Look critically at the two men; the heart and the head.
The heart: Sherlock. Selfish and undying love, adoration, extreme sacrifice, protection at all costs, can only see the man he loves as the perfect man, looks at no other, lives his life for John. His avowed priority, the work, is thrown to the wind for the man he loves. Look at him, Sherlock is all heart.
The head: John. Cannot allow himself to voice his emotions. Blind to the love emanating from Sherlock as he has convinced himself that Sherlock can not love. Forces himself to comply with rules and expectations, forces himself to ‘move on’, stands by his decisions even in the face of incredible unfolding events. Takes a logical approach to his choices in life. Lives a different life to the life he really wants with Sherlock.
John is so in his own head, so overthinking things, that he cannot see what is right before his eyes. He is bogged down by conformity to the rules he has set himself, probably from standards set by parents. He chose the army as a career; rules, regulations, order, hierarchy. Now in marriage and his GP career John is killing himself slowly, living a life that is not for him. His head is ruling his fate. Whereas Sherlock has abandoned all logic to run at full pace into love. The head and the heart, but not as we initialy thought.
“Whatever it takes, whatever happens.” – Sherlock Holmes
John is in danger, and Sherlock is protecting him. I can’t wait to see the depth of both of these go to in series 4.
hold the fuck up
I’ve just realized some implications here. Namely, that John thinks there’s no one Sherlock would go out of his way to protect. We, the audience, know that’s patently fucking stupid, because we saw Sherlock do just that in Reichenbach. So why does John not make that same connection?
Has Sherlock not told John that he “died” because John’s life was threatened?
No, John knows it’s him Sherlock is protecting. As evidenced by the fact that he comments on it to Lestrade, John knows that his chair being back out in the living room means something, and then when he sits (quite possibly to try to figure out what Sherlock wants him to do with it) check out his expression of realization when he lays eyes on the perfume bottle. I’m not entirely sure whether he thinks Sherlock had it left there as a message that he was specifically protecting Mary or John, but after Sherlock’s promise at the wedding he certainly knows it means one or the other of them. And in a sense, protecting either of them is protecting both. That’s the point of the whole chain of vulnerabilities.
(However, according to Sherlock himself, John’s life was no longer in danger by the time he stepped off the roof. Mrs. Hudson’s and Lestrade’s lives, however, may have been. So Sherlock was never protecting John there, but it does show he cares enough to take a risk for his friends. On the other hand, he’s also enough of an ass to then leave them hanging for two years. So, you know. John may find him understandably hard to read sometimes. :D)
His Last Vow squee: the top 10
I was thinking about favorites and, of course, Series 3 (because everything ends up being about Series 3) and realized that my many of favorite bits of the series are in HLV. In many ways, that’s my favorite episode of the three. TEH was fresh and exciting and TSoT was funny, melancholy and touching, but HLV was unforgettable, intense, full of reversals, villainy and question marks— and passionate, epic love. This doesn’t mean it’s easy— or that I’m in a hurry to rewatch it— but nevertheless, I think it’s my favorite, the episode that was the most up my alley in terms of themes, angst-level, romanticism, and mood.
Of course, it’s also got some of the scenes I hated most in all of BBC Sherlock. My feelings about HLV were very intense in both directions, but my issues were all due to the misdirections and the emotional wallop is quite intentional, I think. It fades with time, though, but the fondness remains, at least for me. And so, I thought that given that this episode won more than one Emmy (woo-hoo!), it deserved some celebration.
So, why not: I thought I’d try to see what my favorite 10 scenes are. Or maybe just indulge in some gratuitous screen-capping, ‘cause that’s always fun, too.
1.
Sherlock looks so ridiculously, epically attractive in John’s dreams, doesn’t he? And I find it so cute that he’s dreaming about this: their beginning, Sherlock looking fabulous and untouchable as he literally hovers over John’s pillow, telling John he needed him, and he was going to show him the world. Ella would have a field day. And John’s breathing ‘oh god yes’, as if Sherlock had just propositioned him. I suppose he had.
2.
