Premium Episode 125: The Johnlock Conspiracy Theory (Sample)
John Watson + Sherlock Holmes = Johnlock = the idea that Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are in a secret gay relationship in the BBC series 'Sherlock'. We dive into the "shipping" community that spawned a conspiracy theory and eventually led to people baking symbols in the show, practicing numerology, harassing dissenters and accusing others in the fandom of being pedophiles. Find out if you're more of a "toplocker" or "bottomlocker" when it comes to your favorite duo. Episode written by Travis View and including Liv Agar, Annie Kelly, Julian Feeld, and, of course, Jake Rockatansky.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 125 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, The John Locke Conspiracy Episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Ager, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Earlier this month, two of my followers who go by the names Ducky Ayesha and Iz Chow on Twitter suggested that we look into the John Locke conspiracy.
I hadn't heard of it, but I decided to give it a Google, and that pulled me down the path that sucked up just days of my life.
If you've noticed that I haven't been tweeting as much as I typically do the past few weeks, this is a big reason why.
This is a once very active conspiratorial movement.
Based not around politics, necessarily, but entertainment media.
And despite the apparent low stakes of the conspiracy theory, it led to harassment, baseless accusations of pedophilia, and untold innocent Tumblr users getting sucked into an emotionally fraught rabbit hole.
I thought that's just what they call Tumblr.
Yeah, because you tumble into a state of depression.
I wound up spending days digging up archived versions of old Tumblr posts, watching hours of Sherlock fan videos, and other assorted activities that were neglectful of my health and family.
This is like an apology.
It was like, I don't know, it was like, oh, fresh ground!
It's like QAnon, but you know, untrodden upon by my mind.
The whole Johnlock conspiracy and the drama surrounding it is such a complicated clusterfuck, it's tough to know where to begin.
So I'm just going to start by laying out some of the basic information and build up from there.
Sherlock is a BBC show that ran from 2010 to 2017 over the course of four seasons, or four series as they call them in the UK.
There are only 13 total episodes of the show, but each episode is like a movie running around an hour and a half each.
Here in the U.S., our shows, they pump out like 24 episodes every single year.
But your country, Annie, they seem to take a more leisurely pace with their entertainment.
Yeah, the longest running show of all time here is 10 episodes, so that's correct.
The show depicts Sir Arthur Coden Doyle's classic characters Sherlock Holmes and his roommate Dr. John Watson solving crimes and getting into sticky situations in modern day London.
This particular version of the Sherlock Holmes story was created by Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat, who had both previously worked on Doctor Who.
The creative duo are called Mofftists by fans.
Sherlock Holmes is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, and his trusty flatmate and companion, Dr. John Watson, is portrayed by Martin Freeman.
The show was critically acclaimed, winning Emmys, BAFTAs, and a Golden Globe.
Sherlock also developed a passionate following on the social media platform Tumblr.
Around 2012 to 2014, the Sherlock fandom dominated the site, creating endless gifs, fanfiction, analysis, fan theories, and critical essays, which are called metas in the fandom world.
Before I talk about the Johnlock conspiracy, I need to talk about Johnlock.
And before I talk about that, I need to talk about the fandom concept of shipping.
I apologize if this sounds rudimentary or basic, but I am a dad in my late 30s, so I'm explaining this as if I'm explaining it to myself.
So I need this broken down.
No, I've always wanted to hear you explain the concept of shipping, to be honest.
Travis, you can just admit that your teenage daughter finally wrote an episode.
So shipping is when fans want two or more characters become romantically or sexually involved.
The term reportedly derives from X-Files fandom in the 90s.
X-Files fans who wanted to see the lead characters, Moulter and Scully, be involved romantically were called our shippers.
And this was later shortened to just shippers.
Conventionally, the name of the ship is a mashup of the characters names.
For example, in Harry Potter fandom, the ship between Draco Malfoy and Luna Lovegood is called Druna.
