#even then literally only two queer x-couples have stories regardless!

[monsieuroverlord]

One of Marvel's Pride Stories this year, apparently:

(Hi, still internally screaming, thanks for checking in!)

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 3 – Death Cannot Stop True Love… [HLV 1/1]

… All it can do is delay it for a while. Whilst Westley’s hair in that film horribly resembles my lockdown hair, more happily the fantastic movie The Princess Bride continues to resemble Sherlock – there was a very popular meta on the links between the two for a while there that can be found here: X.

This chapter is going to run through EMP theory as it begins, covering mainly the second half of HLV. It’s important to note, however, that the first half of the episode provides a lot of clues about the way certain images function in the mind palace, which backs up EMP theory quite nicely – the last ideas that Sherlock has going around in his brain before he is shot inevitably swirl around in there whilst he’s unconscious and form an important part of the train of association.

I toyed with the entirety of HLV being in EMP, because parts of it are weird (think Magnussen pissing in Baker Street, or the fucky MP glasses), but I ultimately dismissed it, though I’m willing to be challenged on this. I dismissed it as being a part of Sherlock’s post-wedding drug abuse for a few reasons. The first is that we only see Sherlock wake up from his drug abuse, not go into it – EMP is something that’s going to be hard for viewers to swallow, and Mofftiss are actually quite good at dropping big hints and drawing attention to the important bits along the way. That’s really not the case in the crack den, which is well integrated into the plot and has no traces of Sherlock’s mind palace. The second is that, actually, the premise of HLV is far too integrated into the main plot of s3 to be entirely MP – the CAM stuff and Janine at John and Mary’s wedding could be Sherlock extrapolating, but it seems like a bizarre extrapolation to make given how much fuckier the s4 mysteries are (London aquarium, Culverton’s drugging, the entirety of TFP) - the only MP fuckiness we get in HLV really takes place after Mary shoots Sherlock, like the restaurant scene with CAM or the Appledore Vaults being his MP. Mary shooting Sherlock also has far too many throwbacks with Norbury and Eurus in s4 to be completely irrelevant. So, with that in mind – let's go.

To understand what’s going on in HLV, we’re going to need to understand the metafiction going on – and this is where a good knowledge of acd canon comes in. Most of HLV isn’t actually based on His Last Bow, but on Charles Augustus Milverton X. To give a brief synopsis (although I would thoroughly recommend this story, not least because it’s incredibly queer) Holmes is engaged by Lady Eva Brackwell (Lady Smallwood in our world) to stop Milverton (Magnussen) from showing her husband some indiscreet letters she wrote to a squire some years ago. Holmes realises he can’t get Milverton under the law, so gets engaged in disguise to Milverton’s housemaid (Janine) in order to break in and burgle him. Watson agrees to come too. When they break in, Milverton is talking to another woman (Mary) who shoots him in revenge for Milverton’s use of information causing her husband’s suicide. She escapes and Holmes and Watson burn all of Milverton’s letters, and then escape. They refuse to help Lestrade solve the murder.

All of this lines up pretty evenly with HLV until the moment when Sherlock is shot. Admittedly there are minor changes to the Smallwood plot line (who committed what indiscretion), but these are minor and seem to be to make the plot work in the modern day – nobody cares if someone has a working-class ex anymore. But we get huge canon divergence from the shooting scene onwards.

Sherlock believes that Mary is Smallwood because of her perfume. This is a rational enough assumption to make, but it’s not just based on perfume. We know that since Lady Smallwood has engaged Holmes, Lord Smallwood has committed suicide – so she fits the profile of the blackmailee from Charles Augustus Milverton perfectly. She fits the patterns that Sherlock expects to see in his deductions. Mary does not – our first point of canon divergence. It sets up a painful parallel between John and Mary and the couple from Charles Augustus Milverton; they never name the indiscretion that led the husband in acd canon to kill himself, and given the company that Doyle kept (Wilde, Douglases including Lord Francis Douglas, who was thought to have killed himself shortly after being ennobled – much like the unnamed nobleman - because of his sexuality) it seems reasonable to assume this silence is euphemistic. Let that mirror linger in your thoughts, because it’s important.