Well, John’s not going to wait around for Sherlock to come and show him a good time. BAMF!John can take care of his own needs, quite literally. One of my favorite John scenes ever. He’s the BAMFiest, and the rampant dry sarcasm makes me giggle. I also think it’s quite important that this is clearly a side of John that’s dying to come out, and logically, he’s had to have consciously repressed it recently (and that can’t last). This is the man who misses the war, and who didn’t want his wife here to see this— he wanted Sherlock. But nothing really goes John’s way in HLV, does it.
Sorry to drag this up again, but I was thinking about the earlier discussion re. bi John vs. ‘straight with exception’ John while I was walking my dog, and I thought of something else I’d like to add while it’s in my head.
I think that a lot of people who label themselves as ‘straight with an exception’, and even more so, ‘straight with exceptions’, are people with a lot of internalised biphobia. This was certainly the case with me – I identified as straight (heterosexual – I’ve been aware of my aromanticism for a long time) with an exception and then with exceptions for quite some time before I started as identifying as bisexual (or grey-bisexual, to get nuanced), and I know several others who did the same.
There is a massive stigma attached to bisexuality and biromanticism (and, by extension, pansexuality and panromaticism), and in societies where being gay is becoming more accepted, biphobia is more prevalent. I’d expand upon that, but my bisexuality, biphobia and erasure tags will do that nicely for me.
Technically, in order to be bisexual/romantic, all that you need to do is experience sexual/romantic attraction to people of the same and other genders. People, as in a minimum of two. A minimum of two, as in a minimum of ONE person of one gender and ONE of another. Meanwhile, heterosexual/romantic technically means ‘EXCLUSIVELY sexually/romantically attracted to men/women depending on gender’.
Of course, identity is more complex than language. Even if I ever experienced romantic attraction to someone, I imagine I would still identify as aromantic, because I would not consider a solitary experience sufficient to alter how I see myself and how I interact with other people generally. That said, I know from experience that lots of people who identify as bi or pan now once identified as ‘straight with an exception/exceptions’.
Hand in hand with biphobia, a large contributing factor to this is misunderstanding of what being bi actually means. So many people believe at least one of the following misconceptions:
- Bi people are attracted exclusively to cis men and women
- Bi people don’t have a gender preference
- Bi people can’t be happy without a man and a woman at any one time
- Bi people are all either polyamorous or cheaters
- Bi people have to have dated/slept with at least one man and woman
- Bi people are ‘greedy’
THAT is precisely why John being explicitly bi would be so powerful. I would argue that he had a relationship with Sholto, but generally, he prefers women, or at least, he prefers DATING women (and social biphobia, internalised biphobia and his upbringing make that perfectly realistic – the same is the case for many bi men in their 30s and 40s). He doesn’t need both to be happy, he isn’t insatiable, and he is capable of monogamy.
Him being ‘straight with an exception’, meanwhile, would simultaneously vilify queerness (his “not gay” retaining face value), perpetuate the idea that people who read characters as queer are delusional (people have been reading Watson as queer for decades and have spent a lot of time considering John as queer, particularly since The Sign of Three), and send out a message to young people who are struggling with internalised biphobia that it IS preferable to be straight with exceptions than to be bi.
I’d like to clarify that I am not trying to attack people who identify as straight with an exception/exceptions. I just want to offer my perspective, as someone who once identified as such and now identifies as grey-bisexual, on why I’m passionate about bi!John.
John Watson: Not Gay
Sherlock tends to have multiple readings built into it, which is part of the reason why I like it so much, and why I can keep writing about it months (or years) after a series of it has aired. And the question of John’s sexuality fits into that paradigm. We can discuss it for years, because you can read it so many different ways.
John’s refrain of “not gay” makes the question of his sexual orientation open and shut to many people. To me, those scenes, in conjunction with his actions and decisions in the rest of the show, only serve to highlight the fact that John’s attractions are a difficult subject for him, and he feels like he has something to prove (or disprove). It seems to me that it represents an argument he has in his head, and people making assumptions about him and Sherlock fall into his internal debate.
John flirts with women; he dates women, and practically forgets their names while doing so; he sleeps with women; he marries a woman. Sounds pretty straight.
However.
