The Sherrinford “Not”
The Final Problem Explainer, Part I
Contents
[Recommended Reading: Poetry or Truth? Part One and Part Two, BBC Sherlock: A Drama In Five Acts, and Bond, Hannibal, and Holmes]
I. The Nature of the Pattern: The Five Games
II. The Sherrinford Games:
1. Shoot the Governor
2. Who Killed Evans?
3. Save Molly Hooper
4. Buridan’s Ass
Imagine Hamlet is a real person. Someone makes a documentary, a reality TV show, about this real person, Hamlet. The person you see on the screen is real Hamlet; you watch him living his real life. The only filter between you (the viewer) and Hamlet’s life is the editor of the show, who arranges the documentary-style footage into a legible story.
Now imagine William Shakespeare writes a play. Hamlet. This play, Hamlet, dramatizes the doings of the real person, Hamlet. Imagine in this scenario that the character Hamlet is played by Real Hamlet. You’re not watching Hamlet live his real life, but you’re watching him act out a version of some things similar to things he has previously done in his real life. Some things have been edited or embellished for artistic or dramatic purposes. You could even imagine, for the purpose of this exercise, that Shakespeare is not the playwright at all, that the true playwright is Horatio, real friend of real Hamlet. After all, we see the fictional Horatio who declares his intent in the final moments of Hamlet to “speak to the yet unknowing world/How these things came about”. Perhaps Shakespeare is only Horatio’s literary agent.
Now imagine, centuries later, Tom Stoppard writes a play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This play is yet another degree of remove from Real Hamlet; it is a play about Hamlet. It is a play about a play about the real person Hamlet. It isn’t simply theatrical fan-fiction, though. The purpose of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is specifically to illustrate the vast gulf between viewing authentic first-hand footage in a documentary of the life of Real Hamlet, and viewing a post-hoc dramatization of it. The purpose of this play is to deconstruct the theatrical illusion of reality. The purpose of this play is to expose the inherent limits of a fiction.
When you watch Hamlet, your mind uses the implications and suggestions of the text to fill in the spaces between scenes and create a fully realized world that these characters continuously inhabit when out of view. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, using the same medium of theatre, strips this illusion away.
Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this analogy in regards to BBC Sherlock.
The first three series of BBC Sherlock follow the doings of the real Sherlock, as though a documentary. The ‘authentic footage’ of these episodes is contrasted with John’s blog, which we can see on the show or view for ourselves in the real world online, which we see them bicker over, debate what ought to be included or edited out, etc.
In Series 4, the viewpoint changes. We are now presented with a Play About Sherlock. The first two episodes are Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a dramatization of the life of Sherlock, a staged adaptation of John’s blog. The writers use the conventions of Brecht’s epic theatre to telegraph this change in lens, to indicate to the viewer that they are now watching “a presentation of life, not real life itself.” The discussion of “doctored footage” at the opening of TST further suggests that this “presentation of life” takes liberties with the original material.
The final episode of Series 4, “The Final Problem”, is analogous to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Like RGAD, “The Final Problem” is the play about the play about BBC Sherlock.
Like RGAD, the purpose of TFP is to illustrate the vast gulf between viewing a documentary of the life of Real Sherlock and viewing a staged adaptation of John’s blog. The purpose of TFP is to deconstruct the filmic illusion of reality. As TFP begins the viewpoint shifts a second time as we find Mycroft sitting in a home theatre, watching an old black-and-white romantic melodrama, having been very pointedly positioned outside of this polished, edited, and tidily heterosexual “presentation of life”. The romance is interrupted, Stephen King’s IT-style, by the appearance of Eurus within the film, and we flee with Mycroft — or is it Mark the Author-God now? — out of the theatre and down the hall, where the absurdist “pantomime” begins.
With this shift we move from the intradiegetic, Watsonian (literally!) exploration of authorship in TST and TLD, into an extradiegetic, Doylist exploration of authorship in TFP. RGAD is often described as taking place “in the wings” of a production of Hamlet — not in the sense of connecting scenes with unwritten character moments, and not even in the sense of actors dropping out of character to discuss their roles in a meta sense, but in the sense of half-realized beings musing about their existence with self knowledge gleaned only from the moments of their life provided by the script.
When you watch TST and TLD, like any production attempting conventional realism, your mind uses the implications and suggestions of the action to fill in the spaces between scenes with a fully realized world that these characters continuously inhabit. TFP, like RGAD, strips this illusion away.
TST and TLD explore which moments of life John Watson chooses to “film” and draw inspiration from to build his surface narrative, and which moments he omits, edits, adapts to please his audience. TFP explores the moments that Mofftiss have chosen to build their narrative. TFP is a self-aware self examination of their own story. The character is the plot, Sherlock is the show, and TFP distills and crystallizes what they are saying about their own characters and the story they’re telling about them.
Taken together, the purpose of S4 and the show as a whole is to expose the inherent limits of a literal visual adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which as a medium does not allow naturally for the admitted fabrications and elisions of Watson’s original narration, and which have therefore been all but forgotten in a modern era dominated by film and television Sherlock Holmes adaptations.
That’s all well and good, you say. I accept that the events of TFP could not possibly have been real. But…. why???? Why that??? It’s one thing to conclude that TFP is fake because what else could it possibly be, it’s one thing to say it ‘strips away the illusion of conventional realism’, but it’s quite another to accept that the production team went through six weeks of filming and god knows what sort of budget to make something they not only knew was fake, but to make that. I can watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and generally see the point because at least it’s honest about its purpose, but there’s still 90 minutes of truly unwatchable television here that aren’t inherently given meaning simply by being fake in a particular way.
To argue simultaneously that every line, every moment, every frame of the preceding twelve episodes was carefully chosen to have significance and purposefully constructed in a pattern that we can discern and decode and that the 13th episode is fake — not even fake like it’s a film adaptation of the blog like TST and TLD, but fake in a weirder, far more abstract way — feels on its face like a contradiction. A copout. ‘This last episode doesn’t fit the established pattern as we understand it, and moreover it appears to be very poorly conceived and is very unpleasant to watch, but that’s ok, because it’s just fake!’ It sounds like the desperation of someone who can’t admit that they might have had it wrong all along.
