#emp meta

Okay this maybe a stupid question

But here’s what I thought

Does Sherlock know he’s still not awake? Or does he think he’s awake and that this is reality ?

In TAB he thought he was awake only to find out he was wrong, when he thought he actually woke up, he hadn’t. And he later realises that he’s not awake when he wakes up in a super melodramatic setting

My point is he is losing control of his mind and spiraling down to the point where he can’t himself differentiate reality and MP and as we are seeing this whole thing from his pov as well. We can also have only his limited pov so what’s real for him is real for the audience.

The only way we can know Sherlock knows he is still stuck in his emp is if he has control over everything but we’ve seen in TAB he’s already fallen so deep sometimes he doesn’t know.

At the end of TAB when we transition to the modern world while he talks about it, it seems that he’s aware and in control because his dialogue ’ we would be very much at home ….’ points to the fact that he is going to devise the upcoming events according to his rules.

But what if somewhere he got so lost maybe right after that scene, that along with the audience he assumed this is reality too

Maybe he thinks this is real and we only are in his head so this as shown as real to us too

He can only wake up if he realises he’s not!

He can only wake up once he realises he’s not awake and but first he has to figure out this is not Real himself

I apologize if this is all too incoherent or stupid and maybe we already have some proof that he’s conscious of the fact that he’s still in his MP (in that case …..😅)

Sorry if this was already discussed? And obvious? And I’m being stupid?

So the reason we are shown s4 as a continuation of the shows reality is because it is Sherlock’s reality too maybe.

@gosherlocked @tjlcisthenewsexy @sarahthecoat @monikakrasnorada @sagestreet @ebaeschnbliah

@shylockgnomes

Between the plotholes, over the top cinematography and OOC-ness,  Season 4's pretty fucky. Now many have speculated that Season 4 never happened canonically and that Sherlock is still in his Mind Palace: The Extended Mind Palace-theory (EMP for short)

Others have also argued that The Final Problem all took place in John's Mind Bungalow as he's dying as Eurus shot him through his left eye.

Other metas (Especially @The_7_percent_solution 's meta's have focussed on a combination of the two. (A dream within a dream)

This meta will focus on the possibility that Sherlock is still in his HLV coma after Mary shot him, trying to find out whether he can trust Mary.

Basically, I don't believe Season 4 happened for real, and I think it's just Sherlock taping together "Thought Experiments" together, trying to figure out Mary's true motifs.

This meta is big, going all the way back the Empty Hearse where we see this Skip Code:

Save souls now! John or James Watson

Saint or Sinner? James or John? The more is Less?

Taking every third word it goes

Save John Watson, Saint James the Less

This skip code is our warning of the coming plot, as it can alternatively be read as the paths that Mary can take.

John Watson or James Moriarty? Saint Mary the Redeemed or Sinner?

Sherlock's off to find out.

Now with this in mind, let's take a look at the Thought Experiments Sherlock makes up in Season 4 (Although it's worth mentioning the showdown vs Magnussen might be Sherlock's worries about having to kill for Mary, manifested in a showdown of the unsolved case which I believe is part of the EMP)

The Abominable Bride.

This episode gets a new layer as Dreaming!Sherlock has to straighten some things out about the moment Mary shot him first. We know the first layer of the story, where TAB!Sherlock tries to figure out the case of the Bride. The second layer is shown to us as well, as Plane!Sherlock tries to figure out how and if Moriarty could've been alive. When this meta gets added however, we discover a third layer to the story, as Sherlock tries to find out if Mary would've killed him if she stuck to her original plan of an headshot. The answer is yes, Sherlock would've been dead, so he goes on to the next step of the flowchart, chalking up one point for "Saint Mary the Redeemed"

The Six Thatchers

First things first, the talk about "Fate" in this episode obviously takes a new twist in this meta. Sherlock asks himself when the roads become rivers, so when it's obvious that Mary's good/ a villain.

As for the Thought Experiment, Sherlock tries to think of Mary getting killed, setting up the events of a estranged John and Sherlock. The way she gets killed doesn't matter, so Sherlock just takes the most random character and slaps a ton of detective clichés (Jealousy, understudy to the big guns) just to get rid of Dream!Mary to get on with the thought experiment.

The Six Thatchers focusses on Saint Mary the Martyr, instead of villain!Mary.

The Lying Detective

The Lying Detective features the most mirrors of the EMP-trilogy. Whereas Norbury was just a generic villain to get rid of Mary, Culverton is a Villain!Mary-mirror As in, someone who is very loved hiding a very dark secret in plain sight, which is not found because, well, people love that person.

And also that person has a daughter that may or may not know the parents' habit of killing people.

The hospital-theme is there because Sherlock's in a hospital and tries to think of how he's weak to Mary/Culverton when he's heavily drugged/out of his mind/sleeping. And you know who's the solution? John Hamish Watson, the Army Doctor, who will always saves Sherlock and he knows it.

Actual dream!Mary is still Saint Mary the Redeemed in Sherlock's mind, but Culverton is an added thought experiment.

Final Problem This focusses on how Dead!Mary would change up a John and Sherlock-dynamic, or worse, allow a villain to step up. So Sherlock needs to make up the biggest villain yet to intervene, so he thinks up the personification of his childhood: The East Wind, to experiment with the thought what would happen to John if Mary was killed and he were to be on his weakest, ready to be killed by a villain.

Here is where the path splits again First we see the Final Problem, John's mind bungalow. Sherlock thus far has only focussed on the strategy part. How to spot a villain. How to kill a villain. How to beat a villain One feature of interest was left out, out of character, you might say. Sherlock saved the worst experiment for last, John's emotion. John is the Final Problem. His possibly last thoughts as his eye got shot out.

The actual episode is Sherlock trying to figure out John, the ultimate test for the two. He figures out that the two of them together can do anything (The rest of the episode doesn't contribute much to the theory because this is more Sherlock trying to figure out a widowed John, so all the theories made don't change-a-lot for this one)

So in the end, it doesn't really matter who Mary is. There are two men arguing in a scruffy flat and there is no villain that can stop them"

I’m posting this on behalf of @frankvanandel on twitter, who for some reason couldn’t create a tumblr account but wanted to share their theories with tjlc:ers out there! Tagging some people who might be interested under the cut:

Henlo bois and girls :D . This won’t be an actual meta, it’s just an observation I made months ago, and it regards how the concept of Sherlock’s mind palace evolutioned during the seasons from 1 to 4.

Let’s start with season 1, here there’s not much to say, Mark and Steven didn’t actually talked about a mind palace, but they referenced to a superior mind that only Sherlock possesses. He calls it his ‘hard drive’:

We have a more concrete introduction to his mind palace in The Hounds of Baskerville when Sherlock had to solve the case about Henry through the words ‘Liberty In’. Here we see all these “useful words” float in thin air, and it’s explained by John how it works. We were told that it’s a momory tecnique, but we already know that it’s much more than that. ;)

In season 3 Sherlock Mind Palace is finally revealed for what it really is, and actual place where Sherlock can think about possible scenarios and where he personifies all parts of him (Moriarty=fears). Here we get a handful of scenes, from that beatuful scene where he gets shot to the ‘vision’ of him trying to figure Mary out.

Then we have The Abominable Bride and guess what? We get even more data about Sherlock’s Mind Palace, and ENTIRE EPISODE.

In the end what do we have? Sherlock Season 4, which is probably an ENTIRE SEASON in his mind palace. This is perfectly in line with the evolution of Sherlock’s mind palace, and it would make perfect sense. Moftiss said many times already that this show is about a detective, not a detective show and that they wanted to show us how really Sherlock’s mind works.