John Watson develops crushingly intense emotional relationships with men that are so close to being romantic it’s impossible to distinguish with the naked eye. Once might be a fluke, an “exception,” if you will; but we see two of them. For all the women we’ve seen John date, it’s these two men he doesn’t want to shake. He never gets over Sherlock, and his admiration for Sholto is so obvious that it makes Sherlock jealous.
If it stopped there, we could say that John lives at least on the border of homoromanticism while considering himself a straight man. But it doesn’t stop there.
buneesi replied to your post: loudest-subtext-in-television replied…
i have a long held suspicion Mycroft is genuinely asexual and Sherlock in his youthful brother-worship said “Oh yeah, ok im that too” aaaaand wakes up one day 36 years old and cluelessly sexually attracted to his flatmate. woop
DING DING DING
Okay, not only does this make a lot of sense it’s got me thinking. While I DO like Mystrade and whatever Mycroft/Anthea is called, part of me always reverts to Mycroft as being forever single. The idea that it’s him and not Sherlock who is actually asexual is a REALLY interesting take. That Sherlock did – and still does to some extent – idolize his brother is obvious. However, I’d never thought of Mycroft’s sexuality as something that would impact Sherlock’s in this kind of way.
It’s clear to see how Mycroft’s personal distance from others has effected Sherlock. I’ve often seen Mycroft’s genuine emotional distance from the rest of humanity as one of the factors which as lead Sherlock to try and force a distance between himself and the rest of humanity that he finds difficult to maintain. (Not the only factor, mind you, but one of them.) He needs much more human contact and socialization than Mycroft does even while he clearly thinks that he shouldn’t. Again, that Mycroft has an impact on that is obvious from the discussion in the hospital in SiB. I’ve often thought that the speed with which Sherlock began dragging John along with him as soon as he determined that he could speaks to his starvation for human interaction. John was still more or less a stranger in SiP but that doesn’t stop Sherlock from dragging the guy onto a crime scene.
Now, many asexual people still desire romance and the emotional closeness that the rest of humanity has. I’ve even known asexual people who have and maintain romantic relationships. However, what if Mycroft weren’t just asexual but also aromantic as well. Sherlock himself tells us that Mycroft played “mother” for him a child so that it would be natural for him to internalize Mycroft’s genuine lack of need for those kinds of connections as being the way he himself should be.
This idea also makes what Irene said all that much more interesting. Mycroft she calls The Ice Man, someone with no need or desire for interpersonal relationships. Sherlock, on the other hand, she calls The Virgin – not someone who doesn’t need or want romantic/sexual relationships, but just someone who has not had one. And If you picture the look on Sherlock’s face, that hurt. She sees that he wants things he himself doesn’t want to want and then tosses it in his face in front of the ONE PERSON who really is what Sherlock aspires to be. He protests far too loudly that he doesn’t care what Mycroft thinks and therefore to have the fact the he DOES want/need this kind of thing broadcast in front of his bother would be painful in the extreme.
totally brilliant. just a small additional note, this also fits in with the scene when sherlock approaches mycroft essentially in concern that mycroft must be unhappy and lonely. until now i just hadn’t thought about it much, and i guess just considered it a small side narrative about mycroft’s emotional life. now that i really think, though, perhaps that scene was really all about sherlock after all. maybe in coming to know and love john and thereby truly understand how lonely and miserable he was living the life he had modeled after mycroft, he (wrongly, ostensibly) assumes that mycroft must feel that same way and simply not have the perspective to understand. so the point of the conversation wasn’t to give us some small, random glimpse into mycroft’s inner life, but to give us a richly contextualized window into sherlock’s. essentially, we are shown that sherlock has come to recognize how important human connections (and john) are to him and to understand how lonely he was before.
Sally Donovan is in the middle of her own totally legit story arc, and I’m not even kidding
Even among fans of Sally Donovan (at least as far as I’ve seen), there seems to be general acceptance of the idea that Sherlock’s writers aren’t interested in her as anything more than a mild antagonist for Sherlock.
And on the one hand, it’s really easy to see why people would believe that.
But… I don’t think it’s true. I think the writers have very definite plans for her.
Not that that necessarily means those plans will turn out to be great ones, because who knows. But I can be hopeful for the time being, can’t I?