It’s a very sensible criticism. I understand this criticism. To accept that they made an entire episode that is nonsensical and fake, the writers’ choice to make such an episode in the first place still has to make some sense. The episode must have some raison d’etre. If you can’t make sense of what’s happening, it’s rational to come to the conclusion that there isn’t any sense to be made of it. If you can’t conceive of an explanation for the existence of an entire episode that’s consistent with your understanding of the rest of the show, it’s completely rational to question your understanding of the rest of the show. I certainly did!
Besides, what are you supposed to get out of ninety minutes of television that has no direct relation to the reality of the characters? What can the writers possibly be communicating with ninety minutes of television that has no direct relation to the reality of the characters?
There are two essential questions to answer here: 1) what justifies an absurdist interlude episode within the broader arc of the show, and 2) what is this particular absurdist interlude communicating. In other words: what is the nonsense episode trying to say, and why is a nonsense episode the only way it can be said.
The purpose of this meta is to explain what can be communicated in ninety minutes of television that has no direct relation to the reality of the characters, and what meaning can be found in TFP simply by its being fake in a particular way.
I. The Nature of the Pattern: The Five Games
If, in the traditional play, the action goes from point A to point B, and we constantly ask, ‘what’s going to happen next?’, here we have an action that consists in the gradual unfolding of a complex pattern, and instead we ask, ‘what is it that we are seeking? What will the completed image be when we have grasped the nature of the pattern?’
— Martin Esslin, Introduction to “Absurd Drama” (x)
This meta is going to look at the structure of TFP.
In the past, after early draft scripts of other episodes were posted online, I’ve noted that Moffat and Gatiss appear to have a “subtext first, realism later” writing method, where they first sketch scenes and rough dialogue for the symbolic meaning they wish to convey, based on their established codes and symbols, then in revision mould this scaffolding into something approaching logical human behavior and natural speech. Their early drafts are rough, quite silly, inelegant — it’s clear that the artistry of the final product is applied in layers over time, while the grammar of their symbolic language is present from the beginning, even more starkly obvious without the window dressing yet applied.
TFP was very clearly not written to make logical linear in-universe sense, or to portray rational, realistic human behavior, not even within the already highly-stylized and borderline-fantastical logic of the established show universe. Transitions between scenes defy basic explanations of cause and effect. What this leaves then, to convey meaning, is what scenes are shown to us, and the order in which they are shown. In other words: the nature of the pattern.
My rule of thumb is that the earlier in the production process something must be decided, and the more money something costs, the more significance it has. Filming locations, constructed sets, dialogue that is reinforced by set pieces. A character’s motivation that does not flow from the previous action.
TFP looks like a lot of nonsense on first watch, but if you let go of the idea that it was supposed to make logical linear in-universe sense (which, again, it very clearly wasn’t), the structure is ultimately very simple.
The meat of the episode is the series of Saw-esque games at Sherrinford, the prison where Eurus is held. The opening of the episode is fairly utilitarian in rationalizing the existence of Sherrinford and bringing us there. Sherlock, John, and Mycroft play four of Eurus’s games in Sherrinford, after which they transition to Musgrave Hall, the Holmes ancestral estate, for a final fifth game.
These five games — four in Sherrinford and one at Musgrave Hall — are the bones of the structure that give TFP its meaning. The question isn’t why does Sherlock’s evil sister want to draw him into torture games — that already makes no sense. The question must be instead: why are we, the audience, being shown these games? Why do these scenarios need to be laid out before us? The sequence is not based on logical cause and effect, so why this sequence? The setting is not based on any sort of reality, so why this setting?
To explain these five games, I will draw on both the five-act model of storytelling as described by John Yorke and Brecht’s epic theatre.
But first, to recap: Part One of this meta series explored creator comments that seemed to suggest that S4 is, to put it bluntly, fake. Part Two of this meta series introduced Brecht’s epic theatre, established Brecht as a natural ally in an exploration of the distance between the superficial ‘reported’ events of the Sherlock Holmes canon and the potential ‘reality’ they belie, and argued that references to Brecht’s works have been incorporated into the show as far back as the Chinese theatre troupe in S1. Part Three of this meta series introduced Yorke’s model of storytelling as described in his 2013 book Into The Woods, argued that multiple aspects of Yorke’s model are on clear display in BBC Sherlock, and, given both Yorke’s explicit acknowledgement of Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat as a resource and their previous work together, we might plausibly consider Yorke’s book as a cipher for BBC Sherlock. There is strong circumstantial evidence for both Brechtian and Yorkean influences on the show and the writers themselves — the working hypothesis of this meta is that this is all intentional.
Part Four of this meta series applied Yorke’s three-act dialectic model to decode the pattern of themes and references to the James Bond and Hannibal Lecter franchises that span the entire show.
The link between the five games, the five acts of Yorke’s model, and the presumed five seasons of BBC Sherlock is the immediately obvious connection, but, perhaps surprisingly, that’s not where this analysis has led me. Yorke himself writes that, while a five-act structure is a classical structure of narrative that has been used since Shakespeare, the the intrinsic ‘laws of narrative’ that the five-act model is built upon — reversals, symmetry, the tripartite dialectic, etc. — are essentially fractal and modular, and can therefore be assembled in any number of structures, with any number of acts. The five-act model may be used as the framework for the five seasons of the show broadly, but I will argue that the meaning of the five games in TFP is organized in its own way, mapped by the deeper ‘laws of narrative’ that underlay the five-act model Yorke describes.
This meta will thus combine (synthesize) and apply the principles of both Brecht and Yorke to explain the meaning of TFP. To understand the structure and meaning of TFP in this way, both Brecht and Yorke are essential. This is what all of these analyses have been leading up to.
Brecht and Yorke, Together At Last
Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of the European stage’s characteristic illusions. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. A whole elaborate European stage technique, which helps to conceal the fact that the scenes are so arranged that the audience can view them in the easiest way, is thereby made unnecessary. The actors openly choose those positions which will best show them off the the audience, just as if they were acrobats. A further means is that the artist observes himself. (x)
The artist observes himself.
