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Before the wedding, Sherlock was able to cope with the pain of losing John to Mary by channeling his energies into the wedding planning, but now he doesn’t have that as an outlet anymore. Cigarettes aren’t strong enough to help him cope, like in S2, so Sherlock returns to using drugs, after apparently having been clean since before the events of ASIP. Sherlock later tells John that he purposely started using drugs in order to advertise a fake pressure point to Magnussen, but this is an outright lie. In the scene at Appledore, Magnussen tells Sherlock that he never believed the drugs were Sherlock’s pressure point for a moment, and Sherlock doesn’t seem surprised. He even inclines his head and quirks his mouth in agreement when Magnussen adds that Sherlock wouldn’t care if his drug habit were made public, which of course makes it absolutely useless as a pressure point since Magnussen operates by exposing people’s secrets through the media. The real reason Sherlock goes back to drugs in HLV is because of how deeply he’s missing John. Sherlock also apparently picks a drug den near where John lives, even though it’s super far away in the suburbs, perhaps because he wants any excuse to just be physically closer to John.

Meanwhile, John is obviously dissatisfied with his life with Mary and misses everything that he used to have with Sherlock.

The first time we see John in this episode, we learn that John is literally dreaming about Sherlock while he sleeps next to Mary. (*bangs head into a wall*) I still can’t believe they actually put this in the show. As many, many people have pointed out, John’s dream about Sherlock is also strikingly erotic. Sherlock’s voice sounds seductive and his pupils are dilated, and John throws Mary’s hand off of his own as soon as he wakes up. This suggests that he either can’t bear to have Mary touch him, or he feels guilty for emotionally cheating on her (in a sense) by dreaming about Sherlock.

(screencap from here)

The next scene demonstrates that John has been thinking about Sherlock constantly during his waking hours, too. John and Mary’s neighbor Kate Whitney comes over for help, and John assumes she’s looking for Sherlock before she’s barely said anything. Mary looks bitter and annoyed when John brings Sherlock up, as if maybe she’s been hearing a lot about Sherlock over the past month and is sick of having to put up with John blatantly pining for him.

Speaking of, Mary acts far less sweet and charming in this episode than she did in TEH and TSOT. She snaps at John and acts a bit belittling towards him in the early scenes with Kate, when she and John go outside, and when she and John go to the drug den. She’s also rude to and dismissive of Wiggins when he approaches their car, during the lab scene at Bart’s, and then again when she first walks past him at Leinster Gardens. Mary might have felt a need to play nice before the wedding, but not anymore. She thinks that between the wedding and the baby, John is safely hers and the gloves can come off now. It’s also obvious that unlike in TSOT, in HLV Mary hasn’t done anything to encourage John and Sherlock to hang out together since she and John got married and returned from their honeymoon. Mary doesn’t feel like she should have to accommodate John’s relationship with Sherlock anymore.

Later on, Wiggins reveals that John has started cycling to work and that he keeps all his shirts (all his shirts, not just some of them) folded and ready to pack. In TEH, the scene where John and Mary briefly talk and kiss before John tries to visit Sherlock after work implies that John and Mary typically left work together. That, in turn, suggests that they probably used to commute together in the mornings, too. But John has stopped doing that now—he’s pulling away from Mary. Wiggins’s pointed deduction that John keeps his shirts “ready to pack” also suggests that John might be considering leaving Mary—or even if he isn’t seriously considering it, he wants to. After a month of marriage, maybe some of John’s thoughts from the stag night have been creeping up on him again.

In short, after just one month of life in the suburbs with Mary and without Sherlock, John is completely miserable and desperate to escape. He’s extremely tetchy and he’s itching to get out on a case. As Sherlock says later on, John couldn’t even survive one month in the suburbs without storming a drug den and beating someone up. He’s not suited to the life that he’s trying to lead with Mary, and he clearly wants back everything that he used to have with Sherlock: both Sherlock himself and the life that they once shared together.

After John goes to find Isaac Whitney at the drug den, Sherlock and John are reunited once more. After this, there is so much subtext layered into their interactions for the first chunk of the episode.

First off, Sherlock and John treat each other much more coldly and harshly in HLV than in TSOT. The careful equilibrium they had found together before the wedding is gone now. Sherlock is heartbroken that John married someone else and is obviously hurt by John’s practical abandonment of him after the wedding. John, meanwhile, feels guilty for missing Sherlock so intensely when he feels that he’s supposed to be settling into his new life with Mary and preparing for the baby. And maybe he’s seriously thinking about leaving Mary and feeling awful and conflicted about it. For all of these reasons, Sherlock and John both seem to have been avoiding each other for the last month. Their feelings are just too intense to bear, and perhaps they were each unsure of what would happen if they saw each other again. Once they do see each other again, they take their pain and frustration out on each other, each essentially trying to punish the other for their part in preventing them from being together.

This becomes evident in the scene at Bart’s after John and Mary pick Sherlock up from the drug den. When John demands to know why Sherlock is using again, Sherlock hits back by retorting that he might as well ask why John has started cycling to work. Essentially, Sherlock is saying that their reasons are the same: they’re pining for each other. Sherlock is on drugs again because he misses John, and John is cycling to work instead of commuting with Mary because he’s distancing himself from Mary due to his feelings for Sherlock. In classic John fashion, John immediately gets defensive and tries to cut Sherlock off. (A few people have made some of the points that I’m building off of here.)

And Sherlock knows exactly what’s going on here. As I’ve said, I think Sherlock had doubts about John’s feelings for him after he first got back to London, but at this point he seems to be able to read John pretty clearly again. He knows that John is in love with him but has chosen not to act on it, and he’s starting to move on from being just heartbroken about this to being a bit angry about it, too. After a month of radio silence from John—after John promised him his marriage to Mary wouldn’t change anything about their friendship—Sherlock is tired of acting like a totally gracious angel the way he did before the wedding. He’s starting to act bitter and petty towards John instead.

Meanwhile, part of John’s anger towards Sherlock in this scene comes from a sense of shame, because John knows that Sherlock knows he’s in love with him, and he’s angry and embarrassed that Sherlock knows this and will even go so far as to acknowledge it in front of other people. John finds this especially hurtful because he thinks that his feelings are unrequited. From John’s perspective, it looks like Sherlock is just being a total jerk by intentionally using John’s feelings for him to get under his skin, seemingly just to cover his own ass about the drugs and not for any deeper reason. As a result, John is completely unwilling to engage with Sherlock’s comment about the cycling and he’s extremely tense when Wiggins starts deducing him.

Then Wiggins tells everyone that John keeps all his shirts folded and ready to pack, as if he’s considering leaving Mary and moving out. Which is even more humiliating for John.

HLV states on two separate occasions that John is “addicted” to Sherlock and the lifestyle that he provides, and this happens for the first time in this scene. When Wiggins says that “some guy” hurt his wrist, John says that it was probably just “some addict, in need of a fix.” Sherlock agrees, and we can tell from the glances that Sherlock gives Wiggins and John that Sherlock knows it was John. Earlier, when Sherlock first came back to London, John wrote on his blog about Sherlock, “I was hooked. He’s like a drug.” John just can’t keep away, but he feels that he should, because he thinks Sherlock doesn’t love him back. John thinks that chasing after Sherlock any longer is only going to get him hurt, so the powerful pull that he feels to Sherlock is a bad thing, like an addiction.

But John just can’t stay away. When Sherlock and John go back to 221B, Sherlock tries to draw John back to him with a case, just as he always does when there’s any kind of rift between them. And at first, it works. As soon as Sherlock mentions Magnussen and it becomes clear from Mycroft’s reaction that this is an important case, John wants in on it.

John: It’s for a case, you said? Sherlock: Yep. John: What sort of case? Sherlock: Too big and dangerous for any sane individual to get involved in. John: (a bit aggressively) You trying to put me off? Sherlock: God no. (smiles) I’m trying to recruit you.

(gif from here)

This is John at his most lovestruck.

Janine reveals herself, and John cycles through a range of emotions. When he first sees Janine, John looks shocked, lost, and hurt by the idea that Sherlock has started a relationship with someone other than him. Even if John doesn’t know that Sherlock is in love with him, he never expected this.

When Janine leaves to get dressed and Sherlock comes out from his bath, John switches to incredulity. He’s especially hung up on the fact that Sherlock has a girlfriend—apparently, John has at least figured out that Sherlock is gay. (Well done, John! That’s a start!) I also think this scene might offer some evidence that John still doesn’t know about Sherlock’s feelings. John’s incredulous faces are a bit smiley, and I don’t think John would be quite so smiley if he’d figured out that Sherlock was in love with him at the wedding and knew that they’re both avoiding their feelings for each other.

Sherlock keeps trying to explain the Magnussen case to John, but John clearly doesn’t listen to a word that Sherlock says about the case. He just wants to talk about Sherlock and Janine. I think this is the first time we’ve ever seen Sherlock’s strategy of trying to draw John back to him through a case fall flat. John is just so stuck on the apparent Sherlock/Janine situation that he doesn’t respond as he normally would, and even as he did just a few minutes ago. Now that John has realized that he can’t get over Sherlock and can’t focus on his relationship with Mary—and that he’s actually pretty miserable being married to Mary—he’s especially distracted by anything that has to do with Sherlock being in a relationship.

After Janine returns, settles herself on the arm of Sherlock’s chair, and starts flirting with Sherlock, John gets full-on jealous. When Janine gets up again, John even stands up and puffs out his chest like he’s showing off and attempting to reclaim his territory, lol. (I once saw a meta pointing out John’s body language in that particular moment, but unfortunately I don’t have the link.)

Even though John won’t get off the topic of Janine, Sherlock keeps determinedly trying to talk about the case. In essence, Sherlock is trying to establish a professional relationship with John because he thinks that’s the best way to get John back into his life again after his marriage to Mary. Sherlock thinks that John has chosen distance, and he’s willing to give John that distance as long as he can have John back in some way.

Soon afterwards, Magnussen and his goons show up and John does something very interesting indeed. When one of Magnussen’s men searches John for weapons, he finds the tire lever that John tucked into his waistband earlier that morning and that John and Mary both agreed was “sexy.” As Sherlock looks on (in a bit of shock), John leans forward and says to the man suggestively, “Doesn’t mean I’m not pleased to see you,” echoing what Moriarty said to Sherlock at the pool in TGG.

John’s willingness to make a gay sex joke about himself, completely unprompted, indicates that he’s feeling far less defensive of his sexuality than he ever has before. John’s previous jokes about his sexuality have all been more like “no homo” jokes than what he says here; this seems like a shift. With this line, John is giving both the audience and Sherlock a hint that things he once thought were off the table—namely, a relationship and sex with Sherlock—might not be anymore. (My thanks to abrae’s meta for first alerting me to the significance of John’s joke here.)

This is quite an admission from John! He’s not drunk like during the stag night. John is starting to reach his breaking point; he seems to have realized that he’s completely incapable of performing heteronormativity in the suburbs with Mary, and he’s nearly desperate to get back to Sherlock.

But unfortunately, Sherlock and John’s relationship has now become painfully complicated.

After Magnussen and his goons leave, Sherlock acts as if John coming with him on the case can be taken for granted, which is true, of course. This pisses John off though, because to John it just feels like Sherlock takes for granted that John is in love with him and will do anything for him. Sherlock’s behavior really bothers John because it makes him feel like his feelings are just obvious. So that’s why we get the “I’ll text you instructions.” / “Yeah, I’ll text you if I’m available.” / “You are, I checked.” dialogue. Right after this, John is also upset when Sherlock points out that he’s gained weight in his first month of marriage to Mary, because it’s yet one more way that it’s obvious John is miserable with Mary.

Continuing his behavior from the lab scene at Bart’s, Sherlock also takes his anger out on John in the first two scenes with Janine by intentionally using his fake relationship with her to punish John for hurting him by marrying Mary.

As @ivyblossom has pointed out, Sherlock deliberately tries to make John jealous of Janine at 221B. He really lays it on thick with her when John is around because he’s purposely trying to needle him.

Sherlock then takes a dig at John for marrying Mary when he and John are riding the elevator up to Magnussen’s office after Sherlock’s fake proposal. I’m taking this idea from @sussexbound’s and @asherlockstudy’s great commentary here. Here’s the dialogue between Sherlock and John:

John: What are you going to do? Sherlock: Well, not actually marry her, obviously. There’s only so far you can go. John: So what will you tell her? Sherlock: Well, I’ll tell her that our entire relationship was a ruse to break into her boss’s office. I imagine she’ll want to stop seeing me at that point. But you’re the expert on women.

By saying “Well, not actually marry her, obviously. There’s only so far you can go,” Sherlock tells John that he crossed a line when he married Mary to run away from his feelings for Sherlock. Sherlock knows that John wasn’t truly in love with Mary, so here he states that it was dishonest and cruel of John to marry her just because he couldn’t face what he felt for Sherlock. Sherlock’s pointed “But you’re the expert on women” then emphasizes that John has a long history of using relationships with women to avoid the implications of his same-sex attraction to Sherlock. That was never fair to those women, and it’s something that Sherlock himself has never done: he’s never used women as a screen to hide his attraction to John.

This is all so carefully phrased and says so much, both about John’s behavior throughout S1-S3 and about how thoroughly Sherlock understands exactly what John has been doing all this time.

In the meta chain I just linked, asherlockstudy points out that the church scene in TAB shows Sherlock and John coming face to face with all of the women whom they wronged in S1-S3. The inclusion of the feminist plotline in TAB thus serves (among other things) to emphasize what Sherlock said to John in the elevator. And even though Sherlock has always been honest with himself about his attraction to John and has never tried to hide it through heterosexual relationships, he isn’t totally blameless here, either. Victorian!Janine’s pointed comments to Sherlock in the church emphasize that Sherlock treated her unfairly when he pretended to date her and then milked their fake relationship for all it was worth in front of John. Sherlock and John have both treated women unfairly while pining for each other.

Even though Sherlock takes his anger out on John in these early scenes, HLV also shows us over and over again that Sherlock will do anything for John. When it comes down to it, Sherlock’s love for John is something transformative and selfless, and it leads Sherlock to acts of extreme self-sacrifice. HLV also shows us again and again just how thoroughly John trusts Sherlock. John acts bewildered by Sherlock’s plans on several separate occasions in this episode, but he always goes along with what Sherlock wants him to do.

All of this really starts to come out when Sherlock and John go to CAM Tower. When they get there, Sherlock says they’re going to break into Magnussen’s office. John is surprised by this, but he immediately goes along with it anyway.

Sherlock and John go up to Magnussen’s office, and they find that both Janine and the white supremacist security guard have been knocked out. John stays to take care of Janine, and Sherlock goes upstairs and overhears Magnussen cowering in fear while someone threatens him. Before Sherlock has fully stepped into the room, he overhears Magnussen ask this person if they would really take things this far to hide the truth from their husband.

Sherlock enters the room, and Mary’s identity as an assassin is finally revealed. Sherlock is absolutely shocked, and we get this exchange:

Mary: Is John with you? Sherlock: He’s…um…. Mary: Is John here? Sherlock: He’s downstairs.

Sherlock sounds scared when he says this. That’s because as soon as Mary turned around, Sherlock started to fear that Mary is dangerous to John and started panicking internally as a result. If Sherlock seems slow to react to Mary when he first sees her, remember that Sherlock isn’t great at thinking on his feet when John is in danger.

Sherlock offers to help Mary, and Mary shoots him. I’m going to talk about Mary in more detail later, so for now let’s focus on Sherlock and the mind palace scene that unfolds right after Mary shoots him.

The mind palace scene is all about Sherlock being in love with John. As several people have pointed out, the architecture of Sherlock’s mind palace is based on locations from the case in ASIP. The staircase that Sherlock runs down and then later drags himself back up again when he’s coming back to life is from the building in Brixton where Sherlock and John examined Jennifer Wilson’s body (Sherlock and John’s first crime scene together), and the corridor with the large wooden doors is from Roland-Kerr Further Education College (the place where John saved Sherlock’s life by shooting the cabbie). Sherlock literally built his mind palace out of his memories of his and John’s first case together! If he had already developed his mind palace before he met John, which I think is likely, then this means that Sherlock redesigned his mind palace after he met John. Their relationship means absolutely everything to him.

