Bond, Hannibal, and Holmes
How BBC Sherlock defines the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes.
Contents
[Recommended Reading: Poetry or Truth? Part One and Part Two, BBC Sherlock: A Drama In Five Acts]
I. The Blunt Instrument
II. The Bond Thesis
III. The Scalpel
IV. The Hannibal Thesis
V. Being, Nothing, Becoming
In the previous meta, I introduced John Yorke and his five-act story structure. I gave a few (hopefully familiar) examples to illustrate how we can feel instinctively that a three-dimensional, Hegelian story is deeper and more affecting than a two-dimensional, Kantian story. I also sketched out what BBC Sherlock might look like if it were following Yorke’s template.
But the question of whether BBC Sherlock is following Yorke’s template is still rather loosely addressed.
The most obvious step toward answering this question would be the appearance of a fifth season: the fifth — and therefore final — act. But the announcement of a fifth season, while necessary to follow Yorke’s template, does not give us sufficient information on its own as to whether they are following Yorke’s template. Any further season will necessarily be the fifth season, whether or not the writers have ever given a passing thought to John Yorke.
So we need a more specific test. One such question, and one that we can test before a fifth series is announced, is: does each series form a dialectic triad? Can we identify a coherent argument — a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — across the three episodes of any season of the show?
We know that the fourth act, specifically, functions as the ‘synthesis of the antithesis’ of the argument that the overall story is making, the culmination of all things wrong within the story, a wrongness that won’t be resolved until act five.
There are a lot of reasons why you might say that S4 is the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes. You might also say that none of those reasons inspire you to believe that grievous wrong was done just so that it might be righted in the next series.
You might say S4 felt less like an argument and more like a load of nonsense.
But, if we can find the pattern within the apparent nonsense of S4, and if we can decode the argument contained within that pattern, we can:
- be far more confident in our assumption that they are following Yorke’s model, with all its implications for symmetry, fractal structure, and most crucially, how S5 will ‘synthesize’ and resolve the previous four, and
- be equally confident in our interpretation of what the argument of the show is, because we have identified it on the deepest structural level possible.
In other words: successfully decrypting a code (the show) confirms both the cipher (Yorke’s book) and the message (TJLC).
So. Is the show really making an intelligible argument within this framework? What does the show say are the two opposites? What is the message?
What is the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes? How exactly has everyone been getting it wrong?
And because S4 is the culmination of all things not properly Sherlock Holmes, my approach to answering these questions begins with an examination of the two things in S4 most glaringly out of place in a Sherlock Holmes story: James Bond and horror movies.
“It’s a little bit James Bond I guess; it’s a little bit horror movie.”
— Steven Moffat, post-s4 interview for Vulture, January 17, 2017 (x)
I. The Blunt Instrument
The canon of Sherlock Holmes consists of 56 original stories and 4 novels. These have been repeatedly adapted in film, and have spawned thousands of pastiches, homages, and inspired-bys created over the course of more than a century. All of these together create an enormous body of fiction that has been meticulously mined for gems of significance and meaning by Mark and Moff to pavé the crown of their passion project opus.
With this sheer volume of raw material to work from, it has never been clear to me why the writers would make reference after reference after reference to James Bond.
MOFFAT: In all the chatter, we’ve probably forgotten that both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, in their literary originals, belong to the same genre of the smart British person going into battle against evil fiends. (x)
Bond is British, yes. Iconic, sure. Bond and Holmes are both routinely conscripted to serve as sexy, cool fictional ambassadors of quintessential English masculinity to the rest of the world. There are comparisons to be made, certainly, but why would two self-confessed Holmes fanboys nod to Bond so frequently as to suggest they’d rather be working on a different franchise altogether?
A critic for The Guardian used their entire review to compare the episode unfavorably to James Bond (x), inspiring Mark Gatiss to pen a poetic retort in the spirit of Doyle himself (x):
In his poem, Mark argues that Holmes has always been a “man of action”, saying, “There’s no need to invoke […] Her Majesty’s Secret Servant with licence to kill.”
Which is true! It’s absolutely true. There’s no need to invoke James Bond. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t need to use Bond to pad his resume or prove his swagger.
Which is why it’s incredibly suspicious that the remaining two episodes of S4 repeatedly and brazenly invoke Bond anyway.
The references to James Bond films throughout Sherlock are frequent, overt, and undeniably intentional. They’ve been enumerated before, but I’ll lay them out here. Everyone remembers Flight 007, a.k.a. ‘Bond Air’ from ASIB. The Flight of the Dead.
Many people pointed out that Sherlock’s return to London in S3 called back to the same shot of London in Skyfall (2012).
In S4, we not only revisit the Flight of the Dead, but the Bond references escalate across the board.
The first episode, TST, is the motherlode of James Bond parallels. Not only is TST generally chock full of extended fight scenes, shootouts, and exotic hideaways, but it shamelessly borrows specifically from modern Bond era’s Casino Royale (2006) and Skyfall (2012), things as specific as:
- crashing into an embassy, guns blazing…
- … in order to retrieve a hard drive with the identifying details of multiple embedded spies…
- … or showdowns eerily back-lit by fluorescent jellyfish…
- … or just the good old MI6 building.
S4 serves up plenty of old-school iconic Bond imagery too, including:
- a riff on the signature gun barrel sequence that has appeared in almost every Bond film since Dr. No (1962):
- A memorable villain like Jaws, known for his metallic smile:
- A twist on the ubiquitous Bond Girl, forever emerging from swimming pools for no plot-related reason:
In the DVD special features for TLD, they make a point of highlighting how the stunt drivers in TLD’s lavish, helicopter-filmed Aston Martin car chase scene also worked on all of the most recent Bond films.
But TFP really takes the cake, as the majority of the episode is set inside a veritable Bond villain’s lair. In the DVD special features, Arwel explains how he’s been “allowed” an homage:
Unfortunately we lost Ken Adam this year, the old designer of the great classic Bond movies, or quite a few of the Bond movies. I was allowed to have a little bit of an homage to him in Episode 3, because what was scripted essentially became a Bond villain’s lair, you know, so I got to kind of play with that a little bit.
Ken Adam, the designer Arwel names, was the set designer for seven classic Bond films. The inspiration for that distinctive circular grate, for instance, in the ceiling of Eurus’ cell can be seen in both Dr. No (1962) and You Only Die Twice (1967).
Arwel’s tribute to classic Bond is followed by another nod to modern Bond. Musgrave Hall is a dead ringer for Bond’s ancestral home seen in the climactic showdown of Skyfall (2012).
Sherlock composer David Arnold was apparently “allowed” his own homage to Bond as well. Arnold is a massive, lifelong fan of original Bond theme composer John Barry. Prior to his work on Sherlock, Arnold scored or otherwise worked on the music for five of the six most recent Bond films, and he even confirmed via Twitter that he reused a motif from his Casino Royale (2006) score in the score of TFP (x).
Considering all the direct references and explicit homages, the critic who compared TST to James Bond must have been either a plant, or the most satisfying spontaneous reaction to art ever recorded.
The discrete facts of these connections between Sherlock and Bond have been known for a long time, and it’s easy to blame them on the small, self-referential sphere of British film and television production when you consider each in isolation.
But when one franchise bleeds into the other to the extent that critics not only begin to call you out on the similarities, and not only do you respond to said critics publicly and in irreverent verse, but everyone involved in the production of your show takes every possible opportunity from DVD behind-the-scenes content, to post-finale interviews, to direct responses to fans on Twitter to confirm that yes, we were thinking about James Bond when we made that artistic choice, it becomes clear that this is less about a subconscious love affair with big explosions and much more about pointedly and specifically inviting the comparison of your own work with James Bond.
