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Speaker A: Hi, it’s Willa.

Speaker B: We have an episode for you today that, in the scheme of decodering episodes, is old. It’s the second episode we ever made, all the way back in 2018. But in the last few months it’s felt oddly relevant and we wanted to play it for you.

Speaker A: The episode itself is about fans of Sherlock Holmes and particularly fans of the British TV series Sherlock.

Speaker B: Sherlock aired from 2010 to 2017 and starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson. Sherlock, the TV show is actually pretty delightful, but as you’ll hear, the fandom around it got very dark thanks to a subset of viewers who believed in a theory called the John Locke Conspiracy. And though that fan theory is now a decade old, like I said, it’s been resonating lately. Like a lot, actually. The first time it came up was with Heated Rivalry.

Speaker A: Heated Rivalry is the surprise massive hit TV show that premiered at the end of 2025 on H in America and on Crave in Canada. It’s about two star hockey players who secretly start having sex and then fall in love.

Speaker B: And though it is based on a series of romance novels, I think it’s fair to say those novels themselves are based on a certain genre of fan fiction that has been extraordinarily popular since at least the days of Star Trek. It’s called slash fiction, and it’s when fans queer the text of a TV show or a movie or a book by taking what is subtextual sexual tension between characters and making it explicit. Heated Rivalry is like if that genre of fanfiction stopped being fanfiction and was just the show itself.

Speaker A: And that is pretty much exactly what a cohort of fans around Sherlock really wanted to happen with Sherlock and actually thought was happening with Sherlock.

Speaker B: So, in short, there’s a connection between Heated rivalry and Sherlock. And there’s also a connection between Sherlock and Stranger Things. This is is actually the second reason this episode of ours seems relevant right now.

Speaker A: This connection to Stranger Things was actually brought to our attention by a listener. Her name is Maya Hayes, and she wrote in to point out that just as with Sherlock all these years ago, some fans found the ending of Stranger Things so unsatisfying, they theorized it was a kind of fake out.

Speaker B: And another episode, a better episode, must be coming again. This is exactly what happened with Sherlock, and it is a pretty conspiratorial way to be a fan.

Speaker A: And this actually brings us to the last connection that made us think it was a good time to air this episode about Sherlock and the John Locke Conspiracy.

Speaker B: And it’s that we, Decoder Ring are on a bit of a run here with shows that touch on conspiracies.

Speaker A: Two weeks ago, we aired an episode about the conspiracy theory growing around the film Eyes Wide Shut.

Speaker B: And two weeks from now, we’re gonna air an episode about an early Internet phenomenon that turned its viewers into proto conspiracists combing the Internet for clues.

Speaker A: And we thought we would just make the connection between the episode we just aired and the one we’re about to air explicit by airing this episode, which is also about a humdinger of a conspiracy theory. All three of these episodes that were airing, they touch on something you see all the time now.

Speaker B: An approach to reality and to fiction that doesn’t really distinguish between them. That close reads fact like it’s fiction and treats fiction like it’s fact.

Speaker A: So take all that together and it just felt like it was time to air the John Locke Conspiracy episode again.

Speaker B: Please be warned, it contains dark adult content.

Speaker A: Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening. When I was a kid, maybe in the sixth grade, I went to a friend’s house. Her older sister was watching TV in the living room and I heard something amazing. Beverly Hills 90210 was a primetime soap opera about the trials and tribulations of well heeled high school students. I loved it instantly. In the episode I saw Brenda Walsh, a sassy Minnesota transplant, and her boyfriend, the bad boy Dylan McKay, were spending their summer vacation sneaking around because they had been forbidden from dating by Brenda’s overprotective father.

Speaker C: I’m not leaving, daddy.

Speaker A: You get your bags, young lady.

Speaker D: We’re going home.

Speaker A: No. Not until you accept Dylan as part of my life. I don’t know quite what it was about the two of them that I liked so much. The kissing on the beach, the naughtiness, the intensity of it all. But I became pretty obsessed. In high school, I recorded a couple of Brenda Dylan heavy episodes on her vcr and I would fast forward all the other stuff just to watch their scenes over and over again. Soon after, and not for the first time, Dylan and Brenda broke up. He started making out with her best friend, Kelly Taylor. Meanwhile, the actress who played Brenda, Shannon Doherty, got fired from the show and Kelly and Dylan became the series grand romance. I never bought it. Actually, I hated it. Brenda and Dylan belonged together and there was nothing anyone, even the writers, could do to convince me otherwise. Even now. And I’m not going to get super worked up about it. If you are a Kelly and Dylan fan. What was wrong with you. If this sounds juvenile and girly to you? For a long time I felt the same way. I wasn’t proud of all the YouTube comments compilations of Brenda and Dylan I’ve watched in my life. And that’s what I wanted to explore. Whether this juvenile and girly passion for make believe people’s love affairs is a waste of time, or if it’s actually a meaningful way of interacting with fiction, with our own imaginations, and with authority. But as I started looking into the subject, I realized something about myself. I’m a total amateur, rooting for couples, wanting them to get together. This is called shipping, which is short for relationshiping. If you’ve ever wanted two people on a TV show to smooch, you’ve shipped them. But shipping can be much more purposeful and intense than that.

Speaker C: I barely was into like the Draco Snape thing. That was like a very short thing. And the Draco Harry then like took over my life.

Speaker A: So when I was in Buffy fandom, the only thing I cared about was Rupert Giles.

Speaker C: Star Wars Kylux is a. Oh my God. Armitage. Hux.