Inside the mind palace, Molly, Anderson, and Mycroft all represent parts Sherlock’s own consciousness. Molly represents Sherlock’s medical knowledge and Anderson reinforces it; Mycroft represents logic. John, however, doesn’t appear in that early sequence alongside these other characters. He can’t show up there, because what he means to Sherlock is too important and complex for a mind palace version of John to represent any one single concept.

When Mycroft tells Sherlock that there must be something in his mind palace that can help calm him down, Sherlock goes running in search of John—but instead of finding John, he finds Mary, who shoots him in the heart while wearing her wedding dress.

(screencap from here)

Then Sherlock falls back screaming in agony.

They weren’t going for subtly with this visual. What more do I need to say?

As Sherlock struggles for control, he runs into a dungeon and finds Moriarty. Sherlock demands of him, “You never felt pain, did you? Why did you never feel pain?” It’s clear from Sherlock’s face that he’s not just talking about physical pain, and Moriarty confirms this when he answers by talking about pain, heartbreak, and loss.

Then Moriarty tries to talk Sherlock into just letting go and allowing himself to die. In that moment, Moriarty represents the part of Sherlock that finds death tempting: the part that believes death will finally offer him relief from the hell that his life has become after John’s marriage and his and John’s near estrangement.

As Moriarty keeps talking, however, he comes to represent Sherlock’s fears about John’s safety. This is quite fitting, since that was Moriarty’s narrative role all throughout S2!

Moriarty says that John is in danger, and that’s the turning point in the mind palace scene. Sherlock realizes that if he dies, he’ll be leaving John in danger from Mary, and that’s what compels him to come back to life after he flatlined on the hospital bed. Sherlock drags himself back up from death so that he can protect John.

Sherlock literally came back to life for John! This is one of the most important moments in the show! This is a love story! Insane stuff.

While this is, like, the most blatantly romantic thing in the whole show, there’s something about this moment that I also find kind of heartbreaking.

When Moriarty is talking about Sherlock dying, he says this:

Moriarty: Mrs. Hudson will cry, and Mummy and Daddy will cry, and the Woman will cry, and John will cry buckets and buckets. It’s him that I worry about the most.

Sherlock is still lying dead on the floor, unresponsive. Then Moriarty goes on:

Moriarty: That wife! You’re letting him down, Sherlock. John Watson is definitely in danger.

This is the moment when Sherlock’s eyes fly open and he starts to struggle to come back to life. It’s not when Moriarty says that John will cry over his death, it’s when he says that John is in danger from Mary. I can’t help but wonder if this means that at this point in the show, Sherlock doesn’t put much stock in his knowledge that John is in love with him. Sherlock has watched John struggle with his feelings for him for years and he knows that John chose to marry someone else, so at this point, maybe he’s concluded that no matter what John feels, John is never going to act on it. John might love him in some capacity and he might cry over his death, but he chose someone else, so clearly he doesn’t care that much and he’ll get over Sherlock’s death again. But the idea that John is in danger matters deeply to Sherlock, and it’s enough to get him to come back to life for John. For Sherlock, then, dragging himself up from death is an entirely selfless act. It’s not about any hope that if he comes back, John will leave his evil assassin wife and he and John can actually be together. It’s about protecting John, even after John rejected him and broke his heart. (*sobs for days*)

The mind palace scene also includes the fall music from the rooftop scene in TRF. As I noted in the ASIB section of this meta, this music first gets introduced in the scene where Mrs. Hudson is held by the CIA agents in 221B, which suggests that we’re supposed to associate it not just with peril, but with one of Sherlock’s loved ones being threatened. This makes sense because the mind palace scene is about Sherlock realizing that John is in danger from Mary and struggling to come back to life so that he can protect him.

Also, when John finally gets upstairs, finds Sherlock lying on the floor, and says his name, the sound of John saying “Sherlock” echoes in Sherlock’s mind palace. Further evidence that this is all about Sherlock’s love for John.

John, however, sees none of this. John stays with Sherlock in the ambulance and then stays with him at the hospital all night; we know that because he’s wearing the same clothes the next morning when Mary arrives. John might have even been in the room when Sherlock came back to life after flatlining. He knows that Sherlock’s first word when he woke up was “Mary,” and Sherlock gasped that out right when he first pulled through—you can hear it in that scene if you’re listening carefully. John isn’t visibly there in the room when that happens, from what we can see, but he might have been there outside the frame. If so, that would mean that John stayed in Sherlock’s room even after Sherlock flatlined and seemed dead. (*continues sobbing*) It’s also possible that John just learned about Sherlock’s first word upon waking up from the doctors or nurses afterwards. Either way, though, John has no idea what just went through Sherlock’s head. He has no idea that Sherlock came back to life for him.

Before we move on, I need to give a little disclaimer. I feel like there’s a shift in the writing after the mind palace scene in HLV, and at that point the characters’ actions get much harder to explain. Personally, I think that for the most part, TEH, TSOT, and the first third or so of HLV mostly make sense. These episodes have some writing choices that I disagree with, sure, but the narrative mostly hangs together and can be explained. (That’s the goal of this meta project, anyway.) After that, though, things get harder to decipher. I think this is probably because either (a) the writers were doing EMP Theory, so nothing that happens after Sherlock gets shot is actually real (although some of it might offer distorted versions of events that are happening in real life), or (b) the writers just got messy. Either way, there are a lot of narrative threads left hanging at the end of S3 that are very hard to explain without knowing what was ultimately supposed to happen in the story. I very firmly believe that the S4 that we got was not the writers’ original plan for how to end the story. Either they changed their minds after S3, or S4 is somehow fake and we never got the reveal because they never made S5. As I explained in the introduction to this stupidly long meta project, for now I’ve decided to write this without EMP Theory, so I’m assuming that everything that happens after Sherlock gets shot is still real—I think it’s useful to at least try to map out what that would mean. After I get this project out into the world, I’m hoping to spend some time reading and thinking about EMP Theory so that I can decide how I feel about it and whether I’m convinced. So! The rest of this meta offers one possible reading of the show, but it’s just one, and I might change my mind about it later. I think that without knowing the real/original ending to the show, we can theorize about what the writers were trying to do in HLV, but it’s hard to know for certain.

So. Sherlock regains consciousness in the hospital. John might be with him when he wakes, since he knew that Sherlock’s first word when he woke up was “Mary,” but he might not be. Either way, at some point John leaves and Mary enters the hospital room and threateningly tells Sherlock not to tell John that she was the one who shot him.

At this point, Sherlock knows a few things. He knows that Mary is a well-trained assassin and that she has a past that she’s actively trying to hide from John. He knows that she came to threaten Magnussen in his office and that she was prepared to kill Magnussen because he has information on her. More than that, Sherlock knows that Mary is committed enough to keeping the truth from John that she chose to shoot him (Sherlock) when he discovered her instead of accepting his help. Now that Mary has threatened Sherlock again in the hospital, Sherlock also knows that he won’t be safe from her if she’s worried that he might tell John what happened.

But of course, Sherlock is scared that Mary is a threat to John, and there’s no way he would ever keep this from John. So, Sherlock decides that he needs to trick Mary into revealing the truth to John herself—after that, he and John can try to figure out what to do. Sherlock comes up with a plan to make this happen and escapes from the hospital to set it in motion.

After Sherlock escapes, John and Lestrade go looking for him while Mary searches separately. It makes sense that Mary would want to confront Sherlock on her own, but it’s sort of interesting that John doesn’t automatically assume that he and Mary should look for Sherlock together, even though he did call her to tell her that Sherlock had escaped. John must be feeling really distant from Mary at this point for it to not occur to him that a life-or-death situation like this should bind them together. He doesn’t think of the two of them as a team.

Strangely, though, John and Lestrade don’t seem very worried and aren’t acting as if finding Sherlock is all that urgent. We later learn from Sherlock that this took place only a week after he was shot, so you’d think John and Lestrade would be freaking out that Sherlock will die if they can’t get him back in hospital quickly. Messy writing, I guess.

John and Lestrade go to 221B, and John says that given where Sherlock was shot in the chest, he must have been facing his killer and must have seen who it was. (John didn’t think to ask Sherlock about this anytime in the past week, apparently?) John then asks why Sherlock didn’t tell them who the shooter was, and Lestrade suggests that Sherlock might be protecting someone. John says “Why would he care? He’s Sherlock. Who would he bother protecting?” and then sits down in his own old armchair in the sitting room.

For God’s. Fucking. Sake. The fact that John doesn’t immediately realize that he is the person Sherlock is trying to protect is what convinces me that John still hasn’t figured out that Sherlock is in love with him and can’t have had a true epiphany at the end of TSOT. It’s incredibly frustrating, because after witnessing Sherlock’s behavior in TSOT and hearing that best man speech, John really should have figured it out by now. He’s not stupid. But the plot requires that he still not know, I suppose, so he doesn’t. (Moffat, when I catch you, etc. etc.)

Although John doesn’t get it immediately, he then rubs the arms of his chair thoughtfully and asks aloud why Sherlock thinks that he’ll be moving back in. Then he sees the Claire-de-la-Lune perfume bottle that Sherlock left for him on the side table next to his chair, and he stares at it for a very long time. At CAM Tower, Sherlock said out loud that he could smell that perfume, so John probably makes the connection and realizes that this is a hint about who the shooter was. I think that in that moment, John might put the pieces together and realize that it was Mary. He might also realize that Sherlock thinks she’s a danger to him, and therefore that John might want to move back to 221B to get away from her. Even if John figures it out then, though, Sherlock wants John to see and hear the truth for himself, so he calls John on his phone and asks him to come to Leinster Gardens.

Before calling John, Sherlock somehow got everything ready for the confrontation with Mary. Presumably he enlisted the help of Wiggins and other members of his homeless network so that he could (1) have someone move John’s chair and its round side table back to their usual places in the 221B sitting room, (2) have someone go to Chiswick Cemetery to find the real Mary Morstan’s grave site, and (3) have someone set up a projector in front of the façade of the empty house that he owns in Leinster Gardens. Lol.

Interestingly, the Leinster Gardens scene subtly hints that Sherlock didn’t fully trust Mary even before she shot him. Before Mary enters the empty house, she and Sherlock talk on the phone about how she correctly identified Leinster Gardens as one of Sherlock’s hiding places.

Mary: How did you know I’d come here? Sherlock: I knew you’d talk to the people no one else would bother with. Mary: I thought I was being clever. Sherlock: You’re always clever, Mary. I was relying on that. I planted the information for you to find.

Mary got the information by talking to Anderson and his friend Benji (I don’t know that we ever hear anyone say her name onscreen, but it’s in the final shooting script). Benji told Mary that Anderson only knew about Leinster Gardens because he stalked/followed Sherlock one night. There’s no way that could have happened between when Sherlock got shot and when Mary talked to Anderson and Benji, so that means Sherlock deliberately planted the information with Anderson at some point before Mary shot him.

When Sherlock first met Mary in TEH, he deduced that she was a liar. For months, though, Sherlock chose not to act on that deduction. He deliberately pushed it aside, since he believed that John had chosen Mary and he wanted John to be happy. Sherlock wasn’t about to pull at any loose threads that could unravel John and Mary’s relationship. This scene shows, though, that Sherlock still never trusted Mary completely. He planted the information about Leinster Gardens for her to find just in case he ever needed to confront her in a discreet location. (What if Sherlock feared she might be a cheater, and that’s why he intimidated David in TSOT? And he thought he might one day have to confront Mary quietly, to try to convince her to go back to John? Absolutely awful. If Sherlock thought that was what “liar” meant, though, it would explain why he didn’t suspect that Mary was an assassin, even after he started to worry that he’d missed part of Moriarty’s network.)

There are several aspects of the Leinster Gardens scene that are extremely important. For one, this scene proves that Mary is absolutely a villain: specifically, she’s Sherlock’s version of the Sebastian Moran character from ACD canon.

In ACD canon, “The Adventure of the Empty House” is the first story set after “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the one where Holmes confronts Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and dies/fakes his death. In “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes returns to London after being gone for three years. Holmes enlists Watson’s help in taking down Sebastian Moran, the sniper who was Moriarty’s right-hand man before Moriarty’s death and who is now the last remaining obstacle standing in the way of Holmes being able to reveal himself to the public and fully resume his life with Watson. To take down Moran, Holmes creates a wax statue of himself and positions it in front of 221B’s sitting room window, hoping that Moran will believe the dummy is him and will shoot at it. Moran falls for the trap, and Holmes, Watson, and the London police capture him. With Moran arrested, Watson moves back in with Holmes at 221B and the two of them resume their crime-solving adventures together as best friends and partners.

The Leinster Gardens scene recreates the scene with the dummy, with John taking the place of the wax figure and pretending to be Sherlock. Mary, of course, plays the role of Moran.

By naming TEH “The Empty Hearse” and making Lord Moran the villain in that episode’s central case, the writers created a red herring for Sherlock viewers who had read the original stories and were expecting a Moran plotline upon Sherlock’s return to London at the beginning of S3. With the Leinster Gardens scene in HLV, they reveal that in this show, Mary is actually the Moran character. She’s an assassin who works for Moriarty and who is now a major obstacle to John being able to fully reconcile with Sherlock and move in with him again.

Mary being an assassin who works for Moriarty also makes perfect sense based on everything that we know up to this point. We already know that Moriarty has used snipers twice before, so he has people working for him who have Mary’s skillset. And if Mary works for Moriarty, then her presence in John’s life makes so much more sense than it ever would otherwise. I mean, it’s ridiculous to think that John started dating a nurse at his clinic and then later she just happened to turn out to be an assassin who was totally unconnected to Sherlock and John, because there are just that many hidden assassins running around London. It’s equally ridiculous to believe that John was attracted to her because he’s somehow really good at unconsciously identifying dangerous people. Get real. But the idea that Mary was deliberately planted at John’s clinic and ordered to get close to him, so that she would be in an ideal position to wreak havoc upon him and Sherlock after Sherlock’s return? That makes perfect sense. ALSO, given Moriarty’s plan with the rooftop in TRF, it makes perfect sense to think that Moriarty planted another sniper on John to keep an eye on him long-term, to make sure that Sherlock didn’t contact John! Sherlock actually believed that Moriarty would do something like that, and that’s the whole reason why he thought he had to take down the whole network. It’s just that when Sherlock got back to London, he thought he’d succeeded and didn’t realize that there was still a hidden assassin watching John’s every move. Maybe there actually was another assassin in London who Sherlock took out and who Moriarty had placed there as a red herring, and that’s why Sherlock doesn’t think to suspect Mary.

But Mary isn’t just a hidden sniper, she’s also a love interest for John. And that, too, makes perfect sense for Moriarty’s plan. As we saw in ASIB, Moriarty was absolutely willing to push Irene into Sherlock’s and John’s lives in order to cause problems for them. He probably did the same thing with Mary—he deliberately planted Mary as a love interest for John to make sure that when Sherlock returned, it would be even harder for him and John to have a relationship together. That makes complete sense within the context of Moriarty’s plan to “burn the heart” out of Sherlock. Relatedly, I think it’s likely that Mary doesn’t have genuine feelings for John, and she pursued a relationship with him only because she was ordered to; as I’ll talk about a bit later, there’s a good amount of evidence that Mary was cheating on John with someone else.

So, the Moriarty plotline is still in play and Mary has a key role in it. And I think that given everything we know about how Moriarty operates, we should believe that Mary still works for Moriarty, not that she’s a former assassin genuinely trying to escape her past.

On the topic of Mary being a villain, @221beemine has done an interesting meta about how Mary is lit in HLV. Starting with the scene where she shoots Sherlock, Mary is frequently lit so that her face appears half in shadow, or she’s shown in a dark profile with bright edge lighting. These are unusual methods for lighting female characters, and they make Mary appear both mysterious and sinister. I think this matches perfectly with an interpretation of Mary as a villain whose identity as such has finally been revealed, but who we still don’t know very much about. And I don’t think these lighting choices would make any sense if we were actually meant to forgive Mary for shooting Sherlock and were actually meant to believe that she really has left her past as an assassin behind.

