Fridge Horror / Sherlock

Series One

A Study in Pink

• Although it seems to mostly be simply because he misses the action, the fact is that John, who is seriously depressed, has a loaded gun in the top drawer of his desk. Think about that for long enough and it becomes very disturbing. John is looking at having to move away from London. Mike says he knows John "couldn't bear" to live anywhere else... it's possible that if pushed too far John might have considered the gun as an alternative.
  • Let's think about the gun for a minute; He has this gun before he meets Sherlock, and it's technically an illegal firearm.^note  Handguns are very heavily restricted in the UK, and concealed handguns even more so. It's left over from his Army days, so why didn't he turn it in? He's not in danger or anything. Only conclusion of all of the facts: it was a last resort. John was, at least at one point in time, thinking about killing himself.
  • John's total and apparent unconcern for his physical safety during the meeting with Mycroft is pretty badass, but it may also indicate something very dark- that John is totally unafraid of Mycroft and his antics may be because he couldn't give a damn if Mycroft kills him. Or at least, that he would much prefer, say, dying gunned down in some warehouse in God-knows-where, in defence of some guy he's just met, than continue the completely dull and empty life that he had been living since his return from Afghanistan.
• The symbolism of John's possessions, or lack of them. He seems to own only his clothes (and John, like Sherlock, has a very limited wardrobe at that, no more than about half a dozen outfits), wallet, phone (which was a gift and not something he could afford to buy) a couple of books, a laptop, a coffee mug, a notebook and a gun. Presumably he sold or discarded a lot of his possessions upon being deployed- returning from Afghanistan with a very low income and a lot of personal problems, he's been probably financially unable and emotionally unwilling to gather possessions again. ^note  If he's in a flat he can't really afford, there would be no point in collecting things that would simply need to be moved again shortly, and which may not fit in new dwellings. The abrupt and violent end to his military career has left him with almost literally nothing. It's in stark contrast to the piles and piles and piles of stuff that Sherlock owns- so much that it clutters what's really a rather large two bedroom apartment.
• Sherlock comments that Harry's alcoholism is part of the reason John is estranged from her, but that it's "more likely" because she'd left Clara, who John seems to have fancied. (In his blog, Harry tells Bill that John can't be gay, because of "the way he used to look at Clara.") John does claim that he and Harry have never gotten on, so there may be a basic personality clash/family dynamic issues there to begin with, but blanking your sibling for leaving their partner is drastic and implies that either Harry treated Clara exceptionally badly and John wouldn't stand for that, or he was that into Clara that it more or less broke his heart when Harry left her and put distance between them. There's obviously something "big" behind the scenes to do with Clara. After all, since when have we seen John fancy any woman that much? In series 2 he goes through girlfriends at a rate of knots and flirts with anything in a skirt, but is never implied to have ever really been serious about anyone and no reference is ever made to him having a long-term relationship in the past. Bill teases him by calling him "Casanova" and tells Harry that John had a reputation for being a bit of a "dirty boy" prior to being deployed, which pretty much spells out lots and lots of casual sex. That he would be so upset about Harry leaving Clara, and wouldn't even answer Harry's texts or let her visit him for six months because of it, goes to show that whatever happened, John was devastated- far more than when Sherlock sabotages his own relationships.
• A throwaway line from Anderson reveales that some kids found Jennifer Wilson's body. Think about that: a group of kids came across a dead body in an abandoned building.
• There's an emphasis in the Brixton crime scene on how little regard Sherlock has for police procedure. Anderson has to specifically warn him not to contaminate the crime scene, and then he goes to view the body without wearing the protective gear meant to stop that from happening (it really doesn't take much to contaminate a crime scene- fibres from your clothing, stray hairs.) Given the events of the The Reichenbach Fall and Anderson speculating on how many crimes Sherlock could have committed it's horrifying to think how many crime scenes Sherlock might have contaminated by his disregard for the rules, and how many samples of his own DNA the authorities have been ruling out because, well, they're Sherlock's. That's a lot of DNA they're going to have to re-examine. Not to mention that Lestrade is going to be in dire trouble for not making Sherlock follow the rules in that regard before allowing him into crime scenes.
• It's been noted that although John is left-handed (in that he writes left-handed), he consistently shoots and throws punches with his right hand. It could be that he's simply cross-dominant. But it could also be related to being shot in the left shoulder, which may have weakened his entire left arm, making it easier (and in the case of shooting, more accurate) to use his right hand instead.
  • There may also be a (psychosomatic or otherwise) connection between the injury in his left shoulder and the tremor in his left hand. Although he loses the tremor, he may not have lost the impulse to use his uninjured arm/hand. This would tie in with Sherlock's assertion at the end of A Study in Pink that John was shot in the left shoulder. John says it's a "lucky guess", and it could be, but it's also very possible that Sherlock was deducing, not guessing. He had already noticed that John was left-handed. If he'd seen powder burns from the pistol on John's right hand, it would have been much easier to guess that there had been an "actual wound" and it was his left arm/shoulder. It also explains why Sherlock brings up the topic of the "actual wound" apparently out of nowhere- he's just noticed the powder burns and it's on his mind. John keeps his hands behind his back in front of the police; when he sees Mycroft he drops them to his side. As they leave Mycroft and go to cross the road, Sherlock glances at John, mentions something about Dim Sum, then launches straight into "You did get shot, though"- a topic change that takes even John by surprise in how random it seems. He's not used to the stealth Sherlock Scan yet.
• When the pink lady takes the bottle, there are three pills left and she takes one, leaving two. But when we next see the bottles, when the cabbie offers one to Sherlock, there's only one pill left. Why aren't there two? Because the cabbie's passenger from California is dead too, they just haven't found the body yet. And he fits the above profile of the other victims: who thinks they're better than other people more so than a tourist from Eagleland?
• One of the victims, Beth Davenport, only got into a cab because her friends, worried about her driving drunk, confiscated her car keys. It was also her birthday.
• At the beginning of A Study in Pink, Holmes is seen whipping a corpse. Molly tells him that the dead man worked at the same hospital, and she knew him and liked him. In The Great Game, we are introduced to "Jim from I.T." It's never explained which part of the hospital Molly's late colleague worked in, but it's not even remotely unlike James Moriarty to have killed him to create a job vacancy upstairs for "Jim" to walk into. Was "Jim from I.T" observing Sherlock from afar well before they officially "met" in The Great Game?
• John shooting the cabbie:
  • John responds to being called out on having just killed a man by smiling wryly, admitting it, and then justifying it because he wasn't a very nice man. He then starts giggling with Sherlock, changes the subject, goes out for dinner, and casually blogs about the whole thing later. Think about that long enough, and it becomes very unsettling. John has a lot of compassion for people he's decided are the victims of crime, but if he decides someone is the perpetrator, this polite, kind, decent, mild-mannered doctor will kill without hesitation, and then won't have an ounce of misgiving or remorse about it.
  • In the unaired pilot, he explicitly says that he'll sleep just fine that night.
  • When Sherlock reminds him, "You have just killed a man", for the briefest moment we see, not John's warm and genuine smile, but the pinched pseudo-smile from the episode's first half — the expression he gives to his therapist, to Mike Stamford on the line "Got shot", and to Mrs Hudson when he apologizes for exploding at her. This is the face of John's PTSD — and only a moment later, he sees Mycroft before Sherlock does. This is called hypervigilance, and is another symptom of PTSD.
    He [Sherlock] wasn't going to let this other arrogant, pompous psychopath win. Which is when someone shot the taxi driver. Someone like that's bound to have enemies so it shouldn't have been a surprise but I hadn't seen anyone shot since Afghanistan. It's something you never really get used to. That someone could have the power of life and death over someone else - but I'm glad whoever it was did it, because they undoubtedly saved Sherlock's life. And, frankly, after everything that man had done to those innocent people who got into his car, a quick death like that was better than he deserved.
  • Buckets upon buckets of Fridge Horror there: that John (who can't confess to shooting the cabbie, obviously) still has enough of his innate decency and humanity to be much more upset by it than he'd ever let on to Sherlock. Or to his blog, you get the hint that he's understating the feelings he "never really gets used to." And then summing it up with "better than he deserved" which, while arguably true, is both chillingly vindictive and oddly heartwarming- because he really did dispatch the cabbie in the quickest and least painful way possible, and probably never found out that in the thirty seconds or so it took the cabbie to die, Sherlock savagely tortured him for Moriarty's name.
• After Sherlock discovers it was John who shot the cabbie, John asks him "you were going to take that damn pill, weren't you?" Sherlock replies "of course not." It's fairly clear he's lying as the idea of him doing so is so absurd once the situation has passed, but John may have had a very serious reason for asking him- because if Sherlock wasn't going to take the pill, then John had just shot the cabbie for no reason. Of course, he was a psycho who had just killed four people. But as Sherlock pointed out to Lestrade, John wouldn't have shot someone if that was it. The only reason John fired is because he felt Sherlock was in immediate danger- danger that couldn't wait for the police to arrive. John was probably right in insisting that Sherlock is enough of an "idiot" that he really was going to take the pill, but he really, really needed just then to be reassured of it, for his conscience's sake if nothing else.
• Sherlock really puts his foot into it when he rhetorically asks John what he'd say if he were dying, dismisses his response of "please, God, let me live"- and then discovers that that's pretty much exactly what John did say, or think, when he was wounded in Afghanistan. But Sherlock doesn't just ask John what he'd say if he were dying. He asks what he'd say if he'd "been murdered." He'd earlier pointed out that the circumstances surrounding John's injury must have been traumatic- traumatic enough to cause psychosomatic pain. It seems that John wasn't just, for example, caught in crossfire. Someone actively, deliberately and personally tried to kill him.
• When deducing about who shot the cabbie, Sherlock casually admits to Lestrade that his confident attitude was a bluff; he was in danger after all.
  Sherlock: "He didn't fire until I was in immediate danger, though, so strong moral principle..."
• The cabbie only claimed that one of the pills was non-lethal. He might not have cared if he died, but if he was willing to kill to get money for his children, he would want to make sure he "outlived" as many people as possible. Sherlock really didn't have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving because he really had been outsmarted, because he had already been outsmarted about the way that they were going to try to outsmart each other. The con wasn't getting him to pick the wrong pill. The con was getting him to accept that the basic premise of the game was still being followed. The con was getting him to take a pill at all.
  • It also wouldn't have been surprising if all of the pills, across every murder and eventually Sherlock's contest, were all poison, and the cabbie had simply built an immunity to the particular poison he used before going on his killing spree. After all, it's more than possible to survive poisoning yourself with a lethal dose of cyanide or arsenic so long as you've consumed small enough amounts overtime to essentially teach your body how to protect itself from them.
  • The cabbie also has a serious vascular condition and is probably on medication that alters his blood chemistry. It could well counteract the effects of the drug he hands people. (Or it might just an overdose of the same medication as he's already on.)
• The cabbie had an aneurism in his brain for three years. Just take a moment to let that sink in: He was not only actively killing innocent people - figuratively speaking, he had a bomb in his head that could go off at any given moment and he decided to spent his last time on earth driving around in a busy city full of people than spend time with his family. What exactly happened to make him make that decision?
• When the two of them first arrive outside 221b. The able-bodied man rolls up in a cab, because he always takes cabs. The disabled one arrives on foot, having probably set out well in advance of the arranged meeting time (and who knows how far he had to walk?), because he can't afford a cab.
  • Fridge Tearjerker- when John is stranded in Brixton later, why doesn't he just call a cab from the crime scene to come and pick him up? Because he can't afford one, and has to attempt to get home on foot as far as possible instead. The fact that by the time Mycroft calls him, he is trying to hail a cab, kind of implies he was in serious pain by then and had little other choice.
• The murders in A Study in Pink start in October, at which time John is already in London and in therapy, and Sherlock and John meet in January. John was in London over the Christmas period, but his only family seems to be Harry, who he isn't speaking to. It's entirely likely that he spent Christmas on his own that year in that depressing, bare flat, still wounded and suffering from PTSD. Even worse when you see in A Scandal in Belgravia that John makes a pretty big deal out of the festive season.
• John's phone. He claims he has never gotten on with Harry; He won't speak to her, call her, answer her calls, answer her texts, let her visit him or even really answer her online comments to him. Nonetheless she gave him her old phone because she wanted him to keep in touch, and he's still got the phone. If he really had that much contempt for Harry he would have gotten rid of it. The fact that he still has and uses it is a Tear Jerker because it's probably a combination of things. First, he really does love and care about Harry and although he at first chooses not to contact her, he knows she's just a phone call or a text away if he needs her or she needs him. Secondly he's not in a monetary position to buy his own mobile phone. Thirdly, while Harry wanted rid of the phone because she left Clara and didn't need it for "sentiment", there may be "sentiment" in John keeping the phone, since he "liked" Clara, who originally gave it to Harry, and wanted something to keep that had some connection with her.
• Sherlock's claim that he doesn't want to use his phone to call the victim's phone, since the number's on his website and might be recognised. Sherlock is so desperate for validation- or at least human contact- that he put his real name, real address and personal mobile phone number on a public website. And to make it worse, throughout the first two seasons there's no sign, ever, that anyone has ever called him after picking his number off the website. Kirsty Stapleton used the website, but wrote him a message, and every single other client they have seems to be either a police case via Lestrade or someone who made contact through John and his blog.
• Sherlock's confusion when John refers to talking to "a friend" of his. The only "friend" Sherlock mentions having? The skull on the mantelpiece. He jokes about talking to the skull in public attracting attention, but considering that John's blog later claims Sherlock spent some time ranting about a case to a frozen turkey, it's entirely possible that before John came along Sherlock did spend a lot of his time talking to the skull, which just goes to show how lonely (and possibly unstable) he was. After all, the skull- unlike most, if not all of the actual living breathing human beings that Sherlock knows- wouldn't tell him he was a freak or a psychopath or a sociopath or a child or a lunatic. The skull also wouldn't care about his lack of tact and social graces, wouldn't criticise him or tell him to piss off. John really is probably the first friend Sherlock has ever had, and using the word "friend" sounds like it might be a big deal for him.

