#what did vastra say about masking

[anteroom-of-death]

@blueberryblogger how dare u leave these in the tags

Controversial take but this felt like more of an age gap than Twelve and Clara. Matt Smith plays a decrepit old man falling apart at the seams as a twenty-eight year old. Decrepit old man plays a twenty-eight year old guitarist pining over a girl. Make sense?

[asarahworld-writes]

One Trip

After a canonical adventure with Bill, Twelve ends up meeting a eighteen year old Rose, and they end up travelling together, despite the Doctor’s better judgment. Pretty soon his timeline starts reforming, and the Doctor begins to forget the previous timeline. By the time he’s mostly forgotten, Bad Wolf starts appearing again. Over a series of adventures, Bad Wolf continues to appear, and things escalate. By now, the Doctor can no longer remember why it’s a bad thing…

@doctorroseprompts It’s the Paternoster Gang rather than Bill, but I didn’t want to do Bill a disservice by grossly mischaracterizing her when I haven’t seen her episodes at the time I started this.

AO3 link

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She’s eighteen and so beautiful (and far too young for him) and he watches jealously as she takes Mickey’s hand.  His eyes cloud as she pecks the boy’s cheek, angrily thinking that he doesn’t deserve her.  They’re young and happy, carefree even, not giving the world around them a second thought.  One day, soon for her but far in the past for him, he’ll take her hand and they’ll start to run.  Not normally the type of man to reminisce, he smiles softly as he starts to remember the adventures they’d shared.

He’s running, she’s halfway down the block about to cross the street, unable to see the truck turning the corner.  He slams to the pavement, his body shielding hers from gravel and other road debris.  Mickey stands beside them, looking surprised and thoroughly shaken, but he barely registers in the Doctor’s mind.  He’s far more concerned about Rose.

“Are you all right?”  He asks urgently, helping her back to her feet.  She winces as she gets up and he feels guilty for brief rush of pleasure he’d felt as she’d touched his hand.  He reaches out to touch her shoulder, jerking back when Mickey slaps his hand away.  “I’m a doctor,” he growls, examining Rose.  Nothing, thankfully, is broken (though he suspects a serious sprain) and he promptly tells her so, pointedly ignoring the younger man.  She thanks him for saving her life and he awkwardly tries to brush it off, desperately pretending not to know her.  He can see the TARDIS a few feet behind her and knows that he needs to leave.

But Rose is here and she’s cautiously asking if he’d like to get chips, in return for saving her life.  He looks at her, and he must have some strange expression on his face because she is smirking as if he’d answered ‘yes’.  Mickey protests, saying that he’s a stranger, an old bloke who might spirit her away and kill her.  Well, three out of four isn’t bad.  There’s no denying the fact that he was so much older than either of them.  Or that he had invited Rose to travel (alone) with him across the universe.  (Or that she had died, killed by the Time Vortex running through her head.)  But he wasn’t a stranger, not from his perspective. They walk to the chippy and the Doctor sees new timelines forming in his head.  Timelines where his Ninth (tenth, the part of his mind that was the Warrior asserts) self never met Rose Tyler.  He pushes the thoughts away.

Rose reaches for her chips, wincing once more and the Doctor realizes that she must be in pain.  Without thinking, he calls the TARDIS and she materializes around them and he quickly asks for her to bring forward the medbay.  Very begrudgingly, she acquiesces, gently reminding the Doctor that her Wolf was not yet ready to meet him.  The Doctor ignores her, scanning her shoulder with the sonic and sighing when the TARDIS confirms his suspicion.  He tapes her shoulder with a forty-second century wrap, the sprain should heal within the next few hours.

“Where are we?”  Rose is looking at him, confused and scared, though to anyone else who didn’t know her she’d be doing a fine job of masking those emotions.

“It’s called the TARDIS, it’s a spaceship.  Is that all right?”  He says, not wanting to overwhelm her, though knowing that she’ll be able to take it in.

“Is it alien?”  She looks around, at the foreign equipment, at the walls, and (finally) at him.

“Yes,” he says quietly, anticipating her next question from his original timeline.

“Are you an alien?”

He nods, not quite able to believe that she was here, in the TARDIS.

Rose looks at him, clearly trying to decide if he was telling the truth.  “What’s your name?”

“I’m the Doctor.”

“The Doctor?  Doctor what?” Some things, it seemed, were set in stone, the Doctor thought.