Returning to Leinster Gardens. Mary acts completely unrepentant in this scene, which offers more evidence that she’s a villain. There’s a sneer in her voice and expression when she tells Sherlock “You were very slow.” Mary also threatens to shoot Sherlock again and to actually kill him this time. It’s only when Sherlock reminds her that her face is projected onto the side of the building outside that she backs down from that threat. MARY IS A VILLAIN AND WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO THINK IT’S OKAY THAT SHE SHOT SHERLOCK.

Mary also has one piece of dialogue in this scene that’s very important to Sherlock and John’s love story.

Sherlock: Why didn’t you come to me in the first place? Mary: Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever. And Sherlock, I will never let that happen. Please understand. There is nothing in this world that I would not do to stop that happening.

Sherlock lied to John when he faked his death and it did break John, but Sherlock did not lose John forever. John is still inextricably tied to Sherlock because of how deeply he loves him; they’re still wrapped around each other’s lives. John loves Sherlock in a way that he doesn’t love Mary, and this line shows that Mary knows this. She’s seen all of this happen between Sherlock and John, and she knows that she is replaceable in John’s life in a way that Sherlock is not.

After Mary delivers this line, Sherlock gives her a look that is scorching with contained anger. All of Mary’s actions and dialogue throughout this scene have shown Sherlock that she’s determined to hang on to John while still deceiving him about who she really is and what she’s done. Mary’s version of love for John (if she does have any feelings for him) is selfish and possessive, and it’s not at all like what Sherlock feels for John. Sherlock sees this, and it makes him furious. He’s furious that she, of all people, is the person who got to marry John Watson, and that she’s now acting like she’s entitled to him, especially while Sherlock himself has been acting so selflessly for John this whole time. Sherlock isn’t feeling sympathetic towards Mary in this scene, and it shows.

But as I’ll talk about in just a moment, Sherlock also knows that he can’t abandon Mary, at least not yet. He knows he has to take her case.

Sherlock gives Mary that scorching glare, then flips on the lights to reveal that John was sitting at the end of the passageway the whole time. Mary looks genuinely upset—she seems shocked and devastated that John has found out the truth about her. She’s likely terrified that now that John knows the truth, she won’t be able to continue keeping Sherlock and John apart romantically for Moriarty, and Moriarty will kill her. She’s trapped.

After this, Sherlock, John, and Mary all go to 221B to discuss things further. I think this scene at 221B might be one of the saddest Johnlock scenes in the entire show.

Let’s talk about Sherlock’s side of the story first. In this scene, Sherlock tries to push John back to Mary and insists that John can trust her. Sherlock’s decision to do this is extremely difficult to understand, since the writers changed course after S3 and we never got to learn what they’d originally planned for Mary’s character. I’ll try to explain my best interpretation of Sherlock’s actions, though.

By this point, Sherlock knows that Mary is bad news. But he still doesn’t actually know that much about who she is and what she’s involved in. Sherlock isn’t stupid enough to think that out of all the women in London, John just happened to date and marry a secret assassin. And ever since John got kidnapped and put in the bonfire in November, Sherlock has been worried that he might have missed some part of Moriarty’s network. So, even if Sherlock still believes that Moriarty is dead, he probably suspects that Mary was originally planted by Moriarty or by someone else sinister and that she has some ulterior motive for getting close to John. Furthermore, we should remember that even though he sometimes messes up and jumps to conclusions prematurely, in general Sherlock believes that it’s a mistake to try to act before you have enough information.

As a result, Sherlock thinks that he needs to learn more about Mary before he can figure out what to do about her. That’s one reason why he thinks he needs to keep Mary close and acts accordingly. Remember, Sherlock did something similar with Irene in ASIB when he intentionally misidentified the doppelgänger’s body as hers and then accepted her as a client when she showed up at 221B. Even though he didn’t trust Irene, Sherlock didn’t kick her out because he knew that she was part of something bigger and he wanted to solve the larger case.

Second, Sherlock knows that Mary is extremely dangerous and that she’s fiercely committed to holding onto John. I think that based on that, Sherlock concludes that for the time being, the best thing he and John can do to keep John safe from Mary is to convince her that John has forgiven her and is going to stay with her. If John seems like he’s going to leave her, then there’s no telling what Mary will do. As we’ve seen again and again and again, Sherlock cares about John’s safety above all else. Sherlock will do anything to keep John safe, and that includes lying to him.

Third, if Mary is indeed part of some larger game with other dangerous players, then Sherlock might be thinking that if John stays with her, Mary will work to keep John safe from those other actors, too. Mary just told Sherlock in Leinster Gardens that there is nothing she wouldn’t do to stop herself from losing John. Since Sherlock thinks that Moriarty is dead, he might fear that there are other people who he doesn’t know anything about and who could be a threat to John. He still doesn’t know who put John in the bonfire in TEH—it could be people from a remnant of Moriarty’s network, but it could be someone else entirely. (We don’t know when Sherlock figured out that it was Magnussen, but I doubt it was this early on. It’s even possible that Sherlock didn’t figure that out until Magnussen showed him the video, and he was just faking confidence in front of Magnussen when he acted like he already knew.)

Finally, Mary is carrying John’s child—or, at least, Sherlock thinks she is (more on that in a moment). So Sherlock also probably thinks that he and John can’t do anything that might risk prompting Mary to disappear with John’s baby. They need to keep her close for a few more months, at least.

Put all of that together, and Sherlock knows that he and John can’t just try to drop Mary now that they know she’s evil. They need to keep her close for now so that they can try to learn more about her and what she’s involved in, and so that John and the baby will be safe from her (and perhaps other dangerous actors) in the immediate future.

Sherlock, however, still hasn’t overcome his main character flaw: his inability to be fully honest with John. It’s a repeat of TRF all over again. Here, Sherlock believes that John’s decision to take Mary back won’t be convincing enough to her unless John actually does decide to take her back. So Sherlock tries to manipulate John into doing it.

It gets worse. The revelation that Mary is an assassin and has been lying to John about her identity this whole time gives John the clearest possible chance to leave her that he’s had since Sherlock first came back in TEH. In light of how thoroughly Mary lied to him and the fact that she shot Sherlock, John could absolutely take this as an opportunity to leave her for Sherlock. Sherlock must realize that John might see this as an option, but he doesn’t try to push John in that direction at all. Instead, Sherlock tries to get John to do the exact opposite because he believes that it’s what’s safest for John. Of course, Sherlock should have explained his thinking to John and just been honest with him about why he needed to stay with Mary for the time being. But Sherlock’s decision to try to push John back to Mary still shows that Sherlock cares about John’s safety above all else and will always choose to sacrifice his own feelings to keep John safe.

From John’s perspective, all of this is pure hell.

John’s dialogue in this scene offers perhaps the most important piece of evidence in the entire show that he was never in love with Mary the way he is with Sherlock.

Sherlock: John, you are addicted to a certain lifestyle. You are abnormally attracted to dangerous situations and people. So is it truly such a surprise that the woman you’ve fallen in love with conforms to that pattern? John: (his voice shaking with barely suppressed tears) But she wasn’t supposed to be like that. Why is she like that? Sherlock: (after a pause, slowly and very sadly) Because…you chose her.

There’s a heartbeat sound right after that, indicating that this is a moment of monumental emotional significance for both Sherlock and John.

In this exchange, Sherlock starts by making a clear reference to John’s attraction to him and the lifestyle that he has tried to provide John with ever since ASIP. John can barely contain his fury and hurt at this, and he immediately insists that Mary wasn’t supposed to be like that. John chose Mary after Sherlock died because he wanted to find someone who wasn’t like Sherlock, someone who wouldn’t remind him of Sherlock, someone he didn’t feel attracted to in the same way. John’s vehement insistence that Mary wasn’t supposed to be like Sherlock reveals that his truest and deepest feelings are for Sherlock and not for Mary. He wanted to find someone he wouldn’t have the same intense feelings for, someone it would be safe to have a relationship with because he wouldn’t be opening himself up to heartbreak with them the way he did with Sherlock by falling so deeply in love.

It absolutely destroys Sherlock to hear this. Remember that I don’t think Sherlock is a very good actor, so his “you chose her” and the way he has to pause and look away from John before he says it aren’t him acting. On one level, this line is a lie. Sherlock knows that John doesn’t have some magic sixth sense for dangerous people, but he tells John that he chose Mary because he hopes it will convince him to go back to her. But on a deeper level, this isn’t a lie at all. In this moment, we can see on Sherlock’s face that he’s honestly expressing his real, genuine heartbreak over the fact that before Mary’s past was revealed, John did choose her over him.

The acting in this scene is absolutely insane.

(gifs from here)

After Sherlock says that John “chose” Mary, John bursts out, “Why is everything always MY FAULT?” And when Sherlock insists that he and John treat Mary like a client, John agrees, but he’s furious about it. He chokes out at Sherlock, “Your way. Always your way.”

John’s dialogue here reveals two crucial things about how he feels at this point in the narrative. First, John’s words express his intense anger at Sherlock for implying that John’s actions are the reason why the two of them aren’t together. John just admitted that he chose Mary as a romantic partner because he was trying to get over Sherlock and everything that Sherlock represented to him. When Sherlock responds by saying that John “chose” Mary, John gets furious at the implication that this is all his fault. From John’s perspective, the only reason why he was ever in a relationship with Mary at all is because Sherlock faked his death and disappeared for almost two years, leaving John to believe he was dead. John accepted Mary into his life because she gave him a way to try to overcome his grief while he mourned Sherlock. Moreover, John thinks that Sherlock has never given him any indication that he’d be interested in a relationship with him. Even worse, he also believes that Sherlock has known about him being in love with him for years, and has always just let John suffer through that without returning his feelings. So when John says “Always your way,” it indicates that John feels that he’s been forced to follow Sherlock’s lead all these years because he’s the one in unrequited love. From John’s perspective, it’s not his fault that he and Sherlock have ended up in the twisted and terrible place where they are now.

I think that with these lines, John is also expressing anger at himself for still being in love with Sherlock when he thinks that Sherlock will never love him back. John probably feels that no matter what he does, he can’t escape his attraction to Sherlock. Even when he deliberately tried to find a romantic partner who wouldn’t be like Sherlock, he failed and somehow ended up with a secret assassin. So when John chokes out “Always your way” at Sherlock, he’s expressing his frustration that no matter what he tries to do, he always finds himself drawn back to Sherlock and everything that he represents. At this point in the show, John seems to resent his love for Sherlock because of how much pain it keeps causing him. And once again, John takes this out on Sherlock.

The next bit of dialogue offers us even more proof that John doesn’t love Mary the way he loves Sherlock.

John: Sit. Mary: Why? John: Because that’s where they sit. The people who come in here with their stories. The clients—that’s all you are now Mary, you’re a client. This is where you sit and talk, and this is where we listen, then we decide if we want you or not.

As @formerprincewille writes here, John makes it clear to Mary “that Sherlock is a permanent fixture in his life and she is not.” He and Sherlock are the inseparable unit. They will be the ones who decide whether or not Mary gets to stay in their lives.

Notably, Mary looked very upset in Leinster Gardens after Sherlock revealed that John had seen and heard everything. But in this scene, she appears entirely unrepentant, both when Sherlock and John are having their argument and when John turns to her and yells at her in anger. At first Mary was shocked and upset that her cover had been blown, but now that she’s regained control of herself, she’s steely once more and she certainly isn’t about to apologize for anything that she’s done.

Mary, John, and Sherlock all sit down. Mary reveals the flash drive and Sherlock tries to relate the events of the night when Mary shot him in a way that will make Mary seem as forgivable as possible.

When John angrily says “Oh, look at you two. You should have gotten married,” Sherlock looks at John like this:

(gif from here)

@ivyblossom has a great meta about this here. There is so much pain and regret in that expression. Since this comes right after they’ve been talking about Sherlock and Mary both deceiving Janine, John has just aligned Sherlock with Mary as someone who has lied. Sherlock deeply regrets that he ever had to do that to John, and he regrets that it’s still what he’s doing right now to try to protect him. I think that in this moment, Sherlock wants more than almost anything to be able to tell John the truth. But that almost is still there, because Sherlock prioritizes John’s safety above everything else.

Then this happens:

Mary: (harshly) People like Magnussen should be killed. That’s why there are people like me. John: Perfect! So that’s what you were, an assassin? How could I not see that? Mary: You did see that. And you married me. (Tilting her head at Sherlock) Because he’s right. It’s what you like.

Sherlock looks deeply uncomfortable and unhappy when Mary says this; just take a look at the gifs here. That’s because Sherlock doesn’t really believe it’s true. When he said the same thing to John a few minutes ago, he was feeding a lie to John. And Sherlock isn’t happy about having to do this.

Mary continues to act unrepentant as they talk. In this scene as a whole, she sometimes casts her eyes down and stands or sits quietly as if ashamed, but she never apologizes for any of her actions—not for being an assassin who killed people, not for lying to John, and not for shooting Sherlock. She’s more than willing to take the opportunity for reconciliation that Sherlock is offering her, because it’s her best chance to stay alive and safe from Moriarty for the time being. But Mary seems to harbor no remorse for her violent past, and she doesn’t make any promises to act differently in the future. Her dialogue to John basically says, “This is who I am, and I think you like it. I don’t intend to change.”

Honestly, Mary is a terrible person, and not the sort of person who Sherlock and John would usually have any sympathy for. Their whole job is to catch people like her. But in this scene, Sherlock keeps lying to try to make Mary seem more palatable so that John will stay with her. Sherlock even lies by saying that Mary saved his life, saying that she shot him in a way that let him live and that she phoned the ambulance.

Both of these are lies. Mary absolutely meant to kill Sherlock, which we know BECAUSE SHE DID. HE FLATLINED, HE DIED. Sherlock only came back to life because of the intense power of his passionate, unbreakable love for John. Also, Magnussen was the one who phoned the ambulance, and Sherlock even saw him do it! Sherlock deliberately lies about both of these things because he’s trying to make Mary seem as forgivable as humanly possible so that John will stay with her for the time being.

Let’s talk some more about how we know that Mary intended to kill Sherlock. I’ve been trying not to get too deep in the weeds about what the minor characters are doing in this meta because I want to stay focused on the romance arc between Sherlock and John, but I think this is worth getting into for a bit here because it’s an important part of Moriarty’s plan for Sherlock.

Moriarty’s plan has always been to break Sherlock’s heart and then kill him. And at this point in the story, Moriarty has very successfully broken Sherlock’s heart. Because of the consequences of Sherlock’s fall, Sherlock has had to watch John marry someone else. He’s learned that Mary is pregnant, which makes him think that there’s truly no chance of him and John getting together now. Given Sherlock’s morals and his behavior in TSOT, I think it’s extremely unlikely that Sherlock has even thought about the possibility of trying to start an affair with John. But if he has, he knows it would be incredibly messy and painful, and they’d both feel guilty and terrible about it. It definitely wouldn’t be the romantic happy ending that he’d once dreamed of. All in all, Sherlock is so distraught that he’s on drugs.

So in Moriarty’s plan, it’s time for Sherlock to die. To make that happen, Moriarty arranges for Sherlock (and John) to go to CAM Tower on the specific night that they do because he knows that Mary is going to go after Magnussen that night and that she’ll intercept them there. Moriarty probably doesn’t actually order Mary to kill Sherlock—he probably doesn’t tell her anything—but he expects her to do it. Then he plans to dispose of Mary himself, because he isn’t the type to leave loose ends lying around.

For an explanation of all of this, you can check out @loudest-subtext-in-tv’s recent meta, “Whether Mary meant to kill Sherlock” here and then our replies to that meta here and here. Here’s a basic summary, though.