The Blind Banker

• A psychologist will note upon seeing John's row with the self-service scanner is somewhat common for people with PTSD to react especially badly to them, what with the unfeeling insistence of the machine and the pressure from the queue. It's Played for Laughs in the episode, but John's outburst may have been a function of his war trauma.
  • The Blind Banker takes place a month after A Study in Pink. John moved into Baker Street to save money. It didn't work. Despite the fact that his living expenses have now dropped, in the first few minutes of the episode it's highly implied that he's so broke he can't afford to buy food, let alone pay the rent or any other kind of bills. He's even desperate enough to begin to ask Sherlock for a loan, even though he's clearly humiliated by it. Since he refuses to go to Harry for help and doesn't make friends easily, it's unsettling to think of what might have happened with him if he hadn't met Mike Stamford completely by chance in A Study in Pink.
• John and Sarah were abducted on a busy street in Central London, while Sherlock (not to mention dozens of others) were only really a few feet away- and, apparently, nobody saw it. John was actually knocked unconscious in full view of anyone happening by, at the front door, and would have had to have been carried to a nearby car/cab in plain sight of anyone who happened to glance over. Sarah was probably unconscious as well. Sherlock was standing virtually right there on the street a couple of doors down from 221B and never saw or heard anything concerning. And worse, perhaps? Mrs Hudson was also home that night, and she apparently didn't see or hear anything either, even though John was assaulted and abducted several feet from the internal front door of her flat.
• We're shown John's reaction to Soo Lin's death, even though he was to some extent responsible, or perhaps because of this, he's devastated and then later, with DI Dimmock, angry and accusatory. ^note  Significantly, he describes Soo Lin as "a young girl." She's not that young- she's old enough to work in a museum- and John isn't exactly old either, but it's an indication of how he saw her- young and vulnerable and someone he needed to look after and didn't. Sherlock never comments on it. Yet twice at the museum, Sherlock had shown great concern for objects. He reveals where he's hiding to rebuke the gunman for shooting up the place when there were priceless ancient skulls on display, even using the expression "have a bit of respect!"- and earlier, when he startled Soo Lin and she dropped the teapot she was holding, he caught it, regardless of the fact that it was full of hot water. At this stage, while Sherlock has regard for friends, people he's close to, such as John and Mrs Hudson, he really shows he values museum artefacts over Soo Lin herself. He doesn't really know her, and cares little about her. More than anything, he seems disappointed that the one person they had found who could solve the mystery code was now dead.
• Despite knowing full well he has a day of work ahead of him, John stays up all night (for at least the second night in a row) with Sherlock helping him with the book code, and he's that exhausted at the clinic the next day that he literally falls asleep at his desk. This is somewhat Played for Laughs, but think about that for a second. This may not be heart surgery in the middle of an air raid, but a doctor working at a clinic like that would be diagnosing patients and prescribing medication. All an overtired doctor needs to do is absent-mindedly write "50mg" on a prescription when they meant "5mg" and you have the potential to kill people. John chose to stay up all night helping Sherlock when he could have said no, and then he chose to go to work when he knew he really wasn't up to it and could make serious, life-threatening mistakes. Rather frightening.
  • John's financial situation meant he had to go to work next day.

The Great Game

• The bombs get more and more damaging. First, a car park; Not very busy, but damaging. A busy street; Lots of people there. Then, an old lady in a block of flats; People lived there, it blasted through several floors, and everyone who lived in the flats would have kept all their possessions there. Then, a little kid who sounded about 5; You don't know where the kid is, but she sounded pretty terrified. Finally, the bomb was strapped to John, and Sherlock would have been caught in the blast.
• In A Study in Pink, Donovan tells John to stay away from Sherlock Holmes because "he's a psychopath. Psychopaths get bored." Two months later and John comes home to find Sherlock is firing a deadly weapon indoors. He demands to know what the hell Sherlock's doing. The answer? "BORED!"
• John's reaction when Sherlock starts speaking to him while he's beside the train tracks. Sherlock is actually some distance away from him, is not being threatening or alarming in any way, and while he was no doubt pretty stealthy, he's standing right there in broad daylight, with nothing to hide behind or conceal himself with. John is very, very startled and scrambles to his feet- an oddly vulnerable, fight-or-flight reaction from a man who barely blinks when he's held at gunpoint. John has nerves of steel- so long as he can see and hear properly and is not taken off-guard. This sort of overreaction to being startled can be a function of trauma/PTSD.
• It's hard to hear, but when John sees the news report at Sarah's about the explosion at Baker Street, there's a mention of a hotline to call, for family and friends worried about loved ones and wanting to track them down. Such a hotline would only be started if there were people involved feared or confirmed dead. This is a busy street in central London- and the explosion was so forceful that it blasted a huge crater in the building across the street, shattered the windows of 221B and knocked Sherlock onto the floor. It's very likely that people were hurt or even killed in that explosion. Even more—how about the restaurant?
• When Mycroft returns in The Great Game and asks John how living with Sherlock has been going for him, John's tense response is "I'm never bored." Mycroft returns with this obnoxious, ingratiating "Good, that's good, isn't it?" and a smug smile at him. It can take a couple of watchings to really pull the significance of what Mycroft's said out of his general smugness: "because we've established that when you're bored, you end up spiralling into depression and develop excruciating pain that limits your ability to walk."
  • It could also, thinking on it further, function as a defence of Sherlock in that respect, or a reminder that there are worse things than being "never bored." After all, they've just had a row bad enough that John preferred sleeping in his clothes on a sofa than sleeping comfortably in his own bed.
• Bomb victims:
  • When the second hostage (the young man in Piccadilly Circus) contacts Sherlock, he calls and apparently gets through to DS Donovan first, who pops into Lestrade's office with the phone and gives Sherlock a withering "Freak, it's for you." Despite being a police officer and not a complete idiot, she apparently missed that the caller was completely terrified and crying almost hysterically. Both before and after this, Donovan is seen to be concerned about the victims of crime (particularly the kidnapped children in The Reichenbach Fall) But here it seems taking a pot-shot at Sherlock was more of a priority. Either that, or the person who put the call through in the first place... wasn't the hostage. Given that she knew what had happened with the first hostage, it seems extremely cold of her to be more interested in calling Sherlock "Freak" to notice how distressed the caller apparently was.
  • On a similar note—that particular young man stood in the middle of Piccadilly Circus for hours, crying and terrified, and apparently not one of the hundreds of people who passed by thought to check if he was okay. And Moriarty would have banked on that.
  • This goes for all of the hostages (except John.) The woman from Cornwall sat in a car for hours in a busy car park, and not a soul noticed she was strapped to a bomb and crying (the bomb wasn't even hidden by her clothing or anything.) The young man, as mentioned, standing in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. The old lady, who apparently had nobody in her life who would have checked on her, called her or visited her, for twelve hours. And the little boy, who would have had to have been either kidnapped or unattended in the first place to have been found by Moriarty.
• A homeless woman asks Sherlock for spare change; when he asks her what she wants it for, she responds, "Cup of tea, of course." He hands her a fifty pound note along with (presumably) a note asking her to make enquiries after the Golem. She does, and later hands him back a note saying "Vauxhall Arches." Fine, right? Except, by her sarcastic comment about the cup of tea, she wanted change for either booze or drugs. Sherlock uses the Homeless Network to spectacular effect, but he's probably also supporting the alcohol/drug habits of other people's children in doing so.
• John is lucky that Joe Harrison was smart enough to heed his "Don't... don't" and not try to attack him when he walks into the flat and finds them there. There's no reason to believe that John wouldn't have shot him. And while Lestrade and Mycroft are both implied to be really good at turning a blind eye to both Sherlock and John's blatant disregard for the law, John would probably have found it difficult to explain why he and Sherlock had broken into Harrison's flat and ended up shooting him for no real reason. (After all, it's later revealed that West's death was an accident, and Harrison had done nothing with the memory stick, so his greatest crime is drug dealing- not exactly a saintly thing to do, but on par with breaking, entering and then menacing someone with an illegal firearm.)
• Professor Cairns was killed because Sherlock and John didn't arrive at the Planetarium on time. They didn't arrive at the Planetarium on time because they were mucking about at Vauxhall Arches. And they were at Vauxhall Arches because Sherlock arrogantly refused to listen to John trying to tell him about Woodbridge's astronomy hobby. Sherlock's actions, or lack thereof, directly caused the death of someone who was totally innocent.
• Similarly, the little boy almost died because of Sherlock's next to non-existent knowledge of astronomy, which Moriarty had to have read on John's blog.
• When John suddenly grabs Moriarty during the pool scene, watch Moriarty's face. He's genuinely surprised. What does he say? "Good. Very good." He's just realised that he's underestimated John, and is probably already devising new and evil ways of using John's loyalty against Sherlock in the "something special" he is saving up for him.
• The scene where John comes out by the pool and Sherlock thinks he's Moriarty is a lot more horrifying in hindsight. John, who underdresses most of the time, is wearing a winter coat. He's blinking out SOS, which is exactly what a soldier would do in a situation like this. There's probably a million other little clues that Sherlock could have picked up on. But Sherlock's scanning system completely shuts down, even though it's implied to be instinctive. That's how badly he was rattled by John's supposed betrayal.
• While the series never reveals what happened between John leaving Baker Street for Sarah's flat and Sherlock arriving at the pool some hours later, John later blogs a basic outline — he was bundled into a car and knocked unconscious — but most of the details are missing. It was clearly extremely traumatic for him; in terms of his blog, he posts that he took some time away from guns and bombs and maniacs after that incident. In the actual series itself, the effect that being Moriarty's hostage had on him is hinted at earlier than the trial. When John intercepts Jim's text on Sherlock's phone during The Reichenbach Fall, and tries to bring it to Sherlock's attention, he looks like he's about to pass out. Not a reaction we've come to expect from someone who developed a hand tremor because he missed being in constant danger. It's highly implied that there are some details of his hostage experience prior to Sherlock appearing that he's unwilling to share, because they are really bad.

