And each time she returns to the mind palace, it’s in increasing states of panic, shame, and/or drunken episodes. Cassie is dissociating from reality hard, with no control over when she drops back into this room for half-answers.
Sherlock utilizes his mind palace at a party—specifically, John Watson’s (Martin Freeman) wedding in the series 2 episode “The Sign of Three”—but very much keeps his cool. By this point, the mind palace has evolved from a mental database of word associations to an actual space: a courthouse populated with his impressions of the wedding guests, a.k.a. suspects. As he interrogates them, while dealing with his brother Mycroft (Mark Gatiss) condescending to him about coincidences from the judge’s seat, Sherlock must work with just the stories and anecdotes passed around with the hors d’oeuvres during cocktail hour.
That’s what’s tricky about a mind palace: The information all originates with the person who built it. That’s all well and good when working within a limited library of one’s own research, but much thornier when it comes to half-formed impressions of real people. Cassie’s Alex isn’t the entirety of Alex Sokolov, only her jumbled memories of and assumptions about a man she spent a drunken layover with. Until, that is, she breaks into his apartment.
“Other People’s Houses,” the midseason turning point of season 1, expands the scale of Cassie’s mind palace by transplanting a floorplan of Alex’s even more sumptuous digs inside of the opulent suite, while in real life Cassie is going through what might as well be a stranger’s home. Nothing she finds matches the charming man from Bangkok, and so begin the judgments and even suspicions that maybe he deserved to get murdered.
Cassie’s Alex takes exception to her exhuming a life he’s not alive to provide context for, but she doesn’t listen to him until, in one of the series’ best moments, he turns the spotlight on her. Suddenly the mind palace’s windows looking out onto Bangkok are instead dioramas of Cassie’s apartment, from the mess of a frequent traveler to the damning empty bottles of an alcoholic. Because this Alex has all of the ammunition needed to discredit Cassie—after all, he’s pulling it all from her own head. She tries to take control of the evolving mind palace by erecting a mountain of vodka bottles, mocking the pity and disgust she imagines he feels for her as a stereotypical alcoholic, but this overwrought display only reveals the depths of her own self-loathing.
This sequence is messy and cringeworthy and painful to watch. It possesses nothing of the restraint nor subtle symbolism we observe in the final evolution of Sherlock’s mind palace in the series 3 finale “His Last Vow”: a winding staircase with floors and rooms expanding outward. We don’t even know the place exists in this form until John’s wife Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) shoots him and he retreats inward to stay alive. This time, instead of conjuring up words and phrases to check against his own knowledge, Sherlock’s subconscious manifests key people from his life, including Molly Hooper (Louise Brealy), who talks him through exit wounds and which direction to fall to prevent himself from bleeding out. There’s also a downstairs run-in with Jim Moriarity (Andrew Scott) that ultimately pushes Sherlock back to life to save John.
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