Mary is the housemaid who has broken in to shoot Magnuessen/Milverton – so far so good. Although Holmes was hidden in the original stories, he was still present and sympathetic; the logical canon-following route here is for Mary to kill Magnussen, and that’s exactly what Sherlock expects her to do – but she doesn’t. She shoots him instead, and Sherlock can’t understand this. As we’ll see, he spends the rest of HLV trying to justify this pattern-breaking to himself, and is finally unable to.

Once Sherlock has been shot, the Molly/Anderson/Jim/Mycroft section which sets up EMP is fairly self-explanatory – the only thing I want to dive into here to point out is that this is the first appearance of Jim in the EMP, as a kind of restrained beast, and his most pivotal line is the fear he represents: John Watson is definitely in danger. This sets up what he’s going to represent for the rest of the EMP sequence. Other people have delved into the rest of this section before, and extensively – I don’t have a huge amount to add. We know John is in danger from Magnussen, because that’s ostensibly why Mary was there, but she didn’t seem to care as much as the housemaid from the initial stories did. We also know from the original stories that Magnussen has the power to make John suicidal, but in this story he hasn’t yet – but because of this, Sherlock senses that the danger is much more than a loss of reputation. It’s heart-re-starting-ly important.

The next bit I want to jump into is Sherlock’s conversation with Janine in the hospital. A lot of people have argued that this is one of the only real moments following Mary shooting Sherlock, and that Janine fiddling with the taps is part of what induces Sherlock’s fucky mind palace wanderings. I don’t buy into that theory – the more I think about this scene, the less it makes sense as being real in the context of EMP theory. The first reason for this is, very simply, that it means Sherlock has woken up after the realisation that John is in danger. The driving idea behind EMP theory is that Sherlock has to spend s4 making that realisation and trying to wake up – having that actually happen at the very start of EMP, only to be aborted, is bizarre. Secondly, it completely negates the idea that Mary’s actions are possibly fatal, which is a theme that reverberates through s4 (and all the chapters of this meta) - if Janine fiddling with the taps is what pushes Sherlock back into his MP, then by rights Janine should appear in S4, instead of the preoccupation it has with Mary and shooting.

What, then, is going on here? Sherlock is told by MP!Jim that John is in danger – and then imagines he wakes up. In his MP, Janine appears, puts him in pain and puts him back under. She, then, is the reason he can’t wake up. Janine has been Sherlock’s beard, and it’s quite possible to read her as being a symbol of Sherlock’s repression, but I think that’s a simplification; discounting TAB, Janine doesn’t appear again, and even then it’s minimal, whereas s4 is literally built around the concept of repression. As I go into in a lot more detail in chapter 9 (X), which is about the use of drugs to mask our darkest secrets in TLD, it’s the drugs that represent Sherlock’s deepest repression, in this case the morphine that he uses to mask the pain. Having Janine be the one who is fucking with the taps simply makes the link clearer, particularly when we might not associate hospital drugs with the other kind of drugs that Sherlock normally takes to take the pain away – however, it’s clear that the drugs that anaesthesise his pain do the same job as Janine – hide his queerness. Janine turned vindictive causes him intense pain, and he needs to turn back to the drugs to slip back under. Bearding was always temporary in this show, at least for Sherlock; drug abuse is a consistent problem and becomes a running metaphor for Sherlock’s repression in the EMP.

