#thob

After the intro that shows Henry as a child in Dartmoor, THOB starts off with a scene between Sherlock and John in the sitting room at 221B. After showing up at the flat covered in pig’s blood sometime early in the morning on a Monday, Sherlock waves around a harpoon while basically crawling out of his skin, desperate for cigarettes or a case. John gives Sherlock some tough love when it comes to the smoking, but he also acts very supportive and encouraging of Sherlock’s efforts to quit.

John later writes up his blog post about the Dartmoor case on March 16, just four days after he posted his final notes on Irene after talking to Mycroft and giving Sherlock the camera phone on March 12. The events of THOB span three days, including Sherlock and John’s breakfast together at the inn in Dartmoor before they leave to return to London. This means that the first THOB scene with John and Sherlock in 221B takes place on either March 13 or March 14—the very next day after John talked to Mycroft and gave Sherlock Irene’s phone, or just two days later.

(Side note: I got the timing of this opening scene wrong in the S2 fic that I wrote, so unfortunately I feel a need to awkwardly correct myself here, just in case anyone reading this has also read my fic—a hilarious thought, lol. Anyway, based on this meta, I used to think that the writers intentionally placed this first scene from THOB out of order, as a sort of playful nod to the ACD canon timeline being a complete catastrophe. @loudest-subtext-in-tv disabused me of that notion, however, by pointing out several points of continuity between the first scene with Sherlock and John and the scene with Sherlock, John, and Henry that follows right after. So the opening scenes of THOB do occur in order on a single Monday morning in March, just as we should expect them to.)

At this point, it’s been almost two and a half months since Battersea. And as we see from this opening scene between Sherlock and John, Sherlock is absolutely losing it. It’s been almost two and a half months since he learned that John might return his feelings, and Sherlock is losing his mind over his inability to tell John how he feels. He’s desperate for distractions, and it seems that he and John haven’t had any really good cases since the conclusion of Irene’s case in early January—none that John felt were worthy enough for him to write up on the blog, anyway. Sherlock took on the harpoon case (based on the ACD story “The Adventure of Black Peter”), even though apparently it wasn’t interesting enough to warrant including John, and even though he found the conclusion “tedious.” (And hey, that’s fair. I can imagine that harpooning a dead pig in order to prove a murder method could get a bit tedious, yeah.)

Otherwise, though, the tone of the first scene between Sherlock and John matches the tone of the spring–summer montage from the opening of ASIB very well. The banter, friendship, and domesticity that Sherlock and John share in this scene feels very similar to what we saw unfolding between the two of them several months ago, before Irene. I think it’s beautiful to see that Sherlock and John retained their unique dynamic together as friends, even after Battersea, and even just one or two days after that incredibly tense scene in the kitchen where John gave Sherlock Irene’s phone and held back everything else that he so clearly wanted to ask or say.

It’s especially wonderful to see that just one or two days after that tense scene in the kitchen, John slipped back into his usual role as Sherlock’s best friend: snarky and ready to call Sherlock out on his bullshit, but also very supportive. These are some of the very qualities that Sherlock first saw in John in ASIP and fell in love with him for.

Henry arrives with his case, and Sherlock decides that he and John will go to Dartmoor to investigate. After that, the rest of THOB shows that even though Sherlock and John have still retained their unique dynamic together, there are also real moments of tension between them as they both struggle with their feelings for each other. Their inability to open up to each other also leads to misunderstandings between them.

As always, there’s plenty of evidence of Sherlock’s feelings for John scattered throughout the first half of the episode. Here are a few (certainly non-exhaustive) examples.

When Sherlock and John are interviewing Henry, we learn that Sherlock used to read John’s emails to his girlfriends. Jealous much, Sherlock? I say “used to” because it doesn’t seem like John has tried to date anyone else since Jeanette, who broke up with him almost three months ago. More on that in just a minute, because you’d better bet it’s significant.

Then in this lovely shot that I absolutely adore (it’s my profile pic on here!), Sherlock holds the cab door open for John as they leave for the train station together to go to Dartmoor:

(gif from here)

I just love their body language in this moment. They look so united together as a couple.

And I know that no one in the fandom ever forgot Sherlock’s side-eye and smile at John after John pulls rank at Baskerville.

(gif from here)

Gay.

