlock asks again, and John can hardly ever say no to Sherlock. He gives him the phone.

What if we applied the phone equals heart metaphor to this scene? The camera phone is currently in John’s possession, which sets it up as a metaphor for John’s heart. Sherlock asks for John’s heart, and at first John refuses to give it to him—he’s reluctant and uncertain about giving it away. But Sherlock asks again, and John can’t say no to Sherlock. He gives him his heart.

At the conclusion of the Irene Adler case in the ACD canon story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes asks his client to let him keep a photograph of Irene Adler as a reminder of the case, and the client agrees. This scene between Sherlock and John is a modern update of that part of the story, and it seems to me that the writers deliberately used the phone equals heart metaphor when they decided how to translate this scene.

The phone equals heart metaphor has been in play since ASIP. Right when they meet, John gives Sherlock his phone, signifying that it’s inevitable that he will fall in love with Sherlock and will give him his heart. Then in TBB, there’s a moment where John runs after Sherlock while they’re investigating the Black Lotus gang’s graffiti and yells at him “Answer your phone, I’ve been calling you!” Within the wider context of S1, I read this to mean that John is interested in Sherlock and thinks that he’s been sending Sherlock signals, but that after their dinner at Angelo’s, from John’s perspective Sherlock appears aloof and disinterested, so John doesn’t feel that he’s been let into Sherlock’s heart. ASIB then establishes the phone equals heart metaphor in the very text of the show, not just the subtext: in Mycroft’s study, Sherlock says to Irene “This is your heart, and you should never let it rule your head” while holding up her phone. This clues the audience in to the metaphor and tells us that we should keep an eye out for it when analyzing the show.

By having John hand over a phone to Sherlock in a moment that beautifully mirrors their first meeting in ASIP, this scene at the very end of ASIB reinforces the idea that John has fallen in love with Sherlock and that Sherlock now has his heart. In this scene, John is clearly conflicted and cut up about it, but he still can’t resist letting Sherlock have his heart.

This covers the most important developments in ASIB, but I have three final thoughts before we move on.

First, there are two different moments in this episode where characters taunt Sherlock for being a virgin. At Buckingham Palace, Mycroft responds to Sherlock’s indignant “Sex doesn’t alarm me” with a very smug “How would you know?” Then in the final showdown between Sherlock, Mycroft, and Irene, Irene says that Moriarty calls Sherlock “the virgin.” Regardless of whether or not Sherlock has had sex before (I think it’s fair to assume that these characters are right and he hasn’t, but it’s not really a big deal if he has), these two comments are there to emphasize Sherlock’s inability to take his relationship with John to the next level.

Second, Irene’s behavior towards Sherlock throughout this episode is sexual harassment. Irene exposes herself in front of him in their very first meeting, drugs and beats him with a riding crop without his consent, breaks into his bedroom to taunt him while he’s still drugged and not in control of his own body, sends him sexually suggestive texts for months, breaks into his bedroom a second time and sleeps in his bed, threatens to take him on a table until he begs for mercy, and interrupts him when he’s trying to talk to her about something else by asking him about his sexual history and then suggesting that they have sex. Irene does all of this even though Sherlock never reciprocates any of her advances. He’s clearly not interested, but she keeps pursuing him anyway. This is the very definition of sexual harassment. I’m not the first person to point this out, but Irene’s behavior is truly awful, so I do want to call it what it is. Irene treats Sherlock terribly, so the fact that Sherlock still forgives her and saves her life is a really important testament to the strength of his empathy. Or he’s just a doormat. But I think we’re supposed to think it’s the former.

Also, Irene’s behavior towards Sherlock contrasts very sharply with John’s. Even though John is now in love with Sherlock and clearly aware of it, John never pushes Sherlock to go further than he’s ready to go when it comes to sex and romance. At two different points in this episode, there are moments when John backs down and refrains from pushing Sherlock to talk about his feelings because he feels that Sherlock doesn’t give him positive signals to proceed. This happens in the New Year’s Eve scene after Battersea, and then again in the final scene between Sherlock and John in 221B. John backs off even though it’s clear that he really, really wants to know what’s going on in Sherlock’s head. Part of this is because of how nervous John is himself, but John is ultimately very respectful of Sherlock in both these instances. Unlike Irene, John is very careful not to make Sherlock uncomfortable in ASIB. It’s worth pausing to appreciate this.

Finally, ASIB introduces the heartbeat sound effect, which is often included in the background of scenes that carry emotional significance for either Sherlock or John. Sometimes they accompany specific moments and are meant to tell us something about how Sherlock and John are feeling about each other. More broadly, though, ASIB is threaded through with heartbeats all over the place, and I think this is meant to emphasize that at this point in the narrative, Sherlock and John are very much in love with each other. Here are some of the especially significant/meaningful heartbeats that I caught on my last two rewatches, although I know there are many more.

1. When Sherlock wakes up after being drugged by Irene and panics, there’s a heartbeat right as he calls out for John. This emphasizes how much Sherlock trusts John and how close he feels to him.

2. The scene outside the morgue. Sherlock complains that the cigarette Mycroft gave him is “low tar” and Mycroft replies, “Well, you barely knew her.” Then there’s a heartbeat and Sherlock gives a rueful laugh. Sherlock laughs because Mycroft is wrong—he’s smoking for John, not Irene, and he knows John very well. The heartbeat serves to emphasize this and to show how intensely Sherlock is pining for John.

3. There’s a heartbeat right when John sees Irene for the first time during the Battersea scene and realizes that she’s alive. This indicates that John is heartbroken that Irene is back, because he thinks that Sherlock is in love with her and that her survival will take Sherlock even further away from him. A moment later, when Irene says that she needed to disappear, John replies with “Then how come I can see you, and I don’t even want to?” This line highlights that John didn’t want to see Irene in this scene, a.k.a. didn’t want to know that she’s still alive, reinforcing the message from the heartbeat.

4. There’s a heartbeat when Sherlock is getting ready to enter the plane with the dead people, right when the American agent tells Sherlock that he’d get a medal if he shot Sherlock in the head. I think this is a clue that Sherlock has messed things up massively by deciphering the code on Irene’s phone in an attempt to impress John. Sherlock has allowed his love for John to lead him to make a big mistake, and he’s about to face the fallout from that. 

5. There are also heartbeats right after Irene walks past Sherlock on the plane and when the scene changes to Mycroft’s office. I think these are meant to indicate Sherlock’s devastation at the idea that he’s messed everything up so badly for Mycroft by trying to show off for John, as well as his devastation over the fact that everyone thinks he’s in love with Irene.

6. There’s another heartbeat right when Irene first says that she got help from Moriarty! I’m telling you, that is the critical moment in that scene.

7. There’s another one when Irene says that Moriarty calls Sherlock “the virgin.” Another indication that this comment is there to taunt Sherlock for his inability to take his relationship with John beyond friendship.

8. There’s another heartbeat right before Sherlock starts ripping into Irene.

See what I mean? There will be more heartbeats in future episodes, always indicating moments that are significant for Sherlock or John emotionally.

Next: The Hounds of Baskerville

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: The Great Game

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

~

In TGG, Sherlock and John work together to solve Moriarty’s puzzles and the Andrew West/Bruce-Partington plans case, but there are still major tensions in their friendship and their working relationship as a case-solving team. In part, this is because this time around, it’s Sherlock who’s acting more cooly towards John, in response to the way that John hurt him in TBB. Part of it also stems from the fact that in this episode, John seems to really struggle to see through the cold, detached, and entirely false exterior that Sherlock has grown accustomed to presenting to the world in order to protect his own intense emotions and vulnerability.

TGG starts immediately after the end of TBB. In fact, the dates on John’s blog don’t allocate enough time for these two episodes. TBB is set across seven days, while TGG is set across at least six. If we assume that Sherlock flew out to Minsk later the same day of his last scene with John in TBB and got back to London the next day, then all together the events of TBB and TGG take thirteen days. Since TBB started on March 23, that means the pool scene should happen the night of April 4. But John posts about everything that happened in TGG, including the pool, on April 1. So, what I think we can safely take from this is that TGG is meant to follow immediately after TBB, with just enough time in between for Sherlock to fly to Belarus and back and nothing else.

Sherlock goes to Minsk to talk to a potential client. In, like, three minutes, Sherlock proves that this guy who supposedly murdered his girlfriend in a rage can, in fact, be very easily provoked into a rage. Sherlock has zero interest in helping such a person, so he turns right around and comes back to London.

Feeling depressed, Sherlock spray paints a smiley face on the wall of 221B’s sitting room with the Michigan yellow paint from the previous case and starts shooting at it. When John runs in, Sherlock complains about being bored because he doesn’t have a case, but he and John solved one and narrowly escaped death just three days ago! Sherlock has certainly had a more action-packed week than he’s had since late January, if it’s fair to assume that there were no major cases in the two months between ASIP and TBB (John probably would have noticed anything really exciting). What’s really bothering Sherlock is John: Sherlock’s apparently unrequited love for him, and probably how badly Sherlock fears that he misread the situation.

Sherlock brings up John’s blog by saying that he finally read the ASIP write-up and snaps at John for writing some pretty mean things about him in that post. Now that John has revealed that he didn’t think they were dating and has started acting like he’s more interested in dating Sarah than Sherlock, Sherlock is probably starting to fear that John may not like him all that much after all. Sherlock might worry that John isn’t interested in him as a person, he’s just interested in him as a detective and in getting to participate in the cases.

John says that he thought Sherlock would be flattered that he wrote up their first case together, but now that Sherlock has had some time to reflect on John’s writing in light of what happened in TBB, Sherlock appears genuinely hurt by the way that John described him on the blog. Sherlock’s reaction shows that he can easily get hurt when he sees John notice and point out his less attractive qualities. (We know from TAB, though, that eventually some of John’s less tactful comments will come to sting a bit less for Sherlock—or, at least, Sherlock will feel that the nice things John says about him on the blog outweigh the harsh things.)

As they argue and Sherlock snaps at John, John gets genuinely angry at Sherlock and starts to storm out without even trying to repair the situation. At that point, Sherlock shows that he’s hurt by John’s reaction, too. Sherlock calls out “Where are you going?” in a bewildered voice, and then after John leaves, he regretfully stares out of the window after him as he walks away. Gosh.

So, Sherlock is still so in love, and it’s still slipping through. And while John was the one who was tetchy and prickly in TBB, in TGG it’s Sherlock who starts acting more cooly towards John and who tries to pull back a bit emotionally. I think we can see this in the way that Sherlock is less animated around John and the way that he treats John a bit less gently in TGG than he did in the previous two episodes. Sherlock is more detached and cold in his demeanor for much of TGG—until the pool.

Sherlock’s hurt also seems apparent in the way that he doesn’t always fully involve John in the cases in this episode. During the first case from Moriarty, the Carl Powers case, Sherlock mostly works on his own while John awkwardly hangs around nearby. In the lab at Bart’s, Sherlock examines the soil and pollen on the shoes with a microscope while John just stands around in the lab, apparently without a task from Sherlock. Later that evening, Sherlock is working on the case at 221B when John deliberately steps into the kitchen and says “I want to help. There’s only five hours left.” Apparently, Sherlock didn’t give him anything to do after they got back from the lab, either. He preferred to work on his own.

As the episode goes on, though, Sherlock starts warming up a bit more again and begins deliberately setting John his own investigatory tasks, as he did in TBB. And John accepts them, every time. Sherlock does want to involve John and he does want for them to become a team, but he just needed some time to calm down again after TBB. Also, once Sherlock asks John if he’d like to come on the first case, after that there’s no question that John will follow Sherlock and be there for the rest of the cases, too. John is present for all of the cases, and he becomes more and more involved in the actual investigatory work for each one as the episode goes on. It’s still a bit rough and uncertain, but they’re becoming a team!

Anyway. After John storms out of the flat due to his and Sherlock’s argument about the blog, John goes to sleep at Sarah’s and we learn that John and Sarah are still together. They haven’t had sex yet, but they’re flirting with each other and they both seem to hope that they will have sex soon.

Moriarty sets off his first explosion across from 221B, and when John learns about it the next morning, he rushes over to Baker Street to check that Sherlock is okay.

In the scene with Mycroft at 221B, we get several more small clues that Sherlock is suffering from (to his eye) unrequited love. Mycroft tells John that “Sherlock’s business seems to be booming since you and he became…pals,” with a studied pause right before the word “pals.” During that pause, Sherlock gives Mycroft an unhappy look as if he knows that Mycroft is about to do something mean, then glares at Mycroft right after “pals,” as if he thinks that Mycroft is intentionally taunting him with that word. Mycroft then decides to rub John’s apparent lack of interest in Sherlock into Sherlock’s face by pointedly saying to John that Sherlock must be hellish to live with. John replies to this rather uncharitably, just saying “I’m never bored” and declining the opportunity to contradict Mycroft or to say anything nice about Sherlock. Sherlock looks so hurt after that, much more than he did when John downgraded them from friends to colleagues in Sebastian’s office a few days before.

So in both of these scenes early on in the episode, we see evidence that Sherlock craves John’s approval and praise and feels hurt when John criticizes him, points out his blind spots to other people, or doesn’t stand up for him. In short, John’s opinion really matters to him.

After Mycroft leaves and Sherlock gets the call from Lestrade with the first of the Moriarty clues, Sherlock asks John if he’s coming. Then he smiles softly at John and says “I’d be lost without my blogger.” This line is such a great little detail, because it’s Sherlock’s way of apologizing and trying to make up with John after their fight from the night before. Sherlock doesn’t just say that he’d like for John to come along, he specifically invites John by referring to his blog, the thing they just fought about. The next scene at New Scotland Yard shows that Sherlock actually is still upset about the blog, so we know that Sherlock called John his “blogger” in this moment in a deliberate attempt to be nice about the blog in order to make up with John. Which is really quite considerate and sweet of Sherlock.

Here’s the full exchange:

Sherlock: Lestrade. I’ve been summoned. Coming? John: If you want me to. Sherlock: Of course. I’d be lost without my blogger.

John seems a bit surprised that Sherlock is inviting him after their fight, so he checks that Sherlock really wants him to. Idk, I just think this scene is a bit sweet, as they’re both still feeling around the edges of each other and figuring out how to make this work. John wants to make sure that he’s truly welcome, and of course he is.

There’s more evidence of Sherlock’s continued affections throughout the rest of the episode, of course. For one thing, I’ve noticed that in all three episodes of S1, Sherlock doesn’t seem to enjoy explaining his deductions for anyone other than John. He often gets impatient with Lestrade and Dimmock when they don’t understand things immediately and he tries to rush through his findings for them without explaining things properly. With John, though, Sherlock will explain everything in order and at a slower pace so that he can show off. The scene by the Thames when Sherlock, John, and Lestrade are there to observe the gallery attendant’s body is an excellent example of this. Sherlock starts snapping at Lestrade about all the things he’s missed, and John has to ask Sherlock to take him and Lestrade through his findings to get Sherlock to do it properly. John is the special one!

Here’s one more little detail about Sherlock’s side of the story that I’ll throw in. When Sherlock meets John at the train tracks where he’s investigating Andrew West’s death, John asks “How long have you been following me?” to which Sherlock replies, “Since the start.” Maybe this means nothing, but it’s more fun to imagine that it could be a neat little clue that Sherlock has been in love with John and “following” him “since the start.” It makes me think of the “Since when do you call me John?” / “You’d be surprised” exchange during the Reichenbach Falls scene in TAB, which is Victorian English for “How long have you been in love with me?” / “You’d be surprised.” (I’ll talk about that again when we get to TAB.)

Turning to John for a bit now. The pool scene is a momentous turning point in the show’s portrayal of John’s feelings for Sherlock, but before that, TGG gives us a few clues that offer insight into what John might be feeling.

In the “Jim from IT” scene at Bart’s, we get an early example of John’s extreme jealousy whenever anyone else tries to flirt with Sherlock. John’s jealousy in this scene is nowhere near what we’ll see in ASIB, but his body language, wariness, and less-than-friendly attitude show that he’s very unhappy about Jim’s flirting. So just like Sherlock did in TBB when John tried to go out on a date with Sarah, John is now starting to show a bit of jealousy and possessiveness regarding Sherlock, too. John has strong feelings for Sherlock, even if he hasn’t fully faced those feelings yet or feels conflicted about them.

More importantly, though, TGG shows the continued strengthening of Sherlock and John’s relationship around their cases, especially as John appears to grow more comfortable with Sherlock. John still seems on edge during some of the cases, especially the early ones, and he doesn’t seem to enjoy interviewing witnesses very much. But all the same, John continues to follow Sherlock along quite willingly, and he goes wherever Sherlock asks him to when Sherlock sends him off to investigate on his own. The two of them are starting to act as a unit now, and I think that overall John shows a bit less frustration over how Sherlock treats him on their cases in TGG than he did in TBB.

That said, there are still clear tensions between Sherlock and John. John frequently shows irritation at Sherlock when he thinks Sherlock is being presumptuous or abrasive, and he’s unhappy at first when Sherlock isn’t doing as much as he could to involve him. More importantly, at this point in their friendship John seems to be struggling to truly understand Sherlock—especially when it comes to Sherlock’s way of expressing empathy. Perhaps as John is still trying to figure out what he might mean to Sherlock and how he fits into Sherlock’s world, John is starting to worry that Sherlock can’t show him the care and empathy that he would need from him in a relationship. But of course, if John fears this, then he’s entirely wrong.

S1 gives us plenty of evidence that Sherlock cares deeply about the victims involved in his and John’s cases. However, Sherlock often chooses not to wear this on his sleeve, and he deliberately attempts to bury it inside himself instead. Sherlock can be an incredibly caring, selfless, and empathetic person, but at the start of the show, we meet him at a point in his life when he’s chosen to try to hide that from the world as much as possible by putting on a cool and detached persona. It really is just a persona, though, and it’s one that Sherlock will gradually learn to discard as the show progresses. Sherlock’s character arc isn’t about him learning these qualities, it’s about him learning to feel comfortable revealing them to others (especially to John, but not only to John).

