#I saw someone else say this was him trying to write a moffat episode and failing which. lol!

[macbethz]

I say this as someone who is a fan of both moffat and rtds tenures I do think it’s a LITTLE funny that this finale has unanswered mysteries that remain unanswered for seasons to motivate continued viewership, and the solution to the mystery we did get was actually really simple the whole time but contained elements that encouraged fan speculation, both things people who don’t like moffat regularly accuse him of doing

[marta-bee]

More Mary Thoughts

@wizardlysherlok replied to this post on AGRA/Agra parallels in Doyle-cannon and BBC-canon:

it feels like if AGRA was empty of full, it wouldn’t be right for john neither way: if it was full, it would the the great betrayal and also the “she wasn’t supposed to be like that”, the wife who lied immensely to her husband and(for god sakes) shot his bf. If it was empty it wouldn’t work either because it was boring and the same life john was trying to scape because it was making him unhappy...conclusion : Mary does not work for john in every way 

Ooh, a chance to talk about Mary generally! I’ve apparently got just enough codeine still in my system, and it’s close enough to the witching hour, that this seems like a fun topic rather than the don’t-poke-the-bear dread that usually falls on me when I speak her name in this fandom. Here’s hoping I don’t regret this come tomorrow.

Even in Doyle canon, I never particularly liked Mary’s story, which is meant as a judgment on Doyle and not some fictional woman. She’s clearly introduced because Watson --being a romantic-- needs a romantic partner, and for a whole host of historical reasons Doyle felt like it needed to be a woman. Any woman would do, apparently. And even without getting into issues of whether this is akin to queerbaiting, it also just makes for a very boring character IMO. Mary is the equivalent of a Bond girl : more saintly than sex-appeal, perhaps, but who only really exists as an object the male characters get to react against. There’s precious little of Mary specifically that makes any difference to SIGN.

I do like some of the grace notes Doyle gives her in later stories. I think there’s a reference in one of the stories that she had a reputation for being both kind and clever and women from her neighborhood came to her to help them solve their little problems, a sort of more everyday vision of Sherlock Holmes. But at least in SIGN she’s a walking trope and frustratingly little more. 

I think the Granada series was wise to leave her out almost entirely. (She only appears in the movie version of SIGN, and there is only a client.) She just would have been a distraction to the story they were trying to tell. In the RDJ/Jude Law movies she’s actually brilliantly done, somehow challenging and supporting their relationship at the same time. She’s also witty and daring and would not seem at all out of place in a Jane Austen novel with all that witty back-and-foth, and all three of them have this great chemistry. If ever there was an adaptation that screamed both Johnlock and Johnlockary (and of course Warstan), it’s this one.

Goodness, we need more fanfic about Kelly Reilly’s Mary. I need to write her again. She’s brilliant.

Which brings us to the BBC. I’m going to be very brave and say my biggest problem with her isn’t that she wedged herself into John’s and Sherlock’s relationship and somehow came away with the right to dictate its terms, even posthumously. It’s not even that she lied to her husband and manipulated him, endangering him and their child in the process; or that she shot Sherlock, or was an assassin who apparently went mercenary. All of that could be really interesting if done well! And really, I can think of storylines that would actually justify quite a lot of that. Even shooting, even killing Sherlock, even not being apologetic about it after the fact- I could write a story where that character made sense as a romantic opposite to John. I actually got about 10,000 words into one attempt, though I never finished or published it because the fandom was pretty toxic to anyone interested in a more shades-of-grey ersion of Mary at the time.

No, what really drives me up the wall with BBC’s version of Mary is they don’t really settle on any one version of her. Actually in each of the five episodes she appears in, there’s this radically different version of who she are and what motivates her: supportive friend; bride; sociopath assassin; government agent; martyr. The most sympathetic take on that I can give is that Sherlock himself is trying to figure her out and can’t make sense of her so keeps trying one mold after another. But whatever the intent, the effect is that Mary’s just ridiculously muddled for me, and I never really connected to her because I didn’t understand her. I’m not sure the show-runners did either. Seeing what Moffat in particular did with women characters in Doctor Who makes me think he genuinely struggles to find them interesting if they aren’t really... extra, for lack of a better word. John and Sherlock, being men, had their BAMF moments but also a psychology that actually made sense along somewhat normal terms; Mary had to be a super-sekrit assassin, and a rogue that was targeted by a media mogul, and the hero who saved Holmes and then did it again from beyond the grave. All of which would have been fine if it actually came from a coherent characterization. But BBC’s Mary was all BAMF and stunning reveals and little to no coherence that made that make sense, so her character never really developed any kind of a reality for me. My brain couldn’t make sense of her, so my heart never latched on either. In the end I was just left confused and frustrated

Even all these years later! I still don’t know what to make of her, and that’s just bad writing. I would love to have a Mary who lied from start to finish with John “Trust Issues” Watson, or who shot Sherlock to the chest where it somehow made sense. That could be fascinating. It’s not what we got, though; at least it’s not what I was able to get out of the show.

Here’s another thing that would be fascinating, and I’d really love to see in some adaptation; even this one, though I don’t think we’ll get it. Mary Morstan in 1895 makes some sort of sense even with a suspiciously close friendship between Holmes and Watson, because male friendships operated in a very different realm than heterosexual marriages did. There were different kinds of intimacies in that time, I think. But when you bring the characters into the modern world, it eems like a super-close friendship like Holmes and Watson seem to have, one that seem to emotionally resemble marriage even if there’s no physical/sexual component, would be a challenge to what any self-respecting modern woman would tolerate from her husband. I don’t mean because it makes John gay, and of course married people can have friends, but there’s something about John and Sherlock that in the modern world strays damned close to emotional infidelity. 

I mean, how can you have that without either weakening the relationship between John and Sherlock, or making Mary cuckolded in some sense? Now throw into the mix in this particular adaptation, even before Mary, John and Sherlock had a ... unique relationship. John would date and have sex (or not), Sherlock would be stuck in seemingly perpetual celibacy, but if Sherlock dared to date (and I think this would be true for a man as well as a woman) John goes into a disbelieving jealous rage. This strikes me as not normal male friendship, though it’s not romantic or sexual either. It’s queerplatonic af on Sherlock’s side, increasingly stretching the bounds of what can be called “platonic”, and for John, it’s kind of a monodirectional monogamy in at least an emotional sense. I mean, the man went and got married, but we all saw his reaction when Sherlock dared to (seemingly) date someone else.

Now throw a modern woman into that mix, trying to marry and start a family with one half of a duo in that truly fucked-up dynamic. Imagine what it would be like for her to exist in that world. You can imagine polyamory of some variety, or jealousy, or a very altered view from what the mainstream imagnes are the expectations of married life, or whatever spin you like to put on it. 

I guarantee you -- if done well -- it would be fascinating. And I’d very much like to see it. Or read it, or something. If you want to make that woman as much of a danger junkie as John, as much of a skilled, professional killer, wehther on the government’s payroll or a disillusioned former agent who refused to follow orders and was forced to “branch out” or even just a true psychopath who was utterly self-motivated and ruthless but still wanted to protect John or at least what John represented to her? 

Well, that could be fascinating, too. Even more so. There’s just one catch: you’ve got to actually tell the story. They never seemed to get around to that, and I think I’m still more than a bit bitter.

..... And apparently I’m rambling. Thanks for allowing me to talk about her a bit. I’ll shut up now. :-)

[multifandom-panda]

HOW CHIBNALL PISSED ME OFF

I have been away from Tumblr for years, but here I am now. The reason for my return is simple: Chibnall pissed me off and Facebook is not the right place for a a rant like the one you are going to read. Posting it on twitter would make more sense, you say? Probably. But I have no time to count words. I will start with why I had high expectantions on Chibanl and then I will explain how he shuttered every single one of them. 

1. When I heard Chibnall was coming after Moffat I was happy. I have always had that twisted relationship with Doctor Who where I loved the adventures, the adrenaline, the jokes, the discoveries, the aliens, but I also loved the feels and angst that came with the Companions and the Master. I had seen Broadchurch, so I “knew” Chibnall, I was sure enough he would not mess around. I was so wrong

2. Female!Doctor. Not a fan. Nu-uh. I have never felt the need for a female Doctor. There were plenty of great female characters in Doctor Who, both in the Classic era and the New era. Every single one of them had their own personality, their own skills and flaws. It was great, because they were actually people. Doctor Who was the first show that I watched where I didn’t get annoyed by female characters. They were strong in their own ways, and that didn’t mean being a super killing machine without special fighting skills. They were real and they were fundamental. Without them the Doctor lost his moral compass and we saw that more than once. So no, I didn’t need a female Doctor, I was alreay represented by amazing women in the show who were not less important than him. Moreover, I have no problem feeling represented by a man, I mean... men are still people, they have feelings and I am capable of understanding that. It’s called empathy. I am not so stupid that I cannot relate to a character only because they don’t have my genitalia. 

3. Lack of imagination. Another problem I have with a female Doctor is the same I have when authors remake characters, when they change gender or ethnicity to a character to give people representation. It’s insulting. You are basically saying that you are not capable of creating a new character for that minority (being women, an ethnic group or disabled people) without using a pre-existing character. It means that in your head, to detach yourself from the negative stereotypes, you need a white male model because you are not able to imagine a minority character without those flaws on your own.

4. Companions: Graham was fun compared to Ryan and Yaz, but if we compare the Companions to the older ones, the new ones lose. And lose real bad. They left me nothing. They characterization is non-existent, they follow the Doctor and that’s it. Ryan should have disability but it appears only when the screenwriter remembers. Meh. I don’t have much to say about them, they really didn’t left any impression on me. I was not fond of Martha and I can list reasons why, I couldn’t stand Clara and I can go on 30 minutes saying why. These new ones are just... meh.

5. The Doctor. I didn’t see him... her... them. Let’s start with a note: I saw Jodie in Broadchurch and I didn’t like her there, so when I found out she was going to be the new Doctor, I was not amazed. If it had to be a woman, I would have preferred someone else, but anyway. This Doctor didn’t have any special features, it just looked like an hyped 10 or 11, but without their depth. Kind is an adjective, not a character trait. I feel that her character was not studied enough, she didn’t have enough depth. It got better with the beginning of this new season but honestly? You can’t be able to write a character properly only when they face their nemesis. 

6. The episodes. Oh. My. God. The first season of this new Doctor was a series of episodes that looked like they jumped out of the 60s. Teaching people through an entertainment show doesn’t mean you have to take the show, make an episode on whatever the problem you want to discuss is and make some sort of documentary about it. It means you try to explain to people through fun, adventures, analogies... those who watch DW now are not 6 years old. They know that if you show them a genocide on another planet with segregation, spaceships etc, you are telling them not to be racist assholes. They do not need Rosa Parks to give them a lecture. Episode in which appears a villain with an unkown objective and we don’t see ever again, but ok. 

7. The cherry on top. The timeless children. What. The. Actual. Fuck. So Chibnall just decided to take 60 years of TV show and toss it into the garbage can, right? That was the purpose, right? Because otherwise I don’t see it. So the Doctor is a creature from another planet, not Gallifrey, who can regenerate. The Gallifreyan see them, think “oh nice” and go all Frankenstein on them. Noice. I have just a teeny tiny itsy bitsy problem with that. And for one I mean so many that they are more than the leaves on the trees in the Amazon forest. You are nullifying “End of time”, “This is Gallifrey”, the 50th anniversary... moreover Clara saw their past, she would have seen that something was off. They can’t remember? Fine. But it’s still there, it’s not like they transplanted their brain. 

8. The name of the Doctor. The big secret. The name that must never be spoken. The name that was keeping the universe together... and they revealed it like that. Brendan? Really? The name of the Doctor was a legend, you were not supposed to name them for real! Brendan? SERIOUSLY?

9. Doctor and Master. They were friends since they were kids. They grew up together. They studied together. They went on adventures together. They lost friends together. They grew apart and they kept fighting each other... but they were best enemies. Ok, a couple of times one really killed/let the other die, but go back to the beginning and count those times. They were two faces of the same coin, getting on each other nerves and saving each other over and over again. For the Doctor, the Master was the only other Time Lord in the universe for so long he was willing to pardon a genocide to save him (more than once). Their relationship was based on the fact that in a way they were complementary: the Master has no restraints, while the Doctor tries to be good when they both have done so many terrible things (including genocide, eh Doctor? You are not so innocent, honey). Their relationship was beautiful and painful. And it went down the drain. You are telling me that the Doctor is a superior being, they are not equals anymore, they are not two faces of the same coin, they are not even the same species so what are we talking about? And the coldness of the Doctor while she lets him die? Who the hell are you?

TL;DR Chibnall took a character I loved from a show I loved and torn it apart. The season and the characters were not written as I expected, I mean that they were 2D version of themselves, no depth there. Nothing interesting. I think he tried too much all at once: female Doctor, 3 companions, one shot episodes. Man, pick one thing you want to change and stick with it. You already have to run a show you have never run before, so you have to understand how to make it work. 4 characters are difficult to handle all at once and at the same time give them all the right space, depth and characterization in seasons that have less than 15 episodes each.

I am so pissed. I didn’t appreciate Jodie, but in a little corner of my mind I had always tought I would come back to Doctor Who once she was gone, but that’s not possible anymore. Funny thing is, this show made me meet the majority of my friends, the people with whom I started hanging our 6 years ago. We would have never met without DW probably. I kind of feel robbed now.

[elizadoolittlethings]

MG - The Man Behind The Genius

(via Get Ready to Love Mark Gatiss)

“Can we just sit here and watch this Spider-Man cartoon?” Mark Gatiss smiles slyly but it’s not clear if he’s completely kidding. We’re sitting on a couch in The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York where a small retro-TV is playing an appropriately retro episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. “I love cartoons,” Gatiss tells me. “Did you ever see the old Star Trek cartoon? It’s brilliant. It’s basically like season four.”

The guy sitting next to me might look like Mycroft Holmes, but he barely sounds like him at all. This guy is softer, more childlike, more down to talk about whatever, so long as those things are James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, superheroes, Star Trek… In short, if you meet Mark Gatiss, you want to be best friends with him instantly.

For the uninitiated: Mark Gatiss is the co-creator (with Steven Moffat) of Sherlock. He’s also an actor IN Sherlock as Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s  snippy, brilliant older brother. He’s written for Doctor Who numerous times, including last season’s “Robots of Sherwood,” as well as the classic Dickens 2005 episode “The Unquiet Dead.” He’s got a recurring role on Game of Thrones as Tycho Nestoris of the Iron Bank, but has roots in the famous British comedy The League of Gentlemen. In short: he’s done some things that are beyond impressive.

Our chat is talking place two hours ahead of The Museum of the Moving Image’s special screening of the Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More,” which is the one Mark wrote for this season. And yes, I can call him Mark, because he told me to. Glancing over at my open-notebook, full of my chicken-scratch  questions, he spies the word “Gatiss,” at the top of the page complete with a frantic double underline. “Don’t say ‘Moffat’ or ‘Gatiss,’” he coos. “Say ‘Mark.’”

To say Mark Gatiss is disarming would be an understatement similar to saying Sherlock Holmes is smart. It’s not that Mark is disarming, it’s like you and he have been exchanging dog-eared paperbacks for years and this conversation about the animated Star Trek from the 70s is old hat. After we talk about how great the writing is on that cartoon Trek, I ask him if he’d ever want to write for Star Trek.

“The new series?!!“I love Star Trek, so yeah, I wouldn’t say no. Simon Pegg’s writing the new one [Star Trek Beyond]. So yeah. You never know!”

Is there anything else—any other established universe—Mark Gatiss would like to write for other than Star Trek?

“Nooo…No. I want to do something new. But it’s so hard to get it off the ground. I’ve said this many times, and it’s absolutely true. That there is a reason why people revisit brands that are so familiar; it’s because they’re so familiar! And it’s getting harder and harder to try and convince people to take a punt at something new. So, that is absolutely vital. Otherwise, there’s no blood in it—and I say this knowing that I’m associated with two of the biggest reboots in history—and people will always revisit Sherlock Holmes. And I think that now that Doctor Who has really returned after its absence, Doctor Who is imperishable. It will probably stop again one day and then come back again, because that’s what it does. Like anything. But, I would love to do something that people look back on fondly, because it was a brand new thing. But it’s terribly difficult—A. to think of it! B. To get it off the ground. What is the new thing! Sherlock Holmes himself said there is nothing new under the sun!”

What if Steven Moffat left Doctor Who? Would Mark still write for Doctor Who?

“Of course I’d still write for Doctor Who! If they’d have me! It’s a continuing honor and thrill! I would say that unlike Russell [Davies] saying ‘that’s me, done,’ I think that if Steven were to leave, he’d still come back after a few years and do another one. Because he loves it. I mean, Russell loves it too! But, I think Russell saw it as his take on it and that was it. Which is a very grown-up way of moving on. But I can’t resist the urge.”

When you’re hanging with Mark Gatiss, who wants to be a grown up anyway?

Would Mark want to be the showrunner of Doctor Who if Steven Moffat left?

“The truth is I know how incredibly demanding it is. And one of things that makes it very difficult to see is the sort of casual attacks Steven has had to put up with over the past few years. It’s incredibly hard work and they care so much. It’s a 24 hour job. And when people say ‘why can’t you make more episodes!?’ I mean, the episode we’re watching tonight: I was sent the final effect shot the day before I left for New York. That episode is just complete and it’s on this Saturday. There are so many things to consider. But to answer your question, I know how hugely demanding [showrunning] is, but also how hugely rewarding it would be. It’s a huge, life-changing decision. I’m an actor and a writer. I couldn’t act if I did it. Because I wouldn’t have time. The only thing I could act in would possibly be Doctor Who. WAIT A MINUTE! I’ll DO IT!”

At this, Mark begins giggling like a madman, throwing his head back and repeating “I’ll do it! This will effect my whole life? HA HA HA HA! I’LL DO IT!!”

The comedian, the sketch-comedy writer version of Mark Gatiss has emerged! Fittingly, we switch our conversation to the importance of humor in his writing. How and why is he just so damn funny? Is Doctor Who and Sherlock nothing without humor?

