88thparallel:

sarahthecoat:

possiblyimbiassed:

sarahthecoat:

88thparallel:

It really is a hard idea to stick to, Nonny, I totally get it.

Here are the things that help me keep the hope alive (settle in, folks, I’m about to go on a tangent):

First, S1 & S2 (and I’d argue at least some of S3) were so well done, crafted with such care by everyone involved. Gatiss and Moffat are such fanboys it is ridiculous, and I don’t think we should forget that we fell in love with this show and these characters in the first place thanks to them.

Second, I personally think it’s par for the course for show runners to keep fans in the dark. I know Mofftiss are sometimes arseholes in how they go about it, but they obviously need to keep the element of surprise (especially if they’re doing something that is truly groundbreaking and never-before-seen-on-tv like they claimed they were ::cough:: Johnlock ::cough::). They can’t tell us what they have planned, and this is not unique to these writers, this show, or the BBC. 

Third, I think that the show is following a five-act structure. We’ve witnessed the good times, and now this is the crisis/conflict stage, after this comes resolution/happy ending. Read more about how this is a 5 act show here in @toxicsemicolon‘s most recent meta.

Fourth, there are too many coincidental loose ends that can’t possibly be accidents, like in HLV – Molly tells Sherlock after he is shot: “It’s not like it is in the movies. There’s not a great big spurt of blood and you go flying backwards.” Yet that is literally exactly what happens to Mary when she is shot in T6T (the very next episode). Why would they do that unless they want to raise red flags for the viewers. It was almost comical how overblown Mary’s bullet wound was, and that was on purpose. So… why?

Same thing with the skull painting. The same painting has been a prominent mainstay of the flat at 221b for 3 seasons/series and suddenly in S4, it glows and changes colors and sometimes is completely black. Why? Mofftiss claims that it’s budget constraints with the original painting’s artist, but in the same exact series they were able to afford to film two helicopter scenes and rent an Aston Martin? I don’t buy it. There’s a reason.

We’re lucky to have a fandom full of brilliant people who like to pull at those threads and unravel the nonsense. Check out the blogs of @inevitably-johnlocked, @monikakrasnorada @mrskolesouniverse @raggedyblue @sarahthecoat @fellshish @heimishtheidealhusband @may-shepard @toxicsemicolon @marcespot @marcelock @jenna221b @tjlcisthenewsexy @consultingidiots @shylockgnomes @patiencegrenade @possiblyimbiassed @ghislainem70 @ebaeschnbliah and @sagestreet (and I’m forgetting tons, my apologies!) for some great insights and discussions. 

Ever since I discovered meta I’ve been sure that there is something more meaningful coming. 

If nothing else, there are too many coincidences to be accidental. Just a few  examples (I could go on for days… don’t tempt me)

• In TLD, Culverton Smith says (of getting away with murder) “You don’t build a beach if you want to hide a pebble; you just find a beach!” and then in the very next episode, Mycroft tells Sherlock about Eurus while flashing back to a beach covered in pebbles (which they shipped in for that scene) and then holding a pebble, which he drops onto the beach. Read more in @finalproblem‘s amazing meta here.
• In TFP, the patience grenade explosion in 221b was powerful enough to blow John and Sherlock out a window (and according to Mark Gatiss, “boop they’re fine” cuz they bounced off the thin awning of Speedy’s cafe, which must also heal burns and scrapes and bruises but whatever), but it didn’t burn paper or half the things in the flat. It DID, however, destroy John’s chair. The chair that they replaced it with? John’s chair from TAB. From Sherlock’s 1800s mind palace. Arwel Wynn Jones has confirmed this.
• This tale from Sherlocked Con of a discussion with Wanda Ventham from @fleurdebee legitimately haunts me.
• Comments from the cast and crew that don’t make sense yet… including Louise Brealey’s tweet about Chekov’s gun
• Speaking of which, you should read all of @toxicsemicolon‘s other astoundingly brilliant meta including Poetry or Truth? 
• Set designer Arwel Wynn Jones has trolled us (or given us clues?) many times, namely referring to elephants (”the elephant in the room”), but also the skull painting (more skull fuckery here).
• Here’s a solid list of questions that @snycock came up with for Sherlocked UK that either prove that the whole cast and crew went through some sort of collective insanity for TFP, or there’s something more coming and things don’t make sense for a reason (which is what I think)
• “The Lost Special”
• “Mirrors” (where one character stands in for another in a scene, like Molly for John, or Culverton for John, etc.)
• Imagery of both burning/fire and drowning/water

Check out my tags for more meta, it’s incredible what this fandom discovers. Most of my meta is tagged under #hope for s5 #what fresh fuckery is this #I believe in mofftiss 

Ok, I’m starting to get incoherent and my browser just crashed all my tabs so I’ll leave it at that. The meta rabbit hole is deep and wide and curvy and I could probably fill a book filled with just links to other people’s brilliant findings.

I guess the main takeaway I want to leave you with is this:

I don’t think two men who cared so much about this show for so long would chuck it into the toilet for no reason. The same brilliant minds that gave us villains like Moriarty, Culverton Smith, and Magnussen suddenly giving us an improbable two-dimensional psychopath in Eurus makes no sense. TFP itself makes no sense in about 100 different ways. And I don’t think any of that was an accident.

