I have uploaded my analysis of the subtext of the ‘Dangling Garridebs’ scene to AO3.
Summary: Why did Mofftiss include the ‘Dangling Garridebs’ scene in TFP? What does it mean? The Garridebs scene in TFP analysed step by step, metaphor by metaphor.
(This is NOT a fic. This is a meta post.)
yay! i am always so happy when meta gets archived on ao3.
2020 is not only the year of the 10th anniversary for BBC Sherlock, but also the year the canon story “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” finally fell into public domain worldwide.
To celebrate this I had written a series of posts in December 2019 about every single adaptation of 3GAR there has been – so far.
While 3GAR marks a lot of “firsts” for Sherlock Holmes adaptations in general – and was also used as the plot for the first known pilot episode of television history, ever – the history of these adaptations themselves is quite unfortunate.
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy indeed.
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (1924) It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy …
Radio (1932): Gordon & Lovell One of many “firsts” for The Three Garridebs
TV (1937): Hector & Podmore The original Sherlock Holmes pilot episode
Radio (1939): Rathbone & Bruce The Three Garridebs: A “jolly story” for Christmas Day
Radio (1949): Stanley & Stelton The plot-heavy adaptation of 3GAR
Radio (1964): Hobbs & Shelley The one that gets it right
TV (1994): Brett & Hardwicke The one that had to make do
Radio (1994): Merrison & Williams The 3GAR adaptation that’ll shatter your heart into a million pieces
Radio (2009): Lowrie & Albert By permission of the estate of Dame Jean Conan Doyle
Short story (2015): The Phantom of the Music Hall When two Garridebs appeared in a Doctor Who short story
Video game (2015): The Great Ace Attorney The shard that got stuck in John’s pipe - TAKE THAT! OBJECTION!
TV (2017): Cumberbatch & Freeman (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) References to Doyle’s The Three Garridebs in series 4 of BBC Sherlock
TV (2019): Miller & Liu ”Miss Understood”
Radio (1984): SWF, or WTF did I just listen, aka it’s not a love story, it’s a botched up thriller
Rode & Groeger (2006) (audio sample, ebook available with an introduction by the writer, Daniela Wakonigg): The QUEER one
Comic/Graphic Novel: On The Case with Holmes & Watson - The Three Garridebs (2012): Who says that it’s just for children? It’s so cute!
rb for additions
Nathan, Alex or Howard... cliffhanger anyone?
@waitedforgarridebs - That one is for you 😏
... you all don’t understand.
For these episode descriptions they “randomly” put snippets taken from each episode together in several montages, and usually they used text that we’ve actually seen as important text on screen. Like #SherlockLives, I’M BACK, MISS ME, Eurus’ song, etc
Why, for the love of everything that is holy, did they have to write down the names of the three random brothers (a.k.a. the three Garridebs) for the TFP montage. Why.
They also use text that we see in the show, mainly floating text... and the the Garridebs's names didn't appear like this, they were scrawled on the photographs. It would have been more consistent to incorporate the scrawled names, to increase the font variety.
HMMMM, why would someone go to all that effort?
that one story where watson gets shot and the only thing he thinks is like “omg… holmes does love me”
acd snapped
I’ve been half-assedly catching up on people’s posts from a cottage with poor wi-fi, but basically… Mofftiss did not skip or disrespect The Three Garridebs in S4, they devoted the entire series to it.
People keep using the term ‘self-inflicted Garridebs’ with respect to Watson being shot, but hey, remember how important names are in Doyle’s subtext? The name Evans is basically Welsh for John.
The Garridebs moment was always going to be self-inflicted on Sherlock. That’s how Doyle wrote it.
wow, i hadn't made the evans=john connection, but it makes sense! yikes.
the elephant in the room was at 29 Ryder Lane, and Little Ryder St was the address of the only Real Garrideb in The Three Garridebs
hmmm!
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.
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…)
thanks so much, brilliant as always! if i ever watch s4 again, it will be thanks to you and your metas. (AND others' too, there are other meta writers!)
I made some notes as i was reading. I think the whole theme of "inversion" is one that is established very early on, when the first shot of sherlock on screen in ASIP is upside down. I am beginning to think that any "inverted" or "opposite day in bizarro mirror world" thing is probably a tell that we are inside sherlock's head, whether that means EMP, or coma, or POV, or running scenarios, or any other metaphorical visualization, "filming thought".
LOVE the reminder that "metaphorical murder" is about falling in love. Again, not crazy about the choice of metaphor, but, it is a story about a detective, and detectives solve murders, so i guess they went with what they had to work with. (In "what dreams may come" they got to work with painting, which is prettier to look at.) W/E.
I'm totally ok with EMP beginning in TRF. I would offer as a tell, the so far never truly explained 90° change in orientation between sherlock falling (feet toward the building) and landing (parallel to the building). I don't buy any of the three "explanations" in TEH, they are all demonstrably bogus, even if some of the metas exploring that may have tragically disappeared. It's possible that we're actually frozen mid fall, given the many textual and visual references to falling, flying, and landing. (That would be a fun project with ariane's transcripts)
also i love the progress, from the "ideal man" craft project in TSOT, which sherlock showed to his favorite john mirror, to the realization that john is only human, here and in the hug scene in TLD. If this is all scenarios in sherlock's mind, then saying "TLD happened before TFP" is meaningless, all the timelines are entangled, like THOB and ASIB.
thanks again so much for this. I always feel like watson after holmes explains his deductions, it's magic before, and "why didn't i see that" after! but i don't see it, on my own, mostly, i'm a watson i guess! :)
