Hi DBS!
Just wanted to share a little something –
I went back to watch TSoT the other night and got to the Drunk Stag night bit. Heaps of gold there. I mean, that whole scene is awesome and also laden with sexual undertones… they were not even trying to be subtle about it. Anyway, I was cracking up watching Sherlock do his Drunk Deducing Dance, which culminates in the priceless “do NOT contaminate the integrity of the crime scene… blegghhh” part. Beauty.
That scene moves on to our duo sleeping off the booze in a cell. What got me was the slow transition between those two scenes. Check out the picture, I screencapped it.
So we see Sherlock with his ‘lalala-move-along-nothing-to-see-here’ face after puking … followed by Sherlock’s image actually slowly disappearing into John’s mouth in the next scene. I was like, Whut. This is ridiculously blatant imagery, lol.
Like you said in your ”Thoughts on all those “no homo” quotes” entry – ‘They’re telling us one thing and showing us another.’ They are doing everything they can to insert such innuendos, and I gotta ask, how do you backtrack from that ? lol
Anyway, thanks for reading!
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Yyyyessss ma’am I sure had noticed this! You’re so right. So very, very blatant. I’m pretty sure when I spotted it, I texted my Johnlock-obsessed friend something along the lines of “so Sherlock is wiping off his mouth and then the camera transitions so that Sherlock is inside John’s mouth and some editors who went to film school and are fucking professionals actually deliberately did this.”
Her response: “This is why I love you.”
Slowed down, for your entertainment:
Thanks!!! <3 DBS
pardon me if its mentioned before, realize in HLV John kicks down wiggins and kicked chair in 221b after SH reappearance with his psychosomatic limp. I can’t help but feel that theres a deeper significance to the limp than his adrenaline/ risk addictn (or dependence) He was limp bec of meaningless existence; SH came so he feels hes doing something/ can move on- no longer limp; then emotional rush/ tension that gives him impulse to use leg to do somethin like how someone want to stomp when mad
Oh yeah. No, people don’t develop psychosomatic injuries over adrenaline addiction. I think it’s pretty obviously tied to John’s feelings of uselessness. It’s a physical manifestation of his sense that there’s no purpose or place for him, and nothing for him to contribute.
John’s clearly a man who needs to feel like he’s needed. Not just useful—because John is a doctor, he’s always got something valuable he can contribute to society, and furthermore he clearly doesn’t suffer from fundamental self-esteem issues. He needs to feel like he’s doing something that requires him,something that not just anybody can do. Any doctor can treat hemorrhoids and strep throat. But when he was in Afghanistan, with a team, he wasn’t interchangeable with just anybody else.
And when he’s with Sherlock, there’s no one else who could be there, who could fill the role in Sherlock’s life that John does.
I think this tells us something about why and how John grieved. Because when he lost Sherlock, he didn’t only lose a friend. He lost his place in life. This has a similarity with losing a spouse, or a parent when you’re a child, in that the person you’ve lost isn’t only someone you care for, but someone who forms an important foundation in your life. In a very practical, real sense, their loss leaves you struggling to find your bearings and rebuild your entire life around yourself.
(Sherlock really has no conception of what he did to John with that stunt. I don’t think he can; I don’t think he’s got the experience or background to have any idea how extensively he shook up John’s life.)
It’s worth noting that John is still limping in TEH, even though he’s met Mary and is meaning to propose. He loves her, and she brings much-needed stability back into his life, but this indicates that he isn’t finding his purpose with her. He doesn’t feel like this relationship with her is the thing he’s needed for.
And I like the fact that Sherlock didn’t reallycure John’s limp. He made it go away because he gave John a purpose; he didn’t fix whatever it is in John’s head that makes him need to be needed so badly that he’d develop a psychosomatic limp over it in the first place.
That limp represents John’s sub-conscious (or maybe not so sub-conscious; if you asked him he might well tell you this to your face) equating of uselessness and brokenness. He sees himself as having been discarded by the Army due to no longer being able to do the job; ergo, he’s a cripple, he’s broken, he’s refuse.
My apologies to people with disabilities in the audience; I don’t mean that this is true, because it’s so very not. What is true is the frustration that can arise from feeling like you’re less than fully functional. For a lot of us, even a weekend of flu-ridden sofa-coma is enough to leave us feeling like a lump or a burden on the people taking care of us. For John, clearly he’s turned that frustration in upon himself.
But think about this one for a moment. Lots of us want or need to be needed. But for that urge to be rooted so bone-deep that John is in physical pain, his body actually physically twisted from the deprivation when he can’t fulfill it… He seems to have picked that limp up subsequent to being invalided out of the Army, and it’s understandable if that gave him a sense of being kicked to the curb. But even before that, he must have had a deep sense that being useful to other people is an overriding priority. How does a person learn that the most important thing in their life is that they need to be useful to someone else? Where could he have come by this sense of needing a One True Place in life?
