Appointment in Samsara Part 2: Secret Twins, Through the Looking-Glass
A re-examination of the show within the context of fatalism, the Ghost Driver, and Secret Twins.
In order to know what our Storyteller has gotten up to and what it means, we have to look back at all the many examples of the Car and Driver metaphor throughout the show. You likely already have valid interpretations for a lot of my examples; however, in some, there exist double readings — secret twins.
Let us begin with an honorable mention: The Gay Pilot. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
John: You haven’t eaten today? For God’s sake, you need to eat.
Sherlock: No, you need to eat. I need to think. The brain’s what counts. Everything else is transport.
John: You might consider refueling.
…
John: So, you don’t…do…anything.
Sherlock: Everything else is transport.
The body is transport. We also learn throughout the show that food is sex, refueling the body like you refuel your car to keep it running. Similar to Julian English in Appointment in Samarra, one’s sexuality is one’s vitality.
Sherlock: There are cars that pass like ghosts, unseen, unremembered. There are people we trust, always, when we’re alone, when we’re lost, when we’re drunk. We never see their faces, but every day we disappear into their cars and let the trap close around us. I give you the perfect murder weapon of the modern age: the invisible car.
The Invisible Man With The Invisible Car
In the midpoint episode, they included a case called: “The Hollow Client.”
Alan had been winding Jack up to the point where Jack genuinely believed he was invisible. Jack had wrapped himself in a complex set of mirrors so that it appeared as if he was invisible. Or had been wrapped up in the mirrors by Alan. He briefly considered invisible paint. Perhaps Jack and Alan were highly-advanced scientists (they weren’t, they were media students).
Given the secret twins concept we could read Alan as Anteros (requited love), with the show and John doing this to himself in Series 4. He is wrapped up in a complex set of mirrors so that we may have missed him all along. Anteros didn’t actually pull a prank. In fact, the more prominent Anteros/Archer reference in TSOT is the Sherlock look-alike named Archie who helps Sherlock finally ‘save the life.’
Archie: “The invisible man could do it . . . the invisible man with the invisible knife.”
The Mayfly Man
Most ghosts tend to haunt a single house. This ghost, however, is willing to commute.
The Mayfly Man deduction scene begins at the midpoint of the episode, at the midpoint of the entire series. It is the moment of breakthrough where our protagonist learns key knowledge that he did not know during The Great Game: Don’t solve the murder, save the life. Within this episode and Series 3, the mayfly man is John and Sholto is the Sherlock mirror, but James Sholto is our double mirror — secret twin — so he is also John.
I’m you aren’t I?
Sholto as a soldier “should” have died. The following quote is exemplary of John and Sholto’s shared fatalist outlook in the face of death:
“There’s a proper time to die, isn’t there? . . . and one should embrace it when it comes — like a soldier.”
He missed his appointment with Death, just to come home to be extremely paranoid and isolated. The only way his death is avoided is by Sherlock appealing to the Sherlock-mirror (and John) through their shared love of John. This episode is all about locked room mysteries. Series 4 is the puzzle for John’s escape room and as the waters gang et al foreshadow, Series 5 is the break in.
There’s a man in there about to die, the game is on — solve it!
TSOT’s delayed action stabbing stretches throughout the rest of Series 3 and 4, because John marrying Mary is what causes so much of their downfall. If you kill John you kill Sherlock like the grenade metaphor suggests, and John is already dying.
Helpfully, Sherlock mirror Tessa provides some other useful information besides “John Hamish Watson” and “Enjoy the wedding.” She tells us: “I had dinner…with a ghost — with a ghost Mr. Holmes!” “Boring, boring — no! Fascinating.” The Mayfly Man has been stealing peoples identities (Charlie, Molly, Culverton, Faith, Eurus, etc.) and hiding in plain sight as the man behind the camera — literally. John is slowly killing himself and thereby Sherlock by delayed action stabbing/patience grenade, but leaves to make his alibi somewhere else.
This is the episode, I’ll remind you, where John is accused of not being a soldier: “you could be a used car salesman now for all I know,” which is one of many references Appointment in Samarra where a man attempts to outrun his fate and fails. So of course, when the mayfly man is caught, Sherlock tells him: “You should’ve driven faster.”
The Ghost Driver
Charlie and the Mayfly Man are just two examples of “ghost drivers.” There are many others that have been invisible to us. Besides TBB — which focuses on smuggling/foreign travelers — virtually every episode has some iteration of a thematically significant driver and/or transportation.
Planes, Trains, and…Bicycles
The episodes before and after the midpoint, do not have especially important “cars” in them. Rather, they change shape into different modes of transport.
In TEH, we have the train car:
They’re cars, not carriages. It’s a legacy of the early American involvement in the Tube system.
The car is an empty car that has diverted from its predetermined course. This is fine on its own thematically, as they should be diverting from their canon prescribed path. Except, it’s meant to blow up parliament and more notably Elizabeth Tower, a would-be suicide mission. However, the “driver” put it there ahead of time and the explosives (patience grenade) will go off while the culprit is in a different location, alone in a room, with the remote switch.
— The driver of that train hasn’t been to work since. According to his flatmate, he’s on holiday. Came into some money.
— So if the driver of the train was in on it, then the passenger did get off.
— The driver must have diverted the train and then detached the last carriage.
I love that they say driver and not…conductor (of light…sorry).
In HLV, the car is less prominent but we are told a) John is cycling to work and b) Mary drives the car. She is in control, so John takes his Bicycle…and keeps his shirts folded, ready to pack.
The Storyteller
TRF is symmetrically opposite TST, which is why it is the episode we get John taking over the narrative in his own Fall. Whatever he’s up to will bring him to where he is at psychologically in TFP.
I’m a storyteller. I know when I’m in one.
I’m The Storyteller. It’s on DVD. Just tell him. It’s all coming out now. It’s all over. Just tell them.
