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EMP Theory from HLV to TLD

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

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

Note about the BFI screening:

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents

Background on EMP Theory

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

Why EMP Would Not Suck or Be Cheap or Whatever

My Take on EMP Theory

1. Background on EMP Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the protagonist jumps off a waterfall to get to his spouse

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

the protagonist is creating everything around him in his own mind

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

the idea that suicidal people punish themselves in their own mind

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

dying forces the protagonist to get over his fears

going through hell involves confronting terrible memories

time is weird and dreamlike when you’re dead

Seriously, READ. IT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come on. Give EMP a chance.

4. My Take on EMP Theory

His Last Vow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Mary could have so thoroughly fooled him.

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

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

That Moriarty could still be alive.

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

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

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

escaping through a window several floors up

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

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

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

getting a spare cell phone for Wiggins to hand to Mary

getting Wiggins in position

setting up a projector with Mary’s picture on it

getting to Leinster Gardens

getting John to Leinster Gardens and in position

That’s a lot to swallow if it’s real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how does Sherlock remember it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Side theory: Euros is just Sherlock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guess we’ll see.

Back to HLV:

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

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

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

Sherlock feels very weird, like he’s drugged.

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

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

The Abominable Bride

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also note Sherlock’s use of this phrase:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherlock’s still in his brain.

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

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

#tjlc #meta #my meta #emp theory #PART 1

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