i like that you have a phd in bbc sherlock! but yeah, it's an unfinished story with a lot going on, and one can find indications for a variety of possible directions or patterns. none of us is in charge of any bit of what happens next.

“who is he” “he’s with me” “but who is he” “i said he’s with me” currently screaming at the fact that sherlock refused to describe his relationship to john in this scene literally “he’s my flatmate” would have been perfectly accurate description, john had already looked at 221b and said yeah this is nice, but he refused!! to limit it to that! he wasn’t sure what they were becoming!! screaming!

1. repetition means it's important. to me, this is like telling the audience, They are Together, like, TOGETHER-together, right from the start. there's gonna be boatloads of subtext, but right up front, here is some #confirmed #text. just so you know.

2. this comes back, restated in ways like "if you know who i am then you know who he is" (see 1. above) and "we decide..." and so on. in HLV, so you don't forget that going into whatever s4 is supposed to be.

it really does drive me crazy that all of these lines that are a) very obviously gay and b) definitively not played for laughs are like….this level of not picked up on. i excused it for so long because that was the nature of the beast but no. it’s unambiguously gay end of story!

The fact that they took Dracula, the entire premise of which is that the story is made of painstakingly documented firsthand accounts so that all of the information is 100% verifiable and turned that on its head, immediately casting doubt on Jonathan Harker’s reliability by 1. pointing out that he would have left out some things to avoid upsetting his fiancee (specifically calling out that he would have omitted queer sexuality and romance from his account) and 2. turning his manuscript into a raving document about how much he loves Count Dracula is extremely telling. They’re clearly fascinated with unreliable narrators, and specifically narrators that are unreliable about queer romance!

there is zero chance that i will watch dracula, but this is kind of what i mean when i say "on beyond johnlock". like, they are writing this with the queer romance *as a given*, it's right there in the source material, but it's hidden/repressed. so the interesting thing for them is (i think!) to explore why and how it's repressed, and at least in sherlock, what would it take to un-repress it? also, what are all the consequences of that repression, many of which are really ugly and painful.

as i dimly recall from the gothic lit and oscar wilde courses in the pre TAB semester here, dracula was a response to the wilde trials that basically said, the way out of this fix is to hide the queer. and now i would have to go find the metas (or, please correct me!), but what was the other cornerstone book written around the same time that took a different more out approach? was it frankenstein, or am i just thinking of it because it was also discussed in the gothic metas? anyway, stoker was supposedly really closeted or something, so i expect dracula would be at least as repressed as sherlock, maybe moreso. making it an attractive story for mofftiss to explore in exactly the same way as sherlock holmes. i get the feeling that doyle repressed holmes because he had to, not because he wanted to, but then the subsequent fandom and adaptations really doubled down on it. so it's a little bit different process of digging one's way out of it.

The Sherrinford “Not”

The Final Problem Explainer, Part I

[Read the rest on Medium.com/TJLC]

I read it today, in bits and pieces, and took loads of notes. I LOVE THIS!! It’s Why S4 Is Like That, it’s On Beyond Johnlock. I knew there had to be SOMETHING but I knew I wasn’t the one who was going to figure that out.

It makes sense of what Rachel Talalay was saying about how they filmed TST with all these transitions that made it clear they were moving between built sets, but also why that was not working for TST. YES they write the subtext first and then loosely paper it over with just enough of a surface story. I think we pick up on that subtext so much more than we think, and it’s why sometimes you go back over the actual dialog in a scene and it makes no sense, but the delivery and the subtext are what’s really being conveyed.

Love the discussion relating the “shoot the governor” scene back to ASIP, and contrasting the different choices. John’s line in TFP about how he “got a woman killed” twigged on TBB when John chose to leave Soo Lin “in hiding” and go after Sherlock, which you can tell by his face when they find her body, he felt her death was his fault for not staying with her. Then he has another similar kind of choice in HLV when Sherlock gets shot. He really does keep getting this quandary. (and then he wonders, who would Sherlock bother protecting? You, John. He’s protecting you.)

