1. So, Sherlock has just been on walk about, not hunting down/eradicating Moriarty’s network? The cases he’s been involved in are because he can’t help butting in. So why is he coming back now?
2. I don’t know what to make of Sherlock’s assertion that John’s friends “hate him.” I can’t believe that’s true, and yet, isn’t that the sort of Sherlock is usually right about? This confuses me.
3. People seem to be taking the smile & wink as sincere, but it seems totally phony to me? (But it does explain the smile & wink in SiP, so yay for that!)
1. Each of those crimes could be connected to Moriarty, because Moriarty didn’t so much commit crimes himself as enable others to do so, right? A sort of crime concierge.
2. I think the “John’s friends hate him” thing is pretty easy to explain. And that moment does something important in the narrative structure of the episode: it makes clear how the whole thing is based on dramatic irony, that is, the viewer knowing stuff the characters don’t. We know that Sherlock’s such a dick that people were probably reacting to him, not John. I think John probably knows that too. Sherlock doesn’t. That means that we share knowledge with John that Sherlock doesn’t have, which binds us to John. Dramatic irony is about the relation between the viewer and the story. This mini-ep is very, very much based on what we know and the characters don’t—that is, it’s as much about what’s going on with the Sherlock audience as we wait as what’s happening to the characters as they wait.
3. That’s where the sincerity of Sherlock’s smile and wink doesn’t really matter within the context of the story. Sherlock doesn’t mean it, and John’s not there to see it anyway. Because it’s not for John, that wink; it’s for us. It’s not a wink from Sherlock to John, it’s a wink from the show to its audience. The whole ep is like that, a series of inside jokes to we who wait that the characters can’t get.
And that, that, is the brilliance of the “stop being dead—okay” moment. Because John’s startled reaction shows that he does get it the way we do. He does hear, suddenly, the sneaky hint that Sherlock’s coming back. (And it’s like , a moment of conversation between the two of them, too.) So in that moment, John shares with us the extra-diegetic knowledge. He becomes, for just a second, like the audience outside the show, and thus very close to us. He joins us in hope. After all, he loves Sherlock as much as we do, doesn’t he?
We already knew Sherlock and John were something of an itemcouple pair in public, which makes me wonder…”All his friends hate him,” he says of John, because he read it in their faces.”I wrote an essay on suppressed hatred in close proximity based entirely on his friends.” But…Sherlock had to be there to read those faces, so I daresay he wasn’t reading their hatred toward John, but toward himself. Which is a bit heartbreaking, but also a bit charming, because oh, Sherlock, you egocentric fuck.
