Escaping a mob with a bag of marbles led Mary into Samantha's home, where she learned about the stories told by the stars in the night sky. Fascinated, she studied the constellations as Samantha explained the prophecy they told, one concerning her people.
Through Sam, Mary meets Barry who becomes her landlord in her ancestral home. Together with their housemates they become family. Then disaster hits.
I’ve been musing about this for a while, and finally took the time to put it together. It’s a long one, but mainly because of the images.
In The Six Thatchers, we are shown Mary’s apparent flight from London, through randomly selected places around the world. Many of us have noticed that elements of this flight are strange; I’m going to discuss some of them here.
First, Mary seems to be selecting her destinations based on (a) three rolls of a die and (b) the selection of a location based on this roll – from this source:
Many of the place names listed here are obsolete. There are references to East Germany (reunited with West Germany in 1990), the USSR (dissolved in 1991) and Yugoslavia (dissolved in 1992). Many of the cities are very old, but Noranda, Quebec, was founded in 1926 and became Rouyn-Noranda in 1986, so that sets the date limits for this source. Most of this period was dominated by the Cold War, which lasted from 1947 to 1991.
Maps and more under the cut.
Each city on Mary’s list is followed by a sequence of numbers, which presumably pinpoints its location on a map. My best guess is that these are (1) a letter and 2-digit code representing longitude (2) a sign and 3-digit code representing latitude and (3) a page number, meaning this is likely an atlas. An old atlas. It’s profoundly unlikely that she has a digital version.
Mary matches her dice rolls to (2), the latitude. This is an extraordinarily difficult way to choose a destination. These numbers are obviously not indexed; she’d have to scan the pages looking for a match, and there might be many matches, extending all the way around the globe, or there might be none. This is a terrible method for anyone to use while on the run. Mary’s carrying an outdated atlas, and using it in the most tedious way possible to figure out where to go next? I don’t think so.
Finally, this atlas is not actually in English. Note the listings for Nova Lisboa (New Lisbon) and Nova York (New York) on the right-hand side. Further, the only map coordinate systems that I could find with a letter + 2-digit longitude are from eastern Europe. Sounds... Serbian. And, funnily enough, it appears that Serbian adopted the Latin alphabet between 1914 and 1993, overlapping our timeframe.
Based on the maps that we see as Mary rolls the dice, she visits the following places. Of course, we rarely see exact city names, so I’ve made some executive decisions to produce this map:
1. Norddal, Norway
2. Gdansk, Poland (the name sweeps through her motorcycle)
3. Liechtenstein, Switzerland (the map trails off; we only see this name clearly)
4. Varna, Romania (on the coast, to fit the lighthouse)
5. Borujerd, Iran (we sweep past several places, and I chose one in Lorestan Province, due to sentiment.)
6. Marrakhesh, Morocco
That looks fairly haphazard.
But let’s say it’s not, because... we know it’s not. Almost all of Mary’s die rolls are heavily tinted in blue, our signal that something is fucky, as @consultingfangirl and others have noted.
All but one, that is. The roll for Marrakhesh, Morocco is not blue. And it turns up snake eyes (perhaps making her both a shark and a snake, like CAM).
I think this tells us that the Morocco roll was Mary’s only destination. So, where did all those other “randomly selected” places come from?
Soon after The Six Thatchers aired, @xthismeanswar posted this wonderful look at two of the places Mary visited. Both Norway and Poland contain places named Hell that may have inspired part of the trajectory we were shown onscreen. As a bonus, Hell, Norway looks like a shark; Hel, Poland is on the coast very near Gdansk.
Also, something caught my eye while I was determining the place names. When we sweep through Romania on our way to the lighthouse, Serbia sneaks in on the left, including a familiar place name.
Where have I seen that before?
Oh, right. The Serbian city in the Serbian atlas.
Ok, for kicks I threw out the two Hellish places (because fake) and Marrakhesh (because Mary ran straight there) and added Novi Sad.
This looks decidedly non-random. It actually reminds me of this, Anderson’s ‘Sherlock trajectory’ from Many Happy Returns:
(I still assume that we are meant to ignore Anderson’s solution; this was plainly not how Sherlock got back to London.)
The route looks even prettier when I flesh out the the original Holmes’ journey to Switzerland from The Final Problem. So, why not? Let’s swap out Liechtenstein (which we weren’t sure of anyway) for Meiringen, the home of Reichenbach Falls.
This is looking less like it was Mary’s journey, and more like it was Sherlock’s.
As @grumpy-swoop noticed, the score for this segment is called “Running Away“, even while Mary says in her letter to John, “I’m not running”.
Within “Running Away”, @bbcromance caught some of “The Lie in Leinster Gardens”, but I noticed while grabbing screencaps, beginning with Mary’s Gabrielle Ashdown alias (how appropriate), an underlying reference to Sherlock’s “Taxi Chase” theme, too. There’s more than one lie hidden in this part of the score.
Running Away (at the 2:45 mark):
Taxi Chase (at the 0:45 mark):
This is Sherlock’s run, not Mary’s. It makes sense, then, that the first stop was in Norway. As Holmes told Watson in The Empty House,
“You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend.”
In plotting a route for Mary, Sherlock is revisiting his own exile, and focusing most heavily on his time in eastern Europe. It’s not a direct record of his entire post-TRF journey, obviously – he can’t have spent two years going from London to Novi Sad in this direction. It’s ‘ostalgie’. As the hacker Craig describes it, while Sherlock is staring at us out of the screen, “People who miss the old days under the Communists. People are weird, aren’t they?”
We know why Sherlock may have an idée fixe about Eastern Europe; I think all of the experiences Ajay relates in The Six Thatchers are about Sherlock. We see the shadow of his long-haired colleague “Alex”, chained to the ceiling and being beaten with a pipe... that cannot be a coincidence.
As far as we were told in The Empty Hearse, Sherlock’s quest to break Moriarty’s syndicate ended in Serbia. Why give us two more points on this curve then, leading into Iran? In Doyle’s The Empty House, Holmes tells Watson that he had travelled to Persia (where Iran was then) during his exile, via Lhassa, Tibet. Did this happen in the Sherlock universe, too? Or are these parts of the network that Sherlock couldn’t reach, because he was imprisoned too soon?
By now you can probably guess where I’m going with this... keep tracking the movement of this map of Iran after it’s left the screen, and you shortly reach Baghdad and Samarra, Iraq, which also spent many centuries under Persian rule (though admittedly not as recently as Doyle’s time), and are the focus of the story we hear told repeatedly in The Six Thatchers about an inevitable meeting with death.
Norbury: Always expecting to see the grim figure of...
Mary: ... death.
Sherlock: Hello.
If Sherlock skipped his appointment in “Persia” after The Reichenbach Fall because he was caught in Serbia, maybe he has to end up there in S5 following The Final Problem. And if Mary’s death was faked, I bet this is where they will eventually have their confrontation.