As Mycroft will tell us in ASIB, Sherlock “has the brain of a scientist or a philosopher, yet he elects to be a detective.” With this line, Mycroft reminds us that Sherlock could have had a dazzling career in a field where he worked to advance knowledge solely for the sake of knowledge. But instead, Sherlock chose to become a detective so that he could put his skills to use in a way that would directly help other people. I’ll add that he did this by inventing his own position as a consulting detective, apparently so that he could take on the cases that he felt were most worthy, even if those cases didn’t always align with the priorities of the police (as in ACD canon). It’s true that Sherlock wants to be able to work on interesting puzzles, but he’s purposely invented a job that lets him combine that with his desire to make the world a bit less miserable. All of this reveals a great deal about Sherlock’s inner character and proves that he absolutely cares about helping people, not just about the mental stimulation that solving cases provides.

John really struggles to see this in TGG, though. During the Carl Powers case and then again after the death of the old woman when Moriarty blows up her building, John gets angry at Sherlock and essentially tells him that he doesn’t seem to care about the victims. Sherlock acts unshaken, but if we look carefully at his body language and at what he says to John, we can see that he does care.

Here’s some evidence of this.

1. First, just take a look at Sherlock’s face as he listened to Soo Lin’s story in the previous episode.

2. Every time, as soon as he solves one of the Moriarty puzzles, Sherlock immediately and urgently asks the victims to tell him where they are so that the police can find and rescue them.

3. During the Carl Powers case, when Sherlock and John are at the lab at Bart’s, John accuses Sherlock of not caring about the woman who has been kidnapped. After they leave Bart’s, however, there’s a moment in the cab where we see Sherlock looking out of the window on the left side of the screen and an image of the woman superimposed within his line of sight on the right.

(screencap from here)

This shot is deliberately composed to suggest that Sherlock is thinking about the woman and cares about helping her.

4. After the death of the old woman, we can see on Sherlock’s face that he’s shocked and upset that she’s been killed. He was very confident just a moment before, but hearing her death over the phone immediately shatters that confidence. Great gif set of this here.

5. Shortly after that in 221B, John gets angry with Sherlock and accuses him of not caring about any of Moriarty’s victims. Sherlock shoots back at John that caring about them won’t help them, but the rest of the conversation proves that he doesn’t mean this the way it might sound on its surface.

Sherlock: Will caring about them help save them? John: Nope. Sherlock: Then I’ll continue not to make that mistake. 

John then expresses reluctance to help with the case because he’s upset with Sherlock. Sherlock replies to this with “Oh, you’re angry with me, so you won’t help. Not much cop, this caring lark.”

With these lines, Sherlock tries to tell John that in order to work effectively and actually save the victims, he needs to dissociate. Sherlock tries to remain removed from his emotions about the victims while he’s working precisely because that’s how he can best help them. I think I saw someone say once on tumblr that this is actually quite similar to what doctors do while attending to their patients, especially in emergency situations, so it makes a lot of sense for Sherlock to hope that John will understand his reasoning. And @thegildedbee reminded me that Sherlock made this connection to John earlier in the episode, too, at Bart’s! There, we get this exchange:

John: Try and remember there’s a woman here who might die. Sherlock: What for? This hospital’s full of people dying, Doctor. Why don’t you go and cry by their bedside and see what good it does them?

This may sound very harsh, but it’s Sherlock’s way of saying that he’s trying to stay above the fray emotionally so that he can do what he can to save the victims.

In both moments, though, John doesn’t seem to get it at first. I do think that deep down, John appreciates Sherlock as someone who can be very emotional, honest, and caring. He really does know Sherlock incredibly well, and he’s able to appreciate Sherlock for who he is even when other people don’t. But John also struggles with his attraction to Sherlock, and especially with his fear that Sherlock will never return his feelings. Because of this, John often tries to protect himself from heartbreak by trying to convince himself that Sherlock “doesn’t feel things that way”—that Sherlock can’t be expected to feel love the same way that John does. Not just for him, but for anyone.

John’s fear of his own attraction to Sherlock and his fear of being rejected make him very conflicted. As a result, when it comes to understanding Sherlock’s emotions and his empathy, John flip-flops back and forth repeatedly throughout the show. When he’s being honest with himself, John really does understand Sherlock and sees through his mask. But when he’s feeling especially afraid of his own feelings for Sherlock, John falters and has trouble seeing through the mask because he’s deliberately trying not to. This is John’s way of trying to protect himself from getting too emotionally attached to Sherlock. (@loudest-subtext-in-tv made a point somewhat similar to this here. Her post is what first got me thinking about this, but I disagree with her a bit, because I don’t think John ever actually convinces himself that Sherlock is a sociopath. After TGG, I don’t think John is ever seriously confused on this point; I think John has a much more positive—and accurate—view of Sherlock than that throughout the show.)

John starts to display evidence of this in TGG, and I think TGG might be the time when he struggles with it the most. John gets angry at Sherlock for his apparent coldness and criticizes him for not caring about the victims several times, but at other moments he really does seem to understand that Sherlock cares. @silentauroriamthereal has pointed out that in the scene where the old woman dies, John puts a hand on the back of Sherlock’s chair to comfort him after seeing how upset he is. And after Sherlock says “Not much cop, this caring lark” during their argument in 221B, John seems to understand Sherlock’s point after a few more moments—he starts checking the papers to help with the case just as Sherlock asked him to. I think that if John ever had any true doubts about Sherlock’s empathy, that moment is the one that dispels them.

TGG thus establishes a pattern that we should keep an eye out for. Whenever John is most insistent that Sherlock doesn’t feel love or empathy, that’s a clue that John is feeling especially frustrated by and conflicted about his own feelings for Sherlock.

So, to recap. Before the pool scene, Sherlock has fallen in love with John and knows it, but he thinks his love is unrequited. John is powerfully drawn to Sherlock, but he seems to have conflicted feelings about this, especially because he thinks that Sherlock rejected him romantically back at Angelo’s and he doesn’t want to let himself fall for someone who won’t love him back.

Oh, and just for fun, TGG is also full of rainbow lens flares. Just because this show is super gay and they really want to make sure we’ve gotten that by now. It’s like the pride colors London Eye in TBB!

And now, the pool scene.

The pool scene is a critical turning point for both Sherlock’s character development and for John’s journey of recognizing his feelings for Sherlock. Let’s start with Sherlock’s character development.

Before the pool scene, Sherlock is obviously fascinated by Moriarty and relishes playing his “game.” While I think it’s true that Sherlock is primarily motivated in his work by a sense of duty to his clients/the victims and a deeply held sense of justice, it’s also true that Sherlock craves engaging challenges. When Moriarty bursts onto the scene, Sherlock is fascinated by Moriarty as a figure who may be able to provide them, and he’s thrilled by the emergence of Moriarty as a rival who can finally match him. There’s a moment during the Connie Prince case where Sherlock is talking to Lestrade, and when Lestrade demands, “So just tell me: what are we dealing with?” Sherlock says “Something new” with a truly delighted smile on his face.

By showing us Sherlock’s fascination with Moriarty and how much he enjoys sparring with him, TGG gives us insight into the darker side and potentialities of Sherlock’s character. Considering S1 as a whole, we can see that Sherlock has tried to arrange his life so that he can do noble work by helping people and taking cases that the police won’t or can’t solve, just like the Sherlock Holmes of ACD canon. At the same time, however, Sherlock also struggles enormously with boredom and a sense of purposelessness between cases, and this crushing ennui can lead him to desperation, even to the point where he treats his own life lightly in ASIP and is fascinated by Moriarty in TGG.

I also think that in TGG, Sherlock is especially thrilled to have the chance to throw himself into Moriarty’s cases in part because they offer him a way to take his mind off of his apparently unrequited love for John. After Sherlock ran off to Belarus because he was upset about John and John’s apparent choice of Sarah over him, Sherlock was aching for a case that could distract him.

Sherlock is so excited to meet Moriarty that he invites him to the pool for a face-to-face meeting. He also appears incredibly confident when he walks into the pool and begins addressing Moriarty.

But when John steps into view, covered in explosives, Sherlock’s demeanor changes immediately. Sherlock is absolutely shocked, and he stares at John for several moments before managing to say, fearfully, “John?” Seeing John covered in Semtex terrifies Sherlock, even if he hides it quickly. When Moriarty appears, Sherlock reaffixes his usual tough-guy exterior and swiftly hides his anxiety behind an unruffled, cold façade.

John later writes on his blog that he thinks Sherlock looked at him in shock when he first stepped out because it seemed, for at least a few seconds, that John might be Moriarty. But I actually think John got that wrong. I think Sherlock was so shocked in that moment because he was terrified for John’s safety.

It’s very important that for this face-to-face meeting, Moriarty kidnaps John and uses him as a pawn. It shows how closely Moriarty has been watching Sherlock—Moriarty knows that John is the most important person to Sherlock and the person that he can use most effectively to threaten him.

Then we get Moriarty’s ominous and incredibly important threat: that if Sherlock doesn’t back down, “I will burn you. I will burn the heart out of you.” This is an absolutely crucial line, one of the most important in the whole show.

Moriarty: D’you know what happens if you don’t leave me alone, Sherlock, to you? Sherlock: Oh, let me guess: I get killed. Moriarty: Kill you? No, don’t be obvious. I mean, I’m gonna kill you anyway someday. I don’t want to rush it, though. I’m saving it up for something special. No no no no no. If you don’t stop prying, I will burn you. I will burn the heart out of you. Sherlock: I have been reliably informed that I don’t have one. Moriarty: But we both know that’s not quite true.

Sherlock is fundamentally a love story between Sherlock and John. The arc of the love story is what drives the plot across the episodes and series; the cases are there to move the love story along, rather than the love story being grafted onto the cases after the fact. Keeping this in mind, let’s talk about Moriarty’s narrative role in the show.

In ACD canon, James Moriarty is actually a rather minor figure. Doyle introduced him for the first time in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the same story where Moriarty appears to defeat Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. This is actually so funny to me, because it’s so clear that Doyle just wanted to kill off Holmes and be done with him, and he invented a villain out of the blue for this purpose. Before “The Final Problem,” Holmes had never spoken of Moriarty before, but then in this story he tells Watson that Moriarty is, like, the absolute worst thing ever, so formidable, etc. etc. (Holmes and Watson briefly discuss Moriarty in The Valley of Fear, but even though that story is set before “The Final Problem,” Doyle wrote and published it after.) The point I’m trying to make is that in ACD canon, there is no significant Moriarty plot arc to speak of—there isn’t any build-up to Moriarty and Holmes’s fatal showdown at the Reichenbach Falls prior to the story in which it actually takes place.

In Sherlock, however, the writers decided to make Moriarty the show’s central antagonist. And since this is a love story, Moriarty serves as the central antagonist not because he’s capable of executing formidable, dastardly crimes whose scopes and solutions test Sherlock’s crime-solving limits. Instead, Moriarty’s role is to serve as one of the most important forces keeping Sherlock and John apart romantically.

In S1, Sherlock and John don’t get together for quite ordinary reasons. They’ve just met and they’ve known each other for only about two months, so it’s totally reasonable that they haven’t just fallen into each other’s arms. At first, Sherlock feels hesitant to get involved too quickly; then he starts to worry that John doesn’t like him back. Meanwhile, John has difficulty getting a read on how Sherlock feels.

When Moriarty steps into the picture and threatens to burn the heart out of Sherlock, however, the central conflict of the show takes on a new form. With this line, Moriarty threatens to destroy Sherlock by breaking his heart, not by killing him. And Moriarty does this while John is standing next to him covered in Semtex. The message is clear: Moriarty plans to destroy Sherlock and break his heart by using Sherlock’s love for John against him. Then after that, he’ll try to kill him.

(This is another reason why I believe that Sherlock fell in love so early on in the show. The fact that Sherlock is already in love with John and aware of his own feelings means that this makes sense as a threat from Moriarty.)

Once Moriarty makes this threat, Sherlock’s whole attitude towards Moriarty changes. Instead of being fascinated by the master criminal and drawn to him, Sherlock now sees Moriarty as a true threat and takes him seriously as a dangerous enemy. Just as importantly, Sherlock also starts to believe that John’s safety hinges on how he handles his relationship with him. Before, Sherlock tried to take things slowly with John because he wasn’t ready to make a move. But Moriarty’s threat makes it clear that Moriarty sees John as the way that he can destroy Sherlock, and the fact that Moriarty kidnapped John and decked him out in explosives has also made it clear that Moriarty is very much capable of hurting John and willing to do so.

After Moriarty’s threat and his actions at the pool, Sherlock begins to fear that Moriarty will hurt John in order to get to him. As a result, Sherlock decides that he can’t risk showing John how he feels and pursuing anything more than friendship with him, because he thinks that would put John in even more danger from Moriarty. No matter how much Sherlock might want something more with John, protecting John becomes his highest priority, and Sherlock is willing to sacrifice his own feelings to keep John safe. This becomes incredibly important throughout S2, especially in ASIB.

One more note about Sherlock. TGG essentially presents John and Moriarty as conflicting choices for Sherlock. John represents the path of empathy, of Sherlock continuing to prioritize his moral code and his commitment to solving crimes out of concern for the victims. The side of the angels, if you will. John also offers Sherlock the possibility of eventual romance, if Sherlock can open himself up to that. Moriarty, meanwhile, represents the darker option, the path of choosing mental stimulation over everything else and without regard for the consequences. Of course, Sherlock chooses John, and he makes this abundantly and decisively clear at the pool. From here on out, Moriarty will seek to punish Sherlock for that choice.

From Moriarty’s perspective, there’s a twisted romantic/sexual dimension to this, too. Moriarty makes it clear through all his flirting that he basically wants Sherlock to be his psychopath boyfriend, as I’ve seen others in the fandom put it. As thegildedbee reminded me, when Moriarty first set his sights on Sherlock back in ASIP, there was no John in the picture for Sherlock yet. After the pool, Moriarty will seek to punish Sherlock for his love for John and will try to use John against him.

Now for John. I think the pool scene is when John starts to realize that he’s falling in love with Sherlock—that what he feels for him is more than friendship or attraction. John grabs Moriarty from behind while covered in explosives and tells Sherlock to run, offering to sacrifice himself to save Sherlock. Two episodes ago John killed a man to save Sherlock’s life, and he threatened to kill the Golem earlier in TGG if he didn’t let Sherlock go. But now, he’s actually offered to die in Sherlock’s place. That’s a big deal. Crucially, John only releases Moriarty when Moriarty says “You’ve rather shown your hand there, Dr. Watson” and one of the snipers trains their red dot on Sherlock’s forehead. By grabbing Moriarty and telling Sherlock to run, then releasing Moriarty when Moriarty threatens to kill Sherlock, John demonstrates that saving Sherlock is what matters most to him, not bringing down Moriarty.

Have a look at this gif set. You can just see everything here. There’s John’s look of dawning horror as he sees the sniper’s dot on Sherlock’s forehead, Sherlock’s resigned and pained shake of his head to show just how tense and terrified he is and that he doesn’t want John to sacrifice himself, and Moriarty’s smug smiles in both gifs on the right. Moriarty knows that he’s figured out Sherlock and John and has them wrapped around his finger, because he knows that they’ve fallen in love with each other.

I also think John’s actions at the pool show that he really understands Sherlock—he knows that Sherlock is a good person and that he’s trying to do noble work. If John truly thought that Sherlock was cruel and unempathetic and only cared about the puzzles, then I don’t think he would have offered to die for Sherlock like that and would have prioritized saving Sherlock over defeating Moriarty. After their big fight in 221B before the lost Vermeer case, John figured it out.

After this first burst of action at the pool, Moriarty leaves for a little bit. And notice just how agitated and distressed Sherlock is after Moriarty leaves. Sherlock is obviously freaked out about how close John came to dying, but he also seems to be struggling with the fact that John was willing to die for him. Sherlock paces around frantically while scratching the back of his head with his gun for several seconds before he finally manages to choke out: “That, er…thing that you, er, that you did—that, um…you offered to do. That was, um…good.” This shows that Sherlock is struggling not only with how close John came to dying, but also with his realization that John cares about him enough to sacrifice himself to save him. This is the most John has ever revealed about how much he cares about Sherlock, and Sherlock doesn’t seem to know what to do with this information—especially after he just heard Moriarty threaten to “burn the heart” out of him by hurting John.

The really, really important moment for John comes right after this. Moriarty returns to the pool, announces that he’s “sooo changeable!” and the snipers’ red dots appear on both John and Sherlock. Then, there’s a moment when Sherlock and John lock eyes right before Sherlock aims his gun at the explosives on the floor. In that moment, Sherlock looks at John for confirmation of his plan, and John nods.

(gif from here)

This is the key moment. Sherlock and John have both just agreed that Sherlock will shoot the explosives and bring down the entire building, killing everyone inside. Sherlock and John have silently agreed to die together to bring down Moriarty and his snipers, so that neither one of them will have to leave the pool without the other. True love!

I’m not trying to argue that John has a clear-headed epiphany that he’s in love with Sherlock right then and there, in the middle of such an intense situation and when he thinks he’s about to die. But I do think this moment catalyzes John’s recognition that Sherlock has become something more to him than a friend. After agreeing to die alongside him, John is going to have to start working through his feelings for Sherlock in earnest in S2.

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: The Blind Banker

This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.

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TBB takes place in late March, almost two months after the end of ASIP. John’s blog establishes that Sherlock and John met for the first time on January 29, and most of ASIP takes place the next evening on January 30. On March 23, John makes separate posts on his blog about unmanned checkout machines and about how he and Sherlock discovered Van Coon’s body that day; those posts thus establish March 23 as the day when the events of TBB begin.

What were Sherlock and John up to in the time between ASIP and TBB? We get a few hints from Sherlock’s and John’s blogs. (You can find archived versions of Sherlock’s blog here and John’s blog here, but I’ll also link to the relevant posts as I bring them up.)

Judging from his blog, John seems to have been in especially good spirits in the first week after he met Sherlock. On January 31, the day after he shot the cabbie, saved Sherlock’s life, and went out for late-night dim sum with Sherlock at the Chinese restaurant, John wrote up a short post titled “My new flatmate.” And honestly, John almost sounds a little lovestruck in that post. He writes about going to look at 221B with Sherlock and then solving the serial suicides case, and it’s sort of like he just stops short of describing his first night with Sherlock as magical. A week later, on February 7, John writes up “A Study in Pink,” his more in-depth post about his and Sherlock’s first case together. John says a few fairly harsh and blunt things about Sherlock in that post, but he also seems to be completely in awe of Sherlock. He calls Sherlock arrogant, but he also calls him clever and seems amazed by everything that Sherlock can do and by Sherlock’s utter disregard for convention. All in all, during that first week John certainly seems excited about his new life with Sherlock.

