#tab meta

Anyway, I have a really dumb question that I haven't really thought about before and though I maybe you would know the answer or can point me towards a meta or another author who might have an explanation, if there even is one lol!

What is the scene with John and Mary supposed to mean, when he says he's taking Mary and leaving and then he corrects himself and says Mary is taking him? Is it just to show how she was in charge of John? Or something mundane like it's because John can't drive lol? I don't know why I started thinking about it, but now I'm kind of fixated on it 🤦🏼‍♀️.

Thanks for any insight!!

Hi Nonny!

Never a dumb question here! That's the best part of this community, because I'm not always going to have the answer but someone else usually does, hahahh!

Okay, so MY PERSONAL INTERPRETATION of it is that I believe this is one of the only modern scenes in TAB that is part of the mind palace fever dream, as I believe that it's about Sherlock realizing his love for John; just the sudden abruptness of it being the only modern scene off of the Tarmac (if I remember correctly; I used to watch this episode ENDLESSLY, I LOVED writing meta about it) makes me think that Sherlock is trying to still work through Some Things™ (that meta linked talks a bit more about my interpretation of the Graveyard Scene as a whole and I hope you'll read it!).

That said, because I feel it's Not Real™, I am interpreting it as Sherlock realizing how much control over John's life Mary actually has, how trapped John is, and how Sherlock himself feels bitter about Mary being the asshole she is and rubbing it in Sherlock's face CONSTANTLY that John is hers (seriously, ALL of Season 3 is just Mary being a petty poop and parade-marching John around Sherlock every chance she gets to advertise that she "won" John. John is nothing but a trophy to her). He's jealous and petty in his own way, and we see all through TAB that Mary, in his mind, is painted as deeply unpleasant and a nuisance that Sherlock tolerates for John's sake.

So yeah, for me it's nothing more than Sherlock, in his mind, actually REALLY doesn't like Mary at all, which is why S4 is such a friggin' U-turn for me because they absolutely despised each other before S4.

If anyone has any additional thoughts, please let us know!

Remember how S4 was all about John just forgetting how to be a doctor??

Well it started in TAB

SIR EUSTACE: Somnambulism. WATSON: I beg your pardon? SIR EUSTACE: I sleepwalk, that’s all. It’s a common enough condition. I thought you were a doctor. The whole thing was a bad dream.

Sherlock doesn't want John to be the doctor (doctor=attraction to women/ soldier=attraction to men). In TEH, Sherlock tells John in the train car that he is a soldier, not just a doctor. In TSOT, he says "All girls like a soldier" (poor Sherly). TAB starts off with John as a soldier and we never really see John working as a doctor in the episode. There is one part where John reminds Sherlock "which one of us is a soldier and which one is a drug addict" to which Sherlock replies "You are not a soldier, you are a doctor" implying that Sherlock believes John is "not there yet".

Ooh yass, I love getting a thought provoking ask! Thanks for sending this. 😊 and I love Molly too! Love that gal to pieces! ❤️

So I too rewatched TAB morgue scene just to refresh my memory a bit, and especially after rewatching that (and thinking of some other important pieces of info from the episode) I think I can pretty clearly see what’s going on with Molly here.

First and foremost, I think we have the bigger picture of the crime. Ultimately (in this AU of Sherlock’s head at least, which is still not my fave concept but whatever lol) this is Molly Hooper who is part of an organized bunch of women doing everything in their power to pull off this incredibly elaborate and large-scale revenge plot. They need the tale of Emilia Ricoletti to be told just so. The moment when Dr Hooper makes the snide remark “isn’t he observant now that Daddy’s gone” was right after Watson states that Emilia had clear signs of TB and that should be checked out even though her cause of death was a bullet to the head. That piece of info ends up being super important when finding meaning behind this elaborate crime. Because of course it turns out that Emilia knew she would die soon anyway so wanted to accomplish something big with her death. Naturally, Dr Hooper wouldn’t want anyone sniffing around and figuring out anything beyond the information she was giving out.

And here’s the other thing. Molly was part of this band of women, this group who looked out for each other and even avenged each other in pretty extreme ways. And who else turns out to be among them? The Watson’s maid! And good grief is John ever a Sexist Jerk Face in that episode lol. He’s dismissive of his own brilliant and more than capable wife, but he also treats the maid like a worthless nobody. You best believe that every bit of John’s bad behavior, both toward the maid and his wife, has made it back to that group of women. Molly likely knows exactly how John treats the women around him, and she would have no patience for that kind of idiocy.

Sherlock: You said your life turned on one word Faith: Yes. The name of the person my father wanted to kill.

