Looking Closer at How The Abominable Bride Foreshadowed and Can Be Used to Chronologically Decode Series 4:
In the closing of TST, Sherlock asks, “When does the path we walk on lock around our feet? When does the road become a river with only one destination? Death waits for us all in Samarra. But can Samarra be avoided?” While the Sherlock presented in this episode is telling the story of Samarra to ruminate (to an intentionally parodic degree, right out of an episode of a crime show with a brooding heterosexual male lead et. al shows) over the noble death of Mary –– who was faced with a reminder of her past and tried to flee far away from the threat of death, only to face it in the end, much like the merchant in the story –– Sherlock is actually talking about several instances in the show of characters being unable to avoid death, and by doing so, is posing one of the most important questions and framing one of the central conflicts in the entire show. Ironically, Mary is the only character here who has actually been able to avoid death for certain thus far, because she is Death.
In series 3, Mary is the figure of Death in the story. Sherlock deduces that Mary is a “Liar” in TEH but is unable to admit it to himself, instead opting for denial as Sherlock emotionally shuts down over the immutable mistake he made by not letting John know he was alive. John moved on to someone else, and Sherlock wanted deep down for him to be happy, because Sherlock believes he lost his chance. He eventually instead pursues Charles Magnussen, a figure he compares to the sharks at the London Aquarium that appear throughout TST as forewarners of death, and even goes so far as to arrange an appointment with him in an episode where he already is flirting with death through his relapse. But when Sherlock arrives, he finds himself facing at the consequence of his denial; Mary shoots him in cold blood and leaves him for dead. Canonically, Sherlock quite literally dies on the operating table, and only brings himself back through supernatural means via his love for John and a figment of Moriarty warning him that he’s in danger from Mary (this is one of many signs Sherlock knows Mary and Moriarty are linked, but is still unable to admit to himself –– and communicate it to John).
In TAB, the bride is the figure of Death in the story, and the figure is shared as a mantle. The conflict between Sir Eustace, Lady Carmichael, and the bride has multiple meanings, as John and Mary share elements of all three, but the most prominent and certainly the most functionally important is relaying the true meaning behind the events of series 4. On a surface level, the bride is Emelia Ricoletti, Lady Carmichael in joint, among others: Sir Eustace receives a warning via unmarked envelope of his inevitable death, falling pale like the merchant in the story and shutting himself in his manor to avoid the threat of death, only to come face to face with it again, and is killed. Eustace believes the bride is the late Mrs. Ricoletti, but a large pool of blood was found in front of Lady Carmichael, which Sherlock eventually deduces to collectively mean she and the brides were working together to seek vengeance on her husband. On another level, Sherlock is chasing Moriarty’s ghost –– and consequently relaying to himself via the figure of the killer bride who the real enemy is left in his absence, as Sherlock envisioned in his mind palace after going into shock in HLV, Mary shooting him in the heart in her wedding dress.
In TST and TLD, John has recurring visions of Mary after her “death”, receives an unmarked envelope with a message attached, shuts himself in his house, only to face death again when he’s shot by someone and the screen fades to red, with the red rug beneath him looking like a large pool of blood. We can tell because of the events of TAB that this means John has indeed been mortally wounded like Sir Eustace, somehow haunted by the “ghost” of a risen bride –– but as Sherlock also concludes in TAB, the ghosts are not actually ghosts, and are very much real. Despite this forewarning, series 4 still ends in a different kind of death. A sweeter, softer kind, a quiet death of repressed feelings and lies.
When Moriarty told Sherlock in TRF the final problem was staying alive, he wasn’t just presenting him with an inevitability, but a kind of choice. Moriarty told Sherlock in TGG, “I will burn the heart out of you” if he continued to pursue him, a specter ever present to Sherlock, putting John’s life in danger and unwilling to share Sherlock with anyone else, wanting to mold him to be just like him –– cold and unfeeling. Sherlock’s strategy was to close himself off from John in series 2 as an alternative to John being killed while he found a way to stop Moriarty (present in his greatest fear in THOB), and after the events of ASIB and John’s overheard borderline confession in Battersea, so he and John could eventually be together. But when the time came, Sherlock went too far and made the wrong choice in choosing lying about his fall to John over telling him the truth, or death over love. Sherlock could either stay alive and be alone, or be with the man he loves and die. If he wanted love, death had to go hand in hand. That was Sherlock’s conclusion in TRF –– he chose both, or the right conclusion by staying alive, but through the wrong means, by not being honest about how he feels. Moriarty’s method was more on the nose, while Mary’s is subtler, but in a way, even more cruel.
At the end of TFP, after John was shot in the previous episode by a smoking gun, he finds himself in that kind of death. Him and Sherlock return to cases together and life goes on, but the truth stays buried. He chose both, or the right conclusion in staying alive, but through the wrong means, by not being honest about how he feels. Both John and Sherlock believe they can’t have both –– life and love –– and instead have to choose between the two, or attempt a compromise. And when it comes down to it, not only do they not believe they deserve the other person, but they would rather bury their own feelings and hope the other finds happiness somewhere else. Mary might appear to be physically gone like Moriarty, but similar to Moriarty with Sherlock, she still haunts everything in John’s life and his decisions like the figure of Emelia Ricoletti, sending John and Sherlock off as the two of them are frozen in time. In the end, John and Sherlock feel they cannot avoid the fate of Samarra.
But the truth is that another ending already exists. In TST, Mycroft refers to Sherlock writing an alternative retelling of Samarra called “Appointment in Sumatra”. In canon, “Sumatra” is a reference to “The Giant Rat of Sumatra”, appearing in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” by Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock describes to Watson in the story, “Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson… It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.” The term “Sumatra” already appeared in TEH as an underground road where a subway car was hidden, disconnected from the rest of the track. Inside was a bomb –– the presence of Death –– and right before it was thought to go off, John halfway confessed how he feels about Sherlock. And it didn’t end in death. The bomb didn’t go off. Instead, they both lived. The bomb fluctuated between 1:28 and 1:29, and day before and the day that John and Sherlock met. But series 4 still follows the ending of Samarra vs. the ending of Sumatra. The only way out for John and Sherlock is for something to happen that incites one of them to decide to confess their feelings, like the other person being shot.
In parallel to the image of John and Sherlock being stuck at the end of TFP, the bomb is still waiting to resume –– and when it finally explodes, John and Sherlock will learn that they can have both life and love, and they can have each other. Their story doesn’t have to end like it always has before. Mycroft tells Sherlock in HLV, “The east wind is coming, Sherlock. Coming to get you,” a story he told Sherlock as a child to scare him, right before Mary shot Sherlock in her wedding dress, and far before an invented sister was ever shoved into the picture. When Eurus reveals herself to John, she describes “the east wind” being the origin of her name, while Mary earlier stood against the painting of the wind behind her, not unlike the bride and Lady Carmichael before the pool of blood, being functionally the same person in Sherlock’s dream. At the end of HLV, Sherlock says, “The east wind takes us all in the end.” In the story His Last Bow, Sherlock describes it as such:
“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”
“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”
“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us will wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine with the storm has cleared.”
See also: The Unfinished Act of Series 4, 10 Revealing Things From The Six Thatchers That Haunt You Late At Night, 10 Revealing Things From The Lying Detective That Haunt You Late At Night, and 10 Revealing Things From The Final Problem That Haunt You Late At Night.
Bonus: The storm will clear:
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