Next on Sherlock, nuclear winter.

It's January 2017, and the bomb has just gone off.

The big one, the one that changes civilization as we know it.

Sure, there were those who said it was coming, said the world was in for heartbreak and tragedy, said the past would come back to make everyone pay . . . but no one listened. The audio in the mind palace had been turned down while the fanfic channel was playing . . . .

Yes, I'm talking about Sherlockiana here, not the real nukes. All the  talk of gloom and doom about Watson being a happily-married hetero-normative male in the next season of BBC Sherlock just got me to thinking . . . it could always be worse.

It could always be worse.

Because everyone is assuming that the baby appearing in setlock photos belongs to John and Mary.

Sure, her pregnancy happened last season. But "tragedy and the past returning," right?

Suppose, just suppose, that the  tragedy part happened with Mary's pregnancy. More than a few Johnlock shippers have guilty hopes in that direction, I'm sure. So if that happens . . . whose baby is in those setlock pics?

Remember a time, aways back when, when Sherlock Holmes travelled to a distant land to save a certain lady in the nick of time? It was a standalone moment, one we never saw the lead-up to nor the after-party for. But there it was . . . and maybe there was an after-party.

And the results of that after-party got dropped on Sherlock Holmes's doorstep, where John Watson would, of course, wind up being the one to carry that result around in a baby-carrying harness.

And suddenly the scorecard seems to read:
Sherlock -- straight
John -- straight
Mary -- straight
Irene -- bi

KA-BOOOOOM! There goes the nuke.

Johnlockers, of course, would quickly start building fanfic bunkers. A few would not survive, yes, but Sherlockians are tougher than that. Sherlock having a hetero moment and producing a baby is just one more trial, as any epic romance must have, right?

Worst case scenarios help us mentally prepare for what's to come, so when whatever does happen happens, we can go, "Oh, that's not so bad!" And reading a lot of Tumblr commentary these days, it seems like the classic Sherlock/Irene Montenegro hiatus romance could be the worst case scenario for a lot of folks. (And make Nero Wolfe the baby who fiddled while Johnlock burned.) What was once a commonplace thought now becomes the unthinkable. Or not.

I'm really enjoying the brain-play going on in Sherlockiana these days. I just hope we all survive it.