Moffat Appreciation Week: Day 2: Favourite thing about the Sherlock Special
‘The Abominable Bride’ comes with many fantastic scenes, but if I had to choose my most favourite Sherlock moment, it would be the one up there and everything that follows.
Sherlock’s mind palace is a peculiar place between dream, fiction and reality, where Sherlock doesn’t need to ask ‘Afghanistan or Iraq?’, he just knows (and no, that wasn’t the only place an army doctor could have got shot at those days; have a list.). He doesn’t need to play nice during their first meeting, because no matter the rules of whatever universe he happens to be in, he and that guy will end up sharing a flat, a tea pot, a life.
Of course, like in every dream (and nightmare) the longer they go on, the less they do what one wants them to, which is why the opening scene is pretty much where Sherlock’s perfect world ends:
Mycroft is still the clever one (who has found a goldfish - no Holmes without a Watson), Watson gets to finish most of his sentences, a bored Mary goes off and solves Sherlock’s case, while he more or less manages to murder the husband of his latest client, and a very dead Moriarty shows up for tea to discuss an old case and finish things off at the Reichenbach Falls. Like they always do.
Moriarty: This is how we end, you and I. Always here, always together.
In the end, this is ‘Sherlock Holmes’, their fate is already written, there to read in the Strand: there can be nothing new under the sun.
Still, we are in Sherlock’s mind which is not there to lift the bride’s veil. It’s there to tell a story, to prove Moriarty died for real.
When both of them are down and there is nothing left but perform the truly impossible miracle of the Falls, the Mind Palace regains control and shows how back in 1891 Sherlock Holmes really survived. Why every Sherlock Holmes survives all of Moriarty’s final problems.
He doesn’t need to be better, stronger, or more clever; for once being Sherlock Holmes is enough, because Sherlock Holmes is followed into battle by John Watson, who’d never leave his side, who would be there in his darkest hour(s) to save him, may it be from Moriarty, the hound, his boredom, or himself.
John: It was my turn.
Sherlock knows friends protect people, which is why Sherlock Holmes’ Boswell keeps a few details to himself and doesn’t bother to mention that occasionally it is he who saves the hero in his “idiotic stories” on his blog, The Strand and all the other places a future world will read their fantastic adventures to come.
And yet, Sherlock jumps, as that’s what Sherlock Holmes’ do. He knows he’ll survive, and that soon they’ll meet at 221b’s fireplace, because John Watson will come up with something (an explanation - or even better - a story) to save him.
If the stories of MP!John Watson, which ended up in our universe under the pseudonym of an Arthur Conan Doyle, are the proof of John’s boundless admiration for Sherlock Holmes (and they are), then The Abominable Bride is where Sherlock Holmes takes up the pen# in an attempt to set the biggest lie in fiction right.
At the end of the day, Sherlock Holmes has no idea how he survived the fall, and all the other falls thereafter, for it takes John Watson to write the story and save a life.
*hence John’s point of view
#canonically that would be His Last Vow.