Investigating Sherlock

by Nikki Stafford

  By contrast, on Sherlock the titular character is infantilized to the point of referring to himself as the child that Mary and John have practiced on all this time. John is infuriated by Sherlock’s deceit when he discovers he’s been alive for two years, and Sherlock must apologize to all of his friends. John’s wedding affects Sherlock so deeply it shakes him to the foundations of his mind palace. He’s constantly berating Sherlock for his inept way of handling social situations, and everyone around Sherlock tsk-tsks the great detective for not knowing the proper way to do things. In the stories, Irene Adler mesmerized Holmes but is rarely mentioned again and he encounters Moriarty only once; on Sherlock their presence looms large. Season three is certainly the season where the Holmesian purists had to either accept that Moffat and Gatiss were going to go off-book and create a new Sherlock for the modern age, or stop watching.

  But what’s so wrong with their approach? In the past 130 years, fans of Sherlock Holmes have read the stories over and over, have seen them dramatized in countless radio, stage, film, and television adaptations. And with only a handful of exceptions, they are set in the Victorian era with all of its necessary trappings. Moffat and Gatiss have moved Sherlock into the 21st century, an age where that which doesn’t conform to society’s expectations is labeled some sort of disorder; where anxiety disorder diagnoses are as common as the flu; where social media has opened up a world where people feel comfortable to share their deepest thoughts, feelings, and grievances either in a direct or passive-aggressive way. Of course in the 21st century, Sherlock would have to apologize for doing what he did. Did anyone reading the stories ever truly believe that John Watson’s reaction to Holmes’s return was genuine or realistic? Most people who have read that story, whether as a child or as a grown-up, react to Holmes’s glib way of revealing himself with shock and disappointment, made palatable only by the fact that Holmes agrees he was perhaps hasty and apologizes quickly.

  But now Sherlock is taken to task for treating his friends like that. Now we understand that such deceit can have long-term effects on relationships. Now we have so many terms to describe aspects of someone like Sherlock — sociopath, psychopath, Asperger’s, autistic — that all of them are bandied about by one person or another. In fact, despite the past two seasons showing that Sherlock definitely does not conform to a diagnosis of sociopathy, he refers to himself that way five times this season, as if insisting that while he’s starting to understand others’ emotions, he still doesn’t understand himself.

  Moffat and Gatiss have made it clear that they’re not just fans of the original Doyle canon, but of the pastiches and adaptations that it has inspired. There are shades of Rathbone, Brett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (as mentioned, their favorite of the movies), the fake biographies of Sherlock Holmes (see below), and they even incorporated fan theories of Sherlock’s fall into “The Empty Hearse.” In the 21st century, male emotions don’t have to be as stifled as they were in the Victorian era — even amidst that social climate, Doyle hinted that Watson and Holmes cared about each other deeply, despite their outward appearance, which in and of itself sparked early fan speculation. (Let’s just say Mrs. Hudson isn’t the first person to think Watson and Holmes might have been more intimate than the stories let on.)

  All of Doyle’s stories, with the exception of three — two told from Holmes’s point of view, and the other as a third-person narrative — are filtered through Watson’s perspective, so the television series gives us a chance to flip that narrative, look into the mind palace, and see what the great detective is actually thinking. Studies now show how rare it is for a child to have a genius IQ, but far rarer is a person gifted with extraordinary intelligence who doesn’t also have anxiety, depression, or fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. Sherlock is haunted by an older brother who was clearly so jealous of him that he ridiculed him to the point of making him feel like an idiot all the time. When Mycroft appears in Sherlock’s mind palace, it’s never in a loving, comforting way like Molly Hooper; he’s there to chastise him into focusing, to belittle him, and to remind Sherlock that his intelligence will always be inferior to Mycroft’s. After being shot by Mary, in the last three seconds of consciousness, Sherlock goes to his mind palace only to hear Mycroft wasting his time by scolding him: “Mummy and Daddy are very cross.” And in a funnier moment, the rivalry comes through once again when Mrs. Holmes opens the door and asks her two grown sons if they are smoking, and they both spin around like guilty boys caught with their hands in a cookie jar. Mycroft immediately lies by denying it, and Sherlock says, “It was Mycroft,” like any annoying little brother would do.