“Humor is fundamental. I couldn’t agree with you more. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why we love these shows. Essentially from slightly humorless people who thinks it needs to be po-faced all the time. The man who created the Daleks—Terry Nation—was Tony Hancok’s writer. He was a very, very funny man who could also write great science fiction. That’s what Russell is. That’s what Steven is. What I am. Lots of people. Humor is bound-up in the DNA of [Doctor Who]. ‘Robots of Sherwood,’ for instance, is a straightforward romp. But, you should no more criticize a show for being too funny—what’s wrong with too funny, anyway? You hear that a lot. Someone says ‘it’s too funny.’ WHAT? Too funny? Would your prefer it was moderately funny? I’d go for much too funny any day. That doesn’t mean you’re messing with the format, that you’re spoiling it. And if you look back at the history of the show, that’s what it’s always been at its best. It doesn’t get much grimmer than “Genesis of the Daleks.” But of course there’s humor. Of course there is. It might be pitch black, but it’s there. And sometimes the level is pitched one way and sometimes the other. But to me, it’s absolutely quintessential to Doctor Who, it’s a fun show.”

Though I would have loved to talk to Mark for hours only about Sherlock Holmes and his favorite stories and which movies are his personally, secret preferences, I decide that since we’re already best friends, we’ve had that conversation in some alternate world. Instead, I’m interested in continuity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle flippantly didn’t care about continuity. Does Mark Gatiss care about continuity?

“Because we live in such an overly-examined age, in which everything is easily consumed and spat-out, everything has taken on a ludicrous level of importance. If Conan Doyle hadn’t had his famously lax attitude toward continuity, we wouldn’t be able to have the fun we have. From speculating on the strange fact that Professor Moriarty and his brother have the same Christian name, that Watson’s war-wound moves about, that Mary calls John “James”! I’m sure people did write to [Doyle] and complain, because there were always fans! But the thing is, it’s fine. My attitude is this: get it right if you can because if you’re perversely getting it wrong, it looks careless. But. Absolutely frankly: if someone came up with an idea for Doctor Who that flatly contradicted something that happened in 1967, fuck it. Of course fuck it! Someone once said to me ‘six months ago is ancient history,’ in terms of television. That’s true, because you’re talking about the general audience and not the fan audience. AND if you flatly contradicted something that happened in 1967, the fans would find a way of explaining it. I remember—in talking about Star Trek—someone telling me that reason William Shatner has so much eye shadow on in “Journey to Babel”—more than ever—is because Star Fleet officers are allowed to wear a certain amount of make-up during formal ceremonies! WHAT?!! I mean you don’t have to explain it! The Master was a snake at one point!”

Looking smooth, and talking smooth are something Mark Gatiss knows how to do, and that’s partially because he’s a big Bond fan. Could secret government mastermind Mycroft exist in the Bond universe?

“He does exist in the Bond universe! We made an explicit reference. In ‘His Last Vow,’ I say ‘As my esteemed colleague is fond of pointing out, what the country needs sometimes is a blunt instrument. Which is M! From the books! And of course I’d love to write a Bond film. It’s the one that’s eluded me. Me and Steven we both wanted to do Bond. I did From Russian With Love on radio!”

As our time comes creeping up on us, and the Spider-Man cartoon winds down, I ask Mark if there’s a world for a gay Bond? What about a straight Sherlock? The last one gets a guttural laugh from him, and we launch into the territory of diversity among established characters and fandoms.

“The point is to me, none of these things should be done because anyone feels pressure to tick a box. A show like Doctor Who has brilliantly celebrated gay people, incidentally, which to me is proper progress. But I think personally, there should absolutely be a female Doctor, a black Doctor, an Asian Doctor, but it’s because someone comes along who is absolutely indisputably the person for the job. With James Bond, it’s a literary antecedent. If you were for reasons of box-ticking made James Bond gay, that’s not James Bond. By all means have a gay spy! I’ve written about one myself! [Mark’s Lucifer Box novels] If you want to do a gay British Spy, adapt my books! That’s my advice. Do a franchise based on my books!”

Will Mark Gatiss fulfill his dreams of creating the next “new” thing that we will all love and obsess over? What is the future for our beloved Doctor Who/Sherlock writer? In addition to a film, more Doctor Who and the three new Sherlocks, that is. What is Mark’s secret project he hasn’t talked about yet?

At this he narrows his eyes, pats my leg and says with a Mycroft twinkle and almost a sneer:

“Can’t talk about it.”

Mark’s Doctor Who episode “Sleep No More” airs this Saturday.

[codenamesailordarillium]

I just stumbled across your tumblr & saw the thing where you said you don’t mind random asks, so I hope this ones ok: I got into DW over the past year & am now hardcore RiverDoctor. Unfortunately it seems like I’ve arrived to the party about 10 years late. Which means I stumbled across the section of the fandom that hates on THoRS bc 12 wasn’t “River’s Doctor” & 11 didn’t get to take her to Darillium for the first time today... Would you have any thoughts on that whole thing?

Wow…well, first I wanna say it’s always great to have new people on board. I know it might seem like you’ve gotten into it too late in the game, but trust me, new people in our corner in the fandom are always welcome (as with any fandom, of course). Feel free to send asks gushing about it to people, I’m sure fellow shippers would be happy to welcome you with open arms. ^_^

As for the rest well…this is gonna get long and probably have the potential to piss certain ppl off bc I have Opinions™, so gonna put the rest of this under a cut.

Hoo boy…yeah, 11/River *ONLY* shippers. See, the thing was, initially, back in late 2013/early 2014, when we were fresh off of Matt’s regeneration ep and all, I could sympathize to a certain degree with ppl who were sad about him leaving and were reluctant to see River/Alex with 12/Peter because it wouldn’t be the same or whatever. I didn’t agree personally (tho initially I was p bummed about Matt leaving, Peter started winning me over real quick not long after he was announced), but I understood that people have a certain attachment to characters and specific dynamics shippy or otherwise. 

But to me, River was always the priority when regarding my interest in DW, and I wanted to see more of her in the show again, regardless of which Doctor it was with. I didn’t like how abruptly Moffat decided to end her story, just because the majority of the big reveals unfolded with Matt as the Doctor and suddenly because he and Karen and Arthur weren’t gonna be on the show anymore it meant Alex had to go as well. That didn’t really seem fair to River as a character, ‘cause it felt like we’d only been shown the bare bones of her story, her background/origin, her getting married to the Doctor, and then her dying. It didn’t feel right for her to just…not be there all of a sudden. Certain episodes (and lbr character dynamics) during series 8 and 9 would have probably benefited from her presence (off the top of my head I’d say Time Heist, how the hell did this show have a heist episode with no River using her time-traveling archaeologist sleuthing skills, like dafuq).

So…pre-THoRS, the Doctor/River fandom after Peter took over the role was a bit of a mixed bag. There were the people who only wanted River with 11 and just angsting in general because there wasn’t gonna be any more of that, but there also was a significant bunch of us who were DEEP into wanting River & 12 to happen. People were still in the fandom, writing fic, drawing fanart, what have you, probably at a slower rate than they had previously, but there was still stuff being put out there, simply because we wanted to entertain what that hot Capalston Sex Storm chemistry might look like. So when news of THoRS suddenly hit us in the face like…

…needless to say, a good number of us were suddenly stoked, new life had been breathed into the fandom and there was pretty much constant excited yelling for like the three and a half-ish months after it was announced. Once the episode finally came out and Darillium got switched from that big dreadful moment where River’s story turned tragic (well, even more tragic than it already was) to literally the most warm and fuzzy soft 24 years of domestic marital bliss for River, there were diverging opinions.

Post-TNotD the fandom had come up with all these headcanons about 11 having lost River directly after losing the Ponds, which was why he was up on that cloud for a century and the generally accepted consensus was that Darillium had to have happened with 11. Admittedly, it doesn’t really paint 11 in the best light after the fact that he seemed to have tried dying on Trenzalore without ever having taken River to Darillium like he’d promised. But, looking back, a lot of 11 & River’s relationship as it was depicted in series 5 & 6 was fraught with emotional hurt on River’s end, so for me personally (and some others), it didn’t really seem entirely out of character for 11 once we really started thinking about it. 

Really, it’s more complicated because of the nature of TV and how with a show like DW it’s really impossible to plan out these big story beats ahead of time with different Doctors. Moffat initially tried getting David to stay an extra season after RTD left, and had David said yes, that means a good chunk of River’s story would have unfolded with 10. It kinda just ends up being a case of who’s currently part of the cast and how can we mold this particular part of the story around them. By the time Steven decided on the way in which he wanted to show Darillium unfold, Matt was already gone, so it had to happen with Peter.

(And I mean, if you wanted to put a positive spin on it, you could see it as 11′s big blustery last-ditch attempt at trying to prevent River dying in the Library from happening.)

I was admittedly a vocal cuntface about how much I DIDN’T want THoRS to end on Darillium before “24 years”. I hated the idea of 12 finally seeing and being with his wife only for it to end all unnecessarily angsty again. Moffat managed to completely upend and rewrite my expectations in that regard, fortunately. 

For a lot of us, it was about River being shown to finally have some no-strings-tied happiness with a Doctor who knew her. I think a lot of people wanted that to be with older!11, but narrative-wise, I think regardless of whether it’s older!11 or 12, the point is the Doctor being at a point where he can be the husband who River needs. One whose memories don’t need to wiped after the fact like all the classic Doctors, War, 9, or pre-Library 10. Aside from the whole HELL YEAH SPACE WIVES angle, I think that’s also what fuels a lot of the desire for River to be with 13 as well, a Doctor who knows and loves her regardless of what face their wearing.

For some ppl in this fandom tho, that didn’t suffice because it didn’t happen with Matt & Alex. And I mean, if that’s how someone feels, that’s their prerogative, but I don’t see any reason to rain on everyone else’s parade when it literally brought new life and excitement and joy and FUN into our fandom after what felt like quite a long dry spell without any River content. 

And I mean, not to get mopey and sad about it (trigger warning for some potentially upsetting stuff), but the news about River being back on DW in September of 2015 couldn’t have come at a better time fore me personally, bc that was literally a time in my life where I had sudden and overwhelming/dangerous mental health issues, to the point where daily I contemplated suicide and knowing that River was finally gonna meet the Scottish version of her husband was quite literally the thing that kept me alive, because I fucking HAD to see it. So, I do tend to bristle when I come across opinions that trash that particular episode, because it means a HELL of a lot to me. 

The only thing I can say about dealing with people who stew in negativity is to just try to avoid them. I don’t follow anyone who professes THoRS-negative opinions and in some very rare cases I’ve blocked certain people. In addition to this, bc Tumblr’s blocking system is balls, I use the xkit blacklist extension and literally put people’s urls into it so I don’t have to see their stuff when others unknowingly put it on my dash. (Tho be aware that if ppl change their urls you might need to go in and change it to their current one, but it’s not that hard to do.) Because at the end of the day, you just want to be able to enjoy the ship. You are the one curating your own fandom experience, and once you know what you want to avoid (or who), you gotta just take the necessary precautions.

[willidleaway]

Doctor Who, series 12 as a whole

In short: [looks up if the last SW:TCW season will be out on Blu-ray]

Oh hi, didn’t see you come in. I was trying to distract myself from the fact that series 12 of Doctor Who went there.

I mean, the show’s gone up itself a bit, hasn’t it? And I do mean that quite literally. It’s gone upstream in canon and I just don’t know why Chibnall bothered. It’ll teach me to complain about Moffat’s new!Who for taking Doctor-lore so seriously, I suppose, given everything that’s happened now.

Things I liked about series 12: I do feel that with Chibnall as showrunner, each series feels more cohesive in a way that they did not with Moffat, and really not even necessarily with RTD. Plot elements get set up and paid off all throughout the series, and it’s a nice thing to see.

Sacha Dhawan was pretty great to watch, and I rather think maybe his introduction in this series brought out a bit more in Thirteen as well.

Things I can’t say I liked about series 12: just about everything else. This is not equivalent to saying I hated everything else about series 12. But this is me saying that at the end of the day, I found the plotting too exhausting with not enough heart to get me to care much about the story or the characters. The show’s starting to feel like a caricature of itself, in many ways.

In less short: again, I don’t mean to say I disliked everything about series 12 apart from the new Master and the improved cohesion, but I ended up pretty indifferent about much of it, and did start to get a bit irritated by the increasing defiance of ‘show, don’t tell’. But I’m really disheartened by the fact that series 11′s focus on the companions seems to have been just a passing whimsy in the overall picture of Chibnall’s master plan.

But what exactly was the godforsaken point of this master plan anyway? Why bother plotting this series so tightly and cohesively together if the message at its heart is ... basically nothing but a revelation about our protagonist, and one that ultimately (not at first, but ultimately) holds no emotional weight by the protagonist’s own admission? Great, you’ve woven this giant earth-shattering twist into the Doctor Who canon. But is that all that the show is good for? Editing its own lore?

Of course, part of this is that I’m old. (As far as you know.) The show that returned in 2005 is not the show that’s airing now in 2020, and as someone who was sold on new!Who based on the vision it had in RTD’s time, I’m bound to connect less strongly with Chibnall’s vision for the show. This sort of evolution is fine in principle—even necessary—if it’s actually still good television, competent storytelling, with its heart in the right place and an audience that it speaks to. I’ll admit that series 12 is spectacular television in the literal sense of it being a right flashy spectacle of a show—Spyfall should have convinced everyone of that—but is it good? And the serious doubt I have after watching this finale—I had an inkling of a doubt back in episode 3 but by god it’s a serious doubt now—is: is Doctor Who, under Chibnall’s supervision, actually a competent show?

I’ve seen multiple people across subreddits compare this finale to Episode IX of the increasingly incredulous Star Wars saga, and I can’t say I disagree. I’d honestly almost extend the comparison to all of series 12—you have to, in a sense, because the series just functions that cohesively.

And I’d make the comparison a tad favourable to The Rise of Skywalker, actually. There is a case to be made that JJ Abrams, for all his faults and overambitious gambits, was trying to say something beyond just ‘oh Palpatine never died and Snokes grow in jars’ or ‘oh here’s the skinny on Rey’s ridiculously dark past’. I genuinely saw attempts—gestures—at broader messages like ‘you are not alone’ and ‘together we can overcome anything’. I’m not saying these are particularly novel or insightful messages to try and convey, and I’m not saying they were even conveyed that competently. (Episode IX fell into the same more-tell-than-show pit of quicksand that series 12 has found itself in, for one.) But by god there was at least an attempt, whereas I don’t see that here.

If you want a study in contrast, look no further than Moffat’s series 9 finale in comparison to the finale we got tonight. There was an actual character arc! Twelve’s obsession with his ‘duty of care’ bit back on him! He was forced to recognise loss as part of events! Granted, Moffat still pulled his ‘everybody lives’ gambit so Clara only technically died and for all intents and purposes lives a fairly exciting life for many years after we say goodbye to her. But there was an actual emotional resonance that was there!

The point is that Moffat, for all his lovely diversions into past show lore and Time Lord social psychology, never forgot about human relationships and human emotions and how they drove the audience’s investment in new!Who. I mean, sometimes it was played up in a rom-com way (you can take Coupling out of the TV schedules, but never out of Moffat’s writing, I suspect), and there were times when it worked and times when it definitely didn’t work. But it was always there. You could find it. You could see yourself in it, sometimes.

This? What was the point of this? The Doctor is the Timeless Child. It turns out this was a carefully guarded secret known only to the highest echelons of Time Lord society and certainly to the ominously named Division. A large chunk of the Doctor’s life is basically missing, possibly forever.

From a lore point of view: sure, this has massive implications! And Chibnall is at least smart/restrained enough not to spell it all out, and at the end of the day there’s still some mystery—at least, for as long as Chibnall doesn’t proceed to smash that to bits as well in the remainder of his tenure.

But from a storytelling standpoint? Ruth!Doctor even spells it out: ‘have you ever been limited by who you were before?’ The Doctor’s past, ultimately, just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to the companions. It doesn’t matter to the Doctor. It doesn’t matter to (I would wager) a large part of Doctor Who’s audience. Chibnall knew this and yet built the whole arc of series 12 around this revelation, which was totally irrelevant to the heart of the show by his own indirect admission.

It doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that you build a 10-episode run around. It feels like something you drop like a mic at the end of a two-parter, and then pick up the pieces of the next time around. In fact, you know, I think series 12 would have been better if we started off with this revelation, giving us time to have any meaningful emotional fallout, some space for it to breathe.

Series 1 had the revelation that Gallifrey was destroyed in the Last Great Time War, but we didn’t build to it. It was given to us near the outset, in episode 2. And new!Who was richer for it, for treating the Time War not as a culmination of some arc, but something that impacted so many subsequent events in the Doctor’s life and by extension in the companions’ lives. The big surprise in series 1 was the Bad Wolf, because it was Rose all along—basically your average Londoner whisked away into extraordinary circumstances and doing extraordinary things. There’s some value in seeing that sort of thing on screen. I don’t find any such value in seeing the Doctor’s past rewritten on screen.

Chibnall, I suspect, overestimates the level of patience everyone else in the world has for tedious lore unfolding, and sees this as only the first half of a grand multi-series plan for reinventing the show. I suspect we will learn that RTD and Moffat were both wiser to attempt no such thing.

[tardispowered]

Book Review: The Day She Saved the Doctor

Summary

Spoiler Warning: If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read. (That being said, it’s basically a one star read) 

So, I had an issue with this book as soon as I saw the title. “The Day She Saved the Doctor”. A lot of this has to do with my near contempt for the majority of the back half of Moffat era Who. It’s not that they’re progressive because I am all for that- but there’s this big act like being progressive in Who is this NEW THING BOUGHT TO YOU TODAY BY MOFFAT! NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!

And… it has.