Series Two

A Scandal in Belgravia

• At the beginning of the episode, while they're still at the pool, Sherlock looks to John, who gives a curt nod, before shifting the aim of the gun from Moriarty to the bomb. John's just given Sherlock permission to kill them both — after having been in fear of dying for some little time — if it takes out Moriarty, too.
• Archer's threat to shoot John is all the more powerful because it really does seem that they would have done it. The CIA need Irene because she knows how to get into the phone. They need Sherlock because he knows how to get into the safe (or so they think, anyway.) Why would they need John? No reason at all.
• John's expression when he's awaiting execution at Irene's. Keep in mind he's had a gun to his head for the entire scene so far, and he's been fairly unbothered by it, even snapping at the CIA to ask Irene if they want the code to the safe so badly. But then, Mr Archer is ordered to shoot him and he suddenly looks terrified and blurts out "WHAT?" He's been threatened with death on a number of occasions by now. But this is the first time he's had to sit through a countdown while Sherlock, the man who has saved his life before, is insisting that he doesn't know the code and can do absolutely nothing to prevent the upcoming execution. John has his head down and apparently can't see what's happening- but he can hear how desperate and genuinely terrified Sherlock sounds.
• When Sherlock wakes up still very groggy after being drugged, John's been there the whole time watching over him, getting him back into bed, etc. Remember that his sister is an alcoholic? He's done this before... Maybe many, many times. That's probably why he seems so matter-of-fact and slightly unsympathetic about it.
  • Another similarity is that at the time at least, he probably cared deeply for his sister, too. In other words, this evening is bringing back some bad memories for John. And, if Mycroft has already shared his concern about "danger nights" and is getting him to pull surprise drug busts when Sherlock is away, guess too times what must be going through John's mind. Something like, "God, this is Harry all over again" is rather likely.
• When Sherlock first met John in A Study in Pink, he warned him that his worst habits were playing the violin while thinking, and sometimes not talking for days on end. When did he do this to excess? During his borderline Heroic BSOD between Christmas and New Year, after finding out Irene was "dead." Ordinarily and elsewhere, Sherlock has admitted "I like company when I go out, and think better out loud...". The exact behaviour he warned John about doesn't make an appearance for an entire season and when it does, it causes John to seriously worry about his friend. If Sherlock had been doing a lot of silent violin-playing on his own just prior to John moving in, he was probably just as lonely and depressed as John in his own way.
• On New Year's Eve, during the conversation Sherlock and John have about his composing and the "faulty" blog, Mrs Hudson rather despairingly removes two plates of food; John's virtually empty and Sherlock's one untouched. John later tells Irene that Sherlock isn't eating. He found out she was "dead" on Christmas Eve. It's highly possible that Sherlock hasn't eaten anything at all in an entire week. No wonder John was so worried about him; he was on a fast track to making himself seriously ill, and that's if he wasn't also doing cocaine...
• It may be that when John is approached by a strange, beautiful woman standing outside his door, he initially assumes that she's a prostitute. ^note  And hey, she works for Irene, which means she may well be a sex worker of some description. She asks what he's up to on New Year, and he responds by asking what she had in mind, which all sounds very much like a PG rated proposition. If this was the case, it would show that John has been emotionally tense over Sherlock's moping around to a point where he's willing to abandon his friend for a random prostitute.
• After Sherlock is tricked into giving out information that compromises a government scheme to foil a terrorist plan, Irene attempts to blackmail Mycroft with the information on her phone. However, after watching a second time, it becomes clear that she isn't just blackmailing him using the information on her phone; she's blackmailing him using Sherlock, who would likely be arrested for treason if it was revealed he had compromised government security and given top secret information to terrorists.
• Irene breaks into 221B twice; the first time while Sherlock is unconscious in bed and would have been totally unable to defend himself if she had tried to hurt him further or just outright kill him. John, very close by in the next room, had no idea she'd even been in Sherlock's room. Given that she had no qualms in whipping Sherlock and drugging him, he got off lucky. Although she considers that more or less foreplay, she still had ever reason to make sure Sherlock would leave her phone alone, and Sherlock was totally at her mercy regardless of what she chose to do.
• While the scene was supposed to be funny, once this bit of dialogue sinks in, it becomes rather unsettling.
  John: [with Sherlock in a sleeper hold] Remember, Sherlock, I was a soldier, I killed people.
  Sherlock: You were a doctor!
  John: I had bad days!
• When Mycroft tells John that Irene is dead, John asks if he's sure, and Mycroft says he is, because he "was thorough, this time." This time? It's possible that he only meant he'd thoroughly checked that the dead woman was actually Irene, but the way he says it makes it sound as though he had something to do with the dead woman at the morgue at St Bart's; that is, he tried to have Irene offed and somehow got the wrong person, and the later Karachi incident was also a hit by the British Government.
• So Sherlock first meets Irene and spends what must be less than an hour getting to know her before she drugs him and leaves. As far as the audience knows he never sees her again for the next few months and is only contacted by her via her texts. Still, in that short amount of time he was able to care enough about her for the thought of her death to send him into a Heroic BSOD. One that causes him to become horribly depressed, refuse to eat and worry his friends to death that he might be doing drugs or harming himself. Again, as Mycroft says, he "barely knew her" but it was enough to upset him this much. Now try to imagine what sort of state Sherlock would be in if one of his "real friends", aka the people he's grown close to over several months and who clearly love him back, were to die.
  • Or even say, for whatever reason, some event forced him to stay away from his friends and probably never see them again, leaving him all alone without any emotional support.
• John knows that Irene has texted Sherlock at least 57 times in the space of a few months- but he's pretty much gobsmacked when he finds out that the texts were flirting. It's entirely possible that part of the reason he was so concerned about the 57 texts is because he thought they might be threatening Sherlock- after all, it seems that Sherlock was becoming increasingly agitated by the flood of texts from Irene, and the last John saw of the woman she'd drugged Sherlock and beaten the hell out of him with a riding crop.
• Sherlock tells Mycroft to lock Irene up if he's feeling kind toward her, because he doubts she'll survive for long without her "protection" if she's at liberty. Irene tearfully agrees that she won't last six months and begs him for mercy. We see later that Mycroft lets her go, knowing full well that someone was going to kill her.
• At the Christmas party, Sherlock is told by both John and Lestrade to, quote, "shut up." He butted into a conversation about Harry to abruptly tell John she was still drinking; he knows this is a sore point for John but still expressed it as "nope!", whereupon John uses easily the most vicious tone of voice with him for the entire episode. He then gets told to "shut up and have a drink" by Lestrade, who is trying to stop him from humiliating Molly. So he deserves to be told to shut up. Except that Sherlock seems as yet to honestly have no idea that he's being totally inappropriate. Two of his best friends in the entire world (and he doesn't have friends to spare) have just publicly told him to "shut up" (quite a harsh, demeaning phrase) and he has no idea why. No wonder he hates social events like "Christmas drinkies" and spends most of the scene almost literally hiding behind a computer screen. Sherlock has probably spent most of his life being told to "shut up" and not understanding why he should shut up. He really does need John or someone else to give him pointers like "no, Sherlock, that was not kind."
• John mentions during the Christmas sequence that he's going to spend Christmas Day with Harry. But later that night Mycroft orders him to stay by Sherlock, and the impression given is that he does so for an entire week. It's only barely touched upon in the series- A Scandal in Belgravia is the first time we've heard a mention of Harry since A Study in Pink- but there's a strong story there in the expanded universe of the blogs. At the beginning John was completely ignoring Harry's comments on his blog, wouldn't call her, wouldn't answer her calls, wouldn't answer her texts. Just before the events of The Great Game she asks if she can visit, and John cruelly suggests that when he's not so busy they'll 'do drinks.' After nearly being killed by Moriarty, John spends the rest of the year gradually warming up to his sister. He starts answering her texts and her blog comments. In August she has a failed attempt to stop drinking, and when she falls Off the Wagon one night and seems to be posting drunk, John immediately and gently tells her he's on his way to see if she's okay- at midnight. By September (when Sherlock and John first meet Irene) Sherlock deduces John hasn't called his sister- which implies that he does do so on the odd occasion now, or it would be a given, not a deduction. And finally, by Christmas, John and Harry are at the point where they're going to spend Christmas Day together like civilised people. Sherlock tells John that Harry is still drinking; John tells Sherlock to shut up, which is surprisingly vicious of him. And then? Sherlock has a danger week, and John probably never did spend Christmas with his sister. Extra sad when you get the impression that while John has Sherlock and Lestrade and everyone else in his circle, Harry may well have nobody. She and John certainly don't seem to have any other family.

The Hounds of Baskerville

• When Sherlock denies having "friends", at first it just seems like he is lashing out in the midst of a panic attack. But we later learn that he'd been drugged with a chemical that played on his greatest fears. Seeing the hound itself wasn't so much a fear as just seeing the hound, which all logic states should not exist, and thus made Sherlock doubt his own mind. But that was only part of it. The fear wasn't just playing on him doubting his own genius but also doubting that John was his friend even though we've seen him verbally acknowledge John as such a few times in the show so far. We know that his so-called "friends" at school actually hated him and both Mycroft and Donovan point out in the first episode that Sherlock "doesn't have friends". It's possible that this fact has been rubbed in his face all his life and, even now, a part of him doubts that John really likes him as a person because so few people have. It's essentially him sadly admitting that he is a freak who has no friends as everyone says.
• During the last sequence in the Hollow, Sherlock realises that the drug is in the fog. Lestrade is the only one of them to do the most sensible- if ineffective- thing, and starts breathing into his sleeve. Later, Bob Frankland is the only one who points out the obvious- that they should shoot the hound that is threatening them all- and Lestrade, not John, fires first. Why? Because Frankland and Lestrade have only just arrived and are less drugged and more rational. Although John is the one who actually hit the hound, he seems to have been too dazed to think of firing before Lestrade did, even though he already had a gun in his hand. And all of this makes perfect sense when you remember that the drug was designed as a weapon that would get enemy soldiers to panic in the face of danger and be unable to fight back or defend themselves. Someone standing stock-still and having a screaming meltdown, as Henry is, would be a very, very easy target in a combat situation.
• Judging from Sherlock and John's conversation in the graveyard, they hadn't spoken to each other since John had left the pub the night before. It's possible that either one of them or neither of them slept in their room at the inn the previous night to avoid each other ^note  though they're both wearing different clothing to the night before. When they see Lestrade for the first time, the clock on the wall says it would have been about ten to midday when Sherlock finally finds John and decides to try to "break the ice." That's a long morning of not speaking to each other, particular on John's part. Sherlock's been around to Henry's, but it's implied that John has simply been moping about on his own all morning. He's in a strange village and knows pretty much next to nobody. Few things suck quite as much as falling out with someone in a strange place and finding yourself more or less on your own.
• When John was drugged with a hallucinogenic that induces fear and locked in a lab, he starts to panic at the bright lights, and the piano music that began after his nightmare in the beginning of A Study In Pink began playing. In all likelihood, John was having a PTSD response to the drug even before he hallucinated the hound. And the worst part, Sherlock engineered it to test out his theory of the drug being in the sugar!
  • John is flooded with bright lights and loud noises, and then abruptly deprived of both. It's not totally obvious from the audience's point of view, but for at least some of that scene, John would have been next door to completely blind, and probably had ringing ears/trouble hearing accurately too. Now have fun imagining what it would have been like for him, stumbling around in the dark trying to use a torch to work against night-blindness, and trying to judge what he's hearing through ringing ears.
• John's last resort is to lock himself into one of the cages. If there had been a literal hound it would have been the only thing he could really have done, and if said hound had been intent on attacking him, it wouldn't have been any protection, considering that it had apparently been able to break out of one of the cages.
• When John is finally freed in the above scene, Sherlock tells him that they've all been drugged. He then asks John if he can walk. John's response is that of course he can, and he does, though he's as white as paper for the next two scenes and it takes him ages to get himself back together properly. The fact that Sherlock asks if he can walk either indicates that he thought John was so traumatised he was virtually going into shock right there on the spot, or, even more chillingly, he could possibly be aware that John's PTSD may have been triggered, to the extent that his psychosomatic leg pain may have shown back up again.
• When Sherlock goes to test the sugar, in light of what happened to both John and himself, he's sure he's right. When the sugar turns out to be perfectly all right, he reacts by smashing the slide in a fit of rage. This is obviously out of character; not only have we never seen him behave like that before, but John, who by now deals rather calmly with Sherlock's behaviour, responds by flinching, ducking and giving an alarmed "Jesus!", even though Sherlock threw the slide in the opposite direction to him. ^note  Remembering, of course, that John could still be coming out from under the influence of the drug and therefore a bit more sensitive to violent theatrics on Sherlock's part than he usually is. One of Sherlock's first observations about John is that he has "nerves of steel", but not here. Sherlock is convinced that narcotics are behind it, but since he was not in the lab with John, he had no idea that he had been exposed to the gas until the end, where he has to deduce it. There are only a couple of conclusions that Sherlock could draw from the sugar being fine; one of them was that John wasn't drugged at all, and so his terror was entirely induced by outside influences- that is to say, by the set-up Sherlock had used. To wit: Sherlock's rage may have been partly because he was having to face the possibility that he'd just traumatised John for absolutely no reason. ^note  It's perfectly possible for ordinary, mentally healthy people to hallucinate under the right stimulus- and Sherlock pushed all of those buttons with John in the lab. Sherlock had a flash of seeing the hound for a few seconds, out of the blue, with no real set-up. John was systematically terrified over a greater length of time, and had to be almost coerced into admitting that he'd seen the hound.
• Sherlock's meltdown was not simply fear of the hound, it was because he was seeing something that didn't make sense and was worried he was losing his mind. When John "sees" the hound, it never for one solid second occurs to him to question whether the hound is real or not; when Sherlock finally arrives to rescue him, virtually the first thing out of John's mouth is astonishment that Sherlock didn't see the hound, since he was so convinced it was really, physically there. Sherlock may not be highly suggestible, but John may well be- either that or he trusts his senses so much that he's prepared to trust them even if they contradict his intellect.
  • On the other hand, Sherlock himself is facing the fact that he did see a hound, and if he hasn't been drugged, then he's either mentally ill or he's so highly suggestible that he couldn't possibly function any further as the world's only consulting detective.
  • When Sherlock first sees the hound, what he's actually seeing is a vicious black dog, and his drugged mind added on details making it more vicious, and much bigger, and adding the glowing red eyes. When John sees the hound in the lab, what he's actually seeing is presumably absolutely frigging nothing at all. His mind created that from scratch.
• So much of the emphasis during the scene with John and Sherlock by the fire is on Sherlock's fear that John's lines can be overlooked altogether, at least initially. They appear to be chatter to try to ignore the fact that Sherlock is really unnerving John by being so wired. However, if Sherlock had been in a position to listen to John, the case could have been solved a whole lot sooner. Many of John's suggestions are dead on or at least huge, broad hints. He describes Henry as "manic", which hints at someone deliberately trying to break him down mentally, astutely points out that there is no reason for there to be a secret mutant super-dog,, introduces the idea of the Morse code (which Sherlock is too upset to realise is helpful until the next day), gives another broad hint in that they all heard the dog and saw footprints, indicating that something real was out there, and then puts that idea together with "Maybe we should just look for whoever's got a big dog." The pieces were all there, but Sherlock was incapable of putting them together, something he frequently accuses John of not being able to do.
• We have now seen what Sherlock is like going cold turkey from cigarettes. Now imagine what he'd be like on something like heroin. No wonder Mycroft is so desperate to keep him clean. And also consider that drug and nicotine addiction is basically Sherlock self medicating to stop himself becoming completely and perhaps dangerously erratic when nothing interesting is going on.
• Look at Stapleton's face when Sherlock shows her the word "BLUEBELL." She's alarmed, bordering on scared, and it's probably not just because she made the kid's rabbit glow in the dark and then had to unfortunately get rid of it. She blurts out "have you been talking to my daughter?" Imagine how she must have felt being confronted by a tall, dark, slightly creepy stranger who has apparently been in contact with her eight year old daughter without her knowledge. He recognised her as Kirsty's mother by their surname. For all Dr Stapleton knows, Sherlock could be anybody, including your typical internet chat room creeper pretending to be a nine year old girl making friends.
• On the subject of Kirsty Stapleton: there's something deeply disturbing about Dr Stapleton's daughter having a cute little bunny named Bluebell while her mother spends all day experimenting on animals- including rabbits. The glow-in-the-dark rabbit seems to be a fairly harmless and non-cruel thing to do, but Stapleton hints darkly that all sorts of horrifying stuff is going on at Baskerville and that much of this horrifying stuff would include their experiments on rabbits, monkeys etc. At eight years old, Kirsty probably has no idea what her mother actually does for a living.
• Sherlock reassures John that the effect of the drug isn't permanent and they'll both be fine. But what about Henry Knight? He's been dosed with it regularly for twenty years. We know he left Grimpen for a time and came back, but it's not clear how long this was for. Throughout the episode he shows distinct signs of being very unstable (random flashbacks, crying jags, manic episodes, not sleeping), very paranoid and suggestible even when he's not breathing in the gas at the time (floodlights scene) and having fits of uncontrollable aggression (attacks his therapist.) All symptoms of prolonged use of the hallucinogen. Finding out the truth about the hound was no doubt helpful to him mentally, but he's heavily implied to have permanent mental damage from years of being drugged without his knowledge.
• Look at the difference in the looks on John and Sherlock's faces when the mine goes off. Sherlock is clearly shocked, John much less so. That was not the first time John saw something like that happen to a man.
• There's a faint implication of Fridge Horror here in John's interaction with Henry. John too has been in therapy after experiencing trauma, and may also have had periods of questioning his own memory and reasoning- after all, he had a psychosomatic limp, but the pain was very real to him, so he understands that there's sometimes a difference between an established empirical fact ("there is nothing physically wrong with your leg") and the reality for an individual ("but nonetheless your perfectly normal leg causes you agony and you can't walk without a cane.") Later we discover that Sherlock has never before doubted what his intellect and senses were telling him, which partly explains why he's so dismissive of Henry's mental state- he simply can't empathise.)

