Presented by Drinkingcocoa at 221B Con on Saturday, April 14, 2018
[Spoiler warning: This talk discusses content from the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.]
In the six-month period between July 2016 and January 2017, the established universes of Harry Potter and Sherlock staggered under the impact of significant new additions to canon. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play that was presented as “the eighth and final Harry Potter story,” gave us a character named Delphi, who may or may not have been the secret daughter of Voldemort. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them introduced Obscurials, magical children who respond to forced self-suppression of their gifts by developing an Obscurus, a parasitic destructive power that bursts out of them like a bomb and usually kills them in childhood. And the fourth season of BBC Sherlock revealed Eurus, “an era-defining genius,” the younger sibling so frightening that Sherlock can’t remember her.
For those of us familiar with Harry Potter, themes from Potterverse have always helped to illuminate BBC Sherlock. For example, Voldemort helped us understand Moriarty, a supervillain who considered himself more than a man, yet was destroyed by his jealousy of the ordinary love between Sherlock and John Watson. Harry Potter helped us see how Sherlock was willing to sacrifice himself, then come back to life to protect his loved ones. Like Potter, BBC Sherlock is about the power of love being greater even than death, especially for characters who were exceptional and isolated during their formative years and therefore will never take love for granted.
I found that the character of Delphi and the concept of the Obscurial helped prepare me to make sense of Eurus Holmes.
Here are some things that Eurus and Delphi have in common. The biggest thing, I think, is that the Sherlock and Harry Potter fandoms were waiting for years for the next installment of the story — and when those installments came, and the plot was driven not by the title characters but by characters we’d never met before, the rejection from many viewers was intense. Some of us had been seeing same-sex romance in the stories and hoped to see that become official. The stories we did get, though, were less charming, more disquieting to some of us: stories of the frightening loneliness of growing up an unwanted girl. Among some fans, the reaction to Eurus and Delphi went something like: Why are you here? We don’t know you. There’s a story that was changing us, and for me, you’re not in it. And that response is a significant part of this show’s fandom history. But for this session, I am going to be talking about the stories we did get on screen and stage, rather than the vital stories that we didn’t get.
Eurus and Delphi have in common the rejection of being the forgotten sister, the unwanted daughter. They haunt narratives with their absence: Mycroft talks about “the other one.” Sherlock, with his frequent lapses in memory, has ghostly visions of the Maid of the Mill singing “do not forget me,” and the crypt full of brides that he calls “the avenging ghost[s],” “the women I — we — have lied to, betrayed… the women we have ignored.” The wizarding world is always afraid of the heir of Slytherin, the son of Voldemort, whether or not there’s a scapegoat for this fear. Eurus and Delphi have in common this struggle to be written back into their own family narratives, to force those family stories back to their own points of origin and the moments when they were excluded.
Delphi accomplishes this by commandeering one of J.K. Rowling’s signature literary devices, the Time-Turner. Rowling’s time travel functions according to her own specific, allegorical rules, not the better-known conventions found in many science fiction stories. For Harry in Prisoner of Azkaban, for Delphi, and arguably for Eurus, too, bringing Sherlock to Musgrave Hall with his best friend in the well — the Time-Turner is not about actual travel in time and space but about returning psychologically to a traumatic event — under controlled circumstances, anchored by the support and witness of a friend — not in order to change anything, not to be seen by the people of the past, but just to shine a light on that moment from a different perspective, to set the self free, perhaps even to save an innocent life.
Delphi appears when 14-year-old Albus Severus Potter hears Harry lying to Cedric Diggory’s father out of survivor guilt. The way Delphi hijacks the plot, and the play’s use of the Time-Turner, are allegories for how the subconscious can derail conscious agendas to focus attention on an urgent unresolved matter. Delphi forces Harry and his loved ones to return to the original trauma: Voldemort’s attack on baby Harry and his parents.
Delphi, who is Albus’s shadow self, makes her plea to the person she thinks is Voldemort: “I only wanted to know my father.” Delphi attacks Harry, but Harry’s loved ones overpower her. The Delphi persona recedes and disappears from the narrative, leaving Harry’s loved ones to stand with him as he witnesses, as an adult and parent, the horror of his own parents being killed and his toddler self’s helplessness to stop it. This shared understanding releases the tensions between father and son, freeing them to show their love for each other and repair their relationship.
