LMAO you guys are gonna love this…
Operating on the principle that the writers were purposefully fucking with our heads in TFP by stripping the narrative of all “emotional context” in order to get us too caught up to follow that “iron chain of reason,” I girded my loins and dove willingly back into hell to take another look at that headstone cypher scene, since it went by lighting-fast with a suspicious air of “don’t bother paying too much attention, just trust us on this.”
Once Sherlock realizes that The Clue is in the Graveyard, since the stones all had fake dates, he runs over to take a look. We are shown four headstones and their conflicting dates.
The numbers, in order by tombstone are then [134 1719], [28 9 1520], [1818 2426], and [1617 1822 32]. Sherlock is the one who decides on what order the numbers must be taken in, and mentally lines them up before himself.
Here is where Euros’s song comes into play, and the lyrics are shown on screen to be:
I that am lost, oh who will find me?
Deep down below the old beech tree
Help succor me now the east winds blow
Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go!
Be not afraid to walk in the shade
Save one, save all, come try!
My steps - five by seven
Life is closer to Heaven
Look down, with dark gaze, from on high.
Before he was gone - right back over my (h)ill
Who now will find him?
Why, nobody will
Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen
Lost forever, nine by nineteen.
Without your love he’ll be gone before
Save pity for strangers, show love the door
My soul seek the shade of my willow’s bloom
Inside, brother mine–
Let Death make a room.
If we number the words in each stanza and apply the headstones, which we are explicitly shown how to do, the solution to the puzzle becomes easy to apply ourselves.
Sherlock lines up the headstone dates and the lyrics of the song in his mind’s eye…
assigns each word a number (each stanza starts over at 1 and ends on word 32), and drops all the unnecessary words.
With only the words relevant to the solution to The Final Problem before him, we now get to watch Sherlock play Mind Palace Slappy to put them all in order according to Euros’s puzzle. There are four headstones and four verses to the song, so this should be a piece of cake, right?
Wrong! While Sherlock mutters the solution to himself as he goes along, the solution draws one line from each headstone, plus one additional line which was never part of Euros’s puzzle.
Given only the numbers present on the four headstones ([134 1719], [28 9 1520], [1818 2426], and [1617 1822 32]), the solution should be:
1) I am lost, help me brother
2) save my life
3) before my doom I am
4) my soul seek my room
But as we can see in the screencap above, Sherlock has clearly picked out the words “Without my love” (with second “lost” hovering in the background) which enables him to say aloud to us the solution:
1) I am lost, help me brother
2) save my life
3) before my doom I am
4) lost without your love save
5) my soul seek my room
The only way Sherlock could have possibly come by that 4th line is if there was another headstone with the numbers [28 1238] that was squeezed between the [1818 2426] and [1617 1822 32] headstones, and which would have split itself between the last two verses of the song (tacking on the 28th word of verse 3, and then words 1, 2, 3, and 8 of verse 4).
This is the “emotional context” which was not part of Euros’s puzzle, but which comes entirely from Sherlock himself in his efforts to solve it: I am lost without your love.
Love was never part of the puzzle, but it was part of Sherlock’s solution! And if The Final Problem proved anything, it was that this episode, this series, this show in its entirety, like Sherlock, is utterly lost without someone’s love. (Spoiler alert: it’s John.)
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