I mean, yes, Classic Who has its problems. It’s as much of its time as anything. However, DW has always been progressive and that includes Her Saving Him all the freaking time! How many times have Sarah Jane and/or Leela saved four’s ass? Even in Nu!Who, 9 wouldn’t be alive if Rose hadn’t pulled his ass out of the fire more often than not. There are instances of her saving him throughout the series so this is not new and to act like it is feels like an insult.

Still, I support women writers of Doctor Who because we need more of them. It’s still very much a boy’s arena. And the fact that I have contention with these stories is partly the writers but also partly the editor who decided these were good enough. Because they aren’t. They really aren’t. And it makes this book seem like a gimmick to shine the spotlight once more on HOW GREAT WHO IS NOW SEE WHAT HE HAS GIVEN US WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL

Well I’m not—because this is bullshit.

Ok, to be fair it caps off at about 90% bullshit with 10% being decent to pretty good. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?

Sarah Jane and the Temple of Eyes – Jaqueline Rayner

Props where props are due, I started out really enjoying this one. Sarah Jane and Four were both well characterized and it made me laugh out loud in several parts. Some bits made me side-eye a little, such as Sarah getting jitters over the mention of Blindman’s Bluff… but as she’d been blinded and fairly recently I imagine, given the weight of it in the story, I went along with it. There were a few Moffat Era (from here on out abbreviated to ME) bits that me sigh but otherwise, yes fine.

And thennn Sarah Jane gets kidnapped. Which okay fine sure.

And four gets kidnapped trying to rescue Sarah okay sure

The antagonist wanted memories, Sarah offered to give them memories of hers, the antagonist declined saying  they didn’t need them, Sarah said the antagonist wouldn’t have memories like hers. Now, this is set in Ancient Rome so I was thinking, right, makes sense, modern girl and all

But no. Because SJ has memories of the DOCTOR and the DOCTOR is the BEST THING TO EVER EXIST and she would HATE TO LIVE WITHOUT HIM

And this is the one ME thing that consistently bugs the shit out of me. This CULT OF THE DOCTOR where everyone falls at their feet salivating in love or fear at his very presence. He is even called a God in this narrative to fit the lonely God title that 12 gets. And I hate that. He’s not a God. He’s not a hero. He’s a guy who likes running around the universe and not being told what to do.  And he does help and save the day and that’s what makes him a good person.

But no he has to be THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER AND LET US ALL WORSHIP HIM BECAUSE HE IS GOOD AND RIGHT and so on

Moreover, I am assuming this book is bent toward one of a more feminist ideology, and I have no problems with that.

Only it’s hard to believe that when Sarah Jane has a line like: Oh the Doctor is talking down to me but he’s 700+ so it’s alright.

Also I hated that the Doctor, the fourth Doctor of all of them, said out loud that Sarah Jane is awesome and so good and he trusts her and so on and so on. Because nothing says subtlety like a ham handed asspat right? And ooc for four too.  

But one thing that really bugged me near the end was the Doctor saying: “After all, if we can’t trust a bunch of women with the secrets of the universe, who can we trust?” And not even tongue in cheek. I imagine it’s supposed to be feminist or something but iit’s really not because HEY GUESS WHAT Women can be evil too and use that knowledge against others. And in fact the main antagonist ALREADY HAD but she was a scheming woman who wanted power and not like these who… are apparently better or something. I don’t even know.

It also felt really patronizing to women of ancient Rome who were, apparently, so shackled by the patriarchy that they couldn’t do anything else but be Oppressed. And, granted, it probably wasn’t great being a woman in Ancient Rome compared to modern day, but it showed nothing of their strengths and what they did have. What they could do. It was all: Poor Women Oppressed Doing Terrible Things.

It also didn’t help that Ancient Rome was just a set dressing. Like I’m not asking for a historical epic but it was just presented so slap dash and very little effort was put into making it seem like a real historical place.

Finally, Sarah Jane read a bit young to me. She generally has more confidence then that. (BUT IF SHE HAD THAT CONFIDENCE FROM THE BEGINNING, HOW CAN THE DOCTOR INSPIRE HER? /gag) Though it feels to me (and I could be wrong) that she just wasn’t used to writing Sarah Jane.

 Two out of five stars

 Rose and the Snow Window – Jenny T. Colgan

This is the only good story of the lot. The author’s bio says that Colgan writes for Big Finish and done 10th Doctor stories so it makes sense. It’s nicely paced, nicely plotted (more or less) and it’s clear she knows what she’s doing. Though I will say as a bit of an aficionado of 9, the writing in the story does tend to shade more to 10 at times, so the characterization, for me, isn’t as on point as I’d like it. Also there were some weird lines that made me go: bzuh? Overall though, it was entertaining, and Rose was well written and Nikolai was adorable (if not fleshed out terribly well). The ending was a bit more rushed than not but I actively liked reading it. Enough so I’d give the book overall one star rather than just a half.

Because, most importantly, Rose actually actively saved 9’s ass. So well done there

Three out of five stars.

 Clara and the Maze of Cui Palta- Susan Calman

Calman’s bio mentions no previous involvement in Doctor Who and, yeah, I can kinda tell. I mean, far be it from me to say someone has to have official endorsement to be a good writer for Who (If that were the case I would be able to watch S10 without frothing at the mouth. Not to mention the awesome fanfiction writers out here) but it’s sort of clear she doesn’t work with these characters often.

You could tell that she at least got the gist of eleven and knew what he was supposed to be like but in reality he was really skewed.  But not as bad as Clara. Hooh boy. Clara was not done well. The basics seem to be okay but she’s entirely too giddy in a girlish kind of way (which isn’t really suit her at all.) Laughing and clapping hands and things of that nature. And then I feel like far too paranoid being lost in the maze.

Because that’s all the story is. Them lost in  maze. Granted there’s a skeleton suggesting they should probably leave sooner than later, but nothing chases them. There’s no real danger but them being lost. In a maze. It was kind of a boring read to be honest.

And then it ends with another ASSPAT FOR FEMINISM with 11 saying:

‘Clara, I was wrong to have not listened to you sooner. It was the maze, doing funny things to my judgement…. But I do trust you, I hope you know that’

Because if you don’t have it down in Writing that the Doctor loves and respects Clara and knew he did wrong then it’s just not enough. Gotta hammer it in there. Also it undercuts itself by him apologizing then blaming the maze. If it really was the maze, then he’s got nothing to apologize for. If it wasn’t, then don’t bring it up.

Anyway, she sort of saved the Doctor in this one. Kind of. But she mostly saved herself. I mean, yes, they could have been wandering around that maze for a very long time but she would have died of natural causes long long long looooonng before he would’ve.

So, go team, I guess. /shrug

One out of five stars.

 Bill Potts and the Jackets-Dorothy Koomson

To start out, I have to admit that while I love the idea of Bill Potts and Pearl Mackie knocks the acting out of the water—I don’t think S10 gave her much character to work with. Oh she had some but to put it simply, S10 was mostly concerned with Missy and PROGRESSION POINTS. (and I am 1000% for a black gay woman as a companion, but hey give her something to do beside saying she’s gay in every episode and then have her wait ten years being slowly turned into a cyberman before ‘fridging’ her in the end to fuel 12 angst. Yes, she want off with Heather. But she’d only known Heather for maybe MAYBE a handful of hours.)

Still despite my extreme dislike for S10 I am always willing to give new writers a chance.

But unfortunately in this story it was clear that the writer had no idea what they were doing and it showed. MAN did it show. Bill was portrayed alright given the circumstances of her characterization (or lack thereof) but 12 was so badly done it’s not even funny. Forget the 12th regeneration, he’s not even the Doctor.

For example

Upon confronted with someone who claims to be Bill (who is the real one) when he already has a Bill in the TARDiS (and nothing otherwise wacky or dangerous is going on) he flat out refuses to consider any possibility but that it’s not Bill and tells them to go home. There’s no investigation. No nothing.

I mean it COULD BE that I missed something in reading (because I was annoyed so I did skim) that fake!Bill was using memory alteration on him or something but if she was it doesn’t stand out.

But even if that’s true, 12 is just acting like an asshole through most of this. Moreso than he even did in S8. It’s like that’s the only version that the author knows and they ran with it. But it’s not 12 and certainly not s10 12 who had learned a lot through Clara. (and retains it despite not remembering her)

Like he is severely mad at antagonist and agrees to help her but tells her to, to paraphrase: Get in the TARDiS now before he changes his mind.

Which fine, if she had been someone murderous or had tortured people or whatever. But there is clear indication at that point in the story (and the narrative supports the idea) that she was going to give Bill herself back but she didn’t trust the Doctor to help her. She didn’t hurt anyone. She just wants to get home. Even grumpy 12 would be more compassionate than that because guess what? Compassion is the Doctor’s default.

Also the real kick in the teeth is that Bill didn’t even save him. There was nothing to save him from. She more or less saved herself which is all well and good but when the title and idea of the entire book is: ‘When She Saved the Doctor’, you’d expect her to do a little saving.

It didn’t help either that the story was poorly constructed to and overall just an aggravating read.

No stars for this one. I’d be tempted to give it negative stars but rather blame the author, I’d rather blame the editor who thought this one was ok.

Because it’s not.

It reallllly fricking isn’t.

  SO YEAH I wouldn’t recommend this book at all. It has a decent 9/Rose story where Rose is cute as hell but beyond that, it doesn’t even live up to its own hype. It’s sad too because it could have been so much more.

[dreameater1988]

The Doctor’s & Clara’s romance

I’ve made a little compilation of all the notable Whouffle and Whouffaldi moments over the seasons, along with my thoughts and theories:

Their relationship was set up as romance right from the very beginning with these words, because it becomes obvious right away that Clara might be romantically interested in the Doctor by hinting at future snogging. I don’t believe that she immediately jumped him, but she let him know from the beginning that she wasn’t uninterested. 

Let’s jump to “The Crimson Horror” where Eleven and Clara pose as husband and wife and they both convinced Mrs Gilliflower, a woman who is anything but stupid. In fact, they both seem to enjoy it, too.

I always like to believe that the end of “Nightmare in Silver” is the moment Eleven realizes that he fancies Clara because he notices her on a physical level. Besides, the conversation Mr Clever had with Clara in which “the Doctor” confesses his love to Clara is probably based on the Doctor’s own thoughts to which Mr Clever had access at that moment, but Clara saw through it and knew that the Doctor would never admit it.

When Clara suggests that she needs a boyfriend for Christmas dinner Eleven was excited. He actually believed that she was serious for a moment and he was more than happy to be her boyfriend, yet at the same time he was a bit worried that he might disappoint Clara. It was Eleven who was disappointed when he realized that Clara wasn’t actually serious.

Unfortunately they never really got to explore that part of their relationship because he got stranded on Trenzalore and later regenerated.

Matt Smith has confirmed that Clara was sort of his girlfriend while Jenna said in an interview or during a panel that Clara realized she was in love with him during the regeneration.

The rest is under a cut because it’s long:

After his regeneration the Doctor picks up where they left of, with the boyfriend argument. He assumes Clara never actually wanted him to be her boyfriend and admits that it was his mistake for assuming so for a brief moment. 

I never actually paid a lot of attention to this dialogue before watching the German dub for the first time and afterwards I realized that it could be read in various ways. In the German dub “Am I home?” was translated to “Do you want me to live here?” and the Doctor reply is “If that is what you want” and I now realize that the English original can be read as exactly that. The Doctor was more than happy to let Clara live with him.

The Doctor is heartbroken when he realizes that Clara doesn’t understand that he and Eleven are the same person and that his feelings for her haven’t changed and he begs her to give him a chance, which she does.

We all know that Clara started dating Danny in S8 because for her a romance with the Doctor was off the table now that he had made it clear he wasn’t her boyfriend, yet the Doctor is anything but fine with the competition. One of my favourite scenes and clear indication that the Doctor was jealous and actively trying to sabotage Clara’s relationship was the moment he hid in her bedroom during her date. He didn’t want her to be with anyone else.

Nevertheless, he is curious and wants to know just how serious Clara is about the other man and when he realizes that she is in fact serious, he can’t just let it happen.

He is jealous, but he can’t openly show it, so he decides to just do better than the competition.

The brief moment during “The Caretaker” when Twelve assumes she is dating Adrian breaks my heart every time I watch it. He thinks that Clara has chosen the young, dorky looking man with a bowtie who reminds him so much of his former self and he feels reassured that Clara is only using Adrian as substitute because Eleven is gone and that she still loves him. In his head the Doctor thinks that if she still loves Eleven, she can love the current him as well.

The Doctor is devastated when he realizes that Clara isn’t dating Adrian, but Danny, a soldier who couldn’t be more unlike the Doctor.

Again he is competitive and starts showing off while Danny is in the room, trying to prove that he is better for Clara, that he can take her to places Danny couldn’t even imagine, trying to show him that Clara is his by proving she wouldn’t hesitate to run away with him even in the middle of her date with Danny. 

MOTOE is meant as their break-up, their “last hurrah”, because Clara thinks she has chosen Danny and can no longer travel with the Doctor because he has changed. However, she is shocked to learn that their goodbye might be a bit more final than she had in mind and tries to cling to him despite her decision of not wanting to continue wit their travels. She is nervous and frightened. She doesn’t actually want to stop seeing him.

I think the “last hurrah” ist more like a “first hurrah” to them because I genuinely believe that they slept together on the Orient Express, probably for the very first time. That is based on a theory by @anotheruserwithnoname (if you would be so kind to reblog this with a link to your theory added, I couldn’t find it on your blog). The entire corridor scene is sizzling with sexual tension, as several articles have pointed out. Also the fact that both the Doctor and Clara were utterly nervous suggests that they knew what they were about to do (for the first time).

Clara specifically uses the word “dump” and unlike Danny she knows that the Doctor is sort of like a boyfriend or at least has the potential to be because S8 is basically a love triangle story.

After their adventure on the Orient Express Clara understands the Doctor a little better and she knows that she can’t leave him, so she decides to lie to Danny, her boyfriend, about running away with another man. If the Doctor had been just a friend Clara could have told him, she could have told Danny that she had decided to keep travelling with him and their previous phone call tells me that Danny would have understood and Clara knows this. Yet she still decided to keep the Doctor a secret - because he is more than a friend.

This is one of the strongest lines the Doctor has ever said to Clara and Steven Moffat himself confirms that it was meant as an “I love you”, but in this case “I love you” wasn’t enough. The Doctor’s feelings for her are so strong that they cannot be expressed simply by those three words.

This is a very interesting bit of dialogue because it raises the question why the Doctor is angry. Because he is travelling to the afterlife to get Clara’s boyfriend back, the boyfriend of the woman he loves. He doesn’t actually want to do it, but he has to because he loves her so much and he would tear the world apart to make her happy, even if it means that she is going to be with another man.

Towards the end of the episode Clara says something to Danny that makes him realize he never stood a chance against the Doctor. She tells him “He is the closest person to me in this whole world. He’s the man I will always forgive, always trust, the one man I would never, ever lie to.” It hits Danny that he can never compete with that, that even though Clara may have loved him, she will never love Danny as much as she loves the Doctor.

Yet Clara does lie to the Doctor at the end of “Death in Heaven”, just like the Doctor lies to Clara because they want the best for the other (and because they’re idiots). It is only later that they realize just how miserable the other has been and decide to elope together at the end of “Last Christmas”.

Playing “Pretty Woman” is an undeniably romantic gesture, one even Missy recognizes because she gives Clara a look. After telling her all about how Time Lords are above love and romance the Doctor goes and proves her wrong and you can read from Missy’s face that she thinks “oh what an idiot”. 

When the Doctor tells Clara that she needs another relationship, what he actually tells her is that she needs a relationship with a human, someone mortal, someone to keep her grounded. He wasn’t okay sharing Clara with Danny, but I think Clara’s relationship with Jane Austen is proof enough that he isn’t generally against sharing her with a person who would be good for her. He repeats that later in TGWD. However, Clara reassures him that he is enough for her both times.

Funnily enough the bit of dialogue in between where he tells her that humans are always writing songs about relationships or go to war is exactly what the Doctor will do for Clara at a later point.

I’m still in shock over the fact that this line was actually on the show. Obviously, they never say “I love you” to each other. Clara doesn’t because she promised Danny that she wouldn’t say it to someone else. The Doctor doesn’t because his feelings for her are a lot deeper than a simple “I love you”. Yet here is the confirmation that they loved each other. Clara assumes it and the Doctor proves it by coming back for her.

This is the scene where Clara understands for the first time just how their relationship is going to end, I believe. He said it to her before during that episode, he said that one day the memory of her will hurt so much that he won’t be able to breathe, but I don’t think Clara understood it at that point because they were still in the middle of trying to save Ashildr. Here she realizes that she is the person the Doctor truly can’t bear to lose.

Again, they never said those three words to each other for reasons I’ve already mentions and right before her death Clara is afraid that he is going to say them at last because it would rob her of her courage to go through with it. She knows that he loves her, but if she hears those words she knows she will want to stay. For his and for her own sake.

The parallel with the old couple was wonderful and subtle, but that is exactly what the Doctor and Clara are at this point. They are in a romantic relationship, if not married. And there is a wonderful theory out there that I’ve seen her here, but I don’t remember who posted it that said the sudden shift in their S9 relationship makes much more sense if you assume they got married after “Last Christmas”.

In his quiet moments during his 4.5 billion years in the confession dial that is what the Doctor does. He imagines that Clara is by his side. Steven Moffat also said in an interview that the Doctor painted the portrait of Clara from memory.

Again I’d like to point out that the Doctor spent 4.5 billion years trapped in his own person torture chamber and there are moments he thinks about giving up, he thinks about confessing everything, but he doesn’t because that is his last chance of saving Clara. It’s a small chance, but he clings to it because he is determined to get her back.

Even Clara is surprised when she learns just how far he would go for her, what he would go through just to have a tiny chance of saving her and she is shocked that he would do that.

Finally, in the cloisters, Clara decides to come clean and I believe she told him a lot of things during the scene we never saw, including that she loves him, even though she might not have used those exact words. 