        - The Lying Detective

In Poetry or Truth II: Brecht and The Great Game @toxicsemicolon explains how S4 is “not real life for John and Sherlock. [The episodes] are the clumsy travesties of the wonderful incidents of which John was once the faithful recorder” A conclusion that comes straight from “Studies of Sherlock Holmes”, an essay written by Ronald A. Knox.

Known as “the Cornerstone of Sherlockian Literature”, Ronald A. Knox’s essay  started The Great Sherlockian Game. Moffat and Gatiss not only agree with it but clearly take from it to write their series. Give the essay a read. Is short, witty and really fun.

In said essay, among other works, he quoted two books written by Gaston Leroux: “The Mystery of the Yellow Room” and “The Perfume of the Lady in Black”. Previously discussed by @green-violin-bow in this post, these books address one of the most sherlockian subjects: The locked room mysteries. If these titles sound somehow familiar, there’s a reason for that:

So I went and read both books. A locked up room mystery in each one, with Joseph Rouletabille as the smart journalist solving the cases no one could ever, and his faithful friend, the narrator in both books, a lawyer called M. Sainclair. The Holmes/Watson dynamic is obvious from the start. Worth mentioning at this point, as John Watson can be seen as a self insert of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rouletabille is clearly a self insert of Gaston Leroux.

I was watching TAB and something started to sound funny.

There was a post about how the text Sherlock sends to mary was almost the same words he used in TAB, about the curtain rising etc.

Then he says he needs to solve a case in order to solve this case, saying that we have to go deeper (meeettaaaaaaaaa)

Sooo. 

Mr. Ricolleti was at an opiates den after the death of his wife = John drinking after Mary died

Mrs. Ricolleti showing up and delivering a message = Mary’s posthumous dvds

When hearing about the Ricolleti case, mary is all of us after tfp:

We are confused, but suspicious. We have to analyze this, even if the season or show is supposedly over:

Us tin hatters are still Mary, who says to Lestrade

At which she receives scoffs from old white men (Lestrade/Mofftiss)

But then, Mrs. Hudson comes and delivers a message:

Someone help me make sense of this. Does this “M” mean Moriarty coming to deliver a message?????? Or am I just reaching

Thoughts?

Hey Nonny!

AHHHHHH I KNOW that there was something back in the day, be damned if I could find it now...

But here's my interpretation:

We have to remember that everything in the Victorian era happening is in Sherlock's head, so this is his interpretation of how Molly is towards John.

Now, one could speculate it's because Sherlock wants to be John's Daddy, but the way Hooper says it is sarcastic and condescending, meaning Sherlock actually has picked up the underlying hostility John and Molly have with each other due to their mutual jealousy of each other having Sherlock's attention.

I think the actual truth is, especially with Watson immediately "deducing" that Hooper is a woman but Holmes apparently didn't, is that Sherlock wants John to be HIS daddy, LOL. The way John stands up for himself and essentially eviscerates Hooper for talking down to him, "asserting his dominance" is John, in Sherlock's mind, showing Hooper who the "daddy" actually is.

Or something like that, LOL.

Hey Nonny!!

Aww this is so sweet, thank you!!!

Soooo back at it again. Has anyone talked about this? Please point me to them, if yes.

We’ve all read about the infamous glowing skull appearing throughout S4 (if you haven’t, do go through @inevitably-johnlocked ‘s metas and this post by @loveinthemindpalace​, they are awesome) 

Re-watching TAB for the umpteenth time, this thing has been on my mind since the past few views. If what I think is true, this is a very subtle but a VERY interesting clue on S4.

So the below is the scene where Mike Stamford is taking John to meet Sherlock for the first time in TAB. The blue circled window belongs to the room Sherlock is in, whipping the corpse. The red circled metal grid door which has blue-ish lighting.

Mike and John enter Sherlock’s room. But wait, what is that in the corner? I don’t have to circle it. It’s a blue-ish thing besides Mike Stamford and that is probably the only thing standing out and staring at your face in this scene.

Let’s see a bit zoomed in

Below is the S4 skull

It does look like our S4 skull frame?!  I can’t say for sure of course, but the resemblance is there. The angle in TAB is from sideways and we always see the skull from the front in S4 but I can’t un-see the similarity....especially because we know TAB is mind palace and S4 has been haunting the fandom since it’s release, the touted EMP. 

To top that, Arwel even blatantly(indirectly) almost agreed to it on twitter. [here] [original]

We do not see this blue-ish frame again in TAB, it’s only for that scene when they both walk in to Sherlock.

It even illuminates Sherlock’s face and body later in the conversation.

But if you see from this side of the window, there is no blue light coming from the red circled door strong enough to be illuminating Sherlock or his window that much with that face/skull image appearing on it. 

So in conclusion, the strong blue light was added in the scene when they enter Sherlock’s room and it matches exactly with the skull.