Isaac, Shezza, Billy ….. a sign of three?
Sherlock BBC, His Last Vow
Good catch, @ebaeschnbliah. Another instance of ‘My husband is three people’, aka splitting characters into three mirrors.
What I’m wondering about, though, is how we can break this scene down into its different functional components: Moffat usually doesn’t just throw around several mirrors for one character without giving each mirror a very specific, very narrow function (like in the hiker-and-the-backfiring-car scene in ASiB where the two John!mirrors aren’t just there for funsies, but essentially represent a split of John’s character into a body!mirror and a heart!mirror, as @loudest-subtext-in-tv pointed out.)
Moffat always does that: Several mirrors for one person mean that each mirror has a very narrowly defined function.
And then, these, in turn, tie in seamlessly with the larger narrative, ie, when Moffat splits characters into several mirrors, this always has a deeper meaning for what the episode as a whole is all about, and each of these mirror!functions always comes together into one clear subtextual meaning.
I know this has to be the case here, too. But so far, I’m really struggling to see it.
The first few minutes of HLV alone introduce several Sherlock!mirrors right off the bat, so they should each have a different function (Kate Whitney is a Sherlock!mirror, Isaac is one, Billy Wiggins is one too…and that’s not even counting John, who’s an obvious Sherlock!mirror at the start of the episode and possibly Mary, who usually is a Sherlock!mirror, too). Somehow these first couple of minutes mean something else than what we can uncover with just a textual reading.
I know it will probably all come together seamlessly, with each mirror having a function and all of them together telling us something about what’s going on subtextually. But I just can’t seem to be able to put my finger on it.
I will have to think about this some more. Hm…
Agree, @sagestreet This is a very important scene and I think all the characters represent parts of Sherlock himself. As mentioned on another thread of this post, it’s also the original canon story ‘The man with the twisted lip’ which seems to be very interesting. Some more musings about this scene:
Just like in TWIS, Kate and Isa Whitney appear only at the beginning of the story. The case Holmes investigates after Isa Whitney has been sent home, is quite another one as well.
It’s about a man (happily married, affectionate father of two children, living in a large villa outside London, popular with all who know him). This man ….
- leads a double life (former actor, then journalist, then selling matches disguised as beggar and ‘quite a recognised character in the City’)
- literally wears a theatrical mask and a wig
- is the victim in one of his two roles (husband drownded in the Thames, body not found, just his coat)
- and the murderer of said victim in the other role (the match-selling beggar who gets arrested as possible murderer of the missing husband)
Holmes assumes the man to be dead, probably murdered …. until the wife of the missing man shows him a note she received days after her husbands presumed death. The note changes the case ….
Like with ‘Yellow Face’ - TWIS is a case with no victim, no murder and no crime ….. VICTIM & MURDERER ARE ACTUALLY THE SAME PERSON !
JOHN: We are never playing that (Cluedo) again! SHERLOCK: Why not? JOHN: Because it’s not actually possible for the victim to have done it, Sherlock, that’s why. SHERLOCK: Well, it was the only possible solution. JOHN: It’s not in the rules. SHERLOCK): Then the rules are wrong!
What a lovely dialogue from THOB. :))))) But ack to the beginning of HLV. There is a car (body) driven by John and Mary beside him (facade and heart=the man with the mask) and on the backseat thee are three addicts …. three times Sherlock.
- Shezza (‘main’-Sherlock - but undercover/disguised/masked investigating Magnusson)
- Billy (Sherlock’s former self and 'master’ of the drug-house, the dump …. the skip? A 'house' Sherlock owns like the one with the fake facade in Leinster Gardens? Is Billy a version of Sherlock before he had chosen to wear a facade …. and the drug-house is an earlier version of the Empty Houses in Leinster Gardens?)
- Isaac (Sherlock before he 'became’ Billy? An addict who isn’t completely alone yet? Who is still cared for, still looked for by someone close to him … someone who loves him? And if Isaac, the addict, is a mirror for Sherlock, then his mother Kate, who wears a similar dressing gown like John … how farfetched is it to assume she is also a Sherlock-heart-mirror like John?