There will be much more on this thread in Part 3.
For now, there are the double decker buses.
This moment in TRF and the one in TST below, are the only times a double decker bus features in a scene with any significance.
Is it really a suicide or is it murder by false public image (of sexuality) that inevitably pushed him into it?
On a related note, a blog post I suggest reading is “Death by Twitter” where a woman’s ex drives her so mad and paranoid someone was coming after her that she eventually jumps in front of a bus. It looked initially like a hit-and-run, but the victim’s brother (also John) alerted them of the strange messages. The ex eventually ran away, so Sherlock never caught him.
More on the invisible/ghostly half of the Ghost Driver thread can be found in this episode as well.
John: Anyone? Anyone at all know where Mycroft Holmes is? I’ve been asked to meet him here. No takers? Right. Am I invisible? Can you actually see me?
Mycroft: Tradition, John. Our traditions define us.
John: So total silence is traditional, is it?
It’s called Pepper’s Ghost. A simple reflection, in glass, of a living breathing person. Their only mistake was breaking the glass when they removed it. Look around you. This room is full of Brides. Once she had risen, anyone could be her. The avenging ghost — a legend to strike terror into the heart of any man with malicious intent, a spectre to stalk those unpunished brutes whose reckoning is long overdue. A league of furies awakened. The women I…we have lied to, betrayed…the women we have ignored…and disparaged. Once the idea exists, it cannot be killed.
He planted that doubt in her head, that little nagging sensation. You’re going to have to be strong to resist. Can’t kill an idea can you?
This is the work of a single-minded person, someone who knew first-hand about Sir Eustace’s mental cruelty. A dark secret, kept from all but her closest friends…including Emelia Ricoletti…the woman her husband wronged all those years before. If one disregards the ghost, there is only one suspect. Isn’t that right, Lady Carmichael?
There are no ghosts in this world…save those we make for ourselves.
The name Carmichael is almost hilariously too good to be true, but fitting nonetheless. She shows up in Sherlock’s subconscious for a reason and the real life scenes in TAB go out of their way, frankly, to point this out. They could have easily made her a flight attendant, but they didn’t. They specifically made Lady Carmichael the pilot/driver of the plane.
Parked Cars
On a less serious note, THOB gives us a lot on Bluebell and the hound drug, so the car relevance in this episode is really just:
Speaks for itself.
A Car Boot
I believe one of our passengers didn’t make the flight. But that’s the deceased for you — late, in every sense of the word.
This example is visually loaded and echoes Sherlock being handcuffed and locked in the boot in TLD, but its significance will matter more in the context of the flight of the dead which will mostly be covered in part 3.
The Driver, the Hiker, and the Boomerang
ASIB is by far the most important episode supporting my theory and for more than just the Flight of the Dead. It much more explicitly lays out the potential danger lying ahead for both John and Sherlock between Series 4 and 5, though we don’t fully understand how until it is paralleled again. The case of the driver and the hiker gets an impressive amount of screen time for an otherwise simple conclusion (for Series 2). The accident is played out on screen three times so we may form our opinion on who caused it: the driver or the victim or both.
This scenario within the context of the episode and Series 2 functions as a short term warning for Sherlock. If he gets distracted by John, then he can’t keep his eyes ahead of him towards the flying weapon. This theory is only the correct conclusion within Series 2, but as the show nears the fifth act, this scene offers new insights when given more context. Additionally, it is best explained when paralleled to a similar scenario in Series 4. Therefore, I will unpack it a lot more in part 3. First, I must cover the basics with what we know so far.
Relative to Series 2, the hiker is Sherlock but relative to Series 4, it is our secret twin: both him and John. Though, the driver is only John. Just look at these seating arrangements:
This description also connects the driver to John:
Sherlock: Did you see him? Morbidly obese, the undisguised halitosis of a single man living on his own, the right sleeve of an internet porn addict and the breathing pattern of an untreated heart condition. Low self-esteem, tiny IQ and a limited life expectancy, and you think he’s an audacious criminal mastermind?
The driver thinks he and his car somehow killed the hiker. However, he only inadvertently contributed to a man’s death, because of poor timing and bad luck.
The “murder” weapon turns out to be a boomerang — it goes in two directions. It symbolizes the reciprocation that Sherlock in Series 2 wrongly believes will kill both of them. He condemns Alex Garrideb or Anteros, at least in the short term — though, inherently his choice to separate his head and heart will have consequences.
Irene — a Sherlock mirror who has by contrast embraced her sexuality as her armor — at first doesn’t understand how the hiker was killed. Sherlock explains to Irene how he knows the driver didn’t mean to cause the hiker’s death.
Sherlock: The position of the car relative to the hiker at the time of the backfire. That and the fact that the death blow was to the back of the head. . .Two men, a car, and nobody else. The driver’s trying to fix his engine. Getting nowhere.
His car is going nowhere — John will not be heading out (again?) to go after Mary — though he may have intended to. This is also John’s sexuality he cannot run away from. He is stuck, unable to “choose a side.” Forwards or backwards? He is trying to “fix” his engine, but cannot do it on his own.
Sherlock: …And the hiker’s taking a moment, looking at the sky. Watching the birds? Any moment now, something’s going to happen. What?
Irene: The hiker’s going to die.
Sherlock: No, that’s the result. What’s going to happen?
Irene: The car’s going to backfire.
Sherlock: There’s going to be a loud noise . . . noises are important. Noises can tell you everything. For instance . . . On hearing a smoke alarm, a mother would look towards her child. Amazing how fire exposes our priorities.
The backfire is a complex idea that will require more context to unpack, but the most important thing this scene highlights is the noise — not the fire itself, but the alarm. The Chekhov’s gun moment at the end of TLD is not a real threat. John wasn’t really being shot in a literal sense, but he is in big trouble. We see and hear the gun go off without seeing it hit its target. What we really get is the broken string, not a physical threat, but a signal to a deep emotional wound — a cry for help.
