[ SECRET POST #2620 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2620 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[My Mad Fat Diary]


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03.
[Stargate Atlantis]


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04.
[Andromeda]


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05.
[True Detective]


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06.
[Samurai Flamenco]


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07.
[Star Trek: DS9]


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08.
[Supernatural]


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09.
[Wild Adapter]


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10.
[The Bletchley Circle]


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11. [ns]


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12.
[Junior Prom - Prelinger Archives Video]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 015 secrets from Secret Submission Post #374.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: So what's the deal with fandom X?

[intrigueing]

The Sherlock Holmes stories have...timeline issues. See, they're not written in chronological order, and not written as taking place in the present day. Doyle would write a story in 1891 and mention in the text that the events take place in 1888, then for his next story, he'd write that the events here took place in 1883. Then the next one in 1889. BUT a lot of them don't have any date, Watson just says "a few months after/before my marriage yada yada."

The problem is that the timeline of Sherlock Holmes goes thusly: 1881 - Holmes and Watson meet. 1888 - Watson movies out of Baker Street. 1891 - Holmes dies. Somewhere between 1891 and 1893 - Watson's wife dies. 1893 - Holmes comes back from faking his death and Watson moves back into Baker Street.

In late 1887, Watson meets his future wife and is married by early 1888, upon which he moves out. The problem is twofold a) fans can date a story as taking place between 1888 and 1891 if Watson is not living with Holmes or mentions his wife, regardless of the date. Mentions of being "shortly before my marriage" would also imply the story takes place in 1887. But Doyle didn't really remember this date very well, leading to stuff like The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Watson is apparently living with Holmes, spends several weeks gallivanting around doing recon for him far from London, and never mentions his wife, but the story is specifically said to be 5 years after 1884, hereby 1889. And b) Watson's wife is an orphan, which is an important plot point, but is mentioned to be "visiting her mother" in one story and stuff like that.

There are several little inconsistencies like that -- the internal logic seems to imply that Watson and his wife are the 19th century equivalent of River Song and the Doctor, because otherwise they could never had really been married/unmarried during all the earth dates that Watson says they were married/unmarried.

Re: So what's the deal with fandom X?

[(Anonymous)]

That's a good explanation, with dates and everything!

I think a lot of people assume Watson remarried later in life at some point after Holmes returned, and the existence of a second wife makes up for some of the inconsistencies.

The main thing, like you said, is to keep in mind that the stories were not written in the order they occurred and many are written as Watson reminiscing about things that happened years before. Also, Doyle couldn't even be botheted to keep track of where Watson was injured in Afganistan from one story to the next, so we really shouldn't be surprised that he didn't keep the facts of Watson's marriage straight over his entire writing career.

Re: So what's the deal with fandom X?

[(Anonymous)]

This is definitely true, but it also brings up another point - a lot of the reason there's so much focus on Watson's wife is because of the Sherlockian game of trying to square everything in the stories together with the conceit that they were actually written by John Watson. These inconsistencies don't matter in themselves, but if you're trying to make everything fit together, you can spend quite a lot of time on minor details like these.