There’s not a single possible answer. Some people suffer abuse that teaches them that if they’re not being useful, they’re being a waste of space. Other people grow up being told that they’re meant for Great Things, that they’re bound to do something Important, until they feel like they’re a failure if they’re not. But I think we can be sure that there’s something fractured in John’s psychology, and it goes way deeper than John simply having a high tolerance for risk.
You might also ask yourselves, what kind of history could a person come from to leave them blase enough with being called stupid’ or ‘an idiot’ on a daily basis to live with Sherlock without ever getting riled or taking those words to heart? What happens in a person’s life to give them a ‘love for danger’ that in fact flirts with emotional masochism? Watson canonically has a gambling problem. In the show, John gambles, too. He gambles with trusting Sherlock to keep him safe no matter what kind of hair-raising insanity Sherlock pulls them into, and he gambles with whether the people he’s chosen to love will cut him too deep for him to bear.
It’s not news that the characters on this show are all, um, questionable in their various ways (let’s be honest, it’s modern noir, they were never meant to be upstanding ethical icons of good behavior). But whereas Sherlock is batshit but not especially broken, John is really, truly a fucked up mess underneath all that cuteness and stoicism and friendly demeanor.
I have some HLV feelings
I was just looking at this gifset and decided it would be better to put my thoughts into my own post rather than tag them onto the end of the set and annoy people with my comments.
We tend to see Sherlock as a loose canon and John as the one who ‘keeps him right’ or ‘conducts his light’. True. John is an amplifier for Sherlock’s good qualities; his brilliance, his charm, his feelings.
But in that scene, we see how John is the loose canon, and Sherlock is the one who grounds him. Not only that, but Sherlock is aware that this is his purpose. He knows exactly what he has done for John in the past (helping him overcome his limp, giving him the kind of life he craves, etc).
John is riled up. He’s ready to burst. And Sherlock says ‘be calm and answer me’. He does something that Mary hasn’t been able to thus far which is bring John back down from that aggressive rage. She couldn’t do it in the restaurant in TEH, nor at the beginning of HLV when John runs off to go and beat up some junkies. Sherlock really, truly knows John and understands how to treat him. Earlier on in that scene, John threatened to knock Sherlock out because he thought Sherlock was taking the piss. He threatened to hit his best friend who was shot only a week before and should technically still be in the hospital. John is fucking dangerous and definitely not in his right mind. But Sherlock doesn’t cower, or threaten him back. He just tells John to be calm and think things through. Sherlock doesn’t get frustrated when John gives the wrong answers. He just repeats the question and waits. Because he knows that John understands what he’s saying, it’s just that his anger is in the way, it won’t let him approach this sensibly.
This dependency on Sherlock for clarity is further evidenced by the fact that John asks Sherlock, ‘But why is she like that?’. Sherlock is John’s font of reason and logic, and in a situation that he can’t comprehend he has to ask his friend why his own wife is ‘like that’ (what he’s really asking is ‘why is she like us?’, or perhaps more specifically ‘why is she like you?’, meaning Sherlock. To which the answer ‘because you chose her’ kind of breaks my heart).
The point I’m trying to make, and that I think series 3 is trying to make, is that this scene perfectly illustrates how much we’ve focussed on John’s effect on Sherlock in the past, but in fact Sherlock has been just as vital to John. I dread to think what John must have been like during those 2 years alone.
I’m almost certain this has been said but I haven’t seen it on my dash. So may I just point out how much I love the parallels between series 1 Molly and series 3 John.
When we first meet Molly, when she is at her most infatuated in regards to Sherlock, she attempts to change her appearance to…
Hi Bee! How much do you think John suspects of Sherlock’s feelings for him? His face when he sees the footage of Sherlock dragging him out of the fire- did he get an inkling right then and there? What does he think at the end of HLV? Thank you for you input! #tjlc #<3
So I started typing this as a normal post and then I realized it was way more fun to do it as a ramble through John’s thoughts a la LSIT. It is soooo much fun.
I think seeing the fire footage was the final piece of the puzzle for John. He suspects more and more heavily throughout the best man speech. To backtrack, when he asks Sherlock to be his best man at the beginning of TSOT, he thinks Sherlock already thinks of him as a friend because he says “of course” when Sherlock asks to confirm that John thinks of him as a best friend. You don’t say someone is your best friend without thinking that they think of you also as a friend, generally their best friend too. He is startled (“getting a bit scary now’) when Sherlock shows that he didn’t know that (through not speaking). “Wait, didn’t you know you were my best friend? Aren’t I your best friend? Aren’t we mates? I thought we were at least mates. I mean, not more than mates, course not, I’m getting married, of course it’s to a woman no matter what Mrs. Hudson thinks. You idiot, how plain do I have to make this? Yes, best friend, best man, whatever. Jesus.”