As we transition from the black-and-white film reel at the beginning of TFP into the hallway and foyer, we shift our point of view. From Part 2 of this meta series, we’re already familiar with applying Brecht’s vision of epic theatre as a convention in which the artist is aware that he is being observed and at the same time observes himself to John and his public-facing blog. Here in TFP, we step outside yet another frame. The artist being observed, observing themselves, is no longer John, but Mofftiss.
TFP is a capsule episode that contains a Doylist exploration of the story they’ve written and the character they’ve created. A breaking of the fourth wall to give an explanation — however opaque and nonsensical at first blush — of the point of their show.
As we know from Yorke (though he’s of course not the first to say it), in a well-constructed story, plot and character are indivisible. The plot unfolds as the character’s psyche dictates; anything you need to know about the character is demonstrated by their actions and decisions, which are what makes up the plot. Done properly, the plot of a story is constructed to serve precisely what the writer wishes to explore about the character. Yorke explains:
It’s a commonplace that character and story are the same thing — a character is what they do and, consequently, what a character wants reveals who they are. The traits a character displays in pursuit of that goal (both conscious and unconscious ones) are, we can see, directly linked to structure.
And:
Character and structure […] are indivisible; one is a manifestation of the other.
The main anchoring points of any plot, and therefore of any character, are 1) the inciting incident and 2) the crisis:
In classical terms then — if we wish to pin down one specific moment in the first act as an inciting incident — it is simply the crisis point (the second turning point) of the first act. Like all good crisis points, it’s a subversion of expectation, a cliff hanger, an antithesis to what’s gone before. It’s the moment that presents [the protagonist] with a choice: whether to take a first big step outside his own limited world into the woods of new experience.
And:
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? Finding themselves in a seemingly inescapable hole, the protagonist is presented with a choice. … This choice then is the final test of character, precisely because it’s the moment where the hero is forced to face up to their dramatic need or flaw.
And:
What the study of inciting incidents reveals to us is the ubiquity of the fractal story shape. Every act has two turning points within it, the latter of which acts as an explosion that invites the protagonist into an alien world. In the first act, that second turning point is called an inciting incident; if it’s the penultimate act, it’s called a crisis point. Structurally they’re the same thing — a choice that presents itself to the protagonist, their name and function changing only according to their position in the story.
In short: the protagonist is presented with a choice. This choice both drives the story forward and defines the character making it. The first and last of these choices anchor the story, give it symmetry, demonstrate how and how much the protagonist has changed and grown, and can be considered a distillation of what the argument of the story is “about”.
A dissection of the pivotal choices that the character makes is the same as a dissection of the story’s structure.
This takes us to our first stop: the four games that Eurus orchestrates for Sherlock, John, and Mycroft to play while they’re trapped together in Sherrinford.
The four games each represent a choice: two from the inciting incident of the five-season arc, two from the (future) final crisis.
These games define the beginnings and ends of Sherlock’s and John’s character arcs.
This is science from the point of view of lab rats; this is vivisection.
TFP is a dissection of the pivotal choices that each character makes, in other words a dissection of the inciting incident and the crisis point.
How can this be done? Thankfully we have Brecht to make this really straightforward.
As Walter Benjamin wrote, the response to Brecht’s epic theater should be: “Things can happen this way, but they can also happen a quite different way”:
The strategy was to produce an experience of curiosity, astonishment, and shock:, raising such questions as: “Is that the way things are? What produced this? It’s terrible! How can we change things?” Such a critical and questioning attitude was also fostered by a “montage of images” and series of typical social tableaux that Brecht called “gests” (Brecht on Theater: 42, 86–87, 104, 134, 139, 198–205). He wanted his spectators to work through these examples, to participate in an active process of critical thought that would provide insights into the workings of society, and to see the need for and to implement radical social change. (x)
Recall the idea of the “Not/But”: Brecht’s innovation was to be extremely explicit about the pivotal choices his characters made in his plays, and for his actors to embody both possible outcomes in the moment they make their choice. This concept is taken to an extreme by a pair of teaching plays he wrote, each depicting the same scenario, with the same person faced with the same decision, but in each making a different decision at the pivotal moment. The titles are typically translated as “He Who Says Yes” and “He Who Says No”.
Brecht worked hard to portray society in his plays in a way that made it clear what was happening was wrong, and highlighted the pivotal choice in order to show where a different path might have been taken.
In the language of the show:
Rejecting the ending to Appointment in Samarra, Sherlock writes his own story:
MYCROFT: Appointment in Samarra.
SHERLOCK: I’m sorry?
MYCROFT: The merchant who can’t outrun Death. You always hated that story as a child. Less keen on predestination back then.
SHERLOCK: I’m not sure I like it now.
MYCROFT: You wrote your own version, as I remember. Appointment in Sumatra. The merchant goes to a different city and is perfectly fine.
Two narratives where the same person is faced with the same decision, but makes a different decision at the pivotal moment. “He Who Goes To Samarra” and “He Who Goes To Sumatra”.
So we must ask ourselves: if a wholly traditional dramatic narrative is propelled solely by the choice that is taken at each pivotal moment, and if a wholly Brechtian drama overlays both available choices as “Not A, But B”, then what light might a brief Brechtian detour shed on an otherwise traditional dramatic narrative arc?
SHERRINFORD: The Clue is in the Name
Sherrinford, the brutalist island prison, and Musgrave Hall, the ancestral home, represent the two opposing paths for our protagonists. The events in Sherrinford represent wrong choices made at pivotal decision points, both in the past and in the future; choices that result in character stasis, failure, or death.
The clue is in the name. The origin of the name Sherrinford is Sherrinford Holmes, the name Conan Doyle gave to his detective hero in an early draft (x) before settling on the name Sherlock instead. Though frequently deployed in Sherlockiana and derivative works as the name of Sherlock’s brother, there is no ‘Sherrinford’ in the official Sherlock Holmes canon, only in Conan Doyle’s early notes.