  One way Moffat and Gatiss have been delving into the psychology of Sherlock throughout the entire series — not just in its third season — is by showing the fine line between Sherlock and his adversaries. Magnussen is pulled directly from “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” and the episode stands as perhaps the series’ best adaptation yet of one of Conan Doyle’s stories. Despite Moriarty being called Holmes’s arch-nemesis (mostly because for an entire decade fans thought he had killed Holmes), Charles Augustus Milverton is actually a far more nefarious and despicable creature, better drawn than Moriarty, and one of the only criminals who causes Holmes to do something illegal. In that story, Lady Eva Blackwell, a beautiful debutante, is about to be wed, but Milverton has letters that could compromise the marriage. Milverton comes to 221B and Holmes tries to hold him hostage when he sees one of the letters sticking out of his suit jacket, only to discover it was all a bluff. “Your supposition that I would bring the letters here in a notebook is entirely mistaken,” the man tells him. “I would do nothing so foolish.” Holmes decides to try something more deceitful and becomes engaged to Milverton’s housemaid in order to gain information — to Watson’s horror — and when Watson asks what would become of the poor girl whose heart he toyed with, Holmes simply shrugs it off. The two men find their way into Milverton’s place — the Appledore Towers in Hampstead — but they’re too late: Blackwell is standing before Milverton with a gun in hand, crying, “So you sent the letters to my husband, and he — the noblest gentleman that ever lived, a man whose boots I was never worthy to lace — he broke his gallant heart and died.” She empties the gun into Milverton, and Holmes wastes no time in breaking into Milverton’s safe to burn all of the other letters Milverton had in his possession before whisking Blackwell away and creating a phony story for the police.

  Throughout both the stories and this series, there have been hints that Sherlock is just a sidestep away from being the criminal; whether it’s the similarities drawn between him and Moriarty, or what he does under Adler’s influence, or the suspicions of Anderson and Donovan, there’s always a suggestion that given a push, Sherlock could have just as easily used his powers for evil instead of good. And here the revelation of Magnussen’s mind palace aligns Sherlock more closely with him than with Moriarty. As Sherlock inconsiderately flashes the engagement ring at Janine to gain entrance to the building, he looks at John and gloats, “You see? As long as there’s people there’s always a weak spot,” which sums up Magnussen’s entire credo. Both men have the ability to name a perfume by sniffing the room; both retain information about people in their heads; both order their mind palaces in ways that allow them to access information when they need it; both are heralded in the British media as scions of their professions while retaining many foes; both prefer to stay out of the limelight on the one hand, while seeking attention on the other. As Magnussen is “reading” Sherlock’s file while sitting in 221B and suddenly says, “Redbeard?” he unnerves Sherlock, then quickly snaps his brain back to the present moment and says, “Sorry, you were probably talking?” Just as Sherlock has the ability to put Mrs. Hudson on “semi-permanent mute,” so too does Magnussen shut out everything that doesn’t directly benefit him.

  But Magnussen and Sherlock diverge in one key way: control. When Magnussen urinates in Sherlock’s fireplace, J
ohn is revolted by him, but Magnussen’s actions are different from Sherlock’s social faux pas in that he is very aware of what he’s doing, and his actions are carefully calculated. Sherlock, on the other hand, gets in trouble when he says something inadvertently harmful, unable to control other people’s perceptions of him. Magnussen’s mind palace consists of information stored neatly in the filing cabinets of his brain; Sherlock’s mind palace stores the information in different spots, requiring a long string of mnemonic cues to get him to the one piece of info he might need at any given moment. He usually has to repeat something over and over again to jog his memory to its location in the palace, whereas Magnussen — as we saw at the end of “The Empty Hearse” — repeats the information over and over to himself to commit it to its proper place in his filing system right away, so it’s easier for him to locate later. Sherlock needs quiet and isolation to properly access his mind palace; in “The Hounds of Baskerville,” he shoos both Dr. Stapleton and John away so he can focus, and in “The Empty Hearse” he closes his eyes and somehow ends up on Shilcott’s landing without realizing he’d removed himself from the company of others. Magnussen, on the other hand, simply requires his glasses, which — despite the visual trickery meant to con us into thinking the filing system is the glasses — act only as a ritual for him. He cleans his glasses, looks clearly ahead, and can instantly access his memory vaults. Magnussen is all about order and control; Sherlock’s mind palace can become cluttered and disordered when facing stress, as we saw in “The Sign of Three.” Sherlock is also easily unnerved when a situation involves one of his friends, whereas the friendless and bloodless Magnussen has nerves of steel.

