#joan: *defeats moriarty*

[wizardlyghost]

so funny to me that moriarty paints an enormous and exquisite oil portrait of joan from memory, has joan's other nemesis murdered for daring to intrude on her territory, and joan has the audacity to tell sherlock "the difference between you and me is she's not in love with me". girl, there is no heterosexual explanation for what is happening here.

[moistvonlipwig]

do you guys remember watching the s1 finale of elementary live and seeing the reveal that irene adler was actually moriarty and then seeing joan watson outsmart and defeat her and also seeing sherlock name a bee after joan. because i do. what a show......

[noiregoth]

Ok so every elementary fan knows they fumbled the bag with the season 6 villain but upon my umpteenth rewatch I realised something.

Spoilers under the cut…

So in s06e10 they reintroduce Moriarty as a threat coming after Morland and although crafty to have Sherlock force them into a ceasefire (unstoppable force, immovable object) killing both of them would be the perfect bittersweet ending to the two of the biggest foes in Sherlock’s life. Have him playing both sides against each other. Seems like a backward step after Sherlock made amends with his father after Mycroft’s death but they could tabled his forgiveness til after Morland died. They’ve previously had Moriarty kill a rival (Alana Marsh s3) so why didn’t they do it here with Michael and then have Morland & Moriarty be the actual villains for the rest of s6? Maybe keeping everything the way it is and if there was a season 8 Moriarty would’ve been the final boss.

Maybe Natalie just didn’t want to come back to reprise the role. Maybe the writers thought it would be redundant to bring her back since she was “defeated” in season 1 but she escaped. They literally wrote her escaping and brought her character back in abstentia after 4 seasons for THIS? Makes season 6 almost for disappointing if that’s possible.

And while I’m here lemme rant about Michael and also Hannah. If Michael has no haters then I am dead. He was so SLIMY AND ELUSIVE AND THE WAY HE ATTACKED JOAN????

They revealed Hannah was an alcoholic (and proceeded to do nothing with it) and didn’t use that as Michael’s “in” to infiltrate Hannah’s circle? Isn’t that less suspicious than a fender bender? 👀 He clearly researched Sherlock’s circle. Randomly meeting at a recovery meeting makes more sense. Tbh I wish Michael had killed her off instead of her roommate but that would’ve blown up the Captain’s life and set him on the path for revenge and messed up the storyline.

The whole thing about him going away because Sherlock is unwell was bullshit. Michael should’ve been dropping bodies waiting for Sherlock to come back. It’s his big finale as a serial killer who announced himself. Either that or it was a lie to abscond. And it would’ve given us opportunities to see Joan being badass without Sherlock there but justifying why he WASN’T there. But idk how I’d feel about an elementary episode without Sherlock.

Then like a cockroach Michael comes back and dies in the most anticlimactic way POSSIBLE. I get that that was the point and I loved the tension with them trying to pin it on Joan (that FBI agent was pissing me off) but I still hated it. It did give us the best finale. And then they retconned it with season 7. 🙃 I’m not saying I didn’t like the series finale, I just think s6 finale was the perfect ending.

Also why didn’t Sherlock just reinstate Alfredo as his sponsor? OR GET A NEW ONE? 📢 Then he wouldn’t have leaned on Michael so much and maybe he would have sniffed out his bullshit earlier. Like the last episode Alfredo is in is so important to Sherlock’s familial healing and THEN HE IS JUST NEVER SEEN AGAIN???? Are we to assume that he thinks Sherlock is dead? They didn’t even bring him back for the last episode of season 7. 😭 Ok the actor was booked and busy in 2019 but it wasn’t right. The writers seemed to care so much about its core characters and after the s3 finale Alfredo is a core character.

JUSTICE FOR ALFREDO.

I think I’m gonna rank the season finales and also my top 10 episodes EXCLUDING the finales.

