#chapter nine: rock'n'roll suicide

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 9 – Rock’n’roll Suicide [TLD ½]

Bowie’s 1972 masterpiece of a song gets today’s chapter title, though with both song and chapter come a cn – as these metas go on, we’re delving further and further into the possibility of John’s suicide in the real world.

Tell them your darkest secret. That’s what Culverton says. As I’ve discussed in previous parts of this meta, I believe that Sherlock takes drugs in the show specifically to deal with his internalised homophobia, and whilst the drug-induced EMP is not a self-induced one, when he perceives himself to be high in his MP (which is a lot of TST and TLD) it means that he’s in deep repressive mode.

So, Culverton Smith drugs people to cover up his darkest secret. Sherlock’s darkest secret is his sexuality, and it’s something that he can’t tell John because he can’t take it back. This is very like Sherlock – he’s somebody who needs to know everything, and this unpredictability is something he can’t emotionally deal with on top of everything else – it makes him more vulnerable than he’s ever been. Culverton is his perception of the danger of his secret, that danger embodied in his MP, and it’s no coincidence that Culverton is undoubtedly the most odious of any Sherlock character. He’s instantly repulsive – an Umbridge type – and unlike other villains in the show, is pretty much universally loathed within the fandom.

It's impossible to analyse TLD without coming to the conclusion that the episode doesn’t make sense. If we take it at surface level, its inconsistencies are covered by Mofftiss’s skill, but they’re undeniable. There are two elements to this.

1.)    Culverton’s collaboration with Eurus

The more I think about it, the more I struggle to get my head around this one. Culverton Smith, serial killer, wanted to be investigated by Sherlock Holmes enough that he found himself an evil master of disguise to bring Sherlock the note. I know that Culverton has a penchant for confessing, which we might tie to the oft-touted idea that serial killers want to be caught. Fair enough. But nevertheless, bringing in an even cleverer criminal mastermind to help you is bizarre, if you’re just doing it to show off. The other option is that Eurus deliberately picked out Culverton, planted the seed in his head, all whilst pretending to be inferior; completely possible, but incredibly random – it doesn’t play into her TFP mystery at all, never coming up again, which feels badly integrated to say the least.

2.)   Sherlock’s deductions

Sherlock’s deductions are frankly bad in this episode. The other place where deductions are notably bad is in TSoT, which I’ve written about here X; the exact same problem applies in this case, which is that Sherlock’s deductions are based on ideas that have nothing to do with the case. In this case, I’m thinking about the word anyone, which the premise of the episode hinges on – he deduces that Culverton Smith is a serial killer not from anything he knows about Smith, but from recollections of Eurus!Faith, Molly and Mary talking about completely unrelated things. There’s a nod to how ridiculous this deduction is when Sherlock works out that Culverton is a serial killer, and then immediately says “why shouldn’t he be?” This is not how Sherlock Holmes works, and it’s a notable reversal of his usual strategy. Sherlock Holmes is famous for removing every impossibility until only one answer remains – he never plucks a solution out of the air and makes the case fit it, which this line suggests is exactly what Sherlock is doing. It also nods to the motivelessness of Norbury in the previous episode, when she asks “Why does anyone do anything?” – it’s a similar sense that the driving cause and effect of the previous three series has been suspended. This is definitely helped by the choice of Smith as a villain; serial killing is a generally motiveless crime in the traditional sense, and Smith’s actions are pretty much never interrogated in the whole episode. At least Moriarty had a thing about Sherlock. On top of that, the idea that names are always double is completely untrue, which is a flaw in deduction that again the conversation between Sherlock and Eurus!Faith accepts when they mention Napoleon and Elvis – sure you can rule those two out as targets, but what about Obama? Madonna? Cher? All of those are much more plausible than anyone as the first word to jump to – and it also shows that Sherlock didn’t remove all of the impossible answers.

Something I noticed about the lack of logic in TSoT was that it pointed to another way to read the mystery. In the case of TSoT, using the wedding as a framework to understand the crime was a random choice and didn’t make logical sense, so in this meta X I flipped it, and used the crime as a way of understanding the wedding. If we accept EMP theory, we don’t have a problem with the surface plot of TLD being pretty thin; that’s what dreams are like. But instead of the purpose of Sherlock’s deductions being to solve the crime, let’s flip it and see if we can use Culverton Smith as a framework for understanding anyone.

Molly is a long-established mirror for John, but she’s also quoting John at this point. Mary is talking about John. All of them are positioning Sherlock as John’s ‘only exception’ in some way – either nicer than anyone else, more hurtful than anyone else, or the only person who can save him. This is the secret that Sherlock is trying to cover up, and which I genuinely believe he doesn’t fully understand at this point; that he is the most important person in John’s life. It’s important (for reasons I’ll get on to later) that Sherlock is both the kindest person and the person who has caused John the most pain, so that needn’t worry us for the moment. What’s important is that Sherlock has tried to cover this up with drug abuse. It’s the worst thing he could tell John and also himself, because there’s much more riding on this than any other deduction – if he’s wrong, he’s hit in the place where he is most vulnerable. There’s also the suggestion that even if Sherlock’s not wrong, it may not be something that John would want to hear – and this fits with Sherlock’s own internalised homophobia, which is almost definitely being projected onto John here.