I dread by simply touching on this topic, fans of this show will create a Trulian ship, but as always, I've resigned myself to my fate.
Trulian, it just sounds good.
It does sound good.
I think I'm the first Trulian shipper.
That's right.
I think Trulian sounds like an ad for a anti-depression medication that would be advertised to me during a Hulu ad break.
That's Trulian.
So in the case of Sherlock, the ship between Sherlock and John Watson is called Johnlock.
Oh, okay.
Fans often create fanfiction, imagining the pair hooking up.
On fanfiction.net, there are over 35,000 stories involving Watson and Holmes pairing.
That is by far more material than the show.
This is a bigger cultural thing than the show.
The show is a tiny part of this giant universe.
It's almost like you in a certain way, that you just bake so much content out of very little.
Yes.
Oh yeah, yeah, if you put together like all the text written by all the influencers and shit like that, the books and all this shit, the cue drops are dwarfed.
Same.
Which is perfect for this show, because as a sort of prerequisite, I was, when I was like a 14 year old child, I loved this show.
It was like the second or third season.
I love Sherlock Holmes and the, like, the books as well.
I was an annoying little nerd.
And one thing about the show is that it's different than the books insofar as like you can't figure out the mystery in the middle of it.
Like the point of the books is that like if you're smart enough with the clues you can figure it out.
But with the show it's like Sherlock Holmes has this like magical power to understand stuff.
That sounds way worse to be honest.
It's very terribly written.
It's an awful show.
It's not good.
They will end seasons based on cliffhangers, but the answer to the cliffhanger is not something you can figure out.
So the fans will just bake for like a year what actually happened.
Sherlock will fake his death in the end of one cliffhanger, and the results of how he actually faked it is not seen in the episode.
You know what that reminds me of?
Back in the day, those claw games that you could play in like Denny's or in supermarkets or whatever, you could actually get shit with them.
And now you think you can, but you technically cannot.
And they've designed it that way.
So you keep pumping your fucking money.
And this is the same thing.
It's like, there's no reward for being smart watching this show, despite that being the entire point of Sherlock Holmes.
That rocks.
We hate audiences now.
We just spit on them.
So that's why that's probably why there's so much baking about like the the ship here is because like you bake anything because why not?
Might as well.
You might as well.
Liv, I do have to ask were you a John Locker?
Um, I don't think I was.
I thought I, my, I think I did a bit of baking.
I can't remember the specific details.
The only relationship I have to John Locke is political philosophy, which is the lamest possible.
Liv clearly will not reveal the two minor female characters that she shipped.
Now, I think it's worth noting that fan culture and fan fiction as we know it today started with Sherlock Holmes fans.
The earliest work of Sherlock fan fiction, which were called pastiches at the time, was authored in 1893 by J.M.
Barrie of Peter Pan fame.
I would argue that, like, playing with the character and his relationships makes even more sense now that the character is in the public domain.
It has already been reimagined thousands of times.
I think that Sherlock Holmes has the Guinness Book of World Records for most adaptations of a single character.
The idea that there is something more to the relationship between Watson and Sherlock isn't by itself that crazy.
In fact, it's been hinted at in older adaptations of the Sherlock story.
Perhaps the most significant one is the 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which was written and directed by Billy Wilder.
In that film, Sherlock is approached by a Russian ballerina who wants to retire and have a child.
She proposes that Sherlock be the father, with the hope that the child will inherit her beauty and his intellect.
But Sherlock turns down the offer by claiming that he is involved in a relationship with Watson.
You find Madame attractive or no?
Oh, I find her most attractive.
For a woman, that is.
Then no problem.
Maybe a slight one.
You see, I am not a free man.
Not free?
But you are a bachelor.
A bachelor living with another bachelor for the last five years.
Five very happy years.
What is it you are trying to tell us?
I hoped I could avoid the subject, but some of us, through a cruel caprice of Mother Nature... Get to point.