Like Sherlock with Victor Trevor, the anguish of being unable to save a loved one is central in Harry’s trauma. We see how it happened during a Quidditch game, when dementors trigger a trauma flashback so severe that Harry loses consciousness and falls off his broom.
Someone was screaming, screaming inside his head . . . a woman . . .
“Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead —”
Numbing, swirling white mist was filling Harry’s brain. . . . What was he doing? Why was he flying? He needed to help her. . . . She was going to die. . . . She was going to be murdered. . . .
With the flashback to Lily Potter’s death, we discover the origins of what Hermione calls Harry’s “saving-people-thing.” This is the permanent state that Voldemort induced in Harry; this is how Voldemort can be so certain that if he wants Harry Potter to come to him, all Voldemort has to do is threaten his loved ones. Eurus created the same state in Sherlock and has the same certainty about how to get Sherlock to come to her, and Moriarty, through Eurus, learned — to his disappointment — that controlling Sherlock Holmes is that easy. All anyone has to do is threaten Sherlock’s loved ones.
In his third year, Harry takes a Time-Turner back to a moment when dementors swarmed him, Sirius Black, Hermione, and Snape, living that scene again but from the opposite bank. With the dual boost of Hermione’s companionship on this Time-Turner journey and the urgent need to save others from the dementors, he is able to cast the Patronus and protect everyone.
This portrayal of trauma from Potterverse sheds light on the Eurus storyline. Mycroft tells Sherlock that everything he is, in a way, is his memory of Eurus. The boy who wanted to be a pirate, who had the mind of a scientist or a philosopher, yet elected to be a detective — what does that tell us about his heart?
It tells us his heart has been traumatized, trying unstoppably to heal. There’s something he can’t remember, some reason why it was so important to solve a mystery and save a life, some reason why it all depended on whether he was stupid or clever, some origin for the dread feeling that he was a stupid boy and he would be unable to prevent someone’s death. Baby Harry heard the woman screaming in his flashback. Six-year-old Sherlock screamed all night. He spent his youth trying to become clever enough, trying to distance himself from the destructive emotions that would interfere with his thinking, in case there was still time to save a life.
After he is shot, Sherlock relives painful memories, like Dudley with the dementors or Dumbledore after drinking the potion in the cave. Sherlock pictures Redbeard as the Mycroft in his head says, “The East Wind is coming.” As Sherlock nears death, he envisions his thoughts being spoken by an imaginary Moriarty, most of these thoughts dark and taunting, encouraging him to just die, until imaginary Moriarty mentions that John Watson is in danger. That thought awakens Sherlock’s saving-people-thing and reverses his decline. Sherlock comes clawing back to life, fist pounding, heart beating, much as Harry Potter chose to return to life from King’s Cross in order to finish Voldemort.
During his flight away from His Last Vow, in order to solve the case of Moriarty’s reappearance, Sherlock decides he has to go deep, deep into himself, deep into the past. He takes drugs to go deeper — his own version of a Time-Turner. This does get him closer: exactly halfway through “The Abominable Bride,” Watson asks him, “What made you like this?” And — you remember — Sherlock said with arrogant certainty, “Oh, Watson. Nothing made me. I made me,” followed immediately by his hearing something and saying, “Redbeard?”
When Sherlock reaches the deepest point, the moment in the past where he’s at the falls of the Reichenbach with Moriarty, the personification of his failures, Sherlock literally beats himself up in his head. He imagines this Moriarty physically fighting him, hollering, “I am your weakness. I keep you down. Every time you stumble, every time you fail, when you’re weak, I am there!” This Moriarty seems to be winning — he says “at the end, it’s always just you and me.” And that’s when — you remember — in Sherlock’s mind, John Watson clears his throat and announces, “There’s always two of us.” Imaginary Moriarty may be as strong as Sherlock, or stronger, but Sherlock has a friend by his side now. He believes he has a friend by his side. He’s internalized it. He’s changed how his story ends; he’s changed. This means he is ready to go back in time and face his trauma. Remember the rules with Time-Turners: change nothing, except the one thing that must be changed. You must not be seen. Know that you have a friend with you, shine a light on your own past from a different perspective, cast the magic, save a life.
That brings us to Series 4, and deep waters, and Eurus, who knew that Sherlock Holmes was flying toward certain death and apparently needed every screen in Britain to express how imperative it was that he not leave, taking with him her last hope. Like Delphi with Albus and Scorpius, Eurus abducts Sherlock back in time. She conducts tests, first: she analyzes John Watson. This friend is important: she has to know if this friendship provides enough stability for Sherlock that he can withstand the trip into his own traumatized past, and hers, that she’s about to force upon him.