More is coming. When the Garridebs story is finally free of copyright, we’ll get our resolution. I don’t know which theory I believe but there are so many… that Eurus shot John and TFP is his dying hallucination, that Sherlock is still in his mind palace (possibly since HLV, or even earlier), that the whole thing is us seeing events through John’s blog (which was commissioned by the BBC yet often conflicts with canon), alibi theory… who knows. I’m happy to point you toward more meta, but I think the blogs I mentioned above and some of the links should start you on your way. Once the evidence starts to stack up, it’s clear… we don’t have the whole picture yet. 

all of that, plus when was it moffat said, “if you aren’t reading the subtext, hell mend you”, was that in the run up to TAB? Or at SDCC the summer before s4? Possibly @skulls-and-tea has the receipt in “creator quotes”. Even as i endured my one time watching s4, i could tell that it was awash in subtext, even if i didn’t know what it meant yet. Sure enough, the stalwarts here are teasing it out. Let go of the surface reading, look under the hood, pull it apart, that’s where the juice is.

Also, the 5 act structure is not only increasingly clear from the overall arc of the show so far, but is hinted at consistently in every set of five anythings in the individual episodes. Look at any set of five*, and compare them to the series. This story is structured up the wazoo, there is not a wasted or a random second anywhere in it, not one “throwaway” line or scene, it’s like a fractal, even small fragments contain the pattern of the whole. the more “sample size” we have, the more consistent that is, even including bizarro mirror world s4. we’re at the “grandpa, why did you read me this” stage of the princess bride. (go watch that if it’s been a while, and also the tjlce video on tpb!) Or Han Solo about to be frozen in carbonite, but just before “i love you; i know”. The dementors are loose and nobody has conjured a patronus yet. But we’ll get there, or it will be their failure, not ours.

*IE, the five suicide/murders in ASIP, the five pips in TGG (a double set, the hostages and the cases), the five tasks in TFP, etc.

There are also a lot of threes, lines or situations that recur three times, etc. Again, consistent to the point where if there are two of something, we can be watching out for the third one. @callie-ariane ’s transcripts are a great resource for “l clueing for looks”.

Thanks for this very comprehensive stack of evidence @88thparallel – compiling all this is a really great work and very useful!

In addition to all this, there are two details in S4 that I would go so far as holding for proof, not just evidence:

1. the fact that the nine digit number of Mary’s fake passport in T6T (‘Gabrielle’) is identical to the patent number of a real, existing cardiac monitor. The chances that this is an accident is too close to zero to have any credibility.

2. the fact that a security monitor of Sherrinford in TFP is actually a typical MRI scan of a human brain.

These things didn’t ‘just sort of happen’ – that’s impossible. Which means they’re there for a reason. Casual viewers won’t pick up on them, though; their appearance are way too subtle for that. Which means they’re there only for the obsessive fans to discover, the ones who go through this show picture by picture (us 😊).

So, a heart monitor and an MRI scanner. And where do these two clues lead us? They lead us directly to a hospital, the only kind of place in the world where these items exist on a regular basis. Which is one of this show’s many recurring themes. Not a coincidence, then.

So, the question here was: Do these writers really know what they’re doing? Yes – I think they very definitely do. In detail, they absolutely do. And that leaves us with only two remaining options: either they’re the epitome of cynics, who willingly spend millions of pounds and years of their working lives just to mock their own audience – especially the most passionate part of their fans. OR there’s more to be expected, most probably at least a fulfilling of the five act structure (if not more). 

And @sarahthecoat, I love the fractal imagery! And since we’ve already had The Sign of Three, I think it must be time for “The Set of Five”. 😉

yep. And of all the medical equipment they could have referenced, they chose a HEART monitor and a BRAIN scan. You can pretty much go through the show episode by episode at this point, and sort characters, props, colors, whatever, into either the brain column or the heart column. Consistent patterns, over and over. The opposite of random. YES s4 was crazy and ugly and hard to watch, but if you take a close look at s3, it’s crazy and painful too, just dressed up prettier. And we’ve been teasing out the subtext for years, so much of what was utter nonsense on first viewing, has fallen into place subtextually. S4 builds on what we learned so far, and takes it that much farther. That much crazier and harder to look at, but still part of the pattern. S3 gave us drinks code, firmed up phone=heart, stairs code, started us looking at vehicle subtext, water & fire, dogs & cats, theatricality, all of which have been vastly developed in s4. Just about any stone you turn over has subtext under it. Every place there’s a line that “doesn’t make sense” on the surface, there’s a thread to pull out more subtext. No wonder it takes years to write these, they are not just formulaic procedurals. its mind boggling.

so this just occurred to me, if phone=heart across the series, is there another object that =brain? We have mycroft=brain in a lot of places, and john or a john mirror=heart. But is there anything that corresponds with phone?

Could the symbol for the brain be the skull painting in 221b? The one that was just fine and dandy and iconic until it was inexplicably* all fucked up and glowing and black and obviously NOT RIGHT and NOT THE SAME?

*Mofftiss’ “explanation” does not count