Contains Spoilers
The Final Problem did indeed pose a final dilemma and a final possible outcome and solution. With Mycroft (Mark Gatiss) having to come clean about the Holmes family having a sister and how Sherlock's memories were altered to make him forget. As Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) and John (Martin Freeman) engage in an elaborate plan in his home to make him see this and bring in a girl and a clown to scare Mycroft into confessing the truth. All John's idea, as he tells them about John being shot by his shrink with a tranquilizer. John telling him if he wants to be safe he knows where to come: 221B. Which he does and Mrs Hudson (Una Stubbs) says if he wants them to listen to him he has to sit on that chair, even if he's not a client, as he says. Which he does and if he wants a cup of tea, Mrs Hudsona advises the kettle is over there and he should make it himself. During all this taking place, is the plane in the air with the little girl, who really wasn't so little, so how come she didn't know a pilot flies a plane, not a driver. Anyway she's the only one awake and everyone else is knocked out. She needs help and hears a phone ringing which she picks up and hears Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) introduce himself.
Mycroft tells them about Sherrinford, being a place where she's been locked up all these years. How there was seven years between Sherlock and him and a year between Sherlock and Eurus. John a adding that makes Sherlock a middle child, which explains a lot. She was clever and as intelligent as them, as Mycroft sates it, but she was merely a thinker, unemotional and having no concept of right or wrong. She used to sing a song. Which they didn't understand. Taking his dog Redbeard and causing Sherlock to search for him. But he couldn't find him. Mycroft also mentioning the cemetery with the funny graves where Sherlock was fascinated as the dates were all wrong. The window crashes and a drone flies in with a bomb that Mycroft says they manufacture. It's armed and the motion detector is set so they can't move to get it. Mrs Hudson vacuums and they need for her to finish as she puts it away it the shed. John mentions that the quote Mycroft stated about how "the truth is rarely pure and never simple" is from Oscar Wilde's,
The Importance of Being Earnest, again as we know and they both studied it at school. Mycroft played Lady Bracknell in the production and Sherlock thought he was rather good. As Mycroft also tells him Eurus wasn't right in the head and she burned down their home and had to be taken away. She also cut herself to see how her muscles worked.
Sherlock says he and John will jump out the window and Mycroft has to take the stairs and rescue Mrs Hudson too, cos he's the closest, which is what they do. The bomb explodes. John and Sherlock then end up on a fishing boat and take it over, with Sherlock adding he's a pirate. They take the boat to Sherrinford and are held there by the governor (Art Malik) who runs the place. Of course Mycroft isn't really injured in hospital and is with them, as Sherlock disguises himself as one of the guards and is taken to see his sister. With Mycroft being dressed as the old fisherman. He could've dresses as Lady Bracknell. Also making a reference about dressing up in clown suits cos that's what the staff at this facility have ended up as. Just as Sherlock bought the clown to Mycroft's home.
Sherlock sees her and she's playing a violin with the sign reading 'Stand Three Feet Away From Glass' - perhaps that should've been in metric measurement! Sherlock puts pieces of his memory together and she makes him come closer, as the others watch the tapes of her sessions. She mentions the song and also Redbeard and flashes of how they used to play at their home, Musgrave. We thought Moriarty was bad. Sherlock edges towards the glass and mentions she was at his house and they had chips, asking how she escaped. They touch the glass and their hands intertwine. There's no glass and she's taken over the facility by talking everyone round. The governor is the man in the taped sessions and she talked him round too. As John goes outside and tells Mycroft to listen to the tapes. They're all subdued and end up in her cell. Sherlock again adding that it's not Moriarty, he's dead. That much we'd gathered by now.
She has the governor's wife and she wants Sherlock to pick between Mycroft and John as to who will shoot him and save his wife. Of course it was pointless listening to her, since apparently she'd have done it anyway. He gives the gun to Mycroft but he refuses. He's one of those people as we know who give orders to kill, but can't pull the trigger himself and she wouldn't ask Sherlock, cos Sherlock would be capable of doing it as we know from killing Magnussen. He then gives it to John who takes the gun and there's a long, drawn out scene where he speaks with the governor who insists they must do it in order to save his wife. Asking if John's married. John refuses to kill David and he grabs the gun, shooting himself instead. Again pointless as she shoots his wife anyway. She tells Sherlock to pick up the gun. She dials the phone and allows Sherlock to listen to the girl and speak with her. If he wants to save her, he'll have to play her game. Yeah the game is on but not with Moriarty at the helm.