At the start of HLV, Mary started to get worried that Sherlock and John were about a hair breadth’s away from finally confessing their feelings to each other. Sherlock was on drugs, and to an outside observer he probably seemed like he was pretty much ready to throw caution to the winds. Meanwhile, John was so anxious and desperate that Mary was literally holding onto him in their sleep to stop him from leaving. At Bart’s, Mary heard Sherlock directly needle John about being in love with him, and even Wiggins could tell that John was thinking about leaving her. Based on all that, Mary realized that she might not be able to keep Sherlock and John apart for much longer, which meant that her usefulness to Moriarty would be at its end. That meant she needed to escape and restart her life again somewhere else. However, Magnussen knows about Mary’s past and can expose her. So, Mary decides that she needs to neutralize him before she can run.

Mary gets information from Janine about when Magnussen will be in his office. Unbeknownst to Mary, however, Janine is also working for Moriarty and is a bit higher up on the totem poll than Mary is. (For more on Janine, see LSIT’s M-Theory.) Janine figures out that Mary intends to go after Magnussen the specific night that she does, so she feeds that information to Moriarty. Moriarty thinks that’s great, since it offers him a prime opportunity to have Sherlock killed now that his heart has been shattered. So, Moriarty tells Janine to tell Sherlock that Magnussen won’t be in his office that night. Moriarty expects Sherlock to walk in on Mary trying to kill Magnussen, and he expects Mary to respond by killing Sherlock.

That’s exactly what happens. And after Sherlock survives through the power of gay love, Moriarty decides that’s fine, and he’ll just keep messing with Sherlock a little bit longer before killing him because for Moriarty that’s a lot of fun.

So, yeah. Mary intended to kill Sherlock. She’s a crack shot, and she was standing six feet away from him. She didn’t miss—she shot him in the chest, in a place where no one expects to survive getting shot, and Sherlock actually did flatline and die. Mary didn’t call the ambulance because she didn’t want Sherlock to survive. Magnussen called the ambulance because he did have a reason for wanting Sherlock to survive—Magnussen needs Sherlock alive so that he can use him in his chain to get to Mycroft. Sherlock only survived getting shot because of his love for John, and because he was in hospital and could receive immediate medical attention when he woke up. 

Before we move on, now is also a good time to talk about the baby and Mary’s implied infidelity. Even before we learned that Mary is an assassin, TSOT offered us a few hints that the baby isn’t John’s. First, that episode went out of its way to introduce David as Mary’s still-attached ex. (@abitnotgood has a nice meta about this here.) Second, as I explained in the TSOT section, Mrs. Hudson’s story about Mr. Hudson indicated that Mr. Hudson cheated on her. This suggests that Mary has cheated on John, because Mr. Hudson is a mirror for Mary. It’s the only piece of Mrs. Hudson’s story about her relationship with Mr. Hudson that we don’t yet have a direct parallel for in John and Mary’s relationship, so it seems likely that this piece maps onto Mary and John, too, and it just hasn’t been explicitly revealed yet. Third, during this scene at 221B in HLV, Mary is shown wearing cuffed jeans with the legs turned up. Back in TGG, Sherlock said that a character on TV couldn’t be “the boy’s father” because of the turn-ups on his jeans. This likely indicates that John isn’t the father of Mary’s child. (This comes from LSIT and @incurablylazydevil here.) Finally, LSIT also recently pointed out to me that Jennifer Wilson (the pink lady from ASIP) is a mirror for Mary. Mary is blonde and clever, like Jennifer, and she wears a bright red coat that looks like the pink one Jennifer wore. We know that Jennifer was cheating on her spouse and had a daughter who was stillborn. The cheating and the daughter’s stillbirth could be clues that the baby either isn’t John’s or isn’t real/won’t survive.

All this seems to indicate that raising Mary’s daughter is not in John’s future. Either the writers decided to go in a different direction when they made S4, or S4 isn’t real.

After Sherlock tries to tell John that Mary saved his life by calling the ambulance, he collapses in pain and tells the paramedics who arrive just then that they might need to restart his heart on the way to the hospital. All of this is literally killing Sherlock.

Frustratingly, we see nothing of Sherlock’s, John’s, or Mary’s lives between this scene at 221B and the events of Christmas Day several months later. If John and Mary’s wedding was in May and HLV started about a month after the wedding, then we’re dealing with a gap of around six months. We only get hints about what the characters were doing and thinking during that time. Mrs. Holmes implies that Sherlock was in hospital for several months and was only released a bit before Christmas. From another scene, we know that Sherlock met with Magnussen at some point before he got out of the hospital. Mary says that she and John haven’t been speaking for “months,” so presumably they weren’t living together between the 221B scene and Christmas. We don’t know what might have been going on between Sherlock and John during that time, though.

I think this is because in HLV, the writers deliberately arranged these scenes so that they would raise new questions for the audience and would leave us with a cliffhanger, just as they always do at the end of a series. We were probably eventually meant to learn more about what happened during that gap, especially between Sherlock and John.

In any event, Christmas arrives and Sherlock invites John and Mary to his parents’ house to spend the holiday with his family. As TEH established, Mrs. Holmes is a mirror for Sherlock and Mr. Holmes is a mirror for John. This comes into play again at Christmas, giving us more information about Sherlock, John, and Mary.

From the Christmas scenes, we learn that Mrs. Holmes is an absolute genius, but she gave up her career in academia to raise her children. If the baby is real, then this might be foreshadowing, demonstrating that Sherlock will be willing to make compromises and to scale back his work to accommodate raising John’s child with him. Alternatively, it could simply be another indication that Sherlock is willing to make monumental sacrifices for the people he loves, which is something that we’ve already seen and are about to see again. (LSIT makes these observations in her M-theory meta.) After all, we saw in TSOT that Sherlock has moved far beyond his initial “married to my work” stance, and that he’s more than willing to scale back his work for John’s happiness. So even without John having a baby, it makes sense that Sherlock’s mirror gave up her career for her family.

On a lighter note, we also learn from Mr. Holmes’s conversation with Mary that Mr. Holmes thinks Mrs. Holmes is “unbelievably hot.” We already knew John thinks Sherlock is hot, but that’s fun.

After Mr. Holmes says this, we get this little exchange that’s very telling:

Mary: Oh my God. You’re the sane one, aren’t you? Mr. Holmes: Aren’t you?

Good on Mr. Holmes for realizing that John is actually insane! But what’s more important here is that when Mr. Holmes says to Mary “Aren’t you?” we as the audience are immediately supposed to scream with one voice “NO!” because we know that Mary is a sociopathic assassin. Mr. Holmes gets this wrong subtextually because Mary is not mirrored by either of the Holmes parents. Attempting to compare her to one of the partners in that relationship is futile, because the Holmes parents are mirrors for Sherlock and John. The Holmes parents have a happy, stable relationship, and Mary is not in this picture as one of the partners in that endgame couple.

John later says to Mary that Sherlock must have brought them there to see “his lovely mum and dad, a fine example of married life.” John is right. That’s exactly why we, the audience, are seeing Sherlock’s parents again in HLV—because they’re a fine example of married life for Sherlock and John, an example that doesn’t include Mary.

For now, though, John decides to “forgive” Mary. He tells her that no matter what she did in the past, he’s ready to move on from it and doesn’t need to know about it. He’s choosing to build a future with her so that they can raise their daughter together.

John’s forgiveness is almost certainly fake. He hasn’t forgiven Mary and he doesn’t trust her, but he’s come around to Sherlock’s way of thinking and decides that he needs Mary to believe that he’s forgiven her for now. Perhaps in the months between the 221B scene and Christmas, John figured out on his own that Mary is part of some larger game and that he needs to keep her close. Maybe he and Sherlock talked about it once they had a chance to talk without Mary in the room with them. Or maybe it’s simply that John has decided to trust Sherlock and to play the role that Sherlock has given him. Shortly after this, we see that John brought his gun to Sherlock’s parents’ house when Sherlock asked him to, even without knowing why. Maybe it’s the same thing—John pretends to take Mary back because he knows Sherlock wants him to, even if he doesn’t understand why.

In any event, at Christmas John pretends to forgive Mary and to take her back. There are multiple reasons to believe that John is pretending here.

First, John’s actual words throughout his and Mary’s conversation don’t communicate real forgiveness. Here’s what he actually says:

John: I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to say to you. These are prepared words, Mary. I’ve chosen these words with care. The problems of your past are your business. The problems of your future are my privilege. It’s all I have to say. It’s all I need to know.

John never says “I forgive you” or something even remotely akin to that. Hey, unlike:

(gif from here)

John’s little speech to Mary is also stiff and rehearsed. He even tells Mary “I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to say to you. These are prepared words, Mary. I’ve chosen these words with care.” This shows that John’s forgiveness and willingness to return to Mary are not genuine. He’s walking a careful line with her; if he’d truly forgiven her, then he wouldn’t feel like he had to be so careful with his words. John is clearly still holding back from Mary, and it’s not because he’s feeling overwhelmed by his emotions, like he did when he spoke to Sherlock in the train car. It’s because he doesn’t trust her and doesn’t want to be open with her. John has had months to figure out what to say to Mary, and he chose his words with such care because he wanted to say something that would make it seem like he was forgiving her and was ready to move forward without actually forgiving her.

Here’s a gif set from @incurablylazydevil that lines up the scene where John forgives Sherlock in TEH and this scene with Mary in HLV. It shows some really important differences. Sherlock begs John for his forgiveness, while Mary starts the conversation by being snarky and rude. John gets emotional and genuine when he speaks to Sherlock, but he’s stilted, practiced, and reserved when he speaks to Mary. John actually tells Sherlock that he forgives him, but he says something far less direct to Mary. And finally, John smiles and laughs along with Sherlock after their conversation, but he still looks extremely unhappy when he hugs Mary.

Indeed, John’s expressions in this scene with Mary don’t communicate forgiveness or acceptance. He barely smiles at all, even after he’s said his piece and Mary starts crying and they hug. Look at his face while they’re hugging. John does not look happy about this. He looks like something just died inside him. This is a task that he has to force himself to get through.

Here’s another reason why I think John’s forgiveness is fake. The forgiveness scene gets interrupted by HLV’s non-linear storytelling, just like how the train car scene and Sherlock’s explanation of the fall to Anderson were mixed together in TEH. In TEH, I think those scenes are scrambled in part to distract us from the fact that Sherlock lied about the snipers to Anderson. Since we’re supposed to be eager to find out what happens in the train car, we’re meant to be a bit distracted during Sherlock’s explanation to Anderson, and therefore less likely to realize that important parts of it are untruthful and that Sherlock is lying to protect his heart. The same thing happens here. Just like how Sherlock lied to Anderson, John is lying to Mary by appearing to take her back, and the structure of the episode is meant to communicate this. The tension and sadness that we see on John’s face are there because he hasn’t truly forgiven Mary and he doesn’t want to have to pretend to. But he pretends anyway, either because he understands that he has to or simply because Sherlock asked him to.

Interestingly, John’s maroon “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan doesn’t make an appearance in this scene. If John had actually given up on Sherlock and decided to take Mary back because he thought she was the best he could do, then this would be the perfect moment for him to be wearing it. (And it wouldn’t even look out of place at Christmas, given the color.) But he’s not wearing it. Maybe at this point, John is actually feeling more hopeful about him and Sherlock. After learning about Mary’s past, John might be starting to think that this will eventually give him the opportunity to leave her once and for all, and in circumstances that will even leave him guilt-free. He just has to get through this nightmare first.

During all of this, Sherlock has decided that the next step to figuring out what the hell to do about Mary is for him and John to get their hands on Magnussen’s files on her. They need more information, and this is one way to get it. Sherlock decides to pretend to sell Magnussen Mycroft’s laptop in exchange for the files, but he doesn’t tell John about this plan. John had no idea that Sherlock was planning anything for Christmas Day, let alone that he intended to set up a fake deal with Magnussen.

Before this, Sherlock and John probably did read Mary’s flash drive but found that Mary had lied about what was on it. The flash drive was probably either blank or contained partial or incomplete information, so of course Sherlock and John still need to learn more. I mean, would a highly-skilled assassin actually carry around an easily-stealable flash drive with “everything about who I was” conveniently stored on it for anyone to access? I mean, she didn’t even give John a password. Come on. That would be even less clever than the British government putting the Bruce-Partington plans on an easily-stealable flash drive...especially because that flash drive actually did get stolen.

Proving just how much he trusts Sherlock, John immediately runs off to Appledore with Sherlock after Sherlock and Wiggins drug everyone else in the Holmes household. John even brought his gun with him to Christmas dinner when Sherlock asked him to, even though that request made no sense to him at the time. (I think John was being a bit stupid on that one, though. He definitely should have realized something was up when Sherlock asked him to bring his gun to Christmas dinner. But maybe John just thought it was because Sherlock didn’t trust Mary, and John brought the gun because he didn’t trust her, either.)

Just as a side note, this is more evidence that John has always cared a lot more about Sherlock than about Mary. John is literally a doctor, but he leaves his drugged pregnant wife for Wiggins to look after and goes running off with Sherlock. Of course he does, lol.

After Sherlock and John go outside the Holmes parents’ house to meet the CAM helicopter, we get this exchange:

Sherlock: Coming? John: Where? Sherlock: Do you want your wife to be safe? John: Yeah, of course I do. Sherlock: Good, because this is going to be incredibly dangerous.

If any of this is real, then this seems to suggest that Sherlock and John probably didn’t have an honest, heart-to-heart conversation about The Mary Situation in the months between the 221B scene and Christmas. Sherlock is operating on the belief that he’s successfully convinced John to take Mary back and to trust her, and John plays into it because he thinks it’s what Sherlock wants. Sherlock actually wants to get the files on Mary so that he and John can figure out what to do about her, but he’s telling John that it’s to protect her because he—very foolishly—doesn’t want to reveal his true plan to John until he has more information to go off of. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Sherlock!

Obviously, a lot of important things happen at Appledore.

First, John learns that it was Magnussen who put him in the bonfire in TEH and sees footage of Sherlock running into the bonfire to save him. This is important because it’s a moment when John comes face to face with visual proof of how much Sherlock cares about him and how willing he is to disregard his own safety in favor of John’s. It’s hard to tell what’s going on in John’s head as he watches that footage, but let’s hold onto that thought for now and come back to it in a bit.

Then Magnussen reveals that there are no vaults; all of his information is simply stored inside his head. Sherlock has made the exact same mistake that he made at the end of S1 and the end of S2. Once again, Sherlock underestimated his opponent and fell into their trap, just as he did when he believed the Bruce-Partington plans were the final pip but didn’t anticipate that Moriarty would take John as a hostage, and just as he did when he believed that Bach’s Partita No. 1 was Moriarty’s secret computer keycode. More importantly, Sherlock once again tried to come up with his own plan for confronting his enemy without confiding that plan in John, and in doing so, he led John straight into danger. Now it looks like Sherlock and John are both going to be arrested for attempting to commit treason by selling government secrets, and Sherlock doesn’t know what to do. Sherlock should have told John the truth!

For several awful minutes, Sherlock just stands there in front of the empty room with no vaults, staring ahead of himself and looking horrified at what he’s done by bringing John into danger like this.

Once the shock wears off, Sherlock realizes that the only way he can get John out of this is if he kills Magnussen himself. It’s the only way to permanently neutralize Magnussen as a threat to Mary, and therefore to John, Sherlock, and Mycroft so that Magnussen won’t have any leverage over any of them. Just as importantly, killing Magnussen gives Sherlock a way to take all of the blame, sparing John from prosecution and prison. Crucially, Sherlock deliberately waits to shoot Magnussen until after Mycroft and the police have arrived, thus ensuring that multiple witnesses see him aim the gun and pull the trigger. Sherlock wants to make sure that there will be no doubt that he was the one who killed Magnussen and John wasn’t responsible.

Sherlock’s decision to shoot Magnussen in full view of witnesses like this is an incredible act of self-sacrifice, and maybe the strongest evidence of all that Sherlock will do absolutely anything for John. Sherlock must have understood then that he would face life imprisonment or exile for this. He knew he was giving up his whole life for John.

Sherlock steeling himself to shoot Magnussen by looking at John:

(gif from here)

I honestly think the expression on Sherlock’s face in this moment might be one of the single strongest pieces of evidence for TJLC.

Before Sherlock shoots Magnussen, he asks Magnussen to confirm that the Appledore vaults exist only in his mind and nowhere else. Magnussen does, and then after Sherlock shoots him, he says to John “Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.” Here’s what I think is going on with that.