The point is that Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case.
You mean you and Dr. Watson... He is your glass of tea?
If you want to be picturesque about it.
I think, yeah.
I think I am now a John Locker.
I knew it wouldn't take long.
I love the guy who's dumb and it's like, it just never ends.
He's like, well, Tchaikovsky was not an isolated case.
Oh, you play classical music, do you?
It's just like, okay, we need to just end this.
I'm gay!
Now, you might try to explain that scene away by claiming that Holmes was simply lying about his relationship with Watson in order to politely turn down an indecent proposal.
But it's complicated by the fact that in an interview, director Billy Wilder said that he originally intended to portray Holmes explicitly as a repressed gay man.
Wilder said this.
I should have been more daring.
I have this theory.
I wanted to have Holmes homosexual and not admitting it to anyone, including maybe even himself.
The burden of keeping it secret was the reason he took dope.
He took dope!
This guy rocks.
He's like, hey, what if Sherlock was like...
Gay and into heroin.
In the original, he like chills in an opium den.
Opium den.
Oh, nice!
Yeah, I think that's original, him being like a... That's canonized, that he's like a drug addict.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, he's a big coke head, too.
Oh, sounds like a good guy!
Sherlock's a cool guy.
Sherlock is an example of dudes rock.
Absolutely.
Even more intriguing is that BBC Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes the template for his own Sherlock adaptation, and that the film changed his life.
Gatiss said this to The Guardian.
It's a fantastically melancholy film.
The relationship between Sherlock and Watson is treated beautifully.
Sherlock effectively falls in love with him in the film, but it's so desperately unspoken.
Fans of BBC Sherlock, who support the John Locke shift, point to several clues in the show itself.
For example, in the very first episode, A Study in Pink, there is a scene where Watson meets Sherlock's brother, Mycroft Holmes, for the first time.
Mycroft teases Watson for how quickly his relationship with Sherlock has developed.
What is your connection to Sherlock Holmes?
I don't have one.
I barely know him.
I met him...
Yesterday.
Hmm, and since yesterday you've moved in with him and now you're solving crimes together.
Might we expect a happy announcement by the end of the week?
In that same episode, Watson asks Sherlock about his personal relationships, which Sherlock interprets as a come-on.
You don't have a girlfriend then?
Girlfriend?
No, not really my area.
Oh, right.
Do you have a boyfriend?
Which is fine, by the way.
I know it's fine.
So you've got a boyfriend?
No.
Right.
OK.
You're unattached.
Just like me.
Fine.
Good.
John, I think you should know that I consider myself married to my work.
While I'm flattered by your interest, I'm really not looking for anything.
No, I'm not asking... No.
I'm just saying it's all fine.
Good.
Thank you.
You know, notice though, as a lot of like John Lockhart pointed out, when asked about it,
he said that girlfriends aren't really his area, but he doesn't have quite as forceful denial
as for not having a boyfriend.
No, no, he just says I don't have a boyfriend, but to me the allusion there is clearly I'm gay, but like, stop asking me about it.
There are also several scenes where other characters simply assume that they're a couple.
For example, their landlady asks if the pair will need two separate bedrooms.
There's another bedroom upstairs if you've been needing two bedrooms.
Of course we'll be needing two.
Oh, don't worry, there's all sorts around here.
Mrs. Turner next door's got married ones.
I show these clips and these examples because I think it really illustrates this idea that Johnlock could be canon didn't come out of nowhere.
There's an obvious subtext there.
In fact, it's perfectly rational to ask, what is the purpose of all these frequent gestures towards Holmes and Watson being a couple?
If there's no substance to Johnlock within the canon of the show, then the only other possibility is that the show creators were queerbaiting.
Queerbaiting is when creators of media tease the possibility of LGBTQ representation in their work, but never make it canon or official.
This is often seen as a cynical ploy to draw in LGBTQ audiences without alienating a more mainstream cis straight audience.