John also mentions on his blog twice that Sherlock knows some “nice” or “good” restaurants: he says that Sherlock “knows a couple of nice restaurants” in the “My new flatmate” post from January 31, and then he reiterates “Like I say, he really does know some great restaurants” in the “A Study in Pink” post from February 7. John was probably talking about Angelo’s and the Chinese restaurant in the first post, since that one is from the day after he and Sherlock went to those two places together. He might have been talking about those same two restaurants again in the second post…but maybe not. Maybe Sherlock kept taking John out to restaurants during that first week after ASIP, like they really were dating.

We also learn from the blogs that sometime around the start of TBB, Sherlock and John watched a James Bond movie together and Sherlock had fun doing it (see here and here). And if you read through the comments on their blogs from the stretch of time between ASIP and TBB more carefully, you’ll see that Sherlock and John are squabbling with each other good-naturedly about silly stuff, like whose turn it is to clean the flat and buy the milk, or Sherlock’s sarcasm. They’re clearly settling into a domestic routine together, and in a lot of ways they’re basically already acting like a couple. They’re teasing each other publicly, they’ve had at least one movie night together, and they might even be going out on dinner dates where Sherlock shows off his knowledge of the London restaurant scene.

Are Sherlock and John solving cases together during this stretch of time? I’d say no. John ends his February 7 post with this cryptic statement: “And since that night? It hasn’t stopped. Oh, there’s so much more I’ve got to tell you.” This makes it sound like they could have been solving cases together, but John doesn’t write any up. I think it’s likely that John is just referring to the insanity of living with Sherlock—and maybe he was having a really great time going out on dinner dates with the guy.

Moriarty sends Sherlock some coded messages that Sherlock and John both talk about on their blogs, so John is in the loop about that much, at least. But much more importantly, we learn from John’s blog and from one of the opening scenes in TBB that Sherlock worked on the Jaria Diamond case without telling John. Instead of involving John in the case, Sherlock acted like he thought it wasn’t interesting enough to take on and that he hadn’t worked on it at all. So we know that Sherlock solved at least one case without John after ASIP.

Overall, then, it seems like in the two months between ASIP and TBB, Sherlock and John started to get to know each other better as flatmates and became comfortable around each other in the flat, but didn’t really solidify their friendship or their working relationship. Sherlock was head-over-heels in love with John and quite possibly took him out on restaurant dates for at least a week, but he didn’t feel ready to incorporate John into his working life, even after the fantastic start that the two of them had together with the case in ASIP. Perhaps that felt too intimate for Sherlock, and Sherlock was still trying to feel out the edges of this new something that he now has with John.

Following ASIP and this two-month stretch, TBB and TGG show how Sherlock and John actually became a team. As TBB proceeds, we see that even though they really hit it off in ASIP, neither of them was immediately sure of how to proceed after that. The process of becoming an actual team was a bit rough for them, especially since Sherlock wasn’t used to working with a partner at first and this made John doubt that Sherlock truly appreciated him. But Sherlock and John both clearly wanted to make it work, and eventually they did. As a result, their dynamic during all the cases that they work on together at the start of ASIB is very different from what we see in TBB and TGG. These two episodes of S1, then, show us the hard work that it took for Sherlock and John to get there.

Alright! Let’s turn to TBB in earnest by talking about Soo Lin and Andy.

To help us decode the subtext in Sherlock, TBB introduces the concept of “matching pairs.” Matching pairs come up several times in the central case of the episode. There are the two matching vases, smuggled out of China and into the UK in the suitcases of two different men; then there’s the book code, which matches numbers with words and prompts Sherlock and John to look for the one matching book that Van Coon and Lukis both owned.

The matching pairs concept is meant to clue us in to the fact that Sherlock often makes use of mirrors. This is when a minor character is presented as a “mirror” for one of the major characters and the information that we learn about the minor character then tells us something new about the major character. Often, a minor character will share a few apparent similarities with either Sherlock or John (or maybe even both), which establishes them as a mirror. Then when we receive direct insight into the experiences or feelings of the minor character, we can use that information to infer something new about Sherlock or John.

Mirrors are sometimes used in a very direct way, to tell us something that is currently going on with both the minor character and the major character. But I also think they’re sometimes used for foreshadowing or to tell us something about Sherlock or John in the past.

For example, in TGG, John meets Andrew West’s fiancée Lucy. Lucy has blonde hair and a problematic sibling, and she’s in love with a man who has dark hair and who works for the Ministry of Defense. These details establish Lucy as a mirror for John and Andrew West (Westie) as a mirror for Sherlock. When John meets her in TGG, Lucy is heartbroken over Westie’s death, and she’s angry and sad that other people have begun to doubt Westie’s morality and his loyalty to his country by suggesting that he tried to sell the Bruce-Partington plans. She tells John tearfully: “I knew Westie. He was a good man. He was my good man.”

This foreshadows what will happen in TRF and during Sherlock’s time away. John will be heartbroken over Sherlock’s apparent death, and he’ll be angry and sad that other people doubt Sherlock by believing he was a fraud who arranged all the crimes to make himself seem clever, instead of seeing him as the person he truly was—someone who was sincerely committed to justice and to protecting vulnerable people in London. Just as Lucy retains her faith in Westie, John never doubts Sherlock during their last phone call outside of Bart’s and he continues to defend Sherlock to other people long after Sherlock’s apparent death. At Sherlock’s grave at the end of TRF, we see that John remains convinced that he knew Sherlock and knew he was a good man.

So, mirrors are a useful subtextual device in Sherlock, and they may not always give us direct insight into what’s going on with Sherlock and John in the present day. The timing doesn’t have to quite align.

Back to TBB. At the very beginning of the episode, we meet Soo Lin and Andy, who work together at the (fictional) National Antiquities Museum. Soo Lin is a mirror for Sherlock and Andy is a mirror for John.

Soo Lin has dark hair, is very thin, and wishes people would leave her alone so that she can focus on her work. As the episode goes on, we also learn that she doesn’t have a lot of friends or family in London who she’s close to. Furthermore, in the opening scene of the episode, Soo Lin refuses Andy’s attempt to ask her out on a date, in part by telling him “You wouldn’t like me all that much.”

Taken together, Soo Lin’s physical characteristics, her focus on her work, and her social isolation all set her up as a mirror for Sherlock. The way Soo Lin responds to Andy’s invitation of a date also ties back to Sherlock’s decision to turn John down during the dinner scene in ASIP.

Soo Lin’s reluctance to go out with Andy may indicate that Sherlock still has some doubts about pursuing a romantic relationship with John. In particular, Soo Lin’s statement that Andy wouldn’t like her all that much suggests that Sherlock may be nervous that if he really opens up to John, then John won’t love him for who he is and will reject him. 

Personally, however, I suspect that Soo Lin’s reluctance to become involved with Andy and the fact that she seems focused on her work to the exclusion of romance are meant to tell us more about how Sherlock was in the past than about how he’s feeling at the start of TBB. For so long, Sherlock tried to focus on his work as a consulting detective and didn’t form strong relationships with other people. But then John showed up. Sherlock used the “married to my work” line on John in ASIP, but we’ve already seen that Sherlock didn’t seem all that confident about that, and even if he did, his feelings began to shift by the end of that same night. Now that John is in his life and has moved in with him, I think Sherlock is starting to become very hopeful that he can pursue a romantic relationship with John, and he’s likely moving away from the reluctance that we see Soo Lin display towards Andy. And as the narrative of the show unfolds, Sherlock will slowly become willing to leave more and more of his work behind for John.

Moreover, Soo Lin seems regretful when she turns Andy down. When Andy asks her if she’d like to get a drink and pushes a little more after her first attempt to decline, Soo Lin doesn’t say “I don’t want to,” she says “I can’t. I’m sorry.” I think this could suggest that for a long time, Sherlock tried to close himself off from his own longing for romance and tried to focus on his work because he feared that he’d never find someone who would like him all that much, as Soo Lin says. Sherlock may have feared that if he tried to date, he’d only get hurt, and so he thought that romance was something he couldn’t have even though he wanted it. Perhaps for his reason, Sherlock is still a little reluctant to open up to John, even though he wants to.

While talking to Andy at the start of the episode, Soo Lin also says this: “Some things aren’t supposed to sit behind glass. They’re made to be touched, to be handled.” Soo Lin was ostensibly talking about the tea pots, but I think it’s pretty clear from the context of the conversation and the way she looks over her shoulder at Andy as she says this that she’s really talking about herself and Andy. This tells us that Sherlock, too, is meant to be touched and handled. He’s been isolated and lonely for so long, but he longs for romance, and with John he’ll finally be able to have that. More specifically, we know that Sherlock is a virgin, so this line indicates that although Sherlock hasn’t had sex before, John will be able to open Sherlock up to his sexuality and will allow him to explore and enjoy that side of himself.

As TBB proceeds, we also learn that Soo Lin has a somewhat mysterious, dangerous, and morally gray past that involves her brother, and that she thought she had finally escaped that life when she started over with a new job in London. @loudest-subtext-in-tv (LSIT) suggests in her M-theory meta that this could be a clue that Sherlock used to work for Mycroft at MI6, but left that line of work and established himself as an consulting detective in London because he became frustrated with the morally gray nature of the work. I love that idea, and I’m totally on board with that. It also fits well with Westie being a mirror for Sherlock in TGG, since Westie worked for the MOD. Indeed, when Soo Lin tells Sherlock and John her story about her life as a smuggler in China, Sherlock is clearly moved. When Soo Lin says “I had hoped after five years maybe they would have forgotten me, but they never really let you leave,” Sherlock actually looks like he has tears in his eyes. Sherlock relates. He’s tried to leave his past life with MI6 behind, but he worries that they won’t let him go. Perhaps this is why Sherlock is so resentful of Mycroft, dismissive of the British government, and frustrated by Mycroft’s close supervision of his life in S1-S2.  

Meanwhile, Andy wears a lot of checked shirts and at one point wears a jacket that’s in a similar style to John’s. He’s clearly interested in Soo Lin, and he’s Soo Lin’s colleague at the museum. These characteristics set him up as a mirror for John.

In this first scene, and then again and again whenever Andy appears in the rest of the episode, we see that Andy is pretty persistent when it comes to Soo Lin. In the conversation between the two of them at the start of the episode, Soo Lin indicates that Andy has asked her out several times before: “Please stop asking.” Andy later gets very worried about her when she abruptly quits her job, and he tries to find her at her flat and leaves a note asking her to get in touch. He also appears somewhat awkward and unsure of himself, though, especially around Soo Lin.

I think all of this indicates that John will be quite persistent when it comes to Sherlock and a potential romantic relationship with him. John backed down when he thought he’d been rejected at Angelo’s, but he’s willing to try again and he doesn’t want to give up on Sherlock. He’s also genuinely protective of Sherlock; when bad things happen to Sherlock, he’ll get worried and will want to do something about it. But at the same time, John is unsure of how to go about his new relationship with Sherlock, as we’ll see in TBB especially. And throughout the show, John will be very, very hesitant to ever do anything that will put his feelings for Sherlock out into the open for Sherlock to see, because he’s worried that this may lead to Sherlock rejecting him.

Okay, onto the episode itself!

Throughout TBB, it’s clear to see that Sherlock definitely has feelings for John and knows it. Sherlock seems to be trying to keep John interested in him romantically at the same time that he begins trying to draw John into his working life as a consulting detective. John, meanwhile, is powerfully drawn to Sherlock and definitely wants in on Sherlock’s casework. But after Sherlock’s apparent romantic rejection of him at Angelo’s in ASIP, John tries to significantly pull back from Sherlock emotionally. In TBB, John seems to be intentionally trying to signal to Sherlock that he doesn’t see him as anything more than a flatmate and colleague.

After meeting Soo Lin and Andy, we cut to the first scenes with Sherlock and John. Sherlock is fighting with the guy from the Jaria Diamond case while John struggles with a chip-and-pin machine at the grocery store. Then John comes home and snaps at Sherlock, and Sherlock tells John to take his card.

The moment when Sherlock tells John to take his card is one of the moments where Sherlock’s feelings really shine through. Just look at Sherlock’s face as he says it. John just yelled at him over something totally stupid and mundane, and Sherlock responded by looking up at him with literal stars in his eyes. And then when John leaves to go to the shops again, still in a bad mood, Sherlock gives the sitting room a big smile. (This is all before learning about the case from Sebastian.) Sherlock is just so happy to have John in his life and so far gone on John, so early on.

After John comes back with the shopping, we learn that John is having money troubles and probably isn’t doing his share to cover the rent. But Sherlock doesn’t seem bothered by this at all. He just willingly offered John his debit card. Not his credit card, his actual bank card—General Shan identifies it as a debit card later on when she takes it out of John’s wallet. Which is hilarious, because it means that after borrowing Sherlock’s card, John didn’t give it back. He tucked it into his wallet and left it there for four days…which also means that Sherlock never asked for it back. Sherlock straight-up just gave John his card. Okay. And when John comes home after going shopping, flicks through his unpaid bills, and says out loud that he needs to get a job, Sherlock replies with “dull” instead of encouraging this.

Sherlock’s whole initial pretense for bringing John into his life was that he needed a flatmate to be able to afford the rent for 221B. But Sherlock actually moved in before John even saw the flat. It seems likely, actually, that he moved in before he even met John at Bart’s. Before he and John had met, Sherlock had already texted Lestrade “You know where to find me” during Lestrade’s press conference about the serial suicides, and we know that Sherlock meant the new Baker Street address because Lestrade shows up there looking for Sherlock the very same day that Sherlock and John go to look at the flat together. All of this suggests that Sherlock’s reasons for wanting John around are not related to a need to split the rent.

Honestly, I think it’s likely that Sherlock didn’t say anything to Mike about needing a flatmate back in January. It’s possible that instead, the idea that Sherlock might be a difficult person to live with just came up in conversation between Sherlock and Mike somehow. Then when Mike ran into John in Russell Square, he decided to try to set up Sherlock and John as boyfriends—in the scene in the lab at Bart’s, I think it’s pretty clear that Mike knows exactly what he’s doing. And when John walked into the lab, Sherlock immediately saw something in John that he was attracted to, and he decided to run with the flatmates idea.

Well…maybe. Maybe not, maybe I’m stretching things too far. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that regardless of what Sherlock said to Mike, it’s pretty safe to say that Sherlock didn’t actually need to split the rent with John, but he wanted to.

Actually, Sherlock seems to make pretty good money as a consulting detective, even without getting paid for any of the cases that he takes from the Yard. He and John get a fat check from Sebastian at the end of TBB, and in THOB their client Henry Knight is rich, so Henry probably paid them a lot for helping him. In TRF, Sherlock and John solve the Reichenbach Falls case for the posh art dealers, who probably also paid pretty well. Sherlock just needs to take a case or two like that every once in a while, and he’s all set. We also know that Sherlock is getting a special rate on the flat from Mrs. Hudson, so he and John don’t need to pay the going rate for a flat in central London. Basically, Sherlock’s work as a consulting detective seems to be lucrative enough that it can support both him and John pretty comfortably. This makes sense, because in S2 it seems like John might have stopped working for the surgery even on a locum basis and is just focusing on solving cases with Sherlock.

So, after John very awkwardly starts trying to ask Sherlock to lend him money, Sherlock announces that he needs to go to the bank and John rushes to tag along. This is significant because it’s possible that Sherlock only took the case from Sebastian because of John. After Sherlock read Sebastian’s email and John snatched his laptop away, Sherlock laced his fingers together and stared at the wall contemplatively, as if he wasn’t sure whether he was going to take the case. It’s only after John starts trying to ask Sherlock for money that Sherlock announces that he needs to go to the bank, and therefore evidently decides to take the case. When Sherlock and John get to the bank, it becomes clear that Sherlock doesn’t have fond memories of Sebastian from uni and doesn’t like him. Sherlock also makes a big show of acting like he doesn’t care about the five figures that Sebastian is offering, leaving John to accept the retainer in his stead.

All of this was probably very deliberate on Sherlock’s part. When Sebastian’s case fell into his lap, Sherlock decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for him to invite John along on a case again and to try to see if they can recreate what they briefly shared together on their first case in January—to see whether they can really work together as a team. By hopefully solving John’s money troubles for the time being, Sebastian’s case gives Sherlock a chance to try to further endear himself to John. And more broadly, Sherlock might be hoping that if he can demonstrate to John that the two of them can earn fairly good money together by solving cases, then maybe John will see living and working with Sherlock as a viable long-term option for himself. By inviting John along on this case in particular, then, Sherlock might be hoping that he can get John to stick around with him long-term.

Unfortunately, though, Sherlock and John aren’t able to immediately jump back into the dynamic that they’d shared while working on the serial suicides case in ASIP. In TBB, there’s a noticeable shift in their dynamic to something a bit cooler and more closed off than what we saw starting to blossom between them in ASIP. I think that a lot of this (though not all of it) comes down to John and his behavior towards Sherlock in TBB. John seems to treat Sherlock much more cooly in this episode than he did in ASIP, and he gets frustrated or angry at Sherlock fairly easily.

I think there are two main reasons for this. First, John seems to feel that he made himself too vulnerable and revealed too much about himself through the way that he acted in ASIP, and perhaps in the weeks after that. Perhaps John fears that he let on too much through his open admiration of Sherlock, his willingness to throw in everything with him and to run off on the first case, and his hesitant attempt to try to feel Sherlock out at Angelo’s. As I mentioned in the ASIP section, John seemed pretty uncomfortable with how the conversation at Angelo’s went, and especially with how much information about himself he might have revealed by hitting on Sherlock so openly.

John has realized that he feels an attraction to Sherlock that’s something beyond friendship, but he’s uncomfortable with what he feels and wants to push it away. This seems to be because he thinks Sherlock is unattainable and uninterested, and he doesn’t want to get himself hurt by getting too emotionally attached to Sherlock. Notably, John seems annoyed and bristly towards Sherlock right from the start of the episode, so perhaps John’s discomfort and fears regarding how he behaved when they first met have been coming on for a while.