“Just the Doctor,” he beams, not quite believing the scene in front of him.  Rose Tyler was in the TARDIS (with the Doctor, like she should be).

“Is that supposed to sound impressive?”

He lowers his hand from where it had been resting against his mouth. “Perhaps.”  And perhaps he wasn’t as against flirting as he’d once thought.

“People just call you ‘the Doctor'?” Rose asked.

“Usually. I am, as you can see, a man of intrigue and mystery,” the Doctor couldn't help but grin.

A wheezing groan fills the air.  The TARDIS had moved.  Automatically, he takes Rose’s hand and runs to the console room.  London, 1895.  On the doorstep of 13 Paternoster Row.  A knock sounds at the door.

“Open the door immediately or I shall open it by any means necessary!”  The shout made by the Sontaran is just credible enough that the Doctor obeys.  “Ah, Doctor. You had better go on in, Madame heard your TARDIS land.”  Strax frowns, peering into the ship.  “Where’s the boy?  I see you’ve brought a new one along.”

The Doctor looks back at Rose.  She would never be content to stay in the TARDIS while he went in.  “Her name is Rose,” he breathes, savouring how her name rolled off his tongue.  

“Where’s the other one?”  Strax asks, remembering that his companion had been a young boy called Clara.

The Doctor ignores him, locking the door of the TARDIS.  Rose looks from Strax to the inside of the house.  “Where are we?”

“You know how I said that the box was a spaceship?”  The Doctor asks, and Rose nods.  “It also travels in time.”

“Is he an alien?”

“Yes.”  Rose would be fine with this.  “The lady of the house is not human, either.”

“Not human…but not an alien?”

She was brilliant.  “She’s a Silurian.  The first intelligent species on Earth.  A highly advanced civilization that went into hibernation in anticipation of a meteor strike that never happened.  What did happen was the rise of the planet of the apes. You lot evolved into humans.”

“Doctor,” a feminine voice enters the room and Rose looks up to see the Silurian woman. Her…scales were olive-coloured, and instead of hair she had three crests atop her head.  At the sight of Rose, however, she hisses.  “Strax did not mention the human.  Where is Clara?”

“I don’t know.” His tone makes it clear – he does not wish to discuss her.  Not when he has such a, dare he even think it, fantastic companion with him now.

“Who is this? Strax, why did you not say that there was a stranger in our midst?”  Vastra calls for the alien.

“She is a companion of the Doctor,” the alien says, rather scathingly.

Vastra circles back to Rose.  “Well, child?”

Rose looks to the Doctor, she trusted him (he’d saved her life), who simply watched her. The alien woman appears rather posh and so she elects to do a small, rather awkward, curtsey.  “Hello.”

“Your new companion is remarkably calm.”  Vastra eyes the Doctor.  His companion.  Perhaps she could travel with him.  They could have a whole year together before she went back to meet the Ears.  He shrugs, bringing his hand back to his mouth.

There is something…off, about his companion.  Nothing wrong in the way that Clara’s echo had been, but Vastra has a feeling that the Doctor is up to something. There is something different about this girl, and Vastra is determined to learn what that is.  There is a look in the Doctor’s eyes as well, softening whenever he looks at the young girl; if she hadn’t been so surprised, Vastra might have seen it for what it was – love.

There’s a knock at the door and a young, attractive woman bearing a tea tray enters the room.

“Well, what is your name?”  The alien asks, accepting a cup of tea from the young woman.  Silently, she hands tea around the room and Rose gratefully accepts, taking a calming drink before answering.

“’M Rose,” she says, and she sees a hint of something flash across the alien’s face.  The woman takes a seat beside the alien, whispering to her.  The Doctor jerks his head and the alien and the woman abruptly cuts off their private discussion, looking again at Rose with hard eyes.  It’s only as Jenny takes her place beside her that Vastra realizes what the emotions are currently displayed on the Doctor’s face.

“Rose,” Vastra rolls the name over her tongue.  “If you would excuse us for a moment.”  The poor child nods and Vastra marches the Doctor out of the room, nearly slamming him against the wall.  “Who is she,” she hisses.  That the Doctor has become more reckless every time she sees him is concerning.

“Rose Tyler,” the Doctor answers, surprisingly open.  Vastra frowns.