The final deduction “Irene” provides, leads Sherlock to conflate — metaphorically — the boomerang as the cause of death; that is what would directly kill Sherlock. However, it will be only when John is both the driver and the hiker, if he is “recently returned from foreign travel,” like Eddie Van Coon or Faith arriving either as a passenger in a taxi or the driver of an “American car.”
By the time the driver looks up, the hiker’s already dead. What he doesn’t see is what killed him…because it was already being washed downstream.
Your own death is something that happens to everybody else. Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.
I have highlighted a couple parallels between this scene and TLD, but it goes far beyond those. The next time this scenario plays out, the “death blow” will be more clearly demonstrated, as well as the mistake Sherlock can’t afford to make.
Runaway Train
The Great Game as both a concept and an episode will have many implications for Series 5, particularly regarding symmetry, but also given the five pips. Janus Cars is a particular case I highlighted in Part 1 as well as Alex Woodbridge. Janus Cars is the source for my theory on secret twins throughout the show, but it is applicable within the episode itself; You can’t provide a plan without proper demonstration.
To review (see Appendix in Part 1 for a visual summary), Janus Cars sets up a) runaway car metaphor b) god with two faces=John’s two “sides” and indecision c) Janus’ twin Diana=secret twins=John and Sherlock. Alternatively, Eros and Anteros as “twins” associated with John and Sherlock respectively. Further, the “never twins” line can mean they don’t have to be literal twins (or they’re “triplets”). Mirror characters who are siblings tend to be John’s two ‘faces’. We see all this exemplified in TGG with Andrew West, his fiancé Lucy, and her brother Joe:
The Andrew West case, similar to Janus Cars, seems to just foreshadow TRF but it goes far beyond that. Andrew was found dead next to train tracks. The easiest assumption was that he’d fallen off or jumped in front of it, an apparent suicide:
“I hate ’em. . .Jumpers. People who chuck themselves in front of trains. Selfish bastards. . .What about the drivers, hmm? They’ve gotta live with it, haven’t they?”
This conversation and the one he has with Lucy, echo John’s thoughts and feelings post-TRF. However, when it’s solved, it’s actually a murder. The train veered off its predetermined path unexpectedly for Joe and revealed the truth. You had to look closer at the case to realize what happened, not unlike TST with the ghost driver. The body had been dead before the train/driver revealed it.
Wasted as a Cabbie
Jeff Hope as the first driver in the show is foundational. As a serial killer for murder-suicides, it’s the most significant example to answer the question: was it the driver or victim? or both? All the victims can provide insight into John’s psyche or foreshadow Series 4 in some way. One of the victims, implied to have a drinking problem, is named Beth Davenport. I’d noticed the name (Eliza)Beth in relation to this John mirror so many times I nearly overlooked that she was also the “Junior Minister for Transport.”
The fourth suicide victim, Jennifer Wilson, as a John mirror is an iconic reference point when considering Series 4 as the narrative of an author with a stillborn daughter, having an (emotional) affair, who leaves behind a note to catch the killer (himself). I used to say that the fifth victim was intended to be Sherlock, which is still true in a way, but the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Discussing John as the driver/serial self-murderer is crucial to understanding the dynamics of what the show is circling back to. Much of what we can see going on with John in Series 4, can also be seen in Jeff:
obviously you live on your own
mother has been cut out of the picture
you still love them and it still hurts
keeping up appearances but not planning ahead
you’re a dead man walking
not a lot of money in driving cabs
Fits John and/or Faith nicely, though that’s not all.
Jeff: No one ever thinks about the cabbie. It’s like you’re invisible. Just the back of an ’ead. Proper advantage for a serial killer.
Sherlock: Is this a confession?
He’s the ghost driver in the invisible car with the invisible knife.
Sherlock: Oh, I see. So you’re a proper genius too.
Jeff: Don’t look it, do I? Funny little man, drives a cab.
“Smarter than he looks.”
Sherlock: Who are you?
Jeff: Nobody. For now. But I won’t die a nobody, now will I?
Ouch.
All of this is enough to connect him to John, but given the relevance of The Appointment in Samarra, you can also compare Jeff Hope to the servant taking the horse to escape death. Jefferson Hope in the original novel, A Study in Scarlet, also drove the carriage taxi, so that’s not enough comparison. It was a choice, however, to subvert expectations to have the passenger be the American and very much not the taxi driver.
Digging deeper into Sheppey by W. Somerset Maugham (source for the common version of The Appointment in Samarra which the show directly references), I noticed many features of interest in the titular character. The tragic hero, Sheppey, has always considered himself a lucky man. One day he even wins the lottery! Almost immediately, he faints. He arrives home and faints again. Apparently, he’s got high blood pressure (undiagnosed heart condition), though his family suspects otherwise, and so ends the man’s lucky streak. While he considers himself a relatively lucky man still, he starts giving away his money to people he thinks need it more. His selfish family, with the help of a psychiatrist, get him put in an insane asylum, because “a sane man doesn’t give his money to the poor — a sane man takes money from the poor.” It was meant as a morality play to criticize people who don’t practice what they preach. Sheppey becomes a martyred Jesus figure and it’s pretty on the nose, though audiences at the time apparently did not like this ‘cop-out solution,’ so it was a commercial failure. The predetermined, fatalist ending was as unpopular then as it is now apparently.
The most important bits of trivia are the most basic facts about Sheppey: He has a cockney accent and is a barber.
There’s shaving foam behind your left ear. Nobody’s pointed it out to you.
Jeff: Four people in a row? It’s not just chance.
Sherlock: Luck.
Jeff: It’s genius. I know ’ow people think. I know ’ow people think I think. I can see it all, like a map inside my ’ead. Everyone’s so stupid — even you. Or maybe God just loves me.