I also love the point that so many of Sherlock’s deductions, especially in TFP, but also throughout the show, are actually wrong! I am dimly remembering some of the initial anger at S4 and TFP in particular, was outrage that Sherlock apparently “solved” the puzzles, but “lost” anyway. In the context of the overall arc, he’s wrong because he’s shutting off half of himself, and you can’t live like that, it doesn’t work. 

(also, thank you for validating my dislike of John’s s4 hair. While loads of other people were squeeing over it, I was like eeeehhhh ew. Glad to know I was subconsciously rejecting something fake) (oh, and also thank you for validating my nausea over the TEH train car scene, cos it always really bothered me that Sherlock was that dishonest with John. Everyone talks about how nasty John was to Sherlock in S4, but not about how nasty Sherlock could be too.)

Come to think of it, that “manufactured crisis” pattern was right there in ASIP too, with the “come at once, could be dangerous” texts, and then Sherlock was just lying on the couch. Ok it got dangerous later, but still, he was kinda jerking John around just as in the pattern you describe. 

I also LOVE that these “puzzles” are opposite-day-in-bizarro-mirror-world versions of the situations in ASIP (and subsequent episodes). again, I don’t know that I would have ever made the specific connections myself, I am just not that good at identifying those match points. Especially when it comes to shootings, which make me really uncomfortable! Thank you so much, what a brilliant meta, monumental series. whew!

bits of this also twigged ideas about TAB but nothing I can put in a complete sentence at the moment.

You know what happened to the other one…

Like I’ve mentioned, I’m continuing to read the other Holmes sibling as past failed attempts to get a queer version of the Holmes stories told. Here are some lines that are noteworthy in that context:

do you feel like each of these is connected to a single previous adaptation, or spread among several? we have paid a lot of attention to TPLOSH, of course, but also granada, and others.

Yeah I’d agree with you that TPLOSH gets a lot of attention, both from us and the writers, but I think it goes a bit beyond that. Kind of like your “on beyond johnlock” idea!

hmm, could be. they have certainly referenced as many previous adaptations as possible in the show! (what i call "the giant lego set of canon") and i do sometimes wonder if their protestations about [johnlock] "isn't the story we are doing" indicates that there is something beyond johnlock that they are doing. (because let's face it, the show really is doing johnlock, no matter what they say)

The Six Thatchers blog entry is the neatest representation of where I’m at right now. They could have done literally any other historical figure for an adaptation of The Six Napoleons. But they picked Thatcher again. It would be so easy for literally any character to say “haven’t we already done this” and hand wave it away with some “the wheel turns nothing is new” nonsense. But it goes completely unacknowledged.

So the two explanations I can come up with for that are that they are hoping no one notices or calls them out on it because it was only on screen for a few seconds and on a website that nobody but diehard fans actually read. Seems to have worked, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of the blog entry being brought up in an interview. Nobody but us cares. But that also has horrible ramifications for the structural integrity of the show, that those sorts of background details along with the blatant stuff on the blogs just doesn’t matter, right?

Or they know what they’re doing. And you’re meant to notice that this is poking a giant hole in the continuity of the show and examine the other things in this season that are deliberately breaking the diegesis. They picked the blog entry that had Sherlock and John locked in 1895, wrote an episode around it in which John and Sherlock barely speak to one another, an episode where their entire relationship centers around Mary and breaks without her, and are daring you to notice and call them on it.

yes, what you said about writing your version giving you insights into the structure of their version! and what else are they doing besides just johnlock. (much smarter people than me have noted that maybe it hasn't been explicit on screen, but it's hardly a new idea)

do you ever just realize how john and sherlock’s story has endured a century and will endure for centuries more to come? that their love is as old as time and in every decade, in every adaptation, they will find each other and love each other until they take their last breaths and the cycle starts anew.

do you think about how when they see one another each First Time they meet, their souls say “yes, i know you. i’ve always known” and “i’ve missed you. i’m glad you’re here again.”

yes.

Johnlock and TJLC are Red Herrings.

