#As a person who loves ciphers and codes and absolutely has spend 2 hours on solving a stupid code provided in a tv show

[mikaikaika]

Quackity : Chilling after unleashing his social experiment on the ccs

Meanwhile Cellbit :

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 13 – Out of My Dreams [TFP 3/3]

 We’re finally here. I can’t actually believe it. This meta series has exploded over lockdown but we’re finally at the close. The title of this chapter comes from a song in the musical Oklahoma! that you can find here, which has a fantastic dream ballet sequence – weirdly, during lockdown the fantastic film I’m Thinking of Ending Things was released which draws heavily on dreams in Oklahoma!, so maybe that’s my next project. Now, however, onto the end of TFP.

Before jumping into this meta, I really suggest reading this meta by @sagestreet (X) – it breaks down exactly why Redbeard represents homosexuality, and the probability that Sherlock’s repression draw’s on his father’s own repression, which is in turn a metaphor for ACD himself. This is really important in the light of the metatextuality I’ve been plugging through this series, and ties together the 1980s and 1890s themes really nicely – these are the periods of growth for Sherlock and canon!Holmes respectively and their homophobia has to be dealt with.

We left off with about 20 minutes to go, as Sherlock is sinking into the black depths of his mind – the deepest we’re ever going to get as well as the darkest in colour, chiming with the rest of the series. And then – flashes of Eurus, Redbeard and young Sherlock bleeding in through his memory. @sagestreet’s meta argues that Victor Trevor could genuinely have been Sherlock’s first love even at that age, and I don’t dispute the possibility, but I do have an alternate reading for slightly later in age, based on one image alone. Jump back in your mind to TAB, when Mycroft tells Sherlock he was there for him the last time – we get a shot of a teenager in a drug den which is never repeated again, but which has a sense of absolute past trauma attached to it.

I plump for this to be our key trauma personally, but currently I don’t think we have enough information to go on. However, regardless of which age you read Victor, the outcome is pretty much the same. So – Sherlock plunges into dark and we get memories flash before him, and it’s almost like he’s drowned in his EMP, his life has flashed before his eyes – but there is one thing stopping him from dying still. Eurus, trauma!Eurus, is ever a paradox, as repressed sexuality inherently is. On the one hand it’s constantly pushing down and on the other it’s constantly pushing up – and the sheer mania we see in Eurus is only really explicable as a set of mental contradictory impulses in this way. At the end of TFP, we spend so much time thinking that she is trying to kill Sherlock, but she’s trying to save herself and him. His gay trauma has completely regressed to a child’s fear here in the form of the little girl asking why she has been abandoned. The plane in the girl’s hands, going back to the height metaphor, is symbolic of the final struggle for life – as long as it’s in the air, Sherlock is in danger of death (see Chapter 2 ), but he is still under the impression that keeping going by crashing it, and crushing the queer side of him, is the way to go. We see him walk past images of him and Victor as children on the walls and ignoring them, after all.

It’s pretty important that these images are shown just as Sherlock connects to his heart for the first time, who is still drowning of course. The connection is closer and closer to being made! Under that water are the bones, which is symbolic of them being hidden in the recesses of his mind. We get the fantastically awful lines from John, if read superficially, that the bones are ‘small’ – others have been very good at pointing out John’s sudden inability to be a doctor as evidence for the EMP, and so it’s important for us to recognise here that John is not John, but heart!John.

There are other obvious indicators of the EMP here, most notably in the location. Even being out for a couple of hours, it is not possible that Eurus could have done this to Sherlock and John. Who aided her in getting John down the well, and how did they get out? How did they come to shore and not get stopped? How did nobody notice the construction of the giant cell in the garden of Musgrave Hall, and how does it spontaneously open after Sherlock pushes one wall? This switching from location to location – island, cell, home – is a shifting of perspective common in dreams. Moffat has used the idea of there being no time between location shifts before as a dream indicator in the Doctor Who episode Forest of the Dead, so it’s clearly something he has thought about. The pushing down of the wall is a huge symbolic moment – it couldn’t have just been a secret door! Instead, it ties in with the image of the breaking busts from TST as the idea of breaking down walls in his mind – and the drama of it suggests that we seem to have arrived at our final destination.

Everything unites rather wonderfully as trauma!Eurus threatens to drown heart!John, as though this is the culmination of ‘burning the heart’ – because ‘the heart’, both literally and metaphorically, is John! And so the destruction of Sherlock’s heart is happening inside his mind because of John’s suicidal suffering outside. We see the same kind of projection as is implied at the end of TST in the aquarium scene – this pulls in ideas of artificiality, which are important, but it’s also an important visual link. In the death of Mary, Sherlock tries to rerun his own assassination but imagines that John is devastated by the loss of Mary rather than Sherlock because he cannot cope with the queerness – it’s a way of processing John’s suicidal impulses without fully recognising them. This link of someone dying surrounded by water with the projection light shows that this is the revised (and correct) projection of what is happening to John in the real world – it is connected to Sherlock’s heart.