Ashildr is older than the Doctor in this scene and she has seen everything there is to see. She knows the Doctor and Clara are more than just friends, she tells him her theory that together they are the hybrid. That is how strong their love is - it can destroy the universe.

In the end they both realize that they have to part ways because if they don’t do it now, they will never have the courage to, but even this last scene shows how bonded they truly are. “Let’s do it like we’ve done everything else. Together.” And by everything I believe they truly mean everything.

[harmonicalock]

Sherlocked Day 3

Rupert is HILARIOUS !! He started his talk by coming on and jumping over the back of Sherlock’s chair, when he later said he became an actor because he liked showing off you could definitely tell 😂. He was amazing with the little ones, who are just as adorable as ever, and ended up with some sort of rivalry with Indica.

At the autograph table, there were pictures of each of the actors behind where they were sitting. I think it was started when Rupert drew on Louis’ photo but part of it was influenced by the antics of Alistair Petrie at another event. Louis got his own back and then everyone joined in. Mike drew something, with nothing to do Sacha came over and wrote “I’m a twerp” but cutest of all, Tom and Indica came over and were lifted up but their guards so they could join in ! Rupert just watched, pulled faces and laughed as he had his own massive line of autographs to get through.

The cutest part was when we were standing next to him getting an autograph from Sue. Tom came over and put his Sherlock pirate hat on Rupert’s head before running away. Rupert played along and pulled some very funny faces which I sneakily took a picture of.

(I later saw Tom and Indica punching holes in a sheet of paper with the card punchy things as something to do - they really are so cute !)

The game show was hilarious ! It was girls v boys with Louis and Aaron as two very unreliable judges. The girls named their team ‘Shelock’, the boys (with the award winning writer as captain) were 'The Other Team’.

The first round of questions was Sherlocked general knowledge, two of the questions being how many conventions have there been and how many security guards have been following Louis Moffat around to the nearest 10. The girls, Sue in particular, didn’t know the first one, Steven told her it was 4 and pointed out “we’ve been at all of them darling” (probably the right phrasing but don’t quote me on it). Nobody had a clue for the second one so Louis called one of the guards on and asked him to state his job - a bodyguard - the answer was zero !

Then Aaron came on and said he told the body guards to follow him around because Mycroft looks out for Sherlock. The character were used again when they disagreed over the scores - twice someone in the audience shouted out “Mycroft’s the clever one” !

Among other things, there was some very aggressive pictionary, with Jonathan being not quite as violent as he was in LA (where apparently he broke the board) and a disagreement over wether Mike, the professional artist, should be allowed to do it. He did draw a very good black cab.

The funniest round was involving all the cast and crew present - including Indica and Tom. They were given a few lines from Sherlock to read out and the audience, having been split to represent the two teams, had to name the characters and the episode. One of the scenes was Sherlock walking with 'Faith’ with their lines being “Are we going to walk all night” “Maybe, it’s a long word”. By this point, everyone had recognised it and was laughing to see how it would end. When Indica got to the word Bollocks, she just looked at Gordon and after an adorable staring competition said 'Beep’ !

Then Aaron and Louis interrupted saying their acting skills weren’t being put to proper use, so they were given their own scene to act out - the front of the boat scene from Titanic ! It was clearly a set up but it was so funny it didn’t matter.

By the end, with the scores randomly jumping around, the boys were declared the winners. Steven told Louis to read it saying their team name - “the winners are the other team” - making the girls seem the winners

(Going by actual points I think the girls did win, just gonna throw that out there)

Then it was the closing ceremony. All the cast and crew came out on stage, Indica and Rupert having a disagreement ending in her shouting “Rupert is naughty” and making us all scream.

Sherlocked was absolutely AMAZING and I am definitely coming again next year (though maybe try to get a gold package so I can get priority on autographs - the golds and platinums cutting infringement of us in the queues were infuriating !)

(I don’t remember as much of this to write as yesterday as I have a really bad memory - I couldn’t write this last night like I planned as it turned out I had some unexpected homework due today that I had no memory of that needed doing. If I remember anything else at any point I will be adding to this).

I'm sorry the phrasing on this is all so wierd, it's the first day back at school and I'm really not awake

[spectraspecs-writes]

Thoughts on Endgame - Spoiler Free (bc I haven’t seen it yet)

Long post but worth the read, imo. 

When I was waiting for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, I spent my time, naturally, writing the episode on my own, in my head. Granted, it was full of self-inserts, but they were self-inserts rich in character and motivations. There wasn’t any big alien baddie, but the Doctor had to deal with a big spatial conundrum. I think I went with something like a wormhole that put disparate people and civilizations together on Earth, and the Doctor had to work with Torchwood and UNIT to solve it (as well as my own self-insert group, shut up, it was cool.)

And then November 23rd, 2013, came. And I was excited. Because I, after all, was simply a fan, not a professional writer by any means, just a devoted fan who enjoyed writing and speculating.

I was disappointed. 

Whoop-dee-doo, the Daleks are back, so what else is new? Even as a devoted fan, there’s really nothing new to do with the Daleks under the sun, in my opinion. They’ve been rebooted so many times, same with the Cybermen, that there’s just... nothing new to add to them. There are better aliens. And for the Big Bad, Moffat decided to go with... the Zygons??? Who hadn’t shown up since, I think, the Fifth Doctor? I don’t remember exactly, but since they hadn’t shown up in a while, clearly no one really missed them. And that’s who Moffat went with for his Big Bad? And then, as was brought to my attention by another fan, the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey for good reason. They had become horrible people as a result of the Time War. But Moffat decided to... disregard that and bring them back? What? Did he literally not watch The End of Time Part 2 and learn why that was a bad idea? I was simply disappointed. I enjoyed it, yes, but I had built up this ideal episode in my head, and I didn’t get it. And now, six years later, I realize and understand that I was expecting too much of Moffat. God forbid we acknowledge that Torchwood and Captain Jack existed outside of a single line and his vortex manipulator. 

Fast forward to now. I liked Avengers: Infinity War. I see the problems that others had with it after the fact (I’m not typically the person who does in-depth analysis of my entertainment, but I enjoy seeing others do it and taking it in), and I myself had problems with Vision and Scarlet Witch being shipped together, because I didn’t feel anything about it. I never felt any pull toward Vision. Not once. Scarlet Witch has always been cool, but she always seemed more a friend to Vision, because they had the Mind Stone in common, and I liked them better as friends than as relationship partners. And I’ve read people’s analysis of Taika’s Thor versus the Russo’s Thor, and I agree that the former is better than the latter.

Because I like spoilers, when someone I follow on here announced that they’d seen it, I asked them to spoil me. Please - I like walking into movies knowing what to expect. I had a list of the dead from Infinity War the day after it came out. It didn’t ruin my viewing experience. As Data says in the Season Two episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, knowing the facts of the moment is no replacement for the flavor of the moment. Knowing Spider Man died and knowing “Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good” didn’t mean I wasn’t broken up when I saw the scene. I actually felt a tear when Bucky said “Steve...” as he faded to dust (which is a big reaction for me). I knew Bucky died. But the fact of the moment and the flavor are two different things. So when I walk into the movie this Tuesday/Wednesday, I’ll know what happens, but I won’t know the flavor of the moment.

I had a dream last night about Endgame, that took some of the facts of the moment that I got from the spoilers, and made it’s own movie. It didn’t focus on the Avengers the whole time, naturally, and looked more at the new world order. Things cost more, because there was a lower supply of goods compared to the demand. In order to meet that demand, the manufacturing of goods cut a lot more corners and utilized non-traditional ingredients (eg., meats weren’t just your basic pig, cow, chicken, etc., but I didn’t get a whole lot of details beyond that.) People were desperate. There was a lot of crime and chaos. Five years passed from the time of the Snap to the setting of the dream. There were people who, this was all they knew of the world. A lot of the focus, that wasn’t on the Avengers (mostly Tony, Cap, Thor, Banner, Clint), was on a single mother of two daughters. One daughter was a teenager, who had some emotional issues (naturally - she knew the world pre-Snap), and a seven or eight year old, who only knew the world post-Snap, and so didn’t have the same issues. And she loved to dance. They had their own plot, which was pretty rich in details and character and motivation, but you know what? Two things - you don’t know these characters, and I don’t remember the whole dream. So let’s move on to what the Avengers did.

Tony was depressed. He had lost Pepper in the Snap (don’t remember if he really did in Infinity War), and was preoccupied on a daughter that he didn’t have, so he was building an AI to fulfill that loss, but it wasn’t working out. This AI couldn’t communicate beyond a flashing light. He didn’t have F.R.I.D.A.Y. inside the suit anymore, but a voice with an Indian accent (Simad or something like that was the name, not sure but it started with an S.) He didn’t have anything to do with Stark Industries, or even the Iron Man suit anymore, but was just holed up, an engineer, making things. Trying to replace that which he’d lost. Meanwhile, the city was run by a woman whose first name was Ichbin (yes, just like the German “I am”, don’t remember her last name, but I remember thinking in the dream that it was a pretty name). Ichbin was not a nice woman, but she was very determined, a bit of a dictatorial leader, certainly, but most people weren’t too bad off, they just disagreed with her methods. Thor was working for her, he was also sad, but he was trying to work through some issues. If you’ve seen Legend of Korra, season four, it was kind of the same as how Bolin was working for that Earth Kingdom general whose name escapes me. Thor was still trying to be a good man, but there was only so much he could do in his job. Anyway, something happened (this dream ended four hours ago, so I don’t remember everything), and Tony tried to come in and fix it, finding some motivation and wanting to help his friends, with his glowing AI daughter and the AI Simad (or smth) trying to help him. And he loses at first, but then, knocked to the ground, bleeding, trying to push himself up, says, “you know... i just remembered... You’ve got the wrong letters on the sign.” 

...huh?

I know, it sounds like your average dream thing, but apparently Ichbin was living and working in Stark Tower/Avengers Tower whatever, and had changed the letters on the sign. And this revelation was significant because it told you that Tony wasn’t hiding anymore, he was remembering who he was, what he was. He was Tony Stark. And he could help people. So he defeated her, but I didn’t see the battle. What I saw was him, up in the tower, knocking down the letters that Ichbin had set out, and replacing them with his name. And rebranding Stark Tower and Tony Stark as not the the place where the unkind leader lived, but as a place you could go where you could feel safe, to try to recover from the Snap and make your life better. To help people. 

Was the Snap fixed? No, and by the end of the dream, no one had even hinted at Thanos. But we did actually see something that said “we can fix this. we can be better. just because this is life now doesn’t mean we have to just sit and mope. we can be better.” And it didn’t emphasize the physical battles, but the emotional battles. Stuff like that is what I see fans coming up with. Just like I came up with the ideal Doctor Who 50th Anniversary episode.

The real Endgame, I can almost guarantee you, is not going to have as much emotional impact. I realize they have to do the battles, because it’s an action movie, but characters are not just the physical action. Their emotions make the story. And I don’t like that the big movies have moved away from that. I want to see what makes these characters tick on an emotional level. Agents of SHIELD is good for that, but you can do it in a movie, too. 

I’m already in the fandom, I’m going to go see the movie. But I’m just tired of not seeing the humanity in these people. These people are larger than life, but where is their life? Where is their soul? Because all I see is muscle and bone and scars. Give me something happy. Give me some notion of feelings beyond the battles. Because I’m tired.

[rosencrypt]

I saw Doctor Who! Semi-liveblog under the cut:

- Ah, here are the descendants of that expedition upship they mentioned last episode. How did the Cyber patients get here?

- OK, so why don't the farm people chain up the Cyber patients further from the house? Or lock them in a vault, or chuck them underwater or smth

- you can't have a cyberman story without a good ol' base under siege

- John Simm is SO MUCH BETTER when he's not having to shout about drums and be Wacky or Manic every 5 minutes. Just shows what a wasted opportunity those RTD Master episodes were :/

- Oh huh, I didn't think we were going to get an explanation for Simm being around. Raises a few more questions about just why Gallifrey's reappearance was so badly handled, tho

- does the Conscience of Marinus REALLY count as an instance of the Cybermen, Moffat? Actually, I just did some research into this - apparently there are some comics and novels that suggest two or more out of Mondas, Planet 14, and Marinus are actually the same place. The Doctor lists them separately here, though, so presumably that’s not what Moffat’s talking about. He’s probably just making something up. Which, to be fair, is what they did with Planet 14 in The Invasion

- Burning? Is that a Planet of Fire reference? I don't remember the Master being drowned or stabbed tho

- oh no, call back to Last of the Time Lords. Why would you do that :(

- I'm loving Missy's chaotic nature here. She’s so Red

- being rescued from Cybermen via rope ladder from a tall building? Yay, Invasion reference! :)

- noo, why is Bill back now. I have nothing against her, but does cyber conversion mean ANYTHING these days? Also,if she’s grabbed the ladder, shouldn’t that just have torn it off rather than holding back the whole shuttle

- Awww, Nardole did a cute thing

- 2-week time skip? why??? Stop doing that Moffat. I know you love randomly skipping over things, but in this case would there be any difference at all if you didn’t? as far as I can see the only thing this accomplishes is that you don’t have to show the Doctor explaining anything to the locals and you can have Nardole ordering people around with no explanation, at the cost of killing any sense of urgency. I don’t think that’s a fair trade, tbh, and I’d have enjoyed seeing the Masters maybe try to take command of the farms or smth

- Right, so Bill is still perfectly cogent and cyber conversion actually DOES mean less than nothing. great. way to completely defang the Cybermen, Moffat

- It’s been 2 weeks and the Doctor STILL hasn’t been to see Bill? she's just spent 10 years waiting for you, the least you could do is say hi

- oh right, so Cyberbill HASN'T actually been de-cybertised. That’s something at least. Nice callback to Dalek Clara there too

- oh, jelly babies again. Where did he get them? What purpose does this bit serve? It’s just a reference for reference’s sake, and it’s not even a clever subtle reference, since 4′s taste for jelly babies is so extremely well-known

- I feel this scene would be a lot more effective if we were actually seeing Cyberbill. Also, why hasn't the conversion brainwashing thing worked on her, anyway? If she hasn’t been de-cybertised, why is she being all independent and emotion-feeling?

- "You are..so strong" well even more so now, Doctor

- srsly?? she's just resisting through force of will? that's...disappointing. it was bullshit in the monk episodes and it doesn’t make any more senes here

- "You can't be angry any more" - like, you literally are incapable of anger. or should be. how are you doing that? maybe these ones just haven't got around to removing their emotions yet

- yay, Simm is still a horrible misogynist. What a useful and necessary character trait

- "They come after the children" oh, are we going to be seeing Cyberbabies? that's grim

- "less to throw away" - so what, they're putting doing the Davies thing of putting the brains into ready-made cyber bodies? That's very disappointing, and also at odds with the gradual transformation body-horror we saw in the last episode.

- OK, Simm, we know you hate women, you can find some other characteristics now. For a species/civilisation supposedly above petty gender concerns, he seems remarkably not

- how fast does time move on the farm floor relative to the city one? it should take days/weeks/etc. for the Cybermen to travel from the city, which if nothing else gives the defenders plenty of time between waves to prepare

- Right, so the Doctor is defending a settlement from technologically-advanced invaders. This is. A bit similar to Time of the Doctor, tbh

- if the Cybermen have 'evolved', why do they have both old and new Cybermen forms?

- oh the child has a name. Good to know.

- Cybermen with rocket-boots is still a stupid idea, but I'll concede that in this one shot it looks OK

- What do you mean, you don't know what you see in him?? Don’t lie, you've always been just as interested, Simm.

- Eh, are you SURE the Master's going to die, Doctor? For all the times they've done it so far, I wouldn't expect it to stick

- Oh obviously she leaves, so she can come back later and save him

- Urgh, back to 'upgrading' :P what happened to “we will survive”?

- So what, the Doctor doesn't like guns, but he's fine with explosives? Bit of a mixed message there, eh?

- are the Cybermen going to actually do anything here? It’s difficult to be afraid of them when we see them being constantly blown up

- Why is it the Masters so scared of a few Cybermen, anyway? They're smart enough to have taken control of the whole ship in minutes.

- Oh, the other woman has a name too

- "Down to the cellar", you mean, closer to the Cybermen? Somebody didn't think this through. For that matter, why are the Cybermen emerging so far from the house? They can arrive literally wherever, so shouldn’t they be coming up through the floorboards?

- Isn't looking after a load of humans pretty much what you've been doing since, like, forever, Doctor?

- "Oh great, so SHE's allowed to explode!" Nardole continues to be the best, especially since the Masters were sidelined

- Speaking of whom...she's going to force his regeneration, isn't she? Bye bye, Simm. We hardly knew you (in an actual decent story that DIDN'T require you to go ON and ON about those goDdAMN dRUUmMms)

- Oh, they're not going to...GOOD, I was so worried Bill was going to profess her love for the Doctor

- More of this 'oh welcome to being a woman' stuff. You know, the more you harp on about gender, Moffat, the more your insistence that it's no big thing is POINTEDLY BELIED.

- "I will never stand with the Doctor!" -what?? you do that all the time. Hell, you stood with 10 in End of Time

- "Don't try to regenerate!" I'm very much not a fan of the New Series (and esp. Moffat) take on regeneration as a voluntary thing/special attack/etc. I'll concede it's a nice thematic story point, tho - even when the Master isn't just literally shot in the back by themself, they're always sabotaging themself with reckless ambition. Oh, it makes an interesting contrast to the Master's previous obsession with survival (...except when the plot dictated otherwise, as in the fantastically OOC 'regeneration suppression' thing in Last of the Time Lords), tho. A characteristic they share with the Cybermen, in fact. Someone should maybe write a story featuring both of them, with that as one of the themes.

- Actually, come to think of it, that's a central conflict of Doctor Who - most of the villainous/antagonistic factions are fundamentally scared of death and obsessed with their own survival and superiority (the Master, Daleks, Cybermen, Silurians/Sea Devils), in contrast with the Doctor, who accepts his mortality and acts in the spirit of cooperation rather than competition

- Why is the Doctor crowing about his previous victories over the Cybermen here? This lot have nothing to do with them. Is he just trying to confuse them by talking about planets they’ve never heard of?

