We’ve come to the end of the fourth season of Sherlock, and perhaps the last episode of the show. (For the moment there are no plans to make more Sherlock, as its stars have plenty of other projects on their plates.) So let’s see where “The Final Problem” leaves Sherlock Holmes and John Watson… and also fans of the show, who have been along for the ride since 2010.
Summary
Sherlock and John perform a very scary prank on Mycroft to coerce him into admitting that they have a sister. (Eurus thankfully only shot John with a tranquilizer.) He explains that Eurus is the baby of the family—one year younger than Sherlock—a genius of a purest and highest order, and that Sherlock has blocked her from his memory; Mycroft used the little poem about the east wind as a trigger on his brother now and again to see if he was remembering her. He also tells them that part of the reason Sherlock blocked her out is because she seemed to have killed his childhood dog Redbeard, and then set the family home (called Musgrave, after “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”) on fire. After that she was taken away to a place called Sherrinford, where England keeps all of its most dangerous criminals… and that he has told their parents that she is long dead. Mycroft insists that there is no possible way that she could have escaped the place to see both John and Sherlock in the interim, but as they are certain, they infiltrate Sherrinford together.
Mycroft explains that Eurus is capable of “reprogramming” people by spending just a short time with them, and they soon find out that the governor of Sherrinford is also under her power. Sherlock, John, and Mycroft are trapped in a sort of puzzle maze that Eurus wants Sherlock to solve. Their motivation is a little girl alone on an airplane where all the occupants are unconscious—if they solve Eurus’s puzzles, she’ll let them help the girl land the plane. She starts by having Sherlock hand a gun to John or Mycroft to kill the governor or she’ll kill his wife. Both Mycroft and John can’t manage it, so the governor kills himself and his wife is still murdered by Eurus. The next room contains clues from a cold case that Sherlock has to solve with three possible suspects. Eurus says she will drown the man who did it, but once Sherlock condemns the guilty one, she drops the other two instead. When he calls her on it, she drowns the guilty one as well, citing no difference.
The next room contains a coffin with the words “I love you” written on the lid. Eurus tells Sherlock to call Molly Hooper and get her to say those words to him without explaining that her life is as stake or she’ll die in three minutes. Sherlock manages to get Molly to say the words after saying them first himself. He has a breakdown and pummels the coffin meant for her to pieces. In the next room, Eurus tells Sherlock to kill either John or Mycroft. Mycroft starts being horrible about John, telling Sherlock to get rid of him and insulting him; Sherlock knows Mycroft is behaving this way to make it easier to kill him rather than John. Sherlock refuses to go through with the plan and threatens to kill himself in ten seconds. The trio are shot with tranquilizers.
Sherlock wakes in a fake room that built on the grounds of the old family home. He can hear John, who is trapped at the bottom of a well with bones. The well begins to flood. Sherlock can also hear the girl on the plane, and Eurus as well, who is trying to help jog his memory. She tells him that Redbeard was never a dog, and Sherlock finally remembers that Redbeard was the pirate that his childhood friend Victor Trevor pretended to be when they played together. Eurus murdered his best friend, never having one of her own. Finally Sherlock decodes Eurus’s old east wind song using the misdated headstones on the family property and realizes that the girl in the plane is Eurus herself, a metaphor she constructed as a means of asking Sherlock for help. He finds her in her old room and assures her that he is there for her and she’s not alone, then asks her to help him find John. They get John out of the well in time.
Mycroft has to explain to their parents what truly happened to Eurus, and they’re furious with him for keeping her from them for so long. Eurus is sent back to Sherrinford, but Sherlock comes to visit and they play the violin together, sometimes with the whole family in tow. (She was the one who taught Sherlock to play when they were children.) John and Sherlock find another DVD recording from Mary where she tells them that she knows they will be alright because this life they have eked out together is who they’re meant to be. There’s a montage of case-solving at 221B with little Rosie and old friends nearby as the episode comes to a close.
Commentary
This is potentially the end of Sherlock as a series (and certainly is the end for the foreseeable future), and while this episode has some beautiful emotional arcs just like the rest of this season… it’s sort of a great big honking mess.
So there’s a secret sister, of course, and she’s evil because of course she is, and she is given a highly unlikely circumstance to meet Jim Moriarty under because his presence had to be explained away somehow. (When the hell did they record all those footage snippets? While he was standing there during their five minutes? Did she give him a list that he recorded outside of Sherrinford and then left under a floorboard somewhere for her to retrieve? Yeah, this makes sense.) Their sister is branded as a genius/psychopath of the highest order who was taken away by a character we’ve never seen and only heard of once before (guess Uncle Rudy is somehow way more important than we were led to believe?) kept locked away for the protection of everyone else. No one is permitted to speak with her, so no one has ever attempted to help her, but Mycroft frequently asks for her input on matters of state.
But at the same time, their sister has managed to lay her hands on a network that can broadcast Jim Moriarty’s face to the entirety of England, a drone with a motion sensor grenade attached to it, countless wigs and props and color eye contacts, a coffin to fit Molly Hooper, and a weapon attached to a specific but entirely separate murder case. Suspension of disbelief can be helpful when enjoying a fictional plot, but I would have to suspend my disbelief across the Grand flipping Canyon in order to make this narrative work, no matter how many people Eurus can “reprogram” to do her bidding. By the way, the reprogramming thing doesn’t seem remotely plausible either and it really needs to be in order for the entire premise of the episode to work.
