Chapter 11 – The Importance of Being Earnest [TFP 1/3]
This episode is huge. When I first watched it, I hated it. I still have mixed feelings towards it, but what I do know is that there is a huge amount to unpack in it, and I don’t think there’s a way to do this other than chronologically without missing a bit. So – here we go. This is broken down into readable chunks so that it’s not hellish to read, hence the chapters!
We open with the little girl on the aeroplane – this is a metaphor I’ve gone into in reasonable detail in chapter 2 X, so please refer back if you need to, but TLDR: planes/height symbolise dying, the plane scenario is going round and round in the Eurus/trauma part of Sherlock’s brain that is utterly repressed, he finally breaks through to her and then finally to the childhood heart of his trauma and recognises that it is all in his head. That’s the arc of the aeroplane scenario across the episode – so when we open TFP, we open in full panic mode. This is Sherlock in the middle of his childhood panic, in the Eurus part of his brain that represents trauma and convinced this could kill him – we don’t know yet that it can’t. The only person we can talk to is Jim on the phone, welcoming the girl to the final problem. I’ve talked about MP!Jim representing John being in mortal danger, and here we are at last. Sherlock mentally ended the last episode having recognised that John is in danger – the problem is how to break through the trauma to wake himself up. Jim’s voice is important here, because it’s the link back to John – this episode takes place so deep inside Sherlock’s psyche that we run the risk of forgetting the central problem, that John is in danger, and so the Moriarty link is crucial.
Then we have our opening credits, which always fill me with a Pavlovian excitement, even when it’s for an episode I have such mixed emotions about. Then, we get on to the strange scenario that Sherlock and John set up to prove that Mycroft has been lying about Eurus. In metaphorical terms, this is nice; the first third of the episode is about Sherlock finally integrating his brain (MP!Mycroft) and his heart (MP!John), and after having finally reconnected with his heart at the end of TLD it makes sense for the heart to be finally making demands of the brain, forcing it to compromise for the first time. However, before we look at that…
This scene is another rehearsal. Rehearsals are drawn to our attention in TSoT, but we see them elsewhere – TAB, for example, is a rehearsal for the hardcore EMPing of s4. These rehearsals are performances in miniature, not insignificant in themselves but most important in the guide they provide for the real thing. TFP is a messy and complicated episode, and this rehearsal is foreshadowing the game that’s going to follow.
The first thing that this tells us about Eurus’s game is that it’s not real. This isn’t just that Sherlock can talk her down from her invented aeroplane, or that he can break out of the fake cellar in the Musgrave grounds. What we’re being told here is that the game is actually impossible; it can’t be happening. Look at the blood coming out of the portraits’ eyes that is never explained, for example, or the doors slamming at just the right moments like a horror film. It’s not possible, as the female voice in the scenario literally says, pointing out that nothing is impossible. This isn’t true. This, in fact, goes against the one thing everybody knows about Sherlock Holmes. They draw attention to this by focusing on his crap irrelevant deductions in TLD, but they make it even more obvious here; nothing is impossible. Eliminate everything impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Eliminating TFP would be foolhardy – they’ve chosen to show it to us for a reason – but it’s certainly not the truth.
Next – the use of a child’s silhouette. Admittedly, the little girl in the aeroplane simulation turns out not to be a child, but Sherlock’s choice to use a child to scare Mycroft is odd, because Eurus is no longer a child. What’s even stranger is that Mycroft treats the child like she’s an enemy, rather than trying to help her – it’s like he imagines that the child is Eurus. In the real world, this would be completely bizarre, given that Eurus is a thirty-something year old woman. But this is not the real world. This is a world where different timelines, memories, parts of Sherlock’s brain can all mix and are all equally dangerous – hence the genuine fear of the child. It’s the same panic that the child in the plane is actually crashing, although the plane doesn’t exist, or the children in the memories seeming to ask the adults remembering to come to play with them. There’s an interplay between the agentic parts of Sherlock (Sherlock himself, brain!Mycroft, heart!John, trauma!Eurus) and everything repressed and unreal within his psyche – it’s all equally dangerous.
Now – what is it that actually happens when they play the trick on Mycroft? They’re not just coming after him – they’re infecting the house he lives in, with voices that carry on the wind, attacking his portraits, using the swords against him etc. This is important – the house that MP!Mycroft lives in can be seen as the kind of world that Sherlock’s brain wants to inhabit that is made impossible by the existence of Eurus, and the first thing that’s so striking about that world is its age. Mycroft already dresses like he’s in another era, something that I should have thought about long ago – the house backs up the idea that he’s in the wrong time period somehow. We can see his obsession with the past through the many portraits (probably of ancestors) which hang on the walls – but these are the first things that Sherlock and John attack, having them bleed from the eyes. (As mentioned before, this is fucky and remains completely unexplained.) This is an attack on the past, which is good news for us – finally moving forwards! But it’s also a specific attack on the eyes, which is interesting given how important sight is here – Sherlock needs to wake up, for which he needs Eurus to open her eyes, and more generally the theme of the show since 2010 has been that there’s something ‘hiding in plain sight’. It’s as though heart!John taking his rightful primacy in Sherlock’s psyche is hurting the eyes of the past, which have been previously surrounding and informing brain!Mycroft.