- Shouldn't that helmet blast have bypassed regeneration? Being shot like 3 times should have killed him outright.

- Aww, does that mean Missy is dead too? Eh, they've survived worse

- 10 minutes left. Wonder where they'll go from here

- What even happened to Bill? She's going to come and carry him to the TARDIS, I assume

- Oh, Bill's girlfriend came back! That's nice. Now she gets to go to space lesbian heaven. Sort of like Clara and whatshername. Is that the series' first on-screen wlw kiss?

- This whole tears thing doesn't make a huge amount of sense, but sure, let's go with it. How did Heather and Bill get into the TARDIS, tho

- if Heather is the ur-pilot, she should go and crew that Silence ship from The Lodger. NO I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, MOFFAT

- So how does this tie into the bookends in the snow? If he's already unconscious, is he going to get his second wind?

- ah, so he is.

- What do you mean, you don't want to change again?? Like, sure Capaldi, stick around as long as you can, please, but I do think the Doctor is making a bit much of this. It’s like 10 and 11 all over again :P

- Oh, hello David Bradley! Nice to see you again. No idea how this fits into your timeline, tho. This scene doesn’t match up with any of your stories, especially not The 10th Planet.

[cupcakeshakesnake]

Watching The Husbands of River Song for the first time

(When I started writing the post I messed up my typing and the title said “Watchgin the Husnabds of REierv Sogn for the fitrst time”)

-Oh dear, one episode closer to catching up to the show, and one step clser to a yet unknown source of heartbreak.

tf is this flying dish

Wait, they’re celebrating Christmas in 5343?

-Wow Jesus looks like you’ve really outdone yourself

-TARDIS

-TARDEEEEHS

Why is the music all doom-y and scary like this is something bad That is the best note ever

-HEEEEyyyyy it’s the bald guy from the Series 10 trailer!!

-He looks like he’d be a mouse or a hamster if he was an animal

“Is there anything on my head?”

-YES THERE IS

-OH GOSH

IT’S CONTAGIOUS

-I MUST RUN BEFORE RED CHRISTMAS RUDOLPH ANTLERS SPROUT UP ON MY HEAD

-well hello alien santa under the hood

-RIVEEEEEEER

-WTF

-WHAT THE FAAAAAAAAQ

-wait why is she so pissed-- OHHHHHH

-IT’S BEFORE SHE wait hold on a minute

-This is the first time she’s seeing his twelfth incarnation in-show, yes? No?

-*checks Wikipedia* Yes I’m right but...

-I think I’ll have to watch more before jumping to conclusions

-By the way, this.

A time travelling alien as old as time and also a fluffy grinning cat.

-”My husband is dying.”  Doctor: wtf is going on am i about to cross my own timestream or what

-”wtf river”

-Ah yes, flurry snow in the middle of a bajillion cogwheels, brilliant intro.

-Oh shit it’s Moffat

-Poor Twelve must be confused so much.

-River looks like she’s faking though. She’s not the kind of person who coos at people like that.

(unfortunately I could not find a stock photo of a cat looking exactly like this. pity.)

-No, seriously. Look at this cate.

-Anyway who the fuck is that guy in that disproportionately large armor, like, where in the actual sarlacc butthole did he come from

-River Song’s Drama has increased by 100!

-uhhh lemme see I think that’s a mix of Megaman, the old Transformers cartoon and ahh what’s that one videogame I swear there are videogames with people wearing hulky armor like that

-DAMN TWELVE DROPPIN IT

-I don’t even

-I don’t even know what I’m watching

-And yet there’s this lingering fear in the back of my mind that’s still scared of the text “Written by Steven Moffat”

-Wait, if she’s talking to the people in the little screens and they react accordingly to her gestures, then it means they’re watching her too, but where’s the camera?

-Doctor: “the fuck”

-”Do you recognize me?”  “No”  So the Doctor said no because of something unrelated but I swear a part of him just wanted to get back at River

-HE’S WHITE DIAMOND, GEMS HAVE GENDER, WHITE DIAMOND CONFIR-- nevermind wrong show

-”You’re talking about murdering someone!”  “No I’m not, I’m actually murdering someone.”

-”Do you know who you remind me of?”   “Yes, probably of a chap with a big-” (he means big chin, don’t get any ideas)   “My second wife!”

-The dialogue is top notch in this episode

-Oh no, it’s the robot king who doesn’t look like he can eat his enemies very efficiently and his legion of...

...sword-wielding Jawas.

-Heck, they even sound like Jawas.

-what the effing head

-”I wondered why we didn’t share a bathroom”

-Well for me it explains the nonsense body proportions

-”Decision overruled. Recommendation: Chill.”

-I love how the robot suit says “Chill”, it’s just so.. chill. It’s actually chilling out. It’s the chillest robot in robot history.

I have paused at just the right moment

They’re nerding out together

-Aw the Doctor’s laughing

-He’s having so much fun

-”I haven’t laughed in a long, long time.”  There. All the more merrier because of that.

-Oh god

-Okay how many people are River Song gonna hang around with in this episode

-”He only has twelve faces” OHHHHH BECAUSE RIVER DOESN’T KNOW THAT THE TIMELORDS GAVE HIM A NEW REGENERATION CYCLE DOES SHE

‘Little do they know the BBC wanted to continue the show for another fifty years.’

-noooo not the bald guy nuuuuu

-What a cynical robot

-DOCTOR JUST TELL HER THAT IT’S YOUR TARDIS

-Poor Doc

-”Oh yeah I’m SURE I’ll get SOOOO surprised”

-”It’s my girl.”

-The sarcasm is strong with this one.

-”Oh it’s BIGGER on the INSIDE how SURPRISING because I’ve NEVER seen one beFORE”

I’M DYING ASDGSDJSA;;

-”Wait, my Tardis had a fridge?”

-Sooooo when River was with Eleven she was the better driver (in terms of comfort; no offense to Eleven’s Timelording skills in general) but now Twelve is probably the calmest drver so far and River’s, well... not so much.

-”Of course I’m NOT getting frustrated by you doing everything wrong and trying to give you instructions because it’s CLEARLY not my Tardis how can you even SUGGEST such a thing”

-”Yes thank you I am a quick learner and NOTHING else, NOTHING like I’ve flown this Tardis countless times before”

-So if the Tardis can’t take off while someone’s both in and out, then this wouldn’t work, huh.

(From one of the Bunny Suicides books)

-”What sort of medical school did you go to?”

-A king does not unnecessarily endanger the lives of his people... Unless he is cross.

-LOGIC

-OH SHIT THAT GUY’S HEAD GOT CHOPPED OFF TOO

-”Death initiated.”

-The fuck kind of Star Wars cantina did they walk into

-”They’re still digesting their mother.”

-”--I will rip you open and devour you--”    “It’s my stomach.”

-Even the guy whose wife got eaten by his kids is going ‘wtf’

-The fuck kind of CGI was that

-”This is where genocide comes to kick back and relax.”    Oh boy, that’s gonna get on the Doctor’s nerves.

-”Why are you frowning?”   “How’d you know?”   “It’s audible.”

-”The man who gave me this was the sort of man who’d know exaclty how a long a diary you’re going to need.”  “Oh yeah that’s definitely not me”

-I SAW THAT EYEBROW RAISE, RIVER SONG, YOU CHEEKY LITTLE TIME TRAVELLER

-Annnnd River’s supposed to be paid by a Voldemort with a nose.

-WHAT THE FUCK HIS HEAD OPENS UP

-JEEZ!

-YOU HAVE A JAWBREAKER IN YOUR HEAD??!?

-OH MY FUCKING GOD EVERYONE HAS CRACKED UP HEADS

-For some reason, Credits seems to be the common term for whatever currency is used vaguely in scifi universes. They have Credits in Star Wars too!

-Whoever is playing that pale guy is going to have a royally sore throat by the end of the episode.

-”Hail Hydra”

-You should probably just give him the head...

-To be fair you crackhead guys did creep them out

-The thing.

-Did the head just run away or something, why are the Doctor and River so uneasy, do they really just don’t want to witness a brain surgery or am I missing something here

-Dang it Doctor.

-”The skyyyy shall crrrrrack”

-Well the head is there...

-what. the. fuck. is. happening.

-”At last I am whole again”  Well I wouldn’t really call it whole if your body’s a robot but...

-Okay.... that happened.

-*hastily muffled Steven Universy screeching*

-SCREW YOU CATFISH BUG MAN

-Why do his eyebrows make a squeak sound

-”A picnic at Asgard...”  MARVEL/DOCTOR WHO CROSSOVER CONFI-- nevermind

-jesus christ why is that guy so intent on reading River’s diary out loud

-’The Angels Take Manhattan’ was three seasons ago. And yes, that episode was written by Moffat too.

-”An infinite number of faces”   Well, I wouldn’t say it’s infinite per se...

-Besides, if there’s only the head left, wouldn’t that kind of hinder the regeneration, if not stop it altogether?

-Wait, since when was the robot the king and not the head?

-I don’t like the catfish bug guy with the French mustache. In fact, I am liking him less and less by the second.

-WHOA WAIT THAT ROBOT COULD STORE MULTIPLE HEADS IN IT? I THOUGHT IT JUST TOOK ONE OFF AND PUT ON ANOTHER

-Dammit River why would you want to hurt him like that HE IS RIGHT THERE  ;_;

-;_;

-*CRYING EMOJI INTENSIFIES*

-”Two hearts, stupid clothes--”  Well the latter changed a bit.

-MOFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT

-DAMMIT MOFFAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT

-HE IS RIGHT THERE

-DAMMIT MOFFAT

FUCK YOU MOFFAT

-TAKE MY HEART AND RIP IT APART SOME MORE WHY DON’T YOU

-”I’m an archaeologist from the future.  I dug you up.”

-DAMN

-”What do you think of my new body”  “I’ll let you know, I’ve only seen the face”  Okay it’s either me or Moffat that isn’t aware that this is a family show.

-She caught it in her f-cking boobs

-HER BOOBS

-FAMILY SHOW

-”FAMILY SHOW”

-”So, King Hydroflax?”  (idk how tf it’s spelled)  “I married the diamond!”  (”wE ARE THE CRYSTAL--””SHUT UP!!”)  “So you say.”  “Elizabeth the First.”  “Ramone.”  “Marilyn Monroe!”  “Stephen Fry!”  “Cleopatra!”  “Same thing!”

-IF YOU HAVEN’T GUESSED ALREADY, I’M DYING

Glowing cables.

-”Crashing spaceships, that’s my job.”  I feel like I should write a sentence that rhymes with this, but unfortunately I can’t.

-OH THE TOP PART OF HIS SCREWDRIVER ROTATES

-”I’ve been doing it longer!”  “I do it better!”  Like how you drive the Tardis, for example.  (I can also see the above dialogue used in a very, very, wrong, scenario, but I’ll just keep quiet and hope that it wasn’t Moffat’s intention.)

-river u ok?

-k

Looks like one of those audio equipment machines.

-Reminds me of the ‘Profit’ memes.

-1. Crash ship  2. Look outside  3. FIRE  4. Nope the fuck outta there and travel forward in time  5. ??  6. Profit

-1. Visit some yet-to-be tour spot  2. Give money to a random guy and tell him to set up a restaurant  3. Travel forward in time  4. ???  5. Profit

-River why aren’t you closing the Tardis door

-THE GOD DAMN BOT

-Oh look Nardole’s alive too

-”Now that, my dear, is a suit.”  Gotta agree.

HOLE-LEE SHEE-EHT

-THAT’S THE SCREWDRIVER FROM ‘SILENCE IN THE LIBRARY’

-THAT WAS SEASON FOUR

-MOFFAT

-YOU’VE CONSTRUCTED A PLOT STRING THAT SPANS FIVE SEASONS YOU BIG ASSHOLE GENIUS SPIDER

(Screencap of webpage http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/30-9.htm)

-HOLY FLUKES HOW DARE YOU

-”Are you crying?”

-i-- yes yes i am  blame moffat not me

-”There are stories about us, you know.”  “Oh, I dread to think.”  Been looking around AO3, have you River?

-m o f f a t   y o u   m o t h e r f u c k e r

-asdflsdhglljfhslhHSAHG

-ASJDAFLHGLASDJHGFALSDF

-sglsdhgflWEGyglhsghsgFLH;;1 LDG lJHGJLHAGLJhglhgljhglhHS DFHS5134 GLHFGLSDHFGh 454123gshdHFJHgjGSJDFL

-$^B&C%TB#%*&#BWKUWURH#$VB&*#B*:#V:B&*$&*B#&VBBBEYBYEBYFF

Moffat you deceitful fuck, I won’t trust you until the very end

-But thank you for sparing us from saying goodbye to her face

You forgot to say ‘forever’

-Please just let them stay together happily for those 24 years

HA I spelled it right

-Overall one of the best Christmas specials in my personal opinion, and top-notch acting by Capaldi. Really, top, notch.

[elizadoolittlethings]

Mark Gatiss: ‘There’s nothing quite like the sheer bloody terror of theatre’

by

Mark Shenton

- Sep 29, 2016

By a strange sort of coincidence, October sees Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton all appearing on the London stage.

No sooner does Gatiss open next Tuesday in The Boys in the Band at the Park Theatre, than the very next night Shearsmith begins previews for a West End revival of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, and three weeks later Pemberton leads the cast of Dead Funny. The three men were, of couse, all co-founders (with Jeremy Dyson) and stars of The League of Gentlemen, a TV comedy troupe that was born as a stage act (and won the Perrier comedy award at Edinburgh in 1997), before making three TV series between 1999 and 2002 and then a feature film in 2005.

“This is a sort of two-yearly story now, when we all seem to be doing plays at the same time,” says Gatiss, talking in a lunch break from rehearsals a couple of Saturdays before previews begun. “But we’re just working really.”

Today he tells me frankly: “I owe everything to the League – and we’re talking about doing something else now, as it has been 10 years since we worked together and we’d love to again.” Yet it also keeps reappearing in his life anyway: “It goes in cycles of rebirth. People come up to me and say they loved it when they were kids, which makes me feel ancient; but then kids come up to me who’ve just found it, too. It goes round and round.”

During those League years – “we were together for 11 years” – he and the others made a total commitment to it. “We made a pact that we wouldn’t get distracted. We’d seen a few of our contemporaries go off and do other things, but we didn’t want to lose sight of what we were doing, so if we did anything else it would be only short things that we could fit in.”

If the League will forever be a marker for him, another has become Sherlock, the modern version of Sherlock Holmes that he has written with Steven Moffat, and for which they’ve just completed a fourth series of three episodes.

“That takes it to 13 we’ve done in six years. People ask why we don’t do 10 a year, but it’s hard enough doing three every 18 months. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, like bottled lightning; it just came together, the idea of doing a modern version, the writing, the casting and the timing of it. Conan Doyle spent all his life trying to work out why people liked Sherlock Holmes; Steven and I just go, ‘fine’. It’s been astonishing; it sells to more places than there are countries, which is something to do with oil rigs and other territories. And Benedict [Cumberbatch] and Martin [Freeman] have become superstars through it.”

Gatiss is himself far too modest and self-effacing to consider himself a star, though as an actor earlier this year he won his first Olivier award for best actor in a supporting role for his appearance in Three Days in the Country at the National Theatre, and said in a post-award red carpet interview: “I’m over the moon, I really am. It’s a thrill, I’ve always wanted one and I am really pleased.”

https://youtu.be/0cAIHJ6f6zQ

He had every reason to be; as Kate Kellaway put it in her review in The Observer: “Mark Gatiss, as the ‘maestro of misdiagnosis’ Shpigelsky, gives a comic tour de force, and his immodest proposal to middle-aged Lizaveta brings the house down. He sinks to his knees to propose, but lumbago prevents him from rising and he crawls, in a most undignified style, across the stage, bottom up. It’s funny, but it is the more subtle aspects of Gatiss’ performance that fascinate most: the way he holds a smile, lets it go beyond its sell-by date: there is Shpigelsky’s vanity and misplaced confidence in it.”

He tells me he never had confidence in that comic routine himself: “Una Stubbs once told me that when she was doing a play at the Donmar Warehouse a friend told her how she loved that thing she was doing with her hands, and she never got a laugh from it again after that. It’s the old saw about a good review being as dangerous as a bad one. With the entire back routine in Three Days in the Country, I couldn’t remember what I had done about three months in; I lived in mortal dread of it going away, but it was also good because it kept it fresh.”

He keeps himself fresh by combining two careers, one as a writer, the other as an actor. “I’ve always done both. In an ideal year, I do half and half. Sherlock takes a long time to write, then four months to film; I then like to spend three months on a play.”

Theatre has become a mainstay for Gatiss. “I usually do a play a year, sometimes two,” with credits that stretch from the National (where as well as Three Days in the Country he also starred in Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings) to the Donmar (The Recruiting Officer, Josie Rourke’s first show at the helm), Hampstead Theatre (Howard Brenton’s 55 Days), and London’s Old Vic (All About My Mother). “I can write while I’m in a play, too, and I like that – it gives structure to the day – but I always forget, like the amnesia of childbirth, how tired I get. When you do a play you shift into a different pattern, and become more of a night owl, although I’m very much a morning person. When you’re in the theatre, you eat late and sleep later so that has an effect on the day.”

Theatre has also always been in his blood, ever since he first attended a drama club at school and an after-hours youth theatre, before going to study at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, where he first met the other Leaguers and they formed The League of Gentlemen. “It’s such a different experience to sitting in a caravan waiting to film something. There’s nothing quite like the sheer bloody terror of theatre – and the smell of a freshly painted set is exactly the same wet paint smell I remember from drama club at school. It gives me the same tingle of anticipation and nerves and excitement.”

Being in a play is like a holiday romance – it’s very intense, then it dissipates

Of course, one of the joys of working in the theatre is that it is much more social than the solitary act of writing. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been chained to a desk for months, so there’s nothing nicer than joining a new group of friends and everything that comes with it. It’s like a holiday romance – it’s very intense, then it dissipates.”