The performances are gorgeous, and perhaps that makes it hurt even more. Cumberbatch, Freeman, and Gatiss are all in top form here, and the immediacy of these relationships have never felt more present, more emotionally charged. All three of them learn from one another as a result of this event, and it’s heartbreaking every step of the way, from John’s insistence that they be soldiers to Mycroft’s nasty denouncement of John as a means to goad Sherlock into killing him with a clear conscience. But the framing device just a disaster in every direction. Frankly, I would have taken a plot where some version of Sebastian Moran (Moriarty’s second in command in the stories) dropped Sherlock, Mycroft, and John in some creepy puzzle house of horror left by Jim Moriarty in the event of his death over… whatever the hell this was supposed to be. The atmosphere is brilliant and the rest of it is all over the place.
Most importantly, the motivations here are sloppy because no matter how gracefully Benedict Cumberbatch cries nothing can fix the fact that Eurus (somewhat predictably) is not treated as a human being but rather a plot device. The story leapfrogs from one motivation to another where her character is concerned, never attempting to convince the audience on any front as to what she really needs. At first it seems that this is a revenge plot to punish Mycroft and Sherlock for keeping her hidden away all these years. Then it seems to be just another chance to hurt Sherlock by depriving him of friendship, the same way that she did when they were children. Then it somehow morphs into a story about how Eurus was always trying to communicate her loneliness to Sherlock since childhood, and he failed to understand. But it’s hard to believe any of these explanations because they’re never put across with any care or credulity. They’re just steps in this week’s game for Sherlock to parse out.
The other problem with Eurus is that her mental state is rendered irresponsibly across the board. By painting her extreme intelligence as this frightening problem, the episode lands a vague assertion that once a person hits a certain level of genius they are automatically a sociopath, incapable of seeing the value in life and morality (not a particularly interesting or accurate assumption to go on). When you’ve spent an entire television show proving that just because Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes are smart doesn’t mean that they don’t have feelings or value people, drawing their sister in a way that deliberately conflates her remarkable intelligence with an ability to place value on life is neither smart nor believable.
In fact, it seems fair to say that Eurus Holmes is what we get for the years that Sherlock has spent making this precise mistake. Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and Benedict Cumberbatch have spent all this time assuring audiences that while Sherlock claims to be a “high-functioning sociopath” that is merely a lie he tells himself to keep distance from the world. Other fans have related to the character for appearing to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, though Sherlock was never consciously written to embody that (despite John’s quip to Lestrade about him having Asperger’s). But even if there was never a name for a specific condition, the show has played with the veneer of “genius begets mental-illness-as-superpower” for years now, only to stretch that veneer to the absolute limit where Eurus is concerned; she begins as a towering villain who can control a person by blinking and speaking a few select words, but her genius is really meant to be a prison that has kept her completely isolated. Without a clear understanding of how mental illness truly affects people, none of this is well-conceived or even remotely respectful. It’s just there to make Eurus Holmes whatever the show needs her to be.
As an emotional overarching journey for Sherlock, it’s a strange one, too. The point the audience is clearly meant to take away is “oh that’s why Sherlock distanced himself from people. He lost his best friend as a child and repressed the memory and most of his emotions in the process.” And while the addition of Victor Trevor to this narrative is clever (for those not in the know, Victor Trevor was canonically Holmes’s university pal and BFF before meeting John Watson, introduced in “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott”), the idea that this has been the long game the show was playing at all along—that Sherlock withdrew from the world because of this specific childhood trauma—is a step too far, answering a question that didn’t need such an explicit address. What’s more, the answer isn’t satisfying; the idea that Sherlock instead had difficulty connecting due to being a few steps mentally removed from your average person was far more intricate and fascinating.
The only character that this arc manages to make better sense of is Mycroft to my mind: it works well to say that this version of Mycroft Holmes takes a more active role (rather than sitting on his butt in the Diogenes Club for all eternity) in the world around him because his little brother was traumatized by an event in his early childhood, and he decided to step up in order to shelter and protect Sherlock. But that still doesn’t answer any questions in regard to what Eurus’s goal was in all this. She played a remarkably complicated game of making friends with Moriarty, pretending to be Culverton Smith’s daughter and John’s therapist, all for the sake of getting Sherlock to Sherrinford in order to get him to solve puzzles and finally figure out the answer to her song riddle—why? Was he her favorite sibling, and she wanted his attention? Was she jealous of Sherlock having a best friend when she had none, and decided to rob him of another one? What was the ultimate goal of any of this? Because by the end of the episode it’s entirely unclear if Eurus has actually achieved anything she set out to do… or if that was even the point.
Also, apparently we’re still not going to talk about the fact that John flirted with her via text for… a while. Just really not going to address that at all, huh? Okay.
At least it was fun to see Jim Moriarty again, even in flashback. I’ve missed that guy. The videos got real silly after a while, unfortunately, so it wasn’t quite the party it could have been. His partnership with Eurus is pointless to the entire narrative, honestly. Not in a good red herring way, just in a well-that’s-one-way-to-excuse-a-seeming-resurrection kind of way.
And while most of those tactics in the puzzle maze of death where fun and clever when separated out from the central storyline, I’m pretty furious over how poor Molly was abused yet again. Why was she already upset before Sherlock called? Because if there’s something else going on in her life that’s sad, we deserve to know it. But if the point is that she’s just constantly depressed over Sherlock, then I’m going to head over and blow up 221B myself because Molly is a complete human being with wants and dreams and activities that do not always involve her pining after Sherlock Holmes and she deserves better than this. It’s been four entire seasons, come on. She’s allowed to move on no matter how much you need her to wring emotions out of your plot.
