#shortly mrs hudson probably thinks john is dying because sherlock came down and asked for tea during work hours

[skyriderwednesday]

Involuntary Distraction

Holmes brought his hand into position over the dish, adjusted his footing, and-- Hic! His breath hitched at the sharp, unexpected sound, and two drops hit the glass. Watson groaned, “Sorry. I’ll go upstairs.” -- Holmes very much prefers not to be distracted while performing experiments. Some distractions cannot be avoided however.

(Rated G, 426 words)

Holmes bent low over his chemistry equipment, unblinking, only reluctantly drawing breath, channelling all of his focus into the minute adjustment of tendons that would compress the bulb of his pipette to release one precise drop of the alkaline. He brought his hand into position over the dish, adjusted his footing, and-- Hic! His breath hitched at the sharp, unexpected sound, and two drops hit the glass. No matter, he would simply adjust the ratio. He replaced the pipette into its bottle and drew up a little of the acid into its dropper. The alkaline was stronger, returning the solution to neutral would require two drops. He compressed the bulb over the dish, one drop, two-- Hic! Holmes winced, three drops. He grit his teeth. He couldn’t possibly increase his quantities any more to compensate, the process was too delicate and the components too expensive. The sample was small, and it would waste too much of the-- Hic! Holmes growled in frustration and whirled around, spattering acid which fizzed as it started eating into the wallpaper. “Watson!” he cried, glaring at the doctor. “I’m terribly sorry, Holmes,” Watson said, bowing his head apologetically as he made to rise from his chair. “I didn’t mean to disturb you, I’ll go up--“ Hic! Watson groaned, “Sorry. I’ll go upstairs.” Holmes stared, his temper dying as quickly as it had flared, finally processing the noise. Of course, hiccups. His mind had retained enough situational awareness to connect a distraction to Watson making a noise, but clearly not enough to distinguish voluntary from involuntary. He sighed, and realised the dropper was still in his hand. He put it down. “No, there is no need for that. It is nothing you can help.” “I don’t want to distract you while--“ Hic! “--while you’re working. I’ve already done that enough.” “You’re no distraction.” Watson raised one shoulder in his usual shrug, gathering his things. “I’m enough to shout at, at least,” he said. If Holmes was to be honest, he would find it more distracting to think of Watson hiccupping in his room for his sake. “I apologise, I wasn’t thinking. Is there anything I can do?” Watson gave him a bemused look as he sat back down. “They’re only--“ Hic! “--hiccups, Holmes. Ruddy annoying, but no cause for--“ Hic! Watson grumbled, “--concern.” “Would tea help?” “It would hardly hurt.” Holmes nodded, “We’ll have tea.” Watson eyed his worktable, “What about your experiment?” “The solution needs to sit,” Holmes lied, adding another drop of alkaline to the dish. “I’ll fetch us tea.”

[possiblyimbiassed]

Everything in S4 has happened before - did you make a list?

The wheel turns and there’s really nothing new under the sun… It struck me that just about everything we see in Series 4 of BBC Sherlock, seems to have happened before, in one form or another. Which I believe is strong evidence for EMP theory (or at least something similar). I’m sure several people have already commented on this, but I’ll try to write down a whole list of what I’ve found this far – feel free to add to it!

Events in The Six Thatchers

1. Sherlock (in a Secret Service meeting about how to cover up him shooting Magnussen): “I am taking it seriously; what makes you think I’m not taking it seriously?” 

Earlier event: In TEH, the Gothic fan in Anderson’s Holmes fan club, theorizing that Sherlock and Moriarty are attracted to each other: “I do take it seriously. I don’t think we should wear hats.”

2. Sherlock is brought back to London to figure out how Moriarty can be transmitting his “Miss me?” message on every screen in the country. Sherlock’s plan is to sit and wait for Jim’s “spider web” to quiver, rather than trying to find Moriarty himself. 

Earlier event: In TEH Sherlock was brought back to London to foil a terrorist attack on the city. At first, he was just waiting for one of his markers (“rats”) to make a move.

3. In one case, Sherlock is in 221B, holding a plastic bag with ice and a human thumb in it. 

Earlier event: In ASiB Mrs Hudson discovers a plastic bag in the fridge of 221B, containing human thumbs.

4. In “The Circus Torso” Sherlock mentions tattoos on dead bodies. 

Earlier event: In TBB (where a Chinese circus is involved) there are bodies with Black Lotus tattoos on their heels.

5. In “The Duplicate Man” we get the following quote: “How could Dennis Parkinson be at two places at the same time? And murdered in one of them?” Before John manages to say anything, Sherlock tells him: “It’s never twins, John.” 