When Sherlock realized that there were no paper files at Appledore and that he’d made a terrible mistake by bringing John there, I think he saw that this was the end of the game for him. When Sherlock decided to shoot Magnussen, he chose to sacrifice himself to save John, and he decided that the situation that he’d once hoped would only be temporary will now have to be permanent: John will have to stay with Mary not just temporarily, but permanently, so that he can stay safe from her and won’t be separated from his child. Moreover, since Mary has already proven that she’s willing to take desperate measures to keep John, Sherlock decides that he’ll have to trust that if whatever is going on with her extends beyond Magnussen, then Mary will do her best to keep John safe from any other dangerous actors who might be out there. Sherlock thinks Moriarty is dead and he just saw that it was Magnussen who put John in the bonfire, so Sherlock might now think that he actually did eradicate all of Moriarty’s network. That means that Sherlock probably hasn’t made the Moriarty-Mary connection, or that he’d considered it but has now ruled it out. So Sherlock thinks that if Mary is involved with other unknown dangerous people, he’ll have to count on Mary’s assassin training and her determination to keep John safe to protect John.

This was never what Sherlock wanted for John. Sherlock had hoped that by solving the mystery surrounding Mary with the files from Appledore, he could give John a real choice once they both had full information. But Sherlock failed to solve the mystery. He got outplayed, so this will have to be enough. At least with Magnussen out of the picture, John will have a shot at the future with Mary and their daughter that he’d once wanted, right? And after all, Sherlock might reason, Mary is dangerous and exciting, just like he is. She can keep John safe and happy the way Sherlock used to, and she can even provide John with the heteronormativity that John has always seemed to want, but that Sherlock would never have been able to give him.

And so, Sherlock tries to tell John that this is what has to happen now, in just a few words. “Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.”

On the topic of Sherlock’s undying love for John and his willingness to do absolutely anything for him, by the end of S3, Sherlock has now, in order: (1) agreed to die alongside John at the pool rather than live without him, (2) refrained from telling John that he loved him even when holding back broke his heart, because he believed that saying something would put John in even greater danger from Moriarty, (3) faked his own suicide in order to save John’s life, even though lying to John and hiding his survival from John hurt Sherlock terribly, (4) respected John’s choice to remain with Mary even after Moriarty was gone and he and John could have had a relationship, (5) planned John’s wedding to someone else in order to make him happy, (6) come back to life for John after getting shot in the chest, (7) pushed John back to Mary even when John had an out and could have left her for him, because he believed that doing so would keep John safe, and (8) sacrificed his own life and freedom by killing another man in order to protect John from suffering the same fate.

This is true love.

Now we descend to Tarmac Hell, featuring probably the most devastating scene in the entire show.

At some point before the tarmac, Mycroft convinced his colleagues to give Sherlock the option of accepting the suicide mission in eastern Europe from MI6 as an alternative to spending the rest of his life in prison. Sherlock agreed. Now, Sherlock is preparing to leave the country forever. He knows he won’t survive more than six months and he believes that this is the last conversation he’ll ever have with John.

Sherlock steels himself to finally say “I love you” to John. He’s been through so much for John, he’s given him so much, and now he’s about to leave him forever and then he’s going to die. So he has to say it, he just has to.

It’s obvious that Sherlock is planning to finally make a love confession. Even Mycroft sees it! When Sherlock asks Mycroft if he and John can have a moment alone, Mycroft looks at him in shock, his expression saying, “Now? You’re seriously going to do this now? Well…okay.”

Sherlock and John step aside to have their conversation. It’s halting and terrible and they’re both struggling so much. Finally, Sherlock gets ready to say it. 

(gif from here)

Sherlock: John, there’s something I should say, I’ve meant to say always and then never have. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again, I might as well say it now.

There’s a long pause. Sherlock hesitates and looks down.

Then he draws in a deep breath and raises his eyes to look into John’s face.

Sherlock: Sherlock is actually a girl’s name.

You can see the progression of Sherlock’s expressions before and after here. It’s clear that Sherlock was making a difficult decision about what to do, and in the end he decided not to say what he wanted to. Instead he just tried to make John laugh one last time.

I’m struck by how different Sherlock’s and John’s body language and expressions are in this scene. Sherlock stares straight into John’s face throughout much of their conversation, as if he’s trying to take in everything that he can before they part forever. John, in contrast, keeps averting his eyes and looking off to the side instead of looking Sherlock in the eye. When John does look at Sherlock directly, his expression isn’t at all inviting. Sherlock said to Mycroft in front of John that this is likely the last conversation they’ll ever have together, and he says to John that it’s unlikely they’ll ever meet again. Yet although John must recognize the heavy sense of finality in those words, his body language and tone in this scene are very, very different from what he displayed in the train car when he thought he and Sherlock were about to die. Instead of letting himself be overwhelmed by his emotions, John seems to be intentionally using his body language and facial expressions to signal to Sherlock that he isn’t prepared for an emotional goodbye. He doesn’t want Sherlock to go there. 

John also doesn’t take the initiative to say anything kind or meaningful to Sherlock in this last conversation. That’s very different from how he behaved both during their phone call in front of Bart’s in TRF and in the train car. By opening their conversation with “Actually, I can’t think of a single thing to say,” John is trying to tell Sherlock that he doesn’t want to do this. He just can’t.

Why is John so closed off here? I think it’s because he’s finally figured it out—he has finally realized that Sherlock is in love with him. At Appledore, John saw the recording of Sherlock yelling “John!” and diving into the bonfire to save him. Then right after that, he witnessed Sherlock shoot Magnussen. This gif set shows John’s reaction after Sherlock said “Give my love to Mary. Tell her she’s safe now.” I think that in those frames, you can see John come to the realization that Sherlock did it for him, not for Mary. Between Appledore and the tarmac, John had at least a week to reflect on everything that happened at Appledore, and he seems to have finally figured it out. (Mycroft says in TAB that Sherlock was held in solitary confinement for a week before the tarmac.)

John gets it now. He knows that Sherlock is in love with him, and now it’s too late. They’re never going to see each other again, and there’s nothing John can do about it. So in these last moments, John can’t bear to hear Sherlock finally say it out loud. That’s too much for him, so he gives Sherlock signal after signal that he doesn’t want him to go there and isn’t prepared for an honest and heartfelt goodbye.

And Sherlock takes the hint. Sherlock wanted to tell John that he loves him, but when John’s posture remains uninviting, Sherlock backs down out of respect for John’s feelings. At the last moment, he decides that telling John that he loves him would be more of a burden to John now than a relief. So Sherlock switches to humor instead—just like he did in the train car when he realized that John felt overwhelmed and wasn’t prepared to say anything more about his feelings.

It must have taken so much courage for Sherlock to finally steel himself to tell John that he loved him, after we’ve seen him back down from showing or telling John this so many, many times before. And Sherlock even said that it’s something “I should say, I’ve meant to say always and then never have.” That he’s meant to say always! ALWAYS! Ahhhhh!! Sherlock’s decision not to say it here is so heartbreaking, but in a way, it’s also very brave and selfless. Once again, Sherlock has chosen to respect and protect John’s feelings, regardless of what he wants for himself.

Sherlock’s parting “to the very best of times” with that stiff, distanced handshake breaks my heart. The way S3 played out, Sherlock and John were never able to go back to what they had together when they were flatmates, never able to go back to those “very best of times” from before Sherlock’s fall. Those times are far in the past for them now, and neither of them ever realized that they weren’t going to last.

It also hurts that Sherlock doesn’t tell John that this is a suicide mission. When John asks him how long the mission will be and what comes after, Sherlock pauses before just saying “who knows” with a little shrug. Sherlock still seems unable to bring himself to tell John how far he’s willing to go for him.

Once Sherlock is on the plane, we see him staring out of the window with one hand raised to his mouth—the same hand he just shook John’s hand with before leaving him behind. Sherlock also looks like he’s been crying.

Then everyone sees Moriarty’s “Miss Me” broadcast. Oh no! Maybe Moriarty isn’t actually dead! Sherlock isn’t going to die in eastern Europe, apparently, and now he will have to figure out how Moriarty could possibly still be alive and what to do about it.

Before moving on to TAB, I want to talk about two other scenes from HLV that I couldn’t find a good place for before this without interrupting the flow too much. In both these scenes, the characters talk about the fact that Sherlock is gay about as directly as is humanly possible without literally saying that he’s gay.

First, Janine and Sherlock implicitly talk about Sherlock being gay during their conversation in Sherlock’s hospital room. This scene really popped out at me when HLV first aired because it’s just so clear.

Janine tells Sherlock “just once would have been nice,” implying that she would have liked to have had sex with him at least once during their fake relationship. Sherlock says “oh” as if he hadn’t even thought of that before, then dodges by replying “I was waiting until after we got married.” Janine laughs disbelievingly and says incredulously, “That was never going to happen.” This exchange tells us that Sherlock and Janine never had sex and that having sex with Janine is something that Sherlock would never have been willing to do.

As Janine is on her way out, she says to Sherlock “You shouldn’t have lied to me. I know what kind of man you are. But we could have been friends” and gives him a soft, slightly sad smile. I’ve always interpreted this as Janine saying to Sherlock, “I know you’re gay. If you hadn’t tried to lie to me, we could have been friends.” Sherlock looks a bit sad and regretful after she leaves, as if he agrees.

The scene where Sherlock and Mycroft talk while smoking behind their parents’ house also jumped out at me when the episode first aired. Mycroft asks Sherlock why he hates Magnussen so much, and Sherlock immediately and vehemently replies, “Because he attacks people who are different and preys on their secrets. Why don’t you?” I always took this to be Sherlock saying that he’s gay. (The hat deduction scene in TEH backs this up, too, because Sherlock talks about “being different” in the context of him missing John.) @nyxneon has a great meta that breaks down Sherlock’s hatred of Magnussen and Sherlock’s comments in this scene in more detail. Because of Magnussen’s role in the story as a master of blackmail, and specifically because of the history of this in the Victorian era, Sherlock’s comments are very queer-coded, and nyxneon’s meta makes some great points about how this is basically Sherlock saying he’s gay.

That’s it for HLV! If anyone read all of this, then thank you so, so much <3 <3

Sherlock and John have settled on calling themselves best friends, but it’s an awkward and unstable description of what they are to each other. There’s just too much between them. They both know this, and for that reason, they seem to be purposely keeping a certain amount of distance from each other in TSOT. There’s a new formality to their interactions in this episode and the dynamic between them is very different from the ease that they had around each other back in S2. The park bench scene where Sherlock and John wait for Bainbridge to get off duty is an especially painful example of this.

For both Sherlock and John, though, TSOT seems to be something of a breaking point. Neither of them can truly keep all of their thoughts, emotions, and longing for each other locked up any longer, and some of it starts to bleed out.

TSOT has a lot of non-linear storytelling, so in this section of the meta I’m going to try to talk about events in the order in which they seem to have occurred, rather than the order the episode presents them in.

To start out with, we have to talk about “Happily Ever After,” one of the cases from John’s blog. In this case, Sherlock convinces a married lesbian named Sabrina to leave her evil husband Chris and to come out to her family so that she can be with the woman she truly loves. Chris blackmailed Sabrina into marrying him in the first place; he forced her into the marriage by threatening to tell her family that she was gay, and Sabrina acceded because she thought her family wouldn’t approve if they found out the truth about her sexuality. After Sabrina comes to Sherlock and John for help, Sherlock convinces her that it’s worth taking the risk of coming out to her family so that she can escape Chris and be with the person she’s actually in love with.

Sabrina is a mirror for John, Chris is a mirror for Mary, and the woman Sabrina is in love with is a mirror for Sherlock. The comparisons are just so direct! John isn’t really in love with Mary, but things are moving at a fast clip and he may feel as if Mary is railroading him into the marriage. Mary is secretly a villain and certainly does not have John’s best interests at heart, as we will soon learn in HLV. She offers John the veneer of a heteronormative relationship, but staying with her is the wrong decision. Like Sabrina, John needs to decide to leave Mary and to come out to the people in his life so that he can be with Sherlock, the person he’s truly in love with.

Interestingly, in this case Sherlock gives Sabrina the power to make the decision for herself by giving her the photographs that prove her own affair, making it so that Chris will no longer have any control over her. Sherlock tells Sabrina that she should tell her family everything. “What’s the worst that could happen?” John paraphrases on his blog. Even if her family disowns her, “wouldn’t it be worth it to be with the woman she loved?” This tells us that at this point, it’s up to John to make a decision about whether or not to leave Mary, and Sherlock knows it. And deep down, Sherlock believes that what’s most important is getting to be with the person you love. And he’s willing to say that in front of John.

Also, Sherlock only takes the case after he realizes that Sabrina is a lesbian. He took the case because he wanted another queer person to be happy! Meanwhile, John writes about all of this in the most oblivious fashion possible. I hate it!

Moving on to the events of the episode. Let’s assume that the scene where John asks Sherlock to be his best man is the earliest scene from the episode, since it makes sense for that to have happened before Sherlock, John, and Mary got well and truly embroiled in the wedding planning.

Sherlock’s shocked reaction to John asking him to be his best man is meant to be comic relief for the casuals. But for us TJLC believers, of course there’s much more going on here, and I think it’s actually quite sad. That’s really the whole vibe of TSOT, in my opinion: funny on its face, but just really, really sad underneath when you stop to think about it for more than a few seconds.

When John comes to 221B to ask Sherlock to be his best man, he seems very much at ease. He’s pleased to have Sherlock back as a friend, and he’s clearly forgiven him and is on much better terms with him than he was in TEH up until the train car scene. At this point in the narrative, though, John also seems very confident in his decision to marry Mary. He seems to have convinced himself that marrying Mary is truly right the choice, and that he can have Mary as his spouse and Sherlock as his best friend. There’s no hesitance on John’s part when he sits down to ask Sherlock “the big question.” John also tells Sherlock that his wedding day with Mary is going to be “the biggest and most important day of my life,” and when Sherlock contradicts him, John points at him accusingly and sharply insists “No, it is, it is.” Ouch.

I think that in the months after Sherlock returned, John tried to convince himself that pursuing a romantic relationship with Mary was the safe option, and therefore the correct one. He knew he was in love with Sherlock in a way that he wasn’t with Mary, but he didn’t think that Sherlock would ever return his feelings, so he thought it would be pointless to pursue Sherlock. And there’s a lot about Mary that appealed to John—she’s smart, snarky, and funny, and she’s very independent and self-assured. Perhaps most importantly, Mary was different from John’s previous girlfriends because she didn’t appear to resent Sherlock. She actually encourages John to go on cases with him, instead of getting annoyed when John goes off with him the way that Jeanette did. I think John looked at all of that and thought, well, Mary isn’t the person I truly want to be with, but I can make this work. John thought that if he married Mary, he could have a chance at the sort of romantic relationship that he’d always thought he was supposed to have (a wife and a house in the suburbs) with someone who was safe (because she loved him back and wouldn’t break his heart) while still getting to keep Sherlock as his best friend. John probably thought that if Sherlock was never going to love him back, then this was the best he could have ever hoped for.

By the time John asks Sherlock to be his best man, he’s convinced himself that this is the best path for all of them. He’s confident. As Sherlock and John keep talking, John only starts to hesitate when Sherlock doesn’t seem to be getting the message at first, and when he realizes that Sherlock is going to make him say something out loud about how much he cares about him.

John: Look, Sherlock, this is the biggest and most important day of my life. Sherlock: Well…. John: No, it is, it is. And I want to be up there with the two people I love and care about most in the world. Mary Morstan…and you. (Very, very long pause.) Sherlock: So in fact…you mean…I’m your…best…friend?

This is the first time we’ve ever seen John tell Sherlock that he loves him, in any capacity at all. And hearing that stuns Sherlock.