The second reason for John’s cooler behavior stems from Sherlock and John’s casework in TBB. Sherlock seems to genuinely want to include John in the case in this episode—he keeps inviting John along when he goes investigating, or giving John investigatory tasks of his own. But Sherlock isn’t yet very adept at including John. He’s used to operating alone, so he sometimes struggles to involve John in the case in a way that will make John feel fully included and appreciated. Most notably, Sherlock leaves John outside when he breaks into Van Coon’s flat to investigate, and then he does the same thing again when he breaks into Soo Lin’s flat later on. Both times, John gets really annoyed at Sherlock for this and loses his temper.

In response, John seems to be really doubting his place in Sherlock’s life in TBB. John felt that he received a pretty clear rejection from Sherlock romantically at Angelo’s, so he thinks he knows that his place in Sherlock’s life isn’t romantic. So what does Sherlock want him around for? Does he truly value him? John seems to be struggling to answer these questions and to figure out how much Sherlock does or doesn’t want to include him in his work.

As a result, John purposely tries to distance himself from Sherlock emotionally and romantically in this episode. He does this in a few ways: through some of his immediate responses to things that Sherlock does or says, by intentionally seeking out a job of his own even after Sherlock has invited him along on a case, and by jumping at the opportunity to date Sarah when she expresses interest in him.

The scene where Sherlock and John meet Sebastian at the bank for the first time gives us great insight into both Sherlock’s and John’s frames of mind at this point in the story.

In this scene, Sherlock very pointedly and confidently introduces John to Sebastian as his “friend,” placing a strong emphasis on the word. John then immediately and rather harshly cuts in with “colleague.” Sherlock looks visibly hurt by this. Since Sebastian is a jerk, Sebastian then starts telling John about how everyone at uni hated Sherlock. John acts amused, but Sherlock looks genuinely hurt and embarrassed as Sebastian reveals this to John.

Sherlock, then, hoped that John would at least consider him to be his friend by now. And of course Sherlock hoped so! John shot a man to save Sherlock’s life on just the second night that he even knew him, and they’ve been going out on dinner dates and watching James Bond together. But in this scene, John purposely attempts to deny whatever emotional intimacy they’ve built up with each other over the past few weeks, asserting that he isn’t Sherlock’s friend and is his colleague, a much more neutral term. And when we see that Sherlock doesn’t appreciate Sebastian telling John how unpopular he was when he was younger, we see that Sherlock wants to make himself look as good as possible in John’s eyes. John, however, seems oblivious to all of this.

From the bank, Sherlock and John go to Van Coon’s flat. After Sherlock discovers Van Coon’s body, he, John, and the police all look around Van Coon’s bedroom and Sherlock starts sorting through Van Coon’s suitcase. Then we get this exchange:

Sherlock: Look at the case. There was something tightly packed inside it. John: Thanks, I’ll take your word for it. Sherlock: Problem? John: Yeah, I’m not desperate to root around some bloke’s dirty underwear.

I think there’s some subtext going on here. Sherlock tries to get John involved in a specific aspect of the case, but John stands there with his arms folded and announces that he’s “not desperate to root around some bloke’s dirty underwear.” The implication is that John wants to keep his distance to a certain extent, and he’s intentionally (and pretty tetchily) trying to signal that he doesn’t want to get involved with Sherlock in any way that’s sexual. When Sherlock asks “Problem?”, Sherlock looks and sounds genuinely surprised and a bit offended by John’s comment and his tense and dismissive demeanor, as if Sherlock thinks that John is being unnecessarily prudish—and unexpectedly so. After all, from Sherlock’s perspective they’ve basically been acting like they’ve been dating for weeks now!

Whatever John says in Van Coon’s flat, throughout the rest of the episode we can see that John still feels desperately drawn to Sherlock and wants to be important to Sherlock and his work. When Sherlock said that he was going to the bank, John immediately followed him there, even though he didn’t even realize that it was for a case at first—John didn’t know what bank they were going to or why until they got there. When John learned that it was for a case, he immediately wanted to be involved, and he didn’t seem to question that Sherlock was trying to include him even though this must have seemed to come out of the blue from John’s perspective, after almost two full months of Sherlock not inviting him out on any other cases. John wants to be relevant and useful.

John is pretty much always willing to drop everything to help Sherlock with the case in TBB, unquestioningly. Just a few examples:

1. After getting picked up by the community support officers, coming back 221B, and yelling at Sherlock about his ASBO, John immediately heads right out of the door again when Sherlock tells him to go to Scotland Yard to try to get Lukis’s diary. John puts up a token protest, but it’s truly superficial. He readily does as Sherlock says.

2. When Sherlock and John are sitting at the Chinese restaurant across from the Lucky Cat, Sherlock sees the rain-washed phone book outside of Soo Lin’s flat and rushes out of the restaurant to go have a look. John had just started eating, but when Sherlock leaves, he barely hesitates before following him. (Did either of them pay? Lol.)

3. When Sherlock and John get all the books from Van Coon’s and Lukis’s flats delivered to 221B, John stays up all night sorting through them with Sherlock even though he has work at the surgery the next day…and that seems to have been John’s first day on the job. Most people would have been eager to make a good impression on the first day, especially if they’d been out of work for a while, as we know John has been. But John seems to totally forget that he has work until his alarm goes off in the morning—he’s just that caught up in helping Sherlock. (As a quick aside, I love how this reflects ACD canon. In the original stories, Watson is always abandoning his medical practice to go on cases with Holmes, seemingly without any hesitation at all. Here we see the same thing happen, even though John is an employee and isn’t in control of his own practice. It’s like a more extreme version of what happens in ACD canon.)

John does all of this even though he also repeatedly gets annoyed at Sherlock and tries to tell him off for various things. So John clearly feels drawn to Sherlock—perhaps even a bit against his will.

As Sherlock and John keep investigating, Sherlock slips up in his efforts to include John in the investigation at several different points. He leaves John outside when he breaks into Van Coon’s flat, runs away from the community support officers with Bansky Raz outside the National Gallery (which leaves John with the spray paint and to get the ASBO), and leaves John outside again when he breaks into Soo Lin’s flat. It’s not like he’s blameless here. But he really does seem to be making an effort to include John. When Sherlock and John are in Chinatown during their second day of the investigation—which seems to be the longest day of investigating and the one that involves the most running around London—Sherlock builds in a lunch break so that John can eat, even though we know that Sherlock himself never tries to eat on a case. It’s very sweet, really. Sherlock seems totally focused on the case—he keeps talking to John about it while they’re at the restaurant—but even so, he was willing to take the time for him and John to go to a sit-down restaurant together so that John could eat, he didn’t just make John grab something on the go. Granted, he did dash off to break into Soo Lin’s flat when he saw the wet phone book outside, making it so that John didn’t actually get to eat…but still. He’s new to this, okay?

Another thing to note is that when Sherlock breaks into Soo Lin’s flat and then gets attacked by her brother Zhi Zhu there, Sherlock keeps choking out John’s name. Even this early on in their relationship, and when Sherlock hasn’t quite learned how to fully include John in the cases yet, Sherlock’s instinct is to call out to John for help when he’s in danger. Sherlock can probably tell that John is frustrated with him and trying to pull away at least a little, but he still trusts John.

After Zhi Zhu lets him go and leaves, Sherlock goes downstairs and opens the door of the building to talk to John. Sherlock’s voice is all messed up from him having just gotten almost strangled to death, but he tries to hide it from John and insists that he’s fine when John asks if he’s okay. Predictably, Sherlock always wants to appear fully in control in front of John. Basically all episode, he’s showing off for John. I mean, he randomly works in dramatic little speeches like this:

Sherlock: The world’s run on codes and ciphers, John. From the million-pound security system at the bank, to the PIN machine you took exception to, cryptography inhabits our every waking moment. But it’s all computer-generated: electronic codes, electronic ciphering methods. This is different. It’s an ancient device. Modern code-breaking methods won’t unravel it.

Lol. I also love how when Sherlock and John bump into each other in Chinatown, Sherlock immediately starts trying to impress John with how much work he’s done on the case since they split up, telling him “I’ve managed to piece together a picture using scraps of information, credit card bills, receipts.”

Anyway, Sherlock seems to have figured out even at this early point in their friendship just how badly John wants in on the cases. And as a result, over and over again throughout the show, we’ll see that whenever John starts trying to push Sherlock away, Sherlock will try to draw John back to him by getting him involved in a case. TBB is the episode that starts to establish this pattern, and we get perhaps the first example of this when John returns to 221B after his job interview at the surgery.

John goes to interview for the job on the second day of the investigation, the morning after the day when Sherlock and John went to the bank to meet with Sebastian and discovered Van Coon dead in his flat. Even though John is certainly trying to prove himself useful to Sherlock and to carve out a role for himself in Sherlock’s casework, his decision to interview for the job that morning—the day after he’d accepted the retainer from Sebastian in Sherlock’s stead—seems to indicate that John isn’t ready to throw everything in with Sherlock just yet. John isn’t ready to commit himself to just solving cases with Sherlock, and he’s trying to establish a certain amount of independence for himself and a certain amount of separation from Sherlock by getting his own job.

After John comes back from the surgery and walks into the flat, we get this exchange:

John: I went to see about a job at that surgery. Sherlock: How was it? John: (absently) It’s great. She’s great. Sherlock: Who? John: (looking around at him) The job. Sherlock: “She”? John: It.

Sherlock senses trouble, so he immediately tries to direct John’s attention back to the case by asking him to take a look at the article that he’s pulled up on his computer about Lukis getting murdered. Note that Sherlock didn’t lead with this as soon as John walked in. At first, he politely asked about the job. Then when John mentioned a woman and acted interested in her, Sherlock tried to direct John’s attention back to himself by drawing John back into the case. Maybe Sherlock was totally fine with John having his own job, but he doesn’t want John to go out and get himself a girlfriend.

In this instance, Sherlock is successful in drawing John back into the case, and they spend the rest of the day investigating, apparently late into the night. John stays up late with Sherlock the next two nights, too, because of the case. On Day 3, Sherlock and John go to talk to Andy at the museum and then wait there until night falls so that they can find Soo Lin. Then on Day 4, they spend all night looking at the books from Van Coon’s and Lukis’s flats together.

On Day 5, Sherlock spends a busy several hours continuing to look through the books on his own while John goes to work (and falls asleep) at the surgery. When John comes home, Sherlock announces “I need to get some air. We’re going out tonight.” This is actually very sweet? Sherlock has been working diligently on the case by himself all morning, something that we can assume he’s done many times before for many different cases. But by the time John comes home, he seems to have become restless, and he says that he wants to take a break by going out with John in the evening. It seems that after taking John out to restaurants at least a few times, Sherlock has gotten used to being able to go out with John and talk to him, so much so that he wants to do it in the middle of a case instead of just letting the case occupy him completely, as it once might have.

John, however, attempts to slam the brakes on this. After Sherlock suggests that he and John go out for the evening, John turns him down by telling him that he has a date. Sherlock replies, completely unabashedly, “That’s what I was suggesting.” Wow, okay!

John turns this into a joke and Sherlock doesn’t press the matter, but Sherlock actually does look hurt by this, like he actually did intend to suggest that the two of them go on a romantic date together and John rejected him. GAH! Sherlock might respond this way in part because he already did take John out on several dinner dates in February. Like, Sherlock might have actually thought he and John had been dating for the past two months and were just taking things really slowly! Which, honestly, might not have really been all that strange of an assumption if Sherlock has never dated before. Sherlock might have preferred to take things really slowly, so maybe he thought he was doing everything right and things were going really well!

But then John flatly rejects him in a way that demonstrates that John did not think they were dating. And in fact, I think this scene illustrates very well the way that John is trying to pull away from Sherlock emotionally and romantically in TBB.

Here’s the full exchange:

Sherlock: I need to get some air. We’re going out tonight. John: Actually, I’ve got a date. Sherlock: What? John: It’s where two people who like each other go out and have fun. Sherlock: That’s what I was suggesting. John: No it wasn’t…at least I hope not.

Yikes, man. When John hit on Sherlock at Angelo’s in ASIP, Sherlock tried to let John down in truly the kindest and most considerate way possible. The way Sherlock phrased his response (“John, you should know that I consider myself married to my work, and while I’m flattered by your interest, I’m really not looking for any kind of…”) carefully avoided implying that John had done anything wrong or that John was in any way unattractive or uninteresting. Sherlock even said that he was flattered by John’s interest in him.

John’s behavior in this scene, however, is the exact opposite. When John gives Sherlock a look and says “I hope not,” his expression and choice of words directly imply that Sherlock has done something wrong by suggesting that the two of them go out on a date, and that John wouldn’t want to go on a date with Sherlock, anyway. Moreover, by acting as if Sherlock doesn’t know what a date is (come on, John, of course he does), John implies that dating Sherlock is something that he considers entirely outside the realm of possibility because he sees Sherlock as ignorant in a way that makes him unsuited to dating.

I think the disparity in how Sherlock and John each respond when they think the other is asking them out in S1 is meant to reflect their differing levels of comfort with same-sex desire at this point in the narrative. When Sherlock thinks John is hitting on him in ASIP, he responds in a way that shows that he’s uncomfortable with the conversation, but not uncomfortable with the same-sex nature of John’s interest in him. Sherlock’s behavior at Angelo’s doesn’t in any way imply that it would be wrong for John, as another man, to ask him out—quite the opposite. But in TBB, John’s response to what Sherlock said could easily be read that way.

Unfortunately, we’re going to see faux-heterosexual-John-desperately-trying-to-deny-his-attraction-to-Sherlock again. Many times.

Sensing danger again, Sherlock tries to draw John away from Sarah by tricking him into coming to the Black Lotus members’ artistic performance thing that evening. John expressed interest in a woman instead of Sherlock within the context of dating, so Sherlock tries to bring John’s attention back to himself by sneakily drawing him back into the case that evening.

Sherlock’s behavior surrounding everything connected to the Black Lotus members’ performance emphasizes that he wants close companionship with John. Of course, Sherlock wants to go to the performance because he believes that it’s the best way to find the acrobatic assassin who killed Van Coon and Lukis and broke into Soo Lin’s flat. But when John told Sherlock that he had a date with Sarah and was planning to take her to a movie, Sherlock didn’t just let John and Sarah go to the movie while he went to the performance to investigate on his own. Instead, he convinced John to bring Sarah to the performance and didn’t tell John that he planned to crash.

This reveals two things. First, Sherlock really wants John with him while he’s working on the case, as we’ve been seeing all episode. Since Sherlock’s work is incredibly important to him, this in and of itself shows strong attachment to John: Sherlock really wants John involved in the thing that is most important to him. Also, in ASIP, Sherlock told John he considered himself married to his work…and now he seems to want nothing but to involve John in that work as much as possible. Second, Sherlock wants to keep an eye on John and Sarah. He’s jealous, and he doesn’t want the two of them going somewhere alone and where he can’t keep tabs on them.

At the performance venue, Sherlock and John have a short argument where John tries to tell Sherlock that he has things on his mind other than the case. Sherlock asks what could possibly be more important and acts oblivious to John’s intentions. One might read this as evidence that Sherlock was totally focused on the case and didn’t even think about Sarah, but I don’t think that’s right. Instead, I think Sherlock intentionally crashed John’s date and intended to get in the way, but he didn’t realize how upset John would be about this and how interested he was in Sarah.

John is actually remarkably interested in Sarah. They literally just met and he’s actively trying to work a case with Sherlock, but he still really clings to his date with her. John seems desperate for the opportunity to date someone other than Sherlock—mostly, I think, to establish a “safe” distance between him and Sherlock, but perhaps also to prove to himself (and perhaps to Sherlock) that he can date other people.

Anyway, at the gang members’ artistic performance thing, I love how Sherlock lurks right behind John and Sarah almost the whole time and keeps talking to John. He’s so eager to impress John that he just can’t help showing off his knowledge of classic Chinese escapology acts. Cute.

John’s behavior at the performance also demonstrates that as much as he may be trying to prove otherwise, John is far more interested in Sherlock than he is in Sarah. John went to the trouble of bringing Sarah on a date in the middle of an active investigation, but even with Sarah standing right next to him, he keeps turning around to stare at Sherlock. There’s also this wonderful? awful? moment when one of the Chinese performers inserts a long, cylindrical object into another object and John licks his lips and turns around—away from Sarah—to pointedly look at Sherlock. YIKES. I just…. John is really bad at the whole heterosexuality thing. As much as he tries.

(I’m really sorry I can’t provide a gif set for that. I came across one once, but I absolutely lost my mind when I saw it and was so thrown that I fully neglected to hit the like or reblog buttons. And so the gif set was lost to the ether of my tumblr feed. I’ve tried looking for it again, but I haven’t been able to find it. If I ever do, though, I promise I’ll update this with a link.)

So, yeah. John is powerfully drawn to Sherlock and definitely feels sexually attracted to him, but he’s trying to avoid it at this point. I also don’t think that for John, what he feels is really love yet, it seems more to me like attraction. But I think it will become love very, very soon.

Sherlock, John, and Sarah get into a fight with some of the gang members, and then they go directly to Scotland Yard to talk to Dimmock. From the Yard, they go back to 221B together, where Sherlock keeps trying to solve the book code while John awkwardly tries to keep his date with Sarah from collapsing completely. Sherlock is clearly very annoyed at Sarah’s continued presence, and to be honest, that’s fair, especially if he genuinely thought that he and John were dating.

Sherlock steps out of the flat for a few minutes and solves the book code by realizing that the book they need is the London A-Z. But alas, John and Sarah get kidnapped while he’s outside, and Sherlock somehow is so engrossed in the code that he doesn’t notice. After Sherlock rushes back inside the flat and finds them gone, he stands in the sitting room with a look of horrified shock on his face as he reads the graffiti on the windows that he just decoded and now knows means “dead man.”

Sherlock grabs a map of London off his shelves to find the tramway where John and Sarah have been taken, then immediately dashes into a cab to go rescue them. On the way, Sherlock sees the London Eye lit up in pride colors, and it even looks like he stares back at it out of the window as the cab drives by. So in Episode 2, the show has given us a deliberate shot of Sherlock staring at some pride colors on the way to go rescue John, just to remind us that Sherlock is in desperate, powerful gay love with John. Nice.