Having met John, Eurus goes to 221B Baker Street. John describes Baker Street to Mycroft as “a place for people like you — the desperate, the terrified, the ones with nowhere else to run.” Mary calls it “a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted,” a “final court of appeal for everyone.” In her disguise-as-self-portrait, Eurus presents herself to Sherlock as Faith Smith, trying to recall her altered memories, distressed because someone had been killed and she was unable to stop the murder and couldn’t remember who it was. She tells Sherlock, “Please. You’re my last hope. I have no one else to turn to.” Fictional “Faith Smith,” with the scars on her arm made by a desperate child isolated by her genius, is saddened and moved by Sherlock’s assumption that if someone noticeably self-harmed while living with loved ones, the loved ones would do something about it. Like a teacher writing out an assessment test for her students, Eurus plants clues to see what Sherlock can deduce or remember; she needs to know if he has enough substance to help her. She eventually stages the big reveal she’s prepared for John, dropping her therapist disguise bit by bit — “Haven’t you guessed?” “Didn’t it ever occur to you that his secret brother might be his secret sister?” — in confidence that the surprise will turn out to be that everyone expected the mysterious sibling to be male, like John saying, “Harry is short for Harriet.” Eurus expects that Sherlock must have mentioned her to John, sure that her absence was noticed during those endless years she was incarcerated, and she finds — this is quite a blow — that Sherlock hasn’t mentioned a secret sibling to John at all. Delphi’s story helps us understand what Eurus feels. Delphi, too, knew people were expecting Voldemort’s child to be a son. But the surprise that she didn’t expect was finding that Voldemort, who had been her whole life, didn’t even know she existed. No one had missed her.
It becomes even more urgent, then, that Eurus break through to Sherlock and make him remember her. Eurus attacks, putting a Stunning Spell on John when he comes for therapy and sending the drone to blast them out of Baker Street, knowing that this will guarantee Sherlock’s arrival. Once he’s there, she puts him through more tests to see if he can help her. Is he bright at all? Does he feel empathy and love? Can he show her what they look like? Can he extend these complicated little emotions to her? Because nobody else will; Mycroft certainly won’t, and nobody else, since Jim Moriarty died, has been awake enough to hear her cries for help.
The coffin for a woman about 5’4”, “an unmarried woman distant from her close relatives.” Of all Eurus’s tests, this one feels the most equalizing to me. It has nothing to do with genius, mental illness, or crime. For any of us, the thought of saying aloud to someone, “I love you,” might feel like life and death. It might kill us to hold it in and let them leave without knowing that we even exist. It might kill us to say it and not hear it back. For any of us, we can have that person right there, a captive audience, paying full attention to our words, and still feel like it might kill us to say, “I love you.” We might wish, desperately, that they would coax the words from us. That they would assure us it’s okay, that they will do anything we need to enable us to say whatever we need to say. Perhaps, even, though they cannot say so themselves, it is life or death for them to hear what we have to say.
If only they would say it first.
Eurus already showed Sherlock how she wanted him to go first. “Touch the glass,” she said, “and I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll touch it too, if you’re scared.”
Molly, that goddess of death and love, finds it in her to do this for Sherlock. Following her lead, Sherlock demonstrates for Eurus that it’s okay for someone to tell him that they love him, they’ve always loved him, and they want to hear first, whether it’s true or not, that he loves them back. When Molly and Sherlock are finished, Eurus’s face is shining with emotion. Her brother hasn’t failed her yet, this time. It’s still safe for her to dream that maybe she can say aloud to him: I love you. I missed you. How could you not miss me? How could you forget me?
She tests Sherlock to make sure he’s not the same as Mycroft. Mycroft’s loyalty is to Sherlock alone, Mycroft’s saving-people-thing focused entirely on protecting the baby brother whose loss would break his heart, the traumatized baby brother who had been next on Eurus’s hit list until Mycroft did what he could to keep her away and save Sherlock’s life.
If Sherlock chooses to kill John and save Mycroft so the brothers can team up to defeat Eurus, she is lost. Not that they would beat her; she could easily kill them both. But she would be doomed as Voldemort would have been doomed if someone else killed Harry Potter, leaving Voldemort alone in a world where his last chance to feel an emotional connection with another person, his last possible savior was gone. If Sherlock chooses to kill Mycroft and save his friend, Eurus thinks she still has a chance; she can go forward with her Time-Turner plan to seize John, recreate the original crime, and see if this time, Sherlock can change the way the story ends for them both.