[dynamics-of-an-asteroid]

this is literally how the last season of elementary should have gone

Odin Reichenbach: It's my methods for dealing with potential criminals or nothing. I am above the law. There's no way to defeat me so stop calling on help. I control all the information in the wor- Jamie Moriarty: *murders him* Jamie, five minutes later at lunch with Sherlock, Joan, Marcus, and Captain Gregson:

[ruminativerabbi]

Die Kippa

As report after report confirms the rise of anti-Semitic incidents at home and abroad, the controversy surrounding the remarks of Felix Klein, Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner seems worth considering carefully.

The whole brouhaha began innocently enough just a week ago when Klein told the Berliner Morgenpost, an important German newspaper, that he felt it unwise for Jews to wear kippot in the streets of Germany without first considering where they were and in whose company they might be finding themselves there. When I first read his remark, it didn’t seem that shocking to me. The German government recently reported a twenty percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in just one year. I have heard anecdotal evidence from friends in Germany in this regard: not that they feel unsafe as Jews living in Germany, merely that it would be foolhardy to advertise one’s Jewishness in the street in at least some neighborhoods. Klein then went on, entirely reasonably, to insist that Germany do better in educating its public officials, and specifically police officers, to recognize anti-Semitic gestures and slogans and to react to anti-Jewish agitation forcefully and decisively. That all sounded entirely right to me!

The response was complicated. Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, a Chabad rabbi stationed in Berlin, commented that, while he was sure that “Klein’s intentions were good,” he was also sure that “hiding our identity is never the solution.” That also sounded right to me too! Other Jewish spokespeople fell into step with Rabbi Teichtal, most speaking warmly about Felix Klein and admitting that he was certainly right technically, but feeling uncomfortable hearing a government minister appearing simply to accept the status quo as part of how things are and, at least for the foreseeable future, will be.

If anything, it was the response from the non-Jewish world that was surprising…and far less charitable. Joachim Herrmann, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior and a member of a right-wing Christian party, commented that “everyone can and should wear a kippah wherever and whenever he wants to.” And then he went on to warn specifically about the dangers of giving in “to the hatred of the Jews” and making it clear why this should be a matter of deep concern not just for Jews but for non-Jewish Germans as well. Now I’m really not sure what I think: he sounded right too!

But if the response from inside Germany was emotional and strongly put, the response from outside Germany was even more shrill. The President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, pronounced himself “deeply shocked” by Klein’s remark. And then he went on to note without any trace of historical irony that “responsibility for the welfare, the freedom and the right to religious belief of every member of the German Jewish community is in the hands of the German government and its law enforcement agencies.” And then, speaking for his nation more than just for himself, the President went on to say this: “We acknowledge and appreciate the moral position of the German government, and its commitment to the Jewish community that lives there, but fears about the security of German Jews are a capitulation to anti-Semitism and an admittance that, again, Jews are not safe on German soil. We will never submit, will never lower our gaze and will never react to anti-Semitism with defeatism – and expect and demand our allies act in the same way.” So what can I say? He’s right too!

The national newspaper, Bild, one of Germany’s largest, went so far—is this beyond bizarre or truly touching?—they went so far as to publish a kippah in the newspaper that sympathetic citizens could cut out, paste together, and then presumably wear in the streets of Germany as a kind of public rejection of the kind of anti-Jewish sentiment that Klein was decrying in his interview with the Morgenpost.

The headline was unambiguous: “Show Your Solidarity with Your Jewish Neighbors! Make the Bild-Kippa.” The copy beneath the cut-out was what you’d expect, but was somehow still very moving: “If even one person here can’t safely wear a kippah, then the answer can only be that we’re all going to wear the kippah.” And then, for people unfamiliar with the concept, Bild offered even more explicit instructions: “Place the kippah on the back of your head and attach it to your hair with a hairclip. Done!” But it was the words of Bild editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt that stopped me in my tracks: “Die Kippa gehört zu Deutschland,” he wrote: The kippah belongs to Germany. It’s hard to know what to say to that!

This whole incident feels personal to me.