I think that in this scene, Sherlock isn’t necessarily struggling to process the fact that he’s John’s best friend. Sherlock probably already knew that; he and John lived together for a year and a half and did almost everything together during that time, and in the birthday video from MHR, Sherlock claims that all of John’s other friends hate him. He and John don’t even invite anyone else to John’s stag night, and the two other friends Sherlock suggests as potential best men—Greg Lestrade and Mike Stamford—aren’t people John is anywhere near as close to as he is to Sherlock. (Mike didn’t even come to the wedding. But also, of course he didn’t! Mike must have been so upset that after he set Sherlock and John up together years ago, John was stupid enough to marry someone else. Honestly, Mike is quite possibly the most perceptive person on this show. God, I love him.)

Instead, I think Sherlock is struggling with the idea that John counts him and Mary as the two people whom he loves most in the world. Especially because in TEH, Sherlock started to doubt that John may have ever been in love with him. Perhaps as he stood there, frozen and staring, Sherlock was wondering if this means that before Mary came into John’s life, he would have been the person whom John loved and cared about the most. Because that’s certainly the implication. Sherlock might be struggling because he’s coming face to face with the idea that he really could have had a chance with John if he’d made a move before the fall, before Mary. And that John might even know this and have accepted it. Sherlock might be thinking about the life he could have had with John if it hadn’t been for Moriarty.

Back in November, Sherlock heard John forgive him in the train car, but he wasn’t able to wring the love confession out of John that he’d hoped for. After that failure, Sherlock probably continued to doubt his own prior beliefs about how John felt about him, and he might have even started to fear that John is attracted to him but doesn’t truly like him. That’s an awful thought. John’s heartfelt insistence that Sherlock is his best friend should at least put that particular fear to rest.

Importantly, though, John is still holding back. He intentionally tells Sherlock that he loves him only by presenting that love alongside his love for Mary. It’s only in this context that John feels safe stating that he loves them both. John is trying to relegate Mary and Sherlock to well-defined roles in his life that aren’t in conflict with each other: romantic partner and best friend.

Still, John tells Sherlock that he loves him and cares about him, and that of course Sherlock is his best friend. This is about as honest as we’ve ever seen John be about his feelings for Sherlock. And moreover, John is all soft smiles during this conversation. He actually seems comfortable expressing his feelings to Sherlock here. It’s somewhat shocking, actually, that John has finally worked through enough of his own internal conflicts to say all of this out loud to Sherlock’s face. Sherlock’s surprise might also be a response to that, too. For a very long time, Sherlock has known that John struggles with his feelings and that his inability to come to terms with his love for Sherlock is one of the major obstacles that has kept them apart. But here John is, willingly telling Sherlock that he loves him. So all in all, it’s not surprising that Sherlock found John’s words very moving. Especially if Sherlock had started to doubt John’s feelings during TEH, as the train car scene seems to prove he had.

After Sherlock agrees to be John’s best man, the events of TSOT vividly illustrate one of the main themes of S3: Sherlock’s unending willingness to sacrifice his own feelings for John’s. Sherlock believes that John has chosen Mary over him, so after John asks him to be his best man, he spends all of TSOT trying to do everything he can to give John the future with Mary that he believes John wants.

Sherlock does this by completely dedicating himself to planning John and Mary’s wedding. The whole episode portrays Sherlock as the person who was truly in charge of pretty much all of the wedding planning and who did the most work for it. Every piece of wedding planning that we see takes place at 221B, never at John and Mary’s flat. It’s Sherlock who picks out the bridesmaids’ dresses, gets Archie to understand his role as the ringbearer, and intimidates interviews other members of the wedding party and guests. He even composes and performs a waltz for John and Mary’s first dance together and teaches John how to waltz so that he’ll be prepared.

God, just imagine how painful dancing with John must have been for Sherlock. Especially given that we see John dip Mary at the end of the dance at the reception. Did Sherlock and John practice that together, with John learning how to do it by dipping Sherlock?

The scene between Sherlock and David (Mary’s ex) is important within this context because it demonstrates the selflessness of Sherlock’s motivations. Sherlock invites David over to 221B ostensibly to talk about David’s duties as an usher, but then he reveals that he’s deduced that David still has feelings for Mary. Sherlock tells David the following: “I think from now on we’ll downgrade you to ‘casual acquaintance.’ No more than three planned social encounters a year, and always in John’s presence.” This shows that Sherlock is really going above and beyond in his best man duties and is actively trying to make sure that David doesn’t mess up John and Mary’s marriage by tempting Mary into an affair. If Sherlock were acting selfishly and prioritizing his own interests in TSOT, then he wouldn’t do this; if Mary were to start cheating on John with David, then that would give Sherlock an ideal opportunity to try to get John to reconsider his relationship with Mary. But Sherlock doesn’t want that to happen. He thinks John has chosen Mary and truly wants a future with her, so he’s doing everything he can to protect that future. Even stuff that John hasn’t asked him to do and that he doesn’t need to do.

Most tellingly of all, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, Sherlock completely pauses his casework. John tells Sherlock that his inbox is “bursting,” but Sherlock ignores all of these potential cases so that he can devote all his time and attention to John’s wedding. And it’s not as if the cases are all just boring; when Sherlock glances at his inbox for just a few seconds, he immediately picks out the case from Bainbridge, which he later describes as “the most ingenious and brilliantly-planned murder—or attempted murder—I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter: the most perfect locked-room mystery of which I am aware.” Like, there was this gem of a case that Sherlock will think is a highlight of his career just waiting in his inbox. So it’s not that the cases aren’t worth trying to solve! It’s that Sherlock is genuinely ignoring them. Various documents related to the wedding have even taken over the wall where Sherlock usually pins up his case notes, visually demonstrating that the wedding has physically replaced Sherlock’s work. By this point in the story, Sherlock is obviously putting John above his work in a way that he never did in S1-S2. “Married to my work” my ass. John is Sherlock’s number one priority now, and Sherlock isn’t even trying to hide it from anyone.

While we’re talking about the wedding planning, let’s discuss some more evidence that John is not in love with Mary the way he is with Sherlock!

Sherlock hands Mary a double-sided list of people who hate her, and John doesn’t even look up from his phone…which he is currently using to search for cases for him and Sherlock to solve together, instead of paying a single drop of attention to the plans for his wedding to Mary. In contrast, when the police superintendent called Sherlock “a weirdo” in TRF, John was immediately like “I am going to punch this guy’s lights out, and I don’t care if I get arrested for it.”

But actually…is John looking at his own phone, or Sherlock’s phone? Either John has access to Sherlock’s email account on his own phone, or he was looking at Sherlock’s phone. Apply the phone equals heart metaphor, and either way, John has access to Sherlock’s heart.

Maddeningly, however, John still seems clueless about Sherlock’s feelings. When Mary tells John that Sherlock is terrified by the prospect of the two of them getting married, John acts completely disbelieving and asks, “Why would he be scared that we’re getting married?” Apparently, the idea that Sherlock could be in love with him still hasn’t entered John’s head.

Meanwhile, Sherlock might actually be trying to give John some subtle hints. Sherlock chooses lilac-colored dresses for the bridesmaids, and when John tells Sherlock that he likes the bridesmaids in “purple,” Sherlock pointedly corrects him by stating that the dresses are lilac. “In Victorian times, giving a lilac meant that the giver is trying to remind the receiver of a first love.” (See here.) By dressing the bridesmaids in lilac, then, Sherlock is trying to remind John of his first love: Sherlock. On the whole, Sherlock appears extremely accepting of John’s choices in this episode. He’s insanely accommodating and never tries to get in the way of John and Mary. But the lilac dresses suggest that maybe, just maybe, Sherlock was holding out some small sliver of hope that John might still back out.

And even without knowing about Sherlock’s feelings, maybe John did consider backing out—that’s one way to interpret the mismatch between the dates for the wedding that are given by the show and John’s blog. The evidence from the show indicates that the wedding was on May 18: at the end of TEH, Mrs. Hudson and Mary talk about the wedding being in May, and when Sherlock, John, and Mary are shown looking at a draft wedding invitation together in TSOT, the invitation says that the wedding is on May 18. But on John’s blog, all the cases from between “The Empty Hearse” and Sherlock’s post about the wedding are timestamped with dates from after May 18, and Sherlock’s post about the wedding is from August 11. It’s possible to reconcile these apparent inconsistencies by saying that John got cold feet about the wedding and purposely pushed it back by three months because he was so reluctant to actually go through with it. (Thanks to @loudest-subtext-in-tv for this idea.)

Back to the wedding planning scene at 221B. Even if John is completely oblivious as to Sherlock’s romantic feelings, he does seem to understand that Sherlock is committed to him as a friend. When John tries to get Sherlock to pick a case, he says “Please, Sherlock, for me,” because he knows it will work on Sherlock. And it does!

After John begs Sherlock to take him out on a case, Sherlock and John end up trying to solve the attempted murder of Private Bainbridge. From their conversation on the park bench, we see that John has been trying to convince himself that even if he marries Mary, he’ll still be able to have Sherlock as his best friend. They’ll still go on cases together. It won’t be everything John wants, but it’s the most he thinks he’s able to have. Sherlock, meanwhile, is, in fact, terrified. And he can’t bear to have to listen to John talk about how Mary turned his life around.

All the while, the writers keep dropping hints that John and Sherlock are the real relationship on this show. I mean, first, there’s the fact that this episode, the one that ostensibly centers around John and Mary’s wedding, is entirely about Sherlock and John’s relationship. It opens with Sherlock struggling to write his best man speech and talking to Mrs. Hudson about the wedding. It ends with Sherlock leaving the wedding early. Everything in between is about Sherlock and John. There’s, like, almost nothing about Mary in this episode. John and Mary barely interact on screen, and John and Mary’s relationship is pretty much explored through just a few passing lines from John to Sherlock or from John to Mrs. Hudson about how important Mary is to him. Sure, John. SURE.

During the Bainbridge case, Sherlock is absolutely amazed by John. Sherlock thought they were solving a murder, but once John realizes that Bainbridge is still alive, John shifts gears in order to save a life and completely takes control of the situation with a level of skill and confidence that Sherlock deeply admires. During his best man speech, Sherlock says that for him, John was the most remarkable thing about the entire case. He even says that it’s always like that for him: that John is always the thing that he finds most interesting about a case. I think this is a really beautiful testament to the fact that Sherlock loves John because he truly understands and appreciates who he is as a person, and especially because he values John’s unique qualities and skills. What Sherlock and John have together isn’t surface-level, it’s built on mutual understanding and admiration that run very deep.

There’s one moment during the Bainbridge case that offers an absolutely beautiful piece of foreshadowing for when Sherlock and John first have sex. LSIT wrote a great meta about it here. I won’t try to summarize it because I think I’d just repeat what she wrote, so just go read it, it’s very short.

After the Bainbridge case, we get to one of the most important parts of TSOT: the stag night.

By the time the stag night rolls around, John is having serious doubts about the wedding. He knows that he’s in love with Sherlock, and he tries to use the stag night as a last-ditch opportunity to figure out if Sherlock might return his feelings. John’s actions during the stag night even show that he’s actually prepared to cheat on Mary with Sherlock. That’s huge!

Like I said, I think that when John asked Sherlock to be his best man, he felt confident in his decision to relegate Mary to the role of fiancée/spouse and Sherlock to the role of best friend. But as the wedding crept nearer and nearer, John clearly started to have doubts. I think that at the time of the wedding planning scene in 221B, John still hadn’t considered the possibility that Sherlock might be in love with him. But it seems that after that, John might have started to wonder, as his own doubts about the wedding intensified. After all, if after the Bainbridge case John paused to reflect on Sherlock’s recent behavior, there would have been a lot for him to observe. Perhaps John realized that Sherlock had completely paused casework for him, that Sherlock was devoting all of his attention to the wedding planning, and that Sherlock was genuinely trying to make everything perfect for him. Remember, in TEH Sherlock said that weddings were “not really my thing,” and when John asked Sherlock to be his best man, Sherlock expressed skepticism that the wedding would really be the most important day of John’s life. But after John insisted that it was, Sherlock started acting as if he’d taken John’s wishes to heart. Maybe John noticed that switch in Sherlock’s behavior, because he seems to have become more uncertain about his decision to relegate Sherlock to the role of best friend and more anxious to find out how Sherlock feels by the time of the stag night. Or maybe John just got desperate.

As he prepares for the stag night, Sherlock sets out to carefully calibrate his and John’s blood alcohol levels throughout the evening. He even develops his own phone app for the task and consults Molly about it in order to make sure that he gets everything right. (Sherlock also shows Molly that he keeps a thick file on John, which includes a page where he cut and pasted a picture of John’s face onto Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the ideal man. We get it, Sherlock, we get it.)

Sherlock was so careful about keeping track of his and John’s alcohol intake that evening because he was desperate to make sure that he and John didn’t overstep the boundaries that they’ve been skirting together. Sherlock knows that he and John are attracted to each other, but he believes that John has chosen Mary. He doesn’t want to mess this up for John. By trying to keep him and John from getting into a situation where all the guardrails might come off, Sherlock is actually being incredibly selfless and very respectful of what he believes to be John’s final decision about him vs. Mary.

In sharp contrast, John wants to let something happen between him and Sherlock during the stag night. In a bar with bisexual pride lighting—because the show creators really, truly, could not bring themselves to be subtle in this episode—John purposely tries to bring his and Sherlock’s defenses down by taking an extra shot at the bar and spiking Sherlock’s drink with a shot when Sherlock isn’t looking. John wants them both to lose control, because he thinks that with their defenses down, he might be able to try to see if Sherlock would be receptive to having sex with him. If he is, then John thinks this will give him an answer about how Sherlock feels. This is exactly what Sherlock is trying to avoid happening by watching their alcohol intake so carefully.

Remember in the ASIB section when I said that John often drinks right before he thinks he’s about to make himself emotionally vulnerable? This is that again. John doesn’t know how Sherlock feels, but he wants to find out. And to me, he seems to have planned this ahead of time—he saw the stag night as his chance to make a move on Sherlock.

When John and Sherlock are back at 221B and well and truly drunk, John does exactly that with the (in)famous knee touch. John’s actions here make no sense within the context of the forehead detectives game that he and Sherlock are playing, so clearly John has something else on his mind when he abruptly leans out of his chair, positions himself between Sherlock’s legs, and touches Sherlock’s knee.

After doing this, John raises his arms up theatrically and announces “I don’t mind,” to which Sherlock softly replies “Anytime.” John’s “I don’t mind” might seem like an odd thing to say, since he was the one who touched Sherlock, but it makes a lot of sense within the broader context of the show. John has been insisting for two and a half series now that he isn’t gay. When he says “I don’t mind” after touching Sherlock in an obviously sexual way, what he’s really saying is: “I know I’ve said I’m not gay, but I don’t mind touching you. Actually, I want to.” (I didn’t come up with this myself and I’ve seen others float this idea before. Unfortunately I didn’t take good notes whenever I first saw it, so I can’t link to wherever I originally read it to give the op credit. I’m sorry :/)

Combine this with the bisexual pride lighting in the bar at the moment when John started to put his plan for the evening in motion, and voilà, we have evidence that John has finally started to get over whatever internal hangups he may have once had about his sexuality or his attraction to Sherlock. John has fully admitted to himself that he’s sexually attracted to Sherlock, and his actions show that he’s now ready to have sex with Sherlock if Sherlock is willing. And this happens a few weeks after John told Sherlock that he loves him. Put all that together, and it seems like John is making real progress. John actually seems to be willing to pursue things with Sherlock in a way that I don’t think he’s ever been comfortable with before.

Sherlock is loose and relaxed in this scene. He has his legs spread wide for John, and after the knee touch he sits back in his chair comfortably while smiling at John warmly. But as we saw back in ASIB, John is very cautious of Sherlock’s boundaries and will never try to push Sherlock to go further than Sherlock wants to. So even though Sherlock doesn’t try to move away and says “Anytime,” implying that he’d always be open to John touching him, John doesn’t seem to take this as an affirmative go-ahead for anything further, and he backs down.

