hope

221b wasn’t probably fit to live in (let alone sleep) while they were clearing up that debris and rebuilding everything.

So…Sherlock stayed at John’s. 

And then when 221b was fixed, they both moved back home. With Rosie.

I love this because you can read his lips and look at his hand gestures and just know he’s saying “Oh look it’s daddy, hiiiiii!!” and who the fuck says that to anyone without using a patronising baby voice?!

I think we all deserve a little post-TFP, season 4 fix-it fic. Hope this hits the spot!

Sherlock strolls through the crowds passing down the busy street. Apparently, strolling is something he does now. The thought makes him chuckle. He turns the corner and speeds his pace. A few more blocks and he’ll be home. Every few seconds, a passerby turns to stare at him. That’s odd. He does get recognized occasionally but this seems quite excessive. He does a quick physical check. Yes, he’s good, remembered all the proper clothes on all the correct parts and everything.

As he rounds the corner onto Baker Street, a sweet jaunty melody echoes off the buildings. Curious piqued, Sherlock looks around for the source. Classical music is a strange choice for most people. The street is packed but not a single person is humming. Strange.

He fishes his key out of his pocket and almost flattens Mrs. Hudson, who was just getting ready to go to the shops.

“Sherlock, dear, mind the door! It’s nice to hear you humming again. It’s been ages. Anyway, I’m just popping to the shops. Shouldn’t be long.”

Sherlock stops the door just in time. Ah, it was him humming in the streets. Interesting. He smiles apologetically.

“Get biscuits.”

He grabs the banister and starts up the stairs.

“Not your housekeeper!”

He grins but doesn’t reply. Sherlock almost makes it into his flat, almost.

“Sherlock! I forgot. The postman came by while you were out. I put the mail on the kitchen table. I couldn’t find anywhere else since you refuse to get rid of all that clutter. I mean honestly! If you would only let me clean once in a while, say every two weeks, then there would be a place to put received mail and tea trays and the like. I don’t know…

“Mrs. Hudson!”

Sherlock shatters her out of her monologue.

“Thank you for the mail.”

He says with finality as he shuts the door. He leans heavily against it for a moment. He loves Mrs. Hudson dearly but she can go on.

Slipping off his Belstaff and scarf, he heads to the kitchen. Might as well make a cup of tea first. He fills the kettle and waits. He bounces impatiently from foot to foot. A watched pot never boils you know. Ugh! John’s in his head now. Wonderful.

Sherlock turns his back on the kettle and notices the small pile of mail. He might as well get in sorted: bill, bill, past due notice, advert, advert, client request, bank statement, letter from Mummy, advert, client request…

The last envelope is padded and a familiar bolt of dread settles in his stomach. He drops the rest of the mail back onto the table and goes to sit in his chair. He inspects every corner of the envelope but can find nothing out of place. Carefully, he eases the flap free from the envelope. Once it’s free, he turns it over and lets the disk slide out into his hand.

He turns it over and over but there are no clues to be found, except the two words printed on the front: Miss Us?

Sherlock can’t imagine what Mary needs to convey that hadn’t been conveyed in the two prior disks. The postmortem notes are actually getting a bit cruel now. The constant reminder to John of his dead wife is a bit not good. Hopefully, this will be the last. Hopefully, they can let her be at peace.

After several minutes, Sherlock hauls himself to his feet, situates the television, and pops in the disk. He settles gingerly into his chair, waits for the disk to load, then presses play on the remote.

Static crackles for a moment before John’s face fills the screen. Sherlock presses pause as his heart beats wildly in his chest. Why would John send him a message like this? Did he know about the messages all along? No, impossible. He had seen John’s genuinely shocked and anguished face. So why?

Sherlock can’t find an answer that makes sense. He shuts his eyes and breathes deeply until he is no longer on the edge of hyperventilating. He presses play.