So after that scene, John knows for sure that Sherlock thinks of him as a friend, best friend even (best friendship is usually reciprocal). The best man speech enlightens John that Sherlock’s best friendliness runs deeper than he thought, given that when he tried on the bench to tell Sherlock about his strength of feeling, Sherlock up and leaves, which to John means Sherlock doesn’t care, though we know that’s not true. “Can I please tell you your friendship has meant a lot to me? Oh, you just walked away while I was talking. Thanks, you massive dickhead. Mary gets me so much better.”
John is so moved by the speech that he hugs him. “Oh, Sherlock likes me after all. A lot. Wow, a lot! Hooray! Life is great! Everything I ever wanted! Sherlock isn’t a cold unfeeling robot and I get to have sex with someone for the rest of my life! Good enough!”
Then at the end of TSOT, with that shatteringly clear expression Sherlock gives John, when John swallows and turns away, I think that is the first time John realizes Sherlock’s feelings are actually romantic. “Oh shit, what has just happened, does he like me like me, he didn’t respond when I groped him on the stag night, I thought that meant—but I just got married, and I love this woman, and Sherlock likes her too, and she likes Sherlock, and for once everyone likes everyone, and Mary is pregnant, but why does Sherlock look so sad, I better express my repressed feelings through interpretive dance, run away run away…“
In between TSOT and the beginning of HLV he avoids Sherlock entirely. “Fuck. Can’t even go near him. Better dream about him instead in a way implying that losing what we had is equivalent to the horror of war while throwing off the strangling hand of my loving wife—no, that’s unfair, she loves me, I love her, right? RIGHT. Better eat my feelings and then ride out my feelings on a bicycle to even come near to and yet fail to reach the level of endorphins I used to get hanging around that guy and then I need to stomp around and snap at people and maybe punch them while I’m at it. NO, you can’t come on my violence spree, Mary, you wouldn’t understand. Oh wait, of course you care about my safety. Course you do. Sorry, that was unfair of me, I’m just used to dickheads drugging me and faking their death and stuff. Yes, you can come. I guess.”
"Sherlock is back on drugs? Why would he…? I don’t understand. Has he been on drugs all this time? I can’t trust him at all. Oh, for a case? Everything is always for a case…fine. No news there. WHERE"S MY CHAIR. Why would he remove my favorite chair! Dick. Better threaten his brother to show I’m on his side. Maybe he’ll put my chair back.”
“Wtf half-naked woman wtffffff. WHO MOVED THE KETTLE THE KETTLE IS SACRED WHAT KIND OF MONSTER ARE YOU. The only one who really knows him—no that’s ME lady, ME. I’M the only one who—Sherlock agrees with her?!? Bullshit, this must be for a case—but Sherlock is putting on a very thorough act. Is it an act? Of course it’s an act. Oh wow, no, no, they’re totally snogging. I’ve never seen him do that with anyone, not even Irene. ASJCKKDHE. Wtf. My face cannot hold all my feels. I’m going to stomp around the room. Dinner? I’ll give you dinner. Thoroughly. In your pants. NO! I mean. Can’t we go shoot someone like we used to? Please. Petty trespassing? That’ll do.”
“You’re proposing to this poor girl for—wtf is wrong with you? Wtf is wrong with me for liking you?”
"HUMAN ERROR? HUMAN FUCKING ERROR? Are all of your feelings human error? Did you even mean what you said in the speech? I can’t. Just.”
“Shit, he got shot. I didn’t want that to happen. No matter how much of a dick he is. Mary? Why is my wife’s name on your lips? Better not think about that. He ran away? From the hospital? Why—who does that? Must be in danger. Boltholes? How did I not know about these boltholes? Maybe Janine was right after all, I don’t know him after all, this is depressing. Thank God I’ve still got my loving wife who—Fuck. Fuck this shit.”
“And now this is my fault. For having an addiction. You shit. You massive shit. And she agrees. Perfect. I thought I’d found a nice normal woman, but it turns out I’m a total masochist and my type is sociopaths who lie to me. Fantastic. Don’t die though. Not again.”
