I think that Mary telling Sherlock to pick a fight with a dangerous villain and Faith getting Sherlock interested in CS doesn't mean anything by itself - I strongly suspect most villains are dangerous and there should be lots of them in London, so Sherlock shouldn't have any trouble finding one (if he went out looking, instead of transforming his kitchen into a drug lab...)

However, SusiGo may still be right: Euros says "a common friend" brought her and CS together, and then the camera cuts to the hidden "Miss Me" in the note. Which I assumed to mean the common friend was Moriarty - but since Mary has taken to labelling her DVDs "Miss Me" as well - who knows?

(However, I am firmly convinced that Mary taking the bullet meant for Sherlock once and for all puts paid to the "evil Mary" theory! Not to mention that if we accept Euros having the capacity to influence people that Mycroft ascribes to her, everybody who has had contact with her is exonarated from their actions... )

SusiGo wrote:

Rache wrote:

This is maybe the opportunity for another related theme. I just wonder if there is place in here for it or better in another thread.
It is, that for some months now, I more and more fail to understand Eurus' intentions.

I agree. I have tried to come up with an explanation of her intentions but I still fail to see it. What we are told to believe is basically this: 

Moriarty started his Sherlock campaign before the beginning of ASiP and independently of anything Eurus may have planned. About the time of ASiB Christmas Eurus got interested in Moriarty and told Mycroft to bring him to her as a Christmas present. From then on we get all these actions by Moriarty and Eurus: provoking Sherlock up to the fall, the Miss Me video, luring John away from Mary, the whole Culverton Smith case, the murder of the real therapist, the bomb attack on 221b, the killing of the governor and his wife, the killing of the three Garridebs, provoking Sherlock to murder either his brother or his best friend … right?

But for what? For a hug? I really do not get it. 

I would like to come back to this now.

And I want to focus on everything Eurus did and her intentions in Sherrinford in TFP. Thinking about the greater backgroundstory with Moriarty etc. it gets only more confusing, so I'll leave that out for the moment...

Ok, I think we can agree that Eurus is a lost soul since childhood. She always wanted to play with Sherlock and wanted to be saved by him, right? We see her playing with that toy plane in a flashback and during TFP she is basically still playing with/in the plane. The song she sung was in fact a hint for Sherlock as a child, that she needed his help and his love. Sherlock thought the song would lead him to his friend Victor though. The adult Eurus is asking Sherlock: "So why couldn't you work it [the song] out?" "Emotional context, Sherlock!". I'm not sure what she does mean by that? Was Sherlock too emotional as a child, that he thought it was about Victor, so that you couldn't see what the song was truly about=save Eurus? Or was he lacking emotional context, because he didn't get the clue about "love" and "nemo=noone" in the song?
What was she doing to the three of them in Sherrinford? She "experimented" with them to see how they would react in very emotional/moral/life and death situations, right? And she is basically trying to show them that emotions are absurd? That emotions cloud any objective view? That emotions don't get you anywhere? That the best thing to solve her puzzles would be pure brainwork? In the Molly experiment Eurus even told him "Oh look what you did to her. Look, what you did to yourself! All those complicated little emotions, I lost count."
So where is she trying to get him? I'm so confused. She is basically shown as a person who doesn't understand emotions since childhood, her intellect is hindering her. And isn't she trying to get Sherlock to that same point in Sherrinford? But in order to solve her riddle now, Sherlock must be the emotional being so he can understand that she needs him? But how can Eurus know and decide that she must get Sherlock to be emotional, when she herself doesn't really understand emotions? And she is doing quite the opposite with her experiments, doesn't she?

Do you have some ideas or answers?

Last edited by Rache (October 22, 2017 10:39 pm)

But surely not just randomly!? There must be some kind of thoughts behind it.

And have we ever talked about why indeed Sheelock couldn't solve the puzzle as a child? Had it to do with emotions? Was he just not clever enough at that age?