(By the way, does anyone believe that so many of their possessions and furniture remained intact after the explosion in Baker Street? I feel like most of their stuff probably melted, is all.)
And then we get that ridiculous button video from Mary at the end! WHEN DO THESE PEOPLE GET ALL THIS TIME TO RECORD VIDEO MESSAGES? IS THERE A SPECIAL PLACE YOU GO TO MAKE LIFE-AFTER-DEATH VINES AND YOUTUBE CLIPS? The video voiceover is supposed to be heartwarming, but it’s just not subtle enough. It’s like “hey, the showrunners wanted to write their own special outro to the story, but they had to use this dead woman as a mouthpiece, and it’s really awkward to hear these cute little cliches come out of her mouth.”
I’ll take it because all I really wanted to see was Sherlock and John solving cases while co-parenting Rosie, but… there had to be a better way to get that little monologue in.
Yet still with all that said, if all these people wanted to come back with another episode of Sherlock in five, or fifteen, or thirty years, I’d happily plop down in front of the television. It’s time to put this version of Holmes to bed for now, but I’ll miss it all the same.
Emmet Asher-Perrin did think it was cute that they were running out of Rathbone Place at the end. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr. Read more of her work here and elsewhere.
But you have to at least partly forgive any episode which has Mrs. Hudson vacuuming while listening to heavy metal. We need an entire show showing Mrs. Hudson living up life with Holmes and Watson just occasionally doing hjinx in the background.
The usual mix of cool ideas and impressive moments with totally overdone and implausible nonsense. Moffat and Gatiss would be better writers if they weren’t so desperate to show off how clever they can be at every turn. There’s a good character story at the core of this, but it’s just so overcomplicated. And the whole idea of Euros (that is how they were consistently pronouncing it, and they said it was Greek, so that’s how I’m spelling it) being such a supergenius that she could magically enslave people’s minds by talking to them for five minutes is just ridiculous. Although I guess it’s consistent with M&G’s approach of treating Sherlock’s deductive abilities like a superpower.
I’m not sure the missing-glass gimmick would actually be convincing. After all, there’d be no reflections of the kind that were quite visible once the glass was restored. And throat mikes aside, I’d think Sherlock should’ve noticed that his own voice’s echoes revealed he was in a larger space than it appeared.
Oh, and the whole “jumping out the windows barely ahead of the explosion” scene was every bit as ridiculous as the whole “Mary jumping at superspeed in front of a bullet” scene from two weeks ago. That close to an explosion, the pressure of the blast wave and the shrapnel would’ve killed them for sure. Plus, it was a really unconvincing composite shot. Not to mention that if a grenade blew up on the floor of Holmes’s flat, and it was so powerful that it would blow through the floor and endanger both Mrs. Hudson and the cafe two floors down, then how come we saw at the end that the floor and walls of Holmes’s flat were perfectly intact and only the furniture was ruined? That’s just cheating.
I kept expecting that Sherlock’s big coffin-smashing tantrum would turn out to be a ploy, that he’d used it as a cover for palming something, some piece of the coffin that he would turn into a lockpick or something. A bit surprising that it was just the genuine emotional moment it appeared to be. How rare for M&G to write a scene that doesn’t have some surprise twist meaning.
At this point in their careers, Cumberbatch & Freeman use better scripts than this to wipe their…boots.
The final DVD was so totally ham-fisted….gah. Can’t even talk about Molly.
I’ve banished this mess from my headcanon. As far as I’m concerned, the series was over last week: Sherlock said, “It is what it is” and the show ENDED RIGHT THERE.
I’m afraid after this one I was the dream-lady from The Princess Bride yelling “BOO! BOO!” at the screen. I love this show and I have been on board and sharing it with friends since the first day it aired in the States, but one viewing of this one was enough for me and I plan to skip it upon future rewatches. Well, maybe I’ll watch Jim get out of that helicopter, but that’s it.
I was pretty stoked after the reveal at the end of the last episode too, but if I wanted to watch a Saw movie I would do just that. Becoming parents have mellowed the cinematic tastes of my wife and I and we were both squirming through all the dog / kid murder stuff. Also a big thumbs down to the girl in the plane reveal. Ugh.
I was bummed that the Eurus / John scenes and the Molly / Sherlock scene had no payoff whatsoever. I kept waiting for John to be programmed by her somehow but nope, they just dropped that thread totally.
Ah well. One bad episode does not a series kill, even if it ends up being the very last one.
Here’s to teen Rosie putting the pair through their paces in a few years.
If Eurus is so bad at understanding people, how can she manipulate people at all? The suggestion is that she can persuade or brainwash, yet all we see is blatant threats, which she shouldn’t have ever had the power to back up. And how can she control enough people, for long enough, simultaneously, that she can get Sherlock, Mycroft and John shot with tranquilizers at once, yet no one turns around and tranquilizes her? Where did this uncle come from who originally locked her up, whose plan Mycroft says he continued?
The cast including Gatiss really do strongly pronounce it Euros, but the closed caption subtitles definitely all read Eurus, which is also acceptable for the specifically Greek god, both because it just is, and also because of Zeus, Menelaus, Odysseus, Patroclus, and so on. Google gives Eurus its due, Google ngram gives Euros the win, long before the spike in usage after 1990 when it comes to mean more than one Euro. The media are going with Eurus, probably as that was in their press packs.