So, at this point, you have my full attention. What on earth does BBC Sherlock have to say about Sherlock Holmes in the context of James Bond?
II. The Bond Thesis
Now, for this to make any sense, some sort of meaning must be extracted from the comparison of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.
And because, according to Yorke, the fourth act represents the antithesis of the argument being made within a story, we can also reasonably hypothesize that some aspect of James Bond is meant to represent the antithesis of a corresponding aspect of Sherlock Holmes.
With this hypothesis in mind, there are a few potential points of comparison invited by the Bond references found in BBC Sherlock.
The first characteristics of Bond we’ll consider for comparison are the ones raised by Yorke himself.
Yorke has a lot to say about Bond.
Bond & The Two-dimensional Multiplex Hero
Bond is a particular kind of character; he is the refined, simplified, hydrogenated bastardization of a deeper archetype. […] Bond is two-dimensional because he doesn’t change; he has a dimension removed so we may repeatedly enjoy him.
To Yorke, James Bond represents character stasis. Bond, the ‘multiplex hero’, is the example that Yorke uses for a flat, unchanging character. Every Bond story or film has a Kantian, two-dimensional ending: he is never changed by his missions, he never learns anything about himself. Mission after mission, the thesis is restored.
It makes him 100% recyclable as a character.
What’s more, Yorke compares this static ‘multiplex hero’ explicitly to serialized detective stories. To suggest that Sherlock Holmes is like James Bond is, by Yorke’s assessment, to say that Holmes is a static, recyclable character.
It doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to call the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre a multiplex franchise — there are, after all, 56 stories and 4 novels in the canon, not to mention the ever-growing number of adaptations and pastiches. Bond is the representation of the idea that Sherlock Holmes is immortal because he is reusable, and that he is reusable because he is unchanging, and that he is unchanging because the stories are about solving the cases, and not ever about solving Sherlock himself.
A flat series of two-dimensional detective stories, not ‘a story about a detective’.
JIM: Ah. Here we are at last — you and me, Sherlock, and our problem — the final problem. Stayin’ alive! It’s so boring, isn’t it? It’s just … staying.
It’s just stasis.
Bond & The Creation Myth
So the first possible point of comparison is the idea that Sherlock Holmes is a static character. The second point of comparison is related to this concept of Bond and stasis, but distinct. It’s essentially the caveat to Yorke’s characterization of Bond as a character with only two dimensions.
There have been periodic attempts to give Bond more depth — On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Casino Royale, and Skyfall. The latter two are effectively creation myths, which allow the possibility of change, and the former is a love story which gives the scope for three dimensions too. Bond can only change so much, however, before he stops being Bond (see Chapter 20 for the problems inherent in change), so it will be interesting to see where the producers feel they can take him next. [Yorke]
In the most recent Bond movies, it has become the trend to try to explore what makes Bond tick, to construct his third dimension. Bond wants, Bond wants, but what does Bond need? The most recent Bond films are so enamored of the question of ‘what made you like this?’ that they have a new answer to it in almost every movie.
But really, it’s a question as old as the franchise itself. It was answered in the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale. What Bond wants is to do his job, complete his mission. What Bond needs… is love!
In Casino Royale (1953 novel and 2006 film), Bond falls deeply in love with Vesper Lynd, even chooses to leave his career with MI6 in order to be with her. But Vesper is a compromised agent, under the power of the villains who’ve captured her former lover. In both book and film, Vesper realizes there is no escape from the villains, and kills herself rather than allow herself to be used against Bond. Bond is devastated by her apparent betrayal and eventual death, and he learns here that for an MI6 agent, being emotionally compromised is the same as being literally compromised. The detached womanizer we know as Bond is a defense mechanism developed to prevent him from repeating his mistake.
An alternative creation myth is offered in Skyfall (2012). James Bond undergoes a full battery of physical and mental examinations before resuming duty after having been shot in the shoulder, swept over a waterfall, and assumed dead (the ouroboros of references boggles the mind). A psychological association test deems Bond as unfit for duty when he reacts emotionally to a trigger word: Skyfall. Skyfall Manor is the name of his ancestral home, and Bond’s reaction indicates to the psychologist his “pathological rejection of authority based on unresolved childhood trauma.” This trauma is ultimately revealed to be the death of his parents (as if a solitary childhood spent in a desolate estate in the ass-end of Scotland wouldn’t have been sufficiently traumatic).
So, functionally, yes: the Bond franchise is propelled solely by exotic locales, high-octane action sequences, and Bond’s bottomless sexual appetite. But either of these creation myths more or less explains the perpetual tragedy of James Bond: in his line of work, emotional entanglements — particularly romantic entanglements — make you vulnerable.
In most of the films (with the exception of the three-dimensional ones in the canon — On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Casino Royale and Skyfall), he doesn’t really want [the woman], just the sex she can provide. Bond’s uber-goal, as the film of Casino Royale underlines, is total, ruthless self-sufficiency. [Yorke]
The terrible irony of Bond being unable to form the very thing he’s named for — a bond.
“Sherlock knows he can’t have a relationship as enemies will use it against him.”
— Mark Gatiss, RadioTimes Festival 2015 (x)
Sherlock shares these same concerns with Bond, for all John’s attempts to humanize him, and thus sets himself up for the same tragedy. Caring about people doesn’t save them, or so says Sherlock. Sentiment is a defect found on the losing side. Just like Bond, Sherlock Holmes’ ‘want’ as a character is to solve cases, but his ‘need’ as a character is love. Romantic entanglement would complete him as a human being, closing his arc and finishing his story.
Bond & Queer-coding Villains
The last potential point of comparison is the Bond franchise’s treatment of gay characters. An article by Lauren Spungen in Film Matters Magazine (x) does a thorough job of documenting the troubling pattern of queer-coded Bond villains:
Christine Bold, a professor of English literature, notes about the franchise, “beauty, heterosexuality, and patriotism go together; ugliness, sexual ‘deviance’ and criminality are linked equally irresistibly” (174). Although Bold primarily focuses on the book series authored by Ian Fleming, sexually deviant villains have been present throughout the films. From one of the first installments, From Russia with Love (1963), to one of the most recent, Skyfall (2012), many of Bond’s enemies fall on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. (x)
Professor Bold is right: “beauty, heterosexuality, and patriotism go together; ugliness, sexual ‘deviance’ and criminality are linked equally irresistibly,” to the point where, in Goldfinger (1964), villainess and overt lesbian Pussy Galore betrays her boss at the same time as she is ‘converted’ to heterosexuality by Bond’s sexual overtures.
Even in modern films, Bond inevitably finds himself tied to a chair with a man unbuttoning his shirt, caressing his chest, rubbing his thighs, and exchanging playful banter like, “There’s a first time for everything.” (Though Bond, in 2012, is finally allowed the playful retort of, “What makes you think this is my first time?”)
This linkage of villainy, seduction, and homosexuality is still overt in the modern Bond franchise, and Moffat doesn’t shy away from emulating it in S4:
Every single James Bond villain is basically Moriarty. They all are. They really talk like Moriarty. They all get their personal styles from Moriarty, so there’s commonalities there that we’re not frightened of.
— Steven Moffat, post-s4 interview for Vulture, January 17, 2017 (x)
If “talk like Moriarty” and “get their personal styles from Moriarty” are code for “gay like Moriarty,” then we’re all on the same page. Between Irene and Jim, BBC Sherlock has certainly gotten its money’s worth from both the gay-villain-attempts-to-seduce-male-hero and career-lesbian-villain-makes-one-exception-for-male-hero tropes. If there’s an antithesis to be found here, we might consider Mary’s (relatively) successful heterosexual seduction of John Watson and the subtext that both marks her as a villain and links her to Moriarty.