Janine being a symbol here helps me to make sense of the couple of lines that didn’t make sense to me otherwise. If Janine were real, getting rid of the bees would be awful – she gets the future our boys want and she destroys it. But if she’s a symbol in Sherlock’s mind of that bearding, and a barrier to waking up and saving John, then her sitting there, pushing him back into a coma and tearing away the future he longs for – that makes a lot of sense, and is 100% more devastating. The other line that has never made sense to me is Janine telling Sherlock that he could have just been honest with her, that she knows what kind of man he is. This line doesn’t make sense unless she means a gay man. I would be really interested to know how else this can be construed. This line can make sense in the real world if we accept that Janine is working with Mary – which must be true anyway, because otherwise Mary can’t get to CAM – and also wants Sherlock to get involved in that situation, although God knows why – the Janine-is-Jim's-sister theory feels like it might work here, but I don’t think there’s enough evidence for me to unravel it. If Janine genuinely does open the door out of affection for Sherlock, regardless of her relationship with Mary (the two aren’t mutually exclusive), Janine knowing Sherlock is gay doesn’t make sense at all - but Sherlock’s mind turning that beard back on himself to mock him? Absolutely makes sense. Remember, this is the loathing that pushes him back into the deep coma – this scene is really pivotal.

Sherlock vanishing from the hospital bed, despite being nearly dead, is pretty much medically impossible, and is probably the first impossible thing that we see happen in EMP – but it should be a red flag that that’s where we are. It’s also nice and symbolic of his movement away from that surface level, a level which we see him return to briefly in the hospital scenes in TLD when he realises his place in John’s heart. Touching stuff.

We then move into Sherlock’s interrogation of Mary behind the facade of the houses. In case we missed the reference, Mofftiss actually have the phrase the empty house used, a reference to The Adventure of the Empty House X, the story on which TEH is meant to be based. It is telling, though, that very little of The Empty House features in TEH, other than that it is the moment when Sherlock comes back. Others have commented on the minor relevance of Moran to the story and hypothesised that Mary is the real Moran – I think that the facade scene presents that as a genuine possibility. I don’t want to overstate the similarities that The Empty House bears to HLV, but Mofftiss do draw attention to it – and there is something interesting about the criminal being revealed by Holmes only after the criminal thinks they’ve killed him. That bears a particular relevance to Mary – and links her to Moriarty as his potential second-in-command. The most important link, however, is that in The Empty House, Holmes tricks Moran into incriminating himself by creating a dummy Holmes for Moran to shoot at. It’s true that Mary doesn’t shoot at dummy Sherlock (John) here, but the dummy is set up to incriminate her, and she acknowledges that this is a basic trick, one she should have known before. The links of the empty house and the dummy, both made explicitly familiar in the dialogue, do a lot to link Mary’s character to acdcanon!Moran.

This, however, all takes place in Sherlock’s brain. In several scenes, we’ve had Sherlock engage with two concepts in his mind that he can’t know about; one is Sebastian Moran in The Empty House, which only takes place in ACD canon, but even if you think that link is tenuous, he’s also engaged with his canon future as a beekeeper in Sussex. And then, on top of this, there is the problem of Mary versus the housemaid from Charles Augustus Milverton. My suggestion is that these aren’t just jokes put in by Mofftiss to say look-we've-read-the-books – Sherlock's mind is actually using the bees from the original stories to negotiate his relationship with his sexuality, and The Empty House to try to understand Mary’s motives. This is confirmed on a grand scale by TAB – he goes back to ACD canon!Holmes to navigate the problems of his everyday life – so Sherlock is not just a modern Sherlock Holmes, he is on some level self-aware of his existence as a fictional character. As we’ll see going through, his awareness of the existing canon of stories is fascinating and tied up in his repression – how do we break out of canon character, and what has canon been hiding, are two questions which repeatedly come to the fore. Mary is the character who most consistently breaks these canon expectations – a lot of TAB is about this – and that’s something he really struggles to contend with, and is one of the reasons that the reality of canon!verse starts to break down in TAB – it's not sustainable, and it doesn’t tell the full story. These two moments early on in EMP show him negotiating his identity and his experiences in his mind in relation to what he knows about Sherlock Holmes – an early iteration of a theme that’s going to become much larger.