@2 You pretty much summed up my feelings with your first paragraph. The show was very compelling at times, and there was some great acting, but torture-based stories like this leave me cold. I am more of a cosy mystery type of person, and as evil geniuses go, Eurus was totally over the top. Her persuasion powers belonged more in an X-men movie than a story set in the real world. The ending was nice, though, and if this is the end of Sherlock, they left it on a good note.
Moffat is such a magpie. In Eurus I saw bits of River Tam (genius kid sister), his own River Song (killer lets herself out of jail at will), Hannibal Lecter, and Sadako from The Ring. Others have suggested the Joker.
Headcannon – that prison was Azkaban, and Eurus was able to get the Dementors to do her bidding because it made people have intense feelings for them to feed on…
Mrs. Hudson’s taste in music was the single best thing in this hot mess of an episode.
I would watch the heck out of a Mrs. Hudson – Molly team up show.
The transition over the course of the series from spectacular films about solving intricate puzzles/crimes to a psychological drama was disappointing. What’s more it doesn’t feel necessary and the contortions of reality required to make this episode (and season really) work were too distracting. I’ll happily stay with Elementary at this point which most weeks still has somewhat interesting crimes to solve and the character arcs are very slow burns that don’t get completely in the way of the entire point of what a detective drama should really be.
That said, good performances from everyone and I’m not sorry to see it once. But once is enough. Any re-watching will be on the early seasons.
(By the way, does anyone believe that so many of their possessions and furniture remained intact after the explosion in Baker Street? I feel like most of their stuff probably melted, is all.)
Actually with Sherlock’s obsessive compulsive nature, I would imagine he went out and bought exactly the same furniture to replace that which was lost – that’s why we see Watson spray painting the wall and Sherlock shooting it – to get the flat back exactly the way it was.
I’ve just watched it for the second time and it actually made more sense – the basic story that she was just a damaged little girl who wanted someone to play with came across as moving rather than annoying this time around. Still had its faults though – but better the 2nd time around.
And also – did you notice Paul Weller as the Viking?
@6/del: Ah, I was wondering if the “Eurus” spelling came from the captioning. I find that captioning is often unreliable about spellings or unusual terminology. Over in the Batman Rewatch posts, there have been a few instances of the captioning getting some of Robin’s stranger “Holy ____” utterances wrong, like “Holy honey corn” when it was actually “Holy hunting horn.” And people in the English-speaking world do tend to be more familiar with Latin spelling and suffix patterns than Greek. So if it’s the captions that give the “Eurus” spelling, I wouldn’t trust them. Did anyone catch what the actual end credits said?
@12/shirbloke: Sure, they could replace the furniture, but having the floor intact contradicts everything Mycroft said about the intensity of the blast and the danger to Mrs. Hudson. The building’s very structure should’ve been so badly damaged that it had to be rebuilt. It would’ve taken a hell of a lot more than new carpet, wallpaper, and furnishings.
The credits on screen say “Eurus Holmes SIÂN BROOKE”
@15/del: Odd, then, that they pronounce it the way they do. Or odd that they’d spell it that way when they’re so clearly pronouncing it “Euros.” I mean, the other two siblings’ names have short O sounds in their second syllables; they aren’t Sherluck and Mycruft. So “Euros” would seem a better fit.
Perhaps they’re pronouncing it Euros as a comment on Brexit. Or maybe not.
@14 – Eurus clearly didn’t want to kill Sherlock and Mycroft – she wanted to play with them. If she can put together a drone and a bomb, she can make the bomb to the strength she wants – even if using elements to trick Mycroft into believing it is stronger than it is.
We see her do this several times – looking as if she will shoot someone, and actually tranquilizing them. She kills as she chooses, and deceives as she chooses.
@8 Del: I also saw a mixture of Acheron & Aeornis Hades from the Thursday Next novels.
I remember a bit in the first season when Sherlock was clearly disturbed at the thought that he might be a sociopath, and couldn’t see that feeling so worried over it meant he was not — a scene in a morgue where he and Mycroft discuss whether it’s possible or advisable for them to connect with people. Pretty good script, excellent acting, and camera work/framing/cinematography reinforced the image of an isolated Sherlock.
That was a hundred times more compelling than explosions, evil genius supervillain, puzzle maze, Trolley Problem games. And all the female characters get cheated.
@17/shirbloke: Are you making a pun on the plural of “Euro?” That’s not how they pronounced it — it’s “yew-ross.” Rhymes with Davros.
It was like the X-2 X-Men United movie. And that’s not a good thing. I wish I could put on Magneto’s helmet, walk up to the writers, and tap my head. The Office was the only show that got it right: Two seasons. The BBC should only ever do two seasons. They are incapable of good storytelling beyond the number two. Downton Abbey was a warning to us all. Fool me once…
I gave up on Sherlock when it became clear, at some point I don’t clearly recall, that the big reveal about Sherlock Holmes’s mental state wasn’t going to be that he had autism all along but nobody caught it because he didn’t fit the stereotypes (such as banging his head on walls) and also his family is highly dysfunctional. Basically I wanted him to get a therapist who had zero ulterior motives and start learning how to be more like the Sherlock in the books.
@21. ChristopherLBennet
Yes it was a bad pun on Euro I was going for.
I know many How I Met Your Mother Fans Who would disagree, but this finale wasn’t THAT level of bad.