Fans of the show simply refused to believe that co-creator Mark Gatiss, who is an openly gay man, would engage in such awful behavior.
Despite the subtext of the show, the creators often threw cold water on the idea that Holmes and Watson would get together in the Ghent.
This started even before the first season.
In a 2010 interview with the publication Digital Spy, show co-creator Stephen Moffat explicitly denied that Sherlock Holmes is gay in the series, saying this, I don't think there is anything that suggests Sherlock is gay.
But if he was, he wouldn't fancy John Watson.
It's just that thing of two blokes hanging around together, living together.
In this nice, modern world, it leads to people saying, oh, are they a couple?
And that's nice.
I thought how the world has changed.
There's no disapproval.
How much more civilised the world has become.
The majority of Johnlock shippers were just people who were invested in that subtext or liked thinking about their favorite characters getting together.
However, out of the Johnlock community emerged a more intense strain of the belief.
Nice.
They held to the Johnlock Conspiracy, or TJLC for short.
These are people who believe that Johnlock was more than just a fan theory or a typical ship.
They believe that Johnlock was an intentional inevitability.
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would wind up being happily ever after.
This was always the plan from the beginning and further, the show's creators left several clues that prove that this is a fact.
It was more than just like a fan-ish desire or analysis.
It was like a prediction of how things are going to turn out.
The Johnlock Conspiracy emerged in the immediate aftermath of the highly anticipated first episode of the third series in 2014.
A lot of the fervent speculation was probably fueled by the fact that there were long gaps in between each series.
Series 2 ended in 2012 and the show didn't air any new episodes until two years later.
To make matters worse, Series 2 ended on a cliffhanger.
The final episode ends with Sherlock Holmes throwing himself off of the roof of St.
Bartholomew's Hospital in an apparent suicide.
It goes as far as depicting hospital staff carrying away Sherlock's bloody corpse and Watson visiting Sherlock's gravesite.
But in the final scene, we see that, actually, Sherlock is alive and well.
And so for two years, fans were left with a question.
How did Sherlock survive?
Fans naturally spawn their own possible explanations by looking for clues in the show itself.
Show creator Stephen Moffat actively encouraged this behavior by outright stating that there were clues to be found.
He told The Guardian this.
There is a clue everybody's missed.
So many people theorizing about Sherlock's death online and they missed it.
We've worked out how Sherlock survives and actually shot part of what really happened.
It all makes sense.
So there are no coincidences, you know.
As you know Liv, this turned out to be a lie.
Of course!
So the season premiere of the third series aired in an episode called The Empty Hearse.
And contrary to what Moffat claimed, it didn't all make sense.
In that episode, viewers are presented with three possible theories that are all individually difficult to believe for different reasons.
The episode features a recurring character named Anderson who is turning into a conspiracy theorist obsessively trying to figure out how Sherlock survived.
Now, one might get the impression that in the episode, Anderson is a stand-in for the fandom who had spent the previous two years obsessively constructing their own theories.
In one scene, Sherlock purportedly explains how he survived to Anderson, but Anderson is unsatisfied.
It kind of seems like the show is just telling fans, look, we know you won't be happy with any explanation we give you, so we won't even bother giving you a single clear explanation.
As I explained, the whole street was closed off.
Like a scene from a play.
Neat, don't you think?
Hmm.
What?
Not the way I'd have done it.
Oh, really?
No, I'm not saying it's not clever, but... What?
Bit... disappointed.
Everyone's a critic.
I think there's quite like a charming attitude in there where it's just like, you know, you like this show that we write for you?
Well, fuck you!
Taking the one thing that's cool about the original Sherlock or the main thing that's cool about the original Sherlock series where it's like you can figure it out if you pay attention to the clues because you have the same clues that Sherlock does and then just because they're too lazy to make like a good story, removing it.
Yeah, but it's not just removing it, it's also then taunting you for thinking that you could do what was good about the original books.