“Who is she to you,” she amends.  She knows what a person in love looks like, and the Doctor has clearly fallen hard for the ape.  He looks at her like she’s the centre of his universe, but the woman looks at him as if he’s a stranger.  Woman. She’s barely a woman, no more than twenty, Vastra thinks.

The Doctor looks back to the door.  “It’s a long story.”

“Then make it short,” Vastra presses.  As bad as it is for the Doctor to travel alone, it’s not worth the risk to reality for the Doctor to interfere with his own past.

“I can hide her memories.  Have a few more adventures with the love of my lives.  I’m old, Vastra, and yet the rest of my lives have just begun anew.  And already it’s been far too long since I’d last seen her.  Two regenerations.”

“So you keep going back on her timeline every few regenerations and show her the universe over and over again?  I am no expert on the human brain, but it seems to me that you would be constantly re-writing her future, while retaining the memories for yourself.  And then what?  How young is she now?  How young will she be the next time?”

“And what would you do if it was Jenny,” the Doctor flipped the question.  “If you had control over time itself and she was long gone, but you had the chance to have her back?”  He knew the answer.  Jenny had died, in this very room, when the Great Intelligence had tried to wipe out his entire timeline.  An angry Silurian was not to be trifled with.  But neither was a Time Lord.

“How dare you,” Vastra hisses and the Doctor takes a step back. “My Jenny died.  She was murdered by the Great Intelligence before Clara reset the timelines.”

_Clara. _Again with Clara. Who was this mysterious Clara and why did he have a niggling feeling in the back of his mind that he ought to know who she was?

“Yes, and I lost Rose Tyler to a parallel universe. Jenny is with you every hour of every day – I have not seen Rose Tyler in millennia.” The Doctor fires back. Vastra had brought up valid points to his situation, but the Doctor did not want to listen.

“You can not go around plucking people from their timelines, especially when it affects your own,” Vastra counters.  “From what I understand, you left her happy.”

“It broke the both of my hearts to do that,” the Doctor admits quietly.

“But you gave her yourself,” Vastra says gently. “How many people could do that?”

The Doctor turns, leaving the room.  After a moment, the Detective follows. The Doctor was in love, besotted to the point that he was endangering his self.

One trip. One trip, and he'd take her home. One trip and he'd lock away her memories of this him. One trip to steal a day from his past self (more literally stolen from Rickey), to have one more memory of Rose Tyler. He takes Rose by the hand to escort her back aboard the TARDIS, puts the ship back into the Vortex, and asks to see her injured shoulder. Rose immediately shrugs out of her hoodie and it hits the Doctor like a ton of bricks that she's the most beautiful sight that he has ever beheld. How he ever could have forgotten her beauty is a mystery. He does a quick scan with his screwdriver, the test results appearing on the console viewer. Completely healed.

“That was the past,” the Doctor says, with an air of nonchalance. “How does the future sound? Or even better, an alien world. You met an ancient inhabitant of the Earth, and her wife. So for something different,” he grins suddenly. “First door on the left is the wardrobe. The TARDIS likes you, she doesn't normally move rooms around.” To say that he stretched the truth… the TARDIS loved Rose like no other companion.

Rose was gone twenty-four point one two minutes exactly. When she returned, gone was her pink on pink shirt. That the ship had picked the outfit was clear – her shirt was a shimmering lacey sort of material, layered over thick silver tights. Her soft trainers had been replaced by a pair of worn but sturdy boots. “You look, nice,” he stumbles over the words, silently cursing himself. She looked stunning, as ever, and the Doctor marvelled at her exquisiteness. He holds out his arm, rather stiffly, his hearts pounding in his throat as she takes it.

“Have we really moved again? Where are we? _When _are we?”

“It's called Woman Wept. About two thousand years in your future,” [six hundred years forward from his last visit to the planet] the Doctor snaps and the TARDIS doors open.

“It's beautiful,” Rose doesn't let go of his arm as she steps outside.  Privately, the Doctor thinks that the beauty of the planet pales in comparison to the young human [too young, the voice in the back of his head says] at his side [like she should be, he bites back].  He allows Rose to lead him across the planet, taking in not only the sight of Rose but her experience of the new planet.

Unbidden, his first memory of seeing Rose on an alien world comes to the front of his mind.  Well, among alien people, he amends, remembering Platform One.  They walk in silence, and the Doctor looks at Rose, knowing but still needing to guess what she’s thinking.

“People don’t live here, do they?”  Rose asks.

“Depends what you mean by people.  But, no, the planet hasn’t been colonized yet.”

