Dale Pike, Labyrinth, and the Wrong Choice
The reason that Dale Pike's poem "The Deeper Well" is tagged "Labyrinth" is for this: "The paths are unkempt arrows flipped; markers pried one always tells the truth one always lies" The creatures in the Labyrinth change the marks Sarah has made in her attempts to move through it so she stays lost. I have to digress here into the issue of how Jareth, the Goblin King, claims he did everything for Sarah's benefit, stole Toby away from her, made her solve the Labyrinth, played his role as her adversary because that's what SHE expected of him, and meanwhile from her POV she's been confused and lost and solving puzzles, and she HATES it?! And in the end he tells her "Everything I've done I've done for you" like I just can't think of a thing that is more us right now, ok an ARG sounded exciting, but now we are lost and frustrated, we don't know what puzzles to solve and what is real and what isn't, or even if the whole entire thing is just an illusion? but if the solution is to realize "you have no power over me" I don't even know what that means yet Anyway "one always tells the truth one always lies" - she comes to a pair of doors with sentient knockers, she has to choose a door, a path. One knocker always tells the truth, one always lies. She chooses the WRONG DOOR and falls into the oubliette. It's a dungeon cell that can only be accessed through a door in the ceiling, a place where you put people and forget about them. A deep well. This is, if you think about it, also where S ends up at the end of the Dale Pike fic "The Players". He falls down a hole into nothingness, into a room you can only exit through a ceiling, an oubliette. I'm a little lost again here but if we take the Labyrinth reference as a clue this seems to be pointing towards John making the wrong choice by shoving him through the trapdoor; I just don't know what the Right Choice would be in this context. Also at the end of TFP, when Sherlock passes out at the prison and wakes up back at his burnt-out house, we see him falling into black nothingness (ooze), followed by an overhead shot of him lying on the table, like he's fallen into the room. Which has no doors. This could also be a reference to an oubliette. (Which is evidence for Dale Pike being some kind of Someone, since apparently the poem was written a year ago, (have people really checked all the dates out?) and I don't really believe all this, except... I'm just pointing out evidence here.). In this case, though, the room is an illusion that Sherlock can just walk out of? (No idea how this ties in yet.). With reference to the Skull on twitter and tweeting George Takei ... I think most people have the sense not to do this anyway because it's a Bad Idea, but if you want an ARG-related reason just to quiet the voices in your head a little, the solution to the Labyrinth is "you have no power over me" and the Skull was literally trying to offer us power. That was supposedly the solution to the riddle, right, power? (I already wondered if he was just lying and now I suspect he might be the one who always lies). He has no power over us and no power to give us. This is the Wrong Path. In short, I've spent most of the past week wondering if I was going to give up and delete, log out, go inactive for a year or so, but I still can't get away from the game? And does anyone know where I can watch Labyrinth online it's been a while and I'm suddenly very very interested. Tagging some people I have seen posting about Pike/twitter/the ARG @jenna221b @teaandqueerbaiting @worriesconstantly @teapotsubtext (please tag anyone else who would be interested if you would like, I know there are more but it's hard to keep track of who is still playing and who isn't for me)