Now before you freak out on me, TJLC is real and Johnlock is coming by the end of series 4. But what we haven’t realized is that by spending all of our time and effort trying to prove the inevitable, we’ve lost focus of the other stories at play. Just look at us now – we haven’t blogged TJLC theories in three days yet we’ve completely obliterated our brains by collectively overturning every clue and puzzle piece the show, books, and blog could possibly give us. TJLC is obvious, we don’t need to continue to prove it. And look what we can all come up with now that we’re free to do so. We could’ve been like this weeks, months ago, but we hammered TJLC home as if it’s the only plot in Sherlock. It’s not. Maybe no one else was like this but I sure was. TJLC was the most important thing – anything else i happened to discover was just gravy. Now it’s the opposite – I want to decode *every* plotline, TJLC is unfolding and I don’t need to pay it any further attention. I want to tie up *every* loose thread. TJLC isn’t a loose thread and really hasn’t been for a long time.

Since Setlock we’ve been focusing our brilliant minds on child’s play, mostly looking through the TJLC lense. Again, this is what i did, I’m sure not every single one of us was like this. But now I’m overwhelmed looking at all the clues i willingly overlooked because they weren’t relevant to TJLC. Moffat and Gatiss are happy we kept blogging mostly TJLC this whole time – because we’re really not giving anything away in the long run. People will believe us, or they won’t. All the writers have to do is lie. It would be worse for them if we solved The Final Problem and leaked that to the world too early. I mean, USA Today linked to my blog because they liked one of my theories on The Six Thatchers. What the fuck. What if I cracked The Final Problem and a major newspaper’s online account linked to it? That would be worse for everyone involved than constantly telling Johnlockers to keep quiet. With this in mind, Moffat and Gatiss have a bigger twist set up that’s not TJLC and they desperately don’t want anyone to know about it. Anyone who watches the episode early has to sign nondisclosure agreements beforehand. This is bigger than we could imagine. And keeping the analysis to Johnlock is saving their asses, because I know if we chose to drop TJLC, we could collectively Crack this case wide open.

Anyone up for the challenge?

oh man I remember reading this when I was still a lurker! still up for it!

yes! and because it was there, if hidden in subtext, in the original stories, it is also there in all the adaptations, whether it is acknowledged or not.

My Farewell Projects

Hello all! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had any news, and wanted to share a bit more information on what exactly I’m working on.

I’ve always felt bad that I disappeared after series 4. I had hyped everyone up so much for series 4, and then didn’t really know what to say afterward that would make anything better. It’s five years late, but I’ve finally figured out what I want to say to try to make things right. There are two separate projects for the two different ways I want to try to provide closure.

The first is a final video on my old channel. You might have noticed I’ve privated my channel a couple of times at this point. That’s mostly because I feel bad leaving it where it was and imagining someone watching 48 episodes of build up to nothing. I’ve tried so many times to script one last video, at first it would only come out as an angry rant, which I don’t think would be helpful, and then for years it was just one long apology but with no real message or takeaway. Revisiting the show, I found a new perspective on things, and with it, some long awaited closure And it turns out that’s what I needed to finally make a video that I think will actually make the channel feel resolved.

The second is finishing the story. The one we told each other, shaping and adding detail until it became this beautiful thing. I think we all had our own versions of how we’d want things to finish if we could have our way. Even if series 5 comes out someday and follows through on the subtext, that story would not be the one I wanted, the one I wish was told. If you enjoyed the last few episodes of TJLCE and wanted to see how the story would be resolved if that version had been right, then I hope this project can be your alternate ending.  This project has been in my drafts for a long time too, but it wasn’t until watching the show again with fresh eyes, and being able to separate the show as it is from the story I wanted that I’ve made any real progress on it. This project will probably just be published on ao3 though I am considering recording my own podfic for it if people would be interested. 

So far this is the farthest I’ve gotten on either project and I’m very hopeful both will actually get finished this time around. I don’t really have a timeframe yet though. One of my many poor choices in 2016 was letting my channel take over my life. I wasn’t taking care of myself at all and I’m being very deliberate about taking things more slowly this time around. 