When Sherlock and John first go over to Henry’s house and John looks impressed that Henry is rich, Sherlock is visibly annoyed by John’s reaction and almost rolls his eyes. Again, jealous. (Later, Sherlock gleefully points out to Henry that part of his house has damp, lol.)

We also get lots of evidence of John’s attraction to Sherlock. When Sherlock and John first get to Dartmoor and get out of the car together, John totally checks Sherlock out as he’s adjusting his coat. I mean, look at John staring at him. Sherlock even notices John watching him and says “It’s cold” defensively. When Sherlock and John go inside the Cross Keys Inn a few moments later, it looks like they both check each other out pretty conspicuously.

There’s also a very important scene for John when John checks the two of them into the inn. @ivyblossom has a wonderful meta about this here. When John checks in, the innkeeper assumes that Sherlock and John are a couple, and this is the first time we’ve seen this happen after Battersea. John starts to correct the innkeeper, but then he changes his mind almost immediately and just breaks off. This is the first time we’ve ever seen John consciously make the decision not to correct someone who assumed that he and Sherlock are a couple, and it’s such an important development in his struggle to come to terms with his feelings for Sherlock. We never hear about John trying to date anyone else in S2 after Jeanette. It seems that after his disastrous breakup with Jeanette and his all-important confrontation with Irene at Battersea, John finally had to admit to himself that there is something important between him and Sherlock: that Sherlock is the single most important person in his life, that his relationship with Sherlock is the one long-term relationship that he’s truly committed to and that he will always choose to prioritize, and that dating other people isn’t compatible with what he has with Sherlock. John is still nervous about saying something to Sherlock, especially after Irene, but it seems that he’s getting closer to being ready to open up to Sherlock about how he feels.

Just a few scenes later, we have John’s famous “Oh, please, can we not do this, this time? You being all mysterious with your cheekbones and turning your coat collar up so you look cool.” John is looking, and he pretty much openly admits to Sherlock in this scene that he finds him attractive. Just look at the frustration and longing in John’s expression, which he’s not even trying to hide from Sherlock. Like, they make eye contact at the start of this gif!

(gif from here)

Sherlock seems a bit taken aback and silently pleased after John compliments his appearance—he pauses and looks a bit startled before replying with a surprised “I don’t do that.”

Right after this exchange, there’s a moment in the car where Sherlock and John spontaneously lock eyes and then quickly turn away again, as if they’re both embarrassed that they were caught looking at each other.

(gif from here)

@bbcjohnlock has a great little write-up about this scene. As they explain, John is really coming into his feelings for Sherlock in S2, and the tension between the two of them in this scene is just so palpable. It seems to me that John is barely trying to hide his feelings from Sherlock anymore, almost as if he’s hoping against hope that Sherlock might make a move. But then there’s the sadness and worry on his face after he and Sherlock turn away from each other, as if John is also convinced that Sherlock will never fall in love with him in return.

So we have all this great chemistry and simmering tension between Sherlock and John in THOB. But we also have their fight in front of the fireplace at the Cross Keys Inn after Sherlock, John, and Henry go out to the moor for the first time, and then the aftermath of that fight the next morning. These two scenes are significant because of what they reveal about what Sherlock and John each want and expect from each other at this point in their relationship. And as per usual for these two, these scenes are rife with miscommunication and misunderstandings that lead to Sherlock and John both getting hurt.

In the scene in front of the fireplace, Sherlock tells John that he saw the hound and then basically has an emotional meltdown over it. Sherlock probably has been “pretty wired lately,” as John says, because after the Irene disaster, he’s scared as shit about Moriarty and whatever he has planned next. In this scene, Sherlock thought it would finally be okay for him to let down a bit more of his façade around John, and to show him that he gets scared and anxious in ways that he can’t control, just like everyone else does. But instead of comforting Sherlock and telling him that his emotions make sense, John attempts to rationalize the situation in a way that dismisses Sherlock’s feelings. The conversation finally ends when Sherlock frustratedly spits out “I don’t have friends” and John replies with a detached “No. Wonder why” before getting up and leaving Sherlock sitting by the fire alone. @asherlockstudy has a great meta that breaks down this scene.

In this scene, Sherlock tries to open up to John by showing him more of his emotional side: and not just his emotional side, but specifically the part of him that can feel scared and vulnerable. But John feels that he doesn’t know how to handle this side of Sherlock, so he tries to get out of dealing with it by dismissing what Sherlock says. This really hurts Sherlock’s feelings.