When Sherlock gets to the Black Lotus’s hideout, he hovers in the shadows for a few moments and gives a dramatic, impressive speech to John, Sarah, General Shan, and all of Shan’s minions. “How would you describe me, John? Resourceful? Dynamic? Enigmatic?” This is Sherlock’s flirting at its finest, honestly. He’s just arrived to save the day, so he takes a moment to remind John of how cool he is. And he sounds so confident when he does it, too! He’s got this! Sure, John ill-advisedly tried to go date a woman, but obviously he loves working on cases with Sherlock, and Sherlock is far more resourceful, dynamic, and enigmatic than Sarah could ever be. He’s even about to save John’s life, paying him back for when he saved Sherlock’s life two months ago! After this, they’re going to go back to dating and they’ll be on the same page about it this time, and it’s going to be GREAT.

Unfortunately, things don’t quite go that way. Sherlock successfully prevents Shan from shooting anyone, but she escapes and Sherlock almost gets choked to death again by one of her minions. John ends up nudging the arrow out of the way so that it hits and kills the minion instead of Sarah. Sherlock takes it upon himself to untie Sarah and comfort her, and the first words out of John’s mouth are to Sarah: “Don’t worry. Next date won’t be like this.”

Ouch. Well, better luck next time, Sherlock.

The next day, Sherlock and John go to Shad Sanderson and John accepts their ₤20,000 check from a very sour Sebastian. At least one part of Sherlock’s initial plan seems to have worked, then. After this, John becomes an integral part of Sherlock’s work and they try to solve almost every case together. (The only case I can think of that they don’t work on together and that Sherlock solves on his own in the rest of S1-S2 is the one that Sherlock harpoons a dead pig for at the start of THOB.) It’s not really clear whether John keeps his locum job at the surgery after this, but if he does, we never see it getting in the way of his casework with Sherlock again in S1-S2. After TBB, John seems to mainly be making his living by working with Sherlock. Even if he’s still picking up shifts at the surgery from time to time, he’s definitely prioritizing casework with Sherlock over finding full-time work as a doctor.

Sherlock and John had breakfast together that morning before they went to the bank, and the episode ends with a short scene that shows them once again having a slow, comfortable breakfast together at 221B (well, before the scene with General Shan and “M” at the very end of the episode). In that last scene between Sherlock and John, they’re both dressed informally, John in a striped t-shirt and Sherlock in one of his dressing gowns, just sharing a morning together and talking about the case they just solved. This gives us another nice illustration of the way that Sherlock and John have started to settle into life together at 221B, sharing time together as best friends and as something a bit more than just flatmates.

So, we’ve seen that throughout TBB, Sherlock is in love with John and his feelings are definitely showing through. Sherlock acts very sweetly towards John in a few ways, and he wants to include him in his casework. We can also catch Sherlock starting to display a bit of jealousy and possessiveness towards John, and he acts hurt when people embarrass him in front of him. Throughout all of this, though, John seems pretty oblivious to Sherlock’s feelings.

If we think about TBB within the wider context of Sherlock’s side of the story in S1, then Sarah and John’s attachment to her seem to serve as something of a wake-up call for Sherlock. It seems that between ASIP and TBB, Sherlock was perhaps content to simply explore his new relationship with John and to take things very slowly, as far as romance goes. He wanted to just spend time with John without pushing anything, just letting the two of them get used to living together as they got to know each other better. He took John out to a few restaurants around London, watched a Bond movie with him when John suggested it, and settled into a new domestic routine with John at the flat. Sherlock didn’t start inviting John along on cases immediately, but when John started complaining about money troubles and Sebastian’s case popped up, Sherlock decided that this case offered an excellent opportunity to see if he and John could form a true partnership as far as the work goes. Even before Sarah showed up, Sherlock seemed to be making an effort, even if it was an uneven one, to include John in the investigation.

Then on only the second day of them working the case together, John came home from his interview with Sarah talking about how great she was. Three days after that, he had a date, and he informed Sherlock—probably rather abruptly and startlingly, from Sherlock’s perspective—that he didn’t think the two of them had been dating. And so, Sherlock had to suddenly accommodate the idea of John having a girlfriend.

From the blogs, we can see that after the events of TBB wrapped up, Sherlock started to feel pretty cranky towards John.

From a conversation that Sherlock had with Mike on his own blog some weeks before, we know that Sherlock started reading John’s blog back in late January or early February, soon after John posted “My new flatmate” on January 31. From what he says to Mike, it seems that Sherlock was charmed by John’s blog at first, but decided to wait a while before telling John that he was reading it. Apparently Sherlock’s resolve broke sometime in late March, because starting on March 23, he started commenting on John’s posts and having conversations with him in the comments. Sherlock only interacted with John’s posts from March at first, though, not the ASIP write-up. He ignored that one at first, even though he must surely have read it if he read and enjoyed “My new flatmate.”

On March 28, John wrote up “The Blind Banker” and Sherlock commented on it. Later that afternoon (going by the timestamps), Sherlock opened up the ASIP post and wrote this: “John, I’ve only just found this post. I’ve glanced over it and honestly, words fail me. What I do is an exact science and should be treated as such. You’ve made the whole experience seem like some kind of romantic adventure. You should have focussed on my analytical reasoning and nothing more.”

Oh, man. So Sherlock has been head-over-heels in love with John for two months now, and he might have even thought they were dating, or at least getting close to it. But now that John has blown up that notion, suddenly Sherlock isn’t quite so charmed by John’s writing any more. We learn in TAB that even several years after this, Sherlock still goes back and rereads John’s early blog posts about the two of them because they make him feel better about himself, so Sherlock can’t actually be all that upset about how John describes him in these posts, even though some of John’s less charitable descriptions must sting a bit. Instead, Sherlock is upset that John made their first case together sound like a “romantic adventure” only to turn around weeks later and act as if he’d never seen it that way at all. I mean, we know that Sherlock also can’t be all that mad that John made the case sound dramatic and didn’t simply portray Sherlock’s methods as an exact science, because Sherlock himself loves to do dramatic, unscientific stuff all the time. Sherlock is angry because he feels that John has essentially been leading him on, by making it seem like he felt something romantic for Sherlock when maybe he never actually did.

Frustrated and sad, Sherlock runs off to Belarus to look into a potential case that turns out to be a dead end, and that he probably could have easily rejected from the relative comfort of his own couch if he’d vetted the potential client a bit more thoroughly. Then “the great game” begins.

(My thanks to @thegildedbee for getting me to think directly about Sarah as a wake-up call, and to LSIT for getting me to think about the blogs more and about how Sherlock might have seen his and John’s relationship pre-Sarah!)

[winterdaphne2]

Deciphering the Romance Arc: Introduction & A Study in Pink

Table of Contents (will be updated as I post!)

Introduction & A Study in Pink (this post) / The Blind Banker / The Great Game

A Scandal in Belgravia / The Hounds of Baskerville / The Reichenbach Fall

Many Happy Returns & The Empty Hearse / The Sign of Three / His Last Vow

The Abominable Bride

Introduction

This meta project is my attempt to sketch out my current interpretation of the romance arc between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock. It’s a TJLC interpretation of the show, in the sense that I believe the show’s writers structured the overall narrative of the show around a love story between Sherlock and John and initially planned for an on-screen, fully actualized romantic relationship between Sherlock and John to be the show’s endgame. My reading attempts to play “the subtext game” by engaging in some of the same types of analysis that you’ll often come across in other TJLC metas.

If you’re new to TJLC (The Johnlock Conspiracy), then welcome! I think this meta should be pretty accessible to people who are new to Sherlock meta or to TJLC. If you’d like some more context, though, a good place to start might be @victorianpining’s first “TJLC Explained” video here.

This is not a compendium of every piece of TJLC evidence, an analysis of every interaction between Sherlock and John, or a compilation of every piece of identifiable queer subtext in the show. I’m also not trying to prove TJLC here, I take it as a given. Instead, I’m basically trying to pull together a lot of my own thoughts on Sherlock and John’s romance arc in one place, and to lay out my interpretation of the romance in a single, chronological narrative. I’ll discuss when I think Sherlock and John each fell in love, how their love for each other impacts some of their most important actions, how Moriarty fits into this as the show’s central antagonist, and various scenes and details that have jumped out at me because they tell us something important about how Sherlock and John are feeling about or responding to each other at different points in time. Sherlock is a romance/mystery hybrid that cleverly uses the conventions of the mystery genre to tell a love story. The romance is the central mystery that stretches across all of the episodes of the show, and so this is my attempt to solve that mystery.

This meta goes up through the end of TAB and I’ll be posting it in parts, with one post per episode. I’d originally also written up a short section on S4 and what I think it means for the show’s overall message if we treat S4 as real and accept it as the ending to the show. However, I’ve recently become curious about EMP Theory (Extended Mind Palace Theory—the idea that everything that happens after Sherlock gets shot in HLV takes place inside his head), so I’m holding off on posting anything substantial about S4 for now. For now, this meta reflects what I think the writers were trying to do with the show up through TAB if we disregard EMP Theory and accept that all of HLV is real. Once I’ve gotten this project out into the world, I’m hoping to spend some more time reading and thinking about EMP Theory so that I can decide whether or not I’m convinced. I might decide to write about S4 after I’ve done that, but I’m not sure yet. No promises!

I feel very confident about some of the conclusions that I’ve drawn here, but other parts of this meta would be better described as theories than as conclusions. In the end, I’m just explaining the reading of the show that makes the most sense to me at the moment and that I personally find the most satisfying. I believe that there are multiple possible readings of Sherlock (especially since the writers ultimately did not stick to the format of the mystery genre by giving us a neat conclusion), and it’s perfectly reasonable for other people to disagree with what I say here. Actually, the fact that this show is complicated enough for lots of Johnlock shippers and TJLC believers to have wildly different interpretations from one another is one of the things that I find most fascinating and fun about Sherlock. So, I see this meta as a snapshot of my current thoughts at this moment in time. I’m sure that as I keep rewatching, reading more meta, and talking to other people about the show, I’ll change my mind about some of this. And I look forward to doing so!

On that note, I love talking to people about the show! If you read any part of this and aren’t convinced, have different interpretations to offer, or have questions, I would love to talk about it with you. Feel free to reblog with your thoughts, leave a reply, send me an ask, whatever. Getting to talk with other people about this is a big part of my motivation for posting this project in the first place, rather than just keeping it to myself.

Thank you so, so much to @thegildedbee, my absolutely wonderful beta reader, who read earlier versions of the sections on ASIP through ASIB and talked about them with me as a part of Fandom Trumps Hate 2025! I’ve had so much fun discussing the show with her, and she’s given me a lot of great ideas and encouragement. Thank you as well to @loudest-subtext-in-tv, who was incredibly supportive after I told her that I was working on this ridiculous project and who helped encourage me to get it over the finish line! We’ve had a lot of fascinating and fun conversations about the show over the past few months, several of which have helped me work through some of what you’ll read here. So I’m grateful to her for that, too.

As I’ve written this, I’ve drawn on many different metas that I’ve found especially helpful for interpreting the show. I’ve tried to cite those when appropriate to give credit where credit is due, and I’ve also tagged some of the folks I cite. (If you don’t want to be tagged, just let me know and I’ll remove the tags. I’m not trying to spam anyone, just trying to say thank you.) I’m especially indebted to metas by @loudest-subtext-in-tv and @asherlockstudy, which have had a particularly strong impact on how I interpret much of the show. An enormous thanks as well to Ariane DeVere for her absolutely amazing episode transcripts and to the many fabulous gif makers whose gifs I will link to throughout this project at opportune moments. And thank you to all the people on tumblr and AO3 who have been thinking and writing about this show for years. You all have given me so much to think about as I’ve worked on this, and it’s been an absolute joy.

A Study in Pink

A Study in Pink is my favorite episode! I love it because it’s where we see Sherlock and John first meet, and we get to see all the reasons why they’re drawn to each other so powerfully.

ASIP establishes several ideas that are incredibly important for the rest of the show. Here I’m going to try to focus on four core ideas. First, from the very first moment when we meet him, Sherlock is immediately portrayed as a character who knows he’s gay and is fully at peace with that side of himself. Second, over the course of ASIP, we see Sherlock express interest in John and then start to fall in love with him. Third, ASIP shows that John is interested in and attracted to Sherlock, but it also implies that John isn’t yet sure how he feels about Sherlock—or perhaps isn’t even fully aware of how he feels about him. And finally, in ASIP Sherlock and John both save each other from suicide or at least suicidal ideation. I’m going to spend this section of the meta discussing each of these ideas in turn, and a few other things more briefly.

First, let’s talk about Sherlock and his sexuality.

When we first meet Sherlock, he’s in the morgue at Bart’s with Molly, beating a corpse. The second scene that he appears in—the lab scene where Sherlock meets John for the first time—also briefly includes Molly. In these first two scenes, the writers deliberately introduced Molly alongside Sherlock to demonstrate that Sherlock is not interested in women romantically.

In the first scene, Molly attempts to ask Sherlock out on a date by asking him if he’d like to “have coffee,” and Sherlock turns her down by briskly giving her his coffee order. Then in the lab scene, Sherlock accepts a cup of coffee from Molly and then promptly turns and walks away from her. In her “Subversion and Sherlock” series, @loudest-subtext-in-tv (who I’m going to call LSIT from here on out) explains that Sherlock’s body language, the choreography of his movements, and the camera work in these two scenes all work together to convey the idea that Sherlock is not interested in women. In the morgue, Sherlock is shown at a distance from Molly and he’s focused on his notes; in the lab, he immediately walks away from her after taking the coffee and only looks back at that part of the room (at John) when Molly has left. These are our first clues that Sherlock is gay—he has absolutely no interest in Molly, and the show creators even visually separate him from her.

Sherlock knew exactly what Molly was trying to do when she tried to ask him out. When Sherlock points out that she’s put on lipstick, he looks at her very carefully, and then when Molly says that she “just refreshed it a bit,” he pulls his head back slowly and almost warily, as if having a moment of comprehension. Sherlock then pointedly turns her down, and the way he does it is so very different from how we’ll later see him turn down John at Angelo’s. Sherlock doesn’t stop to consider Molly’s offer for an instant. Instead, he rejects her in a way that leaves absolutely no room for doubt or compromise, and even suggests that he would never consider saying yes to a date with her.

So from the very beginning, in the very first scenes where we meet Sherlock, the writers have chosen to introduce Sherlock to the audience by showing him unambiguously demonstrate disinterest in a woman and promptly turn down the offer of a date with her. Notably, Molly’s character is original to the BBC show; she isn’t an adaptation of any particular character from the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle. Although Molly becomes more important later on, originally, the whole point of Molly’s character was to show us that Sherlock isn’t interested in women. This is true in these early scenes from ASIP, and Molly is used this way throughout S1.  

In addition to showing us that Sherlock isn’t interested in women, ASIP does a great deal to establish that Sherlock is interested in men and is entirely comfortable with this aspect of himself. Sherlock’s relationship to sex and sexual attraction specifically might be more complicated, as we’ll get hints of in later episodes, but Sherlock always appears to fully understand that he’s into men at least romantically and that he’s totally okay with that. (Personally, I read Sherlock as homoromantic and demisexual, which means that he’s only romantically and aesthetically attracted to men, and he’ll only experience sexual attraction with someone who he already has an emotional bond with.)

We get clear evidence of this from Sherlock’s behavior when other characters assume that he and John might be a couple. When Sherlock and John go to look at 221B together, Mrs. Hudson tells John about the second bedroom upstairs hesitantly, as if she can’t quite tell if Sherlock and John are together. After she’s said this, John glances at Sherlock to see how he’ll react, and Sherlock doesn’t so much as bat an eye. Later on, Sherlock isn’t bothered at all when Angelo assumes that John is his date, and he doesn’t do or say anything to contradict Angelo. Sherlock is totally fine with other people perceiving him as gay, and it doesn’t seem to surprise him.

During the dinner scene at Angelo’s, of course, Sherlock explicitly says that girlfriends aren’t really his area and affirms that he knows it would be perfectly fine for him to have a boyfriend. The dialogue in this scene is extremely careful and serves to give us clear evidence that Sherlock is gay—there’s really no point to this dialogue otherwise. Sherlock specifically repeats the word “girlfriend” back at John when he says “Girlfriend? No, not really my area.” He doesn’t say that “dating” isn’t his area or that “romance” isn’t his area. Then when John brings up the possibility of Sherlock having a boyfriend, Sherlock doesn’t offer any kind of correction until John directly asks him if he actually has a boyfriend. Sherlock even seems a bit puzzled—perhaps even dismayed—that John feels the need to state out loud that it would be fine for Sherlock to have a boyfriend. For Sherlock, this is a total non-issue.

ASIP even suggests that Sherlock is already out to a certain extent. Mrs. Hudson, Angelo, and Mycroft are all introduced as people who have known Sherlock for some time, and all three of them seem to think that Sherlock is gay. Mrs. Hudson and Angelo immediately assume that Sherlock and John are a couple when they see the two of them together. It could be that Mrs. Hudson and Angelo are both just exceptionally open-minded, but they both come to this conclusion so readily that it seems likely that they might have thought Sherlock was gay before John turned up. After all, most people generally assume that a person is straight until they’re given evidence otherwise (as Sherlock himself does with Harry), and this would have been especially true in 2010. So the fact that these characters don’t assume that Sherlock is straight suggests that they have some reason to think he’s gay. Mycroft also makes a joke about Sherlock and John being a couple, saying to John, “Might we be expecting a happy announcement by the end of the week?” when he meets him at the warehouse. Mycroft delivers this comment sarcastically, but it still implies that he believes Sherlock is gay and that John being of romantic interest to Sherlock isn’t outside the realm of possibility. There are a million other things Mycroft could have said to John to be snarky, so by choosing this line for Mycroft, the writers deliberately reinforced the same pattern that we see with Mrs. Hudson and Angelo: the people who already know Sherlock believe he’s gay or wouldn’t be surprised if he were.

ASIP also establishes that whenever someone suggests that Sherlock and John are a couple, Sherlock will never, ever correct them. He doesn’t contradict Mrs. Hudson, and he doesn’t contradict Angelo. John often does correct people, but Sherlock never does. He’s not bothered by this and doesn’t want to correct people, both because he’s comfortable with his own homosexuality and because he likes John and likes being seen as his partner.

Which brings us to Sherlock’s feelings for John!