If you’d like more regular updates while I work, I’m a bit more active on my side twitter: https://twitter.com/victorianpining. Since I’m mostly focused on the s4 rewrite right now and I’m bad at keeping secrets, you’ll see lots of hints for where I plan to take it as well as some opportunities to weigh in on how you’d like certain details to play out. My inbox here is also open if you’d like to talk about the show, my current projects, or that time in our lives.

Hey, we already chatted over on Twitter. I am happy to see there will be one last video of TJLCE to give everything closure. *puts her TJLC t shirt on and arranges an elephant on the shelf*. I wonder if you will include opinions of other TJLC fans how they today view the whole thing? Not of bitter ex fans because that wouldn’t help anyone, but I think it would be interesting to see how other people today see TJLC. Or would that be too big? I guess you want to lay the focus on your own experience here?

*just me being curious to see where the video will go*

Hello! Haha I’ve already thought about going up to my attic to see where I hid all my Funko Pops in 2017… 

That’s a great question. I plan to leave the video pretty open ended on what actually happened because I still honestly don’t know. I obviously have a theory, but I have learned my lesson about trying to guess the secret motivations of people I have never met. While I’ll probably talk about what I think is most likely, the intent is for the video to work no matter where you landed in terms of an explanation. 

I think the same goes for looking back on the show and the community. I can only truly speak to my own experience so my focus will probably be there, but I would love to hear from others and use that to inform the discussion. Another thing I’ve learned is that it’s important to not get locked into your own view so I think having other opinions in there would probably lead to a better video.

looking forward to these, in your own time. glad to see self care a higher priority than fandom, as it should be. <3 i too had to make that transition from “this show isn’t what i wanted it to be” to “ok, look at the show they did make, and try to see what they are trying to do with it”, but back it s3. the amazing meta writers in fandom made all the difference for me. i do lean in towards a couple theories, but really i enjoy that there are multiple thoughtful readings.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to more of your excellent videos as well @victorianpining, and I’m very grateful for them. They were (together with LSiT’s work) some truly intelligent analyses of the subtext and one of the biggest reasons I began to look closer into BBC Sherlock in the first place. In my opinion most of your conclusions about the subtext are still very much valid and make a lot of sense. 

I think you should take absolutely no blame for the plot line going haywire in S4; no one could have predicted that based only on what we could deduce from the show. Who could tell that the show makers would completely ignore the elephant in the room that they had been building up to for the whole of S3 and TAB, which they had even the cast members hyping for months before the release? And then they threw us out to a hiatus very similar to ACD’s in Victorian times: making the audience believe for years that they have effectively killed off the show (or the main character/book series in ACD’s case), but never actually confirming this clearly by talking about their real intensions with the work. Ironically, I think the cruel lightheartedness with which the show makers have treated their most dedicated audience is similar to Holmes’ behavior in leaving Watson abandoned, mourning and in the dark for years, only to then show up with a new trick. 

Mofftiss’ official comments about the show are not trustworthy and never were. As you said already in your first installments @victorianpining: they are liars. And they have made no secrets about that fact, so the blame for misleading people lies entirely with them. I suspect they might still have their reasons, and that this - apart from emulating ACD - may have to do with legal aspects as well. That’s just speculation of course, and there’s by far not enough evidence to conclude it. But facts remain, in my opinion: this show is still packed with subtext and symbolism, and the story still appears unfinished, whether intentional or not.

YES, emulating both ACD and watson, dialling the unreliable narrator act up to eleven. unfortunately, they seem to think it's "cheeky" or funny or clever or something, but it's just kinda gross at this point. at least they have laid on the subtext with a shovel, so it's harder and harder to miss.

Asking the right questions (trying to lol)

OBVIOUSLY, people come to the Johnlock conclusions at various times through their journey of bbc sherlock, but I really think it's time we move on from spending time over-explaining it and more time decoding the rest of the show. We know Johnlock is real, the evidence is mounting and unshakable, it really comes down to trusting our own senses and standing firmly in our convictions. The evidence of our own eyes.