The first thing Sherlock does after being pushed under by Janine is go and interrogate who Mary is in his brain, whilst also working out her impact on John. Sherlock comes up with a pretty reasonable background for who she is in the Leinster Gardens scene, but this isn’t really what’s important – it's the The Empty House parallel which sees him subconsciously making the link to Moriarty. ACDcanon!Moran, unlike bbc!Moran, was the last assassin sent after Sherlock from Moriarty’s network – this means that the dismantling-Moriarty's-network plot from the start of TEH becomes more than a fill-in-the-blanks montage, it means that the show retains its key villain to the end – it structurally works, in a way that other plot-level ideas haven’t. [@ eurus holmes. anyway]

Something that’s interesting here, is that there is a real shift away from the implications of the dummy in acd canon. In acd canon, Moran attempts to murder Holmes, which is a way of catching him in the act and sending him to prison. This is about catching Mary in the act in a similar sense, but it’s about being caught by John. This is interesting, because it shows that Sherlock’s priorities have shifted from acd canon – or, more accurately, we’re seeing the priorities that weren’t reported in the Strand. The emotional impact on John is far more important than the legal ramifications – and this in itself is the shift which the creators have been pretty emphatic about taking from the original stories.

John often represents the heart in Sherlock’s MP – I haven’t quite worked out how to distinguish between heart!John and Sherlock’s imagined John yet, and am flying on instinct, which is definitely not sustainable! But it strikes me that a lot about HLV and TST is about understanding the impact of this shooting on John, and that therefore this needs to be John as Sherlock imagines him.

We’re still with Sherlock’s imagined John as we move into “the Watsons’ domestic” in 221B – but, as so many have pointed out, for a domestic between the Watsons, they feature very little as a couple! The core emotional dialogue is often said to come between John and Sherlock, but despite Martin Freeman’s excellent performance in this scene, that’s not strictly true either. The centre of this scene is Sherlock explaining John’s love for Mary. It’s not about the Watsons – it's about Sherlock understanding what’s going on, which fits into EMP theory exactly. I firmly believe that Sherlock begins his EMP trip believing that John loves Mary, and slowly unravels the threads to realise that it’s actually him John cares about, and this scene is testament to the first part – the deduction that he makes about John loving Mary is flawless, but despite explicitly referencing himself, he fails to see the obvious – hiding in plain sight - that such a deduction could equally be applied to himself. He’ll get there in the end (TLD), but right now, that’s what makes this scene so painful for me.

Turning Mary into a client is about moving into the rational part of Sherlock’s brain, trying not to let emotion cloud it, even though it’s incongruous and unworkable. We’ll see Sherlock’s brain and heart slowly integrate, finally uniting in TFP, but for now he thinks rationality is the way forward. This also helps us to set out a framework for what happens with Mary in the EMP – clients are deduced, worked out, they present problems - never forget Mary being framed as the abominable bride – and that’s what is happening here. She is the first problem of the extended mind palace to be solved.

But this scene is metafictional too, because it gets to the core nub of Mary – as John puts it, she wasn’t supposed to be like that. And, canonically, he’s right. If we follow acd!canon, Mary is not meant to be an assassin, but more importantly for HLV, she’s also supposed to save her husband. She’s meant to be all-out devoted shoot-Magnussen type – but instead she shoots Sherlock. When John says that, then, it’s not just a nod to an updated show – it’s a genuine problem that Sherlock has to contend with, because in neither acd!Mary scenario nor housemaid!Mary scenario is she obeying the framework of a woman who loves her husband. This failing marriage is not in the stories, it’s not supposed to happen, and things that come outside of established canon come outside of Sherlock’s pre-programmed mould – we can think of this as a way of thinking about our own childhood programming to be straight/cis/etc., but in a more self-conscious, literary way!

