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Saturday, January 11, 2014

My s3 speculation.

{ See updated response here on 24-Jan-2014...}


Had to write this out here and now... because hindsight is perfect.

This is me speculating on ep3.  Which I haven't seen.  Yet.

Which airs for the first time 12-January-2014 at 8.30 GMT on BBC One.

Do not read if you have NOT seen Sherlock s3 ep1 and ep2!


Been thinking a lot about Sherlock and the wedding, and how he's been acting.  I confess that in ep1, I wasn't seeing him being out of character too much.

But I've seen ep2 twice now.  The first time I didn't see everything.

When I was manic the second time, I had a hard time with cognitive function.  I could observe when things happened as usual...  I could record what happened as memories, but I couldn't connect the dots.

Josephine Tey says that criminals have an inability to reason in a linear fashion.  They cannot see that this fact leads to that action and then to this result.

Being manic is like that.  You cannot get from point A to point C, or point D.  Everything breaks down.  Sometimes you can't even move past point A.  You just sort of hang there.

Meaning...?

  • The wedding reception.  Sherlock can't connect things.  (Of course he's also panicking, and I'm finding it hard to tell if that was overcoming his logic.)
  • That also means the case he couldn't solve.  Sherlock doesn't find out where the wound is.  
That would tell him about the weapon and the attack.  [John doesn't either, weirdly enough, but then perhaps when he treats the patient, he hands him off and doesn't find out more.  Still, that seems out of character for both JW and SH.]  Call it a plot hole if you like (it is).

Now, admittedly, I didn't think of this either.  One of my very favorite howdunnits ever involves the same type of murder.  But I was misled -- the entire audience is -- from where they say the wound is.

And I just plain wasn't thinking about the wound anymore, I was trying to solve the puzzle, racking my brains, when I realized I must already know the answer.  Then I did know who the victim must be.

(I figured out who the murderer was almost immediately before Sherlock did.  He'd clued me in.)


Going on my own life and experience, I would say that SH is at the beginning of the manic phase.

Life trauma can do that, I'm told.  Trigger illness.

  • The origami.  "It just... happened." 

Suddenly doing something you've never done before.  Maybe it's just a surprise to those around you, maybe it's totally out of character.  With the origami, it registers as SH being fiddly and fidgeting -- or it did when I first watched it.

  • Using multiple computers:  I did that when I was manic too.  You couldn't use as many program screens on a computer twenty years ago, true.  But I also used a whole row of computers, anywhere from 3-5 different machines at a time.  It freaked people out.

Mostly I'm focusing on acting out of character and the inability to reason.  I hope I'm wrong.  I'm not a doctor nor a therapist, mind you.

Just based on my own experience.  There are other symptoms, certainly.

Inability to use normal judgment.  That's a big symptom for both manic and depressive phases of the bipolar.  Sherlock pinging GL about the speech.  Yeah, SH has shown in the past that he doesn't prioritize the way many other people do.

But... although it's played for laughs, it makes you expect a killer at his door.  A crisis.  Not that he's freaking out about writing a speech.

YMMV.  Let's see when we get to His Last Vow, eh?

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