A really excellent post about John Watson in Sherlock Season 4 by @thepurplewombat got me thinking about Martin Freeman’s acting, which got me thinking about Bilbo, as is my usual train of thought, and it put me in the mood to ramble a bit.

First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor have two characters be so infantilized as Martin Freeman’s roles are with John Watson and Bilbo Baggins. Both John and Bilbo are constantly depicted in fanworks as soft, emotional nurturers who often wear their heart on their sleeve and are the small, yaoi blond sub to their tall, dark, and brooding partner. This baffles me because it is a huge step away from the text, though of course this is all my opinion and I don’t want to come across as telling others how to do fanworks, so allow me to give my perspective.

Martin Freeman is very, very good in both of those roles at showing men at war within themselves. Martin once said the only similarity between Bilbo and John was the actor who plays them, and in that I’d say he’s wrong, or if he’s right it’s because he’s put something of himself so strongly into both roles that it would be uncomfortable to express in an interview. To the latter I cannot comment, not knowing the man personally, but here’s how I see the similarities between John and Bilbo:

Both John and Bilbo are defined by who they were supposed to be in life. John desperately wants to be normal, but more than that he wants to want to be normal. He sees his desire for action and danger, the desire that sent him into war in Afghanistan, as a faultline within himself. He resents the injury that sent him home from the war, where glimpses throughout the series (mostly in the first episode, but later his reaction to seeing Sholto) that the war was one of the high points of his life. More than his injury though, he resents in himself the fact that he misses the war. He wants to be someone who is glad to have been sent home, he wants to be someone who wants to put the war behind him as some sort of embarrassing adolescent phase, one that he’s grown out of in favor of settling down with a job as a doctor, a wife and children.

The reason, I think, for the sheer joie de vivre that we see in John in the first episode of BBC Sherlock, is because Sherlock allows John to be himself. He provides a replacement for the war, as Mycroft observes. For a short time, John is able to forget the war within himself and what he “should” do versus what he wants to do. But the tension returns soon after, as his nagging feeling that he should be working harder to settle down returns in 1.2 the Blind Banker with his dates with Sarah. For a little while we see John hoping he can live the superhero double life, but as this puts stress on his non-Sherlock relationships the tension within him is exacerbated. Can he really have it all, or does he have to choose, as the girlfriend Jeanette first puts into his mind in 2.1 Scandal in Belgravia, between a normal life and a fulfilling one with Sherlock?

I think there is a valid reason why so many fans and fanwork makers project a gay narrative onto John, and that’s because there is an element of struggling with one’s true desires running through the narrative. Like many gay men of a certain time period (and today), he wants to want a wife and children because it is the narrative society has told him he should want. He’s not only never been able to accept himself for who he is, which is a man who loves danger and who is lost, self-destructive, and off-kilter without it, but in addition when he is reminded of society he becomes resentful of the things and people that give him joy in life, namely danger, and Sherlock’s role in it. 

I daresay for a little while near the end of season 2, John was close to making a decision in his life between inflicted domesticity and desired danger. He was leaning towards Sherlock, which I think is the root of much of the ship’s popularity. Sherlock and John felt as if they were moving towards being finally open with one another, with accepting one another in their lives as something they needn’t be ashamed of, of moving on past what society asks of them. Again, one of the core plot points of many gay narratives. This all went to hell when Sherlock faked his death, and didn’t take John with him. 

John had dared to begin thinking he could buck what society wanted of him, but in return his life– as he was beginning to build it– was utterly destroyed. He dared to fly close to the sun, to happiness, and in his hubris he was crushed back to earth by Sherlock’s “death”. He did what many people do when confronted with such a trauma: he retreated back into the past. He made a somewhat superstitious assumption that he had been punished for not wanting domesticity, that he had been slapped down by the universe, and therefore that all that was left to him was to be who he was “supposed” to be – an upstanding member of society, a husband and father.

This is the reason why the revelation of Mary being an assassin was so traumatic in John’s life. Sherlock is back, and Mary is as dangerous as Sherlock, and as dangerous John had been on the battlefield. He had made the assumption that domesticity would protect him from himself, and it had failed. Now he has been burned badly by both sides of the desires in his life. He literally could not win and was horribly punished in both cases, losing Sherlock then losing his wife. Neither side of his personality could taste of anything but failure and grief. So yes, he became angry, he became introverted, as many trauma survivors do, he snapped at the people who represented either side of himself, he was seriously, deeply shell-shocked. 

And to a very real extent, Sherlock understands only later what he has done. The reason why the Christmas episode features Watson saving Holmes from the Reichenbach Falls goes the way it does is because Sherlock finally understands that his moment of over self-reliance by leaving John out of his plan to destroy Moriarty’s network is where he lost everything he really wanted. Sherlock’s version of a happy ending is one where he never faked his own death, and never lost John as a result. Had he not faked it, he and John were in the process of fumbling their way towards a happy life together. Unlike every other interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, the BBC Sherlock is one where John is unable to forgive Sherlock for his betrayal, and that in my opinion has poisoned the narrative and left so many viewers dissatisfied, because the show was at its best when it was two men who had no exact word for what they were to each other, but who knew they were better and happier together. Men who were willing to throw society aside in order to complete one another. Sherlock, as much as John, believed he had to be alone because society had shown him no one could accept his eccentricities, so he too was learning that they could ignore the voices outside and build something together. 

Adventure died, domesticity was used as a bandage to replace it, domesticity was poisoned, adventure returned only for John to discover that it too was poisoned by his grief and resentment which were in turn caused by the initial trauma of Sherlock’s death.

