SarahTheCoat

oh no oh no i’m not done aaa

because all this stuff is STILL in boxes when they get back after getting take out, right? like, they go see the flat (which I feel sherlock has JUST agreed with  mrs. hudson to let. he’s signed the lease like ten minutes before john gets there) then they’re immediately back out the door to go to lauriston gardens and john returns for one last night at the bedsit. but the next day they’re running around investigating things and going to dinner and chasing cabs and THEN they’re back for maybe 20 minutes with the ‘drugs bust’ before sherlock takes off with hope. there has been time for sherlock to panic clean and shove boxes in the closet out of the way, but that’s about it. so the layering happens later.

i’ve always loved how arwel described building the set as building up the layers of all the people who have lived there over the years, just putting new paper over the old, new lives in the same rooms, and that’s just SUCH a great way to think about the story itself, this layering of time over the same characters and i ma just emotional now about all the little things that accumulate in the flat in the short time we are there. little touches of THEM happening TOGETHER and i’m just going to cry about it now

yes!

While I don’t personally subscribe to EMP, I love reading about it because it is at its core a theory about storytelling. It’s about how the story is being presented to us, how it’s being filtered and interpreted and THAT is exactly what I mean when I say Princess Bride is being used as a guide for Sherlock.

Princess Bride is a story about telling stories. It’s full of larger than life characters (sometimes literally!) because it’s a fantasy, but the messages of friendship, determination, the downfall of revenge, the fact that true love is worth figting for – those are all very real.

Sherlock is both fantasy And reality. And we as the audience are being told a cracking good story while, at the same time, the Characters are being told a story. If John’s blog is the story, then the characters of Sherlock are the grandson, and we are the audience watching the grandson (and also a little bit the grandson, but that’s a more complex bit of layering I have a more structured meta about).

But of course, we must always ask: who is the author, and what is the story Really telling us? Which version of the story is the truth? The original, or the ‘good parts’ version?

yes!

Sorry you can tell I’m rewatching ASiP again in minute detail, but there’s something weird here. Apologies if others have seen this before.

First suicide - his wife says how could he have done this, he was happy etc., and we get a closeup of the woman he was having an affair with - except. When all the cameras are pointing at the wife, there’s one watching the affair woman, capturing all this. We see it twice. The implication, then, that these murders by Jeff Hope aren’t random, somebody knows more about the victims and is picking them out.

I’m reminded of this scene from The Eleventh Hour, the episode of Doctor Who Moffat was writing concurrently with this series. The Doctor figures out what’s going on because instead of filming the sun going out, Rory is filming a man with a dog, because he should be in a coma - the key to the whole mystery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDKW8gMhAvU

Hmmm. Any thoughts, regulars? @sarahthecoat @helloliriels @raggedyblue @ebaeschnbliah @devoursjohnlock @lukessense @therealsaintscully

While rewatching that scene the first thing that came to my mind was that it makes sense to point the camera at the love affair in this moment, but it surely is weird that we have a camera filming a camera filming the shot (I hope you get what I mean). This reminded me of Sherlock in TEH delivering his explanation of the fall to Anderson, again via a small camera. And then in TFP the cameras being turned off as Eurus and Moriarty speak. Cameras do seem to have an observational function within the show, the question is what it could imply in this perticular case. Somebody is watching - what I instantly connect to both Mycroft and society…and us (the audience). So I think that both an intratextual explanation and one reaching through the TV screen to us seem possible. Especially considering how in S4 the fictional universe of BBC Sherlock was, in a way, destroyed by blurring the lines between fiction and reality (or the fact that it’s all a TV show).

Uhm yeah, I hope this makes sense somehow @thewatsonbeekeepers. Somebody is definitely watching. And somebody else is crafting the story. Or maybe they’re the same person?

@lukessense I sort of replied to this in another post but yes! I think one of the things this show is super keen on, particularly in later series, is breaking down the fourth wall and trying to get its audience to understand it as a tv show and its characters to gain a meta awareness of that, not consciously but in an abstract sense. sorry I’m explaining badly but I think we’re saying the same thing!!! But I hadn’t thought about that in relation to Mycroft, actually, even though he is literally the camera man… and of course the author, so often, because of Gatiss and pens etc., right? So maybe we have a distinction between cinematographer and audience in terms of roles…

That’s amazing. Never even really registered that we are shown so many cameras like it’s natural … no other show. Proof of the show within a show aspect? All these scenes being ‘doctored’ versions of what happened? “That’s not how it happened?” “It is now”. And “if that was really how you’d done it - I’d be the LAST person you’d tell!!” (You’d also be the last person to fangirl over Sherlock Holmes, right Anderson??) This is genius.