[period of time when Sherlock is in hospital] “Can’t trust Sherlock. Can’t trust Mary. Life is just so great. Well. I know Mary loves me. She’s not who I thought she was, and she’s really fucking scary, but she still loves me, and while I feel utterly betrayed in every way, we’re having a child together. Maybe it’s not that bad that she lied. Maybe. People do silly things. I lied about my height on my driver’s license, after all. Sherlock lied about being dead. We all lie. Sherlock is totally unreliable as a human being anyway and I’ll never understand him. He seems to think Mary and I belong together. Frankly I think he and Mary make a better match because they’re both lying liars who lie and I’m going to say that really passive-aggressively. Oh well, Sherlock’s usually right about things. And. Baby. Okay. I give up. Mary, let’s give it another shot.”
“Holy fuck Sherlock just drugged his whole family and my pregnant wife and what a messed-up dick he is and how did you know I brought my gun fine let’s go shoot things thank God this Christmas was getting a bit too touchy feely anyway. I could stay with my pregnant wife and make sure she’s okay, but I won’t, because I’d rather hang out with this nutso and avoid my feelings like the fact that I’m never actually going to trust Mary again even though I said I would and I’m trying really hard to move past her massive deception even though it’s a lot to ask of me. Sherlock may be a dick but I know where I stand with him.”
“Oh God Sherlock ran straight into a fire to save me I mean I know he did but he just looks so upset here and I thought he was faking all that friendship stuff he said human error after all whose error so many errors all the errors I don’t understand I don’t know what’s real anymore I don’t understand anyone and Magnussen seems to think Sherlock thinks of me as a damsel in distress I’m fucking not but Sherlock’s not arguing oh fuck you mean I’m so important to Sherlock he’d betray his brother to protect my marriage what just what does everyone think we’re in love it’s beginning to get hard to argue…but…really? Why’d he want me to get back with Mary then? I don’t understand.”
"Flick me in the face? I’ve been through worse in the past three years, you moist fucking beanpole. If I can survive Sherlock and Mary, I can survive this. Afghanistan doesn’t even come close. Can’t do anything about it anyway, it’s not like someone’s just going to put a bullet in your brain or—”
“FUCK.”
“That. Thing you did. That was. Um. Good.”
“And now you’re leaving? Again? I…don’t go. I guess you have to. You’ve got your life after all, and it’s better than jail, and I’ve got my pregnant wife, but…Don’t go. This isn’t happening. Six months, and then you’ll be back, right? I can live with…Oh. You don’t really seem to believe that either. Don’tthinkaboutitdon’tthinkaboutitdon’t—Wait…what are you about to say? Is this it? Are you actually going to tell me—oh, fuck you, you tosser. Should have known. No, I’m not going to name my child after the man who broke my heart in a thousand ways because every time I say her name it’ll break my heart again, do I look insane? Don’t answer that, there is nothing the matter with me. Don’t go. Just don’t…oh fuck, no more time. Should we, um, hug? Hand shake? After everything? Well…that’s more British. And manly. We’re men. We’re British men who repress our emotions. Yes. I’m comfortable with that. Here’s my hand. This is it. The last time I’ll ever see you, touch you, talk to you. Hold it together. Okay. Mary’s here for me. She’s scary, but she’s here for me. Goodbye. Fuck.”
"OHMYGOD HE’S COMING BACK THANK YOU MORIARTY YOU BEAUTIFUL PSYCHOPATH!!!”
(“Wait, why is Mary so upset? WHO CARES SHERLOCK IS COMING BACK YAY”)
In HLV, I think that the very first comforting/calming thing that Sherlock goes looking for in his mind palace is John — but when he opens that door in the hallway, he encounters Mary in her wedding dress and gets shot (tangled associations). So he goes in search of Redbeard instead. But Redbeard was always the second option.
loudest-subtext-in-television-d:
Oh, holy shit. This is good. VERY GOOD. THANK YOU.
Rewatching it, it goes like this:
Mycroft: ”There must be something in this ridiculous memory palace that can calm you down. Find it.”
[Sherlock starts running down the stairs that look like the ones from ASiP, the first visual hint we see of John.]
Mycroft: ”The east wind is coming, Sherlock. It’s coming to get you.”
[Sherlock runs down the stairs more, opens a door, gets shot by Mary in her wedding dress, falls backward screaming.]
[Sherlock runs through Roland Kerr-Further Education College from ASiP, also reminiscent of John, opens a different door, gets Redbeard.]
Yeah, I think he was looking for the thought of John to calm him down — hence all the stuff from ASiP — but it was immediately connected to John marrying Mary, and Mary shooting Sherlock, so he had to find something else. Thinking about John just then wouldn’t have been calming.
Awww, jesus. This is killing me.
Stone Romancer, John Watson: Some thoughts on John’s Sexuality
It seems to me that a man who, upon sensing that someone is making an assumption that his (male) flatmate is his boyfriend, would utter the phrase “I’m not gay!” is unlikely to comfortably and happily identify as bisexual.