There’s no room for holiday romances, or ‘showmances’ as I’ve heard them dubbed, though: for the first time, he is working on stage with his actor husband Ian Hallard, whom he married seven years ago. “We’ll be like Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray now,” he quips. The ceremony was held at Middle Temple, the ancient Inn of Court in central London, and he can’t resist telling me: “The ceremony took place beneath the portrait of Edward Carson, the man who prosecuted Oscar Wilde. Who’d have thought? He’d be turning in his grave.”

Doing The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley’s 1960s play about a group of gay men, together now was prompted partly by Hallard’s involvement in a rehearsed reading of the play four years ago, which Gatiss saw and tells me how much it resonated.

“One line that stood out was: ‘If we could only not hate ourselves quite so much.’ I thought it was brilliant. And then [producers] Tom O’Connell and James Seabright got a production together and the Park Theatre said yes, and I had a gap, so I joined, too. Ian was doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Theatr Clwyd in the first three months of the year, and then I went straight off to do four months of Sherlock, so this is a good way of seeing each other now.”

There are other perks, too: “Jack Derges is utterly delightful – being kissed by him every day is all right. But Ian gets kissed by him first,” he hastens to add. The Park is also local to them – they live in nearby Islington – and he says: “I love this theatre. It has an indie feeling to it, and has a really loyal, local audience. But I’ve also wanted to play this part since I saw the film when I was 12 or 13. It’s an important play – it’s fascinating to see where we were, where we’ve got to, and between that, where we think things have changed or not at all. You know that a play is good when you stage it at different times and it means something different each time.”

Continues…

Q&A: Mark Gatiss

What was your first non-theatre job? I worked as a gardener in a hospital across the road from where my dad worked.

What was your first professional theatre job? Working at Darlington Arts Centre, now sadly gone, which in its day was second only to the Barbican in terms of size. I was a deputy stage manager.

What is your next job? I’ve got a lot of things to write, most of them secret at the moment.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Who or what was your biggest influence? My greatest inspiration is Alan Bennett – I’ve never worked with him, but he is it. My acting hero is James Mason, who as a screen actor was unsurpassable; on stage, it is Mark Rylance – his Richard II was a life-changing experience for me, it was breathtaking.

What’s your best advice for auditions? Don’t go, leave them to me! But apart from that, whenever I’m involved in producing things, I try to get actor friends to come in and read in for those auditioning. It’s very unusual for actors to sit on the other side of the table, and they always find it revelatory. At the end of the day, they realise it is very rarely about not being good, but about the fit, and that’s reassuring to know. So my advice would be that if you can, try to get to sit on the other side of the table sometime – it will make you feel so much better when you don’t get a job.

If you hadn’t been an actor and writer, what would you have been? I’m very blessed to do this as I can’t do anything else. The only other thing I really wanted to was be a pantologist, but I didn’t have Latin.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? I try not to as I’m quite a rational person, but in the face of the terror, I can’t tell you how many times I find myself whistling in the dressing room and having to go out in the corridor and turn around three times and blow a raspberry, hoping no one notices.

He goes on: “There is a lot of stuff in this play about self-loathing that is very relevant. The idea that that has gone away is a fallacy. The levels of mental illness and suicide in young gay men particularly is awful. I was talking to a friend recently who told me about a friend of his who struggled to come out. We imagine, living in our metropolitan bubble, that it is easy, but he had gone through hell – it sounded like something from the 1950s, but was to do with what was going on in his own head.”

The play premiered in 1968, a year ahead of Stonewall and the new age of gay liberation that ushered in, but it was a landmark play for portraying gay lives on a mainstream stage so unashamedly, and maybe critically. Some activists have resisted its portrait of these gay lives as too hostile and unhappy; but as Gatiss points out: “I hate the notion of things having to wear the weight of everything on their shoulders. This is actually a particular view of nine particular men, written from a very autobiographical standpoint by Mart Crowley. I feel very like I’m on a soapbox about this, but why should this play have to shoulder everyone’s stories? Obviously it was different when there were very few gay plays, but it’s not like that now that there’s a multiplicity of them, so we can look at it in its context.”

Photos: Tristram Kenton1 of 4

That context is also, of course, pre-Aids – though it’s a sad fact of that disease that it claimed no fewer than four of the play’s original New York cast. During the 1980s, the play duly fell off the gay theatre syllabus entirely; as Gatiss puts it: “There was a period when clearly this was the wrong thing to put on, when we were absolutely under siege. But the last time it was done in New York, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that it was apparently all right to like Boys in the Band again. As time passes and things shift, it is not just ripe for revival, but also still relevant. It’s a false assumption that all battles have been won. There’s a massive debate in the gay community about masculinity, for instance. And what really interests me is the notion how, in any community or cause, when you start to achieve victories, the things that give you common cause start to fray and then you start to turn in on yourself. It’s a bit like the Labour Party is doing now. But so much has been achieved.”

Yet the gay community is facing new challenges now, such as the disturbing rise in chemical drug addictions. “A friend has a really interesting theory about the perhaps subconscious feeling among gay people that we are somehow ‘other’. There’s that wonderful line in Inherit the Wind that you invent the telephone but lose the charm of distance; so for everything you gain, you lose something, too. And maybe the rise of chem-sex is a way for men to say, ‘Yes, I can marry and adopt children now, but I’m still not like you.’ And that’s really interesting.” Addictions are a way to try to cure, or at least temporarily relieve, pain, “whether it’s drugs or sex or booze, which this play is about. And from the outside, all looks fine now – you have Craig Revel Horwood and Bruno [Tonioli] on the TV, and Ian and I were on Graham Norton [on BBC Radio 2] this morning, so visibility is not an issue. Obviously huge steps have been made, but it’s folly to think that everything is rosy now.”

Continues…

Mark Gatiss’ top tip for an aspiring writer and actor

• As Churchill said, keep buggering on, that’s the only thing you can do. For writing, there’s no such thing as a would-be writer. You do it or you don’t, so just get on with it. People are scared, they think they’ll be judged – but the only person doing that is yourself.

Some may still resist the portrait of these bitching, unhappy gay men all over again, but Gatiss is ready with his answer to them: “If someone says that’s not me, it’s not supposed to be. I find repellent the closing down and over-policing of things; it suffocates debate.” That’s a debate he wants to have. And apart from working with his husband, the play has an added resonance for him, too: in it, he plays Harold, whose birthday party provides the setting for the story, and he tells me, “I’ll turn 50 during the run, though we don’t have a show that night.”

After the run finishes, he plans to take a holiday at last: “I’m going to try to have an actual month off, to see if I can do it. People ask me if I’m a workaholic – I don’t think I am, but I love to work. Noel Coward once said work is more fun than fun, and I finished a script the other day and gave myself a day off work and I went off for a massage. But I was quite bored by the end of the day.”

CV: Mark Gatiss

Born: 1966, Sedgefield, County Durham Training: Bretton Hall College Landmark productions: All About My Mother, Old Vic, London (2007), Season’s Greetings, National Theatre (2010), The Recruiting Officer, Donmar Warehouse, London (2012), 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre, London (2012), Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse, London, with Tom Hiddleston (2013), Three Days in the Country, National Theatre (2015) Awards: Perrier award for comedy for The League of Gentlemen at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (1997), BAFTA for The League of Gentlemen TV series (2000), Royal Television Society award for The League of Gentlemen TV series (2000), Golden Rose of Montreux for The League of Gentlemen TV series (1999), Writers Guild award for best short-form TV drama for Sherlock (2012), Olivier award for best supporting actor for Three Days in the Country (2016). Agents: Sarah Spear/Grace Clissold at Curtis Brown

The Boys in the Band runs at the Park Theatre, London, until October 30

[loudest-subtext-in-tv]

EMP Theory from HLV to TLD

Here’s my big write-up on what I think is going on if EMP theory (extended mind palace theory) is correct. I’m not totally sold on it, but I’m even less sold on every other theory I’ve heard, so I’m going to just make the most solid case I can. 

Feel free to raise objections, ask questions, contribute additional evidence, or point me toward metas you’ve already written on points I bring up. Please note that I really suck at keeping up with responses and such, though, so anyone who reads this should also trawl the notes. 

Note about the BFI screening: 

Note that I think the early screenings of TFP are fake versions made to protect their secret reveals and to play upon the alternate endings of the movie Clue, so please do not dismiss this theory because of “spoilers” you may have heard. 

If EMP theory is real it is integral to the Johnlock reveal, so they would not reveal it in a screening. Same goes for things like Mary being alive, Moriarty possibly being alive, Rosie never having been born; those are all contingent on EMP theory. Any fake version of TFP would have to keep Mary and Moriarty dead, Rosie alive, etc.

I saw the Russian screener and it only makes me feel that EMP theory is more likely.

There was nothing in the version of TFP that was screened that explains any of the weirdness in T6T or TLD via any other competing theory. So you either have to believe that they’ll never explain it at all, or they’re going to reveal some explanation only when it officially airs on Sunday -- in which case you may as well consider EMP theory. 

If they’re not doing EMP theory, I feel they would have had to have filmed a lot more extra footage to explain things via a different theory, but who knows. The Russian screener contained a lot of scenes that would be great prior to an EMP reveal.

Table of Contents

Background on EMP Theory

Why Our Dads Would Totally Do EMP Even If You Wouldn’t

Why EMP Would Not Suck or Be Cheap or Whatever

My Take on EMP Theory

1. Background on EMP Theory

EMP theory is the idea that starting around the time Sherlock gets shot in HLV and all the way through at least the beginning of TFP (we’ll have to see), the scenes are actually in Sherlock’s mind while he’s in the hospital.

Please note that theory does NOT originate with me as I wasn’t really aware it existed until well after I deleted in February 2016, I’m just way up its ass since T6T aired and watching S4 thus far has felt like a fucking LSD trip. The origins of the theory are explained here in the EMP theory masterlist compiled by @monikakrasnorada. Quote:

The term “EMP” was coined early in January 2016 in a discussion just after the airing of The Abominable Bride between @the-7-percent-solution, @gosherlocked and myself. This discussion entailed trying to understand / decipher which “present day” scenes in TAB were real which then snowballed into the possibility that perhaps more of His Last Vow might have taken place in mind palace as well. So, a theory was born!

Other contributors on that page are @isitandwonder, @ebaeschnbliah, and @tjlcisthenewsexy. Additional people whose metas or comments got my attention after T6T aired and made me reconsider EMP theory are @impatient14 and @doomsteady.

I’ll reference specific metas as I go, but please let me know if I make an argument and don’t reference someone who worked on that argument already; there’s tens of thousands of people in the community, and it seems like most of the hundred blogs I follow have been hitting the post limit daily since T6T aired so my dash is overloaded, and I have been utterly unable to keep up with my mentions and asks. Given that the basic idea behind the theory is pretty simple to grasp, I’m sure I’m going to run into the same ideas others have via convergent theorizing. Also, this has been brain-frying to write, what with juggling images and links, so I may have omitted some people on accident; just correct me. I’m not trying to take credit for anyone’s ideas and I’m totally happy to link to anything others have written before this. 

There are several ideas about when EMP kicks in, but I’ve settled on the one that seems most damning to me. But before we get to that, let’s get a few things out of the way first.

2. Why Our Dads Would Totally Do EMP Even If You Wouldn’t

Well, the fact that they did The Abominable Bride is pretty good evidence.

But honestly, if you haven’t already, stop and read this meta I wrote about the parallels between Sherlock and the movie What Dreams May Come, which is about the protagonist dying, his spouse killing herself in her grief, and the protagonist going to hell to save his spouse. I’m going to argue that what’s going on in S4 is that Sherlock begins sensing from within his coma that if he dies John will kill himself, so Sherlock must return to consciousness. 

There are TONS of very specific things borrowed from What Dreams May Come discussed in that meta, including:

the promo imagery of water and the hole in 221b’s wall

the entire concept of John’s therapist telling him that writing a blog will make him feel better when it’s really just being with Sherlock that makes him feel better

the protagonist remembers a dog being put down while he’s dying, and his old dog licks his face when he’s in heaven

the protagonist jumps off a waterfall to get to his spouse

the protagonist can sort of hear his anguished spouse while he’s dead and she’s alive; it bleeds through into his world

the protagonist is creating everything around him in his own mind

the idea of characters masquerading as other characters and saying things those characters would say

the idea that suicidal people punish themselves in their own mind

the protagonist has to understand that he’s more than just a brain

dying forces the protagonist to get over his fears

going through hell involves confronting terrible memories

time is weird and dreamlike when you’re dead

Seriously, READ. IT. 

Past that, have you ever seen Doctor Who? While it doesn’t mean they are doing EMP, Doctor Who is the biggest reason why “they wouldn’t do it” is simply wrong: Our dads grew up with crazy shit and write crazy shit on the regular. There are episodes of Doctor Who with all sorts of fake shit, including one that’s really similar to the movie Inception, a movie about dreams within dreams. People scream and complain about Doctor Who ALL THE TIME, believe me, there’s always people saying everything they do is dumb and cheap, but our dads don’t give a fuck. Remember, they just write the sort of thing they want to read/watch.

And what kind of stuff do they like to read and watch? Just like What Dreams May Come, this comes via @skulls-and-tea:

Tom’s Midnight Garden. It’s about slipping in and out of the Victorian era. Moffat says, “I love that book, and I’ve been remaking it ever since.” But we could argue he already did this with TAB and Doctor Who, sure. 

Other notable influences on our dads that don’t necessarily have to point to EMP theory specifically (again, thanks to @skulls-and-tea): Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, H.G. Wells, Agatha Christie does a lot of unreliable narrator stuff, etc.

But the point is they’re VERY into these weird types of stories, so just because you aren’t, that’s no reason to think they wouldn’t do it. Also, a lot of people really like EMP theory and also grew up with weird stories like this -- like me, for example -- so remember that just like anyone else with particular tastes, our dads know other people with similar tastes exist, they wish more stories catered to their tastes, and it’s feasible they would want to write those stories. 

Remember: If they cared very much about alienating people they wouldn’t make a gay Sherlock Holmes adaptation. And their Doctor Who stuff already does stuff similar to EMP.

I also went into a lot of depth about our dads’ twisting of genre conventions, and how it’s necessary in the mystery genre to stay ahead of the reader/viewer, in this meta. When you’ve had a century-long genre convention arms race to keep fooling audiences, you have to do crazier and crazier shit to keep from being too simple. S4 has really proved that so far. And the biggest fucking rug pull in the world would be telling mystery viewers that they missed the point in the story where everything went all fake.

Come on, that’d be fucking hilarious. Do you know how much trouble I had writing M-theory after the point where Mary shot Sherlock? SO MUCH TROUBLE. Everything just stops making sense at that point. And if EMP theory is real there ARE clues there in HLV, so I couldn’t say it wasn’t fair. It would be so funny. Soooo fucking funny. I and so many other people will have spent so much time trying to rationalize things that simply don’t make sense. I would never feel more honored to get jerked around by the author-god in my life.

If ANYONE IN THE WORLD would have the gall to pull “it was all a dream” on such a high profile show, IT IS OUR FATHERS. That is EXACTLY the sort of shit where they’d be like, “You know how you could do this bullshit right...? If the fake scenes actually advanced character development and ended up being important to the plot.”

3. Why EMP Would Not Suck or Be Cheap or Whatever

My biggest reservation about EMP was that it would be unsatisfying, so when I glanced at it in early December I didn’t really dig very deeply. But now that I have, I don’t feel that way at all. I think it would be really cool and fulfilling!

Sherlock didn’t get played by Mary, he just got played by his own mind choosing over and over to be a good, selfless person!

John was never so indifferent to Sherlock! He’s been at his bedside the whole time! He never just forgave Mary for shooting him! When Mary supposedly died and John said, “don’t you dare, you took a vow, you swore it” he may have actually said it to Sherlock when Sherlock appeared to be dying in the hospital. John never beat the shit out of Sherlock in TLD, it was just Sherlock’s brain punishing himself!

Mycroft wasn’t so weirdly idle about Sherlock being shot! Mycroft didn’t hold back tons of info about Mary just to reveal it later like it wasn’t so important a secret anyway! He didn’t act so amused by Sherlock’s investigation and seem so pleased with himself for giving Sherlock mere crumbs!

It could all be setting up the casuals to feel that everything is off and doesn’t make sense, so when the rug is pulled and it turns out John actually raised hell about Sherlock getting shot and Mycroft wasn’t useless, they’ll be like “THANK GOD YES THIS MAKES WAY MORE SENSE.” And they’ll totally want Sherlock to end up with John because they’ll have just seen Sherlock mentally torture himself trying to make sure John is happy. That beautifully aligns with the BBC LGB report’s goal of showing homophobes that queer love is compatible with their values.

Furthermore, character development still happened! Most “it was just a dream” stories suck because they’re just a big unplanned reset button, but this wouldn’t be. It would only retcon stuff like Mary being a saint and Sherlock being an idiot and John being an asshole. Y’all would miss that stuff and grumble about it being fake? Really? I mean I’ll accept it if it doesn’t get retconned, sure, but come on. Sherlock’s the character who’s been growing all these episodes and he’ll get to keep that growth. The plot will require that growth going forward.

And unlike most “it was just a dream stories,” it lays a lot of important foundation for what happens going forward: Sherlock has been going deep into his own head, confronting a bunch of fears and repressed memories, and sorting himself out to be a better person for John. We just had whole episodes of how much Sherlock’s stupid little heart and brain will twist themselves in knots to do right by John. We just got shloads of evidence that Sherlock is NOT a sociopath, and is in fact ungodly levels of selfless when it comes to John. They showed us that Sherlock is willing to lose John and just be massively depressed if that’s what’s best for John. Come on.

Plus, not necessarily every bit of plot was fake. We know from TAB that the different levels of mind palace can bleed together, so Sherlock may be overhearing things said in his hospital room and incorporating them.