Most of the time, John is able to see through Sherlock’s tough-guy mask and mysterious-detective persona to see him as he truly is: a flawed and sensitive human being who can often be impatient and abrasive on the outside, but who truly cares about other people and who follows his own moral compass and sense of justice. John loves Sherlock for all of this, and in all of these respects, Sherlock and John are very similar and well-suited to one another. John chose to become a doctor, so he clearly cares about helping other people. We learned in ASIP that John and Sherlock share a similar moral compass, and John’s total dedication to their shared cases since then has borne that out. John is also flawed and sensitive, but he’s rather rude on the outside and doesn’t have a lot of friends because he, ah, tends “to rub people the wrong way.” It makes perfect sense that Sherlock gets the two of them confused during the stag night forehead-detectives game in TSOT!

But even though John understands all of this about Sherlock, in the scene in front of the fireplace he becomes a bit overwhelmed by the intensity of Sherlock’s emotional side, and he fails to see Sherlock the way that Sherlock needs him to in that moment. John doesn’t give Sherlock the acceptance that he’s craving, and he doesn’t affirm for Sherlock that it’s okay for him to show him his vulnerable side. As asherlockstudy points out, John’s parting barb of “No. Wonder why” must have really hurt Sherlock. With that statement, John implies that even he still believes that Sherlock is so cold and callous that he doesn’t deserve to have real friends. Yikes.

John runs out of there, and he’s so upset that he doesn’t even close the door to the inn behind himself. Then he gets distracted by the car lights in the distance and goes off to investigate. Just a few minutes later, though, Sherlock texts John to suggest that he interview Henry’s therapist, Louise Mortimer. With that text, Sherlock tries to draw John back to him by pulling him back into the case—it’s the same strategy that Sherlock has been using ever since TBB whenever John starts to pull away from him.

This is so sad, because it shows that Sherlock worries that John only sticks around because he loves the casework and is impressed by Sherlock as a detective, not Sherlock as a person. After Battersea, Sherlock now suspects and hopes that John may be in love with him, but he seems to fear that John in just in love with his disguise, not with who he really is as a person. He doesn’t fully understand that John truly understands and loves him for who he is. Sherlock even sends John a picture of Louise Mortimer, implying that he thinks John will want to interview her because he’ll think she’s pretty. With that text, Sherlock is basically saying to John, “You don’t have to love me. I just want you to stay.” (*screams internally while writing this*)

This is also the first time we see Sherlock sign off on a text to John with just “S” instead of “SH.” That’s yet another little detail in this episode that’s intended to show that Sherlock and John’s relationship has grown much closer by this point in the show, even if they’re still having huge misunderstandings. God, kill me now.

John goes to interview Louise Mortimer and flirts with her pretty determinedly, apparently very eager to take his mind off Sherlock. But that quickly goes south. As LSIT wrote at one point, Dr. Frankland shows up and “the whole world floods the restaurant with a chorus of, ‘Hey, aren’t you Sherlock Holmes’s pathetically devoted live-in fucktoy?’ and John accepts he is not yet clear for dating.” And interestingly, John is sort of resigned about it. He’s obviously disappointed when Louise assumes that he’s gay and stalks off unhappily, but he doesn’t really try to make excuses for himself, as he once did with Jeanette. John seems to have accepted that he’s thoroughly in love with Sherlock and that he can’t hide it anymore.

Before Frankland interrupts, though, even while John is still trying to chat up Louise, John mentions Sherlock to her and calls Sherlock his friend. So even though Sherlock and John just had this big fight where they both agreed that Sherlock doesn’t have friends, of course John still thinks of Sherlock as his friend. He doesn’t hesitate to describe him as such to someone else not even, like, an hour later. So John got upset at Sherlock in front of the fireplace, sure, but he brushed it off very quickly.

Let’s say it again. Whenever John is feeling especially hopeless and conflicted about being in love with Sherlock, he tries to protect himself by repeating to himself that Sherlock is a cold, uncaring machine who will never love him back. But John doesn’t truly believe this and it’s just a coping mechanism. A terrible coping mechanism, but, hey, John is a flawed person. When Sherlock tried to open up to John about his emotions, John pushed him away and tried to explain things rationally because John still isn’t ready to deal with the possibility that Sherlock might actually love him.

