The meaning of the ‘Three Garridebs’ scene (‘Sherlock’)
So, @shiplocks-of-love asked me sometime before Christmas to write something about the ‘Three Garridebs’ scene in TFP, and I’ve been typing ever since…basically.:) See the finished result of this blood-sweat-and-tears exercise below.
Ever since the ‘Three Garridebs’ scene in TFP aired, I’ve been puzzling over its meaning.
To be sure, cleverer people than I worked out pretty quickly after the episode had aired that the scene is a literal ‘cliffhanger’ and that it also literally dangles the ‘Garrideb’ scenario (from Doyle’s canon story 3GAR) in front of our eyes. Someone even worked out that there’s a ‘Chekhov’s gun’ (x) element in it.
All of these are brilliant discoveries.
But what I haven’t really seen that often yet is a comprehensive reading of the victim and the three dangling men themselves – a comprehensive interpretation of the case Eurus presents Sherlock with, I mean.
In other words…What does the whole case (the victim Evans, the three dangling men, their description, their outward appearance, etc.) mean?
Who represents who in this scenario?
Why were the descriptions of these three men so very specific down to the tiniest details (the fake tan, for example)?
And why was the scene flipped (when compared to ACD’s canon story 3GAR), with Evans as the victim and Garrideb as the killer?
What could this whole case possibly mean?
(More about this under the cut…)
I was thinking back to your post @sagestreet and one of the first things that came to my mind when I read it: my husband is three people. John brought this case to Sherlock’s attention while they were planning his marriage, and he dismissed the thing as annoyed as he does with easy deductions, at the limits of the involuntary. Too bad that the result of the deduction was that they were twins and Sherlock harassed us by saying that are NEVER twins. Then? But if you fall in love with a real person, this person will have (at least) three different personalities. Let’s say that Sherlock categorizes people by dividing them into three different aspects (let’s say that he divides into three the things to analyze them, let’s say he’s neither the first nor the last to do it), John, a real pesron has three aspects, and that’s how been analyzed in the three Garridebs moment. But if you’re talking about a façade, how many aspects will you ever have? A facade is a flat thing that sticks on it. Always identical to itself because it is not authentic. Three identical twins, against three different brothers.
Interesting addition, @raggedyblue ! Yes, the Garridebs were never presented as identical triplets, were they? All the contrary, Sherlock did his best to tease out the differences between them, because they represent a real person. But by doing it, he also detected what was not real, thus could be discarded, like the artificial sun tan. ;)
Ooh, yes, absolutely agree with @possiblyimbiassed: This is an interesting addition, @raggedyblue.
I never could make much sense of the “My husband is three people” statement in s3.
But, as always with BBC Sherlock, most explanations are actually not as complicated as we tend to think. Mofftiss straight up told us that they’ve been splitting Sherlock into three (major) mirrors all along.
John says, “My husband…” (=John’s husband is Sherlock, obviously).
And then Mofftiss pretty much told us to look out for a split into three mirrors:
And as we all know, throughout the show, Sherlock is divided into:
Sherlock (Sherlock’s core/essence), Mycroft (Sherlock’s brain) and John (Sherlock’s heart). That makes three.
And in the ‘Three Garridebs’ scene in TFP, Sherlock does the same to John: He divides him into Alex (John’s core/essence), Nathan (John’s ‘shortsighted’ brain) and Howard (John’s heart/emotional problems), and tries to determine which of the three mirrors metaphorically ‘murdered’ him (Evans=Sherlock).
I always thought the whole “My husband is three people” thing would turn out to be something insanely complex and complicated when really…IT ISN’T.:)
It’s the overarching mirroring structure that we’ve all picked up on all along. Thank you for clarifying that for me once and for all, @raggedyblue.
(In my defence, Sherlock thought it would be something outlandish and complicated, too: Identical triplets. When in reality…Well, it’s kinda banal. We’re all three people, in some sense. And those three people are, as @possiblyimbiassed has pointed out above, never identical. They are pretty different inner personalities that we have and sometimes these three personalities have different objectives that contradict one another. But pretty much any psychiatrist could tell us that.:))
yes! Sherlock always wants it to be complicated, even when it isn't.