But the most topical instance of homophobia in a Bond story is one that itself references Sherlock Holmes.
In what is probably Fleming’s most famous Bond novel, From Russia With Love, the Russian counter-intelligence agency SMERSH is reeling from a major defection and is desperate to regain international respect. Over a series of meetings, SMERSH decides they will achieve this goal by orchestrating an even more notorious spy scandal for one of their geopolitical foes. They further decide that England, and specifically James Bond as England’s hero, will be their most high-yield target. Throughout the first half of the novel, SMERSH discusses at length their express goal of destroying the English spirit by ‘destroying the myth of Sherlock Holmes’.
“Of course, most of their strength lies in the myth — in the myth of Scotland Yard, of Sherlock Holmes, of the Secret Service. We certainly have nothing to fear from these gentlemen. But this myth is a hindrance which it would be good to set aside.” [Fleming]
Scholars have suggested that From Russia With Love is the novel that more than any other establishes Bond as the modern St. George, patron saint of England, and whose swagger and machismo panders to the national ego that a post-war Britannia can still ‘swing above her weight’ in the global arena. The Russians enumerate Bond’s qualities, looking for a weakness to exploit, and commiserate that the last enemy spy they eliminated was easy prey on account of being gay, and Bond will be a tougher nut to crack because of his notorious weakness for women.
The parallel that is drawn between James Bond and St. George applies by extension to Sherlock Holmes, with the implication that the whole nation could be brought low by the mere suggestion that this single icon were a homosexual.
“‘[…] it is no good killing a man unless you also destroy his reputation. It will, of course, be easy to kill this man Bond. Any paid Bulgarian assassin would do it, if properly instructed. The second part of the operation, the destruction of this man’s character, is more important and more difficult.’” [Fleming]
With SMERSH’s insistence that, in order to ‘destroy the myth of Sherlock Holmes’, Bond must not just be killed but his reputation must be publicly destroyed and discredited, the shape of From Russia With Love appears to become highly visible in the plot of TRF. The Sherlock writers are certainly familiar enough with the story to have highlighted its connection to Sherlock Holmes — Mark Gatiss played Kronsteen in a BBC Radio production of From Russia With Love in 2012 (x).
The scheme ultimately chosen by SMERSH is to get Bond to fall in love with a beautiful young Russian spy and then stage both their deaths as an an apparent murder-suicide, exposing all at once Bond’s illicit relationship, catastrophic misjudgement, and betrayal of the British national interest. The plot to discredit Sherlock Holmes in TRF revolves around his intellectual prowess and honesty, making him out as a villain and the enemy of law and order.
By invoking this Bond story in TRF, the writers show an incredible self-awareness that a gay Holmes will be seen by many as an attack on their own national identity. Not only that, but the progression of Sherlock’s fall from grace echoes the actual historical trials of actual gay Victorian icon Oscar Wilde (x). The suggestion weighs heavy that, had SMERSH been tasked with destroying the reputation of Sherlock Holmes himself, they would have had to look no further than his lack of interest in women.
Taken as a whole, Bond offers us themes of resisting emotional attachment — and resisting the overtures of queer villains in particular — in order to fulfill a duty to the Crown and represent the Empire. When it comes to both his in-narrative and extra-narrative staying power, so long as Bond rejects these specific temptations and limits his liaisons to the heterosexual and disinterested, he lives to die another day.
III. The Scalpel
It’s a little bit James Bond I guess; it’s a little bit horror movie.
— Steven Moffat, January 17, 2017 (x)
Moffat and Gatiss have been equally frank about the horror influences in S4, though no single horror movie influence stands out as immediately as James Bond.
John is an apparent horror aficionado, name-dropping and nitpicking the difference between The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973). Mark Gatiss brought up Pennywise the Clown during the PBS Q&A apropos of nothing (x), though we later saw how TFP opened with Stephen King’s IT (1990) ’s melting projector slides and creepy clown. Much about Eurus brings to mind Samara and The Ring (2002) (x). The list goes on.
This is probably not a surprise, since no horror franchise in existence comes close to James Bond in terms of the sheer breadth of material and iconography to draw on. Therefore, because of this reality, I’m going to assume (and just bear with me for a moment, because ultimately this will be justified) that in order to balance the versatility of Bond as an intertext, all the references we observe to the horror genre are meant to be taken as a whole and together are designed to support a particular horror franchise that will emerge as the dominant second intertext to stand in contrast to James Bond.
I’m being coy, but you already know which one I’m talking about from the title of this analysis. The horror franchise I’m going to focus on as the dominant second intertext is Academy Award-winning horror-thriller film The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the cannibalistic serial killer it launched to fame, Hannibal Lecter.
So, first off. Can I defend Hannibal as the dominant horror intertext? Let’s try it.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is mentioned by name in TFP. Multiple critics have pointed out the similarities with the Hannibal franchise (x,x). When discussing horror film inspirations in a post-s4 interview, Moffat rejected the suggestion of Saw (he’s never seen it) and instead confirmed that Eurus’ prison cell is a direct homage to Hannibal’s cell in Silence (x). The scene borrows dialogue directly from Silence as well:
We’ve also seen Mark Gatiss confirm via Twitter (x) that the concept of the method of loci, i.e. Sherlock’s famous ‘mind palace’ technique, originally came from the sequel Hannibal (1999 novel/2001 film). This Twitter exchange from back in 2012 sends Hannibal way ahead of any other horror film in terms of deeply embedded intentional referencing. Sherlock’s mind palace is a significant innovation of BBC’s within the lore of Sherlock Holmes, and has thus far been pretty integral to the way the writers have told their story. At the same time they were planting the seeds of Bond Air back in S2, they were also introducing Sherlock’s mind palace and talking explicitly about tying their protagonist to Hannibal Lecter.
So far? Seems promising. To make the case for any further Hannibal references in S4, we’re going to need to step back for a moment to get our bearings within the whole of the Hannibal franchise.
The Hannibal franchise consists of four original novels by Thomas Harris: Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006). Those novels have inspired five film adaptations and, as of 2015, three seasons of critically-acclaimed network television.
When the world first meets Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter in Red Dragon, Harris’ first book, he is already in prison. The setup for both Red Dragon and Silence is for Lecter, who worked as a forensic psychiatrist before his incarceration, to act as a sort of ‘consulting sociopath’ for the FBI as they attempt to profile and catch a different active serial killer within each book. The brilliant, sociopathic Lecter both helps and sabotages the FBI as it suits his mood. Helping starts to suit him a bit more in the second book, Silence, when Special Agent Clarice Starling is introduced and Lecter becomes obsessed with her.
Silence ends with Lecter’s escape from imprisonment, and the third book, Hannibal, takes a pretty controversial turn. With Lecter still a fugitive from justice seven years later, Agent Starling continues to work on tracking him down. However, Harris makes an attempt to turn Lecter sympathetic, hinting at childhood trauma that tragically led to his regrettable sociopathy and cannibalism. The book also warps Agent Starling’s character to a point where Jodie Foster refused to return to the film franchise. (Starling and Lecter become lovers and disappear together in the end.)
But Harris and the film rights holders were undeterred by this mixed reception, and the fourth book, Hannibal Rising, is a prequel, telling Lecter’s origin story.
Hannibal Rising is — in a word — terrible.
Hannibal Rising is a hodge-podge of gauche literary references and gruesome but ultimately pointless franchise-typical gore. It can only be assumed to be the author’s attempt to further cash in on (or, as some speculate, sabotage) a fourth installment that the Hannibal film rights holders were intent on creating with or without him.
But Hannibal Rising is where things begin to sound unsettlingly familiar.
The fourth novel’s narrative purpose is to fully illuminate the origins of Lecter’s pathology: an extremely traumatic childhood event that centered around a younger sister.
