Hopkins and Lestrade find Sherlock hot but they both know he’s gay and in love with John (and how difficult that is for him right now)
Last time Lestrade saw an attractive co-worker at Baker Street was at the Christmas party in ASiB,
Soon after Molly gets there Sherlock accidentally exposes her as having dressed up seductively to try to impress him. Lestrade learns that Molly is in love with Sherlock and seems to not know that he’s gay.
Cue Lestrade with another attractive female co-worker at Baker Street. He immediately asks what type of professional relationship Hopkins has with Sherlock. On the surface this seems like a pretty average conversation, except for two clues:
1) she says, ‘it’s nothing serious’, which is a romantic-sounding turn of phrase. It’s the kind of thing you say about someone with whom you ARE romantically involved but it’s just starting out, like in the early days of dating. So that’s a red flag that there’s something going on here under the surface narrative. Maybe Lestrade is asking her about Sherlock: does she like-like him? Is she into him? He needs to know this right up front because, as we’ll later find out, he wants to ask her out on a date. [Edit: Lestrade is going out later with someone from work but it’s a forensic pathologist] (And last time he got attracted to a woman at Baker Street that woman was in love with Sherlock.) (PS I love how, ‘It’s nothing’, actually means, ‘It’s something. But, it’s nothing’. That’s brilliant).
2) She says that Sherlock, ‘loves a really tricky case’. As I’ve discussed here and here, ‘the tricky cases’, ‘the funny cases’, is code for, ‘the gay cases’. ‘Funny’, ‘tricky’, all of these are implying something is, ‘odd’, or, ‘different’, ‘strange’, all of which are code for, ‘queer’. Hopkins and Lestrade’s demeanours during this exchange reinforce that this is what they’re really talking about (in the subtext).
Check it out, here’s what they’re saying and underneath what I think the subtext is with regards to the three of them,
Notice Hopkins smile when she says, ‘I mean he loves a really tricky case’. And look at Lestrade’s smile, in turn, he is happy to hear that she understands that Sherlock loves a tricky case. He is happy that Hopkins isn’t becoming attached to Sherlock romantically, even though he’s attractive, because she knows that he is clearly gay.
Then we get a subtextual clue that Lestrade was also attracted to Sherlock when he first met him: Hopkins asks, ‘how did you two first meet?’. Again, this is another suggestive, romantic-sounding phrase like, ‘it’s nothing’. This is the type of question that friends of a new couple will ask them at a party in a romantic comedy, ‘How’d you two meet? You’re such a cute couple’. This shows us that Lestrade is not outside of the romantic subtext when it comes to Sherlock: he, too, has felt this (possibly inevitable) attraction,
(They both seem to be making blowjob faces here. Make of that what you will).
Bonus subtext clue: note that Hopkins says that he loves, ‘A really tricky case’, singular. Sure, this, idiomatically, is correct, one case represents them all but in the romantic subtext this also says, ‘he’s in love with someone else, it’s a very difficult situation because it’s John Watson’. The tricky case of loving your married best friend. The guy married an assassin and had a baby with her: now that’s a difficult case to crack,