And then, Sherlock’s response: you chose her. That’s why she’s different, and this is actually a vital line. It suggests that the programmed canon that we know these boys follow, because they have to – that’s not what this show is about. Our characters are agents, and for the first time in history, their lives are dictated by free choice. John chose this Mary, not the Mary of canon – and Sherlock himself makes explicit the comparison between John choosing Mary and John choosing Sherlock. The heart of the story is the choices that can be made for the first time. How incredibly exciting.

The ambulance people coming into Baker Street (seemingly without the door being unlocked?) is, I think, the real world blending with the mind palace world here – although not paramedics, there are people currently trying to restart Sherlock’s heart, and this scene shows us that he’s trying hard inside his brain, he’s working with them – he really doesn’t want to die. The idea of the outside world taking on a physical form in his MP is not incredibly hard to believe – I really recommend watching s02e02 of Inside No. 9, written by Mark Gatiss’s League of Gentlemen co-stars Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, an episode which pulls this off marvellously, although with a big cn: for death. In this moment in Sherlock, we get the lovely lines

Sherlock She saved my life.

John She shot you.

Sherlock Eh – mixed messages, I grant you.

These lines are delivered so quickly between the two of them that it feels like Sherlock is talking to himself, like Mary isn’t even in the room. The way BC delivers ‘mixed messages’ – it’s as though there’s still a problem, bbc!Mary hasn’t been reconciled to good!Mary yet.

The next section on our whistle-stop tour is Christmas with Mummy and Daddy. Plenty of people have pointed out how Mummy and Daddy are very clear mirrors for our boys – you can see here X, or you can just look at this picture to be honest.

The Christmas scene doesn’t make sense in the timeline – there's a great timeline diagram here X that shows how much fuckier than any other episode HLV is (excluding TSoT and everything post s3), and that doesn’t even take into account all of the jumping between scenes that we see in the Christmas bit. Jumping from Leinster Gardens to Christmas to Baker Street and back several times is chronologically odd and doesn’t seem to serve a purpose, except to show that the rift between John and Mary has lasted for months – and even that didn’t need such a complex interweaving of flashbacks that is so at odds with the show. It’s also at odds with the plot – why on earth did Mummy and Daddy invite John for Christmas, if he’s no longer living with Sherlock, and even stranger, why did they invite Mary if John and Mary haven’t been on speaking terms for months? This isn’t the way human beings behave. There’s also an old adage in writing which says to never move a conversation to a new place – it’s a waste of time and space. Have the conversation here, or have it there. Don’t abort it for no reason – and that’s exactly what they do here. Mofftiss are pretty experienced, and I’m inclined to believe that they’ve done it for a reason.

So, in MP terms, why does Sherlock gravitate towards his family home instead of Baker Street as the location to unravel John’s relationship with Mary? Bearing in mind that this is a continuation of the interrogation of their relationship, it seems interesting that he chooses to juxtapose them to the only loving couple we see in this television programme. Like a lot of parallels in EMP, this is something that our dads choose to draw our attention to; Daddy says to Mary “you’re the sane one”, as though every happy relationship has a sane one and a mad genius. And they draw attention to it again – Mary points out that Sherlock brought them here to see a fine example of happily married life.

Except, of course, like so much of this interrogation of John and Mary’s relationship in HLV and onwards, this doesn’t quite ring true. Because, of course, there is no mad genius in the Watsons’ relationship, and in terms of sanity Mary is certainly not the sane one. It’s like Sherlock is trying to fit them into the domestic bliss mould, but they just won’t quite go there. The comparison won’t quite be made.