Speaker A: Kylo Ren in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Clint. Like Hawkeye and Coulson, like the SHIELD guy.

Speaker E: Jane Austen. Lydia eloping with Wickham and running off to Las Vegas.

Speaker C: Poe and Kylo Ren. It’s not my favorite.

Speaker A: Darcy and Bingley. I have seen that.

Speaker E: Plants. Yeah, the Voltron ship.

Speaker F: Harry.

Speaker G: Voldemort.

Speaker A: That’s a few of the fans we talked to for this story. For really engaged fans, the relationship the show wants you to root for, that’s just the beginning. Relationships that happen in the show itself, those are called canon. Canon describes things that have happened in the official version of a story. But fandoms, which is the word for the community intensely involved online with a piece of entertainment, don’t just engage with what’s canon. People in fandoms analyze, argue and talk about the work in critical writings that are called meta. They create fan art and they read and write and share fanfiction, which are new stories about existing characters. And they ship. As we were speaking with people, one particularly fraught ship kept coming up.

Speaker G: John Locke.

Speaker A: John Locke.

Speaker H: John Locke.

Speaker A: Take the John from Dr. John Watson and the Locke from Sherlock Holmes, and you get John Locke, the nickname for the romantic relationship between Watson and Sherlock, as played by Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the recent BBC show Sherlock. There are scores of TV shows, movies and books that inspire fan fervor, but none have done so for as long as Sherlock Holmes. We’re going to be focusing on one TV show, Sherlock, and one pairing, John Locke, in which that fervor got extreme. Rooting for that relationship brought tremendous joy into people’s lives. But it also unleashed real darkness into the world and brought a fandom and a television show into chaos. It’s almost a Holmesian tale, full of brilliant theories, false leads and mysterious motives. Except for the ending, which, unlike in A Holmes story, isn’t very neat. This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I’m Slate’s TV critic Willa Paskin. Every month we take a cultural question, habit or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters. Today, who gets to decide if Sherlock Holmes is gay? Sherlock Holmes, the character created by Arthur Conan Doyle, first appeared in 1887 in the novel A Study in Scarlet. In addition to the 56 original short stories and four original novels, Holmes has appeared in tens of thousands of books, plays, movies, musicals, radio shows, TV shows, cartoons, comics and board games from all over the world. He’s been an animated mouse and a drug addict. He solved crimes in the 22nd century and been suspected of being Jack the Ripper. Currently, he’s played by Robert Downey Jr. In a movie franchise, solves crimes with a female Watson on CBS’s elementary, and is an odd, charismatic genius who texts a lot in the aforementioned Sherlock. The show, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, began airing on the BBC in 2010. Set in modern London, it’s sharp and sophisticated. You can hear it in the theme music, sweeping and moody. There are four three episode series. Fans often refer to seasons as a series, as the BBC does, and one holiday special, with most of the episodes riffing on one of the original Conan Doyle stories. Sherlock Holmes has always been aloof, cold, smarter and more logical than the rest of us. But Sherlock accentuated the character’s social awkwardness. He describes himself as a sociopath. Then Holmes meets Dr. John Watson, portrayed by Martin Freeman, an army doctor and Afghanistan war vet. Overcoming PTSD, they become roommates, living together at 221B Baker Street. Friends? Confidants? Partners?

Speaker D: I’m your best friend, Marin. Of course you are. Of course you’re my best friend.

Speaker A: Sherlock was a hit immediately upon its release in the uk. Popular and well reviewed, a passionate fandom sprung up around the show on fanfic sites and social media platforms like Tumblr. On AO3, one of the main sites for publishing fan fiction, there are currently over 116,000 stories about Sherlock Holmes. And about half of those are about Sherlock and Watson. Specifically, between 2011 and 2016, nearly 300 Sherlock fan works were being published every week. The show’s fans are mostly women, many of whom are queer and who weren’t necessarily interested in how faithful Sherlock was to the original Sherlock Holmes. They analyzed the show, riffed on it, chatted about it, and built a community around it. And they shipped various ships, but most especially John Locke. Many of the most popular ships, the majority even, are slash. That’s the term to describe gay male pairings. Why male male ships are so popular could be the subject of an entire other episode. But the term slash, like so much about modern fandom, comes from Star Trek fans who, starting in the 1970s, would use a slash in the title of a zine, like Kirk Spock, to tip readers off to its sexual content. And the thing about Sherlock and Watson, like Spock and Kirk, who are in their way modeled on Sherlock and Watson, is that the idea that something romantic might be going on between them, it’s not new. Conan Doyle wasn’t trying to create a homosexual subtext when he wrote the characters, but he did write a deep and committed friendship. And John Lockchippers are not the first people to see something romantic in that Bond, not the first people to put it in academic terms who have queered the text. There was a close reading from 1941 by the Mystery writer Rex Stout that concluded Watson must be a woman and Sherlock’s wife. The 1970 Billy Wilder film the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a favorite of Sherlock co creator Mark Gatiss and openly gay man himself, strongly implied that Sherlock Holmes was gay. The BBC Sherlock knew about this history and it winked at it. In the first 15 minutes of the first episode, Sherlock and Watson’s landlady asks if they’ll be sharing a bed. And that’s just the start. There are many fan compilations of these moments on YouTube. The clip you’re about to hear is from a 12 minute long one titled BBC Sherlock’s Gay Subtext by the user Makeme believe.

Speaker D: Moving on. I’ve met someone.

Speaker A: Oh, lovely.

Speaker D: Yeah, we’re getting married. Well, I’m going to ask anyway.

Speaker A: So soon after Sherlock?