Read the rest on AO3

By the time I got in line to pay he was loitering at the front of the store again, and I just had that feeling that he was going to try and take the game I just bought, or steal my purse, as soon as I left the store. OR, he was going to try and follow me home. And I know I don’t have to explain that terror to any woman reading this, but all I could think was that I’m in this Gamestop alone with at least twenty other men and something is about to happen. I’m beginning to freak out, to the point where I’ve just pulled my pepper spray out of my purse and into the pocket of my coat. 

So there I am, next in line to pay, and there is this GIGANTIC dudebro right behind me, and I say gigantic as a 6 foot tall woman. He says, “Ma’am? Don’t be offended, but would it be alright if I walked you to your car?” and I was like “Are you serious?” and he was like “There are some weird guys in here right now. Have you noticed that guy watching you?” and then I showed the dudebro the pepper spray in my pocket and he was like “Right on. Would you still let me walk you to your car?” and I said yes.

So I paid, and waited while HE paid, and he walked me to my car. And just as I was getting in, the weird guy who’d been loitering came out of the store, saw me and my dudebro, and turned around and walked away in the opposite direction. 

LMAO you guys are gonna love this…

Operating on the principle that the writers were purposefully fucking with our heads in TFP by stripping the narrative of all “emotional context” in order to get us too caught up to follow that “iron chain of reason,” I girded my loins and dove willingly back into hell to take another look at that headstone cypher scene, since it went by lighting-fast with a suspicious air of “don’t bother paying too much attention, just trust us on this.”

Once Sherlock realizes that The Clue is in the Graveyard, since the stones all had fake dates, he runs over to take a look. We are shown four headstones and their conflicting dates.

The numbers, in order by tombstone are then [134 1719], [28 9 1520], [1818 2426], and [1617 1822 32]. Sherlock is the one who decides on what order the numbers must be taken in, and mentally lines them up before himself.

Here is where Euros’s song comes into play, and the lyrics are shown on screen to be:

I that am lost, oh who will find me? Deep down below the old beech tree Help succor me now the east winds blow Sixteen by six, brother, and under we go!

Be not afraid to walk in the shade Save one, save all, come try! My steps - five by seven Life is closer to Heaven Look down, with dark gaze, from on high.

Before he was gone - right back over my (h)ill Who now will find him? Why, nobody will Doom shall I bring to him, I that am queen Lost forever, nine by nineteen.

Without your love he’ll be gone before Save pity for strangers, show love the door My soul seek the shade of my willow’s bloom Inside, brother mine– Let Death make a room.

If we number the words in each stanza and apply the headstones, which we are explicitly shown how to do, the solution to the puzzle becomes easy to apply ourselves.

Sherlock lines up the headstone dates and the lyrics of the song in his mind’s eye…

assigns each word a number (each stanza starts over at 1 and ends on word 32), and drops all the unnecessary words.

With only the words relevant to the solution to The Final Problem before him, we now get to watch Sherlock play Mind Palace Slappy to put them all in order according to Euros’s puzzle. There are four headstones and four verses to the song, so this should be a piece of cake, right?

Wrong! While Sherlock mutters the solution to himself as he goes along, the solution draws one line from each headstone, plus one additional line which was never part of Euros’s puzzle.

Given only the numbers present on the four headstones ([134 1719], [28 9 1520], [1818 2426], and [1617 1822 32]), the solution should be:

1) I am lost, help me brother 2) save my life 3) before my doom I am 4) my soul seek my room

But as we can see in the screencap above, Sherlock has clearly picked out the words “Without my love” (with second “lost” hovering in the background) which enables him to say aloud to us the solution:

1) I am lost, help me brother 2) save my life 3) before my doom I am 4) lost without your love save 5) my soul seek my room

The only way Sherlock could have possibly come by that 4th line is if there was another headstone with the numbers [28 1238] that was squeezed between the [1818 2426] and [1617 1822 32] headstones, and which would have split itself between the last two verses of the song (tacking on the 28th word of verse 3, and then words 1, 2, 3, and 8 of verse 4).

