THE FINAL PROBLEM
Here we get the climactic reveal the season had been building toward: “Mycroft told me you’d rewritten your memories. He didn’t tell me you’d written me out completely.” Sherlock doesn’t understand Eurus’ statement: “What do you mean, “rewritten”?” In the episode, Sherlock discovers he told himself a “better story” about his entire childhood. Having experienced such a devastating emotional trauma related to the murder of his best friend, Sherlock repressed his childhood memories, corrupting them to such a degree that the friend became a dog in Sherlock mind: “What a funny little memory, Sherlock. You were upset - so you told yourself a better story. But we never had a dog.”
This secret trauma caused Sherlock to erase his sister from his mind completely and led him to isolate himself from others emotionally if not physically. His entire past was “a lie that’s preferable to the truth”. It is an elaborate fiction Sherlock himself created - a self-deception - which Mycroft (and presumably his parents) were co-conspirators in maintaining.
Of course, Mycroft created a fiction of his own as well. He told his parents a “story” that Eurus had died, when in fact Mycroft had isolated and imprisoned her. “I was trying to be kind” he tells his parents when the truth is finally revealed. “Kind? Kind?! You told us that our daughter was DEAD!” to which Mycroft sadly states: “Better that than tell you what she had become.”
WHY FICTIONS?
Why use fictions - lies - as a thematic motif? What is the thematic relevance of “corrupted” memories - of self-deception? The writers’ reason for this motif can be gleaned from Sherlock’s words to Watson in TAB: “There are no ghosts in this world, save those we make for ourselves.” Watson is unclear as to the meaning of this statement, so Sherlock elaborates: “We all have a past Watson. Ghosts. They are the shadows that define our every sunny day.” And, in TFP, Mycroft tells Sherlock: “The roads we walk have demons beneath and yours have been waiting for a very long time.” The ghost, that demon, is Eurus - a devastating truth Sherlock didn’t want to face and so wiped from his mind completely. But one cannot escape the truth. Like a ghost, it’s still there even if you do not see it. As Mycroft explains: “You do remember her, in a way. Every choice you ever made; every path you’ve ever taken - the man you are today - is your memory of Eurus.”
In other word, the truth shapes you, even - in fact, especially - if you try to evade it. Ignorance cannot protect you from the truth. Shutting your eyes will not stop the fangs of a demon from biting you. Self-deception can only leave you blind - helpless - at the mercy of that which you seek to evade. It will shape you, rather than you shaping yourself. And you will be unaware of its hold over you.
Only by knowing the truth - only by facing the truth, rather than running from it - are you free to choose your actions, rather than having them chosen for you. Only by facing the truth can you be yourself - rather than being what blind circumstance or the will of others make of you.
DETERMINISM VS FREE WILL
With the motif of self-deception, the writers are now boring down to the core of Existentialism - to the fact that human beings are not “things”. The writers here are focusing on the fact there is a single characteristic which distinguishes “humans” from “things”:
Free Will.
Things simply “are”. They merely “exist”. They are “brute facts”. They have no power to change their identity. A thing “is what it is” - nothing more. Things are determined.
Humans, on the other hand, are not determined. As the existentialists say: “Humans can never really be anything in the way brute objects can be things with determinate attributes.” Our attributes are “ambiguous” - are subject to our will. In other words, humans have the freedom to choose - to create - our identity.
AUTHENTICITY
The “awareness and acceptance of... this basic ambiguity” is what Existentialism calls “authenticity”. We create ourselves - and are responsible for that creation. This freedom of choice is the attribute which separates “humans” from the rest of existence - from “things”.
To create one’s self is the nature of human beings. To be true to ourselves is the only way to stay human. By exercising our will, we are being faithful to our nature. We are being human.
BAD FAITH
For existentialism, self-deception is the rejection of this nature. It is an example of what they call “bad faith” or being “inauthentic”. It is the attempt to escape the responsibility of shaping oneself. It is the attempt to be determined - to have one’s identity set by others or by happenstance rather than by oneself.
Sartre’s novels are filled with characters who base their actions, not on what they know to be true - not on their understanding of reality - but on “external pressures - the pressure to appear to be a certain kind of person, to ignore one’s own moral and aesthetic objections” etc in order to have “a more comfortable existence”. Such people abandon their own will. They substitute the will of others and let them dictate their identity. They treat themselves as “things” - things to be molded into the shape others want.
Sartre’s novels also “include characters who do not understand their own reasons for acting, or who ignore crucial facts about their own lives in order to avoid uncomfortable truths.” This is exactly what Sherlock did as a child, thus leaving himself to be determined by “fate” - to be shaped by blind circumstance and by others rather than by himself.
(Note: It is not a coincidence that Eurus played the false “Faith” character in TLD)
PINOCCHIO IN REVERSE
For existentialists, the desire to escape the responsibility of creating one’s own identity - the desire to be determined - is the desire to be a “thing” rather than be a human being. It is the reverse of the Pinocchio story. Rather than the puppet’s desire to be a boy, it is the boy’s desire to be a puppet.
It is the desire to give up the responsibility of self-creation. It is the desire to give up being human.
Self-deception - the refusal to know the truth of why one acts or makes one’s choices - is self-abnegation. It is is no different - and no less destructive - than when others make people into things. Where CAM forced people to be “property”, those of “bad faith” volunteer to be property. Where Smith forced people to be cadavers, the “inauthentic” volunteer to be cadavers (Sherlock, the Lying - ie inauthentic - Detective, volunteers to be a cadaver).
The practice is the same - making a person into a “thing”. Only the executioner is different. Self-deception is self-destruction - self-immolation. It is the wish ‘not to be’.
Self-deception is simply an act of suicide, rather than of murder. The outcome is the same regardless: the death of one’s “self”.
THE LYING DETECTIVE
All of this is the reason the second to last episode is named “The Lying Detective”. Not only has Sherlock lied to everyone throughout the episode, but - as the viewer is about to learn - Sherlock lied to himself about his entire childhood. His life is a lie. He has not shaped it. His life has been shaped by “external forces” - to which he had purposefully turned a blind eye. Sherlock - the sociopath - ironically turns out to have allowed himself be made by others.
His life truly is “not his own”.
This was hinted at (along with almost every other reveal in Season 4) in TAB. While speaking with his Mind Palace version of Watson, that Jiminy Cricket - ie his own subconscious - asks: “What made you like this?” Sherlock scoffs “Oh, Watson. Nothing made me. I made me.” That this declaration is false is immediately suggested when, incongruously, we hear the sound of a dog whimpering. Sherlock is surprised, recognizing it: ”Redbeard?” he asks. Then, suddenly, (as if Redbeard wasn’t hint enough) the ghost of a woman appears. This shows Eurus truly is haunting Sherlock’s mind. As Mycroft says: unbeknownst to Sherlock, Eurus lives in his every thought - his every action - his every choice.
She - not Sherlock - is the ‘ghost in the machine’.
That is what changes in the final episode. No longer will Sherlock deceive himself about these external forces. No longer will he relinquish the choice of his identity to them. No longer will he be a puppet.
In the end, like Pinocchio, Sherlock wants to be a human boy again.
That is what Sartre identifies as a “self recovery of being which has been previously corrupted.” And that single sentence is the entirety of the plot of TFP. It is Sherlock’s recovery of himself, from that which he had previously “corrupted” (And note: “corrupted” is precisely the word the writers have Smith use in TLD).
Talk about integration! The writers are really plumbing those “deep waters”.
END OF STORY ANALYSIS