Actually, thinking of this some more, the "no one" clue is very clever.   It obviously leads to the "Nemo" gravestone, and the cipher.   But it also makes the link between Eurus and the girl on the plane (who also has no one).  And Sherlock works out both parts of it.  The first part is more cerebral and the second more emotional, I suppose, so this is an example of him maturing and using the two parts together ... maybe? 

Anyway, I think that by TFP Eurus has waited years to try to get that message across to Sherlock and have him solve it.   I suppose she realised that there was a missing clue - really, we don't even know if Sherlock would have solved it as an adult if she hadn't given him that extra one.  So no wonder he couldn't do it as a child. 

This is all very true.

My problem with this reading of the story is that adult Eurus is never actually made responsible for what she did. And I am talking about Moriarty and his campaign, blowing up 221b, torturing Sherlock, torturing poor Molly, killing the governor, his wife, the three Garridebs, and the therapist from TLD (those are the deaths that we know of). Sorry but the end does not work for me. Too easy, a hug, family visits, Sherlock playing the violin with her. For me, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. 

Last edited by SusiGo (November 18, 2017 1:05 pm)

Thank you for explaining. So would you argue that spending the rest of her life in Sherrinford is sufficient punishment (within the show, not in reality)?
Because my problem is this: I might see Sherlock forgiving her after some period of adjustment but doing it just like that, minutes after he has learned that she killed his childhood friend, does not seem very believable to me. What if he had shot his brother or John? What if John had shot the governor? What about the possible consequences for Molly's wellbeing? 

I think Sherlock can be very forgiving.  Look at how he is when Mary shoots him - he seems to go straight from being scared of her, to trying to reconcile her with John and protect her - there's no stage where it seems he resents her putting him through that. 

Yes. It maybe also helps that he only finds out the truth many years later, after having "forgotten" Victor in the years in between. 

Also, both Eurus and Sherlock see Eurus as the lost little girl on the plane, and that is what he responds to. 

Liberty wrote:

I think Sherlock can be very forgiving.  Look at how he is when Mary shoots him - he seems to go straight from being scared of her, to trying to reconcile her with John and protect her - there's no stage where it seems he resents her putting him through that. 

I think with high intelligence often comes the ability to see the situation from multiple angles and way up pros and cons of multiple decisions at the same time. A bit like playing chess and evaluating the outcomes of many possible moves and their consequences beyond the immediately obvious. He can see the logic in Mary's of Eros actions and is able to see it from their perspective, stepping out of his own pain and hurt that those decisions created. It goes beyond the social norm and law and into abstract moral reasoning where things are usually grey as opposed to black or white and murder isn't always the wrong choice.

This thinking process can be done very quickly and may seem like immediately forgiving someone but in my
headcanon there was a lot of careful internal deliberation on the part of Sherlock as opposed to just letting go.

 

belis wrote:

There is a difference between criminal responsibility and going down the court route and going down the Mental Health Act route. There is no age limit on the use of Mental Health Act and there are children younger than 10 held in secure psychiatric facilities for protection of themselves and/or others with the full blessing of the law. You could easily make the case for mental disorder in case of Euros in my opinion.

What's the procedure for having a person/child committed? There must be some safeguards to prevent people from getting rid of somebody... What bothers me is that Eurus is just "disappeared" after she burns down her first facility (IF Mycroft tells the truth here) - her parents think she's dead - Uncle Rudy and later Mycroft take over responsibility (neither would be next of kin, would they?). Sounds at the very minimum like abuse of the system to me... And Sherrinford is not a hospital, the Governor claims. So for me Eurus is unlawfully locked up, doesn't matter whether the Mental Health Act or criminal law is supposed to apply.

SusiGo wrote:

"So would you argue that spending the rest of her life in Sherrinford is sufficient punishment (within the show, not in reality)?"

Now I'm curious - what would you like to do "in reality"? Bring back the death penalty? Torture? Fact is, the death penalty has been abolished in the UK and even mass murderers can only be locked up. And I consider the conditions in Sherrinford perfectly appalling - regardless of whether it's supposed to be a mental facility or a high security prison.