Speaker D: Well, yes. I’ll be next door if you need me. Why would I leave you? No reason at all.

Speaker A: What’s his name?

Speaker D: It’s a woman.

Speaker I: A woman?

Speaker D: Yes, of course it’s a woman.

Speaker A: But according to the people making and starring in the show, all of this is just subtext. Sherlock Holmes and Watson are platonic. Many fans Disagreed. Emma Grant got into the fandom right before the second season.

Speaker H: In the first episode especially, there’s these beautiful little moments where Sherlock and John kind of look at each other and the looks are very weighted. So it was very clear to me and Sherlock like, like they were almost like they were putting it in intentionally. And I was like, oh, this is going to be fun.

Speaker A: This discrepancy between what the people making the show and people watching the show think could happen on the show. This is normal. It’s the space that fandom needs to exist. Fans sometimes come up with dynamics and events and conversations and interpretations and yes, sexual arrangements that no show ever would. But most of the time this isn’t just fine, it’s the fun. But then, in 2014, just after season three of the show aired, a user posted a very elaborate fan theory online. When I say very elaborate, I mean it was tens of thousands of words long. And it began by interpreting a BBC report on queer representation and then went on to closely read every episode. The shot composition, the score, the colors, the lighting, the dialogue, the references and the letters in the characters names, all with the helping of string theory. Here’s an audio clip recorded by a fan. It’s about Sherlock’s brother Mycroft’s role in the series and will help you get a sense of just how granular the theory was.

Speaker F: The prominent part of Mycroft’s motif, the creepy series of three falling notes we hear a few times in this clip. Here are just the notes. If we hear that, we know that Mycroft is acting largely on his own behalf.

Speaker A: All this analysis led to one conclusion. Here’s Alex Phoenix, that’s her online name, who read the theory and loved it.

Speaker G: The idea that this wasn’t just an ordinary show, it was a mystery show, and that there was a mystery for us, the fans to detect, puzzle out. And that mystery was that John and Sherlock were in a romantic queer relationship and it was going to be revealed.

Speaker A: The idea was that John Watson and Sherlock Holmes were not only characters with gay subtext who should be together, they were gay characters who were going to get together in the show. John Locke was going to happen for real and most likely in the upcoming season, season four. One of the people that came across the idea was Grace Kretcher. Grace, known online as Grace Ebooks. Grace had seen season three and felt sure that something was up. The theory elaborated all of her suspicions.

Speaker I: So you know, we’re like, yeah, I think this is happening. And my friend Jewel said it’s like the Johnlock conspiracy I said back to her, tjlc, the acronym, and after that the two of us, how it sort of branched off from there was that the two of us just started using it on Tumblr.

Speaker A: The John Locke Conspiracy Much of the theory is based on close textual a***, the kind that an English teacher would love. But TJLC wasn’t based only on close. Reading the show, you have to understand, Sherlock and John could only be getting together if the creators were lying to viewers, because the creators said over and over, no way, it’s not going to happen. Now, to be fair, the creators did lie. Steven Moffat, who is also the showrunner for Doctor who, is particularly well known for misleading fans and the press. But when it came to questions about John Locke as a romantic pairing, the showrunners became particularly unequivocal. In July of 2016, before the fourth season aired, but after TJLC was a widespread theory in the community, Mark Gatiss said at a fan convention, we’ve explicitly said that this is not going to happen. There is no game plan, no matter how much we lie about other things, that the show is going to culminate in Martin and Benedict going off into the sunset together. We’re not trying to f*** with people’s heads, not trying to insult anybody or make any kind of issue out of it. There’s nothing there. But some fans remained convinced that these denials were just a diversion.

Speaker J: Almost every time the writers or actors come out saying something, I see people becoming discouraged and worrying that Johnlock won’t happen. I hope this video can help dispel some of your fears. TJLC is real.

Speaker A: This is from a video, the second part of an exhaustive 48 part YouTube series called TJLC. Explained the host is standing in front of a color coordinated bookcase and grinning throughout. You can see and hear the peppy excitement at just talking about this idea.

Speaker J: Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what they say. This is the closest to being a genuine conspiracy that TJLC actually gets, because you have to believe that everyone involved is hiding the truth. It’s not a stretch to believe it though, because the writers have told us time and again that they’re doing it.

Speaker A: Whether or not Moffat and Gatiss are lying is one of the fundamental questions of tjlc, and it’s one we can’t really know the answer to. It’s not possible to prove that someone is lying about something that hasn’t happened yet until it doesn’t happen, which we won’t know until Sherlock is over forever. As long as there’s potentially more Sherlock, it always could. For some people, TGLC became irrefutable. I want to be clear here that this was a relatively small group of people. There are people who are into John Locke and into TJLC in different ways who thought of it primarily as a great hope or a fun idea or a worthy cause, a huge step forward for gay representation. But for some TJLCRs, it became an eventuality, not an opinion or a possibility. Denying it was denying the truth. Not just one ship among many. There’s a term in fandom called fanon that describes conventions that fans have agreed upon. Things that are fan canon, like Spock having a green p****, that’s a piece of fanon, or that John Watson wears red underwear, that’s another. And the most impassioned believers of TJLC developed very specific and dogmatic fanon around the ship. One especially contentious example of this is the concept of top lock and bottom lock. Basically, whether Sherlock Holmes would be a top or a bottom while having sex with Watson. TJLCRs tend to be bottom lockers because, based on their analysis of the show, they think of Sherlock as a man who is a soulful romantic, and they interpret this to mean he would be the receptive partner during sexual intercourse. This idea was meaningful to them, so meaningful that they would fight about it. And it led to lots of nasty skirmishes in the fandom. Here’s Songlin. That’s their username, who was initially interested in the theory.