This is the “emotional context” which was not part of Euros’s puzzle, but which comes entirely from Sherlock himself in his efforts to solve it: I am lost without your love.

Here’s maybe the last time I’ll ask you johnlockers to have hope. I spend a night thinking about it, I wrote an essay for an exam while still thinkiing about it, And the only conclusion that I have come to, is that there has to be another episode. I was wright when I first saw TFP and I thought it was a joke. This can not possibly be it. And I’m not saying this because I have hope, but rather because after using my logical part of the brain, after analizing everything in the episode, it is the only thing that makes sense. TFP should actually be called “Sherlock: The B Movie”, since it includes all the features that can be seen in a B movie. If only the writing was bad, we could assume Moftiss had ruined everything. If only the editing was bad, we could assume they made some mistakes. But there is no way that the final episode of such an important series with such an amazing budget was so bad, and nobody stoped it. So here are the reasons why I still believe this is a fake:

The editing:

As I said, the editing in this episode is completly different from what we have seen in others. It is fast, sloppy and cold, rather similar to what we see in “B” movies, where they use rapid cutting in order to make a movie aparently creepier.

The locations:

TFP had only four major locations in the entire episode: 1. Mycroft’s house 2. Baker Street 3. Sherrinford. 4. The family house. It is very important to note that most of this locations did not require any type of budget whatsoever. The scenes that play in the outside could be filmed without major troubles anywhere. The scenes in Baker Street do not require major changes, since the set already exists from the previous episodes. Molly’s house could well be filmed in the house of one of the creators. And more importantly, most of the episode takes place in dark closed rooms that can be very easily and cheaply constructed. This is another method used in B movies, specially in horror movies, that can’t afford anything better. It is very interesting to note, that the writers and directors of Saw, the movie wich so many have compared to this episode, came up with the idea of the movie because they could marely afford to film in a fiew locations. So, the horror movie had to take place majorly in a closed room. Did Moffat and Gatiss know that when they came up with this idea?

The directing and filmography:

It is rather obvious that the directing and filmography has a very low quality compared to the other episodes. While it is decent enought, it can’t be compared to the amazing scenes we have been shown this same seasons in other episodes. And it is rather interesting to note the decision of the director and editor to make the first scene in the hole movie two eyes opening. One could inmediatly compare this to the first scene in TAB, where it turned out the hole episode was but a dream.

The special effects:

Everybody must have noticed how bad and nonsensical the special effects where in this episode. They where comparable to the ones in “Sharknado”, which is exactly what you should expect of a “B” movie.

The plot and the characters:

Finnaly we arrive at the most important flaw of the episode: the writing. I’m not going to extend my descriptions here, because it could take me hours to point out all the mistakes in this episode. But just to make a quick reminder: John does not recognise a granade, can’t differenciate human bones, does not try to stop Sherlock from comiting suicide, climbs out of a well while his feet are trapped. Mycroft is clueless, vomits at the sight of a death man, has a umbrella sword gun which he uses against a horror clown and is not perplexed to see crying paintings. Sherlock does not recognize the lack of a glass, is Badman, imagines his best friend as a dog eating from a bole, forgives his sister after she has killed docens of people and tried to destroy everything Sherlock loves. Euros is fucking god.

The conclusion:

There is no way that the director, the editor, the writers, the producers, the BBC and the actors all saw this episode and decided it was a good idea, unless it was badly made on purpose. And why would they do this? There is the possibilty that there was a dispute between the BBC and the creators. However, it seems more provable that TFP is suposed to look and feel like a B movie, a copy and paste of every other famous horror movie. And if it is so, the only possible explanation is that we stil haven’t seen it all. I doubt they would show us such an episode if they were going to wait three years for the next season. BBC would never allow it, since it would be obvious that both audiences and critics would dislike this episode at first, and with reason. So the logical conclusion is to assume that there will be a last episode promptly.  That it is a very well hidden surprise.