“I mean people.  What do you mean?”  Again, she says something so like her proper introduction into his life that it jars the Doctor, snapping him back to the danger of the reality he is living.  The touch of her hand in his overrides his rational mind and he easily answers that ‘people’ includes most sentient life forms. Like Vastra and Strax (and himself).

“Aliens. Sentient beings who lived on the Earth before the rise of apes.  Humans. Nonhumans,” the Doctor strives for nonchalance.

Rose looks out at the glacial mountains.  “What’s your planet like?”

Of course she would want to know.  But with Gallifrey…missing, he felt even less like speaking of his homeworld than usual. “Twin suns set over the red fields, with a warm breeze rustling.  The trees were silver and when the morning light hit them, the world looked like it was set afire.”  He stopped his oddly poetic description, looking down as her free hand covered his.

“Sounds beautiful.”  Rose’s face is alight with curiosity and wonder.

The Doctor shrugs.  “The planet was nice enough, I suppose.  I haven’t been there since… since the War.”  The War.  Yet another thing he did not want to think of.  The Time Lords would be beyond furious with his actions.  The way he was twisting the timelines right now was chaotic at best, universe-ending paradoxical at worse.

“I’m sorry,” Rose’s hand gently squeezes his own.

“Still, I’ve got the TARDIS.  A whole universe to explore,” he grins.  “Not a bad life.”

“There’s me,” Rose says softly.  The Doctor looks at her face, trying to keep the more-than-friendly concern from showing.

“It’s been more than sixteen hours since you came onboard, you must be tired,” he deflected. “The TARDIS will have a room for you.”

The ship hums, both in agreement and chastising him.  It’s dangerous keeping her with him, no matter how much they both have missed her.

[the-desolated-quill]

Deep Breath - Doctor Who blog (New Doctor, Same Bullshit)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I was very cross going into Deep Breath back in 2014, and before I talk about this episode, I’d like to quickly address all the bullshit that surrounded the buildup to the Twelfth Doctor.

Moffat kept saying how Series 8 was going to represent a brand new direction for the series and that this new Doctor would be so different to any we’ve seen before. He even hinted at the possibility of a female and/or non-white Doctor, saying there was no reason why it couldn’t happen. Who did we end up with? Peter Capaldi! Wow! A middle aged white guy?! Never seen one of those before!

Now before @furrychimp has a go at me, I’ve got nothing against Peter Capaldi. He’s a brilliant actor and I was confident he’d be great in the role. That’s not the issue. The problem I had was that Peter Capaldi was the only actor auditioned for the role. Moffat didn’t even try to think outside the box or look elsewhere. I’m not angry because Capaldi was cast in the role. I’m angry because of the wasted opportunity here. It was a year after the 50th anniversary. A chance to break new ground and try something different, and Moffat didn’t take it. If Moffat knew a non-white, non male Doctor wasn’t on the cards, why in God’s name did he keep banging on about it? It’s like I said in my review of A Good Man Goes To War, he’s more concerned with looking progressive than actually being progressive. Anyone can say there needs to be more diversity or that there needs to be change, but unless someone within the industry actually pulls their finger out and does something about it, those are just empty, meaningless words.

‘Oh but Capaldi is a lot older than previous Doctors.’

Bollocks! He was 55! That’s not old! And besides, we’ve had older Doctors before. He’s not even the first actor to play an older Doctor in New Who, or have we all conveniently forgotten about John Hurt all of a sudden? This is nothing new or original. And while I’m on the subject of his age, good God how fucking patronising were the press at the time? Listening to them, you’d think Capaldi was a 200 year old corpse that had arisen from his tomb and was at risk of collapsing into a pile of bones by the end of the series. The whole obsession with his age was seriously odd on both sides (those who thought this was some kind of cheap novelty and those who thought Capaldi was so weak and frail that he wouldn’t be able to get around the TARDIS without the use of a motorised wheelchair).

And then there’s the promise that the show was going to get a lot darker than it was before, to the point where the BBC pushed the show further back in the schedules so that you knew how dark this was going to get. This isn’t teatime entertainment anymore. It has to be broadcast at 8:00pm because it’s going to be so much daaaaaarker. 

Well... we’ve all seen Deep Breath. We all know that was bollocks.