Now, I’ve already mentioned that we know from Mark Gatiss himself that the concept of the method of loci, i.e. Sherlock’s famous ‘mind palace’ technique, originally came from Hannibal.
In Hannibal Rising, an adolescent Lecter learns the method of loci just in time to store and repress the details of this traumatic event.
Lecter stores this knowledge deep in his memory palace for a later, more narratively bankable reveal.
More than one reviewer describes Hannibal Rising as a perverse retelling of Hansel and Gretel, due to the common theme of luring children into the woods to be cooked and eaten.
But rather than the child-eating witch of Hansel and Gretel lore, the villain of Lecter’s childhood is recast as a gang of cannibalistic Nazi collaborators. Nazis, of course, because the setting of Lecter’s origin story is 1940s Lithuania, just as the Axis powers invade the Soviet Union.
“It was the second day of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s lightning sweep across Eastern Europe into Russia.” [Harris]
That’s right. Just as a little bonus, Hannibal Lecter’s canonical origin story begins with Operation Barbarossa, which in English, translates to…
Redbeard.
Redbeard, which is not just the name of Sherlock’s childhood dog, but is also tied to Ambassador Rufus Bruhl, the father of the kidnapped children in TRF. Not only does Rufus mean ‘red-haired’, but — as Tumblr user finalproblem points out — the boarding school kidnapping is undoubtedly a reference to the ACD canon story The Priory School, a case about a boy who has disappeared from boarding school and whose father has “a long, dwindling beard of vivid red.”
So.
If we accept that the entire Eurus surface storyline — the sister, the cannibalism, the mind palace of repressed memories, Hansel and Gretel, Redbeard — is an enormous, ironic homage to the infamous decline of the Hannibal franchise that was teased as far back as S2, we might indulge ourselves in revisiting other aspects of the show in this context.
Moriarty, for instance, certainly fits the stereotype of the flamboyantly gay serial killer that was propagated by the Hannibal franchise. Specifically, the active serial killer who features in Silence, the flamboyant, effeminate Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb — who cuts sewing patterns out of his female victims’ flesh to make himself a ‘woman suit’, and whose characterization inspired over a year of protests from LGBT groups leading up to Silence’s sweep at the Oscars — pairs well with Moriarty’s threats to “skin” his client and “make [her] into shoes” in ASIB. It explains Moriarty’s recurring affinity for cannibals, and also lends a far more sinister subtext to the traces of eczema cream found on the shoes of Moriarty’s very first victim, Carl Powers.
We also see Gumb keeping his victims trapped at the bottom of a well.
Gumb’s murderous sociopathy is contrasted (and flamboyance reinforced) by his doting affection for a bichon frise named Precious.
We might also consider the intentionality of casting Lars Mikkelsen from the relative obscurity of Danish television to play Charles Augustus Magnussen, the only character so far other than Sherlock shown using the mind palace technique. Every news outlet covering the casting announcement was forced to mention his brother Mads’ role in NBC’s Hannibal within the first three sentences of their coverage.
(Although it’s a toss up as to whether Lars’ casting should be properly considered a Hannibal reference or a Bond reference, because Mads Mikkelsen had at that point also played Le Chiffre, the heavily queer-coded villain of Bond film Casino Royale (2006) mentioned in the first section of this analysis.)
NBC’s Hannibal is the most recent addition to the Hannibal family. It features the same Hannibal Lecter we know and love, but it focuses on the period of time where Lecter is an active serial killer, before his initial capture. As such, Dr. Lecter appears as a well-regarded forensic psychiatrist who both consults with and treats (and increasingly also drugs, brainwashes, and manipulates) FBI Agent Will Graham. The show’s general conceits of ‘my therapist is a psycho killer’, ‘well-respected member of society is actually a serial killer operating in plain view’, ‘drug-induced coercive manipulation of a person’s perceptions of reality’, etc. are the building blocks that make up the backbone of an entire episode in S4: TLD. It was pointed out by Tumblr user afishlearningpoetry (x) that the billboard that appears briefly in TLD is reminiscent of NBC Hannibal’s promotional posters:
But the best indication that we’re on the right track with Hannibal is Mycroft’s line from HLV, delivered just before the screaming neon Vegas sign of a line foreshadowing Eurus as “The Other One,” hoping to be completely overlooked in its comparative subtlety:
As my colleague is fond of remarking, this country sometimes needs a blunt instrument. Equally, it sometimes needs a dagger — a scalpel wielded with precision and without remorse.
The blunt instrument, as we well know, is James Bond. The scalpel, a tricky thing to get in prison, is dead easy to introduce as a serial killer’s signature weapon in a prequel series:
IV. The Hannibal Thesis
If we’re on the right track, an understanding of Hannibal Lecter should add a further layer of meaning to the comparisons we’ve already drawn between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.
If there really is a unified thematic argument within BBC Sherlock, Bond and Hannibal are both a part of it. If Hannibal is really the key to the ‘horror movie’ half of S4’s antithetical influences, then we ought to expect the Hannibal references to speak to the same points of comparison as did James Bond.
So. Let’s now look at how the potential significance of Hannibal dovetails with the significance we already have drawn from Bond.
The first point of comparison between James Bond, Hannibal Lecter, and Sherlock Holmes is one that you may have already picked up on from plot details I’ve mentioned in this meta. Conveniently, it’s a motif that’s also discussed at length in Yorke’s book.
We’re talking about the ‘Rubber Ducky’ moment.
Hannibal & The Rubber Ducky Moment
… they christened it the ‘Rubber Ducky’ moment, their slang for an incident in earlier life that supposedly ‘explains’ who that character is now. Not surprisingly, the expression is cynical in intent — it was simply too easy to explain psychopathic tendencies, they felt, by revealing that ‘Someone stole their rubber ducky when they were a baby’. Their cynicism, however, has failed to prevent it from becoming a common dramatic motif, and indeed it has a certain pedigree.
The Rubber Ducky moment is Yorke’s term for the causal event of a three-dimensional character’s flaw. We can immediately see that what he’s talking about is the key to what links TFP and Hannibal Rising, and is also the reason they both fall so flat. Sherlock’s Rubber Ducky moment is when Eurus supposedly drowned Redbeard, and Hannibal Lecter’s Rubber Ducky moment is when cannibals eat his sister.
Yorke has pretty negative personal feelings on the Rubber Ducky moment. While Yorke praises Casino Royale as a three-dimensional archetypal story that provides psychological context for Bond’s behavior through his present actions, his opinion of Skyfall’s attempt to retroactively present Bond’s backstory through exposition is: “I don’t want to know.”
But at the same time, Yorke doesn’t completely condemn it. “At its best the Rubber Ducky moment can be a strong and powerful dramatic device, but at its worst it can lead to overblown melodrama, speechifying, and cliche.” The Rubber Ducky moment is a fickle creature — it can be wielded with success, but overuse and misuse lead more often than not to disaster.
This makes it all a delightful coincidence when Yorke mentions, as an example of a Rubber Ducky moment well done (and his only mention of the franchise in his book): Silence of the Lambs.
That’s because, in stark contrast to Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, Silence gives a stellar Rubber Ducky moment to its protagonist, Agent Clarice Starling.
In Silence, we learn that Clarice is particularly desperate to save the innocent victims of the serial killer Buffalo Bill because, as an orphan on her aunt and uncle’s farm, she witnessed the slaughter of the spring lambs. Woken from sleep by their screams, she took a single lamb — all she could carry — and ran away. Clarice was only ten and the lamb was heavy; she only made it a few miles before she was found, and the lamb was returned and slaughtered. As an adult, Clarice is driven by a wish to no longer hear the lambs screaming in her dreams, thus the name of the film.