Earlier event: In TAB (Victorian times inside Sherlock’s mind) we have Watson saying about Emilia Ricoletti: “But she can’t have been in two places at the same time, can she?”  Watson asks why it couldn’t have been twins, and Holmes answers “Because it’s never twins.”

6. And also (reality check!) there’s John hammering down all their cases into his blog as usual, with titles and all. Quite some time must indeed be passing when John is frequently transmitting blog posts, because in between them he even becomes a father! Lestrade refers twice to John going to publish his blog about the Six Thatcher case, thereby making him, Greg, look incompetent and undeserving of the credits. 

Except there are two great big flaws in this: a) John is only seen writing on a picture file (.jpg), not a real blog prompt and b) There are no new blog entries on the official www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk  since John’s wedding in TSoT. Not one. The last one from that time is written by Sherlock himself, complaining about John’s and ‘Mary’s’ “sex holiday”. John’s last blog post was from the Mayfly Man case at the time of his stag night, shortly before the wedding.

7. Charlie Welsborough’s car blows up with his dead body inside. 

Earlier event: In TGG a hostage was covered in explosives and placed in a car, waiting for it to blow up.

8. Sherlock is ‘deducing’ a client’s case, telling him that his wife is a secret spy who will drug the US president with an injection in the neck.

Earlier event: In TEH John was drugged with an injection in his neck.

9. Sherlock is solving a case about a client who has a heart failure causing him amnesia. 

Earlier event: In HLV Sherlock’s heart stops temporarily. Judging by TLD, something weird has happened with Sherlock’s memory in S4.

10. Six busts of Margaret Thatcher are being smashed to pieces, which is the focus case of this episode. 

Earlier events: The whole case is described long before on John’s blog with the same title, with smashed Thatcher figures and with basically very similar events. Maggie Thatcher was also a password to secret info in THoB.

11. Craig the Hacker talks about “Ostalgia” and “Cold War memorabilia”; how some people in Germany long for the old communist era. 

Earlier event: In TEH, when Sherlock was tortured in Serbia, we saw uniforms that looked a lot more like Red Army uniforms from the past, than modern Serbian military uniforms:

12. ‘Mary’ calls Sherlock a ‘Dragon Slayer’ when he meets her in his secret bolt hole.

Earlier events: In TRF Moriarty talked on a video screen about Sherlock as a knight slaying dragons. In HLV Mycroft claimed that Sherlock sees himself as a Dragon Slayer.

13. ‘Mary’ is revealed as one of four freelancing assassins in A.G.R.A. who had been hired for an operation in Tbilisi, Georgia. 

Earlier event: In TRF, according to Mycroft, Moriarty had assigned “four top international assassins” relocated to within “spitting distance” of 221B.

14. ‘Mary’ uses a poisoned letter to drug Sherlock; he gets affected when he inhales the vapor from the paper. Then he sees a childhood memory when he was playing pirates with his dog.

Earlier event: In THoB the murderer uses an aerosol perceived as fog to drug his victims with a substance that works fear-inducing and produce hallucinations when they inhale it:

15. Sherlock goes on an international tour to chase after ‘Mary’. 

Earlier event: In MHR Sherlock goes on an international tour to several countries to chase after Moriarty’s remaining criminal network, after faking his own death in TRF.

16. ’Mary’ dies from a bullet wound in the abdomen, with John at her side.

Earlier event: In HLV Sherlock was very close to dying from a bullet wound in the abdomen, with John at his side.

17. By smashing a Thatcher bust Sherlock gets hold of a memory stick with the acronym A.G.R.A. on it, which contains secret information.

Earlier events: in TGG Sherlock finds the lost memory stick with the top secret Bruce Partington Plans.  In John’s blog case ‘The Six Thatchers’, a knife with Beppo’s initials on it was found inside one of the Thatcher figures.

18. There’s a scene with a swimming pool where Sherlock and the assassin Ajay are fighting over a memory stick.

Earlier event: in TGG there was a scene with the swimming pool (where Carl Powers had been murdered) and Sherlock, Moriarty and John were fighting over a memory stick.

19. There are several scenes from the London Aquarium where sharks swim around in bluish water.

Earlier event: In HLV Sherlock described Charles Augustus Magnussen as a ‘shark’ with a ‘dead eyes stare’, and he was referencing to the London Aquarium.