The conversation between Sherlock and Mycroft, who has been established as his brain in TSoT (I cannot find this meta! Where Mycroft is brain and John is heart! Can anyone help?), is pretty straightforward – the brain is interrogating Sherlock’s obsession with the Magnussen case and why he can’t just let it go, and the emotion we see here from Sherlock is more powerful than pretty much anything we get in real life. I actually think this scene is one of the most vulnerable moments he has in the show – and there’s no way that vulnerability would be to Mycroft in real life. There’s also, crucially, no reason why MI6 should actually want Sherlock dead this early. It’s another tell-tale sign that the surface plot doesn’t make sense – we should be looking deeper. Sherlock has just brought down a terrorist network – MI6 should love him. What Mycroft is actually putting forward is that already, way before Sherlock kills Magnussen, pretty much as soon as he enters EMP this is a two-way fork. He can choose to die at any point. But he doesn’t.

There’s something that I really don’t understand here, though, which I think is important – Sherlock drugging the family with the help of Wiggins. This motif of drugging is something which comes back time and again to represent Sherlock’s repression – but here he’s not drugged. Wiggins is also a symbol of repression, but again he’s completely sober. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated – I don’t like loose ends, and I don’t believe that another use of drugs is insignificant!

Then we have a quick flashback to the canteen scene. A lot of EMP theory has drawn on the canteen scene, and how phenomenally dreamlike the entire situation is. There is no way this can take place in Speedy’s – in terms of the timeline, it can’t even take place in the hospital canteen! However, it seems to draw on a mental image of Speedy’s because of the visual similarities between them (referenced in this meta, although this meta makes the argument for the reality of the scene X). Magnussen doesn’t seem to even have a bruise, despite being battered by Mary’s gun. This scene cannot exist. Magnussen picking at Sherlock’s food has often been seen as a metaphor for Sherlock being sexually assaulted whilst comatose, which is something I buy into – the food=sex metaphor has been striking from the beginning, and it suits Magnussen’s power play. It’s also quite possible in this scene that Sherlock thinks that everything fucky is real, and the absolute fuckiness of this scene draws it out – this is the scene that foreshadows the realisation that Magnussen is working from his MP, and of course that’s a realisation that Sherlock needs to make himself. The scene opens with a moment of dislocation – is this the hospital canteen or not? – and is about Sherlock working out what’s happening to him.

What’s really striking is that John has brought his gun to Christmas lunch, however. Bear in mind John-being-suicidal is the realisation that Sherlock is going to come to in TLD, but it’s prefigured here. We haven’t seen John’s gun since ASiP, when it was used to indicate that he was suicidal. It’s suddenly come back, but Sherlock misses its significance – he expects John to have it, but he doesn’t focus on the significance of the gun itself. He’s still thinking in terms of Mary and Magnussen. What’s significant is that John throws him the coat, which has the gun weighing down in its pocket. This prefigures that scene in TLD -

Faith!Eurus, who is a mirror for John in TLD, is thrown the bag, and we see Sherlock weigh it and then realise there’s a gun in it – too late. A bag is the female equivalent of a coat (*cries about pockets*) and the throwing motif with the heavy gun inside it is a clear link between the two moments. Sherlock didn’t recognise the significance of the gun in the first one, possibly because he couldn’t process the situation without mirrors (more on the importance of Eurus as a series of heterosexual mirrors later). When he realises in TLD that he’s made a mistake, that there’s something he’s missed, the implication isn’t that he’s missed it in his analysis of Faith!Eurus, because in no sense of the word does Faith!Eurus exist. What it means is that he missed it in his first, cursory analysis of John. Not the heaviness, but exactly what it meant. The symbols of John’s suicidal ideation start to appear and threaten to break in right up until the end of TLD – this is arguably the first point we start to see them.

Hypothesis theory – that Sherlock is running simulations in his MP – is not something I hold with through all of EMP, but I do hold with it to the end of HLV. It’s something that we know Sherlock does in real life because of THoB, both in acd!canon and in bbc!canon – he stages something in order to prove it to himself. In this case, he’s not able to see the war between Mary and Magnussen play out, so he’s running it himself, and we’ve already seen him desperately trying to prove Mary’s innocence, and more than that her love for John. But this trip to Appledore will prove that impossible.