Then sends them on a series of puzzle games. One where he must solve who killed some woman out of three brothers and Sherlock deduces which one it was cos of the type of gun, which John examines and since there aren't any crosshairs the shooter must've had to have good eyesight or worn glasses, only one of them could have done it, yet she suspends all three outside so they will all fall into the sea. 'Sink or swim.' Again it was apparent she wouldn't let any of them live. Even the innocent ones. It's not about being guilty or innocent to someone like her. John says they must do this cos today "we must be soldiers." Who don't ask questions, only obey and do their duty. Oh you know the saying, "ours is not to question why but to do or die."
She then sends them to a room with a coffin and Sherlock deduces its height is 5' 4". So it was made for a woman, not a child since it would've been better quality for a child. The top of it has a plaque with "I love you" written on it. Obviously the person who loves him would be Molly (Louise Brealey) and not Irene as John thinks. She calls her and wants Sherlock to make her say those three words to him, otherwise she'll explode the bomb. Obviously Molly wouldn't pick up. Molly it seems when she's at home is not the Molly we see at work. Living in her own despair and misery and ruing her unrequited love for a man she can't have! Yeah sure we've all been in that position at some time
or another in our lives. She finally picks up and then Sherlock tells her he's doing an experiment for a case and she must tell him those words. After a drawn out attempt to reason with her, she agrees to say them if he says them first and mean them. Which he does, eventually she does too. He's tricked since she wouldn't have planted a bomb there and Molly is the only one who's spared. The only one of the outsiders I should say. But here you can say Sherlock was pleading with her using his heart and not his cold calculating mind.
Finally there's the crux of the entire 'game.' Sherlock must choose which one he will shoot cos he can only continue with one of them. Mycroft attempts to talk Sherlock into shooting him and not John cos he's trying to be the better man. Obviously Sherlock plays her and says he'll follow the same route as David, holding the gun to himself. During this time we get the flashback to Moriarty:
Five Years Ago Christmas Day when he flies to the island. This time his song being Queen's "I want to break free." He's her Christmas present and she wants to spend five minutes alone with him unsupervized, where they hatch this plan. Or rather she does. Sherlock saying that's all it took her; five minutes. Well who knows how long she was cooking it up and no matter how much of a genius she's perceived to be, probably took her longer than five minutes. Mycroft was impressed with how she could hep them out with terrorism and other matters. Being Mycroft, would've thought curiosity would've got the better of him and he would've listened in, suspecting the game was afoot! Or at least she was, in not trusting her.
She tranquilizes him and John and he ends up at the bottom of a well and Sherlock in a room surrounded by photos. All the while speaking with the girl on the phone. He tells her they're going to land the plane and she has to go to the front of the plane and radio in. As he also speaks with John who tells him of bones he's found in the water. But they're no dog bones. Sherlock senses air through the wall and since they were only recently painted, he knocks them down and finds they're at Musgrave. She wants him to solve the Redbeard puzzle. He realizes that Redbeard doesn't exist. They didn't have a dog cos of their father's allergies. Instead Redbeard was his best friend when they were little and John finds his skull in the well. Saying Mycroft lied to him. Sherlock recalls his best friend and he rushes outside to the gravestones, working out the words of the song. As he must save John from the well and the water filling up. She says he didn't have a best friend and she wanted to play with them too but couldn't. Thus putting John in the same well she put Redbeard, his friend. He solves the code in the song and finds Eurus in her room.
She's taken back to the island and Mycroft must come clean with their parents about their sister, their daughter and they wanted to know she was still alive. Sherlock pays her a visit with his violin and they both play together. As they redecorate 221B Baker Street and John finds another DVD in the post from Mary.
