Sherlock - BBC

quote by Ivyblossom.tumblr.com question from takeittothemindpalace.tumblr.com
Hi! I really really really love you and your blog, and there's been something bugging me for a while. In A Study In Pink, John says, "Damn my leg!" and then is all apologetic as if it was sudden onset tourettes syndrome or something. But it wasn't. So what made him so angry? Is it because he wants to go with Sherlock and see trouble? Is it because he doesn't like being treated differently because of his leg? I don't know. Am I just over-thinking it? Anyway, thanks. <3 <3
takeittothemindpalace
Well, here’s how I parse that.

When John meets Sherlock for the first time at Barts, his reaction to Sherlock’s deductions are not immediately apparent. He’s surprised and taken aback. He quite literally has to readjust after Sherlock leaves; he shifts his stance a little, as if the world has just shifted on its axis a bit. And it has.

Other people find Sherlock’s deductions about them unnerving, but we already know that John does not. He’s fascinated by Sherlock immediately, from Afghanistan or Iraq? forward. John is deeply, deeply impressed by Sherlock. And he is not easily impressed, as we see later when Mycroft tries to intimidate him. But Sherlock impresses him, and John is very much charmed by him and attracted to him. (I don’t mean that in a slashy way, but you can interpret it that way should you so wish, as I very often do.)

Once John gets over his initial disbelief that Sherlock could possibly know so much about him just by being in the same room with him for four minutes, he is absolutely gobsmacked by what he’s just seen. After that performance, I don’t think anything could keep John from meeting Sherlock the following evening.

John goes home and googles Sherlock. He finds Sherlock’s website and reads through it. This is evidence, I’d say, of his ongoing fascination.

I think what we have, when we arrive at 221b, are two men who are both quite keen to make this work; John because he is utterly fascinated by Sherlock, and Sherlock because he needs a flatmate he can stand who can stand him. When John discovers that Sherlock helps the police to solve crimes, his heart must leap into his throat.

John loves danger, we know that. He’s an adrenaline junkie with a wide and straight moral streak. A madman with a blatant disregard for rules who solves violent crimes has got to be like catnip for him. Lestrade drops by; John notes Lestrade’s face in the paper. The evidence is right in front of him: this guy is legit. He digs into violent crimes and takes down murderers with his remarkable deductive abilities. Sherlock is like a gift John didn’t know he’d been hoping for.

And then he watches Sherlock leave without him. He clearly wants to go along; he wants nothing more than that. But Sherlock didn’t invite him, and John isn’t the type to demand anything, no matter how much he wants it. They just met, after all; who is he to say, take me with you! At this point John has no idea that he could be helpful in anyway; we see that when they actually get to Brixton and he doesn’t really know what to do with the body. But he really, really wants to go anyway. He finds Sherlock fascinating and he wants to watch him; he wants to go see violent crime scenes and see how Sherlock works it all out. But Sherlock goes off without him.

John must be devastated. He’s sort of powerless then, an injured man who is so close to something he wants, but it’s cruelly snatched away from him. When Mrs Hudson tells him he’s the sitting down type, that makes him boil over. He is most emphatically not the sitting down type.

So imagine that: he sits, he’s going to wait until Sherlock comes back and tells him all the exciting things he’s missed. He’ll sit and wait because of his ridiculous, psychosomatic limp. He must be so frustrated. Something he desires more than anything is right in front of him and he can’t have it because his inexplicable limp has made him the sitting down type.

And thus: “Damn my leg!”

It’s not even an actual injury. He must be so confused by his limp; he must hate it more than anything just then.

When Sherlock comes back, the first thing John does is struggle back up out of the chair. He’s practically salivating when Sherlock evaluates him, entirely for his own purposes, as a potential “assistant”. He wants an invite, he wants to demonstrate the degree to which he is not the sitting down type.

Fortunately, Sherlock can tell.

quoting Ivyblossom again who commented on sherlockspeare's statement.
Sherlock, John is the most precious gift that heaven decided to give you.
First: I think it’s really sweet that John never judges Sherlock for not being able to tell the difference between behaving well or badly when it comes to other people’s feelings. I mean, once he understands that Sherlock actually can’t tell.

I know fandom gets a lot of mileage out of the “bit not good” thing, which I enjoy, but I also think it’s a sort of bittersweet phrase coming from Sherlock’s mouth. It sounds like something he’s been asking himself for most of his life. Because he doesn’t say, “oh, was that inappropriate?” he asks, “not good?” as if his goal is to be good.

But good is never his goal. Great, maybe. Right. Brilliant, certainly. Flawless. Impressive. But never just good. Never morally good, either. He is not, I don’t think, a good person. The fact that it comes up in ethical or moral situations makes it sound like a really old criticism.

We don’t dissect cats on the pavement, Sherlock. That’s not good. It sounds like something you tell a child, because more complex words and meanings are either too harsh or will be lost on them. You’d say something is not good rather that telling a child they’re doing something bad. As opposed to using language even stronger and more precise than that. I like this element of the show, because it demonstrates that for all Sherlock’s sophisticated and mature intellectual prowess, he reverts to childhood notions of good and not good when it comes to social interaction. As if the more mature distinctions and nuances are completely beyond him.

