Deconstructing Baskerville (BBC Sherlock)

you went on the tube like that? none of the cabs would take me

Watched “Baskerville” last night.

I’ve brought up how Sherlock essentially grows through the six episodes of series one and two, and Baskerville is a great example of that.

He really pisses John off / hurts his feelings when he tells John that he doesn’t have friends. After realising what he did, he tells John that he doesn’t have friends. He’s just got one. The old Sherlock (series one) wouldn’t have paid attention to John’s reaction, wouldn’t have cared. In Baskerville, while freaking out about the hound, he also says the line that, more than anything, sets up the dramatic events in “Reichenbach”:

I’ve always been able to keep myself distant. Divorce myself from feelings. But you see? Body’s betraying me. Interesting, yes? Emotions. The grease on the lenses. The fly in the ointment.

That line is made all the more poignant when John accuses him of being a machine right before the face off with Moriarty on the roof of Bart’s:

Sherlock: What is it?
Watson: Paramedics. Mrs. Hudson’s been shot.
Sherlock: What. How.
Watson: Probably one of the killers you managed to attract. Jesus. Jesus. She’s dying. Sherlock, let’s go.
Sherlock: You go, I’m busy.
Watson: Busy?
Sherlock: Thinking. I need to think.
Watson: You need to— Doesn’t she mean anything to you? You once half-killed a man because he laid a finger on her.
Sherlock: She’s my landlady.
Watson: She’s dying you machine! Sod this. Sod this, you stay here if you want. On your own.
Sherlock: Alone is what I have. Alone protects me.
Watson: No. Friends protect people.

In the end, when it really matters (or is too late to matter, depending), John finally calls Sherlock his ‘friend’. This is significant, because in BBC canon, that’s the first time he does. That’s before he learns that Sherlock jumped to save him from a sniper’s bullet. The scene takes on a life of its own when you see Sherlock in the cemetery watching John grieve over an empty grave. He protected John because John’s his friend.

Emotion

The feels.

It’s stuff like that makes it easy to ship Johnlock, whether it’s in a brOTP or in PWP: the man that doesn’t show emotion gives in, becomes human, because of a person who is everything he isn’t. Despite everything Sherlock has put him through, he is loyal to the end. The very, bitter, end. 

Just like the RAMC motto: In Arduus Fidelis (Faithful in Adversity)

#IBelieveinSherlockHolmes