The Reichenbach Fall

• The sniper for Lestrade is one of the police department staff. Sheer horror but not surprising when we know that Jim has had access to the security men of the most secured places in the UK before.
• Sherlock's expression when he sees "IOU" on the windows at Scotland Yard. He'd been quizzical about finding "IOU" in the apple at Baker Street, and we don't outright know if he even saw it on the wall outside when he's later fleeing the police. But his expression here is fear and sudden comprehension. He's no doubt realised what this "IOU" means; it's a threat against Lestrade, who is calmly talking with John just behind him and has no idea that he's now one of Moriarty's targets. This goes a long way to explain why, later, Sherlock seems to know, before being told, that Lestrade is one of Moriarty's targets. The other two instances of "IOU" were in or close to Baker Street; it would be easy to guess that these meant John and Mrs Hudson, who had both been used as collateral against Sherlock before. In-universe, Sherlock has only known Lestrade's first name for a few weeks, and probably doesn't really consider him a "friend" so much as a "colleague." His expression when he realises that the Scotland Yard IOU is a threat to Lestrade may also be him realising that Lestrade is his friend, and that he cares about him.
• When Sherlock is thrown into a jail cell for contempt of court, the wardens who take him there roughly shove him through the door. They don't seem to shove Moriarty in the same way, and in fact earlier had permitted him to chew gum in court, something most judges consider to be contempt of the highest order and won't tolerate in their courtroom. Either it's setting up that the world and the justice system were already against Sherlock or, worse, it might indicate that everybody involved in that trial was threatened or paid off, from journalists and bailiffs to the judge himself.
• Why is Lestrade's reaction to the prison break-in a mild "oh no" instead of a stronger word, rather understandable given the situation? He deals with Sherlock Holmes on a daily basis. This is a man who is an expert at keeping his cool.
• So it seems that Mycroft feels guilt over Sherlock's death for inadvertently aiding Moriarty; John feels guilt over Sherlock's death for abandoning him in the lab. What about Lestrade? If his actions (or lack thereof) when Sherlock takes John "hostage" are indeed him trying to help Sherlock and John escape, then he must be carrying around huge amounts of guilt over Sherlock's suicide. After all, in hindsight it's not going to take the police long to figure out that the case against Sherlock really doesn't hold up. If Lestrade had made more of an effort to bring Sherlock in, or keep him from escaping in the first place, Sherlock might have had to face a kidnapping trial, but he'd still be alive. Of course, Lestrade has no idea that he was one of Moriarty's targets. So far as he's concerned, someone who should have been in his custody and who wasn't because he helped him escape then went on to commit suicide. That would be a disaster even if Sherlock and John were strangers to him, much less his friends.
• On discovering that he had been deliberately sent away from Sherlock, John immediately doubles back to St. Bart's, but throughout the whole trip there in the cab, he apparently never tries to call Sherlock's mobile phone. Sherlock calls him. This seems to indicate that while John had no real idea what was happening, he suspected Sherlock was in serious danger and his phone ringing would distract him or put him in worse danger.
• Lestrade's involvement in Sherlock and John's arrests may not simply be his following orders from the Chief Superintendant. Any officer could have made those arrests. Lestrade is once again taking responsibility and may be involved as a way of protecting his friends. As a rule, police officers don't treat people who assault or kill one of their own particularly well. And they certainly don't treat people who hurt children very well. Given that these cops already don't like Sherlock and already seem convinced of his guilt, it wouldn't be surprising that the only thing separating Sherlock from intimate acquaintance with a phone book down at the station is Greg Lestrade.
• At one point between The Hound of Baskerville and The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty hacks John's blog and leaves a video of him simply walking into the flat while they're not home and filming their stuff. It's quite chilling as it is, but then think about it from the point of view of someone who thinks Moriarty was hired and Sherlock was a fraud/psychopath: how did Jim get into the flat? Sherlock arranged for him to get in and also arranged that he and John would be out at the time. And then, how did he hack John's blog? Sherlock had already shown on many occasions that he could and in fact frequently did use John's computer by getting past the password protection. It would be child's play for Sherlock to "hack" the blog, especially if John's blog remembers his password.
• We see that Moriarty ensured an acquittal by threatening the head jurywoman's children. The eldest two children are the slightly older versions of the two in the cabbie's photograph in A Study in Pink, and although the mother had been cut out of that photograph you can still see some of her, and... it's her. Her ex-husband was the cabbie in A Study in Pink. She now has a young baby, implying she'd gotten on with her life after divorcing the cabbie and may have remarried, and now Moriarty's threatening all her children.
• Jim's first text to Sherlock tells him to "come and play- Tower Hill." Tower Hill is a traditional place of execution: hundreds if not thousands of people over centuries. Sherlock would know that, and would probably have realised with a message like that that Jim meant to kill him this time around; this was the "something special" he'd promised he'd been saving up.
  • Fewer than 100 were executed at Tower Hill. And only 22 executions inside the Tower.
• Sherlock could not possibly have been able to guarantee that Jim would want him to kill himself by stepping off the building. Jim had a gun on him. He could have simply handed it over and ordered Sherlock to shoot himself... he got lucky when Jim chose the obvious option. Jim tells Sherlock that his problem is he "always wants everything to be clever." This from the man who has spent three months organising a massive persecution of Sherlock and an elaborate scheme to force him to commit suicide by stepping off a building—thus giving him a glimmer of hope and some faint but real chance of controlling the situation. Jim's plan failed because he didn't just go for the simple, effective method to kill Sherlock. He couldn't just shoot him—he wanted it to be clever.
• It's been noted that Irene seemed to sexually intimidate Sherlock, who appears on some level to actually be afraid of sex. In their first scene together, Kitty isn't just trying to dominate or bully Sherlock into giving her a story; she's sexually intimidating him, by cornering him in a men's bathroom, invading his personal space, being creepy, and asking him to sign her shirt on her cleavage area (translation: "look at my boobs.") This wouldn't necessarily intimidate every man, but remember that Sherlock is spectacularly ignorant about ordinary social interactions. He's probably still a virgin with zero sexual experience of any kind, and precious little practice in the art of flirting/romantic interaction. Picture the scene with their genders reversed and you'll see how unsettling what she actually does is. Especially when she tries to block his escape and implies that Sherlock is actually gay. No wonder he reacted badly toward her. He uses his deductive skills in this scene as a way to try to dominate her and gain control back, as he did in the first scene with Irene Adler, when he walks her through the case of the dead hiker. By being alone with him in a men's toilet, she was also setting up a possible story either about an inappropriate but consensual sexual interaction, or a claim to being downright sexually assaulted by him. The press was poised to turn against Sherlock as a matter of course. Pick the right moment, and she could have the general public believing just about anything.
  • This line, when you think about it, is chilling: "I wanted to be on your side, remember? You turned me down... so..." Kitty's story isn't just the usual tripe bad newspapers are filled with. Even if you factor out Sherlock's suicide, it would have ruined him; it seems it accused him of a ridiculous number of felonies and may have resulted in him being charged with the same. Kitty herself apparently didn't believe any of it. She simply wrote the story because she has no morals and, being humiliated by Sherlock's rejection, she decided to get her revenge like that. Not only this, but in the above line, she's blaming Sherlock. The girl has rejection issues aplenty.
• In the scene where Sherlock and Jim are having tea at the flat, Jim turns the conversation to "ordinary people" and brings up how Sherlock "has John." He suggests he should get himself a "live-in one" and Sherlock quietly murmurs "why are you doing this?" as Jim comments "it must be so funny." Later, Jim does get himself a "live-in ordinary person"- Kitty Reilly. But judging from how tense Sherlock becomes at the mention of John, and how he tries to redivert the conversation away from him, he may well have taken this as Jim threatening to harm/abduct John again.
  • Jim calls Kitty "darling", is apparently living with her, and they're hints that they're sleeping together. Which, for the purposes of Jim's plan, is totally unnecessary. He's not just messing with Sherlock, he's messing with Kitty as well, in the same way he messed with Molly, for no other reason than because he can.
  • * Kitty clearly suspects someone is in her home, and just walks in and turns on the light anyway, in a manner that would leave her entirely vulnerable. She really isn't too bright. Which is also why Jim chose her. Kitty also says Holmes won't hurt "Brook" because she's there, as a witness. She completely ignores the possibility that the monsters she thinks Holmes and Watson are could simply hurt her too.
• John losing it and punching the Chief Superintendant of Scotland Yard is generally seen as a crowning moment of both awesome and heartwarming, but if you think about it long enough it becomes very disturbing. John's never met this guy before, so he has nothing personal against him beforehand, and calling Sherlock a "weirdo" is extremely mild and somewhat justified from the Chief Superintendant's perspective. It seems that this was just the last straw that caused John to go ballistic. Who was he really angry at? Lestrade, a little, but mostly Sally Donovan, who had deliberately come up to the flat for no other reason but to give him an "I told you so" lecture, rubbing it in about what an awful person Sherlock must be and how she was right all along, etc. It was Donovan that he wanted to lash out at. It would have been neither heartwarming nor awesome to see or have it implied that John Watson hit a female police officer, and wouldn't have been cool if he'd hit Lestrade either, so it's just kind of handy that an acceptable male target happened to walk in and made an unwanted comment at the right moment for John to take his anger out on. Of course, we've earlier seen the Chief Superintendant chewing out Lestrade unfairly, yelling at him, name-calling, making snap judgments on a guy he's never met and basically being an overbearing dick, so the audience don't like him already, but this is the first time John's ever laid eyes on him.
  • When John and Sherlock leave Kitty's flat, just after Kitty tells Sherlock that he repels her, John shoulders her out of the way to get past, without even glancing at her. You only see it for a second, but it takes Kitty by surprise and is alarmingly out of character for John.
• John's best friend just died in front of his eyes and now everyone thinks he's a fraud; the same best friend who is the main reason John recovered (for lack of a better term) from his PTSD. Yep. Fun times ahead.
• So everyone thinks that Sherlock is a fraud, meaning that all the cases he worked on are going to be re-opened.
  • Confirmed in the video on John's blog, with the ticker going across the bottom highlighting "Killer of TV star Connie Prince launches appeal".
• Before the phone call, the last thing Sherlock says to John is "being alone protects you" and John replies with "friends protect you." John then finds Mrs. Hudson, alive and well, and realizes Sherlock knew and rushes after him. In their next meeting Sherlock is about to commit suicide to protect his friends and John's on the other end knowing he cannot protect his best friend and is about to be left alone. What a bitter realization for John.
• Moriarty worked as a storyteller in children's show for awhile for his cover story to stick, putting him in close proximity to children as a perfect, nice show host?
• One horrifying implication of Sherlock's rooftop confession of having "made up" Moriarty: Sherlock's not just admitting to being a fraud- he's "admitting" to never being John's friend in the first place, using him to further his "own purposes", and deliberately putting him in situations where he could have been killed. This "confession" in turn would, though, only strengthen John's faith that Sherlock wasn't a fraud. He saw how absolutely floored Sherlock was when he first saw him at the pool and for a second wondered if he, John, was actually Moriarty. In his blog, he describes that look as being one of a little, lost child. Of being hurt and betrayed. John knows there is no way that Sherlock could have or would have faked that reaction, regardless of how good an actor he is.
• Irene was able to do a Sherlock Scan, of sorts. Which is why Sherlock asks the reporter if she can. Irene's become the standard any other woman who's even possibly romantically involved with him has to live up to.
• If Sherlock went to the rooftop suspecting he was going to die, then the argument he has with John over the Mrs. Hudson diversion was probably deliberately designed for two reasons: one, so that Sherlock could reassure himself that John genuinely loved Mrs Hudson and would look after her if a time came where he couldn't. And secondly, more horrifyingly, he may have constructed it so that John would conclude he was a heartless bastard after all, and be shielded a little from his subsequent grief when Sherlock "died". Of course, and as usual, Sherlock vastly underestimates John's loyalty and faith in him, so it probably wouldn't have worked even if that had been the last time they spoke. It seems Sherlock didn't really know if John was going to be there when he finally jumped, and that he was there was simply the way it happened to pan out. The phone call was extremely moving, but the last time Sherlock could guarantee he was going to ever see John was one in which he deliberately started an argument with him and caused him to storm out in disgust.
• Given that John punched the Chief Superintendent in the face it's not unreasonable to assume that, after everything else that happened in the episode, he was given no leniency and was given a prison term. That visit to Sherlock's grave with Mrs Hudson was probably his first. He could well have missed Sherlock's funeral entirely.
• John would have probably been the one to have to tell Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, Mycroft and Molly that Sherlock was dead. Certainly Mrs Hudson. We're never shown these scenes, or anybody's initial reactions, but it's a fair assumption that Mrs Hudson would have been gutted, as if she'd lost her child. And John would have to deal with that, on top of his own grief. Moreover, he also knows Molly has a massive crush on Sherlock and if Sherlock was actually dead, she'd be devastated. As far as he would be concerned, he'd have to be the one to tell Molly that the man she adored was dead.
  • And imagine Molly being in the position of having to pretend to be grieving in that way, as a cover for Sherlock.