Speaker K: There was this, like, whole thing about, like, Sherlock has a wilting bottom, and if he’s not a wilting bottom, then you’re writing him abusively and all. Toplock is abusive.

Speaker A: There’s more, a lot more. But I’m going to leave you hanging off this cliff for a few minutes and back up, because if this sounds strange and obsessive, like it’s blurring the lines between reality and fiction, like it’s taking fiction way too seriously, you should know this kind of behavior has a long historical precedent in how people have responded to Sherlock Holmes for the last 130 years. When did fanfiction start?

Speaker F: Well, what we think about being fan fiction, that can only come up around the late 18th or early 19th century, when you sort of have this notion that characters might belong to someone, which is, historically speaking, pretty new. And then in the sense of sort of organized fandom, it starts with Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker A: That’s Ann Jamison. She’s a professor of English at the University of Utah, and she wrote fic, a great book about fan fiction. When it comes to fandom and almost all of the modern behaviors we associate with it, Sherlock Holmes fans did it first. In 1891, Conan Doyle started writing Sherlock Holmes stories for the magazine the Strand. The Strand was a monthly that became a huge success, and thanks in large part to Holmes, who was an immediate sensation. And almost as immediately, people started to think of Holmes as a real person. Here’s Arthur Conan Doyle in a filmed interview from the late 1920s.

Speaker L: The curious thing is how many people around the world who are perfectly convinced that he is a living human being. I get letters addressed to him. I get letters asking for his autograph. Get letters addressed to his rather stupid friend Watson.

Speaker A: Before Conan Doyle, stories were serialized, but they were serialized. Like Charles Dickens, stories were serialized, one long drama unfolding month after month. Conan Doyle invented a new kind of serialization in which the same character would appear month after month, but in a completely finished story. A familiar character would make readers want to keep buying a magazine. But complete stories ensure that they would never miss anything. Conan Doyle, in other words, invented the procedural, the case of the week format that’s still all over television. But in inventing the procedural, he also invented something else, the story that never has to end so long as someone can imagine another case. Conan Doyle knew that he was being overshadowed by his creation, and he didn’t like it. Who would? He was an ambitious writer who saw the Holmes stories as his schlock work, a paycheck keeping attention from his more literary output. So in 1893, less than two years after Holmes first appeared in the Strand, Conan Doyle killed him. In the Final Solution, Sherlock and his hastily introduced arch nemesis Moriarty plunged their deaths at Reichenbach Falls.

Speaker L: Here’s Russell Miller, who wrote the Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, a biography of the writer, on the reaction to Holmes death, a great outpouring of grief across the world, and disbelief that this could possibly happen to their hero. Workers in the city of London wore black armbands or black mourning crepe trowed around their top hats. And in New York, there were Keep Holmes Alive. Society sprang into being. Strand magazine lost 20,000 subscribers almost overnight, and furious letters poured into the magazine’s offices from devotees who were absolutely maddened with grief and anger.

Speaker A: Eventually, Sherlock Holmes stories written by people other than Conan Doyle would become known as pastiche. And there are thousands of pastiches out there, written by everyone from J.M. barrie to P.G. wodehouse, Mark Twain, A.A. milne and John Lennon. But this started to happen in earnest after Reichenbach Falls fans talked about Sherlock. They wrote letters asking after him, and they wrote new stories featuring him. Sherlock fans basically put together what amounted to the first Save this Show campaign. And eventually, after being offered huge sums of money, Conan Doyle obliged, bringing Sherlock back in stories that explained his death away. After the return, the Sherlock Holmes community continued to evolve. In 1911, a priest named Russell Knox published an essay, Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes, that became the foundational text for Sherlockians. The piece was supposed to be a satire of a new kind of biblical scholarship, but in it Knox read Holmes with an extraordinary level of wonky precision.

Speaker M: But the literary affinities of Dr. Watson’s masterly style are to be looked for further afield than Gaboriau or Poe or Wilkie Collins. He reminds us of the blustering manner of Thrasymachus when he breaks into the argument of the Republic.

Speaker A: It’s a meta, a literary analysis, just like what modern fans do. And like the early meta that inspired tjlc, this one invented something too, something Sherlockians call the Great Game or the Grand Game. Here’s Roberta Pearson, a professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a longtime Sherlockian herself.

Speaker N: So the fundamental precept is that Holmes and Watson were real people and that Conan Doyle was merely the literary agent. The second precept is you then treat it in a kind of scholarly fashion, where you’re trying to resolve inconsistencies and incoherencies in the plots, and you’re trying to do this through both textual evidence and sort of historical evidence.

Speaker A: Conan Doyle was writing on tight deadlines for money. There are consistency errors in the stories, but instead of just acknowledging these mistakes, Sherlockians playing the Great Game try to justify them. For example, Great Game players explain that John Watson’s wife calls him James in one story, not because Arthur Conan Doyle had a brain fart, but because he’s John H Watson, and H must stand for Hamish, and Hamish is Scottish for James. There are still hundreds of Sherlockian societies all over the world whose members are still playing the Great Game. Sherlockians call the stories the sacred writings, or the canon. This is where canon as it’s now used in fandom and pop culture more largely comes from TJL seers use it all the time because they believe. What they believe is that John Locke is going to go canon. And like Sherlockians, TJL seers are also playing a version of the Great Game, reading every detail of the BBC Sherlock as though it was a clue about John Locke. The difference between The Great Game and tglc, though, is that practitioners of the Great Game are acting with tongues firmly planted in cheek. TJLCRs, not so much. In both cases, though, there’s something about Sherlock, the ultimate sleuth, that seems to encourage his fans to get sleuthy themselves, to try and find order and logic and reason in every detail. Fans of both the original stories and the BBC Sherlock are just trying to emulate their protagonist, but there’s a kind of overwrought illogic that can come out of over reasoning. David Grann, the author and New Yorker writer, wrote a nonfiction collection of reported pieces called the Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which opens with a story about the world’s leading Conan Doyle expert, a man who staged his suicide to look like a murder. Grant thinks that Sherlockians brush up against madness so often because they want to be like Sherlock Holmes, but no one can.