Joan and I lived in Germany before reunification, when Heidelberg was still in West Germany. But that’s not the only way Germany was a different place back then. The war was in the past, for example, but not that far in the past. I was present in Heidelberg on May 8, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of German’s unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces under the leadership of General Eisenhower, for example, and at several ceremonies I attended surrounding that anniversary I took note of the presence of actual Wehrmacht veterans, many of who were younger then than I am now. (I write about this now with a certain level of sang-froid. But it was beyond creepy to be there at the time, unsettling and wholly unnerving for me actually to see these people in the flesh.) I had students young enough then to be the children, not the grandchildren, of Nazis. One of my students’ own grandfathers had been a guard at Sobibor. The basic story of the Shoah was known to educated people, of course, but the details were so regularly brushed past for the 1979 broadcast of the American mini-series Holocaust, starring (among many others) Meryl Streep, James Woods, Joseph Bottoms, Michael Moriarty, and Tovah Feldshuh, to be able to capture the attention of an unprecedented number of viewers. Fifty percent of the entire population of Germany, 20 million people, watched the series. After each episode, a panel of historians appeared on screen to take questions from viewers, but no one expected there to be thousands of calls—or, more amazingly, for most of them to be from people who seemed to have previously known nothing about Treblinka or Babi Yar. The national catharsis surrounding that show, in fact, was sufficiently intense for people still to be talking about it five years later when I arrived in Heidelberg in 1984.

Germans have grappled with their own heritage for decades now. They seem to veer back and forth, sometimes embracing the horrific nature of their own nation’s war crimes and other times backing off from accepting what must for most be the almost unbearable burden of history. When Henryk M. Broder wrote in 1986 that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz, he was saying something profound about the amount of energy and steadfastness it takes for a nation to consider crimes on the scale of the Nazis’ war against the Jews without flinching or seeking the blame the victims. He made that comment in 1986, but the comment just last year of Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the extreme rightist party Alternative für Deutschland, that the Shoah was merely “a speck of bird poop on a trajectory of German history that has gone on for a thousand years,” he was essentially saying the same thing. Yes, he was speaking in a crass, vulgar way, but he was nonetheless giving voice to a deep wish of all Germans: that the nation of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven not solely be remembered for Sobibor. I imagine I’d feel the same way if I were in his boots! And yet…the bottom line is that having illustrious ancestors does not exonerate anybody of anything. And I have to assume that Alexander Gauland knows that as well.

Other nations that collaborated in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors have yet even to begin to come up to Germany’s level of self-analysis and acceptance. (And in that regard, I think not only of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, but also of nations like France and Holland, whose perception of themselves as victim-states has almost entirely rid them of the need to confront their own wartime perfidy with respect to their Jewish co-citizens.) For one thing, other than Germany and our own country, how many nations even have federal officials tasked with addressing anti-Semitism? And also worth noting is that, in the end, Felix Klein did backtrack and announced that he had merely been speaking in a monitory voice intended to awaken people to a serious problem, not actually suggesting that Jewish people should be afraid to identify in public as Jews.

The German blogosphere is busy debating the question of whether the “real” problem with anti-Semitism in Germany today has more to do with the resurgence of the German version of the alt-right or the deeply engrained hatred of Israel that festers in parts of Germany’s Muslim community. There are reasons to see it both ways, but the bottom line has to be that the Germans are trying to do the right thing, both by their current Jewish citizens and also by the generations whose ongoing existence was brutally terminated by the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of today’s Germans. As Simon Wiesenthal taught over and over, only the dead can forgive their murderers. Surely the living cannot speak for them. But we who are alive today can note that, despite the dark forces that continue to gather force in the various lands of our dispersion, there are also decent people in the world for whom anti-Semitism is anathema. We should hold that thought close to our breasts as we do what we can to combat the forces of hatred that seem to exist in an eternal cycle of dormancy and revivification. Sometimes fighting the battle is winning the war.  

