#drinks meta

I’ve seen a few people complain that this post I made is not actually a shout out to the fandom TJLCers, but rather a completely arbitrary statement and we are Reaching. To counter, in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (dir. Billy Wilder), the answer to this question is yes, absolutely.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has been cited as a major source of inspiration by both Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and they both admire Billy Wilder’s work, so any similarities between the two cannot be treated as a coincidence. The universe is rarely so lazy.

I invite you to pull up a copy of the movie online (or, if you’re more inclined to a more legal way, pop a DVD in) and skip ahead exactly 20 minutes. This my friends, is the most important part in the entire film. A woman asks Sherlock Holmes to be the father of her child. He declines for Reasons. Those Reasons are explained with the conversation he has with this woman’s translator:

ROGOZHIN: [...] and we considered Tschaikowski -- HOLMES: Oh, you couldn’t go wrong with Tschaikowski -- ROGOZHIN: We could -- and we did. It was a catastrophe. HOLMES: Why? ROGOZHIN: You don’t know? Because Tschaikowski -- how shall I put it? Women are not his glass of tea.

Tschaikowski is gay. That’s what that means. It’s not hard to infer. Things didn’t work out because couldn’t get it up with the Madame because he’s not attracted to women. This same analogy is used minutes later to imply that Holmes himself is gay (for Dr. Watson):

HOLMES: The point is that Tschaikowski is not an isolated case. ROGOZHIN: You mean, you and Dr. Watson -- ? (Holmes nods) He is your glass of tea? HOLMES: If you want to be picturesque about it. 

“Cup of tea” is absolutely code. It was code in TPLoSH, and it is code in BBC Sherlock. This line was inserted by the writers to draw a direct connection to this scene in TPLoSH. It doesn’t actually matter if the writers put this line in for specifically for us or not, but because they did, we know that tea is an important metaphor now, and probably always has been. We’ve been right to look at drinks all along. We've been two steps ahead of the rest of the fandom this entire time.

TL;DR - We were right about tea being gay and now antis are mad.

[This scene also contains the “I’m not free” line, as seen in John’s texts when he breaks it off with E, but that’s something for another meta.]

Was looking at a post this evening by @welovethebeekeeper about this image. Taking a closer look at it, what caught my eye was not the cut-off form of the question mark, but the images it lies between.

Clearly, what we see there is a profile of John on one side, and a cup of tea on the other. 

If you buy the drinks code from @thepineapplering (whose url is JUST FINE DON’T CONFUSE ME by changing it), then tea can bee seen as code for same-sex attraction. Throughout the series, we often see John drinking coffee (opposite-sex attraction), and we occasionally see him offered tea (TSoT), or holding tea (TBB) or almost sipping tea (ASiB), or referring to tea (”I had tea at the palace as well...” Yeah, John, next to your hot naked flatmate, I’ll just bet you wanted tea), but we don’t often, if at all, see him full on drinking it. 

As I said, if tea represents, subtextually, same-sex attraction, and if John represents, subtextually, John, then this wallpaper, with a question mark between a profile of John and a cup of tea, is clearly posing the one question that is on everyone’s mind, namely: Will John Drink Tea???

Because once he does, we can all go home.

Sherlock speaking of fear, shot through the amber liquid in the decanter. Liquid courage indeed.