• In A Scandal in Belgravia, Mycroft and Sherlock have a conversation in the morgue corridor where Sherlock shows signs of his emerging empathy. He's immediately shut down by Mycroft, who scolds him that "caring is not an advantage." Now think about how horrifying this line becomes when you think that Mycroft gave Jim Sherlock's information to gain an advantage over him (and to impress his colleagues as being the only one who could get Jim to talk a little.) Caring about Sherlock was not to his advantage just then, so he didn't bother. Then think about how Jim's advantage over Sherlock on the rooftop scene is that Sherlock now cares about his friends. If he didn't, he'd just throw Jim off the roof and view John, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade as collateral damage in getting the biggest psycho in Britain off the streets. After all, he was prepared to regard John's life as collateral damage at the beginning of A Scandal in Belgravia.
• During the case with the abducted children, Sherlock, out of the blue, starts digging out details from his imagination - he talks passionately about how the little boy obsessed with spy stories would deal with the seconds of time between seeing his kidnapper and being taken, he re-enacts the kidnapper silhouetted as he approached the door. What are the chances that Moriarty deliberately set the crime up to mirror an experience from Sherlock's own childhood? Considering that Sherlock's family is rich and powerful, the youngest child getting kidnapped for ransom is not much of a stretch, and he would absolutely be the type to try and leave a meaningful trail behind. Moriarty knows Sherlock's life story by now and would undoubtedly delight at the chance to give the crime a personal touch (as with Carl Powers's trainers). Most importantly, Sherlock identifying with the victim causes him to come to his conclusions in a way that's even less transparent than usually - he really does seem to know things he could only have known if he'd been there. Since Moriarty wants the police to start suspecting Sherlock, this would fit right into his plans. It would also explain why Sherlock is so unexpectedly vicious to the teacher who was supposed to be watching the children.
• When Sherlock yells at John in 221b because he thinks John is doubting him, Sherlock doesn't believe that John could trust him "100%". After what passes for a heart-to-heart between them, Sherlock realises John's belief in him isn't swayed at all. And then Sherlock needs to fake his own death. This conversation in the flat may be what prompted Sherlock to try and convince John via his "note" that he was a fake, because before then Sherlock thought it was possible that John would have doubts about Sherlock. John listened to Sherlock spend the last moments of his life lying to John because John had convinced him that he believed in Sherlock entirely.
• Moriarty, a highly intelligent, bored adrenaline junkie with a bit of an obsession with Sherlock, actually became so depressed at the idea of beating Sherlock and thus having no more to "distract" him that he committed suicide, both to prevent Sherlock of having any chance of beating him, but more so to solve the problem of "staying alive... it's just... staying..." Hmm. Highly intelligent, bored adrenaline junkie with a bit of a fascination for Sherlock? Does this sound like someone else in Sherlock's life? The idea of life without Sherlock drove Moriarty to suicide. It's not a difficult leap to suspect that life without Sherlock has led John to at least once ponder the merits of "staying alive." Bear in mind that before he met Sherlock, John routinely kept a loaded handgun in his desk drawer. Immediately accessible, right next to his laptop.
• In A Study in Pink, John's therapist encourages him to blog about everything that happens to him. He really doesn't have much success until he meets Sherlock, where all of a sudden tons of things happen to him. This sort of therapy is particularly useful in cases of trauma and PTSD where the person feels unable to properly express the terrible things that have happened to them; the idea behind it is if they record little, fairly trivial things regularly, and express themselves that way, that it will eventually lead the way to them being able to fully express their pain, fear and trauma. Freud believed that psychosomatic symptoms were usually caused by the patient being unable to fully express a thought or a memory or a fear that society had deemed unacceptable. The Fridge Horror? John, by the time of writing up The Hounds of Baskerville, quite openly writes about his feelings, his fears and doubts and faults and how he feels about other people. Then he does not blog a single detail about anything that happens after The Hounds of Baskerville. He posts nothing about Moriarty's crimes, nothing about the trial, nothing about anything at all that happened in the two months between Moriarty's release and the kidnapping of the children, absolutely nothing... except just the single sentence at the end about believing in his best friend. And he is neither able to tell his blog, (and as we see at the beginning of The Reichenbach Fall, he finds it excruciating to tell his therapist), that Sherlock is dead. On his blog, he has to post a video to make the death announcement for him. He's back to square one with being totally unable to express how he feels. He's not simply grieving, as you'd expect anyone to be if their best friend committed suicide. He's also badly traumatised and may or may not be suffering from a more common form of PTSD than the one he acquired in Afghanistan. ^note  Mycroft correctly pointed out that John missed the action and his hand tremor was a symptom of boredom, but Sherlock also correctly pointed out that the original circumstances of John being shot in Afghanistan were 'traumatic'- emotionally- enough so to cause psychosomatic pain, night terrors, insomnia/broken sleeping patterns, depression, moodswings, distancing himself from other people, etc. So while John's missing the action, and "getting off" on danger, is a new take on the idea, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that not all of John's post-Afghanistan issues are simply because he's missing the danger. He was badly emotionally traumatised at around the time, or during the incident where he was shot- and as yet we haven't been let in on details of how or why.
• Mrs. Hudson getting "shot:"
  • It seems odd and next door to completely implausible that John would be told that Mrs Hudson had been "shot." Really, shot? Even with contract killers hovering around Baker Street? They were, so far as John was aware, there for him and Sherlock and had absolutely no motivation and nothing to gain from shooting their landlady. It would have been far more realistic to simply claim she'd collapsed, perhaps had a heart attack, or a stroke, or fallen down the stairs at Baker Street or something along those lines. But if it was Jim and not Sherlock who set up that phone call, it becomes a really sick prank, since Mrs Hudson is just then at 221B with the man who really was to shoot her if Sherlock didn't kill himself as instructed.
  • Even worse—part of John's emotional reaction to hearing the news may have been because he knows all too well what it feels like to be shot. He'd been traumatised by being shot in Afghanistan, and hearing that his beloved landlady was suffering the way he had would have been sickening to him. And, as an army doctor, he'd know in great detail the physical damage even one bullet can do. Sherlock, on the other hand, doesn't have any first-hand experience of shooting someone or being shot or trying to repair the damage a bullet can do. ^note  Which lends some insight into why Sherlock is so reckless with guns. He's never shot anyone, nor been shot. If he ever does have this kind of experience with firearms he might be a bit more respectful of guns. Presumably Jim doesn't either. Choosing to tell John that Mrs Hudson was shot rather than injured or hurt in any other way hit home and was horribly effective.
• Mycroft's interactions with Moriarty are framed as him being the aggressor, with Mycroft interrogating Moriarty, and Moriarty being the resilient, uncrackable criminal. But think about it the other way. One very effective method of interrogation is to ask the suspect very easy questions, questions that they would have no trouble answering and would not deem important, and then move up to larger ones. If your end goal is "where are the hidden papers?", you might start by asking, "what's your name?" or "where are you from?" Moriarty was interrogating Mycroft, and Mycroft never saw what it was until it was too late, probably because he's used to relying on his deductive skills and intimidating people, and not being manipulated by the person he thinks he has at his mercy.
• At least one transcription of the episode has noted that the newspaper blurbs on Jim Moriarty's arrest have him listed as Irish-born but of no fixed abode. There's the possibility that he does have at least a part-time residence that he hasn't copped to and that police haven't tracked down, but given how he leverages his superficial charm and appeal, and how deftly he manipulates Kitty Reilly and Molly Hooper (even though they don't seem to be living together during their brief relationship) is it possible that he's been bouncing around between the residences of unsuspecting romantic partners? A parasitic lifestyle is one of the qualities on the Hare checklist for psychopathy.
• Jim admits that the fun of having the code or pretending he did was the fun of seeing the world's powers all fight over each other to do a deal with him to make him give it up: "who daddy loves best". Fairly standard creepiness for Jim until you remember that Mycroft's department- presumably MI5- tortured Jim for weeks. As far as Jim was concerned, that was all just part of the game- it was better than being bored.
• Sherlock's "death":
  • It not only deprived John of Sherlock himself. The events of the episode and the fallout from what happened at St Bart's means that John has now been deprived of almost everyone he knew through Sherlock. He has complete disgust for Mycroft (who he was never really friends with anyway, but still). Mrs Hudson he still loves, but he can't support her the way he wants to when he can't stand to be anywhere near Baker Street and is trying to cope with his own grief. ^note  The tie-in-blogs make it clear that John, even while living at 221B, worries about Mrs Hudson- specifically about her bad hip. He seems to be concerned that she'll have a fall- at one point he actually comments back to her online to ask if she got down the stairs okay. Elderly lady, bad hip, now lives on her own? Not a good combination. For all his worry, John still can't bear to go back to the flat. His story with Lestrade isn't tied up properly but the last time they speak, John's ready to punch him, and clearly believes Lestrade put his work before Sherlock. It will be interesting to see whether his friendship with Molly survives Sherlock's death.
  • It works both ways, since Mrs Hudson is left at Baker Street living on her own, and John- who was so devoted that, according to his blog, he used to regularly check on her downstairs to see if she needed anything- is not able to even come around to see her. Mycroft is an Ice Queen, but he's lost the only person in the world he cared for besides himself. As for Lestrade, he's alienated his team, is in trouble with his superiors, Sherlock apparently committed suicide after escaping from his custody, and he's probably lost John as a friend. Sherlock's actions might have saved the lives of his friends, but they're all in miserable straits and that's after you factor out simple grief at his loss.
  • And it's not just John's relationships with actual friends that has been hurt. The episode focuses mainly on Sherlock's public image... but what about John's? He was prominent enough in the press to earn his own tabloid nickname and was photographed a number of times. And now, well over half of London probably believes him to be the gay lover of that fake genius who probably committed heaps of crimes. And who either is a total idiot for still believing in him, or who may actually have been in on it and helped him commit said crimes. And he's got next to no chance of forming romantic relationships with women when he's widely believed to be gay. ^note  It's interesting that although he's always corrected people's assumption that he was Sherlock's lover, he never really got upset about the assumptions until they made page six of the national newspapers. Because that kind of thing must really put a dampener on your dating efforts.)
  • This could also partly be Fridge Brilliance and partly orchestrated or at least anticipated by Sherlock. If John, Lestrade, Molly, Mrs Hudson and Mycroft are all to varying degrees or for various reasons not speaking to each other, or not speaking much, they're unlikely to ever compare notes on what happened on the apparent last day of Sherlock's life, and therefore unlikely to figure out that a lot of the details simply don't make sense. Each (excluding Molly, who seems to know Sherlock isn't dead, and perhaps excluding Mycroft for the same reason) may already have a feeling that something isn't "right" about the details of that last day or two, but they're unlikely to individually pursue things. Because after all, making enquiries into Sherlock's death - which Lestrade, if he's retained his rank of DI, has a professional right to do - will put them all inadvertently back in danger. Sherlock, too, if Moriarty's network had the slightest idea that he might be still alive.
  • Molly has managed to help save the life of the man she's been crushing on for at least two years, and that's great and all, but now she has to keep it secret from Sherlock's best friend, who is completely falling to pieces. And she knows how badly John's hurting and she knows she can stop his pain with just two words; "Sherlock's alive", but she also knows that doing so could easily put Sherlock's life in danger, as well as possibly John's. To top it all off, it's heavily implied that she has literally no one she can talk to about this or anything else.
• John was called away to Mrs Hudson. Sherlock coldly refused to go with him. They had an argument which more or less involved John yelling at Sherlock, who was uncharacteristically passive. John abandoned Sherlock in the lab. He found Mrs Hudson and she was fine. He rushed back to St Bart's in time to witness Sherlock's suicide from the roof. Sherlock had shown no signs of being suicidal before. None. The last time he and John talk before the "Mrs Hudson" diversion, Sherlock's messaged John because he's apparently had an idea about using the code against Moriarty. It's nonsense, of course, but to John it's pretty clear that Sherlock intends to beat Moriarty, and people intent on committing suicide don't plan for the future like that. The rooftop jump, so far as John would be concerned, would have come out of nowhere. John seems to not know that Moriarty was ever on that roof with Sherlock. The only suicide trigger that would be immediately obvious to him? His turning on Sherlock and abandoning him. Yep, that's right. There's no sign that John ever believed Sherlock to be a fraud or a kidnapper, but he was Sherlock's best friend, and on the lam, his only friend. And when Sherlock was in a dark place emotionally, he made the mistake of criticising and then leaving him. Dear Lord. No wonder he's in therapy. He blames himself.
• Sherlock and John weren't just best friends, but also flatmates and co-workers- they did virtually everything together. For John, this means that even having moved out of Baker Street, virtually every single memory he has of the previous eighteen months would be unbelievably painful, because they would all connect directly to Sherlock in some way. Fun stuff they did that would otherwise make great memories would now be excruciating. And those hours of petty, silly bickering, especially online, would all of a sudden stop being so light-hearted.