It occurred to me that all that bit about Irene Adler last week was partly so we would know that Sherlock in no way, shape or form meant it when he told Molly he loved her. Just an extra twist of the knife for poor Molly, because we had been told that the only woman he might be interested in sure as heck wasn’t her.
@@@@@ 6 – Zeus and Odysseus are both bad examples of making it okay to change “os” proper nouns into “us” proper nouns because they’re both “eus” endings (third declension) in Greek, and in Latin actually have very different names (Jove/Jupiter and Ulysses). Menelaos and Patroklos (second declension, as is Euros) I’ll grant you.
Throughout the episode I couldn’t help but think of GLaDOS from the Portal games, both in terms of the problem-solving “tests” and Euros’ voice and behaviour. An inspiration, maybe…
Re: Euros – that name rang a bell and now I figured it out: Euros Lyn is name of a director of several episodes of Doctor Who, namely “The Empty Child” – you know, the first DW ep written by Moffat. So I´d say that Euros is correct spelling, I´d even imagine some conversation during the shooting, like this:
Moffat: Euros, that´s an interesting name.
Euros: It´s Greek. Means “The east wind”.
Moffat: That is sooo interesting. I´m gonna use that one day.
@11, couldn’t agree with you more about the transition from intricate puzzle/crime solving to bizarre and nonsensical psychological drama. It seems like the writers got tired of doing the same old hum drum mystery thing (or perhaps ran out of ideas) and tried to distract us with weird psychological/character dramatic twists, hoping to disguise the fact that the plot makes no sense.
Also, that jump out of the window was probably the most unblievable thing I´ve ever seen on TV. How come that the guy from “Scandal in Belgravia”, who was thrown from the same window, ended up in hospital with severe injuries, and Sherlock and John jumped out of the same window with explosion right behind them, from the first floor and probably rigt on Mrs. Hudson´s bins, too… and the next thing is – they became a pirates? Obviously, I thought that they are actually lying unconscious in a hospital and it is just a dream. It really annoyed me that the episode ended and apparenty it was all for real.
@28/Tessuna: Except that Euros Lyn is Welsh, and Euros (pronounced “ayr-os”) is a common Welsh masculine given name meaning “gold.” So Eurus Holmes’s name may well have been influenced by Euros Lyn’s, but Moffat and Lyn would not have had that conversation.
@31 ChristopherLBennett: Oh, thanks, I didn´t know that. Wrong deduction.
I’m afraid you haven’t thought this review through, and probably already have some regrets. It’s a better script than you gave it credit for. I do understand, though. The time constraints on a critic can get outrageous.
1. How could Eurus have accomplished so much in a 5 minute conversation? Obviously not all at once. Moriarty built his career on arranging the means for other people to commit their crimes. It would take less than 5 minutes to say, “Get me the means to talk with you more regularly. You know I’m worth it, because not only am I in a special facility for people too clever for a regular prison, but Mycroft Holmes just delivered you to me in exchange for me figuring out what he cannot.” After that, a bribe here, a blackmail there, and Eurus would have her own smart phone and access to the WorldWide Web. Since Moriarty would profit from collaborating with her on many a venture, he would pay her well, and after his death she could pick up where he left off, earning more ill-got cash, making all of the mischief in the show possible.
And it would tickle him to make videos and tapes for her now and then, a kind of hobby to pass time between crimes, over the space of five years. She doubtless never got a chance to use all of them.
2. Is her kind of Svengali power possible? Theoretically, yes. It’s not such a stretch, after all. Every day advertisers persuade millions of people to buy what they previously didn’t even think about, including products that they know are bad for them. Politicians get entire populations of total strangers to vote against their own best interests. Stage magicians base their careers on getting people to perceive whatever they want them to. And when it comes down to face-to-face manipulation, our prisons overflow with murderers whose late wives stayed with them despite increasing fear and violence. Let Eurus read up on psychology, illusionism, propaganda, hypnosis, and manipulation and she could take this a notch higher.
In fact, that was the point of the non-existent glass wall in the script–to show how easy it is to make people believe what isn’t true. From that clue you could deduce all the rest of Eurus’s manipulations.
3. Was she born evil? No. The writers did intend to show her as neuroatypical. She can’t sort out everything that she feels or experiences–she’s too dissociated from pain to realize when she’s damaging herself, and she can’t distinguish laughing from screaming. This would make empathy challenging, but that’s not the same as evil.
Her jealous desire to kill her brother’s best friend is actually normal for very small children, especially before they fully understand what death is. Fortunately most children don’t have the capacity to act upon it, or we’d see a lot more murder among the pre-acculturated.
However, nobody can become acculturated when shut off from the rest of humanity from early childhood. Uncle Rudy’s decision destroyed any chance she had of ever joining the rest of the human race, and left her wide open for evil–which happened to be the only game in town in Sherrinford. Given a breathing space, her mother could have figured out some better way to control her, being only slightly less intelligence and far more experienced. That was the greatest tragedy of the story–that well-meaning Uncle Rudy and Mycoft let fear deprive this child of her last chance. By now the best she can hope for is the consolation of family visits.
For the record a genius can as easily be a saint as a criminal mastermind. I know someone completely off the charts who feels fabulously in love with the human race. After all, we’re hardwired, when we become new parents, to fall in love with a creature having a brain the size of a tangerine. Symbolically the scriptwriters captured this in Sherlock transforming Redbeard into a dog: a creature of much lesser intelligence who nevertheless exists to be loved, and to provide a great source of comfort. Intellectual parity is overrated.