When Sherlock and John see each other in the graveyard the next morning, Sherlock seems nervous and tense. He was deeply hurt by what happened the night before, but he’s desperate to get John back. His face is unguarded and pained when he calls after John, “I don’t have friends. I’ve just got one.”

asherlockstudy makes some very good points about this scene in her meta. Although we see Sherlock looking nervous and pained as he apologizes to John, Sherlock deliberately puts on his mysterious-detective persona for John in an effort to win him back. He approaches John in his swirly, billowing coat and tries to take back what he said the night before by insisting that he didn’t feel fear on the moor, he just doubted his senses and intelligence. And of course, Sherlock insists to John, he shouldn’t have doubted those at all. Those are infallible, super impressive, and totally worth staying for! He did see a hound, so now they just need to figure out how.

John acts upset with Sherlock at first, but he actually forgives Sherlock incredibly quickly and easily. By the time Sherlock and John notice Greg a few minutes later, John has already slipped right back into helping Sherlock with the case. And when Sherlock gives him drugged-fake-apology-coffee, John even tells Sherlock that he doesn’t need to apologize more than once.

Still, John’s conversation with Greg as they walk out of the inn together demonstrates that he’s still not in the right headspace and he’s still trying to tell himself that Sherlock doesn’t feel emotions in the same way that most people do. As John and Greg walk outside, Greg says that Sherlock “likes having all the same faces back together,” and John replies with an off-hand comment about Sherlock having Asperger’s syndrome. With that comment, John seems to be trying to rationalize Sherlock’s behavior. He implies that Sherlock is incapable of relating to other people in a “typical” way, that this is something about Sherlock that isn’t about to change, and that this is why Sherlock likes having him and Greg around, not because he genuinely thinks of them as his friends. (To be clear, I think John uses the term “Asperger’s” pretty flippantly and insensitively here. I’m trying to analyze what John seems to mean when he does this, and this doesn’t reflect my own beliefs about what it does or doesn’t mean to have Asperger’s.)

Unfortunately, Sherlock comes out of the door behind them right at that moment. He obviously hears John’s comment, because he gives John a hurt and bewildered look for a split second and then his eyes linger on John uncomfortably for a moment as he walks up to him and Greg. Sherlock’s reaction shows that he doesn’t agree with John’s assessment. Sherlock really does want to be able to open up to John more, but John keeps pushing him away because of his own conflicted feelings.

After Sherlock runs his experiment on John in the big lab at Baskerville and John thinks he heard and saw the hound, Sherlock, John, and Dr. Stapleton all hang out in one of the smaller labs so that Sherlock can analyze the sugar. In this scene, John has taken off his green field jacket, and we see that he’s been wearing his “I’m in love with Sherlock and feel hopeless about it” cardigan underneath it all day.

(screencap from here)

Apparently John put that on in the morning after he and Sherlock had their big fight, and we just didn’t see it until now because he was wearing the jacket over it. And as @thegildedbee recently pointed out to me (she stepped in for some extra beta-reading!), this means that John packed it to bring to Dartmoor. He thought he would need it.

Man, the writers and the costume department really knew what they were doing with this cardigan. And my hat is off to LSIT for pointing it out in her analysis of the hiker case in ASIB so that I knew to look for it in other episodes.

Still, THOB does give us one final piece of evidence that John truly does see Sherlock for the deeply caring and empathetic person that he is. When Sherlock, John, Greg, and Henry are out on the moor and encounter the dog again after Sherlock has solved the mystery, Sherlock is determined to explain to Henry what happened to him and his father, to make sure that Henry understands. Great gifs and meta about this here. Sherlock has already solved the mystery, but he cares about Henry as a person and wants to make sure that Henry understands the truth and knows that he doesn’t need to be frightened of the dog. John sees this and understands it. Later, he writes on his blog that this was “one of the most human things I think I’ve ever seen [Sherlock] do.” He also notes that Sherlock “didn’t need to, he’d solved the case but it was as if he knew that the truly important thing was showing Henry what was real and what wasn’t.”

But then, of course, John goes on to speculate that “maybe his experiences with Irene Adler, had humanised him?” Because, you know, can’t let things get too good for these two. 

Ugh, GOD, it must have hurt Sherlock so much to read that.