Series Three

Many Happy Returns

• In Sherlock's discussion with Lestrade at the beginning of the tape, he says he's going to miss John's birthday celebrations because "there'll be people." He doesn't say there'll be stupid people or tedious people, so it sort of implies he's that socially anxious that he can't bring himself to spend an evening with a group, especially of people he doesn't know or trust particularly. He obviously felt bad enough about missing it that Lestrade could "threaten" him into making a tape instead.
  • And then he remarks that all John's friends hate him anyway. Although he's someone who genuinely loves John, he can't spend John's birthday celebrations with him - because he's going out with a crowd of people who hate him.

The Empty Hearse

• At the reunion, where John straight up attacks Sherlock multiple times, Sherlock has already recently been "beaten to a pulp" (with a heavy chain and possibly a crowbar.) He's covered head to toe with lacerations and bruises under that suit and bow tie, and earlier that same day he'd been in such pain that he'd groaned while dragging himself into a simple sitting position to talk to Mycroft about the Serbian mission. John probably had no idea how much he was physically hurting Sherlock by hitting him, just as Sherlock had no idea how much he was emotionally hurting John by talking.
  • On the above reunion scene - in A Scandal in Belgravia, Irene deduced that John had been the one who hit Sherlock, because only someone who "loved him" would avoid his nose and teeth. When John hits Sherlock in The Empty Hearse, he obviously went directly for both Sherlock's nose and teeth, leaving Sherlock with a split lip and a bleeding nose. The punch in A Scandal in Belgravia was provoked and looks a little vicious, but John was actually relatively careful and only really playing. In The Empty Hearse, he is genuinely pissed and hits Sherlock for real, in a way to cause maximum pain and facial damage.
• When Sherlock, Lestrade, and Molly are in the dark room with the skeleton, a voice tells Sherlock "show off" and he says "Shut up John," indicating that he hears John's voice insulting him, which is markedly different from the John we know from the first two seasons. Later in the episode, while Sherlock and John are in the carriage with the bomb, Sherlock lets John believe they're going to die. John tells him he forgives him. That's when Sherlock starts laughing, but it's not because he pulled one over on John, it's because John has been haunting him for the last two years, and he is so relieved that John forgives him for the two years away that he laughs.
• Just what exactly is Sherlock's torturer going to do with his wife and the coffin maker? Not to mention that Mycroft has no qualms having people tortured, even his own brother, in front of his eyes. When the torturer asks if Sherlock "remembers sleep?" and the way he's been chained so that there's no way he'll be allowed to pass out, barely able to stay on his feet by the time we see him - how many sleepless nights was he kept there until Mycroft finally intervened?
• The guard at the door to the cell Sherlock is being held in. He's wearing headphones, and we can tell the music is turned up LOUD. Possibly to keep him amused during a long and boring sentry duty. More likely to block out the hours of screaming going on behind him.
• When Sherlock scanned Mary, the one of the most recurring words that we could see is "liar", along with words such as: "size 12", "bakes own bread", "linguist", "only child", "guardian", "clever", "nurse", "part time", "short-sighted", "disillusioned", Lib Dem", "Appendix scar", "Romantic", "cat lover", "secret", "tattoo". Keep in mind their conversation moments ago:
  Mary: I'll talk him around.
  Sherlock: You will?
  Mary: Oh yeah.
• John and Sherlock's humanity:
  • John, grief-stricken, says this to Sherlock's grave:
    John: "There were times when I didn't even think you were human, but let me tell you this: you were the most human... human being..."
  • He also accused Sherlock of being "a machine" - it was almost the last thing he said to him before his "suicide." Then, when he is reunited with Sherlock two years later, one of the very first things he says is:
    John: "Why am I the only one who thinks that this is wrong?! The only one reacting like a human being?"
  • Not only did he go immediately back to dehumanising Sherlock because he was angry with him, he also lumped Mary in as someone who isn't even human. Considering his guilt at treating Sherlock like "a machine" when he apparently committed suicide, it's kind of horrible that he immediately went straight back to the same low blow.
  • John also seems upset not just that Sherlock doesn't understand how upset he is, but that Mary seems to not be taking his distress seriously enough, either. Why not? It's a small clue that Mary is as much of a "high-functioning sociopath" as Sherlock, if not more. John did see it, even if he made an effort to ignore it or rationalise it.
• Again in the reunion, when Sherlock reveals that Mycroft knew Sherlock was alive, Mary quickly chimes in with "He would've need a confidant," and off the angry look on John's face, meekly adds "Sorry," and clams up. It was probably only intended to be her realizing "Now is probably not the time to chime in," but knowing John's past temper issues, and how absolutely furious he was at the time, it takes a whole new disturbing turn.

The Sign of Three

• When Sherlock tells Mary to do a pregnancy test he also starts rabbiting about "the statistics" for the first trimester, and John tells him quite strongly to shut up. The statistics Sherlock was about to blurt out could refer to the fact that a significant amount of pregnancies end in miscarriage in the first trimester (so for Mary to not be too excited by the idea of having a child just yet) or to the unreliability of shop bought tests.
• There are inklings that the Holmes boy's mother was emotionally distant: Sherlock has a list of things she "has to answer for," and Mycroft has a file.
• Mrs. Hudson tells a story at the beginning about how her best friend, Margaret, was the chief bridesmaid at her wedding and they said that they would be best friends forever. She then goes on to talk about how Margaret left the wedding early and they hardly saw each other after that. Then, at the end of the episode, Sherlock leaves John's wedding early when he feels out of place.
• When Sholto locks himself in his hotel room, Mary tells John to kick the door down. Sholto tells him not to, as he has a gun in his hand and a "lifetime of unfortunate reflexes." A few exchanges later, John takes off his jacket and says he's going to kick the door down anyway. If it hadn't been that Sherlock had already talked Sholto around, that whole situation could have ended in a groom being shot dead at his wedding, by an honoured wedding guest, in front of his bride and best man. On top of that, just the fact that Sholto even brought a gun to a wedding.
• During John's stag night, he downs a shot and then dumps another one in the graduated cylinder he's holding. There's a bit of visual comedy as he brings it back to Sherlock to indicate that in the few seconds he took from the bar to the table, he actually forgot which cylinder had the shot in it, and accidentally gave Sherlock the spiked one. But he'd still remarked to the bartender "he mustn't see". What the bartender saw was a guy blatantly spiking a friend's drink, which is a serious crime.
• Sherlock bolting out of a sound sleep in a jail cell when Lestrade yells at John is hilarious on the first viewing, but gets less and less funny after seeing Sherlock being tortured in The Empty Hearse.
• Sherlock, a civilian, managed to walk right into a military base and wander around for a long time without being caught or even noticed. At one point he evades being seen simply by turning around slightly; then he opens the door of the rec room, and none of the soldiers in there even glance up at the stranger in their midst (who could have had a weapon...)
• It's played for laughs at the time, but Mary and Sherlock both tell an unimpressed John that he has to put his full name on his wedding invitations - Mary points out it's tradition, while Sherlock thinks it's just funny. Then in His Last Vow, we find out that Sherlock goes by his middle name and has never revealed his full name to John before, and Mary's using a false identity and alias. In the end, the only person who was honest about their name was John all along.
• Janine's good-naturedness toward Sherlock being blatantly rude about her appearance and dancing skills is at first just kind of amusing. But when you find out she works for Magnussen, it's actually pretty horrible. Sherlock's faux pas seem to not have any malice in them, just insecurity and social awkwardness. Compared to the utter bastard she works for, who has zero redeeming qualities and who bullies her by flicking her in the eye just because he thinks hurting and humiliating her is fun, Sherlock Holmes is a saint.
• The telegram later revealed to be from Magnussen at John and Mary's wedding becomes Harsher in Hindsight after "His Last Vow," but is actually even worse after "The Six Thatchers." Magnussen specifically says to Mary, "wish your family could have seen this." In "The Six Thatchers," we learn that Mary considered the members of AGRA to be her family, and—at that point anyway—she believes them all to have died horribly violent deaths at the hands of a militant coup in Tbilisi, something that still affects her years later. Not only does Magnussen reveal that he knows all about Mary's dark, violent past, and about AGRA's messy end in Georgia; he's also reminding her of the loss of three people she had held dear to her, and may have even invited to her wedding if they were still alive. Her family—the other three members of AGRA—can't be there, because they all died in a shootout which only she survived, and Magnussen just can't resist twisting the knife. The look on Mary's face when Sherlock reads out the telegram is one of momentary panic—Magnussen has found her—but also one of pain, when she's reminded of the loss of her friends.