20. There are shattering glass transitions between scenes in TST.

Earlier events: John described in his blog post The Six Thatchers how he heard glass shatter when Beppo broke in. Glass shattering (a mirror) was also used to reveal a ghost trick in Sherlock’s Mind Palace in TAB:

21. John refuses to see Sherlock for quite a while, after blaming him for ‘Mary’s’ death, which hurts Sherlock badly. 

Earlier event: In TEH John refused to see Sherlock for some time in TEH, after Sherlock came back and told John thad he had faked his suicide. Sherlock seemed very sad about this.

Events in The Lying Detective

22. John visits a therapist for his problems with grief and depression. (And a depressed Sherlock suddenly visits John’s old therapist Ella in TST for his problems with John). 

Earlier events: Already in ASiP John went to his therapist Ella for depression, and then he visited her again for his problems with grief over Sherlock in TRF.

23. Sherlock is waving a gun quite carelessly, shoots the wall in 221B and seems to be in a lot of distress. 

Earlier events: In TGG Sherlock shot the wall in 221B and later carelessly scratched his head with a gun in the pool scene, where John had just shown willing to sacrifice his life for Sherlock:

24. In 221B Sherlock manages to catch the cup of tea that Mrs Hudson has made for him but drops from shock, before it hits the floor. 

Earlier event: In TBB Sherlock managed to catch the teapot that Soo Lin Yao was tending to in the museum but dropped from shock when Sherlock entered, before it hit the floor.

25. Sherlock is walking the streets of London at night together with Faith, who likes him and thinks he’s “nicer”. By walking with her, he hopes to prevent her from committing suicide, since Sherlock has deduced that she is alone and is carrying a gun in her handbag. Faith is also walking with a cane, which reminds Sherlock of John.

Earlier event: In ASiP Sherlock was running through the streets (and rooftops) of London at night together with John, who seemed to like him and admire him. By running together, trying to solve an exciting crime case, John’s psychosomatic limp was cured and he no longer needed his cane after that. (And John, who was depressed, was probably also prevented from committing suicide).

26. Sherlock predicts the future repeatedly; for some odd reason he knows two weeks in advance that John will get a new therapist and that John will want Molly to examine Sherlock, and he knows exactly where and when it all will happen, in spite of being kidnapped and brought there in handcuffs in the boot of Mrs Hudson’s sports car. 

Earlier event: In ASiP Sherlock tried to convince John that he could predict the fortune cookies in chinese restaurants, but John didn’t buy it.

27. John disarms, assaults and beats the sh*t out of Sherlock when Sherlock is high, frightened and starts waving a scalpel. (It’s a completely horrible, abusive scene, where John is uncontrollably violent, but the event is treated like it was Sherlock’s own fault, as if he somehow deserved the beating. Which is truly disturbing).

Earlier events: In TEH John punched Sherlock in the face three times after Sherlock revealed that he had faked his death and tried to joke about it. In HLV John disarmed and sprained a ‘junkie’ (Bill Wiggins) who was waving a knife, using far more violence than the situation craved.

28. In the hospital, Culverton Smith tries to strangle Sherlock, but John comes to his rescue and fights down Culverton. 

Earlier event: In TGG The Golem tried to strangle Sherlock at the planetarium, but John came to his rescue and bravely tried to fight down the much bigger Golem. 

29. John seems furiously jealous when Sherlock receives a text message from Irene Adler, who is using a provocative personalized ring tone. 

Earlier event: John seemed very jealous already in ASiB when Irene Adler was texting Sherlock, using the same provocative ringtone. He even kept track of the number of messages Sherlock received.

30. Sherlock puts on the deerstalker before leaving 221B because he thinks that’s what people expect from him.  

Earlier event: In TEH Sherlock put on the deerstalker before leaving 221B to talk to the press, because he thought that’s what people expected him to do:

Events in The Final Problem

31. A little girl is on board an airplane full of unconscious people, and she cannot make her Mom wake up. 

Earlier event: In ASIB a little girl (the same actor as in TFP!) and her sister claimed that they weren’t allowed to see their Granddad when he was dead. And then Sherlock was confronted with Mycroft’s plan to fool the terrorists: an airplane full of dead people (among them is the girl’s Granddad).

32. Sherlock’s flat at 221B Baker Street is blown up by an exploding drone (yet surprisingly intact at the end of the episode). 

Earlier event: In TGG Sherlock’s flat was damaged by an explosion in the opposite house (the apartments at the centre of the explosion seemed totally destroyed). The whole thing was set up by Moriarty.

33. By using disguises and deception, Sherlock, John and Mycroft enter Sherrinford; a highly secured governmental establishment. 

