Moffat and Gatiss just filmed 90 minutes of the internal monologue of a tortured queer genius drug addict off his tits on coke, wrapped it up in a gothic mystery, and then gave it to us as a late Christmas present.
“Moriarty’s queerness, never subtle to begin with, is undeniable at this point. He’s been in Sherlock’s bed, he shows up dressed as a bride, he says the one thing everyone is thinking when he tells Sherlock and Watson to elope. He even straddles Sherlock and kicks him about in a scene painfully reminiscent of Irene Adler. And it’s all in Sherlock’s mind. This isn’t Moriarty telling Sherlock that he’s his weakness – this is the great detective telling himself that.”
Has anyone gone through this yet? Because the fact that Mary didn’t get to be a bride on screen has been plaguing me for the last 24 hours.
Sherlock has that moment at the end, before Moriarty raises the veil, where he’s mirroring that moment in His Last Vow.
Mary is the only one of the women that we didn’t get to see as the bride–and we know Lady Carmichael didn’t kill her own husband because she was literally in the room with Sherlock when John saw the bride, yes? Sherlock assumes later that it was Molly who climbed out the window–but why couldn’t that have been Mary?
That particular bride even crops up scaring John in the editing when Sherlock’s “the women we have lied to, betrayed, ignored” line is delivered. John and the bride are on screen for “ignored.” Who has John been ignoring?
The fact that there was a “Miss me?” note on the corpse would support this theory, as well, if you’re of the belief that Mary is the “new” Moriarty. None of the other corpses had notes–why this one, if it wasn’t someone trying to send a message to Sherlock Holmes? (Like the Study in Pink suicides, there was only one note–and it was the one that started Sherlock on the path to Moriarty.)
So Sherlock is asking the Moriarty-bride, who has come specifically out to see him, why she engaged him in the case when she intended to commit the murder herself. He’s so sure it’s Lady C., but at the same time, he’s confused–he says it doesn’t make sense.
And the way he delivers this line is very similar to his delivery of the Lady Smallwood line in HLV. His reaction is similar, as well–he’s shocked. He says explicitly “It can’t be you.” He’s thrown the same way he was when Mary turned around and revealed herself as the person training a gun on Magnussen. Then that string of his mind palace starts to come undone and he “wakes up.”
But Sherlock’s subconscious is starting to put it together–it had to be Moriarty who committed the murder, but not Moriarty as Sherlock knows him.
Even when Sherlock starts to “wake up,” Moriarty’s line “You’re dreaming” is immediately said by Mary. Sherlock’s brain is connecting Mary to Moriarty–especially given the fact that we now know he was still in the mind palace when he heard Mary/Moriarty say “You’re dreaming.”
None of it makes sense to his brain because Moriarty is the “virus in the data.” He’s infiltrating in places where Sherlock’s brain seems too afraid to actually see the truth, the same way Sherlock saw Moriarty in Hound. Almost all the other episodes had direct parallels in this one, but Hound didn’t get one beyond the short mention at the beginning (”the dog one”) and the “once you’ve eliminated the impossible” bit with the ghost. But in Hound, Sherlock saw Moriarty in place of the scientist fellow whose name I can’t remember.
Here, he sees Moriarty in place of Mary.
And then, just like in Hound, he blinks it away and sees the person he’s meant to see. Sherlock “wakes up” and sees Mary.
I’m going to agonize over this for the next year, aren’t I?
I think you should be really proud of this, actually. Nicely done.
Yes, great point. Totally agree.
Also (and I have no spot to back myself up, so I could technically be wrong): I’m pretty sure everyone on the plane gets a mirrored line with their 1985 counterpart except Mary.
Sherlock has one, John has “morphine or cocaine?”, and Mycroft has “Did you make a list?”
Mary’s mirrored line is “You’re dreaming.” And it’s a mirror of Moriarty.