This story is revealed in a harrowing scene where Lecter, who has been trying to get into her head throughout the film, has finally gotten under her skin (ha) enough to goad her into revealing this deeply personal and formative story. Having learned this, he can now better manipulate her. It’s an expository reveal seamlessly incorporated into the forward action of the film.
So what we have in S4 is a preponderance of references to a franchise with two iconic Rubber Ducky moments: one that was a spectacular critical failure, and one that swept all five major categories at the Academy Awards.
This nosedive from best in class to critical failure takes on a further irony when we consider that BBC Sherlock’s bizarre and inexplicable Rubber Ducky moment of S4 was also preceded by a demonstration of its flawless execution.
Elegant, powerful, directly channeling Mamet’s “Death of My Kitten” speech with the literal death of a beloved childhood dog, the mind palace sequence of HLV follows Yorke’s good advice to the letter. The mind palace sequence of HLV won six Emmys.
Stepping back and taken all together, we can see across S3 and S4 of BBC Sherlock a highly self-aware mimicry of the Hannibal franchise’s fall from glory.
But the deliberate parallelism is even more nuanced than that. Because not only is Lecter’s Rubber Ducky moment in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising ineffectual as a device in its own right, it also undermines the very attribute that, as the antagonist of Silence, made Lecter so uniquely terrifying:
“Nothing happened to me, Clarice. I happened.”
“It’s an elegant, invincible line, one that waves away the tricks of their trades as psychiatrist and FBI agent, and paints Lecter as pure evil,” wrote Louisa Mellor, who opened her review of TFP (x) with a comparison to the Hannibal franchise’s demise without, so far as I can tell, acknowledging that Sherlock himself echoes that precise line from Silence in TAB:
“Nothing made me. I made me.”
The Lecter of Silence asserts that he doesn’t have a Rubber Ducky moment, so I’m sure it was a bit embarrassing for him when the Lecter of Hannibal arrived on the scene with his cannibalized sister and immediately gave lie to what should have been an eternally sinister declaration.
This phenomenally stupid character development that took Thomas Harris a decade to bring about is reenacted in TAB over the course of mere moments when, just as Holmes delivers Lecter’s infamous line, he’s distracted by the barks and scrabblings of Redbeard. This split-second juxtaposition likens Sherlock Holmes to three different characters at once and an impossibly pointed question crystallizes about whose character arc is most like his own: (1) the Lecter of Silence, a sociopath motivated by nothing but his own self-actualization, (2) the Lecter of Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, a sociopath motivated by gruesome familial trauma, or (3) Agent Clarice Starling, the selfless hero who is motivated by the cries of an innocent animal that, as a child, they failed to save from inevitable death.
This same question is reiterated in TFP, as Sherlock is more broadly positioned as the Lecter of Hannibal and Hannibal Rising as we see his childhood trauma unveiled and explored throughout the episode, but takes the place of Agent Starling in scenes that specifically mirror Silence of the Lambs.
The purpose of S4, as the ‘synthesis of the antithesis’ within the five-act template, is to show us just how wrong the wrong answer feels just before providing us with the correct one. It anticipates and debunks the counterarguments so that the ‘synthesis’ can have the final word.
The crisis occurs when the hero’s final dilemma is crystallized, the moment they are faced with the most important question of the story — just what kind of person are they? [Yorke]
If the surface narrative of TFP has shown us the parody backstory that belongs to the Lecter of Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, we might expect to find the truth of Sherlock’s backstory in the simplicity of Starling’s: the tragedy of being unable to save an innocent and beloved pet.
Act Four is designed to answer the question: is it more fitting that Sherlock’s backstory follows Hannibal’s — so scarred by his sister that he becomes a psychopath, forever as likely to solve a murder as to commit one?
Or do we see the Sherlock we know in Agent Starling? Someone for whom the innocent death of a childhood pet was enough to make him dedicate his life to fighting for justice for other innocents?
Act Four says: look! Look how bad it would be if Sherlock Holmes were like Hannibal Lecter. Sherlock Holmes isn’t Hannibal Lecter. Sherlock Holmes is Clarice Starling.
See how his present character can’t be explained by a psychological trauma from childhood like in Skyfall, or Hannibal? (See how we ‘tried’ to do this, and how grossly we failed?) See how his behavior can be far better explained by both his enormous love for people who need his help and the threat of future heartbreak?
He has the brain of a scientist or a philosopher, yet he elects to be a detective.
What might we deduce about his heart?
Hannibal & Queer-coding Villains
Then, there’s also the way that the queer-coding of Hannibal both parallels and deviates from the message of Bond.
This is where we can really begin to see precisely how Hannibal is the opposite of Bond, because the axis of their opposition really begins to take shape. We’ve seen already how Casino Royale demonstrates all too clearly how lethal personal attachment can be in Bond’s profession. In Silence of the Lambs, the theme is a variation of the same. It’s captured most concisely by the title of the Salvador Dalí skull that appears on the back of the moth featured on the film cover: In Voluptas Mors.
“In pleasure, there is death.”
Silence makes it quite clear that the specific pleasure being examined is deviant, queer pleasure. Though the film goes out of its way to queer-code every serial killer, the ‘good guys’ on the law enforcement side come off almost worse. Starling, as a young female trainee, endures a constant barrage of leering heterosexual misogyny from her own colleagues at the FBI. At times, Starling seems almost driven toward Lecter by the crude behavior of her superiors. As a result of this dynamic, she ends up defending Lecter’s taste and propriety. When he escapes, she insists he won’t come after her, “because he said he wouldn’t”. A true gentleman! Refined, restrained, dignified, chivalrous… until he’s not. It plays out as a metaphor for the gay respectability politics of the 1990s: stereotypically well-dressed, refined tastes, witty repartee, paragons of polite society, tolerable and even preferable company, just so long as no one mentions the dark, unspeakable urges that, y’know, actually define homosexuality.
Lecter’s polite restraint is sexually coded from the outset. During Starling’s first visit to Lecter’s cell block, a raving mad prisoner whispers to her, “I can smell your cunt”, masturbates fully nude, and flings his semen at her face. Lecter is visibly affronted by this lack of restraint. He politely tells Starling that he cannot smell her cunt, but he can smell (and name!) her moisturizer and perfume brands through a glass wall. In Hannibal it’s stated outright: “I always thought he was a queer,” muses Starling’s crass, corrupt supervisor.
Lecter’s cannibalistic impulses are equally coded. Though in dialogue, his deviancy is characterized by “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” what’s shown of Lecter’s cannibalism is the eating of people’s faces: he grabs them by the face, stares deeply into their eyes, brings their mouths together — then shatters the similitude of physical intimacy with blood and horror.
“In pleasure, there is death.”
Silence follows a long tradition of coupling gay desire and death. In the end of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, the Absurdist play about two gay men cruising Central Park in the 1950s (I mentioned back in Part I), one man provokes the other into a fight over his favorite park bench. The instigator provides his opponent with the knife to defend himself, then deliberately spears himself on it, and thanks him for it with his dying breath. The desire to die, the desire to kill, the euphemistic penetration of knives and needles and bullets, la petite mort — you can trace it through early Brecht to the literary romanticization of the volatile real-life relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine. You can trace it through the subtext-loaded strangling scenes of Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Genet’s Deathwatch (1947).
The scene between Culverton and Sherlock in the hospital, where a cold-blooded overdose and suffocation is set to a dialogue between first-time lovers, is its direct descendant.
Over and over, gay men choose pleasure, and therefore choose death.
Sentiment has always been the losing side, but throughout literature, gay men have willingly chosen it anyway.