And what’s also very interesting …. the car with the five characters in it drives to Molly …. another Sherlock-heart-mirror. This makes three addicts (Shezza, Isaac, Billy), three hearts (Kate, Molly, John) and one facade (Mary). A nice compilation, isn’t it? :)))))
I still think that the fact that they made Kate Whitney a mother in the place of a wife has some meaning (which I can not see of course), unless it’s just a link to the drug / love problems with Sherlock’s childhood. How you build your ideals of beauty during childhood, probably adapting them on your mother’s face, so you build your affective models … I do not know. Regarding the original story, it is really exhilarating to see how this game of mirrors was already so used by Doyle … well, here it would be describing Mary … seriously! ???
“I didn’t know what to do, so I came straight to you” That was always the way. Folk who werw in grief came to my wife like birds to a light-house.
isaac whitney being a son in this version, reminds me of the biblical story, where isaac’s father was willing to sacrifice him just to prove a point. I always found that story rather off putting, personally. “I’m so devout that i’m willing to kill someone else to prove it”. Yeah, nowadays we call that extremism, or exploitation, or abuse. (YMMV, there are other stories that are more appealing.) So this does suggest something to do with sherlock’s childhood trauma. And that it is about isaac whitney being messed up on drugs=chemistry of love, suggests something to do with sherlock’s romantic life. Someone threw sherlock under the bus as a child/teen?
That quote from TWIS, about how people in need come to my wife for comfort: that’s actually a description of sherlock holmes. MANY clients come to him because their trouble doesn’t seem to be something the police can, or will, help them with.
Yes, @sarahthecoat I agree wholeheartedly with your view of that 'sacrifice story’. And it is indeed interesting that the original character of Mrs.Whitney has been changed from wife to mother and Mr.Whitney from husband to son. What might have been the reason for that decision, I wonder.
But it’s not just the relationship status of the Whitney’s that has been changed. In TWIS Mr.Whitney’s firstname is Isa … not Isaac.
’Isa’ … is of Arabic origin and means 'Jesus’.
’Isaac’ … is of Hebrew origin and means 'he will laugh, he will rejoice’ (because Abraham laughed when God told him that his aged wife Sarah would become pregnant with a son)
Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety? (Genesis 17:17)
But there is more to tell. The story of Isaac is actually a horrible and brutal family drama. Another off putting story, you might say. Abraham and Sarah were already too old to get children. So Sarah thought it best that her husband should have childrem - and an heir - with another woman.
Abraham’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abraham agreed to what Sarah said. So after Abraham had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarah his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. (Genesis 16)
As one can imagine, this couldn’t go well. Even while still pregnant Hagar tried to run away but an angel of God told her to go back. So Hagar went back to Abraham and Sarah and gave birth to a son. According to the Bible this happened fourteen years prior to the birth of Isaac. Of course the circumstances weren’t improving once 90 years old Sarah gave birth to a son as well.
On the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” (Genesis 21)
A lovely woman indeed, this Sarah. Though distressed by the matter, Abraham fulfilled the wish of his wife and after reassured by God himself that he would take care of mother and son, he sent Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert with 'some food and a skin of water’. Both almost died but then again an angel appeared and rescued them because … 'God will make Ishmael into a great nation. And Ishmael lived in the desert and became an archer. Later his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.’
If the mention of 'murderous jealousy’ in TAB, in connection with some other bits and pieces of dialogue throughout the story, reminds one strongly of Cain and Abel ('Don’t be smart, Sherlock. I’m the smart one.’ … 'Daddy loves me the best’) … the story of Isaac and his half-brother Ishmael is yet another example of a terrible family history. Two sons from two different wifes and only one is accepted by the father. The other one gets cast out together with his mother. If that isn’t the perfect basis for a downright shakespearean tragedy ……
yeah, off putting indeed! I like my name, but im glad im not named after that sarah. :D
And another suggestion that sherlock and mycroft could be half or step brothers, through the mirroring.