I asked you for one more miracle.
How is this supposed to be a positive thing, though? Because Sherlock says, “I heard you,” and then the implicit extension is, “And fucked off and did nothing about it for two years till Mycroft made me come back, because basically I just didn’t want to tell you till whenever I felt like hauling my arse back to London.”
There’s a lot that’s confusing about this episode, but at least it can largely be explained if you accept the concept that John is a supremely fucked-up puppy who prefers Sherlock being abusive to no attention from him at all.
But there’s absolutely no way to make this bit make sense in any way that could be conceived of as uplifting or bonding.
I’ve been wondering…
All right, here’s how:
Because even after John had given up hope, had moved on and tried to find life with someone else (without Sherlock), Sherlock was still doing everything in his power to come back. He endured torture, he solved cases in the far-flung corners of the globe (or at least if any of Anderson’s theories are correct, he did), and it was all to get back to John Watson. ‘I heard you,’ Sherlock says, and he might have added, ‘and I came back. It took me two years, but even if it had taken twelve, or twenty, or two thousand, I would have been trying to come back. To you.’
Sherlock lost a lot of the roundedness he got from John — regrew the sharpest edges of himself, the harshest, worst bits, that involved being manipulative and selfish and cruel — in his time away…
I’m gonna go ahead and pull a crossover comparison, because let’s be real, the shows are linked if only through writers and also it’s a useful lens: Doctor Who. Ten becomes megolomaniacal, drunk with power and desperately lonely, without Rose. Rose returns, and suddenly the Doctor sees himself (through the helpful device of a half-human alter-ego):
The Doctor: born in battle. Full of blood and anger and revenge. to Rose. Remind you of someone? That’s me, when we first met. And you made me better. Now you can do the same for him.
Rose: But he’s not you.
The Doctor: He needs you. That’s very me.Sherlock is so full of anger and blood and revenge at the start of TEH. But he is reminded, again in John’s presence, of how high John’s expectations were of him, of John’s words at his grave: you were the most human… human being that I’ve ever known and no one will ever convince me that you told me a lie, so… there. I was so alone… and I owe you so much. But please, there’s just one more thing, one more miracle, Sherlock, for me, don’t be…dead. Would you do that just for me?
And as much as it is a DARK AND TWISTED AND DEFINITELY TRIGGERING action to pretend John’s about to die from a bomb in the Underground, Sherlock needs in his dark and twisty, deranged and desperately lonely way to know whether John still believes what he said.
He needs John, just as he always needed John, to bring out his humanity. And from the dark and dangerous depths of the Underground, they survive and climb back to the surface, to London, as a team, Holmes & Watson.
So when Sherlock says, ‘I heard you,’ he is both admitting that he overheard John’s sentimental, romantic magical thinking that Sherlock is a miracle worker, despite the fact that Sherlock has urged him to be rational and reasonable, to stop believing in heroes since they don’t exist; and also that Sherlock heard the plea in John’s voice, and spent two years trying to give John what he asked for, or die trying.
Except he wasn’t working his way back to John. It wasn’t to get back to John at all. He didn’t need to leave John in the first place. He SAYS that. The snipers were dealt with. By the end of the day, no one Sherlock cared about was still under threat. He CHOSE to take off for two years. He CHOSE not to tell John—he told 25 other people he barely even knew, but not John.
So he tortured John for two years without reason. That’s what he’s saying there. It might not be what he means to be saying, but it’s the truth he’d admitting to.