  That’s not to say, once again, that Sherlock’s friends are a detriment to him. Magnussen actually does lose control at one moment in this episode: when Mary is pointing a gun at his forehead. And yet, when she turns the gun on Sherlock, he maintains a cool calm. To be fair, Magnussen has every right to be scared — he knows what he’s done to Mary and how easily she could take his life — whereas Sherlock assumes his friend would never actually pull the trigger. But where Magnussen is crouched on the floor, babbling in Danish, Sherlock simply stands there once the bullet has penetrated him, and Molly enters his mind palace. With the help of Anderson, and Mycroft’s intermittent rebukes, Mind Palace Molly is able to help Sherlock fall in the direction that will buy him some time and prevent his body from going into shock. Aside from being a scene with the most stunning visual effects of the entire series, it’s one that brings joy to all the Molly Hooper fans, for it shows that back in “The Reichenbach Fall” when he discovered she’s reliable and discreet, he inserted her into his mind palace as the voice of reason, comfort, and aid. Mycroft has long been entrenched in that mind palace as a voice of abuse — but here it’s abuse that tries to guide Sherlock as it lectures him.

  While John isn’t in the mind palace, he is the very person who will save Sherlock’s life. Moriarty found his way into the palace when Sherlock first encountered him, but only as a specter there to strike fear in Sherlock’s heart and make him think his life is in danger. Now that Moriarty’s dead (maybe), Sherlock has placed him in his memory banks as a prisoner in a padded cell, filthy and drooling, chained to the wall like a dog but still taunting Sherlock. And as Moriarty curls up next to Sherlock’s dying body — importantly, in death, Sherlock places himself forever in that cell rather than in any other mind palace room — he says the one thing that jolts Sherlock back to reality: “John Watson is definitely in danger.”

  Which brings us back to Redbeard. Clearly Redbeard was a childhood dog loyal to Sherlock, who came when he was called, who loved Sherlock for no reason other than the fact that he was Sherlock. For years Sherlock has been haunted by the death of Redbeard, placing him safely in his mind palace where he waits patiently for his young master to come and visit him. Sherlock accesses him when he needs shoring up. In the previous episode, Mycroft cruelly says “Redbeard” right before Sherlock’s best man speech, knowing that it will unravel his little brother. John has become Redbeard for Sherlock, the friend who is loyal to him no matter what, who will always come back to him, the one he fears losing to Mary — first through marriage, and now through the new knowledge he has of her. He has been broken since losing his first loyal companion, and he’s not about to lose another.

  The neat twist of Mary Watson being a former intelligence agent gone rogue is a great way to liven up a character that Doyle just tossed into a corner after The Sign of Four, mentioning her in passing occasionally and quietly killing her off when she was getting in the way of further adventures. In an age where we like to see our female characters just as strong and capable and multifaceted as their male counterparts, Moffat and Gatiss have chosen to make Mary more than just a pregnant housewife who’s the nurse to John’s doctor, giving her instead a mysterious past, making her an excellent sharpshooter, clear-headed under pressure, yet still deeply in love with her husband. It’s a testament to John that he finds his way back to her on Christmas after what she did. Despite the writers trying to move along quickly with the revelation by having Sherlock blame John for seeking out adventurous companions, that explanation — and Mary’s complicity in it, where she goes along with Sherlock and basically says, “Yeah, it’s your fault” — is immensely frustrating. John might crave adventure, but he also craves honesty. And he deserves better than what happens. But when he takes time to think, he realizes that if he could forgive his best friend for lying about his death for two years and forcing him to mourn needlessly, he can forgive his pregnant wife who did everything she did to protect him. When he sprains Wiggins’s arm at the drug den, he demonstrates that he has some skills he hasn’t told anyone about, too. Sherlock might be able to solve crimes like no one else on the planet, and Mary may be able to shoot out the center of a spinning 50-pence coin at six feet, but when it comes to putting others before himself in every situation, John is the true hero.