Sherrinford is, more accurately, the protagonist who never was.
In TFP, the name that Conan Doyle considered and ultimately rejected for his detective here fittingly represents his detective’s paths not taken.
There are four discrete games that Eurus orchestrates in Sherrinford.
- Shoot The Governor
- Who Killed Evans?
- Save Molly Hooper
- Buridan’s Ass
(If you haven’t watched TFP since it aired, hang in there, I’ll explain them each in detail.)
Each game presents Sherlock (and sometimes, by extension, John) with a choice that corresponds with a choice made in the show’s reality, and each decision Sherlock or John makes in TFP illustrates the path that was not or will not be taken.
Note that Sherrinford does not and cannot represent a single thread of an alternate reality: if the first in a string of choices is made differently, the rest of the narrative will follow a completely different path.
Instead, each game in Sherrinford is its own microcosm. What Sherrinford does is isolate four pivotal moments from the show’s reality and explore why each choice was made, demonstrate the opposite choice, and, more importantly, demonstrate what kind of person it would take to make the opposite choice — or put another way: what kind of character is created by making the opposite choice.
The four games in Sherrinford describe the antithesis of the entire show arc, the decisions at each nodal point where things might have gone “quite a different way”.
These four games are the Brechtian “montage of images”, a “series of typical social tableaux” that “provide insights into the workings of society” — or at the very least, provide insights into the protagonists of this story.
“Things can happen this way, but they can also happen a quite different way.”
The ‘Not’ to each ‘But’; the choice not taken.
II. The Sherrinford Games
1. Shoot the Governor — Counterintuitive Moral Outcome
In the first game, Eurus demands that Sherlock choose either John or Mycroft to kill the governor. If they fail to do so, she will kill the governor’s wife, who she has taken hostage. Who is better suited to take on this iteration of the classic trolley problem?
EURUS: I’m particularly focused on internal conflicts, where strategizing around a largely intuitive moral code appears to create a counter-intuitive result.
When John refuses to kill the governor, in a last ditch attempt to save his wife, the governor takes the gun and kills himself. Because this does not meet her terms, Eurus kills the governor’s wife anyway.
The key to this game is here: two people are dead instead of one.
This game represents the first key decision point in our story: the point when John does choose to shoot Jefferson Hope, the cabbie, through the window at Roland Kerr Further Education College at the end of ASIP. In doing this, John saves Sherlock from taking Hope’s poison. This is the inciting incident of the entire show arc, the point where John links his fate inextricably to Sherlock’s.
After Mycroft declines to kill the Governor — “I will not kill, I will not have blood on my hands” — the game is about John’s “largely intuitive moral code”. In ASIP, John is willing to make the trade of Hope’s life for Sherlock’s, and he’s willing to get blood on his hands to do it. Without John’s willingness to take the shot in ASIP, Hope dies anyway (he had only months to live due to a brain aneurysm) and Sherlock becomes another serial suicide. Two people are dead instead of one.
In order to save a life, John must be willing to take a life. This is the essential contradiction of John: the soldier doctor, the killer healer. In ASIP, he does the moral calculus and makes that choice in the blink of an eye — that is who John Watson is. The choice is the character.
The John of TFP, the anti-John, waffles, and we get to watch an articulation of his thought process. The governor pleads with him, understanding what the John of ASIP understands:
The conversation here suggests that the governor is a mirror for John, and that this is the debate John would be having with himself. John here, as the Governor, is far more comfortable with the idea of dying to save a loved one than killing for one, perhaps reflective of his mental state in ASIP (it’s certainly reflective of his mental state in TGG, where he tackles Moriarty and shouts for Sherlock to escape):
JOHN: You are a good man, and you are doing a good thing.
GOVERNOR (softly): So are you.
JOHN: I’ll spend the rest of my life telling myself that.
Finally he yields:
JOHN: I can’t. (He lowers the gun and turns to Sherlock.) I’m sorry. I can’t do it.
At this point, the Governor takes the gun and kills himself, and Eurus kills his wife.
Afterwards, John weighs what his choice cost him:
MYCROFT: Your priorities do you credit.
JOHN: No, my priorities just got a woman killed.
Contrast with John in ASIP, completely at ease with his choice to kill Hope in order to save Sherlock:
SHERLOCK: Are you all right?
JOHN: Yes, of course I’m all right.
SHERLOCK: Well, you have just killed a man.
JOHN: Yes, I … That’s true, innit? But he wasn’t a very nice man.
SHERLOCK: No. No, he wasn’t really, was he?
JOHN: And frankly a bloody awful cabbie.
A metaphorical reading of this game continues the show’s exploration of sentiment generally and gay love specifically using the language of death, moral codes, and keeping one’s hands clean. Mycroft’s immediate refusal to have blood on his hands speaks for Sherlock’s superego, holding him apart from sentiment and messy romantic entanglements. John’s eventual refusal to have blood on his hands as well, his ‘largely intuitive moral code’ forbidding him from touching another man ultimately resulting in the deaths of both halves of the romantic couple. Gay love saves lives — is it not, in the end, selfish to keep one’s hands clean at the expense of another’s life?
On each level, the meaning is clear. John does choose to pull the lever on this trolley problem in ASIP. Because of this choice, our hero lives and our story is able to begin. The inciting incident. Furthermore, the metaphorical meaning within this choice sets up and foreshadows a climax in which the subtext becomes text, and where, “counterintuitively”, it is precisely “getting one’s hands dirty” — physically? emotionally? — that is necessary to save each other’s lives.
2. Who Killed Evans? —Deduce The Shooter
The second game, otherwise known as the Garridebs game, asks Sherlock to deduce who killed Evans, based on nothing but photos of the three main suspects. This game represents the pivotal choice that immediately follows from that of the first game, John shooting Jefferson Hope in ASIP.
The Garridebs Game bears so little resemblance to the original 3GAR story that it is almost an inverse of it. In the original 3GAR, Evans is the villain. “Killer Evans” is the person who shoots John, triggering the long-awaited ‘Garridebs moment’, the climactic moment in ACD canon when Holmes betrays the depth of his attachment to his Watson.