I also appreciate that John says one word to Sherlock to get him to realize his behaviour is inappropriate. “Timing.” It suggests (as most things in Hounds do, thank god for you, Mark Gatiss) that they have had a previous conversation wherein John attempted to explain to Sherlock that the timing of his commentary can sometimes be improved, because people are frequently not ready to hear about Sherlock’s deductions in moments of pain and weakness. John’s “timing” line here sounds like he’s reminding Sherlock of that conversation (or set of conversations). This rings especially true because Sherlock knows exactly what John means with that one word. He’s instantly frozen by it, too. He listens to John. He takes John’s direction extremely well.

This relationship is so well-written. *dreamy sigh* That’s fine, you can go on about Cumberbatch’s cheekbones. I’m going to be over here pining over that character development and relationship building. I have such a crush on these narrative structures!

You have to wonder what the backstory is to this one. I mean, people who know and love Sherlock are absolutely, 100% convinced that John is Sherlock’s date the moment they see Sherlock and John together. It’s a running gag, obviously, but it wants explaining.

Sherlock is clearly a loner. He knows people (quite a lot of people, actually, more people than John appears to know), but he doesn’t choose to spend his time with any of them. He just solves puzzles. That’s all. He doesn’t enjoy the company of other people. He doesn’t go out for dinner with anyone, ever. (That point ever-so-nicely underscored by his bewildered question to Irene in Scandal.)

It’s pretty apparent to us by now that Sherlock isn’t particularly moved by attractive women. He doesn’t particularly react to Irene at all, even when she’s propositioning him. Maybe others have seen that in him too; he doesn’t seem interested. So they may make the next logical step (“Oh, he must be gay, that’s fine.”) even though he isn’t particularly moved by men, either.

Maybe Angelo told Sherlock ages ago that he was always welcome in the restaurant, any time, with anyone he likes (“Bring a date! It’s on the house!”), and Sherlock never turned up. Then one day, months and months later, he appears with a fellow he’s clearly fond of. Sherlock must be fond of this bloke, he must be trying to impress him, right? Because he’s willing to spend an evening over dinner with him, an event which Angelo has never witnessed. He’s willing to sit in a restaurant like a normal person with this fellow, so he must be tremendously special to Sherlock.

Sherlock doesn’t have friends. So maybe no one jumps to the conclusion that Sherlock has just made a new friend, because…well, he could have been friends with dozens of people but chose not to be. Mrs Hudson loves him, Molly loves him, Angelo loves him, Lestrade loves him too: there must be others, people he’s helped and rescued along the way, people who respect his brain even if they think he’s entirely too odd for this world. I’m sure there are a number of people who would be more than happy to sit across a table from Sherlock if he ever felt lonely. But he never takes anyone up on that. People who admire him are just a side effect of his work. He doesn’t solve the cases for them and their reactions. They’re an unintended but not entirely unpleasant side effect. He doesn’t appear to give them much thought at all. He ignores them.

For some reason, Sherlock takes to John almost immediately, and goes about trying to impress him. Everyone around him notices that: Mycroft asks about a happy announcement, Mrs Hudson makes her assumptions, as does Angelo. Sherlock is the observant one, but everyone around him sees that John is special to him. John doesn’t feel particularly special yet, because he doesn’t know Sherlock. He doesn’t know that Sherlock has just made every possible exception for him.

Sherlock doesn’t take John to Angelo’s in order to work on the case. He takes John there to trick him into losing the limp. Sherlock takes John out for dinner to cure him.

There are three explanations I can think of for that behaviour, all of which I think are true.

The first is that it’s another curious puzzle for Sherlock to solve while waiting for the next break in his current case. (“Can I cure a psychosomatic limp? I bet I can.”)

The second is that John will make a better addition to Sherlock’s life minus the limp (there are, after all, seventeen steps up to 221b, and he doesn’t want to give up his bedroom on the first level). It would be better if John isn’t struggling up and down stairs. Sherlock is not a patient man. I’d say that Sherlock realizes that John would be more of a help on cases minus the limp, but I don’t think Sherlock realizes yet just how critical John will become to that enterprise. (This is, after all, before John turns the tables and impresses the pants off of Sherlock by shooting a cab driver through a window.) If he did realize it, I’m sure he’d have cured that limp long before dinner time.

The third explanation for Sherlock’s act of kindness is this: “You’ll be impressed with me if I can cure you.” The distance Sherlock is willing to go to impress John is kind of epic, when you think about it. It doesn’t look epic to John at the time, but if he ever considered Sherlock’s behaviour after the fact, from the vantage point of knowing him for a year or more, he must marvel at it a bit. Sherlock took a complete stranger to dinner. That’s unheard of. Sherlock takes a very special and unusual interest in John immediately.

No wonder Angelo thinks they have a romantic connection. This is Sherlock pulling out all the stops. It must be love.

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