Speaker O: The ability to kind of miraculously and immaculately solve every puzzle of life is beyond our powers, and we do our best. But if you’re obsessed with that perfection, it can tip you into madness.

Speaker A: Conan Doyle himself went a little mad. The creator of this perfect machine of reasoning devoted the later part of his life and his career to spiritualism, a religious movement that believed the spirit world was real and scientifically provable.

Speaker L: He, in my view, became slightly mentally disjointed because of his extraordinary obsession with spiritualism. He spent a lot of time sitting in the garden of his house in the New Forest, waiting for fairies to appear, playing ethereal music.

Speaker A: So let’s fall off that cliff into these Reichenbach Falls and get back to what happened with the Johnlock conspiracy. To recap, the fan theory we mentioned earlier was posted In March of 2014, just after season three had aired, bringing with it a whole new wave of fans to the show and to the fandom. Many of those new fans were John Lock shippers, and they were intrigued by tjlc. Bickering, infighting, vicious name calling, casual cruelty and worse are a well known part of fan culture and Internet culture more largely. But just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s not painful. And many members of the Sherlock fandom were taken aback by the hostility. Here’s Emma Grant again. Emma wasn’t a TGlcer, but she was very involved in the fandom.

Speaker H: By fall of 2014, it had become this very strange situation where you had a small group of people, really, who insisted that John Locke was going to become canon. Suddenly it was, if you don’t have the right perspective, perspective, according to this person or that person, then they feel completely entitled to come and tell you that not only are you wrong, but you’re an awful person, you’re a homophobe, and you shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t post that story, you shouldn’t talk about this topic. You have no right. That was new.

Speaker A: A regular feature of the fandom at this point was extremely contentious, often hateful exchanges and anonymous comments having to do with the ship Sherlock should be in and how he should be in it. Grace Cratcher is one of the strongest pro TJLC voices out there. She’s the one who came up with the name TJLC from earlier.

Speaker I: I said back to her tjlc.

Speaker A: Grace doesn’t write fan fiction or even much meta, but she helped popularize tjlc. She has strong feelings about it and Sherlock’s character, more largely. She found certain characterizations of him that he was a brooding sociopath, or to put it in tjlc speak, a dark prince, a character who is at his core dark and dominating, personally and sexually, to be ridiculous. And she would say, so the kind of fine distinctions that the fandom was constantly bickering about. And you were sort of p***** about it on Tumblr?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker I: Well, I mean, I guess that’s again, like, I’m a very sort of hyperbolic person. So, like, you can go read any of my posts. And I’m like, this is f****** ridiculous about anything. That’s kind of how I talk.

Speaker A: So, I mean, but you did so in your joking way, you did say this is f****** ridiculous.

Speaker I: In my joking way. I mean, I probably made. I couldn’t even estimate how many posts I’ve made, like, making fun of that idea. Like, you’re trying to ask me if I made one post about it. I mean, you probably would be sitting here for weeks if I compiled all my posts. Being like, this is annoying.

Speaker A: There are a lot of stories about how TJLC became a point of conflict in the Sherlock fandom, but I want to focus on one inflection point because it shows just one of the ways that tjlc, a theory about a fictional relationship, started to hurt people, not just on the Internet, but in real life. There’s a yearly Sherlock Holmes Fan convention in Atlanta 22.1bcon, known as a fan con for all things Sherlock holmes, with over 600 attendees. In 2015, there was a panel called the Gender Politics of Fandom. The panel featured some speakers who made fan works that dealt with rape and other dark themes or that embrace the idea of Sherlock as dominating as a top locker. Remember, top lock and bottom lock are the much argued over idea about whether Sherlock should be a top or a bottom during sex. And many strong believers in TJLC thought that Sherlock was a bottom. Grace was at the convention with a few friends and fellow TJLCRs, and she attended the panel. One of the panelists was a fan who goes by the handle Anarfia. At some point, a man in the audience asked a question about writing fanfiction about rape and rape fantasies, subjects that come up in Anarfia’s Sherlock fic. So she fielded the question.

Speaker O: I said, you know, I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. This is like, something that has been a part of my life for a long time. I’ve had these fantasies, and this is like, part of my way to cope with it is to, like, write about it. And then the people in this group, like, just started jumping down my throat and like, saying that this kind of work is always harmful and you should never write this stuff. And think of all of the young, impressionable fans. You’re a bad feminist and you’re a bad person for writing these kind of things. And I kept talking, and at a certain point, I got super emotional, you know, because I just felt like I was being attacked and everybody was basically calling me a bad person, and I started to cry.

Speaker A: Grace, who was part of the group that spoke up during the panel, has a completely different take on it.

Speaker I: Every single lecture class I took for my gender and sexuality degree was like, five times more intense of a conversation in that class. Like, truly, I have to be perfectly blunt with you right now. The descriptions of what happened at 221bcon on the Internet are facially insane, and they have absolutely no relationship to what actually happened whatsoever.