Some people feel like we’d have been in Sherlock’s mind for too many episodes, but look at it this way: TAB wasn’t supposed to happen at all, it was just an extra episode they gave us because they like us, and it was actually full of clues that help us figure out T6T and TLD are fake. It also reassured us of the arc the story is taking with the waterfall scene. It was fun and still relevant to the game, and I don’t have it in me to complain about something so amazing. Y’all are gonna complain we got several episodes just for us, episodes they knew only we could untangle?

Furthermore, I personally would love to know we’ve been in Sherlock’s head this whole time because it tells us so much more about Sherlock’s character than we’d ever get to see otherwise. His mind and emotional issues are complicated enough that I would expect it to take a multiple episode journey to sort it out.

Finally, just from what I’ve observed about alternate theories for what’s going on in T6T and TLD, it seems like most of y’all want the most important parts of T6T and TLD to be fake anyway. Most people don’t like Mary being good, John blaming Sherlock for Mary’s death, John beating the shit out of Sherlock, John cheating with some rando instead of texting Sherlock, etc. Y’all were willing to throw that stuff under the bus for something like alibi theory or drugs theory or an unreliable narrator, but suddenly the little details are sacred and it would be cheap if those were fake too? 

Come on. Give EMP a chance.

4. My Take on EMP Theory

His Last Vow

There are a few ideas about when EMP begins. For example, when Sherlock gets shot, or when the ambulance comes to get him at 221b, or even just after he gets on the plane. However, there’s one scene that stands out to me as the most likely entry point.

Just after Mary threatens Sherlock in the hospital, we get the scene with Janine. She notes at the end of the scene that she’ll give Sherlock’s love to John and Mary, which implies that Sherlock has not yet been conscious when John is in the room. And that makes sense, because we didn’t get any scene where John asks who shot him and Sherlock tries to hide the fact that it was Mary or anything. When John and everyone are trying to find Sherlock, John even wonders aloud why Sherlock would protect his shooter, as if that question is a new development. 

All evidence suggests that Sherlock did not get to have a conscious off-camera visit with John in the hospital; John just hears Sherlock say, “Mary,” when Sherlock is barely conscious. 

In other words, it appears that Janine is the first person Sherlock is awake to talk to.

Janine (who I suggest is working for Moriarty, or is his sister, in M-theory) added something to Sherlock’s IV when he was unconscious; she admits she “fiddled with the taps” and that it must be a “dream” for Sherlock to have drugs hooked up to him. 

Sherlock turns the “morphine” back up during her visit, but turns it down to a trickle -- not off entirely -- when Janine leaves. Sherlock got a decent dose of whatever was in the IV while Janine was there.

Sherlock then has his “Mary Watson” mind palace sequence. We’re lead to believe he comes out of it and flees the hospital, but our big clue that he’s actually going deeper into his mind palace is that his heart monitor suddenly runs backwards after running forwards the whole scene with Janine (credit to @yan-yae for the find and @doomsteady for the gifs, both at the link).

That is a REALLY weird thing for them to have done. Surely they were able to take enough footage of Benedict doing whatever they needed; lying in a bed looking pensive for five seconds is well within his acting range. So why did they reverse it?

Here’s what happens when you reverse it back, so it’s going forward properly:

He goes deeper into his mind palace. Dude is on drugs and in his mind palace. We’ll see further evidence of this scenario having taken place in T6T and TLD.

Furthermore, check out this weird bit of an interview @skulls-and-tea found. Our dads almost never interject to provide extra information to an interviewer, but they wanted to make very clear that Sherlock’s mind palace alone does not create elaborate scenarios, just his mind on drugs does that:

INTERVIEWER: You could go back to Victorian London; you could have more things set in [Sherlock’s] Mind Palace where he’s going back–

GATISS: [interrupting] Well remember – it’s not just his Mind Palace [in TAB].

Mycroft says it explicitly – ‘It’s a memory technique.’

In both occasions where we’ve gone into it – in ‘His Last Vow’ he’s been shot, and he’s obviously doped to the eyeballs.

And in ‘The Abominable Bride’, he’s all – he’s high.

So it’s much – it’s a particular thing.

We could do it [go back to the Victorian setting] of course, but he’d have to… take a seven-percent solution. Or more.

They could have easily just gone along with the interview and said sure, maybe they’ll do something like TAB again one day, whatever. Instead, Gatiss gave the impression that mind palace drug mechanics are particular and important.

Back to Sherlock’s mind palace deduction about Mary being a liar.

In M-theory, I said that Sherlock’s epiphany about Mary may have been that she could be working for Moriarty: saying “Mary Watson” aloud makes him think of “marry Watson,” a command rather than a name, and the gunshot sequence at the end reminds him that Moriarty had left a sniper on John. He also imagines Mary doing the head tilt that Moriarty is known for. 

If that’s how Sherlock interpreted things, it would certainly explain why he recently had Moriarty in his mind telling him that “John Watson is definitely in danger.” The whole reason that Sherlock came back to life was to save John, remember? If this sequence isn’t about a potential Moriarty connection or at least Mary being a threat, it’s weird for Sherlock to act as if he has any new startling information about Mary after this deduction; it’s weird that the sequence was necessary at all. 

Mary is very ominous in his mind palace, so why does he roll over for her so fast once he leaves the hospital?

One reason why EMP theory makes more sense to me than any alternative is that it’s absolutely nuts that a non-drugged Sherlock wouldn’t immediately suspect that Mary was one of Moriarty’s snipers. We know from TEH and HLV that Sherlock has been trying to figure out who put John in the bonfire, and that he must be concerned that he didn’t take out all of Moriarty’s network given that John was kidnapped the day after Sherlock came back to life. Sherlock’s thought processes seem to make sense up until this deduction, but then they get clouded.

Also note that it makes sense that Moriarty would want to drug Sherlock and fuck with his mind, just in general. We may have gotten some foreshadowing toward the end of THoB, when Sherlock sees Moriarty’s face in association with the fear gas:

Anyway, things get strange after this scene because Sherlock is imagining it all. He’s been drugged so he can’t actually go after Mary. Instead, he’s stuck trying to figure out what may be going on with Mary, and his brain has to make it up. Remember, we’ll see in The Abominable Bride that Sherlock is capable of making up multiple characters with multiple motivations that change as he considers them. We see Sherlock imagine full scenes among characters in TAB when Sherlock isn’t even present for the scenes. We see Sherlock make up entirely new people he’s never met before.

There’s no way to tell a drugged mind palace episode from a real episode except that drugged mind palace episodes wouldn’t make total sense, just like TAB.

Without actual evidence about Mary’s past, emotions start clouding Sherlock’s judgment because there’s several things Sherlock doesn’t want to believe:

That Mary, his friend, could want to kill him.

That Mary could have so thoroughly fooled him.

That Sherlock wasn’t thorough enough in taking out Moriarty’s network, and his negligence left John in danger.

That Moriarty would be insane enough to have some kind of posthumous revenge.

That Moriarty could still be alive.

That someone could marry John and not really love and appreciate him etc.

It’s also possible that Moriarty has agents like Janine or Mary whispering weird shit to him in his drugged state to influence his thoughts; we’ll see some evidence of this idea, and the idea of the real world bleeding through to Sherlock’s mind palace, later. 

So Sherlock imagines that all the following are possible for someone who’s just fled a hospital room after nearly dying of a shot to the heart: 

escaping through a window several floors up

contacting Anderson with his real location, because everyone would be looking for him, including Mary

moving John’s chair back into its usual position in 221b

acquiring a bottle of Claire de la Lune and putting it in 221b

getting a spare cell phone for Wiggins to hand to Mary

getting Wiggins in position

setting up a projector with Mary’s picture on it

getting to Leinster Gardens

getting John to Leinster Gardens and in position

That’s a lot to swallow if it’s real.

When Sherlock puts up the projection of Mary on the outside of Leinster Gardens, he says, “I never could resist a touch of drama.” He’s going to say this in two more scenes later, one that we know is fake and one that we’re not sure about. (Credit to @1895 for the gif, at the link.) What reason is there for the repetition, why link the scenes that way? EMP theory says it’s because they’re all fake.

Sherlock dictates aloud a backstory for Mary based on what little he does know about her. He imagines the name Mary Morstan came from a stillborn because Jennifer Wilson, whose body he found at Lauriston Gardens on his first case with John, had a stillborn daughter and a pink coat similar to one of Mary’s coats, and the location names are similar. Sherlock’s mind obsessing over the first case with John is going to be a recurring theme.

But Sherlock can’t infer nearly enough about Mary to be sure that she’s working for Moriarty, so his brain tries to reassure him she’s not that bad:

Mary’s an excellent shot, yet Sherlock lived, so she must have meant to not kill him.

If Mary didn’t mean to kill him, she must have been buying time somehow.

For Mary to go to those lengths, it must be because she just loves John so much and wants to keep him forever and ever. It’s not exactly difficult for Sherlock to imagine someone loving John so much they’d kill for him; he imagines himself killing CAM for John at Appledore later.

If Mary loves John that much, she’s not a danger to John.

Once Sherlock’s brain decides that must be the case, he decides he has to do right by John: he wants John to have a chance at life with Mary if that’s what John really wants, which is John’s decision; and even if they break up Sherlock still has to save Mary to save John’s unborn child. So he tells them they’re going to have to talk it out.

Time starts jumping around here because it’s all in Sherlock’s head: he’s trying to construct a narrative of how he could save Mary at the same time he’s trying to figure out what Mary’s true past could possibly be. 

If that seems nuts, remember that you already accept this degree of detail and time slips are possible in Sherlock’s mind: we have it confirmed in The Abominable Bride that when Sherlock is drugged up, his mind palace is crazy realistic. It’s not full of wish fulfillment and total nonsense or anything like a typical person’s might be, rather, it’s full of his fears, like John and Mycroft giving him shit.

Think about it. Why did we never get a moving scene of John at Sherlock’s bedside, or Mycroft visiting the hospital at all? Sherlock is stuck in his own mind, where he only partially understands how important he is to them.

When the Watsons have their domestic in 221b, Sherlock’s mind doesn’t have the information to expose Mary’s real backstory. So what does his mind do? It tells him that information is all on a memory stick he can’t read. That’s why we never see any scene of Sherlock reading the memory stick, even though realistically he would. It’s also why he imagines John forgiving Mary without having read the memory stick; that way they don’t discuss it and Sherlock’s brain doesn’t have to fill in information it doesn’t have. Then, since it makes no sense for John “Trust Issues” Watson to not have read the stick, Sherlock decides it must just take John months to forgive Mary.

It’s all dream logic, where you rationalize how things could be happening after the fact.

Why does Sherlock imagine John forgives Mary? Sherlock says it himself in the domestic in 221b scene: John “chose” Mary because she, just like Sherlock, is what John likes. My read of The Empty Hearse and The Sign of Three is that Sherlock is confused over why John won’t pick him over Mary, and Sherlock answers his confusion in that scene: John finally found a female version of Sherlock.

Sherlock also decides that Mary actually likes him; he claims it’s “sentiment” that made Mary “save [his] life.” But how do we know Sherlock’s memory here is inaccurate?

Here’s what CAM says in the actual shooting scene:

But how does Sherlock remember it?

Sherlock also imagines that Mary called the ambulance, when the original footage seems to indicate that it was actually CAM; Sherlock was dealing with dying at the time, so of course he doesn’t know any better. [The link is from @reminderofwhereicanfindher, but I have actually seen several metas point these things out over the years. If you want yours credited, just tell me.]

Sherlock knows that Mary must have been threatening CAM over blackmail material about her past, and decides the next step is to go retrieve it: maybe there’s things in her past that would sway John back to choosing him, but if not, he still needs to save John’s pregnant wife. So he imagines making a deal with Magnussen... in a totally weird, dreamlike setting:

Sure, Sherlock does weird shit; plenty of these scenes could be real, but if they’re fake, they’re good tricks because Sherlock is such a drama queen we just buy it. 

But he chooses to leave for a more dignified setting and doesn’t change his clothes? He supposedly set up the whole Leinster Gardens scene earlier but half-asses his meeting with CAM? Furthermore, if CAM really came to threaten him in the hospital like the deleted scene suggests, why didn’t he just get CAM to come to the hospital?

Furthermore, why does Sherlock never seem to go to Mycroft -- even and especially because it’s later supposedly revealed that Mary has been working for Mycroft? Well, Mycroft knows everything and that’s how Sherlock generally perceives him, but the Mycroft in Sherlock’s mind can’t fill in information that Sherlock doesn’t know, so he doesn’t go to Mycroft yet. It’s the memory stick all over again.

So Sherlock goes on to imagine this elaborate plot to visit Appledore. The first sign that it’s all fake is that this time around, unlike at 221b earlier, CAM’s goons don’t check John and Sherlock for weapons. 

Once Sherlock is at Appledore, Sherlock's mind hits a wall yet again: he’s expecting CAM to reveal Mary’s past, except Sherlock’s mind still can’t fill in that information. So what does it do instead? He imagines that if CAM doesn’t have physical records of his blackmail materials, or electronic records, that leaves only one thing: a mind palace, just like Sherlock’s.

Of course, we allegedly saw CAM’s “mind palace” at the end of The Empty Hearse and the beginning of His Last Vow. But was that a mind palace? We see CAM looking at real video footage of Sherlock pulling John from the fire in TEH; that had to actually exist in order to get back to CAM, and he even shows them the video when they visit. In other words, CAM does have vaults. And of course he does, because when CAM visited 221b he had physical copies of the letters Lady Smallwood’s husband wrote. If CAM wanted to print a story about Lady Smallwood’s husband, he would probably want that picture of Helen Catherine Driscoll he was looking at, and so on. Surely CAM has to sometimes trade proof of things in order to get what he wants from people. He keeps hard copies of things somewhere.

But Sherlock’s mind writes him into a corner where it must be a mind palace, so he imagines killing CAM to save John and Mary both, securing John’s domestic future. Sherlock can’t ever resist a touch of the dramatic, after all. 

Sherlock imagines Mycroft making his case to his colleagues, and imagines Mycroft mentioning “The Other One,” a sibling whose memory Sherlock has repressed because something bad happened to them and part of Sherlock’s mind connects that to his own life taking a doomed twist. Mycroft being the one to drudge up these memories of The Other One will come up again later.

Side theory: Euros is just Sherlock

It doesn’t really matter, but with EMP theory it’s actually possible that Sherlock has splintered memories of himself into the idea of a secret sibling that his subconscious keeps trying to make him remember via his projection of Mycroft. Remember, we don’t get ANY mention of “the other one” until Sherlock is already trapped in his own mind. This seems way more likely to me than Sherlock having a sister who’s nuts.

Consider: Something bad happened and Sherlock went nuts -- and felt that Mycroft did not display enough concern for him after it, apparently -- then Sherlock buried it all. I get the vibe from Sherlock blaming himself unfairly for Mary’s death that maybe Sherlock blames himself for Redbeard’s death or something.

We get crazy Euros stuff later, but we know that Sherlock has a memory of being terrified in a padded cell to draw upon for his death mind palace. So either both Sherlock and Euros ended up terrified in a padded cell, or something fucky is going on. 

It seems possible that Euros is a part of Sherlock’s psyche that Sherlock needs to integrate; otherwise she’s kind of a ridiculous character, even for this show. I mean, Mycroft doesn’t want Sherlock to remember Euros... yet he spent years terrifying Sherlock with stories of Euros’s name -- “the East Wind is coming to get you?” That’s a nonsense strategy, to say the least.

But Sherlock locking up his worst memory by labeling it with a concept that scares him away? That seems more likely to me.

Plus, remember in TEH that Mycroft says they both thought Sherlock was stupid until they met other children. Maybe Mycroft’s just politely omitting the crazy sister that Sherlock is too traumatized to remember, or maybe Sherlock’s psyche got fractured prior to being institutionalized at some point in his life. Maybe part of being stuck in his own brain for several episodes is about integrating the sentiment-driven part of himself that got damaged by something traumatic.

Guess we’ll see.

Back to HLV:

Sherlock imagines saying goodbye to John. He imagines John not seeming to care as much as we’d expect. ‘Cause it’s fake.

Sherlock doesn’t tell John how he feels on the tarmac, which through the lens of EMP theory as I see it is because Sherlock’s not yet emotionally developed enough to do so. Remember, Sherlock’s arc is about going from being a great man to a good one. The ensuing episodes are about having Sherlock work out his shit so he’s truly ready for a relationship, and isn’t just the same guy from The Empty Hearse who falls back on humor when he can’t make himself say the things he wants to say. He’ll be realizing that he’s willing to make any sacrifice for love.

On the plane, Sherlock broods over the time he and John met by reading John’s blog (which we can bet Sherlock pretty much has memorized). But as he flies away, something still doesn’t feel right to Sherlock. He and John still don’t know anything about Mary’s past. Something feels very off. 

Sherlock feels very weird, like he’s drugged.

Something feels very Moriarty. Wasn’t he worried about Moriarty earlier?

Sherlock’s mind decides that Moriarty must be back. But that’s not possible... is it? 

The Abominable Bride

Sherlock is still in the hospital being drugged, but imagines that he’s in Victorian London and meeting John there instead -- because the part of his brain that knows all the gay history referenced in TAB is feeling pretty closeted. 

When he later realizes he’s not really in Victorian London, his brain justifies the drugged feeling by deciding he must have purposely taken a bunch of drugs. 

I said this earlier but I’ll repeat it anyway: 

Note that the first scenes of TAB are about John only, so we know that just because Sherlock isn’t in a scene, it doesn’t mean he’s not imagining it. We see full scenes without Sherlock continually this episode.

Also note that here we get the A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle) version of their meeting. This is important to remember, because the backlit skull in T6T is covered with the text of it.

TAB is where loads of continuity errors start to kick in.

First things first, we’ve got what @skulls-and-tea called “tie hell:” Mycroft’s tie changes from HLV to TAB (credit to Skully for the close-ups):

Okay okay, maybe there was a fuck-up with the wardrobe. Kind of unlikely for this show, given how carefully they do manage everything, but no one’s perfect, right?