What’s even more confusing about how they’ve adapted 3GAR here is there are in fact four Garridebs mentioned in the story:
- Nathan Garrideb, the eccentric old hermit who lives in the house Killer Evans wishes to burgle. Nathan Garrideb is an innocent party and the only person in the story actually named Garrideb.
- John Garrideb, the assumed alias of the criminal Killer Evans.
- Howard Garrideb, a fictitious person invented by Killer Evans who places an ad in the paper designed to lure Nathan away from his home on a particular day.
- Alexander Hamilton Garrideb, yet another fictitious Garrideb. Killer Evans’s ploy revolves around the estate of the recently deceased Alexander Hamilton Garrideb, who, having no other kin, desires to leave his tremendous fortune to three other strangers so long as they share his extremely unusual name — the eponymous three Garridebs.
There are three Garridebs featured in TFP: Nathan, Howard, and Alex. We’re told they are brothers. We can immediately see this is not the trio that the original story features. The Garrideb missing from TFP is the alias of Killer Evans: the one named John.
The premise of the game in TFP is that Evans has been killed, and one of the three Garridebs has killed him. The killer has shot Evans from a distance of 300m. Sherlock must deduce, based on their appearance alone, which of the Garridebs was capable of making this shot.
This detail, the question of who could make a shot from such a distance, is the first hint that this second game points to the end of ASIP. This game represents the turning point immediately following the one represented in the first game: immediately following John’s choice to shoot Hope and save Sherlock, Sherlock must a) realize that the shooter is John and b) decide what to do with this information.
The significance of this game is in Sherlock’s process of elimination: who is able to make the shot, and who isn’t. He narrows it down based on two criteria: eyesight and steady hands.
Nathan he eliminates first:
Nathan is quickly eliminated based on the thought that having killed Evans would have left physical scarring on Nathan’s face. Physiognomy, is that you? We’ll return to this.
Sherlock moves on to Howard next:
Here is where we begin to even more explicitly call back to ASIP.
Because as soon as John and Sherlock meet in ASIP, Sherlock deduces John’s psychosomatic limp, the intermittent tremor in his left hand, even the drinking, though he assigns it to John’s sister in the moment.
SHERLOCK: I know you’re an Army doctor and you’ve been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him — possibly because he’s an alcoholic; more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp’s psychosomatic — quite correctly, I’m afraid. That’s enough to be going on with, don’t you think?
All things that, to hear the Sherlock of TFP, rule John categorically incapable of a kill shot over that distance. The Sherlock of TFP is a Sherlock who, at the end of ASIP, doesn’t realize that it’s John that has saved him until he’s already told Lestrade how to find and arrest him.
LESTRADE: Got nothing to go on.
SHERLOCK: Oh, I wouldn’t say that.
LESTRADE: Okay, gimme.
SHERLOCK: The bullet they just dug out of the wall’s from a hand gun. Kill shot over that distance from that kind of a weapon — that’s a crack shot you’re looking for, but not just a marksman; a fighter. His hands couldn’t have shaken at all, so clearly he’s acclimatized to violence. He didn’t fire until I was in immediate danger, though, so strong moral principle. You’re looking for a man probably with a history of military service, and nerves of steel …
SHERLOCK: Actually, do you know what? Ignore me.
The deduction of Howard’s alcoholism is a devastating contradiction to this assessment. Sherlock deduces that someone who drinks, someone whose hand shakes could have never made a shot like the one that saved Sherlock back in ASIP.
John’s defining characteristic is contradiction. Not just as a soldier doctor, killer healer, but as a crack shot with a drinking problem and a hand tremor. The part that’s ‘wrong’ in this game is that Sherlock isn’t seeing that.
Sherlock assesses his last suspect, Alex:
SHERLOCK: So that leaves us with Alex. Indentations on the temples suggest he habitually wears glasses. Frown lines suggest a lifetime of peering.
MYCROFT: He’s shortsighted, or he was. His recent laser surgery has done the trick.
SHERLOCK: Laser surgery?
MYCROFT: Look at his clothes. He’s made an effort.
JOHN: That’s very good.
SHERLOCK: Excellent. Suddenly he sees himself in quite a different light now that he’s dumped the specs. Even has a spray tan. But he’s clearly not used to his new personal grooming ritual. That can be told by the state of his fingernails and the fact that there’s hair growing in his ears. So it’s a superficial job, then. But he got his eyes fixed. His hands were steady. He pulled the trigger. He killed Evans.
“He’s made an effort.” “It’s a superficial job”. This assessment is based purely on how Alex wants to be perceived.
“The more you look the more you realize the conflict between inner and outer self is absolutely central to successful dramatic characterization.” [Yorke, Into The Woods]
The blind spot of Sherlock’s method of deduction is the inherent duality, contradiction, and paradox of human nature. His method allows for either “good Samaritan” or “bad Samaritan”, with no room for the ‘a bit not good’ Samaritan.
“This conflict between who a character is, and who they want to be, is real life’s gift to drama.” [Yorke, Into The Woods]
The three suspects, the three Garridebs, each represent different facets of John. Alex is how he wants to be seen. Howard is how he’s afraid of being seen. Look at John’s new slicked-back hairdo, his nice suits in S4, and you miss the clutter of booze bottles haunting the Watson flat. Paste your friend’s head on the Vitruvian Man and it becomes harder to find him when he’s at the bottom of a well.
Nathan is the composite, a completely normal-looking guy who happens to wear glasses — both the open admission of and the correction for the flaw of shortsightedness — but who is also completely capable of murder, because of course evidence of a person’s guilt or innocence doesn’t appear on their faces like this is The Picture of Dorian Gray!
In ASIP, Sherlock deduces that John is the killer, yet he chooses to cover for him rather than finish his deduction for Lestrade. Notice how Eurus takes the game a step further:
Eurus demands that Sherlock not only identify the murderer, but personally verbally condemn him.