John, throughout The Blind Banker especially, does not consider himself a particularly lucky man. At least not these days he doesn’t, as if he was lucky (Sherlock thinks so: “I made it home. Many weren’t so lucky.”), until he won the “lottery” and got an undiagnosed “heart condition” that killed him slowly until Death came to finally see him. John and Jeff, certainly in ASIP, make us question as Sherlock does whether or not this man has outlived four people because of chance, luck, genius, or the grace of god. It certainly would be a stroke of genius to put subtle Sheppey references into the otherwise canonically American character in order to foreshadow the main character’s similar fatalistic escape from inevitable death.
The last thing that stands out about Sheppey is that the man Sheppey is named after the place he was born. When Death comes at last to the asylum to take him, Sheppey tells Death:
I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn’t ‘ave thought of looking for me there.
Sometimes, to solve a case, one must first solve another.
Revisiting Old Cases
There are more examples of drivers and various transport that I have skipped past or only briefly discussed, but in order to do them justice we will need to go on several detours. There are particular motifs echoing throughout the show in consistent ways. Some can be analyzed more closely while others I will present without much comment. My goal is to present these patterns to either make you aware or remind you of them, so later we can pull them together in a cohesive narrative.
The Foreign Traveler
If the through-line of John on a plane in Series 4 isn’t enough to convince you that John is travelling/has traveled somewhere important (literally and metaphorically)…
…then I’ll helpfully provide a list of other John mirrors that travel or are implied to have traveled.
- Sir Geoffrey Patterson and Jennifer Wilson — yes all of the victims traveled in a cab, but not all were coming from or going to a different city. These two are most important.
- All of the Banker-Smugglers in TBB, especially Eddie Van Coon
- Banker Ian Monkford used Janus Cars to disappear to South America in TGG.
- Body left in trunk in ASIB (Limbless torso left in trunk in a TST case too)
- the Hiker from ASIB
- Charlie returned home from Tibet
- Ajay
The Smuggler Thief
I bolded the word smuggler above, because it connects the threads of the foreign traveler and a theme of break-ins/locked room mysteries.
For emphasis, John-mirror banker Eddie Van Coon, smuggled artifacts home but brought with him something he stole, something that had a value he did not comprehend until it was too late. Also, Van Coon’s flat was broken into and his murder was made to look like a suicide, foreshadowing something surely. Along with Van Coon’s thievery in stealing the jade pin, the inciting incident for TBB is a banker (foil for John) wanting Sherlock to investigate an unusual break-in. Unusual because they didn’t actually steal anything, only left a message. There are other notable break-ins in the show, the waters gang for example, but the series of break-ins in TRF matter the most since Moriarty never steals anything. It’s all done to prove that he can and to get Sherlock’s attention.
A particular “break in” I want to highlight early on is the one by the Americans in ASIB who were after the phone. The emotional context leading into this scene is Sherlock learning key information about John’s feelings, before arriving home to discover that someone else he loves has been threatened to get to him (and his heart). It’s notable that John and Mrs. Hudson are aligned in similar ways as pressure points in this episode/series, so it’s an intentional choice to have Mrs. Hudson secretly have the phone on her the whole time. When she says, “I managed to sneak it out when they thought I was having a cry,” it reminds me of this moment with Faith:
Faith: I can’t remember. Can’t remember who you’re gonna kill.
Culverton: Dear, in five minutes you won’t even remember why you were crying. The others are all fine.
It always stood out to me that Culverton took the note from her, yet “Faith” has it to bring to Sherlock — given that these are all John mirrors, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss this as simply Eurus’ antics. She gives an awfully convenient explanation at the end of the episode which is purposely not satisfactory. There is still the initial viewing experience where it could feel like a plot hole to the untrained eye. However, the weight that the Note motif is given between TST and TLD, the Chekhov’s gun set up, should make us consider an instance of them presenting us with 1+ 2 = 1 + 1 + 1.
Perhaps, John seemed to have been “having a cry,” wrote down information while he could still remember, and left with it while not fully understanding its value. However, exactly like Mrs. Hudson hiding the phone or Jennifer Wilson planting the phone on the killer and leaving a note, John giving a mysterious note at the end of TST points to what he has cleverly smuggled home (figuratively if not literally) without Mary/whoever else realizing it until he has already given it away. This is exactly what Eddie Van Coon did with the jade pin.
The American
I’d also like to remind you of all the strategic references to America:
- First one of importance: Sherlock deducing Mary could be from America (or spent time there perhaps, who knows)
- “5 orange pips originating from America” — Thomas and Sir Eustace
- Mary’s American accent on the plane in TST
- Reference to the American embassy and president in TST and a plan to manipulate someone with drugs to use them as a “pawn”
- HOUND Scientist bad guy who said “cell phone” because of time spent in America — created a memory altering drug, leaving its users “incredibly suggestible”
- The American CIA in ASIB going after Irene’s phone. Irene is American in canon, but it’s significant that she’s not in the show. The CIA is instead.
- American traveler in ASIP who was a ‘red herring’ for Jeff Hope, who was from America in canon
- Thatcher busts were made in “Georgia.” We are told this out loud and we see it’s Tbilisi, so the country Georgia. However, given my first guess would be state not country and well…everything fishy and American about TST…I’m including it anyway.
- Craig, the hacker who told us this previous information, also got into “serious trouble with the Americans”
Bluebell
An important thread that connects the three episodes of Series 4 is the new glowing skull that is starkly and inexplicably different from the previous three seasons. Early interpretations considered that it could indicate whether or not someone was lying on screen or if something is true, but in my opinion this is too broad and the skull painting features too infrequently for this to be definitively proven. It occurred to me that perhaps the skull becomes brighter when indicating something to do with a drug-induced state and involving a particular memory — “bluebell” essentially.
“TD-12. Sells mainly to dentists and hospitals for minor surgical procedures. Interferes with the memory.”