Sherlock chooses the third option that Eurus didn’t foresee; when he plans to sacrifice himself, it’s funny to see her panic and drop her affected manner to screech at him, sibling-like, that he must stop it at once. Fine; she’ll just cast Petrificus Totalus on all of them, stash Mycroft in her cell and plunk Sherlock and John unceremoniously into her endgame. Like Delphi seizing the Time-Turner and kidnapping Albus and Scorpius back to the past, Eurus transports John and Sherlock to Musgrave Hall with the box house and the dog dish that says Redbeard and… at this point, it works better for me just to think of her as a witch, because otherwise I start picturing all the Sherrinford employees she’s gotten to drag things around and tape pictures to the wall and paint the dog dish, and I lose the flow. Everything from this point on is all clearly meant to read as magic, as allegorical or absurd, like the headstones. Okay.
It helps me to make the mental leap that when Sherlock bursts through the door to her room, it’s the cockpit. The threshold moments in this episode, when they cross from one reality to another, are breathtaking, literally so, like the moment Eurus puts her hand through the glass that isn’t there and gasps aloud, or the boys explode through the windows, or the walls fall down around Sherlock’s cell. This is and isn’t travel through space or time in the same way that Delphi’s Time-Turner use isn’t; it’s a return through the layers of consciousness and memory and deep waters to the moment of trauma. Like Delphi setting up kidnap and murder so she can get to the point of begging her father for acknowledgment, Eurus has brought Sherlock back with her to the moment that her ordinary childhood jealousy and loneliness, things that in ordinary children are contained by their limited powers and therefore forgivable, joined with her extraordinary powers so that nothing could stop the frightened five-year-old from murdering her brother’s friend at will.
By reproducing the original crime for Sherlock, Eurus has set up a confession and a plea: I killed your friend. I was angry at you for not being clever enough to be my playmate and equal; I punished you by making it too difficult for you to save his life. I don’t know how to land. It’s too late. I’ve already killed. Save my soul. It’s the same thing Voldemort wanted from Harry Potter, the same thing Delphi wanted from Voldemort, the same thing Moriarty wanted on the rooftop with Sherlock’s promise to shake hands in hell: emotional connection. These characters are not trying to escape justice; they want their souls saved.
In this way, the Eurus storyline has the same core of faith that sustains Potterverse. Rehabilitation seems unlikely for genius serial killers whose disorders are so severe. It’s not as if Eurus can move back in with her family after all the crimes she’s committed; Hermione states that Delphi will go to Azkaban, and Eurus, too, is returned to Sherrinford. Grindelwald dies in Nurmengard; Voldemort, if he had taken Harry’s invitation to try for remorse, wouldn’t have survived the pain to make a fresh start of his life. Eurus is not asking for freedom; she could have broken herself out permanently, if that’s what she wanted. She’s not asking forgiveness for crimes; she’s just committed several more murders. She just wants to be able to tell someone that every time she closes her eyes, she’s flying and she doesn’t know how to land. By passing all of her tests, by demonstrating that what he lacks in intellect, he makes up for in emotion, Sherlock has shown that it might be worth one last attempt for her to connect with another. Like any other person, she needed someone else with her when she used her Time-Turner, someone to help her return to her own past and shine a light on it from a different perspective. He had the emotional authority to tell her to open her eyes. I know you. I’m here. She couldn’t return to her past alone and free herself; she needed to be sure someone would be with her.
The terrifying, supernatural Eurus persona — who even leaves glow-in-the-dark messages, saying “Miss me?”, the same way Delphi scrawls her insane glow-in-the-dark prophecies on the walls — recedes and disappears from the narrative. Eurus is back to being a profoundly ill woman serving a life sentence; the parents are heartbroken; Sherlock intervenes in their anger at Mycroft because he understands how having a “saving-people-thing” can override other judgment. The rest of the family witnesses Sherlock finding a way to connect with her. This shared understanding releases the tensions in the Holmes family, freeing them to rebuild their relationships and begin to show their love for each other.
So, when we talk about saving the soul of a murderer, what do we mean? After all, the crime can’t be undone, and the person’s nature might not change. For another example, we can look to Fantastic Beasts and to Credence Barebone, the Obscurial.