Sherlock condemns one Garrideb, and all Garridebs are lost. All three Garridebs are dropped, because the deduction of course is wrong, it’s incomplete; they are all the murderer, they are each a different facet of the same person, and to condemn one facet is to condemn the whole. Only when Sherlock synthesizes the different facets of John’s identity can he save him.
This is what the show has been setting up from the beginning, from Sherlock declaring in TBB that a left-handed man’s death was a murder and not a suicide because the bullet entered the right side of his skull, despite sharing his own flat with a left-handed gun owner who shoots with his right, yet another of John’s many contradictions. From the way John mirrors so often come in pairs — Jefferson Hope and Jennifer Wilson, Culverton Smith and Faith Smith — serial killer and suicide victim. From the split second in the finale of TGG, waiting for its symmetrical follow-through in S5, when Sherlock thinks John might actually be Moriarty, the person he’s meeting at the pool, only to realize that John is the final hostage.
Sherlock is able to make the correct choice here, once, in ASIP, in this most pivotal inciting moment. He’s able to synthesize the contradictory features of the shooter, find them in John, and save him. This allows them both to take the first step on their character arcs in this story, now inextricably bound together, the man who killed for Sherlock and the man who risked his career as a consulting detective to lie to the police to cover for that very killer.
But as we see as the story progresses, Sherlock’s standard method of deduction, of always wanting things to be clever, to be black and white and purely logical, fails him all the time. To quote Sir Terry Pratchett’s answer to this conceit, “What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!” The point of BBC Sherlock is that this method of deduction will fail Sherlock, it will continue to fail Sherlock, and it will fail him most devastatingly if he continues to see John through a lens without sentiment.
It’s not that this is something Sherlock must learn from scratch, starting with zero ability and learning in a linear way throughout the story — a deep capacity for love is Sherlock’s Character Flaw, love for John Watson in particular. It is within him the whole time, but it’s the thing that he represses, the thing he believes makes him vulnerable, when really it’s the very thing that will save him. The moment Sherlock lets his love for John, his ability to see John and his infinite contradictions, interrupt his deduction of the person who shot Jefferson Hope is the moment that his character journey begins.
Don’t solve the murder, save the life.
Recap
John’s decision to kill a man for Sherlock and Sherlock’s decision to cover for John’s crime are the pivotal choices in BBC Sherlock that Yorke calls the inciting incident. These are the moments that TFP highlights for each of them using the Brechtian idea of the Not/But. By showing the dialectic opposite of these key decisions in TFP, the writers highlight the depth, agency, and consequences of the choice actually taken in ASIP. It explodes each of these split second decisions so that the chain of reasoning can be explicitly seen — what exactly it was that allowed them to avoid death in Samarra and arrive in Sumatra unscathed.
Given the fractal nature of narrative, an inciting incident can be pinpointed for any given episode, season, act, scene, etc. What is sketched out by these two games in TFP appears to be the inciting incident of the overarching narrative. However, because of the fractal nature of narrative, these are not the only points where these questions are posed, or where these scenarios appear. The shape of narrative means that these inciting questions — “just what kind of a person are they?” — are posed again and again, over the course of a character’s growth, prompting them to find new and different ways of avoiding addressing their neurotic conflict, until they run out of evasive maneuvers and the stakes become such that confrontation and synthesis of their Character Flaw is unavoidable.
The choice at the inciting incident is the first glimmer of hope that the resolution of neurotic conflict is possible, and the choice at the final climax completes the synthesis that began at the inciting incident. I’ve linked these first two games to the climax of ASIP for many reasons, but in part because practically speaking, when looking at an abstract representation of a concrete narrative turning point, it’s far easier to point to two scenes that already exist than it is to extrapolate from an abstract scene into the future. However, narrative symmetry means that some recapitulation of these first two games will happen not just throughout the story, but in the final act to prompt the final two. I think it’s very probable that all the games represent future events of S5, and the first two games represent both the end of ASIP and a future recapitulation of the end ASIP. What does that mean for S5? We might anticipate a murder scene not unlike ASIP, the identity of the killer unknown. Key will be Sherlock’s understanding of John and his capability as both a killer and a deeply moral agent, in order to save John rather than blindly handing him over to the police. Perhaps details from the first game — like the relationship between John, a wife, and a certain man named David — will become salient.
With the third and fourth games, we enter into untrodden territory. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, the response to epic theatre ought to be, “Things can happen this way, but they can also happen a quite different way”. We know the first two games play out as the opposite of what has already happened, because we can plainly see both the game and the show’s reality for comparison. We can see how they each pinpoint and examine the first critical choice of John’s and Sherlock’s character arcs. But while the choices of the first two games have already been posed and answered ‘correctly’ at the inciting incident, we have not yet witnessed their character arcs’ conclusions. If we extrapolate from the pattern thus far, these next two games represent the opposite of what will happen in episodes to come, and pinpoint the final critical choices that will close John’s and Sherlock’s character arcs.
I say “will happen” with full confidence, but only in the Doylist sense. The unequivocal emphasis of the referenced works here is that this is not a natural, inevitable resolution for the character to slide into, but a conscious choice that must be identified by the character and chosen with intent. These are the choices that will define these characters and their story.
[Note for my fellow pedants: If you’ve become familiar with Yorke’s model, you know that Yorke would technically place the inciting incident of an archetypal five-act narrative at the end of the first act. The pool scene in TGG/ASIB could certainly be viewed as the inciting incident of the whole show, particularly if we’re thinking of the arc as it relates to “Stayin’ Alive” as the “Final Problem”, but ultimately that just isn’t the scene that they’ve explored in these first two games in TFP. Is this deviation from formula a relic of adapting ASIP from the unaired pilot, which was originally intended to be the first of a total of six episodes? Is this a concession to the realities of television as a medium, which require immediate emotional investment in the first season in order to be renewed and continue at all? [If you know Yorke’s book, you know he also discusses in detail the necessity and inevitability of adapting form/formula to medium.] Does it have something to do with the symmetry they had planned for S5? Did they just say fuck it and do their own thing because they liked it better? There’s no way to know for sure. If that bothers you, well. It bothers me too! But them’s the breaks!]