TLD and THOB are opposite each other within a five act structure’s symmetry. The theme of THOB was a man whose memory of his father’s death was manipulated by the H.O.U.N.D. drug in the surrounding fog, which turned the human killer into a vicious dog — “a hound” but his real memory was still somewhere in his brain. As an adult in therapy he actively worked to recover his memory of the event thus the clue: “Liberty, In[diana].” The answer to what the “hound” drug is, was classified information only accessible at the Baskerville base by the conservative, potential mirror for John’s father, Major Barrymore. His password being “Maggie” (Margaret Thatcher) has a significant connection to Series 4 and is heavily associated with Mary’s supposed backstory.
The information uncovered about the hound drug:
Project HOUND: a new deliriant drug which rendered its users incredibly suggestible. They wanted to use it as an anti-personnel weapon to totally disorientate the enemy using fear and stimulus, but they shut it down and hid it away in 1986.
TAB helpfully foreshadows John’s paranoia in the following scene:
Mycroft: Our way of life is under threat from an invisible enemy, one that hovers at our elbow on a daily basis. These enemies are everywhere, undetected and unstoppable . . . Is there any large body of people you’re not concerned about?
Holmes: Doctor Watson is endlessly vigilant. Elaborate.
…
Watson: The Scots.
Holmes: Scots?
Mycroft: Are you aware of recent theories concerning what is known as ‘paranoia’?
Watson: Ooh, sounds Serbian.
Mycroft: A woman will call on you — Lady Carmichael. I want you to take her case.
Watson: But these enemies: how are we to defeat them if you won’t tell us about them?
Mycroft: We don’t defeat them. We must certainly lose to them.
The enemies in relation to Lady Carmichael are other ‘brides,’ other versions of ‘vengeful ghosts’ that all add up to John’s invisible enemies through endless self-rebirth throughout Series 4. Mycroft tells Sherlock something in TAB, that in my opinion, equally applies to John (suicidal, alone, and strapped for cash):
A week in a prison cell. I should have realised. . .That in your case, solitary confinement is locking you up with your worst enemy.
“Bluebell” the rabbit was also a significant subplot thread which acted as a symbol for the episode’s “down the rabbit hole” conspiracy theme and an example of the ‘actually innocent’ kind of experiments that occur at Baskerville itself. The “down the rabbit hole” phrase that bluebell the rabbit reminds the audience of gets its origin from Alice in Wonderland. Alice follows the white rabbit down the rabbit hole into a world of nonsense and absurdity. “Alice” and “the white rabbit” are common terms referring to psychedelics and in media are shorthand for drug use, which is certainly present in THOB. As a children’s book, this interpretation was likely not intended. Rather, Alice in Wonderland is a silly, “nonsense” book whose protagonist was a child about to grow up, so many people interpret the stories as an identity crisis.
Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
— “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
Wendy Doniger, who wrote “Self-Impersonation in World Literature,” cited the sequel: Through the Looking-Glass, as an alternate fatalist story where it is not Death she is trying to get away from, but herself.
The phrase, “Appointment in Samarra,” has come to signify the inevitability of death, but there are also other appointments from which we flee in vain, other selves from which we try, futilely, to escape as Alice tried to get out of the Looking-Glass house, only to find that every path that seemed to lead out into the garden, in fact brought her back into the door of the house.
In our stories, this particular brand of fatalism argues that the hope of getting away from oneself is always doomed to failure.
— Doniger
Henry Knight — a strong John mirror to begin with based on his looks and the fact that he goes to therapy alone — grows up strongly associating a traumatic childhood event with his identity. His memory of it, however, has been altered and he feels he has lost touch with reality. Since he cannot prove his experiences to be true or provide another alternative that makes sense to him, he descends further into his psychological torment and eventually becomes suicidal. He lives in a kind of Looking-Glass House and in his psychosis imagines the vicious dog in his own reflection.
In Henry’s next scene, he is running away from the ‘hound’ — his memory and manifested fears coming to get him. Metaphorically, he is running from himself. I believe John is too, though it’s not apparent until Series 4. THOB focuses the narrative within the episode as an important journey through fear for Sherlock going into TRF, while simultaneously foreshadowing John’s storyline — his Fall. It set up the “Hound” drug (TD-12, essentially) in strong connection with altered memories and, of course, Bluebell the rabbit.
“Before Bluebell disappeared, it turned luminous “like a fairy” according to little Kirsty. Then the next morning, Bluebell was gone! Hutch still locked, no sign of a forced entry.”
“You’ve never been the most luminous of people, but as a conductor of light you are unbeatable.”
Bluebell turned luminous because of a Jellyfish: “It was the GFP gene from a jellyfish, in case you’re interested.” The ‘jellyfish’ being the culprit for a crime comes up in TST if you recall.
There is a difference between looking away and looking to.
Through the Looking-Glass
There are general parallels to be made between the absurdity of Series 4, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, not just in comparison between THOB and TLD, but also in TFP. A lot of that is there because of the already strong Brechtian/Beckett influence. So who knows what came first, the chicken or egg? Chess, while an important motif in Alice and Looking-Glass, was not the primary inspiration for its use in the show. Regardless, Wonderland provides the perfect combination of both absurdism, used to instruct the reader about logic itself, and a wide reaching influence in pop culture which the writers can reference.
When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole, did reason and logic go with her?
. . . [Lewis Carroll] was a mathematician, a logician, and a teacher. In addition to writing two books on logic for a general audience — Symbolic Logic and The Game of Logic — he also invented and discussed several logical paradoxes. I believe we can see Carroll as both teacher and logician in Alice’s adventures, and that there are lessons in logic for us to discover in Wonderland.
— David S. Brown, “Reasoning Down the Rabbit-Hole: Logical Lessons in Wonderland”It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Alice need leave behind all that she has learned about Wonderland, or that her experiences have nothing to teach us. Wonderland presents us with a weird sort of parallel Earth where our expectations fail us and we must figure out everything anew. In doing so, we come to see the importance of inductive reasoning for surviving our daily lives, for uncovering the nature of the world around us, and for understanding one another.