Sherlock, with the help of his heart, finally works out that Redbeard is not a dog. @sagestreet’s meta is useful in pointing out that Daddy being allergic to dogs doesn’t mean that Daddy didn’t want one, just that he couldn’t – and that’s a pretty good way of thinking about ACD’s inability to represent queerness as he might have wanted to, and so stamping on the character of Sherlock Holmes. The fact that he explicitly cracks one of the symbols in his mind is fantastic, because it calls back to the TLD scene suggesting that tea and coffee is some kind of code – there is a code in his brain, and he’s starting to break it down. Victor Trevor, whether child or teenager in reality, here is a child and is chosen I think to look like I imagine a child Martin Freeman would look like, but that’s bye the bye. What’s more important is that together, they played pirates. Given that Sherlock has been drowning in the repressed queerness of his brain, we’ve talked about piracy before as being symbolic of fielding that (see TST meta) and instead riding the wave, controlling it and refusing to drown. This hints at the love that Sherlock and Victor were able to enact, if only in youthful play, mastery of the high seas as opposed to adult Sherlock drowning in them. And then, gay trauma!Eurus traps Victor down a well – forces Sherlock to drown his love in that repression, and we know it’s love because it’s the same well that heart!John is in – Victor is equated with him.

“You couldn’t face it, so you told yourself a better story.” Ah yes – how convenient that it’s all tied up in ideas of fictionalising. I’m just going to leave that one there.

“Deep waters, Sherlock, in all your life, in all your dreams” – linking the Carl Powers pool, the TAB waterfall with TFP, and the light on his face reflecting TST – all of these links tying up 1890s repression (TAB) with 1980s repression (TGG, TST). And what is trauma!Eurus’s motive for destroying Sherlock’s love? ‘I had no one.’ The most striking thing about this is that before Sherlock meets John in the real world, and even during the beginning of their friendship, this is the recurring theme in how he chooses to portray himself. It’s not something that applies specifically to Eurus – it’s what we all associate with Sherlock, more than anything, pointing to this motive being about him. ‘Alone is what I have; alone protects me.’ Remember that? Trauma has forced that specific characterising of Sherlock onto him – his queer trauma necessitates solitude.

We already have a clue that Eurus is the girl on the plane by looking at the plane in her hands as a child, but it also suggests that even in her undeveloped form, the capacity to destroy him has always been there. It suggests a suicidal impulse in Sherlock that goes a long way back, specifically connected to his queerness – which ties in with the teenage addict in TAB as well as the cut scene from ASiP in which Greg implies that Sherlock has been suicidal.

Solving the code is a lovely moment – we have all of these hallowed graves of the past Holmes ancestry, which we can read as the hallowed adaptations over the years – and it’s nothing. It’s completely empty. We are disregarding the Holmeses of the past except to use them as tools to get to our trauma – which is what metatextual references have been doing throughout this series. However, there’s something else tricky that I want to throw up here.

I found this problem on an Australian site here, and haven’t seen it on tumblr although I may be wrong! The problem is the cipher. When cracked, it’s not what Sherlock says it is. It might just be a mistake, as the linked website theorises. The words missing are:

Lost Without Your Love Save

Although they appear in the song, their numbers aren’t in the cipher. It could fully be a mistake, or something cinematographical in not making the full cipher clear on the screen – it passes in a blur, after all. But I want to postulate something a tiny bit tenuous here. Sherlock’s subconscious has clearly been grappling with his repressed love for a long time, and it’s something he hasn’t been able to deal with, stemming right back to childhood. Up until now, he has never been able to crack the case, so to speak. But let’s jump back to the (slightly flippant) moment in TSoT when Sholto is dying, and John tells Sherlock that he’s a drama queen, there’s a time limit, the game is on, this is when he works best. And it’s true! We see Sherlock work under very specific time pressure a lot – look at the bomb scene in TEH and the bonfire scene, literally everything about TGG – the show is littered with these moments, and now they come to fruition. He could keep going living a half-life, in constant trauma, because it was not a matter of life and death, and it was too painful to try to confront it. But now in the real world, John is dying – as we can see by the heart down the well (note that brain!Mycroft is abandoned here, cementing the importance of the heart to this deduction sequence) and so he has no choice. And that is the missing bit of the code! ‘Lost without your love/Save’ is exactly what has propelled him to finally face his gay trauma – the fact that John Watson loves him, and will kill himself if Sherlock does not wake up. !!!