Sherlock appears to have been attracted to John and interested in him almost from the very first moment when he met him in the lab at Bart’s. When they meet, Sherlock wants to learn more about John, hopes they will become flatmates, and starts trying to make himself seem interesting to John so that he’ll stick around. Although this starts out as just interest, I think Sherlock starts to fall in love with John in earnest by the end of the episode. My thoughts on this are influenced by both the gay unaired pilot and by the final aired version of ASIP. I think reading these two versions alongside each other can be instructive, because noting what stayed the same and what changed between the unaired and the final versions can help us discern some of the writers’ intentions for ASIP.

When John and Mike walk into the lab at Bart’s where Sherlock is working, Sherlock looks up from what he’s doing and looks directly at John. From that moment on, I think nearly everything about Sherlock’s behavior towards John in ASIP demonstrates that he’s interested in him, wants to learn more about him, and wants him to stick around.

Right after John and Mike walk in, Sherlock asks to borrow Mike’s phone. John then lends Sherlock his instead, and Sherlock asks him “Afghanistan or Iraq?” We later learn that Sherlock deduced a great deal about John just from looking at him, and even more from borrowing his phone. This makes me suspect that Sherlock asked to borrow Mike’s phone already knowing that Mike wouldn’t have it on him and hoping that John might offer his. As @221behavior has pointed out, Sherlock’s pretense for asking to borrow Mike’s phone was that there was no signal on his, but Sherlock never has any issues with cell service inside the labs in Bart’s ever again. We see him text other people from inside Bart’s in both TGG and TRF, which suggests that he might have been lying about the lack of a signal in ASIP.

For Sherlock, borrowing John’s phone served at least three purposes. First, it gave him the chance to deduce John from his phone, and therefore learn even more about him. Second, it gave him an opportunity to try to impress John with his deductions before winking and bowing out of the lab with a flourish. And finally, as my lovely beta reader @thegildedbee pointed out to me, it also gave Sherlock the opportunity to leave a few texts on John’s phone that he knew John would look at later, which lets him portray himself as mysterious and intriguing.

After he’s borrowed the phone, Sherlock tells John that potential flatmates should know the worst about each other. To me, Sherlock’s behavior during this part of the conversation seems more like that of someone displaying interest in a potential romantic partner than someone interested in a potential flatmate. First, Sherlock totally doesn’t tell John the worst things about living with him. He says “I play the violin when I’m thinking, sometimes I don’t talk for days on end. Would that bother you?” not “I will regularly keep human body parts in the fridge.” Sherlock is purposely self-censoring a bit to try to avoid scaring John off! This might be consistent with someone looking for a flatmate, but then Sherlock does something that I think is especially telling: he doesn’t ask about John’s annoying habits. He doesn’t feel a need to know them, because he’s already interested in John and wants to get to know him better. This strikes me as the behavior of someone who’s interested in someone romantically more than someone genuinely just looking for a person they’d be compatible to live with. Sherlock has already seen something in John that he’s drawn to.

I love how during the lab scene, we also get not one, not two, but five shots of Mike giving Sherlock and John happy, knowing, and slightly smug smiles. Mike is totally thinking, “I am so good at setting people up. These two are going to love each other.” Indeed, Mike. Indeed.

After the lab scene, Sherlock is visibly nervous around John in their next few scenes together. He’s clearly nervous when he meets John at 221B to have him look at the flat. He really wants John to like the flat and move in with him! Just look at Sherlock’s expression as he lets John into the sitting room and the way he carefully hovers nearby, waiting for John’s reaction. When John implies that the flat is messy, Sherlock starts anxiously trying to tidy it up.

During the taxi ride to the crime scene in Brixton, Sherlock looks calm and aloof when he’s showing off for John with his deductions. But after John compliments him, Sherlock looks puzzled and touched. After the “What do people normally say?” / “Piss off” exchange, there’s this cute little moment where Sherlock nervously looks away from John and out the window: fantastic gif set of this here. Just watch Sherlock’s face throughout this scene. Sherlock is interested in John, but he’s shy!

After Sherlock and John inspect Jennifer Wilson’s body at the abandoned house in Brixton, Sherlock runs off on his own to search for her pink case—he’s used to working on his own, so stopping to wait for John and explain everything to him doesn’t come naturally to Sherlock yet. But once he’s found the case and has brought it back to 221B, Sherlock wants to invite John to participate in the case again, and he wants to have the chance to tell John about his progress so far. So, Sherlock texts him: “Baker Street. Come at once if convenient. SH.” When John doesn’t respond immediately, Sherlock double-messages him, like he’s anxiously texting his crush, because he is: “If inconvenient, come anyway. SH.” Cute.

After John arrives at Baker Street, Sherlock asks to borrow John’s phone, pointlessly cuddles John’s heart phone for a moment before handing it back to him, and asks John to send a text. Then Sherlock explains his progress on the case and invites John to dinner.

I love that Sherlock called ahead to the restaurant to reserve a table—Billy the waiter removes a little “Reserved” sign as they sit down, and Billy and Angelo both act like they were expecting Sherlock and a guest. We don’t see Sherlock call ahead, so clearly he did this before John showed up at Baker Street. So Sherlock did not text John and ask him to come all the way across London just to send a text—he asked John to come over so that he could invite him out to dinner. Sherlock totally treated their evening together as a date, even if he didn’t say as much to John.

When Sherlock and John get back to 221B from Angelo’s, John asks what they were doing there if catching the murderer was such a long shot. After a pause, Sherlock says a little awkwardly, “Oh, just passing the time.” Read: “I just wanted to hang out with you.” Again, cute. Gif set here.

When Sherlock and John are in the downstairs hallway of 221B catching their breath, Sherlock’s behavior is very similar to how he acted in the cab on the way to Brixton. He pretends to be confident when he calls out to Mrs. Hudson that John is going to move in. But when John turns away to answer the door and takes his cane from Angelo, Sherlock turns his head and blows out a little breath in a way that shows his nerves. Sherlock really, really wants John to like him and to stick around.

(gif from here)

Once they go up to the flat, Sherlock is obviously embarrassed and angry about the pretend drugs bust. This, like so much of Sherlock’s behavior throughout the entire show, is all about John. From Lestrade’s behavior and dialogue in this scene, I think it’s safe to assume that Lestrade already knows Sherlock has used in the past. From the scene in Brixton, we’ve also already learned that Sherlock knows most of the officers on the force don’t like him and isn’t all that bothered by it (except for the fact that Anderson in particular really gets under his skin). Based on this, it seems unlikely that Sherlock would be embarrassed by the idea that Lestrade and his colleagues suspect he’s used before. Instead, Sherlock’s angry reaction comes from the fact that he really, really wants John to stay. He freaks out a bit in this scene because he’s worried that John will lose interest in him if he thinks he’s a drug user. Perhaps Sherlock is especially anxious about this because he already knows that John has a tense relationship with his sister, in no small part because she has a substance abuse problem.

So, Sherlock’s nervous behavior around John throughout the episode indicates that he’s interested in John. Moreover, it’s significant that Sherlock makes a meaningful effort to include John in the case in ASIP. He slips up in Brixton by leaving John at the crime scene, and of course he also leaves 221B with Jeff Hope without telling John about it. But before that, Sherlock invited John along with him to investigate twice, and he sometimes (although not always) pauses to explain things to John and to answer his questions. Over and over again in S1, we’ll see that Sherlock doesn’t do this for anyone else. Moreover, Sally, Mycroft, and Lestrade all make comments to John that suggest that Sherlock has never invited anyone else along to investigate with him before, and that he doesn’t usually open up to other people. Sally: “He doesn’t have friends. So who are you?” Mycroft: “You’ve met him. How many friends do you imagine he has?” John: “You know him better than I do.” / Lestrade: “I’ve known him for five years and no, I don’t.” Clearly, for Sherlock, there’s something different about John.

In addition, when Angelo brings John his cane and John realizes that his limp is totally gone, we see that Sherlock feels genuine warmth and joy when he’s able to make things better for John. Sherlock watches the exchange between John and Angelo with such a warm, genuine smile on his face; he wants John around and enjoys helping him. (LSIT pointed this out in her reading of ASIP here.)

(gif from here)

thegildedbee also made a nice observation about this moment while beta reading this for me. If Sherlock just wanted to show off, then he could have just told John that he wasn’t using his cane anymore. But Sherlock doesn’t do that. Instead, he texts Angelo and asks him to bring the cane over to 221B, so Angelo is the one who hands it to John. For Sherlock, the moment where he proves that John’s limp was psychosomatic and is gone now isn’t about showing off for John, it’s about doing something nice for him.

This is excellent evidence of Sherlock’s deeply caring nature, which we’ll see again and again throughout the show. For now, I think it’s also a lovely part of ASIP because it shows that Sherlock is interested in John for good reasons. Sherlock wants to be someone who can be good for John. He’s not looking for a relationship that is transactional or one-sided, and he’s not just looking for an assistant. Instead, Sherlock shows signs of wanting to begin a genuinely caring and giving relationship with John.

If you’re with me so far, then you’re probably asking something like this: If Sherlock is so interested in John, then why did he tell him that he’s married to his work and isn’t looking for a relationship during the dinner scene at Angelo’s? Basically, I think that in the moment, Sherlock felt that John was coming onto him too fast and he panicked a bit and tried to slow things down.

To me, this actually makes a ton of sense. Remember, Sherlock and John have just met and they don’t know each other very well yet. And although Sherlock has friends and acquaintances who like him (Mike, Mrs. Hudson, Angelo), it seems that he doesn’t usually open up to other people very much, and especially not very quickly. Lestrade even tells John that he’s known Sherlock for five years but doesn’t think he knows Sherlock any better than John does after having just met him the day before. So although Sherlock was interested in John almost immediately, by the time of the dinner scene he didn’t feel ready to make his romantic interest clear. Also, being interested in someone isn’t the same thing as being sure that you’re into them. When he invited John to dinner, I think Sherlock was waiting to see what more he could learn about John and where things would go before he thought seriously about making a move. So when John seems to start flirting with him, it’s not unreasonable for Sherlock to feel a bit nervous about it.

I also think it’s very unlikely that Sherlock has ever been in a serious romantic relationship before. Throughout ASIP, Sherlock is portrayed as something of a loner. Mrs. Hudson and Angelo clearly adore him, but we don’t get the sense that he has a lot of friends closer to his own age, or even that he’s ever expended much effort to make any. In ASIB, we learn that Sherlock hasn’t had sex before. Given all of that, it seems unlikely that Sherlock has ever had a long-term boyfriend, so it seems perfectly natural that he would get nervous and try to retreat a bit when John tries to move things along more quickly than Sherlock feels ready for.

I mean, just watch Sherlock’s face before he lets John down in the most tactful and kindest way imaginable. He looks so nervous, and there are a few seconds when he visibly seems to be considering what John has just said, its implications, and what he should say in response. He’s not quite his usual, confident self in this moment—this is a moment where he looks a bit more vulnerable because he’s not quite sure how to proceed at first and he wants to get it right.

Sherlock gently lets John down by saying “I think you should know that I consider myself married to my work, and while I’m flattered by your interest, I’m really not looking for any…,” at which point John interrupts to quickly insist that he wasn’t asking him out. Even before John says anything, though, Sherlock’s voice gets noticeably quiet and unsure at the end as he trails off. Again, he’s shy! This might also clue us into the fact that Sherlock isn’t being entirely truthful about being married to his work and uninterested in romance—Sherlock himself doesn’t appear totally confident in this statement. His delivery isn’t at all like the way he confidently asserted “I know it’s fine” when affirming that he knew it was fine to have a boyfriend just a moment before.

I think it’s interesting that this is actually a change from the unaired pilot. In the unaired pilot, Sherlock said “I’m really not looking for any kind of—” before getting interrupted by John, and he placed a very forceful emphasis on the word “any.” When you watch the unaired pilot and the aired version of ASIP back-to-back, it’s clear that in the aired version, the creators made Sherlock not only much cooler on the exterior, but also much more hesitant and nervous towards John. They seem to have intentionally changed this aspect of Sherlock’s characterization because they wanted to set the show up for a slow burn romance arc. (More on that in just a bit.) So anyway, the point is that Sherlock turned John down very forcefully in the dinner scene in the unaired pilot, but in the aired version, he comes across as much more nervous around John and far less confident in his decision to turn him down. Again, Sherlock really is interested in him, but he’s a bit nervous and shy, because he hasn’t really done this before!

In my opinion, the scene in the car park at the very end of ASIP shows us the moment when Sherlock starts to fall in love with John. This is when his interest turns into something more.

The key moment comes when Sherlock is talking to Lestrade about the shooter who killed the cabbie. During his conversation with Lestrade, Sherlock appears very composed at first and confidently begins a string of deductions while Lestrade listens attentively. Sherlock describes the shooter as a crack shot who is acclimatized to violence, but who also has strong moral principles. Then as Sherlock says “nerves of steel” in a slightly slower, more breathy voice, his eyes find John across the car park, and he breaks off mid-sentence as his expression changes. A small frown appears on Sherlock’s face as he looks at John. Looking extremely distracted, Sherlock then tells Lestrade to ignore everything he just said. He manages to shake Lestrade off and immediately walks over to John to talk. You can see a lot of this in this gif set.

Figuring out that John was the shooter should have been an incredibly easy deduction for Sherlock with all the information that he had at that point. And Sherlock had been sitting outside the crime scene for at least some amount of time by then, since all the police and other emergency response staff had time to show up and to keep putting a shock blanket on him. I don’t think it would have taken Sherlock nearly as much time to figure out that it was John as it took him to explain the details to Lestrade out loud, so I think the change in Sherlock’s expression right around “nerves of steel” reveals something other than his realization that John shot the cabbie. Sherlock already knew that. Instead, this is the moment when Sherlock starts to fall for John—and just as importantly, Sherlock immediately recognizes what he feels. His moment of confusion, the break in his composure, the little crease that appears between his eyebrows, and his distraction as he walks over to John are all evidence that Sherlock is quickly processing his feelings and attempting to compose himself again before he talks to John.

Lestrade sees right through Sherlock and gives him a very knowing smile behind his back as he walks over to John, which is honestly super cute.

(gif from here)

Lestrade is such a proud dad to Sherlock throughout the show. I love that about him.

Right after shaking off Lestrade, Sherlock flirts with John fairly openly. He seems more comfortable around him now, but also a bit excited, happy, and nervous as he asks John to dinner. I don’t think John recognizes what’s happened here and how Sherlock might see their dinner date, but I definitely think Sherlock does! Sherlock knows he’s starting to fall in love with John, so he purposely asks him out.

They made the flirtatiousness of this scene even more open in the unaired pilot. Honestly, the version from the unaired pilot is one of my favorite scenes in the entire show, if not my favorite. In the pilot it’s just so obvious that Sherlock and John are both falling for each other here. Check out this absolutely fantastic gif set from @darlingbenny. Their nervous excitement is so palpable and beautiful. There’s their slowly spreading smiles, and the fact that they both turn away from each other while smiling at the same moment. Then Sherlock nervously bites his lower lip and looks down to steel himself before he looks back up at John and asks hopefully, “Dinner?”

I mean. Sherlock’s face in this scene is absolutely the face of someone asking their crush out.

(gifs from here)

The creators chose to tone this scene down in the aired version of ASIP to make what was going on a little less obvious. In the aired version, this moment happens much faster and our view of Sherlock’s and John’s faces isn’t nearly as clear. Instead of seeing each of their faces full-on so that we can see their full expressions, we see them both in profile. The lighting is also significantly darker. But Sherlock’s genuine smile, the short moment when he looks away, his little pause before asking John to dinner, the nervous bite of his lower lip, and his hopeful request are all still there. Gifs here.

I think this indicates that the writers decided to essentially keep the broad contours of Sherlock’s side of the story the same between the two versions of ASIP. In both versions, we’re meant to understand that Sherlock was immediately attracted to John and then started to fall for him in earnest by the end of the episode. The writers probably decided that they needed to change this ending scene, though, so that they could build Sherlock and John’s romance arc more gradually. The ending scene in the unaired pilot is lovely, but it doesn’t give us the same slow burn that the aired version of ASIP sets up and that S1-S2 then deliver. If they’d stuck with the tone of the unaired pilot, this would have been a very different show, to put it mildly!

So Sherlock falls in love first. And it’s not hard to see why Sherlock adores John almost instantly and then falls for him hard by the end of the episode. Throughout their interactions in ASIP, John acts interested in Sherlock and his work, shows that he both gets and enjoys Sherlock’s dark and quirky sense of humor, and praises Sherlock for abilities that Sherlock clearly sees as core to who he is, but that many of the other people he regularly interacts with either denigrate or dismiss. When Sherlock and John examine Jennifer Wilson’s body in Brixton, Sherlock sees that John is an independent thinker who isn’t intimidated by him and who is willing to offer his own ideas, as 221behavior has explained. Then when Sherlock realized that John shot the cabbie, he would have understood that John had dashed across London as soon as he learned that Sherlock was in danger and performed an incredibly impressive feat of marksmanship in order to save Sherlock’s life. Moreover, in this Brit-picking post about gun laws in the UK, @7-percent points out that John’s gun is super, super illegal and that John could have faced anywhere from fifteen to thirty years in prison for what he did that night. Sherlock would have known all of this, so he understood the significance of the risk that John took for him. Even better for Sherlock, John doesn’t even seem particularly ruffled by this. He’s totally ready to climb on board Sherlock’s dangerous lifestyle, and his actions that night also give Sherlock a signal that his moral compass aligns fairly closely with Sherlock’s own. So there’s a lot for Sherlock to like about John! Overall, Sherlock probably thinks that John might be someone he can truly be himself around, and that John might even like him for it. Sherlock also smiles at John when John calls him an idiot in the car park, so Sherlock seems to really like that John is willing to both praise him and to call him out on his bullshit. On top of all this, we later learn in S3 that Sherlock believes John is physically beautiful. So, Sherlock falls in love. And from here on out, he has it bad.

Lately, I’ve been having some lovely conversations with LSIT about Sherlock’s character and what we know about him before the start of the show. And at the start of her Sherlock 2.0 Reading, LSIT writes this: “deep down Sherlock longs for romance and he knows it.” That line has really stayed with me ever since I first read it. That’s it, that’s who Sherlock is in just a few words. Throughout the rest of the show, we’ll see that Sherlock is deeply romantic. Twice in the show, in TEH and TST, Sherlock implies that he believes in the concept of “the one.” (In TEH, he says to the girl who was getting catfished, “And you really thought he was the one, didn’t you? The love of your life?” Then in TST, he says to Lestrade about the woman he has a date with, “Trust me, though, she’s not right for you. She’s not the one.”) In TSOT, Sherlock gives an incredibly romantic speech to John at his wedding. And in TAB, we see that Sherlock has this insane, over-the-top romantic imagination (just one great example of that here).