Seriously, how is this any different from an episode in the Matt Smith era? (apart from the fact that Peter Capaldi is less zany and more tolerable than Matt Smith was). It still has the same goofiness and forced whimsey to it (more on that later). In fact some of the humour is actually worse than the Matt Smith era’s. When Madame Vastra tricks the Doctor into forming a psychic link with her so she can put him to sleep, they actually had the fucking nerve to add a comedy cartoon sound effect when he falls unconscious. How fucking desperate can you get?!

But what really strikes me about Deep Breath is how utterly unoriginal it all is. The clockwork robots are back from the overrated Girl In the Fireplace and they’re basically just doing the same shit as they did before only with an extra helping of stupid sprinkled onto them for good measure. ‘Don’t breathe’ is basically the same gimmick as ‘don’t blink’, but whereas ‘don’t blink’ made the Weeping Angels bloody terrifying, ‘don’t breathe’ just makes the clockwork robots laughably inept. A lot of the plot is similar to The Talons Of Weng-Chiang and we’ve seen dinosaurs in London before in Invasion of The Dinosaurs. Not to mention all the lines taken straight from the classic series that Moffat is determined to grind into the dirt (I swear if I hear the ‘you’ve redecorated’ gag one more time, I’m going to scream). Is this what constitutes a brave new direction now? Rehashing plots and concepts from previous stories rather than coming up with your own ideas? Moffat, go stick one of your BAFTAs up your arse. Best place for it as far as I’m concerned.

What’s worse is that this episode has been extended to an hour and 15 minutes, most of which seems to consist of extra scenes of the Paternoster Gang being their usual unfunny selves. At this point it’s not just that they’re boring, underdeveloped and utterly uninteresting characters that bothers me, but also that they are making the Doctor’s universe too small. The man has travelled all across time and space, Surely he must know some other people who would be willing to help him. Why do we keep having to come back to the Paternosters? Strax is still fucking irritating (how can he not tell the difference between an eye and a mouth? Humans and Sontarans aren’t that different. And what was even the fucking point of that medical checkup anyway other than to pad out the runtime?), and I really take issue with how Vastra and Jenny are written. I’ve taken issue with how Moffat presents LGBT characters in his stories before, but this just takes the cake. The episode constantly finds ways to patronise and objectify Jenny while Vastra plays a ‘man with boobs’ type role. And it gets worse when Clara gets involved and we see Vastra start to morph into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Call me picky, but I think we deserve better representation that that. And don’t get me started on that bullshit ‘oxygen share’ kiss. Doctor Who has never been apologetic about two heterosexuals kissing, so why should it treat two homosexuals any differently? It’s just wrong! If they’re open and okay about same sex marriage, why are they being so coy about two lesbian partners being intimate with each other?

So let’s talk about the Twelfth Doctor. Despite my anger and frustration towards the circumstances surrounding his casting, I knew Capaldi would make a great Doctor and he does do a good job in the role for the most part. I liked the stuff at the beginning where the Doctor is really confused and was having memory problems. You could almost draw parallels between him and someone suffering from a memory disorder like Alzheimer’s and it’s genuinely unnerving to see the Doctor in such a high level of distress. I also really liked his final confrontation with the robot and the moral ambiguity of whether or not he pushed him. This is a very different Doctor from Matt Smith and I’m curious to see where they take him (remember I haven’t seen any episodes past Kill The Moon, so I genuinely have no idea what happens to him). Unfortunately all of this is punctured by the usual shit you find in post regeneration episodes. A lot of crazy goofiness and pondering over whether or not this is the same man as before. Admittedly the latter was interesting at first, and The Christmas Invasion did add some dramatic weight to it what with the Doctor being the last of his race and therefore having a more personal connection with Rose than he did with any other companion as a result, but after the twelfth time you’ve done it, you’re just bored by this point. Is the Doctor the same person as before? Er... Kind of. That should be firmly established by now considering the number of bloody times the show has asked this question. Can we move on?

A lot of times I feel Capaldi is scuppered by the humour. He can be a great comedic actor, but this sort of material just doesn’t work with him. It’s too whimsical and eccentric, like the whole sequence with the horse or him calling the dinosaur a big sexy woman. It feels like Moffat is still writing for Matt Smith and it just doesn’t sound right coming out of Capaldi’s mouth. And then there’s the painfully obvious metaphors. There’s a lot you could interpret about the Doctor from what you see on screen. The similarities between him and the robot, and how they both change and replace body parts to the point where you could argue they’re not the same people they originally were. The similarities between him and Vastra, both hiding behind some kind of mask in order to feel accepted. All potentially interesting, but what ruins it is Moffat’s need to fucking spell it out for us. How about crediting your audience with some intelligence?

