When did Sherlock actually OD?
The idea that we’re in Sherlock’s head in S4 has been discussed extensively before, at first by the brilliant people who came up with the EMP theory, later by me (X, X, X, X, X) and by a lot of others. But this interesting post from @the-signs-of-two providing new clues that “Sherlock is in his mind palace throughout S4 while overdosing”, with additions from @sarahthecoat and @gosherlocked, among others, made me want to focus a bit more on Sherlock’s overdose on drugs and some thoughts around that. This meta is not about the multiple mirrors, metaphors, codes and symbolism we see in BBC Sherlock (which have been discussed even more extensively), but rather about what plausible explanations there might be for the increasing absurdity of it.
Messed-up timeline and lack of logics
First of all, I think the timeline of this show is warped, at the very least from HLV and onwards. And actually, there seems to be some hints about this as well, for example these words by Mr and Mrs Welsborough in TST:
And of course, if the events in S4 only happened inside Sherlock’s head, there literally never was such a time. At least not in the order that the events are presented to us. Some big chunks of this story seems to be missing, while others have switched places with each other in time, making a complete, absurd mess of it all. (And I do believe this is all done intentionally by the screen-writers, to distract the audience from what’s actually going on.) After TSoT the narrative is no longer presented in a comprehensible order. But this would also mean that some apparently absurd things we see in S4 might have actually happened before that, albeit in another, more logical, context. And maybe they weren’t even presented to us that way, right? My point is: some things that appear as non sequiturs in S4 just might make more sense in another time frame. So let’s explore that.
An example of the first case, with important, missing time chunks: We’re not privy to what happened after Sherlock nearly died for the second time in HLV, when his heart stopped after the “Watson domestic scene” in 221B.
We only see him show up at his parents’ house at Christmas, supposedly after several months of recovery in hospital. As if the dying protagonist’s condition in between these time windows wasn’t even important. And ‘Mary’, who nearly killed Sherlock the first time and then threatened to finish the job, is now invited to celebrate Christmas with Sherlock’s family as if nothing, apparently meant to reconcile with John. But these scenes are mixed up in time with the domestic quarrel and the scenes where Sherlock sets up a trap to reveal ‘Mary’s true intentions to John. This confusion of timelines makes us totally miss the moment when we should have thought “wait a minute - what happened with the murder attempt against the show’s main character?” It was, of course, never logical, as @gosherlocked pointed out in this addition, that Sherlock was now defending ’Mary’s murder attempt, claiming instead that it was life-saving.
We never get to see how and when Sherlock came to this absurd conclusion, though, we merely see some confusing ‘deductions’ about how a gun-shot can be “surgery” because it’s not a head-shot, or about who must have called the ambulance. These ‘deductions’ have logical errors like causal fallacies and the “slippery slope fallacy”. I once wrote a meta about Sherlock’s lack of logics in HLV and onwards. Something seems to have been blocking his usually brilliant thought process - was it the IV-morphine against the pain in his chest wound? But it had already worn off, hadn’t it?
And neither was it logical, I’d say, that John’s wife had suddenly turned into someone like The Spider of TBB; a facade-climbing ninja committing murders in high buildings. Or that a critically wounded and newly operated Sherlock would be capable of climbing out of his hospital window, stealing the wheelchair and IV-drip on his way and setting up a trap for ’Mary’ in another part of town. And, in the mean time, even place a perfume bottle as a hint to John in 221B. Is he Superman or what?
Another example of missing chunks of time is between TLD and TFP, where we never get to know what actually happened after Eurus shot John in the face.
A smoking gun, followed by nothing, and in TFP we then learn that apparently the shooting was just done with a tranquilizer. Why? We’re never told.
And yet another: When did Sherlock manage to get out of his heavy drug abuse in TLD? 221B was turned into a meth lab and Sherlock was so addicted that he had to inject right before talking to the kids in a hospital. His friends had to take turns babysitting him, but apparently he could just snap out of it off-screen? We never got to know how this worked, that part is also missing.
The thing is, from HLV and onwards, neither Sherlock or John seems to have any normal human limitations. They go through fatal situations, where any real person would be bound to either die or be hospitalised, but afterwards they just carry on as if nothing, and any time frame containing real concern about the consequences to their life and health is simply left out.
Time inconsistencies in Sherlock Holmes is nothing new, though; already some of ACD’s canon stories have them (which would be of no surprise, considering that he wrote those stories during several decades, so I imagine it must have been difficult to recall all former events in a perfectly logical order). But ACD’s inconsistencies are minor, I’d say. BBC Sherlock, on the other hand, displays an increasing level of absurdity, at least from TEH.
I think many of us feel pretty convinced that S4 happens inside Sherlock’s head, since this would explain all the logical problems mentioned above. But it’s still difficult to pinpoint exactly when he was actually trapped in there - the “point of no return” - since there are weird elements in this show already from ASiP. That’s why I think we’re seeing the show from Sherlock’s perspective from start; we’re in his head, and whenever it get’s a bit too weird it’s because he’s fantasizing things, reconstructing scenarios on his Mind Stage. This is how Sherlock Holmes’s puzzle solving usually works; it’s his MO. But there’s a difference between Sherlock recalling and dramatizing events in his head - while reading John’s blog - that have actually happened, and Sherlock making stuff up entirely inside his head. Events that aren’t confirmed by anyone else.
