Yes thank you Kittyhawk, this amazing character deserves her own thread.

It's not so much the number of children, but the relationship.  I have a younger sibling, very close in age, and didn't always want him tagging along when I wanted to play with my friend(s). 

I don't think Sherrinford is part of the health care/child care/criminal justice system at all. It's something outwith.  Apparently Uncle Rudi was able to pull some important strings.  Before Sherrinford, I believe there are secure/semi-secure psychiatric facilities for children who are a risk to themselves and others.  I imagine the usual patients are teenagers rather than six year olds, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of the story!    Yes, of course she shouldn't have been imprisoned (and even if the first facility was not so draconian, she was very young when she went to Sherrinford).   As it turns out, she had the ability to leave when she wanted to anyway, but chose not to (until TFP).  Oddly enough, there's an element of voluntarily choosing to stay there.  I suppose it became her home. 

It does raise some questions about how much Euros was created by putting in that situation at such a young age.  Sherlock was obviously naturally more "human" from the start, but Euros didn't really get a chance to become "human". 

I probably wouldn't try to calculate timing from how quickly Sherlock's injuries heal.  I think in this world, injuries adapt to the plot.

The correct term is actually 'sex'.
'Gender' is just a social construct.
If BBC Sherlock fails at all for me, it's in gender stereotyping.
But anyway, all that aside...I assume it was meant that she destroyed the genitals...a nurse, so maybe with a scalpel or something- I don't know and not something I really wanted to focus on.

Last edited by besleybean (October 3, 2017 10:48 am)

I disagree with you on this on, I very definitely think Eurus is real, or for me it would be a different show.
I don't see the point in her, if she's not real.
I also don't see why the team wouldn't have talked about this...they talk about everything else. What's to hide?

SusiGo wrote:

You are free to disagree with me anytime. But then you should also try to answer the questions I brought up in my posts. 
....

I also don't see Euros as existing only in Sherlock's head (for the simple reason that I don't think Mrs. Hudson, much as I love her, should be the only interesting female character on the show), though I do agree that we can't trust anything we see (so for fanfic and discussion purposes, absolutely anything goes). As for your questions - I'd love to try to answer them, but I don't see any. What I do see is a long list of statements regarding similarities between Sherlock and Euros - which in my opinion can either be explained by them being siblings or by lazy storytelling. And of course I don't even agree with all the statements...

Good point about Euros's room not looking like that of a child genius, though. Another thing that simply doesn't add up in the story of her childhood. Except if it went something like this: Euros was clever and curious, and desperately wanted to have a microscope, and books, and a chemistry set, and... and her parents refused to let her have these things because they thought she was too young for them and should play "like a normal child" for the time being. (I would have liked to read - and my parents would have liked for me to read and stop asking questions - but they figured that I would be bored to death if I went to school already knowing the things I was supposed to learn there and refrained from teaching me. That was in the old days, when you let children grow up instead of "having them professionally assessed" to put them into neat little boxes as early as possible... Worked, too, I sailed through primary school without any problem - or ever learning to study, which did cause problems later.) Now, if maybe Sherlock had those things that Euros wanted (he was a year older, after all, and a boy - maybe the Holmes parents were not perfectly immune to gender stereotyping after all (thanks for the correction, besleybeans!)), and if he would refuse to lend them to her (being another selfish little monster) - that would actually explain Euros's resentment pretty well! Not to the point of killing Victor (btw, SusiGo, if Euros doesn't exist - who killed Victor?) - but the drawings  I'd consider pretty normal in that scenario.

In any case, the room is not proof that Euros lives only in Sherlock's head, because he could just as easily have dreamt up a "proper child genius room", whatever that would look like (hey, maybe all the stuff we'd like to see is just behind the camera ;) ).
 

I kind of like the Sherlock = Eurus theory.  But I don't think it adds to the story, and it raises a lot more questions than it answers!  (Especially when it comes to interaction with her alter egos). 

@Kittyhawk, of course I'm not saying we can't discuss those things, and as a side note, thank you for getting some more discussion going!  It's just that I do think we are looking at a fictional world, and I think that injuries heal according to their role in the plot!  In other words, the rate of healing isn't a "clue" that we're meant to pick up on, in this case.  You could be right about Eurus' abilities being dormant until recently.  

There's also the fact of her influencing the governor, which may have been recent too, and must have been necessary for her to be able to come and go.  It's still interesting to me that when she finally does leave, she comes back. 

It seems that Eurus wasn't very nice to Sherlock when they "played" together and that may also have made him keen to run off and play with a friend instead. 

I don't see anything wrong about Eurus' bedroom.  It is a bedroom after all.  I wouldn't expect her to have a violin, chemistry set, etc. in there.   I know parents are different in how much they divide up the child's and adult's things, but I imagine that in a house full of geniuses that they would tend towards allowing the children access to "adult" books, maps, etc. 

 

Regarding the Euros = Sherlock theory, the biggest problem I have is what that would say about Sherlock! I mean, I can just about forgive Euros for being crazy by now for all the above-mentioned reasons - but if Sherlock imagined that little "is that vibrato or is your hand shaking?" scene, I'd consider him seriously sick. Not to mention that he would also have to have imagined John's therapy sessions - and why would he?

So unless one wants to prolong tenderly_wicked's Unforgettable (https://archiveofourown.org/works/1132535/chapters/2316723) for another season, I don't see why or how Euros Holmes could or should exist only in Sherlock's mind. As Liberty said, it doesn't add anything to the story or solve anything.

For me it is quite the other way around - for me Eurus does not make sense. For me, the real tension and suspense was always between Sherlock and Mycroft. This is where I thought the mystery would be - or in the relationship with the parents. Why do we suddenly need a non-Canon sister for the story to make sense? I must admit, they lost me there. It also destroys the Moriarty magic if he was a sort of tool, this is at least how I feel about it. For me, the Sherlock-Mycroft and Sherlock-Jim dichotomies were full of promise and I really do not understand why they needed a larger than life, cleverer than anyone else sister in the story. 


 

SusiGo wrote:

.... Why do we suddenly need a non-Canon sister for the story to make sense? I must admit, they lost me there. ....

 

That's what happens when  canon writers try to top the more outrageous fanfics (I've seen - not read, I thought the idea too crazy - one where Sherlock has a murderous sister long before season 4 aired). Season 4 does not make any sense at all to me - I can only enjoy it scene by scene, without thinking about the overall plot. And there's some really great scenes with Euros!

That's why I love the character - a great actress, some great moments. No, she does not make any sense from a storytelling point of view (you remember I started this thread "I admit I would have much preferred her not to be written at all,"). But now she exists, and denying her existence makes even less sense to me than accepting it.

Unless, as kgreen20 suggests, you want to go "Dallas" (didn't watch the show, but the uproar was so great that I'd have to have been deaf and blind to not learn about it)... Btw. kgreen20, of course you are right, most children do not kill people (unless of course they are child soldiers). But I wouldn't bet my life on the fact that they don't want to - it's just that normally they don't have the means to act on their impulses (recently I saw a maybe 4-year old try to beat up his mother - ineffectually, of course, but he looked like he meant it).

I'm not saying that Euros Holmes was a "normal" child (what's that supposed to mean, anyway? And why would the sister of Mycroft and Sherlock be "normal"?) But I do think that she wouldn't have been beyond redemption before being illegally locked away. Not to mention that the whole killing story doesn't make any sense anyway.... (Whereas I object on principle to the "it's all a nightmare"-scenario , I'd be willing to go with "it's all a lie cooked up by Mycroft".)