I really hope Chris Chibnall doesn’t go through all this shit when Jodie Whittaker takes over. In my view, all post regeneration episodes should be like The Eleventh Hour. New body, new personality and then it’s business as usual.

But by far the worst aspect of Deep Breath is Clara. I can understand being worried about the Doctor’s memory problems and state of mind, but that’s clearly not the case at all. Clara is more concerned that the Doctor has gotten visibly older, which is beyond absurd. She’s seen all of the previous Doctors. She’s met the War Doctor. Why should the Twelfth Doctor be a shock to her? Vastra says it’s because the Doctor is no longer young and sexy and, no matter how much Clara tries to deny it, that’s pretty much the only reason I can think of why she’d be angry at the Doctor. I honestly can’t see any other alternative. It doesn’t make any sense why she would be this shocked about the Doctor’s regeneration. At one point she even asks how they change him back. It just makes her come across as really shallow and selfish (not a narcissist or an egomaniac. Seriously Moffat, try browsing a dictionary some time). But what really gets me is that the episode clearly expects you to be on Clara’s side, even going so far as to try to imply that the Doctor is so different now that he has at one point abandoned Clara and left her to die, which I didn’t buy for a second. The First Doctor may well have done that, but he’s a very different man by now. Does she have to stay as the companion? They even wheel out Matt Smith again for yet another goodbye speech to reassure her about Peter Capaldi, which was just plain silly. I suspect the BBC were a little worried that people wouldn’t accept an older, less romantic Doctor. I think the BBC need to have a bit more faith in the audience. May I remind everyone that Doctor Who lasted nearly 30 years without the need to shove in any Doctor/companion romances or snogging and people loved it?

And finally we get Michelle Gomez pissing about in a garden. Who is this mysterious and clearly crazy woman who appears to have intimate knowledge of the Doctor? Gee, it couldn’t be the Master, could it? Oh no! Of course not! The Master is a man! And besides, Moffat would NEVER do a plot twist that bloody obvious.

So what is the Promised Land? I don’t know and I don’t really care to tell you the truth. i’ve become so sick and tired of Moffat’s convoluted series arcs and endless intrigue that I honestly can’t even muster up the energy to even be mildly curious about it.

Deep Breath is an uncreative, boring and lazy start to Series 8. That being said, the Twelfth Doctor does show promise. We’ll see where they go from here.

[coffeeteaitsallfine]

hey! just a question, cause i've seen it alot now, what's the signifigance of garridebs? i'm not entirely sure what it even is, something to do with those 3 guys in tfp? 😂 sorry to bother

Hey, no big deal! I love questions, they’re my pride and joy.

Garridebs comes from the story in ACD canon The Adventures of the Three Garridebs, wherein we get three people named Garrideb, trying to get an inheritance, though there is only really one real Garrideb I believe. That’s what you see in tfp with the three guys hanging there. 

But whenever you see one of us, tjlc people, say Garridebs or the Garridebs moment, we’re not talking about the case at all.

In Garridebs we get the crowning Victorian Johnlock Moment. The Garridebs Moment™:

“My friend’s wiry arms were around me and he was leading me to the chair.“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake say that you’re not hurt!”It was worth a wound -it was worth many wounds- to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay beyond that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.”

The whole thing is beautiful, but those bolded part are especially relevant to us yeah? This isn’t the only time we see Watson say he saw Holmes’ great heart (he always pretends it is), but it’s the emotion in this scene by Holmes because Watson could have been injured worse, and the Revelation is what makes it key. Because of how amazing this moment is, and the fact that Steven Moffat has talked about it sooooo many times, it’s everyone’s favorite. Moffat actually did a moment like this with Vastra and Jenny too :> He loves it and we all expect to get it at some point. 

Because the cliffhanger of TLD, John was apparently shot, so we (some of us though not all) believe TFP is John’s nightmare while bleeding out, this is why I believe we get the Garridebs moment “left hanging” literally. And why we can hopefully expect in a fourth episode, for them to have their Garridebs moment and for John have a moment of Revelation about Sherlock’s feelings. Whether he’ll say I love you then or not we don’t know, but hey. The Garridebs Moment. 

I need a moment :’>