3. Save Molly Hooper — You Have To Say It First
Our first step into the future unknown of S5. We’re no longer mapping symbolic road-not-taken sketches (“gests”) onto things we have already affirmatively seen, but extrapolating future events using the template established by the first two games.
EURUS: Coffin. Problem: someone is about to die. It will be — as I understand it — a tragedy. So many days not lived, so many words unsaid. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The “words unsaid” that Eurus refers to in the third game, the words that Sherlock must get Molly to say, the words on the lid of the coffin, the release code that will avert catastrophe, are: “I love you”. “Words unsaid,” “desperately unspoken,” Codeword “Amo”, Codename “Love” — you can start to see the pattern here.
There are two general, interrelated ideas we can begin to extract from this game: a) the idea that without Sherlock’s love, without Sherlock’s confession of love, John will die, and b) the idea that John’s own love confession is something that he will take to his grave unsaid unless Sherlock says it first.
John seemingly cannot admit his feelings, even under immediate threat of death, until he knows Sherlock reciprocates them. For Sherlock’s part, nothing will compel him to fully embrace his love for John unless nothing short of it will save his life.
Note the way in which Sherlock loses this game. A mutual love confession technically happens, yet what I’m arguing is that at the future decision point, this is the choice not taken.
The game begins with Molly, mirror for John, ignoring her phone, i.e. her heart. Specifically ignoring a call from Sherlock. When she finally answers, she immediately assumes Sherlock is toying with her.
He wears her down a bit, and she allows that if Sherlock says “I love you” first, she will say the words back.
Sherlock’s downfall here isn’t that he can’t say the words, “I love you”. It’s that he doesn’t ever mean them. It’s that Molly knows exactly how Sherlock shams and is trying to guard herself, and he’s exposed her deepest, most guarded feelings with a cheap trick.
SHERLOCK: Eurus, I won. I won. Come on, play fair. The girl on the plane: I need to talk to her. I won. I saved Molly Hooper.
EURUS: Saved her? From what? Oh, do be sensible. There were no explosives in her little house. Why would I be so clumsy? You didn’t win. You lost. Look what you did to her. Look what you did to yourself.
When Eurus demands that Sherlock not alert Molly to the danger, she is taking away his favorite gambit to extract a confession: manufactured danger with a manufactured deadline. No fake bomb countdown in an underground carriage. No psychotropic drug in an empty government lab facility. No faked suicide and gravestone confession.
Sherlock makes a false overture, orchestrates a false crisis, and the other person exposes their own true feelings in good faith. Sherlock then retracts his initial overture, leaving the other person wounded and vulnerable.
In terms of heart-phone metaphor…
…Sherlock steals the phone/heart under the guise of a hug, in order to make that person’s phone/heart send a particular message, to which there will be no response.
In terms of a hostage situation in Tbilisi…
…the voice saying “Love” over the phone/heart told them to go in, but when they did they quickly realized it had been a trap.
This is Sherlock’s M.O., and thus this is John’s deepest, most clutching fear: that Sherlock will trick him into confessing his love, with some deception up to and including falsely confessing his own romantic love for John. Instantly decisive to kill on Sherlock’s behalf as highlighted in the first game, this game shows us the desire John will virtually never act upon.
But whose road-not-taken is this? Of the several choices each make as the game plays out, which is the choice that must go another, completely different way?
ELLA: There’s stuff that you wanted to say … but didn’t say it.
JOHN: Yeah.
ELLA: Say it now.
JOHN: No. Sorry. I can’t.
If we accept the premise that BBC Sherlock is a story equally about both John and Sherlock, and that this means they each must have their own arcs, their own façades and their own flaws they are wrestling with, that must come to a breaking point in the final climax, then the choice in this game does not belong to Sherlock. If we follow the template established by the first two games, the choice in this game belongs to John.
As much as Eurus talks about Sherlock’s failure here, the placement of this game tells us that John’s emotional reticence is not a given for Sherlock to navigate around — it is the neurotic conflict that John must overcome. The crisis point takes the character to the precise moment where their flaw must be integrated in order to move forward. The critical failure in this game is John demanding that Sherlock confess his love before John will confess his own. We are looking ahead to the precise scenario in which John will confess his feelings for Sherlock first. Without coercion, without the application of an arbitrary deadline or manufactured crisis, without plausible deniability, and without guarantee of reciprocation.
So what is the scenario that finally takes John to his crisis, his breaking point? What would compel John to finally make his confession?
The Final Problem is, of course: Stayin’ Alive.
Consider the music that plays at the end of this game as Sherlock destroys the casket in a small tantrum. The motif is Vesper’s theme from the James Bond film Casino Royale. David Arnold, who composed the scores for both Casino Royale and BBC Sherlock, confirmed this on Twitter and noted that the motif is “great for loss or regret.” (x)
But this reference to such a specific character at this moment offers specific parallels. Vesper is Bond’s origin story. His love for Vesper, his feeling of betrayal, his reaction to her death is how he becomes the cold-hearted lothario of the rest of the franchise. In the end of Casino Royale, Vesper transfers their poker winnings to the terrorist organization they’d been investigating together and disappears. Realizing he’s been double-crossed, Bond pursues Vesper, but she’s taken hostage by the terrorists and ultimately commits suicide. Bond bitterly renounces her in his debrief until M explains that the terrorists had been holding Vesper’s boyfriend hostage to ensure her cooperation, that she had traded the money for the assurance that Bond would be spared, and had undoubtedly known she was going to her death. Absorbing this, Bond realizes then that Vesper must have left her phone with him on purpose, and discovers that she has left him a note in the phone with a phone number that will allow him to continue to investigate the terrorist organization, reaffirming that her feelings for him had been genuine.
But crucial to the completion of John’s arc here is the note left behind on Vesper’s phone.
SHERLOCK: Oh. Ah! She was clever, clever, yes! She’s cleverer than you lot and she’s dead. Do you see, do you get it? She didn’t lose her phone, she never lost it. She planted it on him. When she got out of the car, she knew that she was going to her death. She left the phone in order to lead us to her killer.