Speaker A: When Grace has descriptions on the Internet, what she means is that after the panel and the convention, people who were there wrote critically about the tjlcrs behavior, and it blew up on Tumblr in large part because people’s feelings about TJLC and TJL sears were already very raw from months of infighting. What neither Anarfia nor the other panelists had known was that One of the TJLCRs had recorded part of the panel, and in the midst of the controversy about the convention, uploaded that recording to YouTube, a recording that showed Anarfia crying and talking about being an abuse survivor.

Speaker O: You know, I went and checked on YouTube. That excerpt, you know, included me crying while I didn’t watch the whole thing. I couldn’t watch the whole thing. But the beginning of it, I was already like crying basically at the start of the panel. And I was just really, really angry. You know, I just felt so violated and really, you know, re victimized.

Speaker A: I asked Grace about the video which she appeared in. Why was that video put on the Internet?

Speaker I: Well, I believe a friend of mine posted it because I told her to after she told me that she had it, because I think it, you know, it was not a video of the. By any means, of the entire panel, but it was like, you know, a small clip of the panel I believe in. Frankly, I can’t even remember exactly what was on it, but I believe that showed me sort of talking very calmly and reasonably.

Speaker A: We spoke with one of the co founders and directors of the convention, Heather Holloway, and she says that at the time, the con did not have a policy strictly forbidding videotaping panels. They do now because of this specific incident. I haven’t seen the video. It’s not online anymore. So I can’t say whose take is closer to the truth regarding the emotional tenor of the panel. It seems clear, though, that things got out of hand and they continued to. Songlin, a Sherlock fan who spoke earlier in the show, was not at the panel, but was at the convention and wrote about it on Tumblr.

Speaker K: I came out and I said that I did not think that was okay. And I thought that the behavior that people had engaged in was unacceptable. And as a result, like, I was the target of a lot of, I don’t want to say harassment. Well, somebody did threaten to dox me, so maybe I should go as far as saying harassment.

Speaker A: Doxxing is when someone posts your personal information online without your consent. It can lead to real life harassment or worse. To be clear, Songlen is not talking about Grace here, but other TJLCers.

Speaker K: A major TJLC writer posted on her blog that she didn’t trust me with.

Speaker B: With children.

Speaker K: And like, maybe a couple hours after she made that post, someone threatened to report me to my university and tell them that I was a pedophile, which did firmly turn me off of TJLCRs forever.

Speaker A: In the aftermath of the con, the moderator of the panel was doxxed. There were calls to dox the con, com, the convention committee. Grace was ultimately banned from the con and the Sherlock community. It just got more and more contentious, with non TGLC ers trying to p*** TJLC ers off and vice versa. For the record, Grace denies ever bullying anyone at the con or online. My sense, and I’m sure this is your sense too, is that people think of you sometimes as, like, you were like, a big name fan of this conspiracy and that it started to bully people. They felt bullied by it.

Speaker I: Well, first of all, I have to say that, like, the stuff that you’re talking about, like, a lot of that is not even coming from the Sherlock fandom. Like, this is just about who I am and my personality. I mean, before I had watched a single episode of Sherlock, people wanted to come to my house and beat me up over Glee. I’m just not willing to really budge an inch on this bullying idea because, like, I was just talking about things that I like and don’t like on the Internet and, like, I just can’t.

Speaker A: Like, you’re never gonna get me to accept that the stuff that I was saying was anywhere even close to the line of, like, bullying or TJLC didn’t just hurt people who didn’t buy into it. It hurt the people that believed in it too.

Speaker J: So this is it, the last video before series four. By the time you’re watching this, series four starts tomorrow. We’ve actually made it. This period of time, not just this last year. Making these videos, but the last three, has been maybe the most meaningful part of my entire life. And while I am a bit sad to see it end, I’m far more excited to see what’s about to happen and how it will change everything. That’s what this video is about. Just building up your excitement even more, because after all of these months and years, it’s about to happen.

Speaker A: That’s from the TJLC Explained video series. Again, it’s the very last episode. When I listen to that and I hear how excited the host is, it bums me out. It reminds me of people who are absolutely sure the Rapture is going to arrive on a certain date and then have to live with the disappointment when it doesn’t come. Because in 2017, the fourth season of Sherlock arrived, the season that was supposed to make Johnlock canon, and it did not happen. John and Sherlock never get together. If anything, the fourth season seemed to run away from Johnlock altogether, underplaying their bond, putting a pin in the dynamic. It seemed straighter, not gayer, than what came before. This was a shock for many, to say the least, and especially so for those fans whose understanding of themselves was changed forever by the show. Here’s Alex, who wasn’t part of the infighting, but believed in tjlc.

Speaker G: I so identify with John Watson, that he is a closeted man. Who comes to his bisexuality later in life, you know, that I discovered something about myself, my bisexuality within watching the show and being a fan of the show. So I think a lot of people had that kind of awakening. And so it becomes a very personal journey of your own in tandem with the show.

Speaker A: If you were a believer, someone so changed by this theory and this pairing, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with the letdown?

Speaker G: They created this world that made it seem like we were walking down a path to John and Sherlock being in an open, queer relationship and it was going to be beautiful. And people got really excited about it. And I did, too. I absolutely believed it. This really dignified queer representation was like my candle in the darkness.

Speaker A: And.

Speaker G: And when that didn’t happen, I was absolutely thrown into a depression. It was dark times. The fandom cleared out. You know, a lot of people just left after series four.

