Following my EMP imput I’m costantly trying to understand the symbolic meaning of the characters in Season 4. Recenly I rewatched The Lying Detective and paid attention to what Culverton Smith said in the episode. So...
-My conclusion is that Culverton Smith symbolises Sherlock’s drug use/addiction: Why? Well, what made me think about it in the first place was the fact that when Culverton tried to kill him in the hospital he did it by OVERDOSING and SUFFOCATING him. For those who don’t know suffocation is tied to drugs because it occurs when an overdose of a drug like heroin causes a person's respiration to drop to where it can no longer sustain life. What ultimately starts with respiratory depression (hypoventilation) eventually become respiratory arrest (the complete termination of breathing).
-Then the fact that Culverton is a serial killer, he doesn’t have a precise reason to kill all those people, but he does kill them anyway. Drugs kill literally thousands of people every year, now THIS is a serial killer.
-Third point is that for the entire episode we see Sherlock high because is preoccupied with the case involving Culverton Smith (another connection with him and drug use).
-Fourth point is the dinamics John-Culverton/John-Drugs in Sherlock. John is always the one to help Sherlock when it come to drugs so it doesn’t surprise me that is John to save him from Culverton Smith in the hospital. John has always been there for him:
In season 4 we see John literally saving him from his drug addiction/use:
-Fifth and last point is that there is another connection between Culverton and drugs: TD12, the memory drug. The one he uses immediately after his ‘confession’.
And if it could’t be more obvious drugs if abused can damage your memory (short and long term).
I know we’ve theorized about John being under the influence of TD-12, but I found something interesting from one of the Sherlocked Con talks with Sian Brooke.
Snycock asked Sian Brooke if Eurus was responsible for the violence that John inflicted on Sherlock In the morgue) and Sian said yes. So it’s confirmed that John was under the influence of Eurus since meeting her.
Source: (x)
(submitted by soophelia)
Hi Lovely!
Ah, this is interesting, and something we’ve suspected since the beginning!
While I take everything anyone from the cast and crew with a grain of salt these days, it’s interesting to have something like this as a possibility on our plates. As many of my followers know, I don’t believe that Eurus actually exists (I think she’s Mary and her face is one created from a false memory), but that the drug itself coupled with Culverton’s ability to use suggestion to manipulate people (which I think MARY also has the ability to do), his repetition causes doubt in John and he lashes out in turn.
So yeah, I think that in some way, they’re influenced by Eurus, but Eurus isn’t who the show tells us she is and TD-12 is the reason why.
This afternoon I had the pleasure of hearing Mark Gatiss - the well-known actor and writer - speak at the Oxford Union. As many readers w...
Thanks to @lavenderandvanilla for linking this. Some Sherlock-related excerpts:
On creating Sherlock with Steven Moffat, Mark spoke of the enormous fun the two of them have had putting it together, speaking of the huge workload but also the amount of fun they have, and how proud they are of the global reach that the show has and how it's pointed so many people back to the Conan Doyle originals. The huge expectations under which the show airs each time round are not something you can quite ignore, he concedes, but feels you don't put that at the forefront of your mind. He feels the most important thing is that you do the show you want and hopefully other people will like it.
On how the Doctor, Sherlock and Mycroft would vote in the general election, Mark was quick to say, "the Doctor wouldn't vote; he's not a registered alien. But he'd probably vote for the most human candidate. Mycroft would obviously vote Tory, and Sherlock would call into question the notion of elections."
On whether there was anything about Sherlock he regretted or would do differently, Mark says perhaps they shouldn't have killed Moriarty off quite so early, especially given that he left the show about five times! The show was originally 6 hour-long episodes, but this was changed to 3x90 fairly early on. At that point Mark had written Episode 2, which was originally going to be an hour-long tale of the lost Vermeer painting, but because everything then had to become punchier, quicker, pacier and with higher stakes, it was simply reworked in to the series finale - The Great Game - as one of the mini-cases Sherlock is set to solve by Moriarty. He claims the 90-minute format "eats up stories", which you have to keep feeding into the mix or the stories become staid and tired. He also spoke of the "12-minute scene" in his first Sherlock episode, a scene all about interaction between characters, which he wouldn't have done if it'd been a 60-minute programme but which the space of 90 minutes allowed him to do (though there was still some concern over whether they'd gone overboard, he reckons the bits of Sherlock people like most are the character discussions).