It’s possible that the Appledore Vaults being Magnussen’s MP is the first time that Sherlock recognises that this is a simulation, and that this isn’t real. He certainly looks incredibly distressed, although that could also be because of the immense danger he’s put John in. However, the vaults being a mind palace doesn’t make sense as surface plot, as so many have pointed out – we’ve literally seen the letters before. (I grant that Magnussen could be bluffing, but it seems odd to draw attention to the letters having a physical form nevertheless.) However, the fact that Magnussen’s MP is in vaults underground is really interesting – imagery to do with going deeper and deeper into Sherlock’s mind is pretty much always falling or sinking, as seen in both TAB and TST in particular. That idea of descending into one’s mind is prefigured very neatly here, and should get us thinking about height generally (I’ve talked about the reverse side of this in the previous chapter X). I also think, although am not an expert on sound, that we can hear a slight eerie dripping when Magnussen walks through the vaults, which ties thematically to the water that is linked to falling/sinking in the rest of the EMP.

Fast forward past the face-flicking, and Sherlock shoots Magnussen. This is the culmination of the metafictionality of the episode, and I think it’s really fantastic. The simulation that Sherlock has run to prove that Mary loves John has failed, because the only way to save John is to kill Magnussen and he’s the only one who can do it – so in short, Sherlock becomes the housemaid, not Mary. He takes on the role, and it breaks canon completely. He’s supposed to be above that, disinterested – but instead he becomes the woman who kills out of love for her husband. He is no longer filling the traditional role of Sherlock Holmes in the narrative. He has disproven the point he needed to make – and so, as brain!Mycroft seems to suggest, deeper waters still. The cut to little Louis Moffat screaming in the firing line instead of BC is another hint that this isn’t real – we might just about accept it here as showing Sherlock’s vulnerability, but given that the entirety of series 4 is about childhood trauma coming back up, the resurgence of a screaming child of Sherlock as he recognises his new place in the narrative is brutal. (Yes, Sherlock has a lot of gay trauma – we’ll find out more when we meet Eurus.)

Eurus, incidentally, comes up here – you know what happened to the other one. I want to home in, though, on Mycroft’s line about Sherlock, that there’s no prison that he could be incarcerated in. This is a bizarre comment, given the events of TFP – it could just be sloppy writing, sure. Or, again, these inconsistencies are pointing to something else, that Sherrinford isn’t a real place and that Sherlock’s death sentence is not a sentence, but self-imposed.

So much has been said, so eloquently, about the tarmac scene, that I don’t know that there’s much more that I can say. The importance of the plane as being Sherlock going to his death is really important as an image that will repeat later – again, see previous chapter X. I’ve also pointed out that there is no point at which Sherlock is told Moriarty is back, yet he seems to know it automatically – another suggestion that this is EMP, and there’s a lot more going on.

The final thing I want to focus on in this episode, though, is the east wind. The east wind is referenced in His Last Bow, which gets very little coverage generally in HLV. His Last Bow is (I believe) the final Holmes story, and the east wind that is coming refers to WW1 – Holmes tells Watson that there is an east wind coming and Watson thinks he means it’s cold, and Holmes laughs and jokes that Watson is a stalwart who will always be there. This is a touching moment to end the stories on, and might remind us of the It is always 1895 poem that will become so important in TAB. Except, this time, John accepts that there’s an east wind coming – he references it repeatedly, actually, as a threat, both here and in TFP. The east wind is the wind of change that comes through the changing years in acd!canon. This seems particularly important here – the social changes between 1895 and 2014 are vital for the next episode, highlighting the idea that the update of the show is a really central part to it. There’s no world war ahead of Holmes (please God @2020) so the wind of change must be referring to something else… I really couldn’t possibly comment as to why the change of time period might be so important!

This chapter has been a long one, but I hoped it help to set up EMP theory on firm foundations. We’ll move into TAB next – see you there!