Speaker A: Here’s Asia Romano, an Internet cultural reporter for Vox, who was an indispensable guide to reporting the story.

Speaker E: After season four came and went with no canonical declaration that Johnlock was canon, they overnight kind of developed this elaborate addendum to the conspiracy that involved this random show called, I think, Apple Tree Yard on BBC, because Apple Tree Yard was scheduled to be in Sherlock’s time slot the next week.

Speaker A: Apple Tree Yard was a real show with a real cast and a real promotional push, but the theory was that it was just a placeholder for the real, final secret episode of Sherlock, which would finally reveal John Locke were together.

Speaker E: So then the show came, and the show actually was a real show that aired, and there was this entire, like, moment of reckoning in the fandom, and people were so upset, people, because they didn’t have anything else to hang their hat on.

Speaker A: After the season four finale aired with no John Locke, some fans developed complex explanations involving the China market and BBC intervention that was keeping Moffat and Gatiss from doing as they pleased. But they also lashed out, especially at Gatis, who they started tweeting at, incessantly calling him Mark Stratus. And worse. The toxic stuff that was happening in the fandom even before season four started to affect the actors, too. The actress Amanda Abington, who was cast as Mary, John Watson’s wife and was married to Martin Freeman in real life, reported a death threat because of her role in the show in 2011. At the beginning of the series, Martin Freeman called Sherlock the gayest story in the history of television. In recent interviews, he said the fans have dampened his enthusiasm for a season five in Particularly strong language, people’s expectations. Some of it’s not fun anymore. He said. It’s not a thing to be enjoyed, it’s a thing of, you better do this, otherwise you’re a. That’s not fun anymore. I reached out to Moffat and Gatiss, but they declined to talk to us. I don’t know exactly what happened, but as a relatively impartial observer, I have a guess Moffatt and Gatiss and all the other scores of people involved with making the show were trying to put the gay genie back in the bottle. What they had thought was an open minded, knowing wink at the history of a maybe gay Sherlock. It got away from them. It meant more to people than they had ever imagined it could. So they pulled back on the subtext. Way back I talked to a lot of people about tjlc and while most of them thought that the hardcore TJLC ers went too far and that the theory was increasingly far fetched, many of them also thought that Moffat and Gatis had egged viewers on. The term for this is queerbaiting.

Speaker B: Do you, I mean, do you feel like the show led you on?

Speaker G: I do. Let’s talk queerbaiting.

Speaker L: Hello.

Speaker G: I feel that they were playing with gay subtext very deliberately, but that they never intended to bring it out into the open and make it text. If they didn’t really want to go there. They didn’t have to have John questioning Sherlock about his sexuality every time they turned around.

Speaker A: Most of us who are raised on television, we’ve been trained to divine the signs of plot and character so as to see where a story is going, often because the show wants us to. They want us to ship the X Files, Mulder and Scully and Mood Lighting’s David and Maddie and the Office’s Jim and Pam. That’s the way TV often works. It makes us want something. And then after much trial and sacrifice, after much will, they won’t. They, they give it to us and we are thankful. But that list, it doesn’t have any gay couples on it because so far that’s not something TV or entertainment has provided in significant quantities. And so Sherlock fans and all the other fans in various fandoms had to make it for themselves. In the past, people shipping Kirk and Spock or Starsky and Hutch or Bert and Ernie or Draco and Harry or slash pairs way older than that. They were too realistic to think that their ships could ever go canon. But as gay relationships have become more prevalent on tv, fans of slash ships want more. They want progress. And anything less is a disappointment. There are still currently John Locke conspiracist true believers who think season five, which is not yet officially happening, is an inevitability, and so is John Locke. One theory is that the fourth season is fake, that it took place in Sherlock’s mind while he lies there in a coma, and that there will be a fifth season in which John Locke will finally go canon. Whatever theory they subscribe to, though, it requires thinking that both the creators and the show and the BBC itself continue to lie to them. Because, remember, TJLC is based on an unfalsifiable premise that the show and the creators are lying to you. If JohnLocke doesn’t come to pass, it’s just that they haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Not that it isn’t ever gonna happen. Here’s Grace again. When you’re by herself and, like, think, do you ever think, like, it might not happen?

Speaker I: No, listen, like, I. At this point, like, I am so far past putting any. Like, I guess maybe the thing that. That would help you. I know you’re not gonna ever fully understand my perspective here, but, like, I would never even think about anything that comes out of these people’s mouths. You know what I mean? The stuff they say does not even enter my psyche at this point, because in my job as a lawyer, I’m constantly testing if people are truthful and if I can realistically depend on what they’re saying. And that is dramatically untrue of any of these people.

Speaker A: There’s a contradiction here. It’s the same one that existed in the way people treated Arthur Conan Doyle’s work, where, on the one hand, the author might as well not exist, but then, on the other hand, this person who doesn’t exist has made this perfectly explicable, logical thing. It’s the perfect author who is totally irrelevant.

Speaker I: But I just want to point out that, like, for instance, Steven Moffat has said things like, well, there’s a group of kids on the Internet who know exactly where this is going. And, you know, prior to season four, the sort of promotion for it was like, this is historic. This is groundbreaking. Be a part of making. Literally. There was an ad sent to the fandom that said, grace, I want to be a part of making history.

Speaker B: You are totally convincing me right now.

Speaker A: And she was. There’s something so compelling about being in the presence of so much passionate certainty. It made me feel like, what do I know? This means so much less to me than it does to you. The truth is that there is no guarantee that TJLC will ever happen. Even if Sherlock does come back, the fifth season might be another disappointment. Listen to me. It almost certainly will be another disappointment.