For over a century, gay writers have looked at the dominant moral paradigm that villainizes queer characters and responded with their own Faustian characters whose voluntary descents into Hell were their way of saying, you know what? Fuck you, I want this anyway. I’ll take both.
So in a way, it makes sense that Bryan Fuller’s modernized prequel to the Hannibal franchise would allow Will Graham — Agent Starling’s predecessor — to take her place in the story as the focus of Lecter’s obsession. In a way it makes sense, in 2018, to tackle queer subjects head on, showing the development of a relationship between two men: a serial killing psychiatrist at-large and the FBI agent tasked with solving his killings, who also happens to be his patient. It seems logical — even bold! — to ‘out’ a franchise like Hannibal via modern reboot, to force the subtle queer-coding of Silence into the light of day. To allow the subject of Lecter’s memory-altering, perception-skewing psychological manipulation, the object of his sinister psychopathic obsession, and partner in his ultimate double-suicide to be — as the subtext has always implied — another man.
In a way, it’s a savvy modern adaptation of the source material.
In another way, it feels like we’re moving backwards.
Backwards because it only further reinforces the idea that there’s a choice to be made at all. To be Good, or to be Gay — one or the other, but never both. As Christine Bold wrote of the Bond franchise, “beauty, heterosexuality, and patriotism go together; ugliness, sexual ‘deviance’ and criminality are linked equally irresistibly.” As with Bond, so it is with Hannibal. In Voluptas Mors. In pleasure, there is death. They’re a package deal.
The paradigm remains the same.
V. Being, Nothing, Becoming
Stories are about capturing change. The path from Point A to Point B. “The image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.” That moment of realization, the progression from unknowing to knowing. In Hegelian terms, this is the moment of becoming.
Yorke describes story as a character’s journey into the woods and back again, a journey into Knowing. But he also describes story as an argument, one where the author must convince the audience of their ultimate point using the particular path that the story traces from unKnowing into Knowing. With an ultimate point in mind, the author begins their story well short of that final truth so that their story can encapsulate that journey and takes the audience with them.
In Yorke’s five act structure, the first act sets up this false or incomplete initial premise. The next three acts are used to oppose that premise to the point where it finally fails — what he calls ‘the worst point’. The final act then takes advantage of the rubble that’s been made of the flawed initial premise and introduces the author’s ultimate point as its solution.
Aristotle argued, I think correctly, that it’s a fundamental unit of dramatic construction — something is confronted by its opposite and revealed to be something else. [Yorke]
In Sherlockian terms, you’re eliminating the impossible on your way to ultimately arrive at the truth.
So there’s a couple of potential explanations for where we are now. Maybe Mark and Moff have been flying by the seat of their pants since S1, slightly disbelieving of their good luck, milking a good thing and riding their success until they were plainly out of ideas and had to clumsily wrap it up in a way that was satisfying to exactly no one.
But maybe, being the sort of people who promote their brand new Sherlock Holmes adaptation by saying hubristic things like, “we think everyone’s been getting it wrong, and we can get it right,” and being the sort of people who are thanked by name in the acknowledgements of Yorke’s book as his ‘unofficial mentors’, Mark and Moff are the sort of people who know exactly how to assemble a formal dialectic argument in story. Who would want to plan out five seasons of formally structured dialectic argument in order to make their point about Sherlock Holmes on the largest possible stage.
And with a sleuthing Sherlockian audience, wouldn’t it be fun to flaunt their point in the faces of everyone who’d been getting it wrong? To shape their story’s thematic argument in the most structured way possible, literally by the book, woven not just into the window dressings but into the very plot of each episode, into the sequence of the episodes themselves, so that there would be no possible way for anyone to view the show as a whole and think that it could have been made with any other purpose in mind?
A deception so audacious, so outrageous that you can’t see it even when it’s staring you in the face?
An actual ‘book code’, in every sense?
Because we were given, in HLV, a thesis statement that starts to assemble the mishmash of Bond references and Hannibal references in the middle three ‘antithesis’ acts into the beginnings of a coherent message across the entire show:
As my colleague is fond of remarking, this country sometimes needs a blunt instrument. Equally, it sometimes needs a dagger — a scalpel wielded with precision and without remorse. There will always come a time when we need Sherlock Holmes.
Not Bond. Not Hannibal.
Holmes.
Now, look at the episodes of S4.
4.1 — TST
TST serves up posh locales, exotic hideouts, and high-octane shootouts. Nearly every plot point has a counterpart in Skyfall (2012) or Casino Royale (2006). Even The Guardian called out this episode for being too much like a James Bond film (x).
The first episode of S4 is the James Bond episode.
4.2 — TLD
In TLD, we have a serial killer operating in plain sight, respected and beloved by his community. We have a psychotherapist who is secretly a sociopath, using therapy sessions and privileged information to manipulate clients. TLD offers up the sumptuous visuals of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal adaptation, as well as borrowing even more specific details like perception-skewing manipulation and midnight strolls through the city with people who may or may not exist. We have Sherlock literally wielding a scalpel.
The second episode of S4 is the Hannibal episode.
4.3 — TFP
Finally, TFP gives us a garish tale about a traumatic childhood memory, exhumed from deep within a mind palace, of a sister who now lives in Hannibal Lecter’s cell located deep within a Bond villain’s lair. Steven Moffat describes it himself as “a little bit James Bond, a little bit horror movie”.
The third episode of S4 is Hannibal-meets-Bond.
TST, TLD, TFP. Bond, Hannibal, and a combination of the two.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Bond is the thesis, Hannibal is the antithesis, and the synthesis blends them together.
This is the dialectic triad of S4.
Next, let’s look at S2. According to Yorke, we ought to find: (a) another triad within the three episodes of S2, and (b) broad symmetry between S2 and S4. Do we?
2.1 — ASIB
‘Bond Air’ immediately identifies ASIB as the James Bond episode, mirroring the first episode of S4. We’ve already discussed how TST contains a bizarre number of scenes that play out like leftover B-roll that was recycled from Skyfall (2012). But fans have also pointed out (x) that in ASIB, several key points are strikingly similar to parts of Casino Royale (2006),
In Casino Royale (2006), Vesper Lynd is a beautiful, whip-smart, but reluctant double agent, whose initial dynamic with Bond is not unlike the verbal and mental sparring between Sherlock and Irene. Just as Sherlock can read Irene’s measurements just by looking at her, Vesper ‘sizes up’ Bond and surprises him with a tailored tuxedo for the high-stakes poker game that gives the film its name. Like Irene goading Sherlock into deducing the meaning of the seat assignment numbers, Vesper eventually extracts valuable information from Bond — in this case, a bank keycode. Unbeknownst to Bond, Vesper uses the code to transfer their poker winnings to her terrorist boss, just like Irene immediately passes her information on to Moriarty. That bank keycode — as chosen by a lovestruck Bond — is, of course, her name: V-E-S-P-E-R. Though Vesper doesn’t have Irene’s luck and is ultimately killed by the terrorists in the end, Bond is left with — just like Sherlock with Irene — Vesper’s phone.
Recall that Casino Royale (2006) and Skyfall (2012) are the only two Bond films described by Yorke as creation myths with the potential for three-dimensionality. ASIB draws from one Bond creation myth, TST draws from the other.
So far, so symmetrical.
2.2 — THOB
Next in S2: THOB, like TLD, is the Hannibal episode. In THOB, the case is tied up in Henry Knight’s repressed childhood trauma, which gives the first hint at how they have incorporated Hannibal’s creation myth. This episode also first introduces Sherlock’s mind palace, which, again, we know is drawn from Hannibal Lecter’s use of the method of loci. There’s even a split-second shot and mention of Hannibal by name (though a different Hannibal) on Major Barrymore’s bookshelf.
