#tf problem

[victorianfantasywatson]

Dale Pike, Labyrinth, and the Wrong Choice

The reason that Dale Pike's poem "The Deeper Well" is tagged "Labyrinth" is for this: "The paths are unkempt arrows flipped; markers pried one always tells the truth one always lies" The creatures in the Labyrinth change the marks Sarah has made in her attempts to move through it so she stays lost. I have to digress here into the issue of how Jareth, the Goblin King, claims he did everything for Sarah's benefit, stole Toby away from her, made her solve the Labyrinth, played his role as her adversary because that's what SHE expected of him, and meanwhile from her POV she's been confused and lost and solving puzzles, and she HATES it?! And in the end he tells her "Everything I've done I've done for you" like I just can't think of a thing that is more us right now, ok an ARG sounded exciting, but now we are lost and frustrated, we don't know what puzzles to solve and what is real and what isn't, or even if the whole entire thing is just an illusion? but if the solution is to realize "you have no power over me" I don't even know what that means yet Anyway "one always tells the truth one always lies" - she comes to a pair of doors with sentient knockers, she has to choose a door, a path. One knocker always tells the truth, one always lies. She chooses the WRONG DOOR and falls into the oubliette. It's a dungeon cell that can only be accessed through a door in the ceiling, a place where you put people and forget about them. A deep well. This is, if you think about it, also where S ends up at the end of the Dale Pike fic "The Players". He falls down a hole into nothingness, into a room you can only exit through a ceiling, an oubliette. I'm a little lost again here but if we take the Labyrinth reference as a clue this seems to be pointing towards John making the wrong choice by shoving him through the trapdoor; I just don't know what the Right Choice would be in this context. Also at the end of TFP, when Sherlock passes out at the prison and wakes up back at his burnt-out house, we see him falling into black nothingness (ooze), followed by an overhead shot of him lying on the table, like he's fallen into the room. Which has no doors. This could also be a reference to an oubliette. (Which is evidence for Dale Pike being some kind of Someone, since apparently the poem was written a year ago, (have people really checked all the dates out?) and I don't really believe all this, except... I'm just pointing out evidence here.). In this case, though, the room is an illusion that Sherlock can just walk out of? (No idea how this ties in yet.). With reference to the Skull on twitter and tweeting George Takei ... I think most people have the sense not to do this anyway because it's a Bad Idea, but if you want an ARG-related reason just to quiet the voices in your head a little, the solution to the Labyrinth is "you have no power over me" and the Skull was literally trying to offer us power. That was supposedly the solution to the riddle, right, power? (I already wondered if he was just lying and now I suspect he might be the one who always lies). He has no power over us and no power to give us. This is the Wrong Path. In short, I've spent most of the past week wondering if I was going to give up and delete, log out, go inactive for a year or so, but I still can't get away from the game? And does anyone know where I can watch Labyrinth online it's been a while and I'm suddenly very very interested. Tagging some people I have seen posting about Pike/twitter/the ARG @jenna221b @teaandqueerbaiting @worriesconstantly @teapotsubtext (please tag anyone else who would be interested if you would like, I know there are more but it's hard to keep track of who is still playing and who isn't for me)

[victorianfantasywatson]

Rewatching THoTB the other night like

John and Sherlock break into Baskerville… into a military base. A high-security area. The second time they go in, it’s to look for a giant Hound that they KNOW Can’t. Be. There.

Because according to Sherlock, he just saw it running around in Dewar’s Hollow last night, and how? Can something exist BOTH in a state of locked-in-a-high-security-compound and running around freely wherever it wants? If he just saw it in Dewar’s Hollow, why look for it in Baskerville, this is like…. looking for someone in a top-secret Murder Prison Island when you know full well they were just now running around London.

For a minute I was distraught, thinking they’d always been writing these kind of terrible plot holes and we’d been overlooking them, seeing only what we wanted to see.

Then I remembered, Sherlock doesn’t think the Hound is at Baskerville at all! Of course he doesn’t, that wouldn’t make any damn sense. He thinks the Hound is a hallucination, that it doesn’t even really exist

….and of course, of course, he’s right.