It may seem a jarring pivot here to suddenly switch to Bilbo Baggins, but indulge me. 

Gandalf upon meeting Bilbo again after many years is shocked at what he finds. He had considered young Bilbo to be one of the few hobbits of the Shire with a thirst for something more from life, and a desire for adventure. Yet the man he finds so many years later is an utter homebody who claims to want nothing more from life than the comfort and solitude of his home. 

We as the audience have not seen what happened in the intervening years, but we do get some hints from Gandalf: Bilbo’s parents have died, including his mother who loved adventure. He has refused to marry, though he is by all accounts the town’s most eligible bachelor, from the book we know it’s because part of Bilbo sensed he was waiting for something, someone to take him away who year after year never came. I would extrapolate here that the slow decay of time and society had beaten Bilbo into an acceptable, bland person. Not happy as such, but comfortable, and without the energy to change even as he never felt any true joy or purpose. This makes him similar to Martin’s John Watson, something that as an American is somewhat baffling to me and that I would typify as an “English” trait: both feel tremendous pressure to conform to society, while in their hearts they were meant for something different. 

We never see Bilbo smile quite so joyfully as when he finally takes the leap and runs out his door. Like John Watson leaving his cane behind and racing through the streets of London, he has rediscovered an inner fire that was thought dead. I hesitate to speculate on a real person, but given the similarities and some tidbits from Martin’s personal biography, I wonder if he has ever felt that split between being a respectable family man versus the glamour and extroversion of his career. Even in “Fargo” we get the sense of a man trapped by domesticity who longs to be something more (in the case of that story, a murderer, but to each his own). 

I tend to see Richard Armitage’s Thorin Oakenshield as the “Sherlock” of The Hobbit trilogy. It’s his quest that Bilbo embarks upon, so in a very real way he represents the danger that Bilbo is chasing after. Though Bilbo repeatedly mentions his desire to return to the comforts of his home, he only once attempts to do so and only after he perceives that Thorin (the adventure itself?) has rejected him. Once accepted into this life by Thorin’s embrace of Bilbo and his desire to help, it’s interesting to note that Bilbo never brings up Bag End again. And on Thorin’s deathbed, is is Thorin who reminds Bilbo of his desire to return home. Thorin vividly remembers that speech, perhaps because Thorin too is someone who is seeking home and recognized that desire in Bilbo but arguably from the opposite direction, in that Bilbo is enhanced by the desire to leave home for adventure, Thorin is enhanced by the desire to leave the world of adventure to return home.

What’s so striking about the moment when a dying Thorin urges to Bilbo to go home and live a long life is how confused Bilbo looks. He really does appear to have forgotten about Bag End entirely, just as he’s confused by Thorin’s request for forgiveness. In both cases, he seems utterly baffled that Thorin thought he needed forgiveness, and that Thorin thought Bilbo wanted to return home. Like John Watson on the case, he has found a life that makes him happy, he has forgotten domesticity. 

At least, both John and Bilbo forget domesticity until the life they dreamed of building outside it is suddenly, and brutally snatched from them by the death of the person that represented adventure to them. The only two times we see Bilbo cry in the trilogy is over the death of Thorin, once at the moment of his death and the second time at his funeral. Sherlock’s gravestone is the only time we see John lose his composure and give in to tears, at least until Mary’s death. (You would never know it given how often fanworks depict Bilbo and John as constantly in tears, but there you are.)

With Thorin snatched from him, Bilbo can’t even consider remaining in Erebor, not even for a day after the funeral. This wouldn’t be so odd, given the emphasis the character has placed on returning to Bag End, if not for what happens when he finally returns to Bag End. 

Bilbo’s return to Bag End is strikingly not a happy ending. After disrupting the auction of his belongings, Bilbo enters an empty, grey home that is in ruins in much the same manner as Thorin’s Erebor. Both homes were ransacked by greed, both leave the returning hero bereft and under the sway of evil, cursed gold. Our last glimpse of young Bilbo’s face is almost demonic as he smiles down to one comfort remaining in his life: Sauron’s Ring. For all that The Hobbit trilogy is about the desire to return home, in both cases we learn that home is perhaps the most dangerous and toxic place for our characters to return to. The domestic has been corrupted, the only purity lies in adventure and the road, where Bilbo returns as soon as he is free (60 years later) of the Ring’s influence.

Why did Bilbo return home? Because he wanted to, because Thorin asked him to, because he felt it was the right thing to do? Whatever the case, we see it is a bad place for him, a place where he is utterly alone with his demons. John Watson is not so different, we rarely see him truly smile when he is not on the case with Sherlock, yet he feels continuously compelled to go on dates, to marry, to settle down, to raise a family that he seems ultimately unable to connect with because it’s not where his true passions lie. Bilbo, by the way, never marries.

Both John Watson and Bilbo Baggins, as portrayed by Martin Freeman, are men caught between their soul’s desire for danger and adventure, and their society’s desire for them to stay home and conform. Freeman’s tremendous acting ability, especially his talent for showing a character thinking two things at once, enhances this aspect, or perhaps places it in both of characters in the first place. Perhaps it is something that comes from within the man himself. Perhaps it’s just a character he feels he understands for other reasons. But the popular fanon of John or Bilbo being domestic, protective nurturers has always rung false to me. They are both men of action who have been forced to be otherwise by a society that wants to soften them. But there is anger within them, there is rage, there is an adventurer that loves danger more than comfort longing to get out, and that inner turmoil sets up within them an endless inner war.