HERE are the questions I think we should be focusing on:

Yes, there are many more Chekovs guns and various other aspects of the show with unresolved points but textually I find these to be the most consequential to the romantic arch/plot.

So looking back on it, one of the constant themes on BBC Sherlock seems to be this contrast between what is said out loud and what you can actually see based on actions.

Sherlock is said to be a high functioning sociopath, but if you pay attention it’s obvious he’s not. Mycroft says caring isn’t an advantage while testing Sherlock to make sure he’s emotionally okay. John says Sherlock is heartbroken over Irene but admits that Sherlock has acted that way as long as he’s known him, that his only proof that Sherlock’s in love is that he’s ignoring all of Irene’s texts. TRF tries its best to get you to doubt Sherlock when you know that Moriarty’s story can’t be true. Sherlock says he proved Moriarty must be dead when he very much Did Not Do That.

Which before I thought was clever and a way to hint at the bigger thing going on with the show. 

Now it’s like, either that was all coincidence and giving them far too much credit… or they REALLY like playing with that contrast…

YES, yes, yes. i think they like playing with that. i think it ties back to the original stories and watson being an unreliable narrator. i think we are supposed to notice the discrepancies and notice what is missing. and i suspect that they have something in mind that i call "on beyond johnlock", but i'm not really sure exactly what that is. i try to ask myself, what could they be doing with the show besides just #confirmed johnlock? because the whole show is already permeated with the bond between john and sherlock, read it however you like, it's been there since ACD STUD. i think it has something to do with why they are such unreliable interviewees too. i think they want us to notice the discrepancy between what they put in the show, and the bs they spout in talks. also when they adopt the metaphors and codes they use in the show, like "he's talking to a mirror" and which one takes tea vs coffee.

and like @kettykika78 says, it's not finished, whatever bs they say about that too.

Okay so @kinklock’s theory that “Mrs Watson” is actually Holmes makes my whole fckn life because of stuff like Mary encouraging John to go on a case with Holmes because the change will be refreshing, and he’s always interested in Holmes’s cases. What a sweet conversation for Holmes and Watson to have! And Watson’s answer that he’d be ungrateful if he weren’t interested because of “what I gained” from one of them.

Like. I live and also I die.

Sherlock and John are now married - according to The Times

Today in The Times, Saturday Review: Critics choice: Sherlock ‘Sherlock and John Holmes set out to investigate the truth about the crime’ - Best misprint ever.

(the photo is from the times, the gif is not mine, but awesome.)

fdghjklhgfjkl WAT LOL

Oh don’t mind me, I’ll be in the corner, smiling stupidly.

REBEKAH SAID SHE’S PREPARING A NEW VIDEO??? AAAAAA

WHERE ARE THE TJLCERS WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT IT

I did see Rebekah's channel active as soon as the new video was posted :) I got over-excited but it was an old video.

It is sad to see her not believing that johnlock would be canon anymore but glad she wants to share her thoughts on it. The fact that Moftiss used up a whole freaking season to play around with EMP or alibi theory or whatever and broke so many anxious, waiting fan's hearts is just sad. They have to make it up to us with S5, come on

@dinner--starving aren't they already canon though? I mean, Mary did say in that video "when I'm gone, I know what you could become", etc, and that scene with them at 221b with Rosie, restoring 221b to live there again (reminder, there are only 2 bedrooms there and Rosie needs her own probably so....) Etc. It's a shitty way to end it but it does feel like they are canon together . (Obviously it's still a giant letdown overall but in my mind Season 4 did end with canon Johnlock.)

@johnlocky yeah true, they were canon the moment they laid eyes on each other, but you know what I mean. They aren't explicitly canon yet, plus Moftiss, the cast and crew have always refuted the notion. They need to stop making fans feel like they are seeing something that isn't there.