— Brendan Shea, “Three Ways of Getting it Wrong: Induction in Wonderland”[Alice’s] use of evidence about past events to predict and control the future course of nature is prototypical of scientific reasoning, and gives some idea of just how important prediction is to our every day lives. Humpty Dumpty, who by contrast seems fairly competent at deductive logic, provides a good example of a poor inductive reasoner. When Alice first encounters Humpty, he is singing a song about how all the King’s men won’t be able to put him back together again. When questioned by Alice, however, Humpty seems oblivious to the obvious predictive relevance of such a song, and refuses to move from his precarious perch. Humpty, despite his argumentative acumen, seems destined for a poor end.
— Brendan Shea, “Three Ways of Getting it Wrong: Induction in Wonderland”
Your death is the only thing that’s gonna call off the killers. I’m certainly not gonna do it. . .your big brother and all the King’s horses couldn’t make me do a thing I didn’t want to.
The fatalist escape from fate and the self is the main parallel I can draw between Alice and Series 4. The glowing skull functions as the figurative rabbit our protagonist follows down the rabbit hole in his paradoxical escape from/search for himself.
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
— “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
I that am lost, oh who will find me?
Deep down below the old beech tree.
Help succour me now the east winds blow.
Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go! (x)
Additionally, Moriarty’s omnipresence in TFP is comparable to the Red Queen (Looking-Glass). Is it an unrelated coincidence that they used a Queen song for his entrance? The crown jewels in TRF?
Moriarty provides an atmosphere of anxiety towards Time and Fate. They are wrapped up in each other as we attempt to escape our inevitable fate against the clock. Time is a nebulous idea that is difficult for humans to wrap their brains around or measure, yet we try to anyway and are thrust forward through space and time on the train of life — a predetermined path as John believes he is on and cannot escape from. In Alice in Wonderland, the most famous character, besides Alice, is arguably the Rabbit. He is constantly running away from her, because he is checking his watch to say: “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!” He is so anxious about time because of The Queen. The rabbit that John is chasing will not slow down for him to catch it, though it is always visible and just out of reach.
Memories can resurface. Wounds can re-open. The roads we walk have demons beneath and yours have been waiting for a very long time.
The Memory Drive
It is important to recognize that the rabbit John is chasing is both his identity and — parallel to Henry in THOB — his memory. They are inextricable.
Our memories form the basis of who we are, and the accumulation of our past experience in turn determines our capacity to relate our past to our present. Alice’s sense of self is shaken by this line of thinking, but a solution soon occurs to her: “I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know.” This in turn raises another important question: are we the same person if we can remember who we were yesterday? Or five minutes ago? Conversely, are we a different person if we cannot remember what we thought we knew yesterday? The answers to these questions have significant implications for memory and its relation to self-identity.
Like Alice, we have a need to understand our memory and, in turn, our own selves. Memory both shapes and is shaped by our sense of self. Memories are deeply personal, and in turn help define us as persons.
The philosophical implications of this type of self-scrutiny become evident as Augustine pursues this line of thinking further in wondering about the mind that thinks about itself: “Does it become its own twin, as it were, one staying here in order to do the viewing, the other moving there in order to be viewed, so it can be inside itself when seeing and in front of itself when seen.” Alice’s habit of thinking of herself as two different people in fact parallels that very same split sense of self that we experience during the act of memory.
— Tyler Shores, “‘Memory and Muchness’: Alice and the Philosophy of Memory,” Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy (2010)
Perhaps it is no wonder that John splits his identity into “two faces.”
As was the case with Henry Knight and (what seems to be) Sherlock in TFP, what started out as a search for a forgotten memory turns into a search for an identity. Who am I supposed to kill? Who would I kill?
Faith: One word, Mr. Holmes and it changed my world forever. Just one word.
Sherlock: What word?
Faith: A name.
Sherlock: What name?
Faith: I can’t remember.
The rabbit which follows us and John around Series 4 to say: “Remember who you are,” takes the form of the ever frustratingly noticeable, glowing skull. The word “luminous” is highly specific and used in relation to both Bluebell and John — no coincidence here and neither is the fact that the skull suddenly “turned luminous.” The glowing skull is a less obvious way of evoking the Bluebell/follow the rabbit narrative without actually forcing a rabbit into the show. In the “TD-12” episode where Sherlock goes on a drug bender, the skull on the wall is naturally…
…luminous.
The luminous skull appears first throughout TST as John’s narrative brings in numerous clients to help Sherlock/the audience deduce what has happened. The note that Faith brings to 221B in TLD is a more literal and/or smaller scale version of what John is going through in Series 4 as he is nearing the truth. He believes he’s been drugged and whatever it was, like Hound, it “rendered its users incredibly suggestible.” Whatever was suggested (the memory of it) is somewhere in his brain he just can’t remember it exactly. Every time something is brought up more relevant as a clue to the memory he’s chasing, the skull gets brighter.
The first time we see the skull in the background (pictured on the left above), it is distinctly different than we are used to seeing it. It’s not especially bright nor distracting, though it’s not totally blacked out like it is in this scene:
— meaning the first case is important, it just doesn’t provide the most blatant clues. In combination with on-screen text and dialogue, we are told the following:
THE CARDIAC ARREST:
“Joel Fentiman was found strangled in the bedsit he shared with his brother. They had always got on well and there was no sign that this situation had changed…”— The heart medication you are taking is known to cause bouts of amnesia.
— Yes, um…I think so. Why?
— Because the fingerprints on your brother’s neck are your own.
Was the brother perhaps a…(secret) twin?
“…we could never have known there was a potential assassin lurking close by. An assassin who turned out to be…”
John: A jellyfish?!
Sherlock: I know.
John: You can’t arrest a jellyfish!