THOB is also where the writers lean heavily on the horror genre as a whole to balance the sheer weight of the Bond intertext. Most notable is how THOB both updates and subverts the classic gothic horror of the original novel. As @heimishtheidealhusband writes in her longform analysis and extrapolation of how Victorian ghost story themes are being used in BBC Sherlock,
Here’s why BBC Sherlock’s treatment of Hound is particularly beautiful. The creature — the hound — is our queer monster. In ACD’s Hound, the hound was indeed physically altered — he was painted in phosphorous to give him a hellish, glowing appearance. And the hound was actually the one to do the killing. In BBC’s Hound, there’s “the hound” — the monster that everyone is afraid of which is actually imaginary, and “the dog” — the real thing that actually exists. In other words, in this version, the “queer creature” in the horror story has been de-monstered. Homospectrality is being flipped on his head — rather than separating the man from the queer, they’re separating the queer from the monster. Because the dog isn’t inherently evil, it’s just the poison in the air that everyone is breathing that makes them fear it, and see a monster instead of an innocent dog. So in this treatment, if the dog/hound represents queerness, heteronormativity becomes a poisonous element in the air we all breathe. (x)
In THOB, the drug is what creates the perception of horror. In TLD, horror is real, and the drug is what’s used to conceal it. Again: symmetry.
2.3 — TRF
In TRF, we’re looking for both Bond and Hannibal. We start with a modern day Hansel and Gretel, a brother and a sister kidnapped from boarding school, whose father’s name roughly translates to Redbeard — all callbacks to Hannibal’s youth as told in Hannibal Rising. The kidnapping case then leads into the ‘Sherlock’s a fraud’ plot, which is itself a nod to the plot to literally ‘destroy the myth of Sherlock Holmes’ from Fleming’s famous Bond novel From Russia With Love.
Sherlock saving the children from being kidnapped in TRF would, in Thomas Harris’ story, have prevented a monster like Hannibal from ever coming into being. In TFP, Sherlock himself is likened to the very same monster he might have prevented. In TRF, he’s cast as the hero — in TFP, the villain.
By the end of TRF, the myth of Sherlock Holmes is destroyed. By the end of TFP, the myth of Sherlock Holmes, as recited in voiceover by Mary, is preserved.
Yorke’s model demands symmetry between the first and second halves of the story, as though folded along its midpoint. “Not only are the beginning and end bookends […], so are both halves of act three — with acts two and four becoming opposite versions of the same journey.”
We can see how S2 and S4 are opposite versions of the same journey with respect to Bond and Hannibal. The references in S2 grow more understated, more sleek, more elemental, playing on commonalities between Bond, Hannibal, and Holmes, with the essence of Sherlock Holmes rising to the fore.
In S4, the references grow more garish, more out-of-place. The essence of Sherlock Holmes becomes unrecognizable, bringing us to the worst point.
At every level it should be possible to detect the same structural relationship. In the first half of every script, the question will be asked: ‘What is the worst consequence of this decision?’ and in the second half the answer will come: ‘This is’. [Yorke]
In this case, BBC Sherlock functions as a metacommentary on all Sherlock Holmes stories. Broadly, it asks: ‘what kind of story is the story of Sherlock Holmes?’ Beginning in S2, the antithesis narrows the scope, asking specifically: ‘What is the worst consequence of treating the story of Sherlock Holmes like the stories of James Bond or Hannibal Lecter?’ At the close of S4, we have received our answer. Basing the episodes of S2 around plot points drawn from Bond and Hannibal is exactly what makes S2 so successful. Conversely, Bond and Hannibal also encompass everything that makes S4 so unwatchable.
Now, what about S3? I’ll only briefly touch on it here, because the internal triad structure of the third act will always be superseded by the second episode’s function as the midpoint of the entire five-act story. In other words, S3 doesn’t follow the same Bond/Hannibal triad structure as S2 and S4, and we shouldn’t expect it to. Nevertheless, we still find Bond and Hannibal in TEH and HLV — TEH ‘revives’ the myth of Sherlock Holmes that was destroyed in TRF when Sherlock returns from being dead and proves he was not a fraud after all, and HLV gives Sherlock the Clarice Starling creation myth, as befits the true hero of the story. TSOT, as the overall midpoint of the show, serves its own distinct function in the story that I plan to cover in full at some point, but not here.
So, in S2 through S4, we see this sort of “trying on” of different creation myths to see which suits. Is Sherlock Holmes like James Bond? Or is he more like Clarice Starling? Or is he actually like Hannibal Lecter?
But none of these character-to-character comparisons can fully explain Sherlock Holmes. Frankly, no creation myth can adequately explain Sherlock Holmes. Mark and Moff know this, believe this, and have said as much in interviews.
I don’t think you know a character by creating a backstory. Nevermind not knowing the back story for Sherlock Holmes. I’m not absolutely sure I know the backstory for Mark Gatiss. He’s one of my best friends. And if you look at each other, do you really know the backstory? We sometimes speculate, because we’re intricate, and we chat about what his parents did. But, you know what? We’re not…it’s sacred turf. You don’t…you don’t mess that up. You don’t bring that into the show. It’s not right. Some things we don’t know about Sherlock Holmes, just as there are some things we don’t know about our friends, and we don’t ever know them. And that’s right and proper. I think if we went and did something like that, in a way the audience wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, “Nah, you just made that bit up.” As if we didn’t make the rest of it up. (x)
The sampling of creation myths throughout S2-S4 signifies that the creation myth itself is antithetical to Sherlock Holmes.
To fully understand the original Sherlock Holmes, you have to understand the sociocultural context of the time period in which he was written. The answer isn’t in the comparison of Holmes to the creation myths of these other famous characters; rather, the answer is in the real-world sociocultural environment that is represented by and still perpetuated by the stories of Bond and Hannibal themselves.
This is why a story structure based in the Hegelian dialectic is so fitting — Holmes is a product of his time period, not a product of a single, universally-translatable formative childhood trauma. To truly bring him forward in time, he must be first understood in his original context and then synthesized and reconstructed in the modern day only after understanding how the context has changed. But BBC Sherlock hasn’t simply done that — BBC Sherlock is about the process of doing that.
Sherlock Holmes is the way he is because of stories like Bond and Hannibal, and the cultural attitudes they embody. The triads set Bond and Hannibal up as thesis and antithesis because they represent two poles of a paradigm; how they each position feeling, sentiment, passion, and love on a spectrum of good and evil, strength and weakness, wins and losses, life and death.
I am your WEAKNESS! I keep you DOWN! Every time you STUMBLE, every time you FAIL, when you’re WEAK … I … AM … THERE! No. Don’t try to fight it. LIE BACK AND LOSE!
To wit, the second and fourth acts contrast how Sherlock and John interact with the fictional constructs of Bond and Hannibal.
In the second act, Bond is a character: “Bond Air” is a codeword that Mycroft can use, “double-oh seven” is a cultural reference that John can make, it’s a film franchise that Sherlock and John can watch together and discuss on their blog. Hannibal is a book on a shelf. In S2, Sherlock and John live in a world in which Bond and Hannibal are part of the fictional milieu. In the fourth act, John and Sherlock embody the stories of Bond and Hannibal; they exist on the same fictional plane. Sherlock Holmes is directly equated to the characters of James Bond and Hannibal Lecter in turn, adding to the evidence that S4 is a work of fiction itself, existing as a story authored within and based on the universe of the “real” Sherlock and John from S2.
Fitting, as our storyteller is known to be such an avid Bond and horror fan.
It’s neat then that an inverse of this reality-to-fiction shift can be observed in the third episodes of S2 and S4 with respect to someone I’ve yet to even mention: Oscar Wilde.