[notgonnarememberthis]

Vulnerable

Just a short little soulmates oneshot to get rid of creative energy after that finale. Oof. I’m still reeling so I punched this one out in about an hour. It centers around being an empath towards your soulmate. Naturally, joanlock cause lord knows I can’t write anything else these days.

I’m still kinda lost on what to write after finishing my latest two fics. Beautiful and Whatever It Takes have both come to a close so I am now open to taking requests. I just need to keep my energy flowing rather than falling into the hiatus head first. I’ve also got a 5+1 thing gearing up to be written I just need to hammer out the kinks. Here’s this for now, enjoy!

WARNING: Does include spoilers for the Elementary season finale.

Sherlock hangs up the phone with a small smile on his face. Though they’ve yet to defeat Michael he can feel they’re growing closer. They’ve taken down the judge standing in their way of getting a warrant now they only need to connect the pieces. He’ll slip soon enough, he’s sure of it.

As he walks, the bag of takeout bounces gently against Sherlock’s leg. His mind wanders to Watson herself. The bond between them, though unspoken, is undoubtedly known by the both of them. It has been for a while.

In their world the phenomenon of soulmates is a rare thing. There’s simply too numerous a population to find the person deemed to be your true partner in life. For most the action of finding that one person amongst seven billion is far too daunting to ever be plagued by the thoughts. Long ago there’d been moments he ached. His chest felt tight, emotions far too piercing when he’s simply going about his day. He’d imagined in moments long ago that it’d been Irene. Yet when he felt nothing when she’d ‘died’ it’d destroyed him. For months he’d been haunted by the doubts of her death. For her to show up months later, more than alive. It was like a punch to the gut.

However by that time he had already known his soulmate was never Irene. For a while he’d suspected that Watson was, indeed, his soulmate. Her emotions would bleed into his often, especially on anniversaries. On the anniversary of her patient’s death, however, is when he truly began suspecting. He’d denied it for a long time even when he threw a tennis ball directly between her shoulder blades and the pain radiated through his own back. His findings only grew stronger when Andrew perished. For days on end vial guilt flooded his chest and clouded his mind. Yet his true confirmation never came until her ‘battle’ with Detective Cortez. The bruise that blossomed against her eye throbbed at his own skin. At that point pressing his remedy against her skin, feeling his own soak in that moment of relief. He knew he could no longer deny it.

Watson, on the other hand, knew for much longer than he. He’s no stranger to peril, that he knows. The fact that he has caused her so much significant pain hurts him. He felt her sympathy for the shots he’d taken by Moriarty’s henchman as she stitched him up. He felt her hesitation as she reset his dislocated shoulder. He felt and saw how his overwhelming disappointment with himself swallowed her after he relapsed. Yet she stayed. Through the pain of the concussion and struggle with recovery she stayed.

He’s just twenty minutes away from their home when a sharp pain strikes across his temple. Panic surges through his body and he’s not entirely sure if it’s his or Joan’s. Her name leaves his throat in a whisper and in the next moment pain spreads across his ribcage forcing him to drop the food onto the sidewalk.

He runs through the streets without a thought. As fast as his feet can carry himself he runs to the Brownstone. His heart nearly stops as he takes in a blood trail leading directly to his door, standing wide open. He approaches slowly not wishing to alert whoever may still be in the home. His heart beats widely in his chest up until the moment he steps inside. A hand grabs his leg and he sees a flash of a weapon being turned to him from below. He catches the other hand mid-swing and disarms, what he’ll later recognize as a helicopter rotor from the hand of his attacker.

Watson sits by the open door, eyes recognizing him now not as an attacker but as her partner. Just as he suspected the area on her temple is already turning a deep purple. Her now free hand grips her abdomen as it cries out against her sudden movements. “Sherlock.” She whispers. He ignores his sympathetic ache dropping to her side in an instant surveying her for potentially mortal wounds.