But before the start of the show, Sherlock seems very much alone. He probably feels that he’s too weird and off-putting to form close friendships with other people, and it’s probably hard for him to even find people who he’d like to get to know better in the first place, because his mind just moves too quickly. Everyone else just seems too boring or too superficial to be worth getting to know on a deeper level. Sherlock has probably never had a serious romantic relationship before, and although he longs for romance desperately, he likely fears that he will never find “the one.”

Then in walks John. And John is perfect for Sherlock.

So. What about John’s side of the story in ASIP?

I think John was immediately intrigued by Sherlock when he met him, and he feels a powerful attraction to Sherlock throughout the episode. However, the writers seem to have intentionally made the romantic nature of John’s attraction to Sherlock slightly more ambiguous in the aired version of ASIP than in the unaired pilot.

John is clearly drawn to Sherlock after Bart’s. Instead of being put off by Sherlock’s deductions about him in the lab, John is impressed. He goes home, googles Sherlock, and then types up a little blog post about how “charming” Sherlock was. Sherlock’s behavior might have come across as abrasive to anyone else, but John finds him fascinating, and he shows up right on time the next day to meet him at 221B so that he can learn more about him. Mycroft is also correct when he says that John is very loyal to Sherlock very quickly. Even at the crime scene in Brixton (before John encounters Mycroft), when Sally tries to tell John to stay away from Sherlock, John’s expression immediately becomes tense and defiant as he listens to her. Evidently, John is much more willing to trust Sherlock than to trust Sally. John then shows his loyalty to Sherlock even more clearly when he turns down Mycroft’s offer of money to spy on Sherlock and doesn’t let Mycroft intimidate him and scare him away. John is intrigued enough by Sherlock that he wants to figure him out for himself, and he trusts his own ability to read Sherlock rather than just listening to what other people say about him.

John also gets Sherlock’s quirky sense of humor right from the first, and he clearly shares it. (This is one of the many things that I love about Sherlock and John together.) For example, when John goes back to 221B after meeting Mycroft, he’s obviously annoyed that Sherlock wants him to text for him instead of getting up off the sofa to do it himself. But when Sherlock says it’s a pity that John didn’t take the money from Mycroft because they could have split it, John smiles genuinely. Sherlock’s joke very easily breaks through his annoyance.

(gif from here)

Shortly afterwards, John also laughs a little after Sherlock’s joke about the skull attracting attention when he talks out loud to help him think. John really likes this part of Sherlock’s personality.

After the dinner scene at Angelo’s, John loves chasing after the cab with Sherlock and giggles right alongside him in the entryway at Baker Street. Right after that, John defends Sherlock in front of Lestrade and the other police officers during the fake drugs bust. And of course, John rushes out of 221B to save Sherlock when he locates Jennifer Wilson’s phone and realizes that Sherlock went with the cabbie—then he even shoots the cabbie to save Sherlock’s life! All of this demonstrates that John is strongly attracted to Sherlock in some way and that he’s willing to take significant risks with and for Sherlock almost immediately.

In the unaired pilot, I think the writers made John’s attraction to Sherlock obviously romantic (and sexual, especially in the dinner scene). John’s facial expressions during the ending scene strongly suggest that they initially intended to show John starting to fall in love by the end of ASIP, just as Sherlock does. Just look at John’s face here, especially in the third gif.

To me, though, things seem a bit different and a bit more ambiguous in the aired version.

In part, this is because of how the writers chose to heighten our awareness of John’s difficulty in readjusting to civilian life in the aired version. In comparison to the unaired pilot, in the aired version John is portrayed as more depressed and more alienated from other people. First, the aired version starts with John’s intense nightmare about Afghanistan, which isn’t shown in the unaired pilot. Then instead of sharing a leisurely and friendly lunch with Mike as he does in the unaired pilot, John just gets coffee with Mike and awkwardly sits next to him on a park bench; the way John interacts with Mike is decidedly less friendly and less personal in the aired version.

When John meets Sherlock, Sherlock immediately offers John a way out of his depression by providing him with the dangerous and exciting lifestyle that Mycroft tells us John craves…in a scene that doesn’t appear in the unaired pilot at all. While we might infer from the unaired version that John’s longing for a dangerous lifestyle is one of the reasons why he’s drawn to Sherlock, in the aired version we’re explicitly told that this is so. In the aired version of ASIP, then, it’s more obvious that Sherlock offers John something that John wants and that isn’t necessarily romantic. That certainly doesn’t foreclose the possibility of romantic attraction, but it does indicate that the writers wanted to make John’s side of the story a bit more nuanced and complicated.

Ultimately, I think that in ASIP, John is interested in Sherlock romantically and sexually, but his interest hasn’t really developed in anything more yet. He hasn’t yet started to truly fall in love—or if he has, he hasn’t quite worked that out for himself, yet.

As I’ve been saying, there’s a lot for John to like about Sherlock. John thinks that Sherlock is charming and funny, he’s absolutely amazed by Sherlock’s abilities as a detective, and he loves working on the serial suicides case with him. John also probably realizes early on that Sherlock is quite similar to himself in a lot of ways—he’s not someone who can be satisfied with ordinary life, he craves adventure and danger. John might also even feel a bit flattered that Sherlock decides to welcome him into his world—to see the battlefield with him—when Sherlock so clearly doesn’t do this for anyone else. Furthermore, John’s behavior at Angelo’s demonstrates that John finds Sherlock sexually attractive. But at Angelo’s, after John tries to feel Sherlock out a bit, John thinks he gets a pretty clear rejection from Sherlock. After that, John backs down and tries to keep things strictly platonic between the two of them. After a few more months of living with Sherlock, that will start to become harder and harder for John as his romantic interest in Sherlock develops into something far more and he starts to truly fall in love. But I think that for now, in ASIP, John isn’t quite there yet.

Let’s start by talking about John’s behavior at Angelo’s. John deliberately brings up the topic of girlfriends and boyfriends and directly asks Sherlock if he has a girlfriend. After Sherlock’s very gay response of “Girlfriend? No, not really my area,” John asks Sherlock if he has a boyfriend twice, once to ask the question, and then again a second time after he thinks that Sherlock didn’t give him a direct answer. Clearly, John really wants to know. When Sherlock says no after the second ask, John licks his lips while staring at Sherlock and says “Right, okay, you’re unattached, like me. Fine, good.” This freaks Sherlock out a bit, so John backs down and tries to reassure Sherlock by saying “No, I’m not asking—no. I’m just saying, it’s all fine.” Gifs of most of this here.

John’s behavior in this scene provides one of our early clues that John is attracted to men and aware of it. John deliberately tries to figure out if Sherlock has a partner and could be gay, and he responds to learning that Sherlock is single and probably interested in men by telling Sherlock that he is also single. Okay. So John is trying to feel Sherlock out. Then when Sherlock indicates that he’s uncomfortable with where this conversation has headed, John is very respectful of Sherlock’s boundaries and backs down. Notably, however, John does so in a way that intentionally leaves his own sexuality unclear. Although John will repeatedly insist that he and Sherlock aren’t a couple and that he isn’t gay throughout the rest of the show, John will never actually say that he’s not bisexual or not attracted to Sherlock. Moreover, as LSIT has pointed out, John will never knowingly say “I’m not gay” within earshot of Sherlock. John doesn’t want Sherlock to think that he could never be interested in him and he always phrases things to leave that door open. The dinner scene in ASIP establishes this pattern early on.

Still, I think the nature of John’s feelings for Sherlock is left a bit ambiguous at this point. There’s some stuff about the Angelo’s scene that’s kind of weird as far as John’s behavior goes. In this scene, it actually takes John a minute to compute what Sherlock implied when he said “Girlfriend? No, not really my area.” There’s a notable pause before John says “oh, right” in a tone of dawning comprehension and asks “Do you have a boyfriend?” (You can kind of see the pause in this gif set, but it’s more obvious in the actual episode.) It apparently took John a minute to figure out that Sherlock is gay, even right after he’d just seen not one, but two people who already know Sherlock assume that he himself is Sherlock’s boyfriend, and after he’s heard Mycroft’s comment at the warehouse. This implies that John didn’t actually start the conversation at Angelo’s with the intention of figuring out whether or not Sherlock is gay.

Right after that slip-up, John’s lip lick seems so out of place—and Sherlock certainly thinks it is, which is part of why he gets so alarmed—that I think it could have been subconscious on John’s part. Given that, it’s possible that John sort of let things run away from him a bit in this scene—he might not have meant to hit on Sherlock quite so openly. It could be that John knew exactly what he was doing, but it could also be that he felt attracted to Sherlock, but hadn’t fully worked that out for himself yet or paused to think about how he felt.

Either way, the lip lick and the way John stares at Sherlock in that moment certainly suggest sexual attraction. And after this scene, John feels that he’s received a clear rejection from Sherlock, so he decides to back down and just keep getting to know Sherlock as a friend.

Related to all of this, I think it’s time to talk about John’s relationship to his sexuality.

John’s behavior at Angelo’s indicates that John is attracted to men, and he’s probably well aware of that. Importantly, though, other pieces of evidence from the show suggest that John has never had sex with a man before.

Early on, we learn that no one in John’s immediate circle knows that he’s attracted to men. Harry and the other people who comment on John’s first blog post about Sherlock are surprised when they think that John’s interest in Sherlock comes across as gay. At the very least, this tells us that John has never had a boyfriend who he was “out” with before: he’s closeted. But going beyond that, TSOT gives us clues that John has never had a sexual encounter with a man, either. First, John and Sholto’s interactions in that episode heavily imply that John and Sholto had feelings for each other when they were in the army, but never acted on them. That fits very well with the idea that John has never been with a man before. Second, in the mind palace scene where Sherlock is trying to work out how the women who work for Sholto are connected to each other, Sherlock asks “Do you have a secret you’ve never told anyone?” and John suddenly shows up to anxiously ask, “What d’you mean?” John’s secret is that he’s bisexual/attracted to men, and the fact that he’s never told anyone indicates that he’s never acted on his attraction to men. He’s always kept his bisexuality a secret.

Together, I think these clues indicate that John has long known that he’s attracted to men, but he’s never actually dated or slept with a man before. Many thanks to LSIT for talking this through with me! Realizing that John has probably never had sex with a man before has had a big impact on how I see his relationship to his sexuality and his reticence about admitting his same-sex attraction.

On that note, to my eye, ASIP offers some of our first clues that John isn’t entirely comfortable with his attraction to men. I think this is in large part due to the fact that John hasn’t been with a man before. John’s attraction to men is a side of himself that he would like to explore more, but it’s one that he doesn’t feel fully comfortable with yet because he hasn’t ever been in a position where he’s felt safe exploring it. For these reasons, John is still closeted, and he’s uncomfortable being perceived as queer.

As I’ll talk about later on, in ASIB we get clues that John was raised in a homophobic household. John’s father in particular was very homophobic, and as a result, John was hesitant to act on his attraction to men when he was younger. After that, John joined the army. There was some kind of attraction between him and Sholto, but the army wasn’t a safe or accepting place for homosexual relationships, either, so John wasn’t out then and didn’t pursue anything with Sholto. (And Sholto was his commanding officer, anyway—it would have been messy and dangerous for that reason, too.) John’s willingness to hit on Sherlock at Angelo’s suggests that by the time he gets back to London, John might be starting to feel like it’s safe for him to be a bit more open about his attraction to men, and to perhaps begin pursuing same-sex relationships. But John has never come out before, and that’s still something that he’ll approach with hesitancy.

In ASIP, John is still in the closet, and he’s quick to correct other people who assume that he and Sherlock are a couple. When Mrs. Hudson makes her comment about two bedrooms, John says “Of course we’ll be needing two” in a puzzled voice, as if thinking otherwise would never have even occurred to him. John’s tone with Angelo is also rather sharp when he insists that he’s not Sherlock’s date. Both of these moments happen before Sherlock’s apparent rejection of John during the dinner scene at Angelo’s, so John doesn’t yet have Sherlock’s rejection as a reason to be upset about people noticing that he’s attracted to Sherlock. I think this indicates that John doesn’t think of himself as someone who presents as queer, and he’s a bit surprised and uncomfortable when other people seem to clock it so quickly.

During the scene at Angelo’s, John quickly backs down when Sherlock tries to let him down gently. While it’s great that John shows respect for Sherlock’s boundaries, John also appears quite uncomfortable as the conversation ends. After John insists that “It’s all fine” and Sherlock says “Good. Thank you” and looks away, John looks thoroughly startled, as if he’s not quite sure what just happened—and might be a bit worried about how much he just let on.

In ASIP, we also learn that John has a queer sister who is out, but who John doesn’t get along with. A lot of fans have explained that Harry is a mirror for John, and it’s very likely that John doesn’t get along with Harry because he sees too much of himself in her. Although it’s certainly true that John doesn’t approve of Harry’s drinking, I think it’s also possible that the tension between John and Harry is meant to indicate that John isn’t fully at peace with his sexuality. For John, Harry’s struggles in her marriage and her drinking might represent the apparent dangers of trying to live one’s life out. We never meet Harry on screen, and the only times we ever see John interact with her are on his blog. It’s only once John has overcome his discomfort with his sexuality that he’ll be able to truly reconcile with Harry and we might meet her on the show.

It’s interesting to me that in one of the very first scenes in ASIP, Mike suggests to John that he reach out to Harry for help and John immediately dismisses the idea: “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.” Perhaps subtextually, we could read this as Mike suggesting to John that things could be better for him if he were more in touch with the queer side of himself and less guarded against it—an idea that John is very quick, at this early stage of his character development, to dismiss. Mike then suggests that John get a flatmate, which leads John to Sherlock. For John, Sherlock is the solution to his lingering internal conflict over his sexuality. Falling in love with Sherlock will offer John a way to gradually come to terms with his own queerness and to finally let his barriers down.

Throughout the show, other characters—Sherlock, Mycroft, and even Irene—will nudge John in the direction of facing and accepting his queerness. One of John’s tasks as a character is to finally do so. I really like the idea that this moment with Mike might establish that pattern early on. I’ll also note that this comment from Mike isn’t in the unaired pilot; in the unaired version, Mike goes straight to suggesting a flatshare. Adding a mention of Harry to this scene is a small change that the writers might have made to slip in more clues that John isn’t entirely comfortable with his sexuality.

So, to put all of this together. I think that at the start of the show, John is aware that he’s attracted to men and he’d like to be able to act on that, but it’s never felt safe for him to do so and he’s still a bit nervous about it. Especially because he’s never been with a man, John isn’t used to thinking of himself as gay or bi, and he’s not comfortable being perceived that way by other people. He’s more uncomfortable with his queer sexuality than Sherlock is, because Sherlock is truly chill with it. But John is accepting of queerness in others, and I think that whatever discomfort he experiences is probably relatively mild.

In later episodes, once John starts to realize that he’s falling for Sherlock, John becomes especially nervous about being perceived as queer because he doesn’t want Sherlock to realize that he’s in love with him. John doesn’t think that Sherlock returns his feelings, so for John, it’s humiliating to have other people constantly clocking his same-sex attraction when that attraction is focused on Sherlock and when John hasn’t been able to act on it, despite wanting to. As Sherlock and John’s friendship strengthens, however, John remains hopeful about Sherlock and does want something more with him. John can never truly give up on the idea of having romance with Sherlock, even if he sometimes wishes he could.

As the show unfolds, falling in love with Sherlock prompts John to gradually overcome whatever hesitance about his sexuality he may have had before. Falling in love with Sherlock makes John much more comfortable with his queer sexuality, so that he will be able to share this side of himself with the person he’s meant to be with. To the extent that John remains uncomfortable with being seen as gay or bi in later episodes, it’s probably because his queer sexuality is so tied up with his feelings for Sherlock. For a long time, John feels deeply uncomfortable with his love for Sherlock because he fears that Sherlock will never love him back. When Sherlock and John finally get together, though, all of that will go away.

To conclude this part for now, I’m not sure that John really knows what he’s feeling as early as ASIP, or that he stops to examine his feelings all that closely during his first two heady days of knowing Sherlock. He certainly experiences a powerful draw to Sherlock, but we’ll need to look at the subsequent episodes to see how John’s feelings and reactions to them will evolve.

This is something that I’ll emphasize throughout this meta, but in general, I think that Sherlock is consistently in much better touch with his own feelings than John is with his. It thus makes a great deal of sense to me that Sherlock falls in love first and recognizes what he’s feeling almost immediately, but that it takes John a bit longer to get there and to figure it out.

Sherlock’s and John’s differing levels of comfort with their own queerness also contrast Sherlock and John with each other from early on in the show, and I think this is actually very true to ACD canon. There is an excellent post about this here, which you should go read (it’s short!). In ACD canon, Holmes is a character who has entirely rejected the task of trying to pass as heterosexual, or as “normal” in many other ways, too. Meanwhile, Watson is just as weird as Holmes, but he clings to heteronormativity even though it doesn’t reflect who he truly is—in reality, Watson is utterly fascinated by Holmes and by Holmes’s rejection of so many of society’s standards. Sherlock’s and John’s characterizations in Sherlock replicate these essentials in a modern context. In ASIP, Sherlock is presented as a loner who shuns many of society’s standards and is fully at peace with his own homosexuality. John, meanwhile, is struggling to fit in upon returning to London and hasn’t fully embraced his own sexuality. But still, he’s immediately fascinated by Sherlock, and at heart John is just as weird and unconventional as Sherlock is. John often hides it better than Sherlock does, though, because he cares about conforming, while Sherlock does not. I don’t necessarily think that John has internalized any self-hatred due to his sexuality, but he’s more disposed to hide his sexuality than Sherlock is.

This is part of the beauty of Johnlock. It allows us to imagine how, over time and through their relationship with each other, Sherlock will learn to open up to other people and to overcome the isolation that his rejection of society’s standards initially forced upon him, while John will become more comfortable with his attraction to the unusual and the “queer” and will learn to embrace it.

There’s one last thing that I’d like to talk about before moving on from ASIP, and that’s the theme of suicide. Even though all the “serial suicides” in ASIP were actually murders, the central case is meant to get us thinking about suicide. This is because both John and Sherlock are portrayed as suicidal or as borderline-suicidal when we first meet them.