In TFP, Mycroft and John flippantly quote Wilde and make silly jokes about Mycroft playing Lady Bracknell from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. But in TRF, Tumblr user johnlocktentacles points out that it’s the real historical events in the life of Wilde himself that become the model for Sherlock’s lived experience (x). From Russia With Love makes it clear that the easiest way to ‘destroy the myth of Sherlock Holmes’ would be to expose his homosexuality to the public, and TRF suggests the consequences of such exposure in such a homophobic era by positioning Sherlock as historical figure and literary icon Oscar Wilde in his prime, when his infamous trial and subsequent arrest and conviction for gross indecency led to his tragic early death.
Taken together, Bond, Hannibal, and Wilde produce an essential commentary on why, for instance, the general public is unaware that Sherlock Holmes is a gay man. The incontrovertible linkage of homosexuality and death is all that’s necessary to explain why Doyle could not represent Holmes more overtly as a homosexual in his day, and why Watson would necessarily take creative liberties to conceal the nature of his relationship with Holmes when recording their adventures.
What’s more, this cultural milieu is exactly what informs our modern John as a character. As a fan of Bond and horror films, our John is absolutely steeped in the moral ramifications of homosexuality that both franchises maintain. It’s no wonder he remains silent on his feelings, denying them at every opportunity, waiting for Sherlock to speak first.
It’s no wonder he can’t conceive of a happy ending to his love story.
So, in the grand scheme of the show and the five-act model, where does that leave us?
As the two opposing thematic pillars of the antithesis, Bond and Hannibal stand at opposite ends of a single paradigm. Both position sentiment as loss, as death. Bond resists sentiment, and wins his empty victories in blockbuster after blockbuster, while Lecter relishes in his loss, gives in to desire and welcomes death.
If we recall the previous discussion of Wonder Woman, the fourth act’s false ending is Kantian, two-dimensional. It sees the thesis restored, it returns to the beginning. Will Sherlock succumb to sentiment? Will he ‘lie back and lose’? The fourth act’s answer is no: Eurus, the personification of Love as a villain, an evil to be defeated, is captured and returned to her prison. Love is still far too dangerous to be allowed to roam free. Sherlock wins a Bond-esque victory, closing off his emotions in order to better do his work. Two-dimensional character stasis achieved.
But as in Wonder Woman, the fourth act’s answer to the posed question leads into the fifth act’s Hegelian resolution, the dismissal of the entire premise of the posed question and the synthesis of a new way forward.
Wonder Woman poses the question: does mankind deserve Diana’s help? But throughout the movie, Diana’s experiences chip away at the entire premise of that question. It’s the wrong question. “Maybe it’s not about what you deserve.”
Identify why each choice is insufficient, and unlock the possibility of a third path. Turn two dimensions into three.
Bond and Hannibal represent the false choice available to Sherlock: resist sentiment and win, or give in to sentiment and lose. The moral implications of these choices have been reinforced by hundreds of years of art and literature.
Bond learns firsthand that sentiment is a fatal indulgence, incompatible with his career of facing down queer-coded villains. Hannibal links homosexuality inextricably to deviancy, horrific torture, death, and cannibalism.
Bond and Hannibal shade both of Sherlock’s options with moral implications, implications that are long overdue to be challenged and defeated.
Because the question isn’t ‘will Sherlock choose sentiment and end up on the losing side?’ That premise is faulty. It’s the wrong question. Maybe sentiment is not about losing.
Maybe it’s about, “John Watson, you keep me right.” Maybe it’s about how Sherlock is better with sentiment, how his capacity for love is what drives him to excel at his work, his love for John most of all.
How do you separate the ‘queer’ from the ‘monster’?
After generations of gay villains and gay tragedies, of gay pain and violence and suicides, of relishing the knife in our gut or the gun barrel in our mouths, how do we synthesize a new way forward?
Easy: with a story where choosing sentiment means choosing life. In pleasure, there is life.
The final problem is staying alive, and choosing gay love means life.
It means you’ve won.
Now, before I wrap this up, I want to reflect on how compelling we should find this extraordinary compilation of evidence.
Countless viewers have picked up on the commonalities between BBC Sherlock and Bond and Hannibal. Hardly a critique of S4 exists that doesn’t mention how disappointingly Bond-esque or horror-inspired this season was. But most significantly, the intentionality of both intertexts has been corroborated by the writers themselves. After TFP, Mark and Moff practically disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving us reeling with no apparent explanation except this bizarre interview that I’ve quoted here multiple times where Moffat’s main points seem to be (a) we did the sister thing because it seemed like fun, (b) we made it all James Bond-y and Silence of the Lambs-y because it seemed like fun, and (c) I guess the show is over now!
In hindsight, this interview is actually a perfectly succinct and sufficient explanation of S4.
Combine this interview with the blunt instrument/scalpel line from HLV, and we are basically guaranteed of the intentionality of these references. Some of the parallels I’ve identified here are extremely broad and may feel tenuous when considered in isolation. On the other hand, many of these parallels were identified in isolation by someone else long before I interpreted them together as a whole here. Ultimately, the recognizable patterns and repetitions serve to reinforce the message: they are definitely saying something in their show that has to do with Bond and Hannibal.
Introduce Yorke, and we have a cipher as well. Upon closer inspection, these two intertexts form a consistent pattern within the structure of the show that delineates not just one triad, but two triads, each based around the same two opposing concepts: Bond versus Hannibal.
In the introduction, I argued that if we can find the pattern within the apparent nonsense of S4, and if we can decode the argument contained within that pattern, we can:
- be far more confident in our assumption that they are following Yorke’s model, with all its implications for symmetry, fractal structure, and most crucially, how S5 will ‘synthesize’ and resolve the previous four, and
- be equally confident in our interpretation of what the argument of the show is, because we have identified it on the deepest structural level possible.
In other words: successfully decrypting a code (the show) confirms both the cipher (Yorke’s book) and the message (TJLC).
By identifying how BBC Sherlock meticulously follows Yorke’s five-act structure — a structure established by a book that thanks Steven Moffat himself in its acknowledgements — we can not only deduce that the show is not over, but we can comfortably extrapolate a future fifth act that delivers the three-dimensional, Hegelian resolution and the ‘correct’ answer to the specific argument that has been laid out thus far.
And with its thesis statement, the show states its position on three-dimensional, five-act Hegelian stories just as clearly as Yorke does in his book:
As my colleague is fond of remarking, this country sometimes needs a blunt instrument. Equally, it sometimes needs a dagger — a scalpel wielded with precision and without remorse. There will always come a time when we need Sherlock Holmes.
Sometimes, we need a Bond or a Hannibal: a cotton candy (or black licorice in Hannibal’s case) that puckers or dissolves on your tongue, a “detective story” to entertain and pass the time. But we cannot live on cotton candy and black licorice alone. We always have need of the deeply nourishing, emotionally rewarding, transcendent experience of joining a character on a journey that indelibly changes them along the way. We grow as our characters grow, we heal as they heal.
Everything up to this point is telling us that this is the story that heals Sherlock Holmes.
By healing Sherlock Holmes, the story also heals us.
Thank you for reading! I hope it was worth the wait.
An enormous thank you to Darcy, Adrienne, Shreya, Ashleigh, and Bruna for patiently beta-ing (and re-beta-ing, and re-betaing…) this behemoth as it took shape over the past months. Thanks also to Bruna for another beautiful banner graphic.
I also ought to formally credit and thank Ariane DeVere for her absolutely indispensable episode transcripts. Nearly all screencaps were sourced from either here or here — thank you fandom archivists for making this level of high-quality analysis possible! Thanks also to the community of TJLCers and meta writers on Tumblr, whose breadth and generosity of knowledge were essential to making most of these individual connections in the first place.