Sherlock: Well, you could try.
John: We did try.
The second time we see the skull significantly in the background, Lestrade sits in the client’s chair, and tells us about Charlie “the ghost driver,” which hints at the truth that John is meant to eventually kill himself and die in a disguise of his own making. This version of the skull is brighter than before, but as we see a full view of the room, it doesn’t overly distract the viewer. It is not nearly as bright as when the other client visits — in the same scene as the “Me-substitute.”
Notice how below, it is staged exactly the same, with notable differences. There’s no sunlight coming in through the back window. John is absent except for his Me-substitute (the balloon or the client? or both?). Now, the skull stands out in stark contrast to a darker wall than above. To say it’s eye-catching is to put it mildly.
We learn about our client’s wife:
You thought she was having an affair. I’m afraid it’s far worse than that. Your wife is a spy. That’s right. Her real name is Greta Bengtsdotter. Swedish by birth and probably the most dangerous spy in the world. She’s been operating deep undercover for the past four years now as your wife for one reason only: to get near the American embassy which is across the road from your flat. Tomorrow the US president will be at the embassy as part of an official state visit. As the president greets members of staff, Greta Bengtsdotter, disguised as a twenty-two stone cleaner, will inject the president in the back of the neck with a dangerous new drug hidden inside a secret compartment inside her padded armpit. This drug will then render the president entirely susceptible to the will of their new master, none other than James Moriarty…Moriarty will then use the president as a pawn to destabilise the United Nations General Assembly…
It is played off as a joke — an over the top exaggeration, which it is, but just like the rest of Series 4 there are nuggets of truth.
At this point in the plot there had been mentions of a red herring: “black pearl of the Borgias.” Mycroft has mentioned it to Sherlock, who feigns disinterest, but later looks it up anyway. Lestrade comes to 221B and talks to Hopkins — who’s there to mention the Pearl — while Sherlock is with the Me-substitute client. Sherlock says the Pearl is “boring” supposedly and Lestrade is there to give Sherlock another broken Thatcher bust. We are lead to believe, despite Sherlock calling it boring, that the busts are being broken because of the pearl in order for the twist later on when it is the Agra drive. Relating this to Mary/Agra, we get this lovely shot composition with the skull directly behind the bust:
In TLD, we are presented with our next mystery via the Note that Faith — the most blatant Me-Substitute for John — is coming to Sherlock to solve.
At this point John knows what happened to him generally, but the skull is dimmed, because he does not know why. What was he suggested to do? What is the name of the person Faith’s father, Culverton (aka Dark John mirror) wanted to kill?
Faith: One word, Mr. Holmes and it changed my world forever. Just one word.
Sherlock: What word?
Faith: A name.
Sherlock: What name?
Faith: I can’t remember.
The bloodied Me we are shown on the note, provides our most likely answer, though on-screen Sherlock explains it away, because Author John doesn’t actually know the answer. He is subconsciously hiding the truth from himself or actively in denial. Sherlock looks at the note and explains to Faith and us what John already knows he’s done. Faith/John smeared blood over “Me” the “very first night,” when the note was written out and the memories not totally gone. This next line: “I think you discovered that pain stimulated your memory, so you tried it again later,” his deduction that “Faith” had scars indicating self-harm right before the on-screen flashback to suicidal John in ASIP, plus the bloodied hand John explains away to Lestrade later this episode…all suggests that John is the one who has self-harmed in order to stimulate his memory.
Another clue comes up in this scene to suggest John traveling to America, when Sherlock for no real reason asks about something he deduced, that Faith arrived in a taxi, in an otherwise unnecessary way.
Faith: Do you ever look in the mirror and want to see someone else?
Sherlock: No. Do you own an American car? Not American, left hand drive.
The fact that it’s a car here should give us pause, given what I have already explained regarding its inherent significance. The “American” comment additionally has no other meaning that we know of so far, but it has only strengthened my interpretation that Culverton’s random America reference is likely not about the current (as of its airing in 2017) American politics. John-as-Culverton is confessing the truth that he’s chasing. He wants to get to the memory [drive] to protect himself and go after Mary. He is just not yet confessing why.
It’s funny, I…I never realized confessing would be so enjoyable. I should have done it sooner . . . but with this…I can break America.
With the exception of the ending montage scenes of TFP, the only scene where the skull features prominently is when Mycroft has become the client and has come to discuss Eurus — John’s other face — and Sherlock’s supposed suppressed memory of her. We are also told: “This is a lie!” and “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.” There’s only so many opportunities for the skull to appear in the background, but by now it should have served its purpose. John falls further down the rabbit hole into a world of absurdity, chasing the rabbit of self-truth and memory until he gets to the very bottom of the well and discovers it—the luminous skull and answer in one:
Victor Trevor, Sherlock’s “friend,” was killed by John’s other face, Eros — John killing himself.
You knew he’d take his revenge. His revenge apparently is me.
On some level, John recognizes the way in which he is being used as a “pawn” or puppet to get to Sherlock — exactly like the 5th pip in TGG.
Sherlock: Brought you a little getting-to-know-you present. Oh, that’s what it’s all been for, hasn’t it? All your little puzzles, making me dance — all to distract me from this.
John: Evening. This is a turn-up, isn’t it, Sherlock? Bet you never saw this coming. What…would you like me…to make him say…next? Gottle o’ geer … gottle o’ geer…gottle o’ geer.
In TGG, the “memory stick” was stolen from Andrew West by the bicycle riding John mirror, Joe Harrison. They fight and in their struggle Joe accidentally pushes Andrew — the Secret Twin — down a flight of stairs. He effectively kills himself over a “memory” and kills Sherlock inadvertently. John may realize he is meant to kill Sherlock which is why he is stopping himself from doing so directly as is the case with Culverton. He ultimately refuses to assimilate someone like Culverton into his identity. John has a split sense of self, but does not yet realize he is actually “three people.”