After Sherlock fails to tell John that he’s pretty, John leans back in his chair and says “You’re not really getting the hang of this game, are you, Sherlock?” John is ostensibly talking about the forehead detectives game, since Sherlock just told him that he picked a name out of the papers without knowing who it was. But subtextually, John is talking about flirting and sex. John tried to make a move, but Sherlock didn’t respond—at least not in a way that John took as enthusiastic consent. So John is saying that he’s trying to come onto Sherlock, but Sherlock doesn’t seem to be catching on. John wants to cheat on Mary with Sherlock, but Sherlock doesn’t get it. (Maybe because, you know, John spiked his drink and got him super drunk. Just a thought.)

John takes this quite calmly, but I think this scene shows just how desperate he’s become. It’s hard to know what John expected or hoped would happen during the stag night, but maybe he saw this as a sort of last chance. If Sherlock had been more enthusiastic and they’d kissed or had sex, I think John might have actually left Mary for Sherlock.

Basically, I see the 221B scene during the stag night as John’s version of the train car scene. John deliberately manipulated Sherlock by getting him drunk in the hopes that he would get a hint as to whether Sherlock was attracted to him, and probably even in the hopes that something might finally happen between the two of them. But in the end, this scene plays out just like a reversed version of the one from the train car, with Sherlock and John having switched places. Sherlock doesn’t go quite as far as John was hoping for, so John backs down and things return to their unsteady equilibrium. It’s yet another instance where Sherlock and John came very close to admitting their feelings or to letting something physical happen between them, but didn’t.

As desperate as John is at this point, though, he still isn’t willing to speak to Sherlock honestly about what he wants and how he feels. It took a hell of a lot of alcohol for John to get close to acting on his feelings, and he still didn’t use his words. And after the stag night, when they’re both sober again, John completely drops the idea of cheating on Mary with Sherlock. He thinks he got his answer from Sherlock, and that it was a no—that Sherlock simply isn’t interested.

I also have to say here that John’s behavior during the stag night is totally unacceptable. He spiked Sherlock’s drink when Sherlock wasn’t looking specifically so that he could try to have sex with him. NO. THAT IS BAD. It’s true that John was still looking for a “yes” from Sherlock when they were back at the flat, and that he backed down when he felt he didn’t get it. But John started from a point that is not okay when he spiked Sherlock’s drink. Sherlock can’t give consent when he’s drunk—it’s not like Sherlock and John all already in a sexual relationship with each other, so that John already knows what Sherlock’s personal boundaries are for mixing sex and alcohol. So John wasn’t in a position to be able to judge what Sherlock wanted or didn’t want. Ugh. And I really do think that Sherlock was trying to prevent them from getting super drunk because he didn’t want them to have sex.

Overall, I think John’s actions during the stag night were very selfish. He purposely tried to take advantage of Sherlock’s trust in him specifically because he, John, didn’t feel comfortable being honest with Sherlock and just talking to him directly when they were both sober. That’s so unfair to Sherlock.

So…yeah. I know everyone loves the stag night scene and the knee-touch. And I think this scene is incredibly important because it tells us so much about John’s state of mind and how desperate he is, as well as the fact that he’s still feeling incredibly conflicted and scared. But I think we need to be able to recognize all of that while also remembering that John’s actions weren’t okay.

Tessa the client shows up and subtext hell continues. As this gif set makes clear, Tessa’s story about her date with the Mayfly Man is a retelling of Sherlock and John’s first evening together in ASIP. Tessa serves as a mirror for Sherlock in particular. Like Tessa, Sherlock didn’t date much, but John seemed nice, and they seemed to just automatically connect. They had dinner together and talked. Sherlock thought that maybe he’d like to go further, but this was special. He wasn’t ready yet. He wanted to take things slowly.

When Tessa says “To be honest, I’d love to have gone further,” Sherlock shakes himself and guiltily withdraws an arm from behind John’s shoulders, where it was apparently resting a moment before.

(gifs from here)

As Tessa continues with her story, she shifts from describing her date with a kind of happy awe to becoming really sad and tearful. She explains that after the first date went so well, the guy never got in touch with her again, even though he’d promised he would. “Maybe he wasn’t as keen as I was?” she says as she starts to cry, “but I just thought, at least he’d call to say that we were finished?”

When Tessa says this, Sherlock kind of loses it. His mouth falls open as he looks back at Tessa, and then he looks really upset and wipes his nose.

(gifs from here and here)

The camera focuses on Sherlock’s reaction during this moment, not John’s, emphasizing that Tessa is a mirror for Sherlock. Tessa’s story resonates with Sherlock especially, and this part in particular shows that John hasn’t given Sherlock closure. Even though John has mostly been trying to act like he’s moved on from Sherlock, he’s still trying to keep Sherlock very close to him. John is stringing Sherlock along, just like the Mayfly Man did to Tessa.

I mean, here Sherlock and John are, sitting close together on the couch with Sherlock’s arm around John as they listen to Tessa describe a date that sounds pretty much exactly like their first evening together. This isn’t an easy position for Sherlock to be in! So of course he gets upset when Tessa says her date abandoned her and didn’t even call to say that they were finished.

When Sherlock later attempts to solve the Mayfly Man case inside his mind palace, Tessa shows up, and she and Sherlock are dressed very similarly. They’re both wearing white collared shirts with subtle vertical stripes under a black outer layer—Tessa wears a black cardigan, Sherlock a black suit jacket.

(screencaps from here)

This once again emphasizes Tessa’s status as a Sherlock mirror. The shirt is even very similar to the one that Sherlock was wearing during the lab scene where he and John met for the very first time, providing another callback to ASIP. (That shirt was also white with vertical stripes, but it’s not the exact same shirt, I checked.)

This gives Tessa’s sad “Maybe he wasn’t as keen as I was?” extra bite. Sherlock was really into John from the start, but after Sherlock panicked at Angelo’s and John appeared to reject him in TBB, John never gave Sherlock another indication that he was into him until it was too late. Sherlock only started to catch onto John’s true feelings in ASIB, after Moriarty had revealed himself and threatened them both.

Of course, things also don’t feel great from John’s perspective by this point. John’s conversation with Mrs. Hudson the morning after the stag night gives us even more evidence that John isn’t truly in love with Mary and that their marriage isn’t going to work out.

As casehusbands (now @coldwarfem) explains in this meta, Mr. Hudson is a mirror for Mary and Mrs. Hudson is a mirror for John. Mrs. Hudson tells John that she knew Mr. Hudson was not “the right one” for her even when they got married. “No! It was just a whirlwind thing for us,” she says. “I knew it wouldn’t work, but I just got sort of swept along.” Mrs. Hudson then explains that she eventually found out that Mr. Hudson had lied to her about a lot of really serious stuff; he’d been concealing the fact that he was running an illegal drug cartel and the fact that he was seeing other people. “So, when he was actually arrested for blowing someone’s head off, it was quite a relief, to be honest,” she says.

All of this maps onto John’s relationship with Mary. We’ve already received quite a lot of evidence that John knows Mary isn’t the one for him, because he knows that Sherlock is. John and Mary also haven’t been together very long and are heading into marriage very quickly—John said so during his attempted proposal to Mary in TEH. Based on what we’ve seen of John in TEH and TSOT, “It was just a whirlwind thing for us” and “I just sort of got swept along” feel like pretty accurate descriptions of how John might feel about his relationship with Mary. And of course, in HLV, John will learn that Mary has lied to him just as much as Mr. Hudson did to Mrs. Hudson, if not more. Mary has been hiding her past as an assassin, including the fact that she went rogue and killed people illegally while not working for any government. Similarly, Mr. Hudson was secretly conducting illegal activities in Florida and was eventually arrested and executed for murdering someone. Then there’s the infidelity piece. I’m going to talk about that when we get to HLV, so hold on to that thought.

Since all the rest of this lines up, the first thing that Mrs. Hudson said must, too: just as Mrs. Hudson knew at the time of her wedding that she wasn’t really in love with Mr. Hudson and he wasn’t the one, John knows now that he doesn’t love Mary and she isn’t the one. This conversation’s deliberate comparison of Mrs. Hudson and Mr. Hudson to John and Mary reveals that John doesn’t love Mary in the deep, emotional way that he loves Sherlock. And the more Mrs. Hudson talks, the more uncomfortable John looks—perhaps John is self-aware enough to recognize himself in Mrs. Hudson’s story.

To top it all off, Mrs. Hudson also says that her relationship with Mr. Hudson was “purely physical.” I think this is potentially significant for two reasons. First, it confirms that John has been physically intimate with Mary without being in love with her—John is getting something from his relationship with Mary, but it isn’t true love and romantic fulfillment. More interestingly, though, I think this could be saying that John and Mary’s relationship doesn’t go deeper than physical reality, which hints at the fact that John has stayed with Mary in part because their relationship is heterosexual. By staying with Mary, John has been prioritizing certain physical aspects of their relationship—its heterosexuality—over love. Just a thought.

Anyway, after his unsuccessful attempt to shag Sherlock on his stag night, John puts on his “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan and goes to talk to Sherlock. John really gave it his all during the stag night, it seems, and his wardrobe choice shows that he now feels quite deflated and disappointed that it didn’t work out the way he’d hoped.

(screencap from here)

Sherlock is ignoring his food and trying to solve the Mayfly Man case. In his mind palace, he imagines himself talking to Tessa and the four other women who dated the Mayfly Man while he messages with each of the women online.

When Sherlock asks the women, “Do you have a secret you’ve never told anyone?” John breaks through into his mind palace all of a sudden to quickly ask, “What d’you mean?” As I mentioned back in the ASIP section of this meta, this is a hint that John is bisexual and that it’s a secret he’s never told anyone.

After all the women log off, Sherlock slams down the laptop lids and frustratedly asks “Why would he date all of those women and not return their calls?” To this, John replies that it’s “obvious” that the Mayfly Man is married and wants to cheat on his partner.

Um. John. You’re telling on yourself.

I mean. Just. Damn.

By contrasting Sherlock’s and John’s reactions to the Mayfly Man, this exchange also comments on the state of Sherlock and John’s relationship at this point. Sherlock can’t even contemplate cheating; the thought just doesn’t occur to him at all. Sherlock, after all, has been over here doing everything he can to give John a future with Mary without getting in the way. Sherlock isn’t demanding anything from John, and he’s certainly not suggesting that John cheat on Mary with him. Sherlock doesn’t want that! He actively tried to prevent it during the stag night. And by selflessly trying to do everything that he can to make John happy, Sherlock is also being loyal to the person he loves. In contrast, John’s readiness to suggest that the Mayfly Man is a married man trying to cheat not only references the fact that John has been actively considering cheating on Mary, but also suggests that John essentially is cheating on Sherlock by being with Mary, since Sherlock and John are the real couple on this show.

In any case, John doesn’t try to cheat with Sherlock again, and he doesn’t come clean to anyone about how he feels. The day of the wedding arrives without John having backed out.

On the morning of the wedding, Sherlock wakes up early (Mrs. Hudson says he’s usually not awake when she brings up his tea) to anxiously practice dancing to his waltz one last time, wanting to make sure that everything will be perfect for John and Mary. Then Mrs. Hudson shows up and starts talking about how marriage changes people and this will be “the end of an era” between him and John.

Sherlock clearly wants to avoid hearing what Mrs. Hudson has to say about how she barely saw her best friend after she got married. Mrs. Hudson even suggests that her friend was in love with her, since she left the wedding early. Sherlock is obviously uncomfortable, and pretty soon he all but kicks Mrs. Hudson out.

Before he does, though, we get this very interesting exchange:

Sherlock: Two people who currently live together are about to attend church, have a party, go on a short holiday and then carry on living together. What’s big about that? Mrs. Hudson: It changes people, marriage. Sherlock: Mmm, no it doesn’t. Mrs. Hudson: Well, you wouldn’t understand, you always live alone.

Rude, Mrs. Hudson! You can just see Sherlock biting his tongue and looking pained in response to that. But what’s interesting here is that Mrs. Hudson starts by saying that marriage changes people, but then she says that Sherlock wouldn’t understand because he lives alone. This implies that it’s actually the living together part that matters and that changes people, not marriage itself. And that’s spot-on for Sherlock and John. Sherlock and John have both changed for having lived together and fallen in love with each other. It’s also telling that Sherlock recognizes that it’s not the marriage part that changes things, it’s living together and being a couple.

After Mrs. Hudson leaves, Sherlock gazes over at John’s empty chair. He clenches his jaw before he looks at the chair brokenheartedly, and there’s a really loud heartbeat sound. Gifs here.

And now on to the wedding itself, which in many ways, serves as an extended demonstration that John doesn’t love Mary the way he loves Sherlock.

Throughout S3, we never actually see much of John and Mary’s relationship. We don’t get any flashbacks that show the initial spark of interest between the two of them or any part of them falling in love. We don’t see John’s actual proposal to her after his first botched attempt at the Landmark (if he even made another attempt—maybe he didn’t). Even in TSOT, the episode that ostensibly revolves around John and Mary getting married, we only see parts of the wedding reception and we don’t see any part of the actual ceremony itself. The whole episode is about John and Sherlock’s relationship, not John and Mary’s. This is, of course, because the relationship between Sherlock and John is always the central relationship in this show.

The way they filmed the wedding reception is also very interesting. The montage that shows the guests eating dinner is filmed in a really aggressive manner, and throughout the reception the colors are strangely washed out, with the whites and yellows in the room making the whole thing feel overly intense and bright. To my eye, the whole thing is shot in a way that makes the wedding reception feel artificial, stressful, and uncomfortable, not light and happy.

This is in part because S3, including TSOT, is largely told from Sherlock’s point of view, and Sherlock obviously feels extremely uncomfortable throughout the wedding reception. He acts jealous of Sholto, hurt when Mary teases him, and tense and regretful when Janine casually asks if he has a vacancy for someone to solve crimes with. Sherlock eventually starts to feel so lonely and out of place that he even calls Mycroft to try to get him to make an eleventh-hour appearance so as to keep him company. And of course, Sherlock is also very nervous for his speech.

This treatment of the wedding—giving the actual ceremony no screen time and filming the reception in a way that makes it feel uncomfortable, lonely, and wrong—wouldn’t make any sense at all if John and Mary were right for each other and this episode really were a celebration of their love. Because it’s not. TSOT is all about Sherlock’s heartbreaking love for John and John’s desperation to be with Sherlock even as he feels trapped with Mary. The way the wedding is presented makes complete sense if we’re meant to see it as an obstacle within the narrative of the show, which of course we are.

I’m going to talk about the wedding from Sherlock’s perspective first, then John’s.

Before his best man speech, Sherlock calls Mycroft and Mycroft repeats back at him what Mrs. Hudson said earlier by saying that this is “the end of an era.” This emphasizes that Mrs. Hudson’s best friend Margaret is a mirror for Sherlock. She was in love with Mrs. Hudson and devastated at her wedding, and then the two of them barely saw each other afterwards. That’s exactly what Sherlock fears.

Sherlock gives his speech and it’s basically an outright love confession. He says John is “the bravest and kindest and wisest human being I have ever had the good fortune of knowing” and that he never expected to be the best friend of such an amazing person. Then Sherlock says to John that he and Mary are “the two people who love you most in all this world” and that “we will never let you down, and we have a lifetime ahead to prove that.”

It seems like Sherlock is intentionally mirroring every heartfelt thing that John has said to him since he returned. When Sherlock calls John “the bravest and kindest and wisest human being I have ever had the good fortune of knowing,” he echoes what John said about him in the graveyard and the train car. Sherlock also mirrors John’s statement that Sherlock and Mary are “the two people that I love and care about most in the world” from his best man proposal by saying to John that he and Mary are “the two people who love you most in all this world.” Sherlock seems to have realized that John feels safe admitting that he loves Sherlock if he can group him in with Mary, so Sherlock intentionally does the same thing in his speech. He’s deliberately confessing his love to John in a way that he knows will feel safe for John.

But I have to say, even though Sherlock purposely includes Mary in his promise that “we will never let you down, and we have a lifetime ahead to prove that,” the substance of that statement…sounds a lot like a wedding vow. Oh, Sherlock.