It's like, yeah, fuck you for thinking that you could do that, by the way.
I hate you specifically for doing that.
And I don't know, I think it's maybe just my national character, but I do find that attitude quite charming in writing.
Why couldn't you come up with, why did it have to be so elaborate?
Why couldn't have Sherlock done something like, I read a book, I read an old Houdini book, where if you flex your muscles at a certain moment of impact, you do have a 45% chance of surviving.
Like something that would have kind of explained what people saw.
I hate when people are like, oh there was a raft that you didn't see, and an airplane flying overhead, and you didn't see it, but it was there.
I don't know, it just feels like, you know.
No, you're right.
It's very cheap.
That scene ends with Anderson bringing up some of the major flaws with Sherlock's explanation and then going crazy while ripping down papers from the conspiracy wall he had constructed.
They hate their fans so much!
They hate them!
That is amazing.
I like that you're charmed by that.
I was like, this is you.
This insane guy is you.
I, like, cannot tell if Annie is shitposting by saying she finds it charming, which I love.
What I love most is, like, a lot of the fans were, like, not angry about it.
They're like, shit, they just take the torment.
That's exactly it.
They're like, we'll literally depict you this way, not subtly, and you'll still come back for another season, won't you?
Like, yeah, no, I'm not shitposting.
I think that's great.
I have huge respect for these guys.
The episode also features John Watson getting engaged and denying that he had a romantic relationship with Sherlock.
I've met someone.
Oh, lovely.
Yeah, we're getting married.
Well, I'm going to ask anyway.
So soon after Sherlock?
Well, yes.
What's his name?
It's a woman.
A woman?
Yes, of course it's a woman.
You really have moved on, haven't you?
Mrs. Hudson, how many times Sherlock was not my boyfriend?
Live and let live.
That's my motto.
Basically depicting their audience as a woman entering dementia.
Yes, exactly.
You are a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist and you're a woman entering dementia.
You're also kind of homophobic, by the way?
The actress who played Watson's fiancée and wife is Amanda Abington, who also happens to be Martin Freeman's real-life wife.
She reports that after her role was announced, she received death threats from zealous Johnlock shippers.
She said this in an interview.
I got, she should die.
How dare she play Mary Morton?
How dare she?
They take the John and Sherlock storyline so seriously that they wouldn't want anyone coming between them.
Now, fans being fans, the premiere of Sherlock series 3 was well received for the most part.
But like you pointed out, it seems like they're just dumping all over their most devoted following for like, for like being involved in the show and like, you know, trying to suss out the clues.
But here's the interesting thing.
We know what happens when a strongly believed theory is disconfirmed.
It doesn't cause a believer to abandon the theory.
Most of the time it causes them to double down.
And that is exactly what happened with some people who strongly believed in Jean Locke.
We can trace the conception of the Jean Locke conspiracy to two Tumblr users who went by the names Julabi and Grace Ebooks on January 7th, 2014.
They conceived of the conspiracy theory and its accompanying acronym TJLC and they spread it rapidly throughout the community in the following days.
The foundational text of the Johnlock Conspiracy is a Tumblr post from January 2014 called Trust Gatiss Operation Johnlock is Go.
Oh my god.
What the fuck?
He's a three-star general, you should trust him.
Oh my god.
Hey, maybe this is what became QAnon.
It's 2014.
Is there, like, a separate conspiracy theory which is about all of the so-called coincidences between this and QAnon?
Because... Well, I think we're making one.
Not yet.
We're baking it right now.
That was written by another Sherlock mega fan called loudest subtext in television.
When I read that meta, I mean, I was shocked by how much it seemed to echo a lot of QAnon stuff.
That essay opens with this paragraph.
I'm about certain that John and Sherlock are going to get together.
I mean romantically and even sexually.
Not in the subtext, not in some happy alternate reading of the show, but in actuality on screen.
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