On whether foreshadowing is always deliberate or not, Mark says that sometimes it is and that it's lovely when people notice the efforts you go to (citing the fact that Henry Baskerville nearly shoots himself by placing a gun in his mouth in the Sherlock episode The Hounds of Baskerville as foreshadowing for the way Moriarty kills himself in the same way in The Reichenbach Fall as a deliberate bit of foreshadowing). But sometimes, he says, it's entirely random and coincidental: "TD12", the memory drug in the Sherlock episode The Lying Detective and a plot device taken from the Conan Doyle short story The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, was not - as some fans supposed - "The Devil's Foot [12 inches]" but that Steven had picked the number entirely at random.
Also:
On social media and how fans and creatives interact, Mark reckons it's a bit of a mixed blessing. Things are consumed so quickly these days, he reckons, that there's a weird discrepancy between how long people work on things and how people just gobble up something in an evening and then say "next!". He says there is feedback on the Internet if you choose to look at it, of course, but that it's generally best to ignore it. [...]
I was rewatching TLD and I don’t recall this being talked about. When Sherlock is in hospital we can see this scene
OH LOOK, The damn serum is glowing, by it’s own apparently! As you can see the bed light can’t hit the serum, or at least can’t hit it in a way it would glow like that. And there is no light source behind or beneath, you can even see how it’s glowing by the shadow on the ceiling.
And of course it reminded me to
Yes! TD12. Then I remembered how some people have talked about Mary possibly injecting the TD12 when Sherlock was again in hospital in HLV, so I searched for the scene. I didn’t recall if we could see the serum or not in that scene and I found this
The damn serum in the foreground and iluminated with a light like the TD12 just before Mary appears.
Also it makes me thing about the glowing skull as some people have already pointed.
Tagging some people, please don’t hate me XD @inevitably-johnlocked @jenna221b @tjlcisthenewsexy @monikakrasnorada @lookingforawaybacktonarnia @jawnlock-is-real @sherchemistlock @whimsicalethnographies @swimmingfeelsinajohnlockianpool @themanandthemachine
These screenshots haven’t been cropped or edited in any way and I find it interesting and amazing how closely they resemble each other. If I just glance at them, I’m hard pressed to realise they aren’t the same person. Wonder why they filmed it like that, hmm?
Currently freaking out about @monikakrasnorada’s td12 meta, on the heels of @shamelessmash’s tld extravaganza, absolutely entranced over @221bloodnun’s work on The Woman in Green, and still alarmed and concerned about Doyle’s The Parasite as an s4 intertext.
Is there a mind control theme running through BBC Sherlock, that is lowkey coming to fruition in s4?
Further thoughts on @monikakrasnorada’s idea about the hospital scene in hlv:
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If we read Mary’s words as mind control / hypnotic suggestion, then Sherlock is being programmed here not to tell John that she shot him.
Does the theory wash?
Well, let’s take some gun surgery to the chest a stab at it and see.
The scene ends in a rather strange fashion, with another close-up on Mary’s face:
Sherlock’s eyes drifting shut:
And then him waking up with an apparent gap in time:
We never do get an answer to the question of whether he promised not to tell John, or what he said to Mary, if anything. We get the scene with Janine, and then, the moment Janine leaves, he retreats into mind palace to try to figure Mary out, or so it seems. He starts with this:
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Mary at her most Woman-in-Greenish. He tries to deduce her, but he gets the smokescreen, the fact of the lie, the cloud of “liar” floating around her.
There are many potential reasons for this, but what if he can’t get further because she’s put the whammy on him? And what about “you don’t tell John,” which is still first in his thoughts when he conjures up Mary?
Has he told John? Has he tried? A partial answer in the next moment, as John fills Lestrade in on how Sherlock’s doing:
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Sherlock has said nothing coherent, apparently, which is...really strange, especially since he was perfectly articulate when talking to Janine.
Also, does this sound like Sherlock to you? The man who was so high off his tits in tld that the room was literally turning around him, but he could still recite a speech from Henry V?
What if he’s tried telling John, and he can’t?
After Sherlock escapes from the hospital and we have the bolthole montage, there’s this:
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The scene leads us to believe that Sherlock is protecting John from the truth. Or, if you’re into this sort of thing, he’s protecting Mary (barf) by setting up a confrontation where she’ll be forced to agree to be a client (barf). The narrative implies one or the other.
BUT does it?
What if Sherlock is doing everything he can to tell John what’s going on, planting clues, and setting up a sting operation in which Mary will reveal the truth, because it’s the only way he can let John in on what happened? What if he’s risking his life to convey this urgent information to John, because he can’t use the words?
Here are a few things Sherlock says during the confrontation at Leinster Gardens (via Ariane de Vere’s transcript):
SHERLOCK (over phone): Only the very front section of the house remains. It’s just a façade. (He draws in a breath.) Remind you of anyone, Mary? A façade.