You! Or me?
You’re me. You’re me! Thank you! Sherlock Holmes. Thank you. Bless you. As long as I’m alive, you can save your friends. You’ve got a way out. Well, good luck with that.
My husband is three people.
I successfully proved to Lestrade that at the time of a particularly vicious triple murder, Angelo was in a completely different part of town…car-jacking.
— Unaired Pilot
In the aired episode, ASIP, the line is changed to house breaking, but the rest of the line is the same.
The wheel turns. Nothing is ever new.
The Wheel of Samsara
“59 missed calls,” as the wheel turns and another story is recycled and rebirthed. John’s substitute/mask is reincarnated over and over until he can no longer do it in death — “liberty in death…the only true freedom,” hence JW’s baby (ASIP) and perhaps John’s newest and truest self…is stillborn.
These stories tell us not merely that we can’t run away from some impersonal fate, some malevolent gods, some old ladies snipping threads up in Zeus’s heaven or a veiled woman who makes a sign to us across a crowded marketplace, but that we cannot run away from ourselves, from the people we are now; we cannot become someone else. When we have a chance to pretend, to become someone else, we still end up as the selves we were, reinventing the same wheel — the wheel that is the metaphor that Hindus and Buddhists use for the process of reincarnation, the cycle of samsara.
— Wendy Doniger, “Self-Impersonation in World Literature”
The cycle of Samsara is thematically consistent with John’s character arc in Series 4 and with the show as one in a sea of many adaptations that have recycled the same stories with a bit of fresh paint. They always try to do something a little different, to “change” just enough to keep audience’s attention while the core of it stays exactly the same.
The deeper you dig the more consistent it felt, but it did not take long to connect the Buddhist wheel of Samsara to Tibetan Buddhism. What I’d previously considered a misdirection for Charlie as a Sherlock mirror, now serves to further cement TST as John’s own “Fall.” Charlie, the ghost driver, had naturally returned from Tibet.
Charlie: I’m in Tibet! Didn’t you see the mountains?
David: Look, never mind mountains. Your mother wants to know if you’re eating properly.
Charlie: Listen, Dad, could you do me a favour?
David: What?
Charlie: Could you just check something on my car?
David: Your car?
Additionally, the Buddha famously achieved enlightenment while meditating under a tree — a cross cultural symbol of life.
John: . . .So did she have it too? . . . The deduction thing.
Mycroft: “The deduction thing”?
John: Yes
Mycroft: More than you can know.
John: Enlighten me.
“He’s always losing things down the back of the sofa, aren’t you, dear?. . .Keys, small change, sweeties. Especially his glasses.”
“Glasses, glasses. Nathan wears glasses. . .So that leaves us with Alex. Indentations on the temples suggest he habitually wears glasses.”
“He’s shortsighted, or he was. His recent laser surgery has done the trick.”
He has created an unassailable architecture of forbidden knowledge. Its name…is Appledore.
After his enlightenment, the Buddha reached Nirvana, never to be reincarnated again. Samsara — the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth — is connected to the Buddhist teachings of suffering. According to the BBC’s bitesize guides to Religious Studies:
Suffering comes in many forms. In Buddhism there are three main types of suffering:
The first is linked to the first three sights the Buddha saw on his first journey outside his palace: old age, sickness and death. This is the suffering of painful experiences, including unsatisfied desires.
The Buddha also taught that suffering goes much deeper than these three things. Suffering is also caused by constant change. People constantly lose the things and situations to which they become attached.
Thirdly, even when people are not immediately suffering, they are unsatisfied because they are not enlightened. This is the truth of suffering.
This “truth of suffering” (Dukkah) is the first of the Four Noble Truths:
The Four Noble Truths are a summary of the Buddha’s teachings. It is these truths that the Buddha taught to his first disciples after he was enlightened.
1. Dukkha — the truth of suffering.
2. Samudaya — the truth of the origin of suffering.
3. Nirodha — the truth of the cessation (end) of suffering.
4. Magga — the truth of the path to the cessation (end) of suffering.
The second, the truth of the origin of suffering, is the aforementioned unsatisfied desire. The roots of suffering and evil are referred to as the three fires or three poisons.
In the fire sermons, desire is comparable to fire. “All is burning.”
The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. (x)
If you don’t stop prying, I’ll burn you. I’ll burn the heart out of you.
and the third noble truth:
Cessation of suffering (Nirodha)
The Buddha taught that the way to extinguish desire, which causes suffering, is to liberate oneself from attachment.
This is the third Noble Truth — the possibility of liberation.
The Buddha was a living example that this is possible in a human lifetime.
So, liberty in death? Not at all.
The Fourth Noble Truth:
Path to the cessation of suffering (Magga)
The final Noble Truth is the Buddha’s prescription for the end of suffering. This is a set of principles called the Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path is also called the Middle Way: it avoids both indulgence and severe asceticism, neither of which the Buddha had found helpful in his search for enlightenment.
Abstinence is not immortality
The Middle Way is the only way to free oneself from the endless cycle of samsara and of suffering. Otherwise the changing of masks will continue forever; the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson will be recycled until they burn out, and without ever being the truth.
The end of Series 4 displays an author and story which has not yet realized the fourth truth or taken that path. John — with two faces, choosing between two pills like Jennifer Wilson — is stuck between the extremes of indulgence and ascetism. In other words, he will not “indulge” in the one thing he wants but deems himself unworthy of, nor can he bear to deprive himself of it any longer. Sherlock is also stuck between two extremes (head vs heart), but he is the one who must make the final move — to answer the call.
We must be careful not to burn our bridges.
— TLD
Acknowledgements
Special thanks, of course, to Kira for the many lengthy conversations. Thanks to Rachel and Fabi for beta reading as well as Amy, Char, devoursjohnlock, Erin and many more for the inspiration and support. All show transcript quotes come from Arianedevere. Source for majority of screencaps.