An Obscurial is a magical young person who has developed an Obscurus, a parasitic, destructive force that usually ends up killing its own host. Dumbledore’s sister Ariana was probably an Obscurial. It works to think of Eurus as an Obscurial: she is beyond ordinary human power; she can travel almost supernaturally, change form, escape confinement, go places most people can’t, and cause mass destruction. Both Credence and Eurus are so powerful they can partially control the Obscurus, but on the inside, they are terrified children, begging, “Help me.”
Others try to exploit them, but the needs of Obscurials are greater than the abilities of would-be manipulators to control them. When Mycroft wanted Eurus’s help, she bargained for gifts that would strengthen her in her fight against being destroyed by her Obscurus. Playing the violin is a way Eurus struggles to maintain her sense of self; the title of the piece from the soundtrack is “Who you really are,” and the guard says, “She doesn’t stop playing, sometimes for weeks.” When she learned that Moriarty, a fellow destructive genius, saw adult Sherlock as a source of hope and interest, she summoned Moriarty to see if it was worth trying to get Sherlock to help her. Credence, too, kept fighting for his sense of self. When Grindelwald gave him a Deathly Hallows pendant so Credence could be a source for him, Credence used it, instead, to summon Grindelwald and cry out, “Help me,” after he lost control and killed his mother and sister.
What would help an Obscurial? Containment. Containment is a major theme of the Fantastic Beasts film, from Newt’s case that cannot keep creatures inside, to the Occamy hatchling that grows to fit the available space when uncontained, to Grindelwald under arrest, purring hatefully, “Do you think you can hold me?” When MACUSA president Seraphina Picquery sees the path of the destruction from the Obscurus, she says, “Contain this, or we are exposed and it will mean war.”
Likewise, Mycroft tells Sherlock and John, “The depth of Eurus’s psychosis and the extent of her abilities couldn’t hope to be contained in any ordinary institution. There’s a place called Sherrinford, an island. It’s a secure and very secretive installation whose sole purpose is to contain what we call ‘the uncontainables.’” Mycroft assures them that Eurus cannot possibly leave this fortress, seconds before she sends a bomb through the window.
What would containment do? It would comfort the terrified person who has never, since childhood, encountered a power in this world greater than their own murderous rage. Credence tries and fails to stop the Obscurus from taking him over; this is why he sobs for help. Voldemort, too, sought containment, obsessed with Harry Potter, the one person who might have the power to limit him. Like Eurus, Tom Riddle could kill others as a child and go undetected. Children, when they feel murderous rage, are supposed to learn that this is a natural human emotion, that they can’t kill anybody just by being angry at them, that there are ways to contain it safely. When nothing can contain their rage, it makes them monstrous, inhuman. Is there no power greater than themselves? As the governor of Sherrinford says, “With Eurus Holmes in the world, who the hell would I pray to?”
Eurus demonstrates the final problem for us with her simulated Obscurus attack on Sherlock after he touches the glass that isn’t there. Kneeling over him, sounding deranged, she screeches at the guards, “Get in here, all of you! Stop me killing him!” When those useless lumps get moving, she lifts up her head to say rationally, “No no. Stop me in a minute,” as if they should have known. Obviously, any idiot could have seen that she meant to have a bit of fun and deliver a warning before succumbing to restraint. It’s an unnerving farce like an endless child’s game, meant for several players, in which one lonely child has to play every role herself.
From Credence, from Eurus, from the failed attempts of Mycroft and Seraphina Picquery, we see that Obscurials cannot be contained by others. What they want, when they beg “Help me” in their childish voices, is help in containing themselves. Both of them stop themselves when they hear magic words telling them to stop, to come down, to be protected or brought home.
There’s containment of the Obscurus only to limit harm to others, and then there’s containment in order to bring comfort to the Obscurial. Mycroft would lie to the girl and have her crash the plane into the sea. Seraphina Picquery wants the Obscurus neutralized. John Watson, though, insists that the girl on the plane is worth saving, just as he told Sherlock, in “The Great Game,” that caring was important. Newt cares about the Obscurus — he is frantic that it not be hurt and doesn’t think the solution is to destroy this thing, dangerous as it may be. Tina cares about the human Obscurial and encourages Newt to save him — him, not it. Newt and Tina are able to connect with Credence because they’re not trying to exploit the Obscurus, like Grindelwald, or destroy it, like Picquery.