@helloliriels and now think about all the talk about the media, newspapers, fairytales etc. on the show. I think what they’re doing is having the TV show reflect on itself (do you say it like that in English?) by creating the feeling of a story within the story. Although I personally think that the story within the story is the superficial plot of the show whereas the subtext (or metaphorical reading) is the actual story. And in S4 we see the deconstruction of the overlying plot (that‘s why it makes no sense) just as the deconstruction of the set. With every allegorical character (like Mary for example) that’s being deconstructed the overlying plot looses logic as those characters were the essance of this superficial and fabricated story (which is, to sum it up, the story of the sociopathic detective and his armydoctor sidekick bff).

Uhm hard to explain, I totally agree with you on this @thewatsonbeekeepers. And completely out of context but is there a difference between overlying and overlaying? Because I didn’t know which one to use. Sorry about that!

Yes I totally agree! And your English is perfect as usual :) I wonder about overlying/overlaying - I’ve always said overlaying and underlying, but I don’t actually know if you can say it the other way around?!

But yes - I think I’ve mentioned this before, but one of my friends did a deep dive on Doctor Who separately to Sherlock, not being into our show, and came up with eerily similar results, that Moffat is really interested in deconstructing the myth of a character and trying to strip that myth away through self-awareness. So very interesting to see us find more and more evidence for this early on!

yes, all of this! i haven't watched as much dr who as some sherlock fans, but i was very interested by the moffat and gatiss episodes that showed the kinds of story telling that each of them is fond of. gothic and ghost themes, de-monstering the monster, bisexuality, etc. not to mention the whole thru-line in dr who, of this character who looks "normal/ordinary" but isn't, and when, where, and to whom, s/he shows the extraordinary self. *shrug asci*

so there's this layer of sherlock fandom where we are following along as mofftiss do their meta of ACD holmes and all other adaptations, through bbc sherlock, and then there's the layer where we also get to analyze mofftiss as the writers through their work, including but not limited to sherlock.

Just a thought that I have to get off my chest before I implode: besides the utterly beautiful display of love, grief and despair that the burning bookshop scene is already, how much more poignant does it get if you consider what it means exactly that Aziraphale’s books have all (except for Agnes Nutter’s Prophecies) burned down to ashes? Like, these books:

THESE BOOKS

I mean, THESE BOOKS

The four or five books that Crowley took so much bother to protect because he loves Aziraphale and knew how important they were for him, the books that changed everything, the books that ultimately spelled out that love in no uncertain terms. A moment so defining that Crowley kept the dove from the church, and has it in plain sight at his place.

THOSE are the books that burned in the fire, and several hundreds more. Not any random books.

Now think of Crowley running in there after having begged Aziraphale to go off with him, so as to put both of them out of harm’s way, twice; imagine him running in there with every intention of doing one of his last-second rescues as he’s been doing for centuries, and finding out instead that not only Aziraphale is gone as he dreaded would happen (because there’s no way Aziraphale wouldn’t have stopped the fire himself otherwise), but the bookshop, the books, THEIR BOOKS, all they had together is no more, cancelled, erased from existence. This is what Crowley is facing in the fire.

That is why it is so UTTERLY DEVASTATING that in the bar scene Crowley has to tell Aziraphale that the bookshop burned down. Since he’s wasted drunk, a part of Crowley still thinks he has lost Aziraphale and, in addition to that, this time he has also failed to save the books, the books that he knows are an integral part to what they have become, that carry their history together.

AND that is why the very next sequence is the most heartrending, gut-wrenching thing I have ever seen EVER, when Aziraphale asks for the prophecies and Crowley points at the book with that overexcited shaky voice yelling “Souvenir!”, because yes now there’s still a chance to stop the end of the world, but this is just as much Crowley telling Aziraphale “Yes yes yes I saved a book from all that mess. Does it have even a little of importance, does it? DOES IT? If it has even the smallest shred of meaning for you then not everything is lost, I saved your books once again, for you, LOOK, remember? We can survive this and live to rebuild on the foundations” and I just jfshbcsbcdjaksaudhofhs

I didn’t need my heart anyway

me neither.