FIRST OFF, i'm so glad to know that rebekah is alive and well! <3<3<3 !! that's #1, and my well wishes are always gonna be there!

mmm yeah, there was never any need for mofftiss to be rude to fans. but others have written about how just making "gay sherlock holmes" would not really be particularly new or groundbreaking at least among the long term holmes fandom. re creating the Great Game is the more audacious undertaking, the "if we can pull it off" thing. personally i take the abundant queer coding all over every episode as indicating that johnlock is basically a given, and we're meant to be looking beyond that.

so the tjlce videos are still a fantastic resource, and rebs should get an award for doing all that work and making them so clear. they teach us how to see the coding and especially in the last few, what it all might mean. pop the hood on this story and look at the inner workings, not just the pretty (or not so pretty) surface.

“A bloody awful cabbie”

On re-watching ASiP it struck me that Jeff Hope, the serial killing cabbie, is indeed remarkably bad at his profession. He seems to believe that he’s an excellent strategic thinker:

Oh really, can you now? The only person in the show that does seem to have a map inside his head is Sherlock Holmes:

But the route this experienced taxi driver uses to take a tourist from the airport to his destination in Soho is by far not the fastest one, as it seems. Sherlock, however, has it all in his head and manages to shortcut him. ”He’s probably memorised the London A-Z”, according to John’s blog. Not that anyone would realistically arrive faster running up and down rooftops, but John refers to it differently on his blog: “We ran down street after street and we managed to catch up with the taxi”. Not a word about how bad the cabbie was on the blog, though.

Anyway, in the show this seems to be a rather incompetent cabbie, which is said once and repeated twice in ASiP, so I assume it’s important:

But in ACD canon (STUD) Jefferson Hope  - originally a hunter from Utah - appears to manage just fine as a London cab driver, as far as I know: “The hardest job was to learn my way about, for I reckon that of all the mazes that ever were contrived, this city is the most confusing. I had a map beside me, though, and when once I had spotted the principal hotels and stations, I got on pretty well.” (X):

(Picture source: X). 

In our days, though, cabbies have GPS in their cars. And John’s blog tells us nothing about Hope’s incompetence. So how come Jeff Hope is such an awful cabbie in the show? My guess would be that perhaps he actually isn’t; the traffic might have been heavy with long queues and they really did manage to shortcut him running down the streets and alleys. I rather suspect this is code for something else in Sherlock’s Mind Palace. “The route he took us to get here” might mean, for example, that this story is circular; we’re somehow gonna wind up where we started from, probably at the end of S5.

Next thing from here, Sherlock and John goes to have a late dinner at a restaurant on Baker Street and we all know what that means, so I assume they’re not very far from home ;)

@raggedyblue​ @ebaeschnbliah​ @sarahthecoat​ @gosherlocked​ @lukessense​

he really was an awful cabbie! @lukessense and @shadowdragon-646 in the notes, got me looking at google maps. if the red line in sherlock’s mental map is the cab’s route, then it goes the wrong way on more than one one way street!

i know i have seen meta relating the traffic signs and signals to story beats in the overall arc of the show/johnlock relationship. maybe in my asip tag by now, or ?? it is late tonight to start looking for it.

Thanks @sarahthecoat , @lukessense and @shadowdragon-646! I love this show, because it makes us think and consider. :) I also tried some Google maps searches, and my actual point here is that I suspect what we see in ASiP is not ’real’ (in the sense that it’s not even supposed to be real). I didn’t check on the one-way streets, so thanks for that @sarahthecoat! But as far as I can see, there are several other problems with how the ’cab race’ is presented in the show that keep puzzling my mind:

1. Sherlock is lying, or at least mistaken. He claims that 22 Northumberland Street is only five minutes walk from 221B Baker Street. But I checked it on Google Maps and it’s actually 3 km away, which means it would rather take about half an hour, right? (3 km in 5 minutes would require a speed of 36 km/h, which would be the top speed of a really fast sprinter. But our guys were walking.) At any rate, John seems to be OK with this - psychosomatic limp and all - because he isn’t complaining. :)