Before they leave Dartmoor, John realizes that Sherlock attempted to drug him and locked him in the lab to experiment on him. But John is such a little danger freak (affectionate) that he’s not even that mad about it—he seems much more interested in needling Sherlock for having been wrong about the sugar than in actually chewing him out for locking him in the lab. They really are perfect for each other, in such a messed-up (still affectionate) way.

During that conversation over breakfast, Sherlock decides that if he’s going to continue trying to keep John romantically distant in the hopes of protecting him from Moriarty, then he might as well play into John’s weird assumption that he doesn’t understand emotions. So while John is eating breakfast and Sherlock is sipping his coffee, Sherlock pretends to not understand why the innkeepers were reluctant to put down their dog. (LSIT pointed this out here.) Of course, HLV later rubs in our faces that Sherlock absolutely understands why someone wouldn’t want to put down their dog.

Related to this, I want to double back to the two scenes that take place on the moor, since they both give us more evidence that Sherlock is really freaked out about Moriarty.

It’s now been about two and a half months since Sherlock learned that Irene was working for Moriarty, and thus that Moriarty used her to mess up his relationship with John. At this point, Sherlock is probably getting pretty anxious about the fact that they haven’t heard anything new from Moriarty since then—that’s probably part of why he was crawling out of his skin at the start of the episode. Sherlock is terrified for John’s safety and doesn’t know what Moriarty is going to do next.

When Sherlock, John, and Henry go out onto the moor together for the first time, Sherlock and Henry get separated from John and the two of them start talking. Sherlock tries to ask Henry more about his father’s friendship with Dr. Frankland.

Sherlock: But he works at Baskerville. Didn’t your dad have a problem with that? Henry: Well, mates are mates, aren’t they? I mean, look at you and John. Sherlock: What about us? Henry: Well, I mean, he’s a pretty straightforward bloke, and you…. They agreed never to talk about work, Uncle Bob and my dad.

Sherlock says “What about us?” quickly and rather aggressively, as if he’s very anxious, and he continues to look uncomfortable as Henry keeps speaking. I think there are two ways to read this, and both make sense. Sherlock might react this way simply because he’s offended by the idea that he and John are dissimilar and shouldn’t get along. But Sherlock might also react this way because he’s nervous about how other people perceive his and John’s relationship. He’s nervous that Henry might have seen too much, and that it’s obvious to everyone who sees them together that there’s something deeper between him and John. Sherlock doesn’t want that, because he fears that it will put John in even more danger from Moriarty.

Towards the end of the episode, in the scene where Sherlock, John, Greg, and Henry go to the hollow and find Dr. Frankland and the dog, there’s an extended moment when Sherlock thinks that he sees Moriarty’s face behind Frankland’s mask. And when he sees that, Sherlock totally loses his shit. When primed by the drug in the fog to see something terrifying, Sherlock sees Moriarty, because Moriarty is what he’s most afraid of.

That wraps up my main analysis of THOB! But before moving on, I want to pause to talk about some incredibly clever subtext embedded into the central mystery in this episode.

@heimishtheidealhusband explains this in a totally wild meta called Ghost Stories Are Gay Stories, which they wrote in preparation for the airing of TAB. You should definitely go read the whole thing, but I’ll try to recap some of the most important parts of it as it relates to THOB.

In Victorian gothic literature, authors sometimes make use of a literary device called “homospectrality,” which is where queerness is represented through monsters and ghosts. Mark Gatiss is a huge fan of this device, and in THOB he does something really, really cool by inverting it.

In THOB, Sherlock decides to take Henry’s case only after Henry uses the “archaic” (as Sherlock calls it) word “hound” to describe the monstrous dog that he believes killed his father. Throughout the rest of the episode, Sherlock’s job in solving the central mystery is to prove to everyone else that the dog that has been roaming the moor is just an ordinary dog: something that is perfectly natural and nothing to be frightened of. When Sherlock solves the case, he discovers that Henry, John, and even he himself had all been conditioned by an external and artificial agent—the drug that Frankland put into the fog—to see something monstrous and terrifying when they looked at the dog. As Sherlock explains to Henry on the moor:

Sherlock: Yeah, but there was a dog, Henry, leaving footprints, scaring witnesses, but it was nothing more than an ordinary dog. We both saw it—saw it as our drugged minds wanted us to see it. Fear and stimulus, that’s how it works. But there never was any monster.