The girl on the plane is Eurus. This should not be altogether surprising for those of us who have seen HLV, because EMP theory seems to be repeating the same motifs again and again. HLV – it’s the Mind Palace. TAB? It’s also the Mind Palace. Now here. We also notice that Sherlock’s brain is reusing the plane from ASiB and the initial phone tactic used by Jim Moriarty – another link to John being in danger. But when Sherlock finally breaks in to his trauma, the most important thing is that it’s not threatening. She’s frightened. She has a constant urge towards death, represented by the plane, that ties into Sherlock’s suicidal urges. They will always be there, every time she closes her eyes – but Sherlock gets her to open them. I don’t have an answer to eye hell (yet), but my current theory is that this is the key – sightlessness is a link to suicidal urges through Eurus.

To jump past the police scene then, which we’ll get to in a minute, Sherlock’s reconciliation with Eurus rather than treating her as an enemy is perfect. Just like trauma!Eurus can never end her suicidal ideation, Sherlock can never put an end to the trauma inside him. Framing this as a battle was always wrong. He resurfaces by learning to live with her and to treat himself with kindness. Forgive me whilst I get soppy, but that’s beautiful. In that light, Eurus remaining in a kinder, friendlier version of Sherrinford is fantastic – she’s still inside him, not particularly desirable, and will never go away, but Sherlock has made peace with her and is friends with her. The violin was a symbol of desire in ASiB and again in TSoT, a way of Sherlock articulating what he could not say, and early in TFP that articulation was destroyed by Eurus’s discordance – here they have learned to play together. A difficult relationship – awkward, dangerous, unsure of boundaries – but a relationship nevertheless.

Rewinding to the police moment – despite the chains around John’s ankles, he miraculously climbs out of the well. More important in this scene, however, is that Sherlock gets Greg’s name right. This is, for me, one of the most significant sections of the entire show. Sherlock has never got Greg’s name right before – it’s a running joke on the show – and the reason Mofftiss have made such a joke of it is that it ties into ACD’s complete inability to remember names. Much like having Mrs. Turner live next door is a nod to canon inconsistency, as is the John/James parallel which, although a mistake in the initial work, they have exploited remarkably well, ACD famously never named Lestrade, only giving him the initial G. This is why Sherlock comes up with every possible G name for him. This is tied into Sherlock’s inability to move beyond the mistakes of canon – we see this weird inability to stick in modern Sherlock’s universe in other ways too, like the slightly old-fashioned nature of his costume (passed off as ‘timeless’, but clearly belonging to old as much as modern times), the deerstalker situation, thinking England has a king, not knowing the earth goes around the sun, not knowing Madonna, seeming to forget who Thatcher is – the list goes on, but Greg is the most constant one. Calling him Greg is a symbol that Sherlock has broken out of the confines of all of the past Sherlocks and has completely slipped into the modern version – which is exactly where he needs to be. Greg saying that Sherlock might be good as well as great – because the persona doesn’t matter anymore.

We should note in passing, in accordance with @sagestreet’s reading of Daddy Holmes as ACD, his disappointment and clear distress at brain!Mycroft hiding trauma!Eurus for so long because it was ‘for the best’. I’m not certain where Mummy Holmes stands in this, though I’m inclined to equate her with Daddy as ACD here, but I’m open to other suggestions for that.

And then we have the final sequence – who you really are. And I admit, I am thrown by Mary’s words – which is a terrible way to end the meta series! She says: ‘who you really are doesn’t matter’ – which is an awful thing to say, although coming from a still present comphet is inevitable. She also says that it’s all about the legend. But regardless of what comphet!Mary says, she’s not there anymore. The life that is being rebuilt is one of two men in Baker Street. Baker Street is the symbolic home of the heart within the EMP, so the rebuilding of that and the replacing of heart!John inside is lovely. Furthermore, if Daddy Holmes is ACD to Sherlock, the idea of Sherlock and John parenting Rosie feels like the start of a new, freer, queerer chapter in Sherlock Holmes history – authorship has changed, and it’s been handed over to a new generation. The final shot, however, hammers home for me the validity of the metatextual interpretation – Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place.

I mention the significance of this in an earlier chapter – Basil Rathbone is arguably the definitive Holmes interpretation who has defined the character for many years, and so could feasibly represent Holmes’s film/tv status as the most portrayed character of all time. They’re not running into Rathbone Place – they’re leaving it. They’re on their way up and out of all those previous adaptations, as Sherlock builds a new heart with no comphet.

He’s still got to get out to save real!John though – let’s not get too carried away – although we seem to have broken through the bulk of internalised queerphobia at the end of this series. I’ve previously explained on my blog why I don’t think there will ever be a series 5, and sad as that is, it is just life, so this behemoth of a meta series has actually just been an academic exercise more than anything else! Nevertheless, I hope if you’ve made it to the end that you’ve enjoyed it, and if you have any thoughts on tjlc that spring from this I would love to hear them!