“There’s blood outside.” He says frantically surveying her. “I thought-”

“His. Michael’s.” She explains cutting him off. “He attacked me after we got off the phone. He wanted to kill me.” Their combined fear renders them both incredibly vulnerable when they’re usually so guarded. He’ll never mention it to anyone but he sees a stray tear run down Watson’s cheek. It’d been so long since she came so close to death. He’d naively hoped that he could protect her from such a fate.

He calls an ambulance while sitting by her side, gripping her hand to ground her to reality. Her head rests on his shoulder as her breath comes out unevenly. He can feel the pang rush through her with every breath she takes. Her other hand still finds purchase on the rotor she’d attacked Michael with. Even in an addled states she’s looking to protect the two of them in the vulnerable state they’re in.

He rattles onto her to keep her awake until the ambulance arrives. He played too closely with a concussion and won’t risk Watson doing the same. They take her away from him far too soon. Even though he climbs into Marcus’s car to follow the ambulance the weight of his hand without hers feels foreign.

When he finds himself by her side once more he grips onto her. Relief floods the two of them and he’s not sure who it originated from. Yet the peace brought forth by the other’s presence is enough to soothe the both of them for now.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“How long have you known?” The question comes unannounced months later. They’ve long since moved from New York starting a new life in London. She continued looking into adoption processes. She’s finally on her last steps towards her goal of motherhood. She even has a name for the little boy when he finally arrives. They’ve both healed from the near loss of their partnership. They still ache from Gregson’s betrayal but they understand it nonetheless. Neither of them denies the thought of killing Michael themselves crossing their minds.

“How long have I known?” He parrots back to her.

“That we’re soulmates.” She hums placing lettuce inside of Clyde’s tank for him to eat. He watches as she gently strokes his shell before returning to her organizing of her new place.

“How long have you known?”

“Uh huh,” She shakes her head narrowing her eyes at him. “I asked first.”

Her eyes challenge his for a few seconds before he finally yields. “I knew for a while but I always denied it. I accepted it after your legendary fight with Detective Cortez.” She rolls her eyes but he can see her lips struggling not to betray her underlying amusement. “Your turn.”

“Since we found Moriarty… Irene.” He nods expectantly. He’d suspected later when he’d been shot but of course she knew since then. She’s far smarter than he ever gives her enough credit for. “What do we do about it?” She asks.

“Whatever you like Watson.” He smiles despite himself. Years ago he’d never had predicted this woman making such an impact on his life. Now he can’t imagine life without her by his side.

“An experiment.” She proposes tentatively. “We’ll see where it takes us.” Her eyes flash to his again seeking his permission. He can feel the waves of nervous energy hidden by her otherwise unbothered appearance.

“As you wish Watson.”

[trekkedin]

Names

So I’ve looked for the meaning of a few names in bbc Sherlock. Warning, it’s a long one. It doesn’t really give any new idea but it’s pretty interesting and gives some indications about the rest of s4. 

I’m giving you the source: http://www.behindthename.com/info/names

Ajay

Means “Invincible, unconquerable”. Thus, “he who cannot be defeated”. It’s Hindu in origin. I don’t really know what to think about it after TST. 

John

English form of Iohannes, the latin form of the Greek name Ioannes, itself derived from the Hebrew name Yochanan meaning “Yahweh is gracious”. The Hebrew from occurs in the Old Testament, but this names owes its popularity to two New Testament characters, both highly revered saints. 

Given that, I'm convinced John didn’t cheat on Mary. It’s not the John Watson we know. 

(More under the cut)

Hamish

Anglicized form of a Sheumais, the vocative case of Seumas. 

Seumas

Scottish form of James We have a John/Moriarty mirror.

James

English form of the Late Latin name Iacomus which was derived from Iakobos, the New Testament, Greek form of the hebrew name Jacob. This was the name of two apostles in the new testament. The first was Saint James the Greater, the apostle John’s brother, who was beheaded under Herod Agrippa in the Book of Acts. The second was James the Lesser, son of Alphaeus. Another James known as James the Just is also mentioned in the Bible as being the brother of Jesus. 