Speaker E: It is very much exactly like any other. Like standard conspiracy where you have a judgment day and a date, a final date of reckoning that is approaching and it never stops. Because the thing is that it doesn’t matter what the ship is. What matters is this way of group thinking.

Speaker A: One thing that really struck me about the story is that fans, especially ones who write fanfic fiction, seem to have so little regard for authorial, well, authority. You can imagine whatever you want, have the characters do whatever you want, stick whatever you want, wherever you want. You want Sherlock to have a crossover with Harry Potter and then have sex with Watson at Hogwarts. You can imagine that people have. In a moment when more and more we treat, and are being expected to treat the creators of entertainment as the only real authority, when we feel so uncomfortable imagining, say that the end of the Sopranos means whatever we want it to, when we’re expected to hang on every detail in Lost or Westworld to try to solve it, when the only people who can imagine the next chapter in Star wars are the ones who own it. People who write fanfiction are aspirational, not because everything they write is great, but because their imaginations are so unfettered, so free. But in the case of tjlc, this imagining, it became deeply rigid. So rigid its believers ceased to think of their theory as imaginative or. Or creative at all. They thought of it only as the truth. And when you know something to be absolutely true, you don’t always feel the need to be polite, because why be polite about things that are factual if it’s true? I’m not risking my moral center by telling you that you’re wrong. This is where tjlc, despite being a conspiracy believed by people with progressive goals and personal politics, starts to look like all the other conspiracy theories out there in our conspiracy theories theory heavy times when a wealth of information has turned so many people into different flavors of Sherlock Holmes, using logical tricks to come to profoundly illogical conclusions, be they about Russia, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Beyonce’s pregnancy, or the members of One Direction. The way that TGLCRs created their own impenetrable ideological world, one where truth was totally self evident, dogmatic and sometimes cruel, treating criticism as a threat, it’s hard not to see parallels to our politics. But in fandom, which is all about sharing enjoyment in something you love, it can feel even more toxic Absolute certainty unleashed in the middle of a game of make believe. This is why, when I first learned about the John Locke conspiracy, I thought it was ridiculous. Not because wanting Sherlock and Watson to get together is silly. Not even because the theory itself is so far fetched, though it is pretty far fetched. But because of how badly it made people behave. People being cruel to one another because they disagree about how a fictional TV relationship should turn out. There’s enough bad stuff in the world already. But as I learned more about this story, I developed some sympathy for the TJLCers. Not for turning their ship into a crusade. Not for hurting people, not for disconnecting from reality, but for letting a show mean too much to them. I cannot name all the shows that have meant too much to me, starting with Beverly Hills 90210. What if I had encountered a theory like this when I was in the throes of that show? A theory that said all the bad press about Shannon Doherty was a plant, a ruse meant to hide her secret return, at which point she would whisk Dylan away. Even now, this idea genuinely tickles me. And that tickle, it suggests to me that I have more in common with TJLCRs than I might like to think. I recognize their passion, their caring. They’re longing to bend a TV show to their desires, even if I would never take it so far. Or maybe that’s just what I want to think, because I never had the Internet for Beverly Hills 90210 last night. And this is true. I had a dream about this episode. About digging deeper, talking to more people, ones who could perfectly explain the allure of TJLC to me. Sleuthing. It’s intoxicating. At the beginning of this episode, I wondered if shipping Brenda and Dylan, shipping anyone, was a meaningful way of interacting with fiction or with our own imaginations and with authority. And the answer is, of course, yes. Look at the power of this one ship. Look at the havoc it wrecked. But it did other things, too. It made people happy. It brought them a community. It awakened them to their sexuality. There’s so much about the saga of TJLC that is deeply modern. That depends on the Internet and how we behave there. And evolving queer politics. But the impulse behind tjlc, to see in the story that you have the story that you want. It’s ancient. It’s as old as sitting around a campfire crafting new tales about Odysseus and Penelope, or dreaming that Romeo and Juliet had just lived, or typing up a new Sherlock and Watson Caper to share at a Sherlockian Society There’s a famous passage at the beginning of the Sherlock Holmes story A Case of Identity, written by Arthur Conan Doyle, which might need saying at this point, in which Holmes explains to Watson how surprising the world is. Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross purposes, the wonderful chain of events working through generation and leading to the most outre results. It would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale and unprofitable. Did you notice they’re holding hands? This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin.

Speaker B: If you aren’t already a Decoder Ring plus member, subscribe now from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or or Spotify or visit slate.comdecoder ring+ to get access Wherever you listen. Members get access to new episodes of Decoder Rings Back, in which I call a listener back and try to answer their question, and they get to listen to the show without any ads.

Speaker A: This episode was written by me, it was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch. Shashale Onard provided production assistance and Danielle Hewitt helped us fact check this episode. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Katie Shepard, Max Friedman and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merrick Jacob, is Senior Technical Director.

Speaker B: Thanks to Asia Romero at Vox and Emma Grant, who were incredibly helpful in getting us into this world. Thanks also to Julia Turner, Steve Lichti, Nick Perlman, Melissa Rosenthal, Laura Bennett, Elizabeth Minkle, Leon Nayfak, Anne Moore, Lena Wilson, Forest Wickman, June Thomas, Brita London, Ava Labelle, Chris Barube, Rachel Strom, Sadie Gunness, Andrew Hammond, and Caitlin Roper. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringlate.com or you can call us at 347-460-7281 and we’ll see you in two weeks.

Speaker N: Sa.