ugh i just watched this and it irritated me
‘moriarty is everything he doesn’t want to be’
well i mean okay i guess i understand that, and while i think it’ll probably be true of sherlock in series three and on i don’t think it’s necessarily true of what we’ve seen of him in series one and…
It’s the word ‘everything’ that I disagree with because he quite clearly was drawn to Moriarty because he was everything he wanted to be in series 1. Benedict mentioned just recently that Sherlock has been building himself up as a machine since childhood, and not only has Moriarty also been doing this, he’s achieved it with a level of brillance that’s beyond man. Sherlock could not physically contain himself once Moriarty started to engage him in TGG directly, because he wanted to close that gap between them so bad. Another cold, calculating, lonely and bored genius that sees the value in not having feelings or sentiment getting in the way? LET’S MEET AT THE POOL AT MIDNIGHT.
The only problem is Moriarty didn’t stop at a ‘machine’ you can turn on and off. He kept going until he became ‘a suicide bomb’, be that by his own choosing or the nature of what he does combined with his ‘too clever to exist’ intelligence. A suicide bomb doesn’t give a shit if other people die in the explosion as long as it achieves its goal, and for a while Sherlock had those same thoughts. Just go back and look at that scene between himself and John in TGG. Caring about people won’t help save them and doing so is a ‘mistake’. If a couple people die while I’m trying to solve this puzzle, that sucks, but at least I solved the puzzle because that’s the important part. But as Moriarty pointed out, Sherlock has a heart. They’re very much alike, but any differences between the two of them Moriarty is able to pick up faster than Sherlock because he won’t have them, and Sherlock won’t acknowledge having them because he doesn’t recognize them in himself. He recognizes it in others, yes, but he thinks he’s turned them off as not to fall in to any traps. “We both know that’s not quite true.” He’s naive - a virgin - to his own sentimental actions and feelings, no matter how weird and make-shift they are. He keeps himself distant and divorced from them, but they’re still there as he’s shown several times.
Series 2 was about bringing out those feelings more and humanizing the machine. He hurts people and he doesn’t like it. He wants to change that. I don’t think that’s something he would turn his nose up to Moriarty not coming to the same conclusion on, though. I prefer Mark’s thoughts on it: “It’s a cliche to say they’re two sides of the same coin but that’s clearly true. Sherlock chose a different side in the game, perhaps because it’s harder to be good! Ultimately, though, Sherlock realizes he is different to Moriarty. He does care about people - although he will never be the like the rest of us.” I am you/you’re me, BUT we differ on this one point. Sherlock does care about people, which in some off-handed way also includes Moriarty as he quite literally extends a hand out to him and seals this game they’ll play for life as opponents (which he doesn’t know will only last for the next ten seconds). I’ve said before I think Reichenbach is a kind of reverence-breaking process because Sherlock won’t get dark and violent with Moriarty for whatever reason, which is what Moriarty needed him to do to confirm he’s the person he thinks he is despite the side he’s on.
Nothing about Sherlock’s actions towards him in the past six episodes suggests he looks down upon Moriarty in any way for who he is (how can he? it would be like judging himself), especially since he missed the glaring clues that Moriarty also had some kind of weird and make-shift version of feelings and sentiment himself. They were just exclusive to Sherlock, which is why he didn’t pick-up on them because he didn’t think Moriarty would have any since he thought he was interested in him for game purposes. He was, but it was revealed to be a little more complex than that. You don’t obsess over and stalk someone for twenty years without harboring some type of strong attachment to them. It wasn’t the healthiest of attachments, but we’re not talking about very healthy people anyway. That exchange on the rooftop was also about humanizing Moriarty, if only for a second, which he was only going to get through a humanized Sherlock because no one gets him in the way Sherlock does. Just like Sherlock longs for companionship and intellectual comfort, so does Moriarty. His not-so-secret envy of John is proof of that. The only difference is he was only going to get both these things through one person, whereas Sherlock had options on both fronts. I don’t think either wants to become the other person, but ‘_____ is everything he doesn’t want to be’ is gross over-simplification of this idea that caring about people is, well, ‘everything’ and makes all the difference in the world when it really doesn’t in their case. If they’re building Sherlock up to be the one we know him for in the future, then he’ll care about people but not nearly as much as I think he gets credited for post-TRF. He will never be the like the rest of us.
you always make me feel so much better. :’)
sebastian u dumb
HMM SO
I WROTE A FIC
ABOUT THIS
yup
it’s
pointless
and nothing will ever be as good as seb’s face
YEAH HEY GUYS GO READ THIS sorry to put this on your dash again but READ THISSSSSSS
This is exactly how I view their relationship…
so it’s pretty great imagining Molly trolling the hell out of Sherlock and actually liking what Jim’s up to way more
but thinking about it, it’s really easy to do that in a way that disregards her agency, again, just shifting her to Team White Dude B. More sophisticatedly you could probably get a Lucy Saxon thing going? Rare is the fan who writes the fucking Anatomist and have Molly’s skillset blow Jim’s out of the water.
so it’s pretty cool that series 2 gave her a bit more to do, even if she was still mostly the Happless Morgue Attendant. Which leads to Essential Molly Fic Rec #2, An Avalanche of Detour Signs, which gives Molly a coherent life and goals and motivations in the background where most of the cock-fencing ~main players~ don’t even notice.