4. Did the scriptwriters intend to depict genius and evil automatically going hand in hand? No. The Holmes Brothers are not evil. Sherlock has done his best to suppress it and deny it, but he has quite a large capacity to care. Mycroft has worked harder to suppress his feelings, but while he can blithely kill people presented to him as mere statistics, so long as he doesn’t allow himself to think about them as individuals, he cannot kill face to face. He avoids human beings and tells himself that he’s no good with them precisely because he would care if they got too close. One point of Eurus’s experiments on her brothers was to try and discover what made them tick emotionally.
5. Are geniuses more prone to madness than other people? It depends. Creative geniuses are. 40% of all writers, artists, and musicians, successful enough at their craft to make their living by it, have at some time been so bipolar as to need hospitalized for a time–compared to 2% of the population. And 80% of all successful writers, artists, and musicians have a family member who has been hospitalized for bipolar disorder. I don’t know the statistics on schizophrenics off the top of my head, but a disproportionate number of creative geniuses are schizoid. And then there’s the correlation between systematic genius and Aspergers, so much so that people I know who have worked at Microsoft have called it “a sheltered workshop for the neuroatypical.” Many in the lower ends of genius are actually more stable than average, having the insight to work out their own problems, but the ceiling for maximum productivity seems to be around 160 IQ (the level of most Nobel prize winners.) After that you start to see diminishing returns. By the time you reach 180, you see poor work history and a whole lot of neurosis and PTSD, because when you perceive that intensely, trauma has a much greater impact.
6. Why does Euros have no clear-cut single motive? Because only 2D characters have a single motive for anything. Certainly not human beings. She loves and hates Sherlock. She hates him because she loves him. She wants him, she’s jealous of him, she wants to be his only friend, she wants to destroy him for loving others, she wants to learn how to love others, and she realizes that he’s her only chance of getting her soul back, but doesn’t know quite what to do about that, so she plays games and conducts experiments, trying to figure herself out as much as her brothers and her brother’s friend, by way of contrast. Don’t look for a rational explanation–she’s not rational. Intelligence and rationality are two separate things. Her intelligence has become the slave of her madness, her dissociated emotions and her need to connect to herself.
7. When did Mary make her tapes? Probably shortly after the wedding, while John was off on some adventure with Sherlock. She knew the risks of her past catching up with her and planned for that possibility, probably along with other contingencies. What’s so unlikely about that? People do it even when they aren’t living lives of crime. A friend of mine found a whole diary of her late mother’s, addressed to her, in case the woman didn’t survive her cancer. Mary’s life was at least as uncertain as a cancer-patient’s.
I hope this fills in a few gaps. I do agree that Molly’s misery needed more explaining. Perhaps a relevant scene lies on the cutting-room floor. And yes, rebuilding 22b stretched plausibility, but I suppose they thought that the fans would demand it, like replacing the Enterprise every time it blows up or crashes, rather than reassigning the crew to new ships scattered throughout the fleet.
@33/Dreamdeer: To your second point: Yes, it’s possible that some people could be manipulated by Eurus the way we were shown. But it’s absurd to claim that she could do it to every person who was left alone with her for even five minutes. Some people would be more susceptible than others, and she’d have to know them well enough to know what would affect them. It would take time to develop a relationship and win their trust, and she wouldn’t succeed with everyone. Most of the groups you’re talking about are either gullible and easily led or are choosing to play along for their own entertainment. Nobody actually believes stage magicians are doing magic; we choose to join in the conceit because it’s fun. And contrary to popular belief, hypnosis works much the same way. Hypnotized subjects’ brain activity has been scanned and determined to be indistinguishable from a conscious state. It’s essentially a voluntary entry into a hyper-relaxed and suggestible state of mind, a choice to surrender responsibility for one’s actions to a trusted other — similar to the state of self-abnegation sought by sexual submissives. Because it’s entirely voluntary, nobody can be “hypnotized” into doing something they don’t want to do. They just refuse.
And even so, not everyone can be hypnotized. My father tried it once when he was trying to quit smoking, and he just couldn’t get into a hypnotic state. Different people have different susceptibilities. So it’s absurd to claim that Eurus’s power could affect everyone exactly the same way. It’s just not possible.
To your third and fourth points, the fact that they portrayed a neuroatypical character as a murderous monster is exactly the problem. It’s hardly a balanced or sensitive portrayal. Having the most brilliant Holmes sibling be the most uncaring and deadly and the least brilliant one be the most decent one is just playing into a very old, ugly stereotype about genius.
Although you have a good point that being institutionalized so young would’ve only made things worse. It’s like how a lot of the behaviors that used to be attributed to autism are now understood to be more the consequence of locking autistic kids up in cold, sterile institutional environments.
To your sixth point, there’s a difference between a character being realistically complex and a character being incoherently written to fit the changeable whims of a writer. The problem isn’t that she had more than one motivation, it’s that she was presented inconsistently. For instance, as someone mentioned, if she can reprogram anyone she spends five minutes with, why was Watson unaffected by the hours she spent as his therapist? Why did she have to shoot him with a tranquilizer? It’s not the character’s rationality that’s required, it’s the reasonability of the narrative.
To your final point, my problem is not that 221B was rebuilt, it’s that its level of intactness before it was rebuilt was inconsistent with what was claimed earlier.
