What if we exist in multiple universes simultaneously. Or perhaps we pass through different realities without consciously noticing it.
We've already died a thousand times, but we have no memories of death. We are preoccupied with the current reality, and have long forgotten the old.
What if medication is an attempt to kill you off in the realities that don't agree with you. These realities cannot confirm to your ideals, nor you theirs. Killing you off means you get more of the realities that you agree with, and these realities will also further benefit from your presence.
So, I made a post with some immediate, off-the-cuff reactions right after watching. Now, I’ve been discussing this privately with a ream of different people, checking my dash every so often to see what other people are thinking, and mulling things over on my own, and I have some new thoughts.
I think that one of my biggest issues with this episode is consistency of characterisation. It sounds ridiculous to accuse the men who created this version of these people of writing their own characters out of character, but it feels strongly that way to me. Let’s start with Mary:
We’re given so many different things to believe about Mary that I practically have whiplash. In no particular order:
She shot the title character and did not, until her dying breath, ever seem remotely sorry for it, nor did she apologise out loud, nor did she even mention Sherlock’s death mission that he took on in order to free her from her blackmailer despite her having shot him.
A huge percentage of her own wedding guests hate her.
She’s motherly and cutesy with her baby.
She “jokingly” calls Sherlock things like “pig” and compares John to a dog. She questions his abilities and judgement.
She finds Sherlock’s sore points and leans on them. She’s overtly cruel.
She thinks she is more intelligent than Sherlock, John, and Mycroft combined. Canon would show that she is not.
“Save John Watson” vs “Go to hell, Sherlock”. Mary has always wanted to insert herself into Sherlock and John’s friendship, take credit for their resolutions, etc. They do not need Mary. Is it that she does actually know this? Is that where her ugly parting message comes from?
She wants a break from her criminal past, yet refuses to adjust her behaviour accordingly. This is one of the biggest ones for me. If Mary wanted to live as a civilian, then there are ways in which civilians go about solving large scale criminal problems. They involve the police, Interpol, the MI5/MI6. They do not go running off on their own. They do not refuse the help - to the point of drugging said help! - of skilled associates. They do not leave a baby behind. They do not take on the danger themselves. Mary already had the opportunity to learn this lesson in series 3 when she shot her so-called friend in the heart rather than accept his help. She could have let Sherlock help. In both cases, he offered it, and she turned on him. These are not the actions of a woman ready to settle down into regular life. Nor is shoving your baby off onto your husband while you go off crime-solving in his place.
Sherlock. I’ve always had a problem with the inconsistency of the writing of his apparent drug usage on the tarmac. First off, in series 3 Sherlock was clearly not high during that scene. He just wasn’t. In TAB, they made him look high, yet the overdose they claimed is medically impossible. If he’d taken a long list of things that the one doctor on the scene claimed could have killed him, he’d have been hospitalised, not up and walking with no apparent difficulty within minutes. Then we get this episode, where Sherlock seems mildly high (and even that’s debatable, at least until the singing) but nowhere near overdose level. That’s inconsistent. Then, apart from the high scene, Sherlock is weirdly facetious for nearly the entire episode. Why have they forcibly regressed him this way? What is this refusal to allow Sherlock to keep any previous character development from prior series?
What I reject the most, and I do so wholeheartedly, with every fibre of my being, is Sherlock choosing Mary over John. Mary essentially replaced John in this episode. Every single intense one-on-one scene between Sherlock and someone else occurred with him and Mary here. John was barely in the thing. And yet John is supposedly Sherlock’s conductor of light, the person who makes him see clearly, not just the guy who prompts him to remember whether it was a son or daughter who died and to behave nicely in public and who Margaret Thatcher is (and btw, wtf? Gatiss wrote THOB, in which Sherlock’s knowledge of Thatcher is prominently featured. Did he forget that he wrote that, or wtf is going on with this???). John is the cornerstone of Sherlock’s grounding, the person who makes him the best version of himself. Sherlock has never looked for someone like himself to solve crimes with. He hasn’t sought out an agent, a police officer, a fellow detective, a local MI5. He chose John - beige-jumper-wearing, illegal-gun-toting, let’s-go-for-dinner-after John. The only time Sherlock has ever chosen someone else to come with him to a crime scene was when he couldn’t get John. THAT feels right for him. That feels in character. For him to deliberately, cruelly bypass John - without even telling him - and ask Mary to come with him is just incomprehensible. Then again, perhaps he merely ALSO asked Mary to come, and it was Mary who brought the baby and passed her off onto John, thereby sending John home, at least initially. Perhaps Sherlock didn’t mean to exclude him. But given all this, it’s almost no wonder that John, left to his own devices and abandoned by the two people who supposedly love him more than anyone else, is tempted to wander.
That said, John. JOHN. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK. With the cheating, I mean, or the strong temptation to do so. Martin stated that John and Mary were in a very good place at the beginning of this series; that doesn’t sound as though John was having second thoughts about having gone back to Mary or that he was unhappy with her. Yet before she even left him, there he is, preening at the attention of some random girl on the bus. Apparently a lot of men cheat while there’s a baby at home, partly because they’re not getting laid, partly because their wife’s attention is primarily on the baby now. It’s still shitty but it’s hardly unusual. And we could argue that Mary’s attentions were divided between replacing John at Sherlock’s side and the baby, so if John was feeling doubly replaced, I do rather understand. But JOHN. His cornerstone is loyalty, reliability, a strong moral centre. It just feels awful to see him this way. He’s a complicated character, but God, this particular complication is ugly.
This was a hard episode to watch. Narrative-wise, it feels all over the place. Some very interesting seeds planted for the next two episodes, but my heart is shredded at John blaming Sherlock for something wholly not his fault, for Sherlock being so desperate to help John that he actually seeks out a therapist - John’s therapist, at that. I hate to think of an estrangement between them. I also hate to think of John once again not having been given all of the facts, nor for having asked for them. It’s the same thing as in TEH when Gatiss simply decided not to have John ever find out about the snipers, or that his life was the collateral of Sherlock’s (blackmailed!!!) decision to jump. Why couldn’t John have been told at some point, finally???? I hated that and I hate this, that he maybe doesn’t even know that it was Mary’s decision to jump in front of the bullet. I hate that he assumed the worst, and I dread finding out what his letter says. Yeah: a hard episode to watch for sure.
Guilt is when you do or feel something with out cause or purpose. There is no reason for you to do this thing, to feel this way. You cannot justify it. Regret is when you can, and so it settles over you like snow on lashes. Just enough to be beautiful, to tell you things have changed ... and to obscure your vision.