His Last Vow

• John's zero-tolerance policy on Sherlock's drug habit, as well as his pleading with him to call and talk to him when he's about to fall off the wagon, become all that more horrible when you remember that his sister, whom Magnussen identified as one of his pressure points, is such a serious alcoholic that she never even showed up to his wedding. John has already lost someone he loves to addiction, probably forever, and he's terrified it's going to happen again.
• Sherlock notes that Molly isn't engaged to Tom anymore. The previous episode saw her stab Tom in the leg with a plastic fork for daring to ask if Sherlock is drunk during his speech. And she slaps Sherlock. Christ, is it any wonder she's single if this is how she treats those she proclaims to care about?
• Janine is blissfully unaware that one of her closest friends, the woman who made her maid of honor at her wedding, cultivated their friendship entirely so that she could gain access to Magnussen.
• During The Empty House sequence, Mary threatens to shoot Sherlock, who only manages to stop her by pointing out that her photograph is projected on the building outside and would obviously implicate her. And then we find out that the figure she assumed was Sherlock and nearly shot dead in cold blood was actually John.
• The middle timeline events for the episode. Sherlock was shot in late June or early July at the most, since it had only been about a month since John and Mary's mid-May wedding. At Christmas, Mrs. Holmes is delighted her boy is finally home from hospital, and Mary expresses surprise that John mustered up enough warmth toward her to ask, "So, you're okay?" To clarify: apparently, Sherlock was hospitalised, and John was not speaking to his pregnant wife, for something like five or six months. It would have been absolutely hell for all three of them, particularly John, who would have felt completely alone with the secret of Mary's betrayal.
• In A Study in Pink, Sherlock dismissed John telling him that his thoughts after being shot were "please, God, let me live." In this episode, he finally realises how much pain John would have gone through after being shot, and how much effort and willpower he would have needed to use just to stay alive. The "Mind Palace" sequence is long and imaginative, but 100% of Sherlock's attention is consumed in how he can avoid dying.
• During the "domestic" between the Watsons in 221B, Sherlock, who has escaped hospital after being shot the previous week, is already looking so awful when he walks into the flat that Mrs. Hudson is completely horrified and remarks loudly on it. He goes downhill during the following conversation, becoming short of breath, obviously in severe pain, and finally collapses from what he diagnoses as internal bleeding and has to be revived on the floor by paramedics he called himself. Throughout the conversation preceding it, both of the Watsons, who both adore Sherlock and who work as medical professionals, are so upset by their own dramas that neither of them seem to notice the state Sherlock is in until he's actually on the floor.
  • He already looks awful at Leinster Gardens, even with the IV bag and John's care—and Mary still makes him bend over to pick up the coin she's shot to prove her marksmanship skills.
  • When the trio arrives at 221B, the first thing Sherlock says is that he's run out of morphine. Mary and John both know for the entirety of the conversation that he's in tremendous physical pain (whether they registered it amid their own emotional turmoil is another question, but they definitely have at least been told). That's how upsetting the Watsons' "domestic" is—not only does neither Mary nor John notice their close friend's horrendous physical state, but also neither of them register that he as good as told them he was in pain.
• Sherlock has been off the wagon for several weeks when he's shot — on opiates, if Magnussen's mind palace file is correct. Presumably, this is going to make tapering off the painkillers he's on even more difficult and, judging by the scene with Magnussen in the "canteen," he appears to remain at 221b after he flat lines the second time — or is at least allowed an inordinate amount of mobility between there and the hospital. Detoxing with a healing mortal wound during what appears to be an (at best) intermittent hospital stay... he's not in for a fun ride.
• After Sherlock shoots Magnussen dead, he turns and shouts to John "get away from me, John, keep well back!" He assumed he was about to be gunned down immediately, and didn't want to risk John being caught in the crossfire. And not only did he expect that John would have to watch him being riddled with bullets and die for real this time, he probably recognised Mycroft's voice and assumed Mycroft would be so pissed off at him that he would just let him be killed without intervening.
• Mr. and Mrs. Holmes may seem to be lovely people now, but when Sherlock goes into his Mind Palace as he is dying, he's confronted with one main idea: "Mummy and Daddy are very cross at him for being a stupid little boy." Either his parents did say and do things to give him this impression as a child, or Mycroft maliciously tried to convince him they felt that way and, on an emotional level, he totally succeeded.
• Sherlock remarks that it was a stroke of luck meeting Magnussen's PA at John's wedding... and seems at that point to believe that it really was. In The Hounds of Baskerville he states his love for coincidences, and that those who don't believe in them must lead "dull lives." In The Sign of Three, Mycroft mentally scolds him that coincidences don't exist, because "the universe is rarely so lazy." If he'd taken Mycroft's advice on board a bit more, he would have realised that Mary's maid of honour being Magnussen's PA was a step too far, and Mary really was tangled with Magnussen somehow. His belief in coincidences (and failure to listen to Mycroft) nearly gets him killed.
• The more you think about it, the more there's a case for John being more like Mary than he thinks:
  • He is initially horrified to find out she is a former assassin for the CIA, but like her, he was also in a government-sanctioned profession where, amongst other things, killing people was part of the job description. Sherlock identifies Mary as a former intelligence agent, which encompasses far more than being "an assassin", just as being a soldier involved far more for John than just shooting at the Taliban. They even left their respective professions at around the same time, five years before. Then we have this exchange in His Last Vow.
    Mary: The stuff Magnussen has on me, I would go to prison for the rest of my life.
    John: So you were just going to kill him?
    Mary: People like Magnussen should be killed. That's why there are people like me.
  • John seems disgusted at this, but think back to this in A Study in Pink:
    Sherlock: Are you all right?
    John: Yes, of course I'm all right.
    Sherlock: You have just killed a man.
    John: Yes, I... that's true, isn't it...? But he wasn't a very nice man.
  • One suspects John did a lot of thinking about this kind of thing prior to the Christmas reconciliation, where the emphasis is not about any moral issues John might have about Mary's former profession, but the fact that she lied to him about it.
• During a later scene in the episode, there is a very brief snippet of a newspaper heading that reads "Lord Smallwood Suicide". Evidently, Magnussen decided that the involvement of Sherlock Holmes was enough grounds to use his leverage on Lady Smallwood's husband, which likely led directly to his death. A similar situation happens with John Garvie, the MP from the very first scene with Magnussen.
  • More chillingly in that Sherlock accidently reveals Lady Smallwood is his client when he mistakes Mary for Smallwood during her attack on Magnussen.
    • Sherlock told Magnussen that Lady Smallwood had asked him to intercede on her behalf when he came to visit the flat. Magnussen already knew who the client was, it wasn't kept secret from him. Probably because there wasn't much point in trying.
• Sherlock tells John to tell Mary that "she's safe now,", but is she? We learn from Magnussen that there are plenty of people who want her dead, who will kill her if they find her. And while Magnussen may now be dead, these people may find her without his help. She is never truly 100% safe.
• Because Mary is using a false identity and papers that aren't hers, the Watsons are not strictly legally married, rendering the whole of The Sign of Three an expensive party with no legal significance whatsoever. Their daughter's birth certificate will also be fraudulent, since birth certificates contain, as a matter of course, the mother's name, maiden name, date of birth, etc. As of the end of His Last Vow, John doesn't even know what Mary's true name, date of birth, and place of birth are. Imagine finding out at some stage that your birth certificate is false and therefore basically worthless, and the amount of problems that would arise from not legally existing.
• Mycroft says he doesn't want Sherlock to take the potentially fatal MI6 assignment because "[Sherlock's] loss would break [his] heart." If you remember what Sherlock said about him while they were playing Operation in The Empty Hearse, there might indeed be a real grain of sincerity in it:
  'Sherlock: Can't handle a broken heart, how very telling.
• Back in The Empty Hearse, when John tells Mary that he doesn't shave for Sherlock Holmes, she tells him that he should "put that on a t-shirt." When confronting Magnussen at Appledore and telling him he doesn't understand how Magnussen's Mind Palace works, he gives him the exact same line. How much of a stretch of it to believe that Magnussen, or someone loyal to him, was listening in on John and Mary's conversation before kidnapping John?
• You know how people say that your life flashes before your eyes when you die? Well. What does Sherlock have?
  • Molly and Anderson, two incredibly devoted people that care about him more than anything else in the world, who he constantly dismissed, manipulated and lorded over, telling him what to do (so they're superior to him).
  • Mycroft, his own brother, telling him that he's very stupid (an attack upon Sherlock's mental acuity, the one thing that he values the most) and Mummy and Daddy are very cross (that he's a disappointment to his family).
  • Mary, in her wedding dress - the one who took his happy life with John away from him, taking his one connection to normal society and his moral compass, then shot him (she could have killed him, for pity's sake!).
  • Redbeard, probably the first loss young Sherlock has ever experienced. Judging by their conversation in The Sign of Three, it's not the first time that Mycroft has practically rubbed it into Sherlock's face as an example for why you should not care about people, because caring only hurts you in the end.
  • And finally, Jim, symbolic of Sherlock's darkest, unfeeling, truly sociopathic tendencies. If Sherlock gives in, if he doesn't have John, he'll become like Moriarty.
  • The fact that, of all those faces who appear to Sherlock, the ones that could probably provide him the most comfort and encouragement - John, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade and his parents - are nowhere to be seen. Irene - The Woman, the one who he feels something akin to admiration/attraction, the one who visited him in hospital and left him a red rose (according to Arwel Wyn Jones) - only gets a brief mention by Jim, and said mention is meant to hurt Sherlock.
    • So, to sum up - in his ostensibly last moments, Sherlock's subconscious informed him that he's not as smart as he think he is, he's a disappointment, he's a lonely pathetic man and without John he might as well become a despicable, monstrous criminal, and that he shouldn't care because it only hurts him and people he cares about. This man may be an irascible genius with lots of outer swagger, but this says a heck of a lot about how low Sherlock's self esteem actually is.
• When looking through Sherlock's pressure points the name "Redbeard" appeared, this at first just seemed to indicate how far he'd gone back into Sherlock's past but with the reveal that Redbeard wasn't a dog but his best friend killed by his crazed sister it's much worse, Magnussen new about Euros, no wonder Mycroft was under his thumb.
  • Even darker interpretation of Mycroft's actions: Magnussen doesn't know for sure about Eurus, only has hints about Mycroft having a huge secret that, after all, involves massive use of government money and resources to house and hide a psychopathic monster, whom he not only indulges despite her having admittedly raped and murdered at least one person while in custody, he actually arranges for her to have an unsupervised visit with a raving psychopathic murderer who has already terrorized the public and "consulted" with God knows how many besides Jeff, Shan, and the "Bond Air" incident terrorists. Let's face it, everything Mycroft does is almost the diametric opposite of what he'd do if he really wanted Sherlock to stay away from Magnussen. Either he's hoping Sherlock will pull off another miracle and somehow neutralize Magnussen while keeping things secret, or Mycroft deep down doesn't care who gets hurt as long as Magnussen never finds out about Sherrinford's resident and leaks it to the public. Meaning Mycroft doesn't care what happens, ultimately, to Sherlock, Mary, John, or any other collateral damage so long as his secret's safe. It also explains why Mycroft's absolutely terrified at seeing Moriarty—he knows that either Moriarty's alive and he secret still isn't safe that way, or (worse, and as it turns out, true) Eurus's reach has extended outside her prison. He went to all that trouble and was willing to let his brother take the fall for open murder, and it still is coming back to haunt him.
• Magnussen freely admits to mildly physically abusing Janine—in particular he tells John that Janine once managed to keep her eye open while he flicked her in the face. No wonder she was so nervous about being late for work at the beginning of the episode.
• Sherlock's "proposal" to Janine is extremely convincing, complete with happy tears and an incredibly loving (and seemingly genuine) face. He put on a very good act, good enough to provoke an equally strong emotion in someone else and get her to act very irrationally because of it. This is a dangerous skill.

Series Four

The Six Thatchers

• John's cheating on Mary with a stranger he saw on a bus seemed shockingly out of character at first. But twice in Season Three, John warned he was likely to stray. In The Sign of Three, he is matter-of-fact in his suggestions as to why the Mayfly Man would want to secretly run all those dates: he's a married man who wants a one-night stand. This is, remember, something he says the day after his own stag night. And then in His Last Vow, he tells Mary he's still "basically pissed off" and warns her that it will "come out" now and again. Apart from the cheating via flirty text, there's no indication in The Six Thatchers that John is pissed off with Mary or has trust issues. It's likely this is how he showed he was pissed off: because Mary lied to him repeatedly, he passive-aggressively decided it was OK for him to deceive her back, in his own way.
• When Mary dies, John, incandescent with rage, can only tell Sherlock:

  John: You made a vow. You swore it.

  • And of course, John also made a vow, and broke it. He made it the same day as Sherlock made his, actually. He vowed to stay faithful to Mary. He's just as angry at himself as with Sherlock.

The Lying Detective

• When Mycroft calls John to tell him Sherlock has left the flat and "gone rogue", John complains that he was trying to sleep. But in the wider shot, we see that John is fully clothed and he's sitting on a perfectly level, made bed. He wasn't trying to sleep when Mycroft called. He was sitting on his own in the dark, the way he was before Sherlock met him in A Study in Pink.
• John casually reminds Lestrade that Sherlock shot Charles Augustus Magnussen in the face, despite the beginning of The Six Thatchers showing that Magnussen's true cause of death was extremely classified. Meaning that John has either just informed Lestrade of the gag order, or Lestrade has been in the know from the beginning. Either way, Lestrade is now liable for a charge of perverting the course of justice.