The most notable thing about using the Culverton secrecy metaphor as a framework for understanding ‘anyone’, however, is the absence of John Watson himself from this deduction. This is a really important feature of this episode, starting with the first half hour being pretty much dedicated to Sherlock and Eurus!Faith rather than Sherlock and John. It is Sherlock’s own internalised homophobia that is holding him back from understanding this deduction, and that’s why it’s vitally important that Sherlock and John are so far apart for the majority of this episode; instead, John’s place is filled by a variety of heterosexual mirrors or proxies who are all ventriloquising John in a way that makes it easier for Sherlock to comprehend in his repression, but simultaneously a lot more difficult!

On internalised homophobia and drug abuse, I’m going to take a brief diversion about Bill Wiggins because I think it’s going to solidify our understanding of how drugs function in the EMP. Bill Wiggins shares a first name with Sherlock – at the end of HLV, he tells John that his full name is actually William Sherlock Scott Holmes. Characters who are called variations on William and John are pretty much always mirrors for Sherlock and John, and the fandom pretty quickly picked up on the similarities that the brilliant drug addict Bill has with Sherlock. He appears in TLD in quite an odd scene – he’s at Sherlock’s flat when Eurus!Faith comes to visit him, and there seems to be no reason for him to be there; he gets about five lines and then Sherlock completely forgets about him and leaves him in 221B – sort of like how in a dream, once someone isn’t necessary, they disappear. I think that Bill represents the drug-addict part of Sherlock, something which is certainly backed up by his confinement to the kitchen.

If Bill is the drug-addicted part of Sherlock, we can think about him in terms of the famous Billy Wilder quote (another William!) – Holmes is addicted to drugs because of his sexuality. Bill represents Sherlock’s personal repression and inability to cope with his sexuality leading to his drug abuse. Knowing what we do about what tea and coffee mean in Sherlock (if you don’t you can catch up here X) the conversation Sherlock has with Bill in TLD is pretty revealing.

We know that Eurus!Faith is a mirror for John, but her gender is important here. Sherlock tells her to go, saying that having a cup of tea is more important, a reference to queer relationships which comes from TPLoSH. We should also note that Bill actually points out to Sherlock that the tea/coffee situation is a code!

Bill is watching from the kitchen, like he’s monitoring who Sherlock is talking to, and is very wary of Eurus!Faith, asking who Sherlock is talking to. Sherlock goes into the kitchen – a laboratory, associated with drugs – muttering about tea, and the character representing his drugged up self asks him wouldn’t he prefer coffee, and his eyes flicker over to Eurus!Faith. There is no reason for Bill to be putting down Sherlock’s desire for tea, and certainly not whilst making reference to a female version of John, unless we read these well-established metaphors onto the scene. Sherlock’s obvious highness in this scene shows that he’s in the repressive part of his brain, and after this conversation with Bill he runs after Eurus!Faith to stop her from killing herself, whilst also – explicitly – recognising for the first time openly that John was in the same situation in ASiP. Drug abusing, repressed Bill Wiggins pushes Sherlock to start to understand his relationship with John, but his repression means that he has to do this – or at least begin it – through a heterosexual lens.

Sherlock’s goal for the rest of the episode is to get a confession out of Culverton, something that we can now understand as a proxy or metaphor for bringing to light the mutuality of his feelings for John. He needs to bring them right out into the open, not just in this murky state of semi-understood – he’s abnormally secretive in this episode, not telling John his plan etc., which compounds the sense of secrecy. He needs something incontrovertible to prove that Culverton is a killer (that John loves him), likely because of this immense insecurity and vulnerability.

John coming to save Sherlock is important but actually, that saving and then reunion is secondary to the significance of the recording device, which is found in John’s cane. John’s cane has always been linked with his suicidal urges, since ASiP, but just in case we’d forgotten Mofftiss makes the link really clear by not only bringing in a suicidal cane-using John mirror and devoting a third of the episode to her mental state, but by having Sherlock explicitly link her to John via the cane. This show can get very cryptic, but this one feels laid out for us. John leaving his cane for Sherlock then is really important – it’s the first time (as I recall) that his cane has appeared since ASiP, when Angelo returned it to him as proof he was no longer struggling. The last time John left a cane behind somewhere, it was proof to the audience that Sherlock had saved his life. The repetition of this action in TLD finally lays out to Sherlock in queer terms, with John, rather than with Eurus!Faith, the simple truth that he saved John’s life. The recording device inside the cane is what catches Culverton out – in our terms, the cane is the proof that Sherlock needs, going back to the very first time he met John, that whatever John may feel for him, he is John’s most important person, the person who saved him.

[It’s not at all breaking my heart that it takes Sherlock this long to realise this despite being a deductive genius and John literally telling him this in TSoT even though Sherlock walked away because he couldn’t handle his emotions because it speaks to a chronic lack of self-worth. All of that arrogance is a front; what a poor child.]

I’m going to go into the hug scene in the next chapter because there are way too many ideas flying around in there for us to take them in here, but I hope you can see how the mystery’s solution in TLD, as unsatisfactory as the surface plot may be, is the perfect segue into the scene we love so well – because Sherlock can’t reach that point until he has accepted his importance in John’s life. The meta on TLD is quite short and will definitely get supplemented at some point, but I have limited time until college restarts!!