The most screaming question to come out of this section of TFP, though, is how the cliffhanger of the previous episode was resolved. So Eurus shot John with a dart, even though it was the same gun that killed his wife. Even if we accept that, how on earth do we accept that Eurus just left him there? For what – for the person who owns the house to find? What happened when he told Sherlock he had a sister? These are all really valuable questions and important moments which are notably absent from the show – we feel cheated by a cliffhanger without resolution, and rightly so. I want to hypothesise, however, that moving away from surface level, this makes sense. We can’t resolve the cliffhanger situation because it hasn’t been resolved – the cliffhanger, which tells us that John is in mortal danger in the real world, can’t be resolved until Sherlock wakes up. How, then, is John with him? The simple answer is that there are two Johns. That sounds not-so-simple, but when you break down John’s functions within the MP it’s the only way this can work.
Since TSoT, we’ve had a working understanding of Mycroft as the brain and John as the heart, existing as a dichotomy within Sherlock’s psyche, and we shouldn’t abandon that. The John that we see in TFP is heart!John, trying to work with brain!Mycroft for the first time rather than against him, even whilst brain!Mycroft acknowledges his new lack of primacy. However, this series is about Sherlock working out what’s going on with John in the real world, so there’s a kind of hypothesis!John floating around as well. This John isn’t Sherlock’s heart, because the crucial thing about hypothesis!John is that Sherlock spends most of the first two episodes in the series trying to work him out – what’s going on with him? How is he in danger? And we last see him at the end of TLD, being shot by therapist!Eurus – that’s what’s going on with him. (Explained in detail in chapter 7 X). So here, heart!John’s paltry excuses for what happened should feel paltry – they’re just barely covering the hole in surface plot. In EMP terms, it leaves that cliffhanger open – it’s still going, basically. We still don’t know whether John lives or dies, because from that point onwards we only see heart!John. It seems odd on the surface that John is the one who puts forward the idea of a simulation for Mycroft, but within the MP this makes perfect sense – because John and Mycroft are the two entities who primarily make up Sherlock, heart!John has the separation that Sherlock doesn’t to be able to let brain!Mycroft recognise what he’s been hiding from Sherlock.
There are three elements of this scene which bother me in minor ways, and thus far I haven’t managed to get an answer to – if anybody has any thoughts on these bits in particular, I would love to know. First is that Sherlock wears a deerstalker in this scene, which is normally a symbol of enforced heterosexuality. It’s a strange place for this to come up – it doesn’t thematically tie to anything that’s going on in the scene. The second is the film that Mycroft is watching – it’s not a real film, but a random scene in film noir style that they shot just for TFP. Again, I’m certain this must have significance, otherwise they would have just put on Double Indemnity as a nod to Wilder. The age of the film and of the cinema vibe points to the era of Rathbone adaptations, suggesting someone stuck in the past again, but I’m not sure that’s enough motivation to write an entirely new film scene. The final question is why Mycroft seems to have something tied around one elbow but not the other. This shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, but there we go. Food for thought, if anyone wants to attempt those?
In the meantime, let’s turn to look at the next scene – Mycroft in Baker Street. This is one of those scenes that people have picked up on as fucky – there is no way all three of them could have escaped from Baker Street completely unscathed, for starters, let alone the skull and headphones remain completely intact at the end. As well as this, John army-doctor Watson not recognising what a grenade is? And Sherlock can’t either? Bull shit. So we need to read this scene metaphorically.
I’m firmly of the belief that the first third of the episode, culminating in this scene, is about Sherlock finally integrating his heart and mind, and brain!Mycroft finally coming to Baker Street to engage with them in truthful terms feels like a mark of that. Mycroft, the brain, was aware of Sherlock’s trauma and repressed it. In finally telling the truth, he can come together with the heart and try to beat it. This all makes sense – and tonally, it feels right for Mycroft to be there. One of the odd things about TFP is that although Sherlock has always been about our two leads, in TFP they suddenly feel like a golden trio – and it works. I can’t imagine those three working in any situation outside the bizarreness of EMP – imagine the horror of Mycroft coming on a case with them – so again, the tonal shift makes me feel like there’s a subconscious awareness of a different dynamic between brain!Mycroft, heart!John and Sherlock than we might otherwise have.
Of course, it’s the final acknowledgement of the trauma that blows up Baker Street, often seen as a safe haven (and phrased as such by John in the previous scene) and, in true dream logic, seems to create the east wind that blows our boys all the way to Sherrinford. No in-between injuries (which there would definitely be), no questions about Mycroft’s disguise, or where he came from or where Sherlock went, how they got the boat, anything. It’s not enough for Sherlock to want to go and rescue Eurus – the trauma (in the form of the patience grenade) quite literally needs to be the catalyst. This is the place that Sherlock never wants to go, and he’s forced into it.