It’s the same thing that the show has been setting up since Jennifer Wilson left her phone behind in ASIP: John’s suicide note.
An instrument of and representation of her love affairs, Jennifer Wilson leaves her phone behind as a clue to distinguish her murder from her suicide. In TRF, Sherlock gives his suicide note to John over a phone call — “this is my note”. In ASIB, Irene fakes her death and leaves her phone behind to Sherlock, and what she refers to at first as her ‘life’ is revealed by Sherlock to be her ‘heart’, but looking back on these scenarios, is there a difference? Leaving one’s phone behind as a love confession before going to one’s death neatly continues the symbolism of the phone-heart metaphor, leaving behind one’s heart and one’s life in the same gesture.
In this game, the phone call, the “I Love You”-engraved coffin, the impending threat of death. Molly’s already tearful emotional state as she handles a massive knife.
“Someone is about to die” is the premise of this game, the “words unsaid” are the Brechtian choice. The “desperately unspoken”-ness of it all — it could go this way, but it could also go another way. The choice — whether in the final moments, to leave a note, to make it spoken —belongs to John.
4. Buridan’s Ass — Who Do You Need?
Faced with the ultimate crisis, the structure asks of the protagonists one simple question: will you revert and die, or change and live? It’s the death of the old self … so that the new person can live. It’s the protagonist’s biggest test. -Yorke
The fourth and final Sherrinford game is simple, and gets straight to the root of Sherlock’s core character conflict. His ultimate crisis, his biggest test.
Mycroft here, as he often does, represents Sherlock’s ‘pure, cold reason’. John, of course, has become the catalyst of all Sherlock’s strongest emotions. Will Sherlock choose John or Mycroft? Reason or emotion? Mycroft spells it right out:
MYCROFT: Shoot Doctor Watson. There’s no question who has to continue from here. It’s us; you and me. Whatever lies ahead requires brainpower, Sherlock, not sentiment.
“Brainpower” or “sentiment”? It’s a choice that Sherlock, because of his black and white, as-yet un-synthesized Kantian view of human nature, sees as mutually exclusive.
Buridan’s Ass is a classic philosophical paradox that proposes that a perfectly rational hungry donkey, positioned precisely halfway between two identical bales of hay, cannot make a rational decision about which bale of hay to eat first, and will therefore eat nothing and starve. In Moriarty’s macabre version, instead of dying the donkey apparently devours one of our recurring stand-ins for Sherlock: the baby Jesus.
In the fourth game, Sherlock faces his own philosophical paradox, and we see him fare no better than the hungry donkey. It isn’t that Sherlock chooses one over the other, but that he is unable to choose at all. The game ends with Sherlock choosing to shoot himself, rather than make a choice between John and Mycroft. His brainpower has always been his most prized virtue, but he has now reached a point where he values sentiment equally. Rather than embrace them both, in this game, he chooses self-destruction. (Like Javert in Les Mis, who is so unable to conceive of the paradox of the noble criminal that when the man he has hunted for decades saves his life, he kills himself!)
It’s reminiscent of the choices on offer from Jefferson Hope in ASIP:
The midpoint image of the man who believes himself to be one thing battling a very different inner self is a universal, central image in all three-dimensional drama. […] That gap, between how he wants to see himself and who he really is, creates a classic neurosis and, as he is unable to reconcile the two, his ending can only be tragic. [Yorke, Into The Woods]
Put another way, to refuse to synthesize brainpower and sentiment is self-destruction. In ASIP, Jefferson Hope’s gun was fake — Sherlock knew he could get away with refusing to make a choice, for now. But it has always been temporary, and as we approach the final climax, it is indeed make-your-mind-up time. Sherlock’s effort to eliminate all sentiment in favor of pure reason is taken to its breaking point, taken to the precise point and situation where it will fail him, to the point where the gun is absolutely real.
Calling back to the Governor, a John mirror, here, as Sherlock points the gun to his own head, creates a Romeo and Juliet situation, a Princess Bride-esque suicidal impulse upon seeing one’s beloved lying dead. On the heels of the previous game, representing John’s choice to enclose his love confession for Sherlock in his suicide note, and introducing the concept that nothing but the prospect of John’s death would compel Sherlock to confess the same, we find the very situation that will test these established limits. Without embracing the synthesis of the cold calculating genius he wants to be seen as and the soft romantic with emotional needs that he really is, Sherlock and John are doomed to a Romeo and Juliet ending. ‘Unable to reconcile a classic neurosis, his ending can only be tragic.’
To avoid tragedy, Sherlock must not only embrace both sentiment and brainpower on equal footing, but he must of course solve the final problem: staying alive.
SHERLOCK: You. It’s always you. John Watson, you keep me right.
Sherlock’s epiphany at John and Mary’s wedding, the midpoint of the five-act arc, articulates the synthesis that Sherlock would have needed to win this final Sherrinford game. With Moffat, it’s always in the phrasing — “John Watson, you keep me right.” “Right” as in “correct” — it’s about Sherlock’s powers of deduction, John as the conductor of light, his “amazing ability” for stimulating genius in others. Sherlock’s superhuman power of deduction works best precisely when he embraces sentiment and his love for John — his intimate awareness of all John’s complexities and contradictions, and by extension those of everyone he might deduce — rather than when he falls back on black and white thinking as he fights against it.
An arc with this central conflict is synthesized when sentiment is required for brainpower, when the false dichotomy is rejected, when caring is an advantage. Rather than facing this choice and choosing self-destruction, Sherlock must choose life: his own life, John’s life.
“Why don’t you go and cry by their bedside and see what good it does them?” I have a feeling we’re going to find out.
Thank you for reading! I really hope it was worth the wait this time!
Huge thank you to all the friends who beta-ed early drafts of this way back in 2018, and to Shreya and Selena for helping me to finally usher it into the published world.
I have again quoted liberally from the transcripts created by Ariane DeVere, and this work would be absolutely impossible without them. Some screencaps are taken from here, others carefully harvested by yours truly. Infinite thanks.
Watch this space — “The Musgrave Hall ‘But’: The Final Problem Explainer, Part II” coming soon!