Re: Molly. On another site, they analyzed all those quick scenes at the end to show the future. Molly is seen with a big smile on her face as she walks toward the location where Sherlock is so maybe they do have a future. Also noted was Sherlock’s uncharacteristic grin when he’s shooting the wall in his refurbished flat.
Euros Lyn getting the Siân Phillips Award at BAFTA Cymru, presented by Russell T Davies, also Welsh. Bonus joke about the English.
The problem with Eurus seems to be that she was written as part of Sherlock’s characterization, but without characterization of her own. The writers were asking what made Sherlock (and Mycroft) who he is, and the answer was trauma brought on by a psychopathic sibling in early childhood.
But they forgot to ask “what would make a four-year-old child so mentally disturbed that she would be diagnosed with a condition that would get her institutionalized for life?” “She’s really, really smart” doesn’t work as an explanation on its own.
They also failed to consider what the normal means of treating a mentally disturbed four-year-old child would be – and “locked up for life” isn’t really plausible. Except, perhaps, as a study of the abuses possible with they type of political/governmental power that Mycroft (and his uncle before him) wields, to be able to bypass the protections of family court and child protective services (or the UK equivalent) and dispose of a child who disturbed them.
She also seemed to have no clear diagnosis. There seemed to be a congenital insensitivity to pain, (which is not the same as mental illness) as demonstrated by cutting herself to see how her muscles worked. But that would not lead to a lack of empathy, except perhaps that she’d have to be taught that others can hurt, and to be careful of her own safety and that of others.
And why did the parents just let the uncle take their child away? Even if they suspected that she’d harmed Sherlock’s friend, giving custody of her over to a relative seems a strange decision, as opposed to seeking counseling, the foster care system, etc. Didn’t they visit her, as a child, even after she was institutionalized? If they uncle said she was dead, didn’t they want a funeral?
The joke was that Sherlock’s parents were normal and loving, despite how Sherlock and Mycroft are. But it doesn’t fit with how they dealt with Eurus.
@37/Ursula: Good point about Eurus being an extension of Sherlock rather than having a characterization of her own. That’s pretty typical of how women on this show are written.
On the bit about cutting herself, I recall them saying that she had asked “Which one’s pain?” The impression I got was not that she was incapable of feeling pain, but that her perceptions were so heightened and she was experiencing so many different things at once that she wasn’t sure which one of them was the sensation that normal people characterized as “pain.” It was just one of the data streams she was processing.
As for Uncle Rudy, the implication seemed to be that he was in government, like Mycroft but with even more clout, and was able to circumvent laws and procedures for the sake of national security. I don’t think the parents were meant to be complicit. More likely that they were pressured and/or lied to. Maybe they were given a fake body to bury, even.
I thought Molly was having a bad day because she had the flu hence the soothing lemon and honey in her tea. She probably wasn’t even thinking of Sherlock until his phone call.
If Molly isn’t over Sherlock she’s going to have some much worse days after he basically invited Irene Adler to come join the gang for hijinks and/or shenanigans.
@38 – There is a difference between seeing characters through the lens of the show’s focus (which is on John & Sherlock) and the other characters not being well characterized.
We only see Mrs. Hudson in relation to John and Sherlock, as their Not-Housekeeper. But her characterization is there – a distinct past, motivations, and personality. When we see her expensive, fast car, it makes sense – of course she has money, given her past (drug cartel) and present (property in central London) and who she is (wild despite her demure exterior, ruthless enough to want her husband executed, clever enough to seem innocent despite her drug cartel connections.) Molly’s affection for Sherlock, her vulnerability, and her quiet competence, is equally well established.
Both have palpable lives off-screen and away from the central characters.
This over the top mess is so convoluted they’ve turned the entire Holmes family into some kind of Super-humans. Frankly I think the Sherlock set in present day NY with Jonny Lee Miller is much more true to the original Holmes.
@38 – As far a the parents go, they are absolutely responsible for Eurus being institutionalized. She is their child, and they have a specific responsibility to ensure that she is properly cared for. It doesn’t matter who “Uncle Rudy” is – they had an obligation to fight him if he tried to take their child and abusively isolate her.
There is no proof that the four year old Eurus killed Sherlock’s friend. No body was found, she never confessed at the time.
We have is the unsubstantiated claim that she did it – a task that would be beyond a four year old’s physical strength, to dump a child older than her in a well.
I’m more suspicious of “Uncle Rudy” – that he was abusing Eurus and Victor in some way, and came up with a story to control Eurus when he killed Victor with her as a witness. The abuse of her treatment after he took her is horrific, and suggests that he was abusive before. He certainly can’t be trusted to judge a child’s hidden actions or to recognize appropriate treatment. In addition, abusers are notoriously good at gaslighting, and convincing others that their victims are at fault.
Mycroft believed “Uncle Rudy” but Mycroft is a notoriously bad judge of character. (See his enabling of Moriarty.) Mycroft was too young to reach his own judgments or do anything about it at the time Eurus was taken. (He’s seven years older than Sherlock, Sherlock is one year older than Eurus, Eurus was four, making Sherlock five and Mycroft twelve at the time she was taken.) He inherited the situation along with “Uncle Rudy”‘s power, at some point later in life, and for whatever reason chose to believe “Uncle Rudy” about Eurus.
Believing whatever story “Uncle Rudy” gave to justify taking their child does not absolve the parents of their responsibility to protect their child from an abusive situation.
The story plays out better with Eurus a misunderstood child, perhaps with they physical disability of insensitivity to pain, as a victim of abuse by “Uncle Rudy” and trying to understand the surreal situation she has been forced to spend most of her life in.