This is the magical spell that Newt uses: “I’ve met someone just like you, Credence. A girl — a young girl who’d been imprisoned. She’d been locked away and she’d been punished for her magic.”
Hearing this, the Obscurus recedes and Credence rematerializes in human form. The script notes say, “He never dreamed there was another.” Whatever he is — is a known phenomenon? There is hope, perhaps, rather than this bitter feeling that he may as well destroy everything?
But then Grindelwald deliberately triggers Credence back into his Obscurus form by torturing Newt in front of him. Tina fights for Credence, casts the magic spell that connects with him powerfully enough to encourage his human form to be present again: “I know what that woman did to you . . . I know that you’ve suffered . . . You need to stop this now . . . Newt and I will protect you . . .”
Credence calms when he hears these things. He has killed several people; those deaths cannot be undone. But like Voldemort, like Delphi, like Eurus, he doesn’t have to keep killing. He’s seen as a person. He’s told that he’s not alone. This is all it takes to save his soul.
When Sherlock breaks through to Eurus and she can finally beg her brother for help, she cries to him, “Every time I close my eyes, I’m on the plane. I’m lost, lost in the sky and… no one can hear me.”
This is the magic spell that Sherlock casts: “I can bring you home. It’s not too late. Open your eyes. I’m here. You’re not lost anymore.”
The magic works. The Obscurus recedes. Eurus is returned to Sherrinford, which is not home, but a place for her to be contained so her family can be restored to her.
So why do we have Eurus in our BBC Sherlock story? She wasn’t meant to be there; she’s not in canon; yet here she is, presented as though she were a secret child, a human rage grown monstrous, as though it were somehow our fault, too, as the audience, that she was abandoned long ago and criminally forgotten.
There is a cost to genius. It can’t be bargained; the genius is simply there, non-negotiable, whether it’s celebrated or medicated with a seven percent solution. In the story of our beautiful consulting detective going from a great man to a good one over the past four series, there is a monster, a shadow self, that must be considered: the overwhelming rage at the rest of the world, sometimes a suicidal rage, sometimes murderous, because of the loneliness of genius. You remember Sherlock as we first met him. The hurt when people told him, “Piss off.” His withering contempt: “She’s cleverer than you lot, and she’s dead. Oh, look at you lot. You’re all so vacant. Is it nice not being me?” The frustration that drives him to run off with a murderous cabbie without even saying goodbye.
Series One Sherlock says that genius requires an audience; Series Four Sherlock understands that genius dreams of playmates. The game is on, and it is a great game. Why will no one else play? Child Eurus begged of child Sherlock: play with me.
This is what makes Sherlock the target of such envy from Eurus and Moriarty. First with Victor, then with John and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson and Molly, he was able to get others to play with him, despite being vastly more clever. This is the way not to be lonely, but the rage must be acknowledged, as well, because along with the rage comes a fear: Would Sherlock’s friends love him without his genius? Is he anything without his genius? This gift that brings loneliness but also, perhaps, brings him friends, or at least attention, or at least enemies — does he even have a self apart from his gift? In Reichenbach, when Moriarty campaigns to expose Sherlock as a fraud, remember Sherlock shouting fearfully at John, “You’re worried they’re right about me. You’re afraid that you’ve been taken in as well. Can’t you see what’s going on?” Remember him asking Molly, “If I wasn’t everything that you think I am — everything that I think I am — would you still want to help me?”
We have Eurus in our story to remind us that genius is relative.
Sherlock has always had the luxury of being contained, knowing from birth that Mycroft’s existence shelters him from the defenseless terror of knowing no higher authority than himself. But Mycroft can still see Sherlock as clever. Eurus, though, is incandescent, like the sun, outshining his light. He calls himself “only an idiot” to her, without any irony, but he is able to save Eurus’s soul by showing that caring is an advantage. Even when she holds John hostage, Sherlock stops to connect with her first, to take care of the girl on the plane, before saving his friend. Eurus’s immense genius contains Sherlock’s. It brings him relief. It throws his other qualities into relief. Sherlock’s brilliance captivates, but it’s Sherlock’s heart that makes people love him and want him not to be lonely. After saving his sister’s soul as well as, again, his best friend’s life, he won’t ever doubt that people see him as more than a mind. I do think, someday, there will be more of this show. These four seasons have brought him to this point of maturity, but that’s not the end of his growth; he’s just now attained his powers.
Note: Thank you to arianedevere.dreamwidth.org for transcripts of the Sherlock episodes.