Almost everything that we learn about John in the first few minutes of the episode is meant to illustrate how much John is struggling with his return to civilian life, and these details heavily imply that John may be suicidal. John suffers from PTSD and is having nightmares. He’s living in a bare, impersonal flat where one of his only personal possessions is an illegal firearm. He’s barely eating and he seems uninterested in food: when he first wakes up and sits down to stare at his empty blog, all he has next to him to eat for breakfast is an apple, which we don’t actually see him eat. Later on, John has coffee with Mike instead of getting lunch with him, even though it was lunchtime when they ran into each other—Sherlock says so when John and Mike arrive at Bart’s. John doesn’t have a job, and he doesn’t seem to be searching for one. He goes to therapy, but he seems to barely talk to his therapist. After his therapist encourages him to start a blog, John does it, but his early blog posts are all about how it’s “pointless” and nothing happens to him. As the episode goes on, we also learn that John doesn’t want to talk to Harry or ask her for help, even though she’s worried about him.

At the start of ASIP, then, John is a man who feels that he has nothing left to live for and nothing to look forward to. He’s not planning ahead, and he doesn’t want help. It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to suspect that John’s gun might have been starting to look darkly tempting to him.

Then there’s Sherlock. On the surface, Sherlock seems much more buoyant than John, and he’s definitely someone who’s planning ahead; when we meet him, Sherlock is actively soliciting cases from Lestrade and he’s just moved into a new flat. But Sherlock treats his own life incredibly lightly, and there are hints that Sherlock doesn’t feel fulfilled and might not find suicide unthinkable.

First, there’s a very telling scene that got cut from the final shooting script. This is from pg. 11 of the ASIP script found here.

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?

Obviously, this scene foreshadows Sherlock’s apparent suicide in TRF. (Although this scene got cut, TBB includes a few shots of Sherlock standing at the edges of roofs and looking down, so the writers still foreshadowed Sherlock’s fall in S1.) But more than that, it gives us a glimpse into Sherlock’s frame of mind before he met John. Lestrade can see enough to fear that Sherlock may be at risk of killing himself, and Sherlock’s dialogue delicately suggests that he’s thought about how he’d do it.

In the final shooting script, this scene was meant to be our first introduction to Sherlock: it’s placed shortly before the moment when he unzips the body bag at Bart’s. When we first meet Sherlock, then, it’s through a scene that’s written to imply that Sherlock might be suicidal.

Second, there’s Sherlock’s willingness to play the cabbie’s game with the pills. Sherlock chose the correct pill, but his behavior in that scene is meant to demonstrate that he risks his life unnecessarily because he’s bored. Sherlock feels deeply unsatisfied and unfilled with his life as it stands, and he’s skirting the edge of suicide as a result.

Meeting each other is what drags John and Sherlock each out of it. As soon as John meets Sherlock, Sherlock gives John a purpose again and offers him a return to the battlefield that Mycroft tells us John misses and that we can clearly see John feels empty without. Sherlock gives John things to look forward to again. And for Sherlock, it’s literally John’s crack shot through the window that jerks him out of the game that he was playing with the cabbie, which I think is meant to symbolize that John saves him from his suicidal thoughts. With John in his life now, Sherlock won’t be nearly so bored anymore. As he starts to fall in love, Sherlock, too, has something new to live for.

Before he met John, Sherlock might have also felt depressed and suicidal because he feared that he would never fall in love. Sherlock craves romance and a deep, fulfilling romantic relationship with someone who truly understands him, and he probably suffered from extreme loneliness before he met John. But John is perfect for him, he’s Sherlock’s “one”! So when John enters Sherlock’s life, John saves him from being suicidal. (My thanks to LSIT for talking some of that through with me.)

By the end of the episode, Sherlock and John have both saved each other, within just about 36 hours of meeting each other. John has even saved Sherlock twice. It’s all very romantic.

There’s also a small detail from TRF that reinforces this idea. After Sherlock gets out of the cab that Moriarty was driving, he stands distractedly in the middle of the street and gets saved from being hit by a car by one of the assassins. When Sherlock shakes the assassin’s hand in thanks, the guy gets murdered by one of the other assassins. John then runs up to Sherlock, and Sherlock says to John, “He saved my life but he couldn’t touch me.”

This line is about Sherlock and John, and it describes the overall arc of their relationship in S1-S2. In ASIP, Sherlock and John were both suicidal, but they met each other at just the right time for them to completely turn each other’s lives around. They saved each other, but then throughout S1-S2, they both felt that they couldn’t take their relationship further by making it into something romantic and by sharing physical intimacy together. They saved each other’s lives, but they couldn’t touch each other. Great meta on this here.

I lied, I have one more thing. ASIP also establishes a pattern that holds all throughout S1-S2 regarding Moriarty. Every episode of S1-S2 ends with some sort of reminder that Moriarty is out there as a dangerous threat to Sherlock and John. Sherlock first learns Moriarty’s name in ASIP. TBB ends with General Shan getting shot on the orders of “M” (M might actually be Mycroft acting on orders from Moriarty, as per LSIT’s M-theory—but if that’s the case, then the closing scene is still about Moriarty as a dangerous threat). TGG ends with the pool scene, of course. ASIB reveals towards the end that Irene was working for Moriarty. THOB ends with the “Get Sherlock” scene that shows Moriarty being released from confinement. And then there’s TRF, which obviously ends with Moriarty defeating Sherlock. This fits with Moriarty’s role as the central villain in the show. This show is a romance, and Moriarty is the villain—his job is to keep Sherlock and John apart romantically. It’s significant, then, that even in episodes where Moriarty’s role isn’t immediately apparent, we are always reminded that Moriarty is a constant threat. My thanks to thegildedbee for reminding me of this for ASIP. As she pointed out, just when Sherlock is saved by John, Moriarty enters the story as the antagonist threatening to keep the two of them apart.

Thank you for reading so far!!

[winterdaphne2]

Casablanca and Sherlock Series 3

Part love story, part pro-Allies propaganda film, Casablanca (1942) is a classic piece of Hollywood cinema from the WWII era and perhaps one of the most famous romance movies of all time.

The film goes something like this:

Ilsa was married to Victor, but they were separated and she believed Victor to be dead. Ilsa meets Rick and the two of them fall in love, but then Ilsa learns that Victor isn’t actually dead and she leaves Rick for Victor. Some time later, all three of them encounter each other. Rick is heartbroken that Ilsa left him, but eventually he realizes that she still loves him. Scary dangerous people are after Victor, though, so Rick arranges for Ilsa and Victor to escape to safety. The film ends with an emotional tarmac scene where Rick convinces Ilsa that she’ll be happier if she leaves with Victor and he and Ilsa say goodbye forever. Ilsa and Victor leave on the plane, and Rick shoots one of the scary dangerous people to make sure they can get away. (At first it seems like Rick is going to get in big trouble for this because he did it in front of the police chief, but at the last moment we see that the police chief lets him off.)

Series 3 of Sherlock goes something like this:

Sherlock and John were in love, but they were separated and John believed Sherlock to be dead. John meets Mary, but then Sherlock returns and reveals to John that he’s not actually dead. Sherlock is heartbroken that John has apparently moved on from him and is with Mary now, but eventually he realizes that John still loves him. Scary dangerous people are after Mary, though, so Sherlock shoots one of them to protect her. There are two very intense scenes where Sherlock reveals that he thinks John will be happier if he stays with Mary. The series ends with an emotional tarmac scene where Sherlock and John say goodbye, and Sherlock leaves on the plane feeling utterly heartbroken and with so much still unsaid between him and John. (Then at the last moment, it's revealed that Sherlock won’t get in big trouble for shooting the scary dangerous guy after all.)

There are a lot of parallels here, and the tarmac scene at the end of Casablanca is so famous that it’s hard not to see the last scene of His Last Vow as a direct allusion to it. But even if the writers didn't deliberately use the rest of Casablanca as a model for S3 (and I think it's at least possible that they did), I think comparing the two and exploring some of the ways Sherlock diverges from Casablanca highlights a few really interesting things about what's going on in S3.

First, if we treat Sherlock and John as mirrors for the characters in Casablanca, then Sherlock actually fills the roles of both John's lovers in S3.

In Casablanca, Rick is the protagonist and is initially presented as a kind of hardboiled anti-hero. Over the course of the film, though, we learn that he’s really not. At heart, Rick is a “sentimentalist,” is in love with Ilsa, and cares about a cause bigger than himself (resisting the Axis powers). Similarly, once we start seeing things from Sherlock’s point of view in S3, we see even more clearly than ever before that Sherlock is a very caring and sensitive person, is deeply in love with John, and is incredibly selfless and willing to put the safety and happiness of others above his own feelings.

This matches Sherlock with Rick, but there's more. In S3, Sherlock is both the hero who sacrifices his own feelings to keep John and his spouse safe and John's first love, the one John thought was dead. So Sherlock mirrors Victor, too. If the writers did intend for S3 to parallel Casablanca, then perhaps this was meant to indicate that Sherlock isn't just the selfless hero who does everything he can to protect John, but is also the character John is ultimately meant to be with. Even if not, though, I think it's really interesting that Sherlock's character fulfills so many romantic roles in S3.

Here’s what I think is most interesting, though. For much of Casablanca, Ilsa is torn between her two lovers—she’s confused about what she really wants and doesn’t know what to do. In the dramatic denouement on the tarmac, Rick convinces her to go with Victor because Victor is an important freedom fighter working against the Nazis. Rick tells Ilsa that she’s important to Victor’s work and that if she abandons Victor to stay with him, she’ll eventually come to regret it because her role in helping Victor fight against the Nazis is more important than whatever he (Rick) and Ilsa may feel for each other. By insisting that Ilsa would regret it if she doesn't leave with Victor, Rick argues that contributing to the fight against the Nazis is ultimately what Ilsa will find most fulfilling.

The audience is clearly supposed to applaud Rick's actions. Casablanca is a product of the WWII-era American film industry, and the argument that people should put a noble cause above their own personal desires—and will even find this more fulfilling—is the film’s central message. This is Casablanca's resolution. It's the film's moral message that enables the tarmac scene to neatly tie up Rick and Ilsa's love story and provide the audience with closure.

But Sherlock isn't trying to make a point like that. I think this is a big part of what makes the two tarmac scenes feel so different, and makes the one in Sherlock hurt so much more.

In S3, Sherlock is heartbroken that he can’t be with John, but he convinces himself that a future with Mary is what John really wants and does everything he can to give John that future. That's similar to the plot of Casablanca, but the crucial difference is that Mary isn't a freedom fighter in the mold of Victor. While Victor is fleeing the Nazis because he's part of the resistance movement and has spoken out against them, Magnussen has dirt on Mary because she used to be a paid assassin. Sherlock wants John to be with Mary because he thinks it will make John happy, but not because it’s important to some higher cause. As the audience, we see that John is torn between Sherlock and Mary for much of S3, like Ilsa, but ultimately I think we’re supposed to understand that John really wants to be with Sherlock and only stays with Mary because he believes he doesn’t have a chance with Sherlock (or because of his own internalized biphobia and his fear of his love for Sherlock). In a lot of ways, S3 is about Sherlock and John misinterpreting each other’s feelings and actions, failing to act on their true feelings, and failing to realize that their love for each other could be something beautiful if they fully embraced it, not something that will only ever keep hurting them over and over again.

The result is that by the end of the tarmac scene, we’re not left applauding Sherlock for sacrificing his feelings and letting John have a future with Mary. Instead, we’re left heartbroken that Sherlock has to leave John and that Sherlock and John couldn't realize that they are the two people in the story who are meant to be together. Unlike in Casablanca, we aren't left believing that there's a noble reason why John should be with Mary instead of Sherlock—especially given how much we know about how deeply Sherlock and John love each other by this point in the narrative.

I think this is what’s most interesting to me. Casablanca is very much a love story, but it has another point to make and uses a romance plotline to do so. In contrast, in Sherlock the love story really is the central story and the whole point of the show. So since it doesn't have a separate moral point to make, the tarmac scene in HLV doesn't resolve Sherlock and John's love story like in Casablanca. And since the show can't feel resolved without the love story being resolved, we're still left hanging at the end of HLV.

[loudest-subtext-in-tv]

What has been your understanding of EMP theory?

it was just a dream so it’s all completely fake

plot beats IRL were conveyed to Sherlock at his bedside and drug-dream mangled

Voting ended onOct 22, 2025

I’m starting to realize some people never gave EMP theory a chance because they thought it was option 1 and couldn’t keep up with meta during/just after S4 aired. Let me know what your impression has been so I can figure out how widespread this misconception is. It will help me tailor my upcoming metas.

[loudest-subtext-in-tv]

New (free, always) Substack post: Why don't Benedict and Martin want to do S5? And why I hope they change their minds -- the winner of the poll last time. This also talks about EMP theory, and I've talked more about it already in the replies.

You don't need a Substack account to read it, just to reply and to have new posts automatically e-mailed to you.

We're also up to 60+ replies on the last post, Whether Mary meant to kill Sherlock, many of which are meta-length from me. Unfortunately replies are not much easier to navigate on Substack than Tumblr; you basically have to click the timestamp link for every reply to make sure you can see things nested under it. So a lot of the substantive stuff I'll have to release later as full metas to make it more convenient, I just don't want to spam people right now.

I should note that since posting that, I decided Mary really had to have intended to kill Sherlock: she shot him in the heart, he flatlined, Magnussen called the ambulance, Sherlock misremembered due to motivated reasoning. I also decided Moriarty did not order her to do it, he just manipulated her into position. That's one of the things in the replies I'll make into a longer meta.

The runner up in the poll last time was "revised EMP theory."

What EMP arguments do you need to hear first?

consolidated list of why other theories don't make sense

consolidated list of Mofftiss's influences that are alluded to and point to EMP

shorter narrative-style overview of what the theory says is real and isn't real

very long episode by episode explanations with constant stops for evidence

Voting ended onOct 18, 2025

I'm going to write all of these at some point soon; the idea is to pick whatever you need to hear first. For example, if you're attached to a different theory, maybe you pick the first option. If you know you'll be persuaded by Mofftiss blatantly borrowing huge concepts from EMP-esque works, pick option two. If you don't really know what EMP theory says (or my version of it), you pick the third option to learn what to expect the fourth option to lay out. If you know you'll be dismissive of a short explanation without a bunch of evidence, maybe you jump straight to the fourth option.

[loudest-subtext-in-tv]

New (free, always) Substack post: Whether Mary meant to kill Sherlock: A place to discuss

List of topics discussed and a poll beneath the cut:

Topics:

@winterdaphne2's new meta about the fall and what we hashed out discussing it together in her replies (follow her, you'll like her stuff if you like mine!)

the utility and fun of discussing ideas before they're fully baked into longer metas with every little piece of supporting evidence

stuff that was cut from two different versions of the TRF script that show Sherlock loves John and his friends and consciously covers it up, and Moriarty deliberately uses Sherlock's sociopath act against him to manipulate John

the proposition that Sherlock's heart was burnt out, thus Moriarty intended Sherlock to die in HLV

exploration and dismissal (for now) of the idea that Moriarty literally gave Mary the order to kill Sherlock (I welcome contrary arguments)

the proposition that Moriarty manipulated Mary into position rather than giving her an order, i.e. her mission to keep John and Sherlock apart was about to fail and she knew she needed to run before she'd outlived her usefulness to Moriarty

the proposition that Mary intended to kill Sherlock regardless of whether Moriarty gave her the order, and it was simply a miracle that love for John brought Sherlock back to life

the proposition that Moriarty considered Sherlock's survival a surprise treat and took advantage of it to torture Sherlock in his mind palace by drugging him in the hospital in real life (EMP theory)

a summary list of several EMP theory tenants, and ideas for what was happening in real life during S4 (some from my old metas and some to be further evidenced later)

arguments against any of S4 being in John's head, or otherwise an alibi for anything

the proposition that only EMP theory is in line with Moriarty's goal of burning Sherlock's heart out and then killing him

a solicitation for disagreements and disproofs before I write up/rewrite longer versions with every tiny piece of evidence

What do you want me to write about next?

revised M-theory

revised EMP theory

commentary on Gatiss saying Ben and Martin don't want to do S5 so it's over

more about Mary (her feelings toward John, the reality of the baby, etc)

just keep working on A Study in Fate fanfic

something else (reply here or email me or reply on Substack)

Voting ended onOct 16, 2025

Revised M-theory and EMP theory options both inherently include folding in John and Sherlock's entire romantic arc. EMP theory functions as the end section of a revised M-theory; they're listed separately because more people are familiar with M-theory than EMP theory, so there may be more interest in prioritizing EMP theory than rehashing S1 through S3.

My e-mail is [email protected]. I'm only cross-posting to Tumblr anymore, but checking replies on my posts doesn't entail looking at my dash so I've been able to manage that. I'll continue to cross-post here so you don't have to have a Substack account unless you want to discuss in the replies with people or have posts e-mailed to you.

I'm interested in reading other people's stuff, but you have to bring it to my attention like winterdaphne2 did. You can tag me in meta here and I will see that. Make sure you're actually interested in discussing it and having parts of it challenged though; it should be a fun and detached search for truth, not some crushing thing where you're really attached to certain ideas and get upset hearing arguments against it. If that sounds fun to you, PLEASE contact me, engage with anything I suggest that sounds flimsy, etc.

[sherlocked-for-life]

Sexually not!oblivious Sherlock.

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i know this is the piss on the poor website but its also something worse and way stranger because every time i give general advice that amounts to “regrettably, sometimes, the problem in a rocky relationship is you” people will pop up out of every crevice to be like “insane take, why are you telling battered wives and abused children its their fault”

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i can say something like “honesty is the best policy” and i will have comments from strangers inventing convoluted scenarios where someone is rigged with a bomb that will explode if they dont lie and be like “this doesn’t apply if you have the exploding truth collar i just imagined, seriously harmful take”

[doubleca5t]

I saw someone say something similar the other day about twitter where his point was basically that there's a whole genre of post where someone will tweet about doing something really nice and positive and then a whole army of people will come into their replies to dream up a situation where the thing they did is bad actually. Like idk if it's envy or resentment or just a need to feel like you're smarter than everyone else but it's annoying as fuck

[taldigi]

Hello???? Suggestions????