The Final Problem

• The whole Eurus situation from the point of view of her family. There is nothing they can do to help her. In the unlikely event that she did begin acting "normally," she's a master manipulator who can never be fully trusted, so even if she was genuinely "cured," there's no way you could know for certain and no way you could let her go free. In order to limit the atrocities she's capable of, your choices are limited to letting her live a life of solitary confinement or killing her. You'll never know if she genuinely loves you, or if you've just become one of her latest experiments.
  • For her parents: your only daughter is a viciously dangerous sociopath with zero empathy, who attempts to incinerate your youngest son and drowns his best friend. She can't be reasoned with because she has no concept of right and wrong; you can't even try to stop her by outsmarting her, because she's cleverer than anyone who might try to contain her. Just living with her is an exercise in mind gaming, when you're never sure who she's manipulating or why she's doing it. She traumatises her younger sibling so badly that his memories and personality are effectively rewritten, and you have to watch that happen. Eventually, your brother has her taken away and locked up, and later your oldest child tells you that she's dead. Years later, you discover he lied: she's alive and as dangerous as ever, but she's still your child, and she's spent her whole life isolated and under constant surveillance.
  • For Mycroft: You've watched the nightmarish events unfold as your parents have, but you're a child yourself. You have to maintain the lie that your youngest sibling has told himself while being fully aware of the truth. When your uncle dies, you become your sister's keeper, with all the Shoot the Dog decisions that that entails, and you decide that it's best to lie to your parents and claim that she's dead rather than locked up...so you get to watch them grieve her, fully aware that this is your lie and therefore your fault. Then, because you've royally screwed up, you hand her the opportunity to torture both yourself and your sibling all over again, and after you've both been thoroughly scarred for life, you get to tell your parents that you've been lying to them about your sister's fate for years.
• Mycroft's obsession with spying on and protecting Sherlock, which has until now come across as over the top, makes complete sense. He knows Sherlock has a dangerously insane sister who murdered his childhood friend, and would still kill him, if given half the chance.
  • And there was always a chance that Sherlock could be a repeat of Eurus.
  • Sherlock always makes sure to correct people that he's not a psychopath, but rather a "high-functioning sociopath." After all, he knows what a psychopath is really like since he grew up with one in the form of his sister.
• Sherlock, after trolling Mycroft into a state of absolute terror, blithely comments both that Eurus has escaped a supposedly inescapable facility, and that he's disabled the security system at Mycroft's house. He doesn't yet understand the absolutely real danger Mycroft is now in, and how terrified he is.
• In The Sign of Three, Mycroft asks Sherlock if he remembers "Redbeard." Initially it seemed the reason he was asking was because he was reminding Sherlock not to get attached too much to people since the loss hurts him so much. In The Final Problem, it's revealed he regularly brings up words like "Redbeard" to see if Sherlock's memories of Eurus are about to resurface. Mycroft thought the prospect of losing his adult best friend, albeit to marriage and not death, might have triggered memories in Sherlock of the murder of his childhood best friend, Victor.
• The death of David the warden's wife is presented as a punishment from Eurus for David committed suicide instead of having John or Mycroft kill him. But actually, it was probably because Sherlock initially chose Mycroft to execute David. But Mycroft refused to even touch the gun, forcing Sherlock to then ask John to do it. Eurus told Sherlock to choose Mycroft or John for the task. When he asked both in turn, he wasn't playing by the rules. Which means if John had executed David, Eurus would still have killed David's wife, and John would have murdered an innocent man for no reason.
• While Sherlock is debating whether to kill Mycroft or John, both men complicate it by volunteering themselves. John admits he should die for his country. But if Sherlock had killed John, it would have left Rosie, still a very young baby, orphaned. John's only relatives are an alcoholic sister he doesn't speak to, and a few distant cousins. Mary had no family she was in contact with at all. If Rosie was orphaned by the death of both parents, she would have no memory of either. And who would look after her? Sherlock;, the man her mother died for, and then murdered her father?
• The reveal of the true meaning behind Eurus' song when you realise it was never about where Victor was. Instead, Eurus just wanted Sherlock to come find her in her room. The horror here lies in that knowing Eurus' character, there was no guarantee that she would reveal where she'd left Victor even if Sherlock had figured out her cryptic riddle. And a child of Victor Trevor's age and size could still easily die down that well he was left in, whether by hypothermia, exposure or drowning. So even if Sherlock had solved the riddle, there was a chance that either Eurus might not have told him where Victor was anyway, or Victor still might have died before he got there.
• While John cheating on Mary with a woman he later found out was Sherlock’s psychopathic sister wasn’t his finest moment, he was lucky that was all Eurus manipulated him into doing. In this episode, we find out she easily convinced another husband and father to murder his entire family ... and then commit suicide.
• When Mycroft tells John - apparently not sarcastically - that his priorities are a credit to him, he's angry and responds with "My priorities just got a woman killed." He's referring mainly to David's wife, who was shot dead when he refused to kill David, but may well be thinking about Mary, too. She got to the aquarium in The Six Thatchers first because he suggested he be the one to wait behind on a babysitter for Rosie.
• Sherlock puts together that Mycroft is trying to make it easier for Sherlock to shoot him instead of John...but all three men in that room know that Sherlock was going to choose Mycroft over John. Sherlock would have shot Mycroft anyway, and yet even after Sherlock seemingly makes his choice—and unravels Mycroft's intended final kindness—Mycroft continues to try to make it easier for his brother, by confessing that he let Eurus talk to Moriarty unsupervised.
• Everything that happened to Sherlock—in this episode, in the series, in his whole life—happened because a five-year-old girl wanted to play with her brother.

Other

Miscellaneous

• Sherlock's reputation as a psychopath who crossed the line from solving crimes to committing them makes some of his online comments horrifying where they used to be hilarious. Especially a comment he makes on his own website: "I would kill every one of you for a cigarette." And one he makes on John's blog, where he tells John the beer he's bought for him is in the fridge "next to the feet." His last comment on John's blog? "John, fetch me my revolver." Ouch.
• Sherlock insists that he is a sociopath, not a psychopath. The sole difference between these is that sociopaths have had traumatic experiences that could account for their lack of empathy.
• Moriarty doesn't just use Sherlock's "fame" against him. Who set up that "fame"? John, and his blog. John's blog began as therapy for a lonely, injured war veteran; John then used it because he wanted the world to know about how freaking amazing his best friend was. Moriarty used something that was intended to honour and appreciate Sherlock as a way of disgracing him and ultimately, or so he hoped, killing him.
• John is a closet Blood Knight and Harry is an Alchoholic. What was their childhood like? One clue: John is in his early thirties, at most - too young to have lost both of his parents through natural causes - and yet, Harry is apparently his only living family member.
  • Not necessarily. Their parents may have been in their fifties when they were born (it's rare for a woman to get pregnant that late, but it happens), so they'd be in their eighties now if they were alive.
• It may be a coincidence, but when someone else fires a gun unexpectedly in his presence (Sherlock in The Great Game and A Scandal in Belgravia for example), John instinctively pulls back his left shoulder. The one he was shot in.
• Trust issues:
  • One of the very earliest things we ever learn about John Watson, before even the opening credits of A Study in Pink, is that he has trust issues. Mycroft later says it too and expresses amazement that John, who he also says doesn't make friends easily, has chosen to trust Sherlock Holmes of all people. And in The Reichenbach Fall, Sherlock lies to him again and again and again, and finally fakes his own death. It's not clear whether Sherlock will ever explain to John exactly why he faked his own death. But in any case- John decided to trust Sherlock, and will probably not understand why Sherlock ultimately told him an outrageous amount of lies.
  • And on the other side of the fence, Sherlock is going to have serious trust issues of his own. He's let himself get close to John, probably more so than any other person, ever, and Moriarty responded by trying to kill everyone he suspected even vaguely qualified as his friend. You couldn't blame Sherlock for concluding "I can't have friends, only bad things come of it", leading him to spend Series 3 in a regression of keeping John, Lestrade, Mrs Hudson and pretty much everyone else at arm's length to avoid having to go through that again.
• It's often said that we're least tolerant of our own faults when we find them in others, and this seems to be behind most of Sherlock's cruelty toward Molly. Molly herself has never treated him with anything but kindness and respect, but he often is projecting issues with himself onto her, particularly in season two. Sherlock's attitude toward Molly is a reflection of the attitude that many others, particularly Mycroft, hold toward him. Right from the beginning, he treats her as if she really has nothing better to do than be in the St Bart's Lab helping him, but then the police, including Lestrade, often treat Sherlock like he's got nothing better to do than run "CSI Baker Street" 24/7. Mycroft has so little regard for Sherlock's schedule, such as it is, that he downright has him more or less abducted to Buckingham Palace when he refuses to go. Sherlock later tells him he was in the middle of a case, but Mycroft acts like he couldn't care less, and as if Sherlock works for him; the exact same attitude Sherlock has toward Molly and her lunch date in The Reichenbach Fall. He's not trying to ruin her social life for the sake of it; he simply is so self-centred, and focused on the case at hand, that he can't understand why Molly's priorities may well be elsewhere. Sherlock humiliating Molly at Christmas in A Scandal in Belgravia is cruel and difficult to watch, but there's so much self-frustration and self-loathing in the way he lashes out at her. He mocks Molly's apparently "forlorn" hopes of romance, but he's not exactly one to talk about that kind of thing. After all, previously in the same episode, and probably most of his adult life, he is the one who has been mocked, as girlfriends are not "his area" and his own brother has no problems humiliating him about it. He's been pining after Irene in a rather forlorn hope of something ,though perhaps not a "relationship" as such. In effect, he's saying to Molly what he's saying to himself: "Don't be ridiculous, who'd want to be in a relationship with you?" In the same scene, he snaps at her "Don't make jokes, Molly", when in the next episode, John says something very similar to him ("'You being funny now? ... Funny doesn't suit you... stick to ice.") Sherlock's attempts at "making jokes" are often as painfully awkward as Molly's. In fact, he's spectacularly awful at even making basic conversation, so in The Reichenbach Fall when he tells Molly to not bother making conversation because it's really not "her area", he's aware that it's not his area either; he can't even have a civilised conversation about Christmas amongst friends in A Scandal in Belgravia. And when Sherlock tells Molly in The Reichenbach Fall that her boyfriend had been a bit naughty, and that she should forget all future attempts at a relationship because it only causes havoc for law and order; remember that Sherlock's "girlfriend" used him the same way that Molly had been used by Jim. In reality, Jim wasn't Molly's "boyfriend" any more than Irene was Sherlock's "girlfriend" and the ploy they used was similar in both cases. ^note  It got complicated with Irene, but in terms of her original strategy, she made a careful and clever campaign of playing Sherlock for a sucker, as Mycroft correctly recognises. Jim dated Molly in order to target Sherlock; Irene spent six months flirting with Sherlock in order to target Mycroft. Both Jim and Irene used someone who was naïve, lonely, inexperienced in love and very easy to manipulate. Jim nearly killed Sherlock and John; Irene nearly caused a major international incident, foiled a counter-terrorism operation, and used Sherlock as collateral in her negotiations with Mycroft. Sherlock and Molly really are not that different from one another, something they seem to at least partly realise by the end of The Reichenbach Fall.
• John's blog entry about taking Sherlock Christmas shopping is Played for Laughs, but imagine what it must have been like for Sherlock: the sounds, the lights, and the sheer amount of information flooding off the shoppers. That kind of sensory bombardment is enough to make anyone explode.
• Moriarty was already established as Sherlock's Shadow Archetype. But really, what's his most dangerous quality? His ability to make others think he's harmless. He can be completely psychopathic to the point of Ax-Crazy, and yet still pull off a performance of "normal everyman" so well it fools even Sherlock. People do not notice him if he doesn't want to be noticed. Who do we know who's like that? John. Sherlock's brilliant, sure but John is the one that can pull off "completely normal, nothing to see here" despite having a fair number of psychiatric and emotional issues himself. When the Chief Superintendent yells at Lestrade for all the things he's allowed Sherlock to do (collect evidence, be on crime scenes, the like), he doesn't even consider the fact that John does this too. And can we forget the scene in the first episode where John was coolly standing outside after killing the cabbie? Moriarty's basically Sherlock's brilliance combined with John's skill at fooling other people into thinking he's an Innocent Bystander.
• When John asks him how they would be able to afford the Baker Street flat, Sherlock says he helped Mrs. Hudson when her husband was on trial. John immediately assumes that Sherlock saved him from the death penalty, to which Sherlock replies "No, I ensured it." This comment, and several other moments (Mrs Hudson jumping when Sherlock sets something down, Sherlock and John's reaction to Mycroft telling her to shut up, her uncanny ability to keep calm enough to grab the phone while being threatened) suggests Mrs. Hudson was abused by her husband. It's revealed in Series 3 that her husband was a drug lord and she "did typing" for his cartel (along with her "night job")—whether or not she was abused (though it's a definite possibility) she was probably used to violence, especially as her husband was executed for shooting people in the head.
• As both Mycroft and Sherlock become slightly warmer human beings, Mycroft's own complete lack of empathy has emerged in season 3, and it's both funny and horrible. For example, he asks Sherlock (though probably rhetorically) if he knows what it was like going undercover - Sherlock was the one being tortured. He complains Christmas is "agony", in complete disregard for the horrible six months Sherlock, John and Mary have just had.

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