Just as Victorian gothic literature would often use ghosts and monsters to represent homosexuality, in THOB the dog is a metaphor for homosexuality. Sherlock, as the protagonist in our love story and as a character who is fully comfortable with his own homosexuality, has to prove to all the other characters that homosexuality is nothing to be frightened of. The dog is just an ordinary dog, something entirely natural and unsurprising. It’s not a monster, but many people have been conditioned by something artificial and unnatural to believe that the dog is terrifying and dangerous. The drug is a metaphor for heteronormativity! It’s only because of heteronormativity, something artificial and pernicious, that the dog appears terrifying. This!! Is!! So!! Good!!

And it gets even better, because of how well all of this fits for our characters. At first, Sherlock thinks that Henry’s story about a monstrous dog roaming the moor and killing his father is absolutely ridiculous. He knows that there’s something else going on here, since there can’t be a monster. But once he goes out on the moor for the first time with Henry, Sherlock has a moment of total panic and then suffers an emotional breakdown back at the Cross Keys because he believes that he’s seen the monster. Sherlock later tells John that he’s always been able to trust his own senses, and he was upset because he experienced doubt. So, Sherlock, who has always been perfectly comfortable with his own homosexuality, experiences a terrifying moment of doubt, and his immediate reaction is to be shocked that he of all people could have seen the hound. In the lab, though, John sincerely believes that the monster dog exists. The general idea here is that Sherlock is someone who has always been comfortable with his own sexuality and who doesn’t see himself as susceptible to homophobia, but John may be slightly more susceptible. Through his relationship with Sherlock, however, John will overcome whatever fears he may have.

We could also read this another way. Sherlock’s moment of doubt in THOB could be a nod to the way that Sherlock fears the consequences of his love for John and doesn’t know what to do about it. Even though Sherlock is very comfortable with same-sex desire, he’s terrified that his love for John will put John in danger. If this is also what’s going on in the subtext, then we can read John’s fear in the lab similarly—John is frightened of the consequences of his love for Sherlock, and he’s not yet ready to fully embrace that love. In other words, I think the broader metaphor of the fear-triggering gas in THOB is about heteronormativity and homophobia, but perhaps Sherlock’s and John’s moments of fear are also meant to indicate that they’re scared of or nervous about their love for each other for other reasons, too.

Either way, Sherlock and John both recover from their temporary fear of the dog in THOB. Sherlock solves the mystery and realizes that the gas was the agent that was terrifying everyone, and John confidently shoots the dog in the hollow. This can be read as foreshadowing: as the show progresses, Sherlock and John will realize that their love for each other is not something that they need to be frightened of and will pursue a romantic relationship together. After all, THOB ends on a light note, with order and normality restored to the town after Sherlock and John have solved the mystery and eliminated the threat from Frankland and the fear gas. As heimishtheidealhusband writes, “here, ‘normal’ is a world where queerness is just part of the fabric of everyday life, and nothing to be afraid of.” Victorian gothic stories do not have happy endings for their queer-coded characters, but THOB does, which hints at the broader intentions of the show.

This is just. So clever. The inversion of the homospectrality metaphor is such a brilliant way to adapt the original ACD story in a modern context while also giving us a beautiful metaphor that explains where Sherlock and John each are in their relationships to same-sex desire at this point in the show.

So, to close: in THOB, we’ve seen that Sherlock and John are both in love, but they’re both dancing around this for their own reasons. Sherlock is comfortable with his own homosexuality, but he’s trying to keep his romantic distance from John because he’s worried about Moriarty. John has faced the fact that he’s in love with Sherlock and has accepted that this is something that isn’t about to change, but he’s also still struggling with his fear that Sherlock doesn’t love him, and he isn’t prepared for Sherlock to open up to him emotionally. As a result, John tries to convince himself that Sherlock doesn’t understand emotions and will never love him back, and he should just accept this about Sherlock so they can stay friends. But John isn’t very good at fooling himself, and deep down he really does know that Sherlock understands emotions and feels them deeply.

Throughout all of this, Sherlock and John both show that they can be spectacularly bad at discerning what the other person needs and wants from them, and their misunderstandings lead them to hurt each other. This certainly won’t be the last time that happens, and in future episodes it only gets more serious and more devastating.