@43/Ursula: “She is their child, and they have a specific responsibility to ensure that she is properly cared for. It doesn’t matter who “Uncle Rudy” is – they had an obligation to fight him if he tried to take their child and abusively isolate her.”
If they knew what was happening to her, yes. But that doesn’t mean they’d succeed. My impression was that, first, “Uncle Rudy” used his clout to get the child institutionalized, perhaps over the parents’ objections (or by manipulating them into agreeing to it), and second, he arranged to fake Eurus’s death, after which the parents didn’t know what was happening and thus were in no position to do anything about it.
“We have is the unsubstantiated claim that she did it – a task that would be beyond a four year old’s physical strength, to dump a child older than her in a well.”
I’d assume she manipulated him into climbing into the well himself, then maybe caused him to lose his grip, then left him there and didn’t tell anyone. Or maybe she talked him into climbing down a rope into the well, then untied the rope. There are a lot of ways that kids fall down wells. Just ask Lassie.
As for Mycroft, given his brilliance, I’m sure his judgment at age 12 was as good as, if not better than, the judgment of most adults.
@43 Ursula: Wow, that makes so much more sense! Thank you. It’s my headcanon from now on. Now if only I could figure out how to stomach that “jumped out of an exploding window and survived” nonsense, I may even start to like this episode a little.
@44 – Mycroft’s genius is “better than Sherlock at the Holmes family game of ‘deductions.'” That is not the same thing as being a good judge of human character.
Sherlock admits that judging human character/motivations is something he’s weak at. (“human, no, nature, no.”) Mycroft is, if anything, even more divorced from humanity. Mycroft doesn’t recognize the vileness of Magnussen, or the dangers of telling Moriarty about Sherlock. Mycroft knew all along who Mary was, and failed to warn either John or Sherlock. Mycroft thinks that somehow having Sherlock promise to leave a list of the drugs he takes is somehow a reasonable substitute for proper treatment of drug abuse and addiction. In this episode, he somehow thinks that introducing Eurus and Moriarty was somehow a good idea.
“Judgment” by itself has little meaning – a person can be a good judge of some things, and a bad judge of others. Mycroft is good at judging abstract logic and remembering esoteric trivia, and bad at judging human nature.
@46/Ursula: You said “too young to reach his own judgments.” I’d agree he isn’t necessarily the best judge of character, but I disagree that it has anything to do with his age. You yourself are saying that he’s just as bad at it as an adult. And there are other things that he presumably was able to judge on an adult level at the age of 12.
@47 – At 12 years old, Mycroft would have incomplete information, and even less experience judging people. For example, this parents likely would not have confided their fears around Eurus at that age. Their instinct would be to protect him. Plus, no matter how bright, a twelve year old is still immature, with a brain that is not fully developed, lacking the cognitive abilities of an adult with a mature brain.
So Mycroft’s “judgments” if any, would be based on incomplete information and less experience than even his known poor judgment of people as an adult.
And Mycroft gives no indication that he drew the conclusion that Eurus killed Victor. Instead, he talks about what “Uncle Rudy” did, and how he continued with that plan. “Uncle Rudy” whom we don’t know and have no reason to trust, who was trusted by Mycroft, whom we know is bad at judging people.
By the time Mycroft was an adult, with power to choose Eurus’s fate, Eurus had been locked up for at least a decade, probably more. Whatever happened as a child was lost to time, and the trauma of her mistreatment while institutionalized, an institution that is very much the worst of what they can be, not even the group homes and supportive care that is more typical in modern residential mental health care.
@@@@@ Ursula yes, but it could also be the best they had, mental health care isn’t good. Also, the way she is so detached could point to a mental illness as well as self-harming as she killed his friend, he found a skeleton. She said she felt lost and alone
I disagree with that – I think it was dealt with very well, people who are mentally unwell CAN feel lost and alone and it’s scary because it’s inside their head and they can’t run away from it.
@49 – Except that we know Eurus received no mental health treatment.
Mycroft ordered that she not be examined — let alone be diagnosed a treated. and he said he was continuing “Uncle Rudy’s” plan of action.
Instead Eurus had been kept in an isolated, low-stimulus environment since she was a small child. That is very far from mental health treatment by any standard, lent alone the best that could be done. After all, Sherlock and Eurus were children in the 1980’s, not 1880’s. An isolated, low-stimulus environment is known to cause mental breakdown, not treat it.
“Uncle Rudy” is implied to have the same (horrific) government power as Mycroft. They could have commanded the best possible care for Eurus. Instead, they locked her up at four years old and threw away the key.
That “Uncle Rudy” and Mycroft horrifically abused Eurus for decades is established beyond a doubt on-screen. Mycroft himself described the place of Eurus’s treatment as “hell.” That is no way to treat a small child.
The childhood events we saw could not have taken place any earlier than the 1980s. By way of example, my aunt had a mental breakdown at around that time. And even in the U.S., with no health insurance, no job, and no money to pay for treatment, she was professionally diagnosed. She had extensive treatment in the hospital. Then more treatment in a halfway house. support for finding a job, keeping the job, and getting an apartment of her own. Nothing like this was tried for Eurus. Even with all the resources Mycroft could command.
One last thought. Is anyone else wishing that Euros was actually Sherlock’s twin? Because of all of the disparaging comments he’s made about how “it’s never twins” over time.
Plus, just to hear Mycroft say “Euros… your secret twin” in the ominous way that he would.