/MOLLY SOAPBOX
if I were just concisely ruining the joke instead of pontificating I’d stick with “it’s pretty goddamn funny to imagine that Sherlock is so fucking clueless he’d completely miss that Molly is co-running a criminal empire without his noticing and she’s using him way more than he’s using her”
Jim from IT and Seb from PR.
For the wonderful @has-a-type, my amazing Jim.
Seb’s cover job is working in the public relations department at Barts and the London, which involves entirely too much interacting with other people in an office setting for his liking, and not enough murdering people in an office environment for his liking. His favorite pastime is ringing the IT department with a computer problem, then, when Jim is about halfway through troubleshooting the issue, sighing loudly and declaring that “this would be so much easier on my Mac.” He smokes Kreteks and rides to work on a Vespa, and doesn’t actually need glasses — along with anything else he can do to ensure that his Seb from PR persona is an utter wang.
That last look: it’s a secret between the two of them, that Sherlock cares and has feelings— a piece of himself he’s been able to make everyone uncertain about— except apparently Jim Moriarty, who tells him playfully that he alone can see everything in Sherlock’s heart.
It’s quite an intimate character insight, especially given that John’s questioned it (“just so I know, do you actually care about them at all?”) earlier in the episode
p.s.
“you’re me” necessarily implies “turns out I may have a heart too”
Okay, Moriarty is unambiguously and elaborately lying about the key code’s existence, fine, don’t worry about it— he’s A Bit Not Good or whatever, he’s allowed to lie to Sherlock (= the audience) to advance his agenda (= the plot).
What really gets me about the episode is that the cinematography is lying to you too.
Moriarty selects the Bank of England app icon on his phone, which leads— through the phone screen, with whirring binary animation— directly to…
… a shot of the bank director’s computer flashing VAULT OPENING!! and the director spilling tea on himself in shock. [via]
ADD ON: that Mycroft believes in the key code enough to sell Moriarty information on Sherlock (of whom he’s creepily overprotective) to get it
ADD ON: that Sherlock fucking knows how easy it is to adjust your behavior slightly to get what you want (dressing as a museum guard to examine the painting, insincerely complimenting Molly to get access to the morgue, etc etc) and even says during the course of Reichenbach:
John: A stranger can’t just walk into a school like that!
Sherlock: Anyone can walk in anywhere, if they pick the right moment. Yesterday, end of term; parents milling around, chauffeurs, staff? What’s one more stranger among that lot?
… and it quickly becomes unfair for Moriarty to call us all doofuses on the rooftop, because we’ve been straight-up lied to in several different ways and taken it on good faith that we were suspending disbelief (come on, really, a fucking magic line of code controls everything, gosh) in service of the story, just like the show was asking.
The episode plain fell apart for me apart once I knew the key code was a lie: the fun part after a twist where you get to re-examine evidence you were given for new interpretations (golly those cryptic remarks about Luke’s father were about Vader?!?!) couldn’t happen, because even Moriarty’s actions (see: above) just made so much less sense if there were no actual code.
tl;dr - these are excitingly grandiose lines
but they would be better if they weren’t in service of a particularly stupid and badly written MacGuffin.
- that actually is the consummate Don’t Like Getting My Hands Dirty
- making sherlock kill himSELF
- that he’s so talented and skilled and brilliant that he can convince another person— THE other person— to do that to himself
- it’s only when sherlock pushes back that moriarty is like oh thank god, i can be stopped, i can’t make this happen i have a match
Q: what cereal do you think moriarty would eat, btw
7266 replied to your post: 7266 replied to your post: omg lol one time i…
i wonder if they have those bottom shelf bag cereals in england bc if they do i feel like moriarty kind of aimlessly chooses sugary ones from there he has no fave bc hes SO CHANGEABLE looool omfg im an idiot
dynamics-of-an-asteroid replied to your post: 7266 replied to your post: omg lol one time i…
Definitely not a box of Life cereal, that’s for sure lmfao. Then again, he might eat something ironic like that. Someone get him some Sherlock-o’s. He’d DEVOUR that box.
