Sherlock was with the Serbians long enough that Mycroft felt that he needed to intervene, and had time to work through their ranks. How much of that took place before Sherlock was captured and interrogated? We can’t be sure, but look at what we can see.
When Sherlock is running from his captors, they are well-prepared—night vision, assault weapons, multiple men on his trail, helicopters. The man who beats him mentions that Sherlock “broke in”. If Sherlock knew that the Serbians had this much power at their disposal, why was he careless with the break in? He’s already looking bedraggled when he runs from them, and when they have him surrounded, he sags with defeat. Have we ever seen Sherlock face an enemy with anything other than defiance before? It makes me wonder how much he may have been broken in by them at this point—whether his run for freedom came directly after the break in or was an escape attempt after being captured the first time.
Sherlock’s back is gouged. A great deal of it looks fresh. Some of it looks as though the blood has dried. At this point the detail is not so great that we can discern possible scarring, so how long he’s been beaten or whether it’s happened before is up to us to decide. What we do know is that he has enough beard growth to suggest that it’s been some time since he was able to shave (and we know that Sherlock prefers to be clean-shaven) and his hair has had time to become significantly dirty and matted.
However long Sherlock was at the hands of the Serbians, we do know that he was gone for two years (more than, considering that his “death” was June 15, 2011 and his return is days before November 5, 2013) and that Moriarty’s network was vast. This can’t be the first time that Sherlock has run into trouble as he was dismantling it. It’s possible that he’s been captured before and was able to get himself out of trouble—after all, he seems very confident that he could have managed this situation without Mycroft’s help.
So is it any wonder that he’s not exactly the Sherlock that we saw two years ago when he returns? He’s emotionally unstable, and that is why so much of his behavior in this episode seems strange. He’s seen and experienced terrible things while gone from London, and all that he knows upon his return is that he needs John by his side again, and that he’s willing to do anything to make sure that it happens. Sherlock can recognize now that he is lonely, that he depends so heavily on John. The conversation that he has with Mycroft about loneliness is obviously a reflection of the one about sex in A Scandal in Belgravia, and just like Mycroft’s “How would you know?” carried the weight of experience, so does Sherlock’s.
This is brilliant. And, on a rewatch, I wonder if Sherlock is suffering from a form of PTSD. Maybe not quite the same as John’s but we never see him sleeping or taking a break away from the case. He’s always on the move, always thinking about something else. Maybe we’ll see something like what John suffered from is Sherlock ever slows down to breathe.
Oh my God, THIS though. I can’t emphasis all of this enough.
Really interesting thoughts here.
All of this. especially the bolded bit, struck me. I touched on the loneliness thing in an earlier post. And the being mentally unstable. At times he seems lost and at other times it’s as though his mind is working at a heightened level of focus than it did before. The influx of on-screen words we see when he is deducing Mary and his ‘vision’ of the bomb going off and blowing up the Houses of Parliament show his mind working in far greater detail than in the previous series. So he’s really all over the place. I love the unpredictability that gives him.