  At the end of the episode, Sherlock commits a shocking act to save his friends, not caring about the consequences he’ll have to face so much as the comfort of knowing his best friends will be safe. Again, detractors — who didn’t seem to mind when John shoots Jeff the cabbie in “A Study in Pink” to save Sherlock’s life — cried that Sherlock never killed anyone in the canon. For the most part, it’s true: Holmes kills Moriarty, and both his and Watson’s guns go off at the same time in The Sign of Four, which results in the death of Tonga, but both those instances were cases of self-defense. Couldn’t Sherlock have deduced his way out of this? Perhaps. But throughout this season we’ve seen Sherlock’s emotions overcoming his intelligence at times, as if, in his robot-like, studied version of humanity, he hasn’t figured out how to both think and feel at the same time. He missed the signs that something was off with Mary, and he never guessed that Magnussen had a mind palace like him. He thought he’d come up with the perfect plan in pretending to bring Mycroft’s laptop to Magnussen to catch him in the act — just as Lestrade says in “The Sign of Three” that the only way he could bring an end to the Waters family gang was to catch them in the act — but Magnussen was already a step ahead of him. He saw Magnussen cowering on the floor before Mary, and in that moment seems to deduce it’s the only way out.

  Holmes being brought to a murderous point over the safety of Watson is not something new to the canon, however. In one of the last stories, “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” Holmes miscalculates the reaction of the villain who shoots at Holmes and Watson as they surprise him in a room. Watson takes a bullet to the thigh, and Holmes, horrified, rushes to his friend’s side, begging him to tell him that he’s not hurt. Watson reassures him it’s just a scratch, and Holmes turns to the criminal and hisses, “If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.” The bullet merely grazed Watson’s leg, yet Holmes was so incensed he threatened murder. Here, Sherlock watches Magnussen humiliate John by flicking him in the eye, watching his proud friend hav
e to take it, and you can see the rage rising within Sherlock. He is used to humiliation, but he doesn’t take lightly anyone who threatens or hurts his friends. When Sherlock shoots Magnussen, John is beside himself with anguish at the sudden turn of events, but Sherlock comforts him by telling him he’s reassured the safety of both John and Mary. Even in the midst of his torment, John looks at Sherlock in a new way, as if up until now he didn’t realize what he meant to Sherlock. Similarly, as Watson looks at Holmes in that moment of Holmes sitting beside him in a panic, he thinks, “It was worth a wound — it was worth many wounds — to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.”

  On the other hand, Mycroft, sitting in the helicopter, only sees the small boy he used to torment. Just as Sherlock lives with the wounds of inferiority perpetrated by his older brother, so too, it seems, does Mycroft live with the guilt of what he did to him. The reason he continues to scold Sherlock yet look out for him at every turn (even admitting that Sherlock’s death would break his heart) is because, to Mycroft, Sherlock will always be his baby brother in need of his lectures and assistance. And in this moment, Mycroft is unable to protect him. Magnussen tells Sherlock that by using the chain of loyalty, he was able to get to Mycroft through Mary. But in this scene, we discover that Mary’s threat from Magnussen, which led to John’s humiliation at the hands of Magnussen, led to Sherlock protecting both of them with Mycroft powerless to intervene. “My brother is a murderer,” Mycroft says with much sadness at the end.

  And then … Sherlock is gone.

  And then he’s back.

  In the shortest exile in British history, a strange turn of events suddenly reverses everything that had been built up, and Sherlock’s off the hook through some weird form of deus ex machina. Is Moriarty really alive? Is it a con designed to lure Sherlock back rather than sending him to his certain death? Could Mycroft have simply orchestrated the stunt? Whatever it is, Sherlock has evaded death once again … and when season four returns, the game will be back on.