But @skulls-and-tea also realized that six months before TAB aired, Mark said this when asked about a fandom theory that existed beforehand that there’s some kind of code to the ties they use:

“There’s nothing, there’s no tie code. No tie code. Sorry! I wish we’d been that clever, but we haven’t.”

Of course they would lie if there was a tie code, so that’s not what’s meaningful here. What’s meaningful is that they already knew the fandom was looking for codes in the ties, thought it was a clever idea they wished they’d used, then fucked up Mycroft’s tie in TAB even though that would make us think something was amiss. TAB was conceived after TJLC was in full force; they’d written the episode for us, the people who pick the show apart more than anyone. Why would they be so careless with the tie? 

They weren’t careless: they want us to think something is amiss.

Furthermore, the plane interior in TAB isn’t the same as it was in HLV, and @gosherlocked wrote up a fantastic overview of tweets from set director Arwel Jones and director Douglas Mackinnon explicitly confirming that the differences are intentional because maybe the plane is in Sherlock’s imagination.

Even without that confirmation, there’s good reason to think the “real life” scenes of TAB are all fake... except for a small part of the one real life scene that is revealed to be fake. Which is hilarious, come on.

First of all, Sherlock looks surprised to see the pilot, as his brain had made her into Lady Carmichael. Presumably he’d seen her earlier and incorporated it. But wait a minute... if he’d seen her earlier, would he be quite so surprised to see her now?

We assume that he just didn’t really consciously see her earlier, that he’s drugged up and that’s why he looks startled. But what if Sherlock made her up entirely -- what if he stole her from his Victorian mind palace for his “real life” mind palace first?

And isn’t it kind of weird that in a scene we supposedly know to be fake, Sherlock imagines he’s in the hospital? With John and Mycroft there, just like we’d expected to see in HLV?

We also get this possible nod to EMP -- though it works without EMP too, just like the episode, which is why I think it’s genius:

Then the grave-digging scene that follows is proof that “real life” scenes may look entirely convincing without being real at all. Again, you already accept that if we were seeing a lie, we wouldn’t necessarily think anything was amiss until the rug is pulled! Unless, you know, the things going on in the scene felt ridiculous, like the the grave-digging one.

Given that we see Sherlock incorporate things from the “real life” level into his Victorian mind palace during this episode -- such as modern John bleeding through into Victorian Watson -- there’s no solid reason to believe that the few bits of people looking over him in a hospital bed aren’t real, even if the grave-digging bits are imagined. Dude is drugged out of his mind.

But there’s also some important stuff we’ve got to cover even in the obviously imaginary parts of TAB. Some of it reinforces that the parts of HLV we covered are fake, and some of it reinforces that S4 is wholly fake.

Early on in TAB, Sherlock’s mind realizes that everything is really weird. It’s clear from Sherlock’s real life observations that John isn’t actually that into Mary, no matter what reconciliation Sherlock imagined. Sherlock’s fears made him think that John chose Mary because she ticks the same boxes that Sherlock does and John simply prefers her, but Sherlock’s mind just can’t seem to uphold that fiction when he goes through the evidence: in TAB, Sherlock’s brain repeatedly recognizes that John would rather go off on cases with him than hang out with Mary. In the beginning Sherlock tells himself that John is only hanging out with him because John likes the fame and attention that writing about Sherlock attracts, but once Sherlock winds up at the waterfall, it’s just too unrealistic that John wouldn’t be there with him, so this particular simulation of what would happen with him and John ends on that key truth.

All of TAB is a battle between Sherlock’s logic and fears. It’s all Sherlock trying to run simulations so he can figure out what’s going on with the people he knows. It's made very clear from TAB that that’s how Sherlock’s brain works, which makes it easier to see how the same battle is going on in HLV, T6T and TLD.

For example, things just feel off about Mary, despite everything Sherlock told himself in HLV. She’s still shrouded in mystery, and it bothers him. The whole episode is about casting light on that mystery:

It’s hard to imagine what purpose TAB serves if not to drive home that Sherlock doesn’t totally trust Mary and is still ruminating over her past, and that he sees a connection between Mary and Moriarty. The arc of TAB doesn’t seem to mesh with HLV, and won’t seem to mesh with S4 prior to TFP, because the poor bastard is just stuck in his head running simulations. We’ll see why this one doesn’t stick when we get to the end of TAB.

From the start, Sherlock’s brain tells him that he’s going to have to go deep into himself.

This is a clue that his mind has levels, some deeper than others. We’ll see that as TAB progresses. This is also a concept from the movie Inception that I mentioned earlier.

Also note Sherlock’s use of this phrase:

Sherlock will say this again in T6T, part of his mind echoing the conflict of TAB: what is going on with Mary? He also said this in TGG when Moriarty started his game with him, which links Mary and Moriarty in Sherlock’s mind.

Sherlock says they’re ready to begin and has Lestrade come on stage to set things up. Sherlock imagines a case about a terrible bride shooting people, obviously evocative of Mary. He has her wear lipstick like Irene Adler and sing “Do not forget me.” What did the opening recap remind us?

He even keeps a picture of Irene, and imagines a whole cult of underestimated women who tricked everyone. Sherlock’s mind knows he’s being tricked by a woman and should not forget it, but he can’t quite settle on Mary despite all the evidence. Why?

Well, Sherlock knows it would be all too easy for him to want John’s wife to be awful and out of the picture. Sherlock establishes that John isn’t enthusiastic about Mary, then later imagines John grilling him on his sexuality in the greenhouse. Sherlock agitatedly insists that sentiment would cloud his mind, and soon after imagines Moriarty taunting him about how he doesn’t actually care what’s going on and is just obsessing over John and sex. The idea horrifies Sherlock: he doesn’t want to think the worst of Mary just because of his feelings for John. Even if it seems realistic that John could be into him, he has to be objective. 

So his brain tries to tell him that Mary must be working for Mycroft, not Moriarty. That... sort of makes sense, right? Mary was going after CAM partly for Mycroft and Lady Smallwood because she works for them. She’s not evil, she just needed a bit of excitement in her life because John ignores her. Plus she’s pregnant with John’s child, so Sherlock has to help her no matter how much it hurts him emotionally.

It may be worth noting, however, that Mary is not pregnant in Sherlock’s Victorian mind palace. Maybe buried deep, in the episode where Sherlock seems to almost have Mary’s number, Sherlock knows the baby isn’t real and he and John can just elope.

Sherlock’s subconscious mind also knows that Moriarty must be behind all this. His mind reminds him that Moriaty’s body was never recovered. He imagines a scenario similar to what I describe in M-theory where the sound of the gun going off comes from another gun wielded by an accomplice, and blood is splashed to fake the suicide. He goes nuts trying to dig up an ancient corpse just to see if the real body is there, but can’t get any answers because it’s all in his mind and he simply doesn’t know -- the same reason he can’t get solid answers about Mary’s past, only a trickle of snippets that don’t quite make sense. He imagines Moriarty is the head of the cult of underestimated women, wearing the bride’s dress and all. 

It all just freaks Sherlock out too much to accept that Mary could be working for Moriarty, that Moriarty could still be alive. Minutes ago Sherlock had said he could never resist a touch of the dramatic (credit again to @1895 for the gif), which links this fake scene to the scene I mentioned outside Leinster Gardens in HLV:

And then his mind has Moriarty mock him for being dramatic and making unrealistic shit up. The problem, Sherlock decides, is that Moriarty is a virus in his brain. Moriarty can’t be alive, Sherlock is just a scared drama queen and it’s ruining his ability to think clearly. 

And John is clearly going to be Sherlock’s in the end! Sherlock has realized over the course of the episode that John is just following his lead because he’s concerned about what Mary will do. Moriarty is totally dead, and whatever is going on, he and John together will be victorious. 

John kicks Moriarty off the waterfall, except... wait... Moriarty seems happy about it? Like that’s exactly what he wants to happen? (credit to @skulls-and-tea)

Sherlock throws off his detective hat, rejects fear, and embraces love by... jumping deeper, into water. 

(Credit to @skulls-and-tea for this too because apparently Skully screamed at me about it six months ago and I forgot because I wasn’t seriously considering anything weird was going on, then I thought I noticed it myself when I went to write this LOL.)

Remember, curly dad keeps saying that Sherlock makes mistakes when he lets in sentiment. And this is a big, big mistake; Sherlock should have stayed paranoid. Moriarty did just say Sherlock would be the first man to ever be buried in his mind palace. And Sherlock just went even deeper than he was in this scene.

Son of a bitch! That’s not how you get out of your mind palace, Sherlock!

And how do we know he’s still stuck there? We see Sherlock talking to John and Mary about how Moriarty is totally dead and he totally knows what he’s going to do next, then they drive off the tarmac...

Except... then we get the epilogue. It has to happen somewhere, at some time in Sherlock’s brain. And it apparently happened after the tarmac scene we just saw, where Sherlock’s supposed to have sobered up?

Sherlock’s still in his brain. 

Aaaand shit, apparently you can hit size limits for posts because partway through adding the T6T images it greyed out the option to post or even save this as a draft. Please hang tight and I’ll get more posted hopefully today, HOPEFULLY before TFP airs tomorrow at the latest.

Tagging those who asked to be tagged: @tea-and-gingernuts @theheartandthebrain @softmolly @sherlockprettydamngayholmes @shrlk @alex4555

[canislondon]

Okay, hear me out. This is about Sherlock.

I know you’ve seen these theories before, but listen. This sounds dumb but put your tinfoil hat on with me for a minute, please.

I am in no way trying to compromise the validity, legitimacy, or integrity of The Final Problem. I thought it was an amazing episode. But..

People had said there were a lot of plot holes. I didn’t agree or even think about it at first but, they’re right.

- Mycroft disappears after the flat blows up. I know they said he’s in hospital because he’s in bad shape, but we never see this, or him having any type of lingering injury.

-What friends are Rosie with?

-Where did everyone in that prison go? There were a ton of people there who just suddenly weren’t.

-Unless Eurus used people that worked there to help, how did Eurus get an unconscious Sherlock and John into (I’m guessing probably a helicopter) and figure out how to fly it to exactly where she wanted to go… without getting shot?

-John was chained to the bottom of the well, and they threw him a rope.

-Again, Mycroft disappears. They say he was in Eurus’s cell, and is now in hospital, if I remember correctly. But again, we never see this.

And not only are there plot holes, there are things that just weren’t really explained, the most prominent one probably being how Molly was totally fine after being emotionally run over by a semi.

Now, recently, Moffat said in an interview, referring to how Molly was okay with that: “Surely at a certain point you have to figure out that after Sherlock escapes tells her, ‘I’m really sorry about that, it was a code, I thought your flat was about to blow up.’ And she says, ‘Oh well that’s okay then, you bastard.’ And then they go back to normal, that’s what people do.”

Um….no. That is most certainly not what people do. She was crying. She was crying when the conversation ended, and, what, the phone just hung up? Well, yes, it did, so there is absolutely no way she would hear all of that, say all of that, and then just be like.. “Yeah, alright, cool.” (Here’s the full interview: http://ew.com/tv/2017/01/16/sherlock-showrunner-season-4-finale/)

And that seems uncharacteristically cheapening for Moffat to completely blow off that scene. That scene was huge in development for both Sherlock and Molly. He helped write it, did he not? How do you miss the point of your own scene?

Answer: You don’t.

Conclusion: He’s lying.

This makes me think of Mycroft spouting slander that he didn’t mean about John Watson. I’ll explain in a moment why this is important.

A lot of this is Molly-centric, not because of Sherlolly but because of things that don’t make enough sense.

Next point. Clothes.

Remember this picture? Yeah! Remember when Sherlock wore that coat in TST? He did! But wait a minute..

When did Molly ever wear that outfit? Or have her hair like that? She never had that much fringe going on and it’s not hard to remember all of her outfits because she has so little. She had the cardigan, yes, but not the red dress.

Granted, this could all be just for the picture, but Sherlock wore that coat. Why would they take the promotional pictures with the characters in clothes they never wear?

Maybe for the same reason points get brought up that are never addressed.

“I’m worried about you Molly, you seem stressed.”

“I’m having a bad day.”

Both of those lines point to some underlying issue in Molly’s life that the audience is never let in on. That seems like something that would be resolved or at least explained by the end of the last episode but no. Was Molly just having a bad day because she was stressed and taking care of Rosie? Could be, except that if Rosamund was at Molly’s flat, John would have mentioned that when they were told her flat was going to blow up. We have no idea what was wrong with Molly. These are some of the plot points that don’t make sense in the final episode. Then, of course there are some physical questionmarks that have arisen. Part 2. Okay, you’ve heard people talk about “Apple Tree Hill,” if I remember the title correctly. What they said was that this is a show that says it has four episodes in the series, but only one is airing. This happens this coming Sunday, January 22nd. Yes, that’s a little odd, but whatever, right? Well, I had also heard somebody mention that The Final Problem took twice as long to film as TST and TLD. I can’t cite or prove that, but I did hear it, and saw it confirmed by someone else. Again, okay, it was an intense episode, sure it took a long time to film. Then there’s my favorite, because I’m rather proud to have noticed this on my own. Sherlock Season 4 is available to buy and download on iTunes and Amazon, but only online. The physical DVD copy of the season is not released from Amazon to be ordered until next Tuesday, January 24th. Why wouldn’t they release it now, since the episodes are over? Stay tuned for the explanation. So I said I’d explain why I think Moffat was lying. He was asked why we didn’t see any resolution of the “I love you” scene, and how Molly was feeling afterwards. He gave a bizarre answer because he knows the answer. He knows it for a fact, because they filmed it. The DVD is not going to be released until the 24th so that it can include the last episode. More episodes can be bought and downloaded online, but DVD’s can’t be updated. So, it has to be held until next week. Because there is a fourth episode. You knew where this was going. Amanda said something along the lines of, “If we pull this off, it’ll be amazing.” If they air a secret fourth episode, that will be “television history.”Now, we never want to get our hopes up. Remember, hope for the best but prepare for the worst (and the worst isn’t even really bad). When I first heard people talking about a fourth episode, I thought it was just people grasping at straws because their ship didn’t become canon. But now that I think about it, a lot seems to fall into line. After all, “people always stop looking after 3.”

UPDATE/DISCLAIMER: I ship sherlolly, whole-heartedly, unconditionally, and I ship nothing else. I loved their scene, I don't think it was an assault on Molly's character development, and I loved The Final Problem. I'm just saying that there is a possibility that this is all more amazing than we could have ever hoped for. ❤

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

I saw: Warning! There will be SPOILERS for the previous episode/tv movie because to hell if I can be bothered right now to write around ‘em. Read at your own risk!

Sherlock: The Lying Detective- So Watson is in a dead wife funk (told ‘ya here be spoilers!) and taking the whole “talking to the lost loved one” to a disturbingly vivid extreme. You’d think he’d realize he was in a Steven Moffat script by now and seek help with that. Oh, he is talking to an, ahem, therapist but he leaves out the “My wife is chatting to me over your shoulder” part. He is shutting out Sherlock, blaming him for the death technically but really avoiding the guilt he feels about the whole “define cheating” thing with an, ahem, random woman met on a bus back when his wife was putting up with his jerk ass. Meanwhile Sherlock is spiraling down the drug fueled drain, going for the full on crash and burn. If you are familiar with The Dying Detective, you might have a clue about part of that, though here the motivation is of the decidedly warm and fuzzy variety. But a bit of warning: Do NOT follow this example of following a friend in need. Just don’t. Anyway, high as a kite Sherlock gets a vist from an, ahem, daughter of a rich and famous guy that is also a creepy as hell sicko when he’s in public, which really tells you something about the public’s ability to ignore people being reprehensible in plain sight....but you should realize that from the real world by now. So now Sherlock is trying to deal with hunting down a murderer that knows he’s untouchable as well as a bestie aching for an excuse to give him a beat down, all while testing the very limits of the chemical abuse his body can take. So, will Sherlock Holmes finally die here, and before the audience gets the answer to the mystery about his own family they have been shoving at us with flashing lights for a while now? Oh come on, the series is called Sherlock and there’s one more episode!! 

That was a lot of fun, to say the least. But really, to be honest, despite the nice character stuff, acting, stylish directing and so on, I think my enjoyment was rather personal. As in, I think I got a bit giddy with noticing things. I kept pausing the DVD to explain what I was thinking, like “That woman, the client, she is the same woman that was talking to Watson! And I bet she isn’t the daughter ‘cause in that scene a second ago they didn’t let us get a good look at the real one’s face, more the hair and makeup and props and....” I was only over caffinated (and I need to avoid the stuff for my heart, so it wasn’t much) but I was a bit high myself, explaining stuff before Sherlock. And when he sits on a bench with a woman, and I’m babbling about my own memory! “We were there! If they show the background that way there should be a merry go round and when were were there that this street performer was that way, and that one was over there, and I remember the family that walked by and that way there was this guy with his arm around a woman but he was looking at someone else and......” Mom just stared at me and said “You remembered all that ???” (London trip was 2009 and we just walked through that area) By the time we got to the end, with it’s surprise I’d anticipated long before, Mom was watching me as much as the show. I mean, it wasn’t like the show was some deep and complicated puzzle, the baddie wasn’t hiding himself, what Sherlock as up to was blindingly obvious and the true “mystery” of the story had been telegraphed long in advance. Still I felt incredibly engaged, even predicting lines of dialog based on a history of Steven Moffat’s writing didn’t seem like things being disappointingly predictable. I had made it a game!

Afterwards we sat there in silence a moment. Then Mom said, “You’re like Sherlock. You’ve always noticed things others don’t see.” I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or her pointing out a basic flaw in my nature. 

Anyway, I don’t think I can judge it apart from my reaction. So, before I end this let me say while Mrs. Hudson got some wonderful bits, I sort of wish they would just leave Molly out if they were just having her there in an unrequited love doormat capacity. And much as I love red, I think a therapist might think twice about putting a rug that looks like a big ol’ blood stain under her patient, but in context it was a nice touch. It might be one of the best episodes of the series. Or ....... it might just be my mood tonight.