In The Six Thatchers, after introductions are made at the Wellsboroughs’ house,
Sherlock spots the Thatcher shrine, just as Mrs Wellsborough is saying, “Charlie was our whole world.” Sherlock is immediately plunged into this aquarium flashback:
Something triggered the watery flashback (which… bears no resemblance to well water, by the way). Was it Thatcher, or was it that turn of phrase?
Once the flashback is over, Sherlock immediately returns to the room:
But… it appears no one else has. Where are the Wellsboroughs? Where are John and Lestrade? In the next second, Sherlock snaps back to the full room, and asks, “You were saying?” and Mr Wellsborough takes the line this time, “Well, Charlie was our whole world.”
By the Thatcher shrine, John questions Sherlock about his reaction, and Sherlock responds, “By the pricking of my thumbs…”, indicating that this weirdness (see what I did there?) was caused by Sherlock having a premonition. This is a Shakespeare reference (another discussion of this here), to Act IV, Scene 1 of Macbeth:
For those who haven’t read Macbeth, it’s about a Scottish military man who receives a prophecy from three witches, saying that he will eventually become king. His wife (Lady Macbeth, naturally) then relentlessly pushes Macbeth into killing King Duncan to steal
his
throne. Both characters are consumed by guilt for the remainder of the play, and eventually pay for their crimes.
But this was not the only reference to Macbeth in The Six Thatchers.
The title of John’s blog post comes from arguably the best-known passage in Macbeth, his Act 5, Scene 5 “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy:
Macbeth is explaining that death is inevitable, recalling the Samarra story. But he’s also telling us that life is not real, that we are all actors on a stage, something that is emphasized to us in The Six Thatchers many times over, in Ben’s makeup, his and Martin’s staring into the camera, the exposed cameraman in the Morocco scene, Mary’s “like it is in the movies” death scene, and by all the projectors.
This soliloquy immediately follows Macbeth learning that his wife has committed suicide. Lady Macbeth had been tormented by the thought that her hands were stained by blood which she could not wash out. Beginning in The Six Thatchers, bloodstains are also a common theme in S4.
Before she dies, Macbeth begs her doctor for some way to erase her memories:
Hmm… if only there were a way to do that.
The plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth was inspired by the Gunpowder Plot. If The Empty Hearse’s Gunpowder Plotter, Lord Moran, was a decoy for Mary, have we come full circle with a reference to Mary in Lady Macbeth? Are these Macbeth references meant to signify a suicide (real or fake), covered up by the play we’ve been shown on the stage?
lanablack 