Of course, the most strikingly queer moment in this scene is the Oscar Wilde conversation, a set up for a joke (or not) about Mycroft dressing up as Lady Bracknell that gets repeated throughout the episode. I pride myself on knowing a little bit about Oscar Wilde, and so we’re going to take a detour – it’s important, I promise.
The Importance of Being Earnest is probably the most successful play by Oscar Wilde. It was first performed in 1895, the same year as TAB, the same year as the poem It is always 1895 which is so important in this show, the same year that Oscar Wilde himself went on trial for gross indecency. The play is about a man called Jack who has two lives, one in the town where he’s called Ernest (and can do immoral things with his even more immoral male best friend and go after the woman he loves) and in the countryside, where he lives a respectable life under the name of Jack. Unsurprisingly, this play has been read very queerly over the years, particularly with regard to the double-life ideas and the dandyish immorality of Jack’s “best friend”, Algy. The quote used in the show is ‘truth is rarely pure and never simple’ – here’s the full quote.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
This line is given by Algy, just when Jack has explained to him the double life situation and describes it as ‘pure and simple’. Two bros discussing their double lives in 1895 written by the most famous gay in history. I don’t know, I’m just extrapolating from the data…
So, an interesting choice of line given that TFP is about Sherlock having two lives – Sherlock Holmes, who has previously always lived within established canon, and Sherrinford Holmes, the metafictional outsider who Sherlock is trying to block out. Now, how do these lines feature in the narrative of TFP?
The most shocking thing, on a surface level, is that the Holmes brothers wouldn’t recognise this line. Wilde is possibly the most quotable man in history, and this is one of his famous ones – it’s even up in Dublin Aeroport (my local aeroport, so perhaps I’m biased here – but rest assured I knew the line the second they said it, and I know plenty of other viewers knew it long before the Holmeses did). Mycroft had even been in the play. The most intelligent man in England? It doesn’t make sense. So, once again, down we go to the metaphorical level.
[best picture I could find of the Oscar Wilde quote in Dublin Aeroport – sorry!]
Heart!John being the only person who recognises Oscar Wilde has an obvious connotation – Wilde represents queer love, but he also represents through TAB the queer love that has always been there. The green carnations in TAB, Heimish the Ideal Husband? That’s all Oscar Wilde, but it’s all in the background, and heart!John only voices it at what he thinks is the final moment – and I do believe that in this moment, the trinity of Sherlock here really do believe they are going to be enveloped by the trauma. Mortal danger leads to that confession, if only in oblique terms – an oblique Garridebs moment, then.
Just as interesting is that Mycroft played Lady Bracknell in school. Lady Bracknell is the old aunt who is the obstacle to love in the play, objecting that Jack’s not good enough for Gwendolen and Cecily’s not good enough for Algy. Brain!Mycroft, who has been dominating heart!John for a long time in the MP, has indeed been an obstacle to love. Mentioning this once might have been a throwaway gag – it’s mentioned at least three times, which points to it being a pretty significant point of comparison. The three times that it is mentioned, two are Sherlock complimenting Mycroft on his Lady Bracknell at the point. Both times Sherlock compliments Mycroft on his Lady Bracknell have been standout moments for me because they’ve been notably peaceful – these two brothers are always bickering and even fighting, and although I’ve made the claim that this is the moment and the episode where Sherlock’s brain stops giving Sherlock a hard time and starts being kind to him, the reverse has to be true as well, right? Sherlock accepts that his brain has held him back before, and the key thing is that he no longer resents brain!Mycroft - because this episode is about being kind to himself and coming to terms with himself. Accepting that Mycroft has been a good Lady Bracknell means accepting that Mycroft had his reasons for behaving like this – socio-cultural, presumably, like Lady Bracknell’s own, right? - and that like Jack in Ernest, he doesn’t resent her/him for it, but neither do those restrictions continue. It’s a lovely metaphorical way to reintegrate Sherlock’s brain comfortably into his psyche whilst acknowledging that the big problem between them has been a queer one – Oscar Wilde, 1895.
It’s also part of a running motif since the start of the EMP, which is declarations of love at the point of death – the dialogue between Sherlock and Mycroft is of course meaningful and important, but heart!John saying ‘Oscar Wilde’ at the point of death is one of the clearest of these moments, and definitely the queerest. I teach English to kids, and this is something that we call a ‘holistic motif’, where you pick a consistent motif and have it run through a story, and eventually the audience starts thinking – I’ve seen this before, it must be important. The classic one in Sherlock is ‘hiding in plain sight’, which has an important purpose for tjlc, but this one starts to dominate in EMP (although it does exist in The Empty Hearse as well). It’s as though this idea is going round and round in Sherlock’s head, in various forms, until his psyche can finally process it (once he’s dealt with his trauma).
The next bit of analysis will take us to Sherrinford, so this feels like a good place to stop this chapter. The next chapter will go through the Sherrinford section of TFP, as this feels like a reasonable way to segment the episode. See you then!