2. If the tourist came from one of London’s airports (which his luggage suggests) he would presumably go to his hotel, most probably the purple dot (Wordour Street 187-197?). So what were they doing stopping on Northumberland Street in the first place? Did the cabbie drive there only because of John’s text message? If I were the passenger I’d have reacted to that, because it would have slowed down my journey and cost unnecessary much (if the taxameter was still running). But this is still quite possible of course; it’s the passenger’s problem, not mine (and I’ve been overcharged by taxis on arrival to foreign cities several times, thankyou very much)

3. But my main logical problem is this: how could Sherlock possibly know the destination beforehand, so he could calculate the cab’s probable route in his ‘mind map’?? He might have been able to follow it running from behind, but even if he knew of all road works, blockings and one-way streets, he could still not know where it was going. He didn’t see the passenger’s luggage until he ran into the cab, and not even from the roof top would he have such an overview of the streets below that he could effectively follow a cab (many London cabs would look exactly the same from above). And running up on the roof would have slowed him down considerably.

And another thing: if the red line on Sherlock’s mind map, instead of showing a real, confirmed route, represents the most likely route for the cab to take, considering all the obstacles that Sherlock was seeing in his head, then why was this man considered an ’awful cabbie’? Was he supposed to rather break the traffic regulations in Sherlock’s opinion?

The only way I can imagine that Sherlock and John would be able to catch up with the taxi would be if it was moving very slowly for some reason, for example a traffic jam. Then they could try to shortcut it a few blocks away, if they saw in which general direction it was heading. And pedestrians aren’t usually inhibited by traffic signs. John’s description on the blog is enough to cover this whole event in a satisfactory, logical way:

”After that, we went on a stakeout. We waited in a restaurant to see if the killer would visit the address I’d texted him. Across the road, we saw a taxi pull up. We ran out, but it drove off. Sherlock insisted on chasing it and luckily he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of London’s backstreets. Of course, as I realised afterwards, he’s probably memorised the London A-Z. We ran down street after street and we managed to catch up with the taxi - only to discover that the passenger wasn’t our killer. He’d only just arrived in the UK.”

Occam’s razor. But the show’s version seems dramatically exaggerated and effectively impossible. Which makes me believe that it’s only happening in Sherlock’s fantasy. And actually representing something else, metaphorically. ;)

@possiblyimbiassed yes, my comment was only focussing on the metaphorical reading :). I’m absolutely agreeing that the cabbie-chase is not realistic at all and probably not real. We have two routes (green and red) and a purple dot representing the cab. So what could the green and red route represent metaphorically? The green one is John and Sherlock on foot. It’s full of up’s and down’s, going down staircases etc. but it’s also the alternate route that’s avoiding the street signs. So Sherlock and John on foot don’t have to take a route that’s determined by rules? Or signs? But for that they have to go up and down a route that doesn’t seem (realistically speaking) like the fastest or most logical one? Maybe a bit of a stretch here, but I’m just thinking out loud. 

But what is the red route representing then? Because there is this one moment on the map where the purple dot (the cab) is stopping and the red route is catching up to the cab. As if somebody else was moving towards the cab. If the red route was the route Sherlock planned ahead then why is it a moving line on the map and not a fixed one? And if we think about colors again…red and green. 

In the unaired pilot this whole cab chase is missing. Instead there’s John following Sherlock and the cabbie, running all the way from Northumberland Terrace (wherever that may be) to Baker St. In ASiP the American tourist wants to go from Northumberland St to an address in Soho which would lead you more or less through Chinatown. Hmm.

I bet somebody else already wrote about this, but yes, the chase in ASiP is probably only a metaphorical one, a “long shot” curing John’s psychosomatic limb whereas in the unaired pilot John’s limb is cured by chasing Sherlock and the cabbie and saving Sherlock because of that.

yes to all of this! i think the whole cab chase is a metaphor for the history of the holmes/watson relationship, and where it (hopes? needs?) wants to go. and again, we have the current writers composing the subtext first, and then lightly papering over it with the surface story. but leaving lots and lots of "snags" to peel it back and look underneath. it's very pretty paper in this case, so it's tempting to leave it. s4's paper has more holes in it, and nobody minds tearing it into strips!