Earlier event: In THoB Sherlock and John, aided by Mycroft’s key card and claiming to be supervising officers, enter Baskerville; a highly secured military establishment:

34. Euros, and later Sherlock, john and Mycroft, are kept in an isolated cell at Sherrinford. 

Earlier events: in THoB James Moriarty is kept in an isolated cell and interrogated (tortured, as it seems). In HLV, he shows up in a padded cell and a straight jacket in Sherlock’s Mind Palace after Sherlock has been shot.

35. Euros uses Sherlock, John and Mycroft, without their consent, for her frightening psychosocial experiments. 

Earlier event: In THoB Sherlock uses John – without his consent - for a frightening experiment on a hallucinogenic drug.

36. First experiment: Euros forces Sherlock to ask John to shoot the Governor of Serrinford, in order to save the Governor’s wife. John at first seems ready to do it, but he can’t manage it in the end. And it was all useless anyway: the Governor killed himself and his wife was shot anyway.

Earlier event: In ASiP Sherlock (unknowingly) made John shoot the serial murderer Jeff Hope, in order to save Sherlock from committing suicide with poison, in his gambling with the murderer just to prove himself clever. The whole thing could have been stopped if Sherlock just had handed Hope over to the police.

37. Second experiment: When Sherlock focuses on solving the crime of the three Garridebs and points out which of them is the guilty part, in order to save the two innocent Garridebs, Euros ends up killing them all anyway. 

Earlier event: In TGG, when Sherlock wasted time, concentrating on solving the case of Connie Prince’s poisoning and get one step ahead of the murderer, rather than thinking of the victim’s prolonged suffering (he thought he’d help the old blind lady best in this way), the hostage and a bunch of other innocent people got killed by Moriarty anyway.

38. Third experiment: Euros forces Sherlock to make Molly reveal her love for him, which hurts her deeply, making Sherlock feel horrible afterwards. And it was all for nothing, since Euros later revealed that Molly’s life wasn’t in danger.

Earlier event: In ASiB Sherlock deduced out loud Molly’s attempt to dress up for a love interest and mocked her in a cruel way. When he realized that her love interest was he, Sherlock, he felt guilty and apologized:

39. Fourth experiment: Euros tries to force Sherlock to shoot either his best friend (love of his life) or his brother. Moriarty reveals that “Holmes killing Holmes” is indeed his end goal. But instead Sherlock chooses to kill himself, which makes Euros abort the experiment. 

Earlier event: In TRF Moriarty tried to force Sherlock to jump from Bart’s hospital’s rooftop and kill himself. Instead, with the help of his homeless network and Molly, Sherlock faked his death. Which later had disastrous consequences on John.

40. Sherlock is shot with Euros’ tranquilizers and falls backwards into unconsciousness. 

Earlier event: In HLV Sherlock was shot with ‘Mary’s bullet and fell backwards into unconsciousness.

41. John is trapped inside a well with a rising water level, but Sherlock manages to break a code from the perpetrator and rescue him. Strangely, already in TLD Sherlock is complaining to John: “I’m at the bottom of a pit and I’m still falling, and I’m never climbing out”.

Earlier event: In TEH John was trapped inside a pile of wood, which was being set on fire, but Sherlock managed to break a code from the perpetrator and rescue him. 

So far, I’ve found over 40 events that have similarities in earlier episodes. I’m sure this list could go on and on. These are far too many repetitions of the same, or very similar, events for them to be mere coincidences.  (perhaps someone could find out some really unique events of Series 4 and do a statistic significance test on the relative proportions).

Some people have written this off as bad or lazy screenwriting. But I think this could only be true to a certain extent, because otherwise we would have found a similar amount of repetitions in the earlier series. And to me there’s no way – absolutely no possibility – that the authors would repeat a case like The Six Thatchers, which has been thoroughly described on John’s blog several years earlier, with no intention of the fans noticing this. It seems very deliberate to me.

Conclusion – the only one that makes sense to me about Series 4 (and most probably the last half of HLV as well) - is: IT’S FAKE. The whole of Series 4 is happening inside Sherlock’s head; Sherlock is re-hashing a series of memories from his life together with John and combining them in new ways, just like a human brain does when it’s dreaming. Some of these inner experiences seem to produce emotional and/or moral growth in Sherlock. It might be EMP, simulations, delirium, drug-induced hallucinations or whatever. But Series 4 just can’t be real; it happens in Sherlock’s head.

So, basically: Sherlock needs to wake up to a Series 5 and help throw out all the demons that are keeping him and John apart. ;)