Then Sherlock brings up the Bainbridge case. Sherlock has one purpose and one purpose only in doing so: to praise John. Sherlock insists that “There was one feature, and only one feature, of interest in the whole of this baffling case, and quite frankly, it was the usual: John Watson.” Then he goes on to call the case “the most ingenious and brilliantly-planned murder or attempted murder I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter: the most perfect locked-room mystery of which I am aware.” Sherlock has dedicated his life to being a detective, even inventing his own position as a consulting detective in order to do so. This case was the most perfect locked-room mystery that he has ever come across, so good that he couldn’t even solve it (!), and yet he’s up here insisting that John was the most interesting—even the only interesting—thing about the case. He’s so painfully in love. John matters more to him than literally anything else! Sherlock then explicitly says that the whole point of bringing this up was to compliment John when he attempts to transition to the next part of his speech with this: “However, I’m not just here to praise John, I’m also here to embarrass him, so let’s move on….”

We’ve come a long way from “I consider myself married to my work,” haven’t we?

Sherlock also keeps saying that he wants to talk about “the elephant in the room,” but that John doesn’t want him to. The elephant in the room is the fact that the two of them are in love. Sherlock wanting to talk about it but knowing that John doesn’t want him to reflects the fact that Sherlock has always been comfortable with his own homosexuality and would be ready to pursue a relationship now that Moriarty is gone, except that he thinks John doesn’t want to acknowledge what they feel for each other and doesn’t want a relationship with him.

Before we get to the part where Sherlock tries to solve the Mayfly Man case mid-speech, Sherlock’s speech is pretty much entirely about how great John is and about his and John’s relationship. He doesn’t talk about the bride and groom’s relationship, as I believe would be a point of focus in a typical best man speech. Aside from when Sherlock says that he and Mary love John most in the world, will never let him down, and have a lifetime ahead to prove it, Mary gets, like, one mention—which is when Sherlock says that telling her that she deserves John is the highest compliment he can give her. That’s really a compliment for John, not for Mary. The whole speech is about John. This is a love confession. You get it. We can move on now. Okay.

By the way, Lestrade pretty much always seems to know what’s up between Sherlock and John, and his face during the speech is totally: “Oh my God, Sherlock is so in love. This is so painful to watch.” Yep. You’re right, Greg, it is.

Sherlock also tells the whole reception hall that when he was trying to solve the Mayfly Man case, John helpfully pointed out to him that the Mayfly Man was probably married and was trying to cheat on his spouse. After saying this, Sherlock adds that this “does help to further illustrate how invaluable John is to me. I can read a crime scene the way he can understand a human being.” John, of course, looks mortified that Sherlock would bring this up at the wedding reception. YIKES. It seems that Sherlock was drunk enough during the stag night that afterwards, he didn’t realize that John had actually tried to cheat on Mary with him. Sherlock has no idea how desperate John was to try to figure out his feelings that night.

Sherlock says a few more heartfelt things about John. Then he starts trying to solve the Mayfly Man case, and as he does so, he starts to act a bit unhinged. Sherlock often turns kind of manic when he’s working on a case, but this time it’s different and he behaves far more erratically and appears less focused than he usually does when solving a case. Again, I think this is comic relief for the casuals, but sad for us because we can view Sherlock’s difficulty in solving the case as evidence of just how hard the wedding day is for him and how much he’s struggling emotionally. Having to watch John marry someone else is tearing Sherlock up inside, so much so that he has difficulty doing the very thing that he’s usually best at. Sherlock only regains his composure and manages to figure things out when he purposely pushes Mycroft out of his mind and chooses to focus on John instead. “It’s always you, John Watson, you keep me right,” he says. Here, Sherlock is openly admitting, both to himself and to everyone else watching, that even if John is marrying someone else, Sherlock can’t give up on him. John will always be the most important person in his life, and Sherlock needs John to ground him. He can’t solve cases without John anymore, even though solving cases is what he’s always been best at. John has become that important to who Sherlock is as a person.

Especially in this scene, TSOT drives home a theme that we’ve seen throughout the show: Sherlock and John complete each other. We saw in ASIP that Sherlock was basically able to bring John back to life and saved him from suicide after he returned from Afghanistan, and that John essentially did the same for Sherlock in ASIP, too. Indeed, in this best man speech, Sherlock says that John has saved his life “so many times, and in so many ways.” Sherlock’s insistence that “It’s always you, John Watson. You keep me right” voices out loud that John brings out the best in him. It’s John who keeps him focused in the way that he needs to be to solve cases.

Sherlock, John, and Mary all rush off to try to save Sholto. When the three of them are trying to talk to him while he’s in his hotel room, Sholto seems suicidal. He’s received death threats and escaped them before, but this time he seems to want to give in and just accept death. From John and Sholto’s conversation at the wedding reception earlier, it seems that there was some sort of attraction between the two of them when they were in the army, but neither of them ever acted on it. Based on the way that Sholto and John each behave in that conversation, my read on the situation is that Sholto was more upset by this than John was. Sholto seems to be someone whom John can think about fondly and smile over now, not someone he’s still hung up on. But it seems like Sholto isn’t completely over John and being at John’s wedding is very painful for him.

Sholto is a mirror for Sherlock in this episode: see here. So all the stuff about how Sholto wants to kill himself at John’s wedding is further evidence of how devastated Sherlock feels.

Sherlock tries to get Sholto to get back to the stiff upper lip by insisting that they have to be strong for John. They have to shove their own feelings down, because that’s what John needs from them. They can’t give in to their own pain and let it destroy them, because that would be the selfish choice that would hurt John.

Sholto: Mr. Holmes, you and I are similar, I think. Sherlock: Yes, I think we are. Sholto: There’s a proper time to die, isn’t there? Sherlock: Of course there is. Sholto: And one should embrace it when it comes—like a soldier. Sherlock: Of course one should, but not at John’s wedding. We wouldn’t do that, would we—you and me? We would never do that to John Watson.

They’re both in love with John, and the pain of watching him marry someone else is killing them. But both Sholto and Sherlock resolve to push through that pain, because it’s what John expects of them, and they’re willing to sacrifice their own feelings for John.

This is especially poignant for Sherlock. Sherlock knows, now, what his apparent death did to John. He’s resolved to never do that to John again, no matter how much it hurts him.

Interestingly, after Sherlock says this, John says that he’s going to break down the door and then Mary says “No, wait, wait, you won’t have to.” Mary realizes that what Sherlock has just said will resonate with Sholto. She seems to have an inkling of how much the wedding is hurting Sherlock (and Sholto), hence her mean-spirited teasing of Sherlock earlier at the reception.

After they’ve dealt with Sholto and Jonathan Small the Murderous Photographer, Sherlock finally performs his waltz on the violin as John and Mary dance. Then Sherlock throws his boutonnière at Janine like he’s a bride throwing a bouquet at the bridesmaids. (This episode…kills me.)

Sherlock then continues to pledge his life to John, acting once again as if this wedding is his one chance to say all the things to John that he would say if it were the two of them getting married. Sherlock tells the room the following:

Sherlock: […] today we saw two people make vows. I’ve never made a vow in my life, and after tonight I never will again. So, here in front of you all, my first and last vow. Mary and John: whatever it takes, whatever happens, from now on I swear I will always be there, always, for all three of you.

Sherlock tells the room that since John just married someone else, he knows he’ll never get married and will never make wedding vows. Then he takes the opportunity to make a vow anyway, doing so in a way that groups John and Mary together as the recipients so that his promise will feel safe for John.

Sherlock leaves the podium and tells John and Mary that Mary is pregnant. He cracks a joke about how they won’t be needing him around much anymore and looks genuinely happy for them at first. Then, of course, we see the smile slide right off his face as reality settles in and he watches John dance away with Mary. Gif set of this here.

The episode ends with Sherlock leaving the wedding early, just like Mrs. Hudson’s best friend Margaret did—the friend Mrs. Hudson said cried through the entirety of her wedding and who is a clear mirror for Sherlock. Exiting the wedding venue, Sherlock wraps his coat around himself protectively like it’s armor as he walks off alone. If I ever watch this scene without crying, it will be proof that the horrors of the world have finally turned me dead inside.

So where does this leave us from Sherlock’s perspective? Sherlock and John are back to solving cases together, and Sherlock feels thoroughly enmeshed in John’s life again as his best friend. John has even told Sherlock that he loves him, which is something Sherlock never expected from John, not after the train car. As far as romance goes, though, Sherlock has given up. Sherlock is utterly devoted to John and knows that he’s never going to get over him, and that he’ll never even try to find someone else. But he believes that John has chosen Mary, and he’s resolved to respect that choice. Sherlock puts on a brave face and tries to do everything he can to make John happy by planning the perfect wedding for him and Mary, even though having to do it absolutely breaks his heart.

Meanwhile, John is devastated, too, because this isn’t what he wants, either.

If you watch John’s face during Sherlock’s speech, it’s pretty heartbreaking. John is clearly moved by all the things Sherlock says about him and by Sherlock’s evident devotion.

It starts pretty early on. When Sherlock says that John and Mary are happy, we get this shot of John’s face:

(screencap from here)

I repeat: Sherlock says that John and Mary are happy, and we get this shot of John looking like he regrets everything he’s ever done and wants to die. This is a brief moment and easy to miss, but then Sherlock continues, and things get worse. 

(gifs from here)

John looks like he’s about to cry during Sherlock’s speech, and we hardly ever see John cry. And the camera does linger on these subsequent shots of John, making sure that we see them.

John knew he was making a mistake. He knew he was in love with Sherlock and not Mary. He knew he didn’t want this marriage, but he went ahead with it anyway.

Molly’s character also gives us more hints that John isn’t feeling great about the wedding. As previously established in earlier episodes, Molly is a mirror for John. And throughout the wedding reception, Molly seems pretty much fed up with her fiancé.

Sure, she smiles for the camera when the photographer snaps some photos of her and Tom at the beginning of the reception. But at all other moments, Molly seems annoyed at Tom and totally done with him.

Remember Molly hissing “Sit. Down.” at Tom after he presents his “meat dagger” theory. Just look at her face here, lol.

(screencap from here)

It also looks like she might stab him in the hand with a fork in this shot here. If she’s not stabbing him with a fork, she’s at least slamming her hand down on his to get him to shut up.

Moreover, Molly and Tom often don’t appear in the same frame together. During Sherlock’s speech, we get frequent cuts to their table that show Molly and Lestrade in the same frame side by side with Tom nowhere in sight, even though he’s sitting right there on Molly’s other side. At the very end of the episode, we also get a long shot of Molly dancing and looking over to see Sherlock leaving. There’s a split second where the camera shows us that she was dancing with Tom, but the camera lingers on Molly by herself for much longer; the whole thing is composed so that you can’t tell she’s with Tom unless you’re watching really, really carefully.

In HLV, we learn that Molly and Tom broke up within a month of this, so all of these clues at the wedding are indicative of the fact that their relationship is on its dying legs. Since Molly is a mirror for John, this indicates that at the wedding, John wasn’t truly devoted to Mary, and his relationship with her is about to fail.

In addition to the Molly subtext, even the camera work in TSOT points towards the conclusion that John isn’t truly in love with Mary and that Sherlock is his true partner. As @just-sort-of-happened points out here, during the second half of Sherlock’s best man speech, the shots of Sherlock standing up and walking around the room are composed so that Mary is often excluded from view. Remember what Sherlock told David earlier in the episode: “In all your Facebook photographs of the happy couple, Mary takes center frame, whereas John is always partly or entirely excluded.” During the second part of the speech, then, we have the show creators deliberately composing shots so that Sherlock takes center frame, often with John still visible, while Mary is partly or entirely excluded. This tells us that the showrunners believe that Sherlock and John are the correct and true couple in this show.

John tries to act happy that he’s married Mary, but of course he’s still totally stuck on Sherlock. Towards the end of the episode, John goes looking for Sherlock and finds him with Janine in the room where the two of them were dancing. John is immediately all “Wow, glad you’ve pulled, Sherlock! Look at us, we’re doing such a good job of performing heterosexuality so that I can lock away my feelings for you forever.” But when Janine offers her arm to Sherlock and Sherlock takes it, jealous!John immediately returns. John tenses up and glares into the space ahead of him like he wants to punch something. This is with Mary standing right next to him, by the way.

Then when Sherlock reveals that Mary is pregnant, John goes through the most…fascinating? upsetting? face journey ever. Take a look at this post here for full details. Seriously, when Sherlock says that he thinks Mary should take a pregnancy test, John drops his head and looks devastated, while Mary laughs. John does not seem happy about having just learned that Mary is pregnant. And he shouldn’t be! In that moment, John realizes that this marriage is very, very serious. With a baby on the way, he can’t get out of this easily. I’m not trying to say that I think John actually thought his marriage was going to end immediately, or that he didn’t think he was committing himself to Mary. He probably did. But now that he knows Mary is pregnant, he’s really committed, and I think the reality of it hits John and begins to sink in for him in a way that he wasn’t totally prepared for.

John only cheers up again when he looks at Sherlock after Sherlock has made his little joke. Overall, John is almost totally focused on Sherlock during this whole exchange, not on Mary. And this scene shows just how much more comfortable John is with Sherlock than he is with Mary. After Sherlock makes his joke, John laughs and reaches out and grabs the back of Sherlock’s neck to pull Sherlock nearer to him joyfully and very naturally. Even though John and Sherlock aren’t usually physically affectionate with each other, doing this comes easily to John because he’s very comfortable with Sherlock. In contrast, after that, John reaches out to touch Mary on the shoulder, but he actually hesitates. There’s a moment when his hand just rests in mid-air uncertainly before he touches her. See this post here. It’s Sherlock’s presence and reassurance that matter to John and that make him feel better in this moment, not anything about Mary.

Then there’s the awkward moment when John starts to see Sherlock’s own happy mask slip, and John looks away nervously and gulps.

Some people think this is the moment when John finally realizes that Sherlock is in love with him. I sort of see it, but I’m not fully convinced. As I’ll discuss in the next section, I think John’s actions in HLV show that for much of that episode, he still doesn’t realize that Sherlock is in love with him. But I think that perhaps during the wedding reception—during Sherlock’s heartfelt best man speech and then this moment with Sherlock on the dance floor—John might start to wonder if there’s something more to Sherlock’s feelings for him than he’s ever realized before. I don’t think John had a real read on things during the stag night; at that point he was just hopeful and desperate, more than anything else. At the wedding reception, though, John might start to question whether Sherlock might have feelings for him that go deeper than he’s always assumed. But I don’t think he’s had a true moment of realization yet.

So, to sum things up from John’s perspective. At the end of TEH, John was still reeling from Sherlock’s return and hadn’t had time to process his own feelings properly. In the months that followed, he adjusted to having Sherlock back in his life, fully reconciled with Sherlock as his friend, and became comfortable expressing his love for Sherlock as his best friend. Still, though, at first John felt that marrying Mary was the right choice. He thought that Sherlock didn’t love him back and never would, so it was best for him to pursue a relationship with Mary; that way, he could have a relationship while still getting to keep Sherlock close to him as his best friend. All the while, though, John knew that he wasn’t in love with Mary the way he was with Sherlock. As the wedding drew nearer, John became extremely anxious to see if there was any chance at all that Sherlock might return his feelings, perhaps because he saw how devoted and selfless Sherlock was behaving during the wedding planning and started to suspect something, or perhaps just because he was getting desperate as the wedding approached. Either way, John decided to throw caution to the winds during his stag night, and he deliberately tried to scope out Sherlock’s feelings by trying to see if Sherlock would want to have sex with him. John didn’t think that Sherlock gave him a clear yes, though, so he didn’t do anything, and when he woke up the next morning he concluded that Sherlock had given him his answer and it was a no. Believing that Sherlock isn’t interested in him, and thus that he’s spent all these years pining for someone who doesn’t love him back, John concluded that he should just go ahead and marry Mary. John let himself get caught up in the whirlwind, as Mrs. Hudson said, and he went through with the wedding even though he had major doubts about the marriage. After the actual ceremony—when John has already married Mary and it’s too late—John might start to see that there’s more to Sherlock’s feelings than he’d thought. But John has just learned that Mary is pregnant! He’s stuck.

At the end of the episode, John is left in a position where he must feel bound to Mary even more firmly than ever before. But it’s not what he wants, because he still wants Sherlock desperately.