Your best friend, the most important person in your life, apparently killed himself. Just dying would be bad enough, but Sherlock's suicide made John a failure. It meant that, when his friend needed him the most, he was completely powerless. That kind of thing haunts a person, and it ripped John apart. And here he is again, and he's asking John for forgiveness, after putting him through all that pain. Sure, sometimes Sherlock manages a modicum of empathy (or at least he mimics it well), but when he needs to exercise that empathy the most he has a tendency to drop the ball. And, because he actually loves John, he tends to assume John'll see things the way he does. Which is dumb, so he sometimes says he sorry and sometimes he just keeps barreling on. Given Sherlock's sociopathy, it makes sense that he would not find a reasonable way to earn forgiveness. But his essential childishness, borne from his inability to understand grown-up things like emotions and relationships, made him desperate for John to forgive him. So his only logical course of action was to lead John into a subway car about to explode, pretend not to be able to stop their impending deaths, and ask for forgiveness. Of course, John forgave him. I mean, who wouldn't in those circumstances? It's a very emotional scene, even if Sherlock was full of it. John is legitimately preparing to die while Sherlock tries not to giggle! But the subtext of this moment, and the rest of the episode, is that John was always going to forgive his friend. John had already forgiven him, really. Because John needed Sherlock to be alive very, very badly, as we saw in his plea to Sherlock's tombstone. He needed his friend, and of course he wasn't going to lose him now.
Rebecca Kulik lives in Iowa, reads an obsence amount, watches way too much television, and occasionally studies for her BA in History. Come by her personal pop culture blog at tyrannyofthepetticoat.wordpress.com and her reading blog at journalofimaginarypeople.wordpress.com.