...
SHERLOCK (over phone): Mary Morstan was stillborn in October 1972. Her gravestone is in Chiswick Cemetery where – five years ago – you acquired her name and date of birth and thereafter her identity.
(She starts walking slowly along the corridor.)
SHERLOCK (over phone): That’s why you don’t have ‘friends’ from before that date.
[so he’s been doing research, and he can reveal that she has been living a lie, but what about that central truth? That she’s the one who shot him?]
SHERLOCK (over phone): It’s an old enough technique, known to the kinds of people who can recognise a skip-code on sight ..
[he knows what sort of person she is, but will he say it? that she shot him?]
SHERLOCK (over phone): How good a shot are you?
(She reaches inside her coat, pulls out her pistol and cocks it, holding it down by her side.)
MARY: How badly do you want to find out?
SHERLOCK (over phone): If I die here, my body will be found in a building with your face projected on the front of it. Even Scotland Yard could get somewhere with that.
[Certainly this is enough for John, sitting at the end of the corridor with his hair all floofed out, to figure out what’s going on. Between the two of them, Mary and Sherlock have already told Sherlock that she shot him, by implication, kind of sort of. I wonder if that’s enough to break the spell? Still, Sherlock never says it directly. Instead:]
(She nods her agreement, still looking towards the shadowed figure at the end of the corridor. She can see one side of the popped coat collar protruding out of the shadows.)
SHERLOCK (over phone): I want to know how good you are. (Softly, encouragingly) Go on. Show me. The doctor’s wife must be a little bit bored by now.
[the business with shooting the coin]
SHERLOCK: And yet, over a distance of six feet, you failed to make a kill shot.
(He holds the coin up to show the hole shot through it. He looks like hell – shaky on his feet, sweating and breathing heavily as he continues talking.)
SHERLOCK: Enough to hospitalise me; not enough to kill me. That wasn’t a miss.
(He smiles slightly.)
SHERLOCK: That was surgery.
Okay. He comes very close to saying that she shot him. He implies it. But it’s not a direct statement.
Previously, I always read the Leinster Gardens deal as Sherlock (for some reason) feeling like it would be somehow be more convincing or effective for Mary to reveal herself. I understood the whole setup as some way for him to involve Mary in the scene, so that John would believe it, or maybe so Sherlock would be there to do some sort of damage control. I was filling in the blanks with a story that made the most sense to me.
What if it’s much simpler than that?
What if Sherlock didn’t tell John because he couldn’t, because Mary programmed him not to?
Later, during the Watsons domestic, Sherlock again does not directly say that Mary shot him. He talks around it, in the hypothetical:
SHERLOCK (looking at Mary): When I happened on you and Magnussen ...
(He takes a couple of noisy, strained breaths, bracing his hands on the arms of his chair.)
SHERLOCK: ... you had a problem.
(The camera pulls back across the floor of the living room towards the door.)
SHERLOCK (offscreen): More specifically, you had a witness.
...
SHERLOCK (voiceover): The solution, of course, was simple. Kill us both and leave.
...
SHERLOCK (in 221B in the present): However, sentiment got the better of you... One precisely-calculated shot to incapacitate me ...in the hope that it would bide you more time to negotiate my silence.
And then follows that stuff about her saving him (barf). (I would love it if this were also a result of hypnosis and mind control...because YUCK.)
Sherlock’s speaking much more directly about the shooting, but the cat is rather out of the bag at this point, anyway? Sherlock didn’t tell, but John knows, so there’s a bit more wiggle room? Maybe?
To sum up, a possible reading of this part of hlv is that Mary uses some kind of mind control mojo to seal Sherlock’s lips, but he undoes that spell by working around it. He sets up an elaborate scene in which Mary will basically confess to having done the deed herself, meaning that Sherlock doesn’t have to do it. Once what’s happened becomes clear to John, it loosens the hold of the mind control mojo on Sherlock, so that he can talk about the shooting a bit more directly, although he never states the bald fact of the matter. It’s John who does that:
JOHN (quietly): She shot you.
(Sherlock pulls a face, half-nodding his agreement.)
SHERLOCK: Er, mixed messages, I grant you.
I give you Mr. Punchline, who always has the last word...he seems a bit confused still, doesn’t he?
[Question: There is that weird light effect, like a ceiling fan deal, going on in the hospital threat / mind control scene between Mary and Sherlock. Someone, in a meta I cannot for the life of me find now, noted that that same effect appears at some point during s4? Anyone know? Could be important.]