In TAB we’re outright told that the Victorian scenes we see were happening inside Sherlock’s Mind Palace:
A fantasy, thus. But we’re also told that the Victorian scenes are the product of Sherlock having overdosed on a cocktail of drugs, within the five minutes it took for the plane to take off and then land again:
But this time frame doesn’t make sense, as John points out:
OK Mycroft, fine, but was there even a plane? And if Sherlock was kept imprisoned and isolated before this supposed plane ride, when could he have got the opportunity to take the drugs? As I said in an addition to @the-signs-of-two‘s post, I don’t believe Sherlock’s OD actually happened in TAB, because TAB isn’t ’real’ and never was. It’s all taking place in Sherlock’s head, even the modern scene on the plane above, which is eventually followed by Sherlock, Mycroft and Greg witnessing a skeleton coming to life, and immediately after that scene this:
And I also highly doubt there ever was any ’deportation’ of Sherlock to Eastern Europe after having murdered Magnussen, because that scenario is absurd in and off itself. It would be much more likely to be part of a drug-induced dream separated from reality. Just think about it: would Sherlock Holmes shoot someone in the head rather than try to solve the problem? And would he do this to protect someone who had shot and almost killed him? And Mycroft, who is ’constantly worried’ about his brother’s welfare and drug addiction, would he send him off to a certain death rather than prison? No - just no; none of those things makes an iota of sense, and nor have they any similarity to ACD canon.
But knowing that Sherlock is indeed a drug-addict (like in canon) and probably also heart-broken after John’s wedding, I think it’s still likely that he actually did OD at some point. The drugs could well have lead to him being comatose and locked inside his own mind for a much longer time than his usual MP visits. The question is when he did it, though. Because if HLV and TAB are too weird to actually have happened, if they represent Sherlock’s drug-induced dream scenarios, then when did he actually overdose? Well, I think Mycroft has the answer:
If there never was any week of imprisonment in HLV, because HLV is all Mind Palace, when is this ‘solitary confinement’ most likely to have occurred?
Well, John’s honeymoon is rather likely to have lasted about a week, isn’t it? On the very final comments on the blog we see how desperately lonely Sherlock feels when John is on “sex holiday” with ‘Mary’:
In other words: he’s spending a week of solitary confinement in 221B. A week when Sherlock could have resorted to drug abuse, turning his own flat into a drug den. But this is also pretty much exactly what we see in TLD, isn’t it? When John has stopped visiting or even talking to him, Sherlock is isolating himself in 221B, high as a kite, preparing drugs in the kitchen, reciting Shakespeare, shooting pictures of Culverton Smith and believing he’s walking on the wall:
What if similar things to these actually did happen, but in another time frame, right after the wedding, resulting in an overdose? Far more logical and likely than the weird narrative of TLD, in my opinion.
After the wedding in TSoT, the next time we see Sherlock (HLV) John finds him in a drug den - with green tiles like 221B’s kitchen. We learn from Kate, Isaac Whitney’s mother, that this is a place where people “shoot up”. John asks for the exact address, but we never get to know it… And even if Sherlock claims that he’s there for a case (Magnussen), later in 221B he admits that he is indeed high.
But the main reason I believe that the OD happened right after the wedding is that this was exactly when John’s blog stopped updating. Since the blog is an external factor, written by John, it simply can’t be reflecting Sherlock’s version of the events. Until he hacks it and takes over the blog after the wedding. I think this symbolizes that Sherlock has now completely taken over the narrative (which is also manifested in S4, with John typing things on a jpg file in TST which we never see published, and people believing it’s Sherlock’s blog in TLD).
Up to this point, the narrative has been - broadly speaking - consistent with John’s version on the blog. But then Sherlock takes over and the blog stops updating. Which might mean that John is having far more pressing issues on his mind than writing on his blog - the issue of waiting by a comatose Sherlock’s hospital bed.
In the mean time, the weirdness takes absurd proportions, because the story is no longer reflecting ’real’ events described by the blog. The ’new’ things that happen are rather parts of drug-induced dream scenarios after Sherlock’s OD I believe, as literally shown in TAB. I think these dream scenarios are made up by a mix of re-cycled elements from Sherlock’s own memories of actual events, mostly from his adult life in episode 1-8, and Sherlock’s imagination of places where he’s never been. But I also believe that the ’real’ Sherlock is hospitalized and comatose after his OD, which sometimes bleeds through in HLV, TAB and S4. So the number one thing I expect to see happen in S5 is Sherlock finally waking up to reality instead of being trapped in his own variant of Dystopia; a reality where he finally gets the opportunity to face the truth about him and John.
Tagging some people who might be interested: @the-signs-of-two @sarahthecoat @ebaeschnbliah @sagestreet @raggedyblue @gosherlocked @elldotsee @spenglernot @loveismyrevolution
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