(Honorable mention goes to the fact that they get into Baskerville because the security thinks Sherlock is Mycroft; they get into Sherrinford because security thinks Mycroft is Sherlock.)

[victorianfantasywatson]

"Miss You" is the risen corpse of Emelia Ricoletti

Note: This is a meta discussing Mary's "Miss You" DVD, and part of me feels that whole "who you are doesn't matter" is too offensive to be discussing as a clue, but that's what I'm doing anyway, because I see what I see, and the idea won't leave me alone. So apologies in advance.

Maybe this has been addressed, I’ve been in and out, but one thing that’s bothered me about TFP being John’s version of TAB is we never see him wake up? So are we supposed to believe we’re still trapped in the nightmare at the end? How does this work with rebuilding Baker St? How is solving cases with Sherlock part of his nightmare? Why would he dream of all that?

In TAB the plane lands, Sherlock wakes up, he goes in and out of the present day, then he finally realizes he’s still dreaming when he gets attacked by a skeleton at Emelia Ricoletti’s grave. He has to wake himself up later, by jumping off the waterfall. The plane lands again and he’s really home.

So at the end of TFP, it seems like John should really be awake. I feel like Sherlock referenced the first, false awakening with this line - “you just went the wrong way last time, that’s all.” And the water pouring over John’s head in the well seems to echo the waterfall. So even though we don’t see him wake up, shouldn’t he have? He was rescued from the well? Besides why would he have a nightmare about Baker St and solving cases with Sherlock? It all seems too normal… except for the Mary DVD.

When Sherlock “wakes up” the first time in TAB, we’re not given any huge indication that it isn’t real, some things like John deserting him at the graveyard feel off but nothing jumps out as impossible and jarring. Sherlock goes back on the case, goes to the graveyard, digs up Emelia Ricoletti’s grave….

And is attacked by a skeleton. Let’s clarify, impossibly attacked from beyond the grave by a dead woman, in a way that’s jarring, that made us as viewers immediately realize something was off about this scene, that it was impossible and shouldn't be taken at face value. That it wasn't real.

An impossible attack from a dead woman ... kind of like suddenly receiving yet another timely pre-recorded message from your dead wife, there to tell you “who you really are, it doesn’t matter!”

Because this is an attack, and it’s JARRING. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the show, it doesn’t fit with their character arcs, it doesn’t make any sense? Who ends a show on this note? It was almost unbelievable to me the first time I watched TFP that this could be the message, THIS could be what it came to, after everything we’d seen, after everything the show had meant to us. I did believe it,because I didn't see any other possible explanation, and it broke my heart.

“Who you really are, it doesn’t matter!” Is hateful. It’s a targeted attack, and I hope - I don’t know, but I hope - that it’s also a signal that this can’t be real, that this isn’t over. Because this message doesn't fit with the world that we've been shown for seven years.

Which leaves open the possibility, if the end of TFP was John’s false awakening, there may be more TFP universe yet to come, in whatever form we next see the show, Lost Special or S5. We’ve picked up on the fact that something is wrong, but most people haven’t yet - I hate to say this, but I'm saying it as a warning, because it makes narrative sense - the end scenes of Baker St may have just been a false awakening. There may be more of John's depressing alternate reality before he finally wakes up.

[victorianfantasywatson]

Current favorite detail about TFP being John's dream: this is how Sherlock gets the Belstaff back at the end despite not having it with him on Murder Prison Island ....because it's romantic. Remember how we felt about that promo picture, Sherlock in his coat, running through the darkness with the lantern? This is how John feels, this is why the coat was magically there, because he has that image of Sherlock in his mind

[victorianfantasywatson]

I can't decide though... Eurus is a mirror for John, his repressed self? So which part is supposed to be tormenting Sherlock - his repressed desires? Or the repression itself, the fear that's kept them apart all these years? Or - does he start off thinking it's the first one, the desires, that's the problem, and realize in his mind-bungalow journey that it was actually the repression? I think it's finally time for me to watch again, I think I'm ready