Mary: "PS I know you two and if I'm gone I know who you could become because I know who you really are: a junky who solves crimes to get high and a doctor who never really came home from the war. Will you listen to me, it doesn't really matter who you really are, it's all about the legend, the stories, the adventures. There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted. There is a final Court of Appeal for everyone...when life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope when all else fails, there are two men sitting arguing in a scruffy flat like they've always been there and they always will. The best and the wisest men I have ever known. My Baker Street Boys: Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson."
All's well in the land of Sherlock as John and he move on, putting everything behind them and carrying on as usual.
Of course it was all a metaphor of sorts for Sherlock being on the plane: actually at their home and the girl was his sister, who couldn't cope with her emotions. Locked up in her room. Nemo Holmes in the cemtery wasn't so hard to work out, we, most of us, do know that Nemo means 'no one'. Forget about Redbeard being a red herring, what about the fact if the plane was real someone would've noticed its course or seen a rogue plane in the sky flying towards a city, it stands to reason, to an extent. As well as the cockpit not being open to the general passengers on the plane. Sherlock hating water and always being surrounded by water. I said that too, that he's always around some form of deep water, the swimming pool, the waterfall, the swimming pool again this season, some sort of river or the Thames.
All was an elaborate plan by their sister to finally reveal the truth now, question being why wait so long. Of course there's not a real answer to that aside from the story being played out now at the end of the series. However there were some parts of this episode which could've been excluded and the thrill of the chase wasn't as interesting as other episodes have been. As Lestrade (Rupert Graves) takes her away and Sherlock actually calls him "Greg." Not to mention everything being business as usual, even for Molly. We don't get to see any reaction or fallout from her, even if it was meant to be an experiment on Sherlock's part when they declared their love for each other. Admittedly didn't it appear as though Sherlock was being very sincere when he said, "I love you" to her, as if he really did mean it. Or was he putting everything into a contextual emotional context.
The Musgrave Ritual is alluded to in the ep and it too was based on a riddle that Sherlock had to solve whilst investigating the disappearance of two staff members from the home of a university acquaintance, Reginald Musgrave. "And so under..." appearing in the song...in the well, where John was now. Sherlock's oldest enemy it appears was his own sister. The trauma of losing Redbeard was so much for him that he shut away those memories, but now as he recalls them, we also see Sherlock's emotions come to the surface, once again a more humanization takes place. This being something he needed to come to terms with, emotionally, and for him to dredge those painful memories up in order to save his best friend and in some ways himself.
Thinking out loud, that means Moriarty killing himself was dreamed up by Eurus talking him round when he came to her, if he couldn't get Sherlock to do it to himself. She had to have known Sherlock would save himself.
Steven Moffat said they had Mycroft make a reference to "my sister..." as early on as the opening pilot episode
The Great Game, but edited it out cos no one needed to know that just yet, or where they had planned to take the series. The scene with the coffin was there but not written in that way and not about Molly and Sherlock, people hated the first scene and so they re-wrote it to what appeared in the episode.
Mark Gatiss: ‘I think what’s actually happened is we’ve now done the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who we’ve always known, became those men. It’s actually weirdly a backstory. We never intended that to be. But the reason we leave it at Rathbone place, is that actually if we do come back, and we’d love to come back, you could absolutely very easily start it with a knock on the door and Sherlock saying “John, do you want to come out and play?” They’ve become the two heroes we always knew them to be, and we’ve accidentally done their backstory. That wasn’t the plan.’
(From Metro.co.uk)
The final shot of Sherlock and John running from Rathbone Place (alas a tribute to Basil Rathbone, not really) but showing their escape from the public eyes and fandom for the foreseeable future! But it can't go for good, it's one of our best drams as I said last ep review.
Thought of how if there was a remake of
Remington Steele, Bene would be perfect for the title role. When he exited the lift for the first time to see his sister, and at the end, it just sort of came to me!
Ha. He seemed to have a look of Pierce Brosnan about him!
Okay moving on...awaiting the next instalment...waiting...Miss me will apply to
Sherlock now! Missing You...!
Yeh shamelessly plugging the book again!!
https://www.amazon.com/My-Continuing-Letter-Benedict-Cumberbatch/dp/1326198017/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1484527971&sr=8-9&keywords=mila+hasan