Interesting that James is basically John’s second name... Especially since one of them was beheaded and the other was supposedly the brother of Jesus (Sherlock)...

Mary

The meaning is not known for certain, but there are several theories including ‘sea of bitterness’, ‘rebelliousness’ and ‘wished for child’. However, it was most likely originally an Egyptian name, perhaps derived in part from mry (beloved) or mr (love). 

So Mary is associated with both bitterness and love. 

Rosamund

Derived from the Germanic elements hros “horse” and mund “protection”. The Normans introduced this name to England. It was subsequently influenced by the Latin phrase rosa munda “pure rose”. This was the name of the mistress of Henry II, the king of England in the 12th century. She was possibly murdered by his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

Margaret

Derived from the Latin Margarita, which was from Greek margarites meaning ‘pearl’, probably ultimately a borrowing from manvari. Saint Margaret, the patron of expectant mothers, was martyred at Antioch in the 4th century. Later legends told of her escape from a dragon, with which she was often depicted in medieval art. The saint was popular during the Middle Ages, and her name has been widely used in the Christian world.

Weren’t everyone obsessed with a pearl in TST? 

Mycroft

Used by Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his character Mycroft Holmes, who was the older brother of the detective Sherlock Holmes. The character's name was from an English surname which is thought to derive from the Old English elements mýðe "the mouth of a stream" and croft "enclosed field, small field".

Sherlock

Used by Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his character Sherlock Holmes, who was a detective in Doyle's mystery stories beginning in 1887. The character's name was from an English surname meaning "shear lock", originally referring to a person with closely cut hair.

Janine

Variant of Jeannine. It has only been in use since the 20th century

Jeannine

Diminutive of Jeanne

Jeanne

Modern French form of Jehanne, an Old French feminine form of Iohannes (see John). Joan of Arc is known as Jeanne d'Arc in France. 

Surprise surprise, another John mirror. 

Sebastian

From the Latin name Sebastianus which meant "from Sebaste". Sebaste was the name a town in Asia Minor, its name deriving from Greek Sebastos "venerable".

A lot of things are happening in Asia Minor in this show...

Holmes

Variant of Holme

Holme 

Refers either to someone living by an island in a fen (from northern Middle English holm) or near a holly tree (Middle English holm).

Watson

Patronymic form of the English and Scottish name Watt, which came from the popular Middle English given name Wat or Watt, a diminutive of the name Walter.

Walter

From a Germanic name meaning "ruler of the army", composed of the elements wald "rule" and hari "army". The Normans brought it to England, where it replaced the Old English cognate Wealdhere. A famous bearer of the name was Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), a Scottish novelist who wrote 'Ivanhoe' and other notable works.

I’m pretty sure John has a plan. Don’t underestimate him.

Moran 

The surname Moran, originating in counties Mayo and Sligo of Connaught, is the shortened version of O'Moran, anglicized form of the older O'Morain "grandson of the great one" with the Old Irish root mor 'great, big' (denoting stature and/or character)

So Moriarty’s man. 

Moriarty

From Irish Ó Muircheartach meaning "descendant of MUIRCHERTACH". This was the surname given by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the antagonist in the Sherlock Holmes series.

Muirchertach

Means "mariner" in Gaelic. This was the name of a 6th-century Irish high king. 

Water, again. 

Hudson

From an English surname which meant "son of Hudde".

Hudde

Medieval diminutive of Hugh or possibly Richard.

Hugh

From the Germanic element hug, meaning "heart, mind, spirit".

We all know what Mrs.H represents, so no surprise here neither. 

Magnussen

Not found. 

Culverton

Not found. 

It’s probably nothing but it’s quite interesting that our both latest vilains have names that don’t mean anything.

Smith

From an English surname meaning "metal worker, blacksmith", derived from Old English smitan "to smite, to hit". It is the most common surname in most of the English-speaking world.