Slow Burn · Slate Podcasts

Decoder Ring | The Johnlock Conspiracy (Encore)

March 25, 2026·53 min·4 clips

A subset of Sherlock fans believed in the Johnlock conspiracy, a theory that turned the fandom dark and chaotic.

Willa starts with a rewind. This was the second Decoder Ring episode ever made, back in 2018, and it feels oddly relevant again. Then the episode turns toward fandom. Anne Jamison puts fan fiction in a relatively modern frame, tied to the idea that characters might belong to someone. Organized fandom, she says, starts with Sherlock Holmes. That claim sounds almost too tidy until the episode walks through what made Holmes feel alive. Conan Doyle began publishing Holmes stories in The Strand in 1891. The magazine took off, helped by a detective who became an immediate sensation. Readers treated Holmes as if he existed. Conan Doyle, in a filmed interview from the late 1920s, remembered getting letters addressed to Holmes and requests for Holmes's autograph. Watson got mail too, with Doyle calling him Holmes's rather stupid friend. The episode uses that strange reader behavior to tell a bigger story about recurring characters and popular culture. Before Conan Doyle, serialized fiction is framed as one long drama unfolding month after month. Holmes gave readers something different: complete monthly cases with the same familiar figure at the center. A missed issue did not ruin the whole thing. The episode calls this the procedural, the case-of-the-week structure still all over television. But the stranger idea is the fun one. When a character returns again and again, audiences start treating him like shared territory. Fandom looks less like an internet invention and more like an old habit of attachment, argument, projection, and belief, sharpened by Sherlock long before modern screens arrived.

As heard by us

Sherlock Holmes fandom becomes a useful lens on modern obsession.

The episode traces Sherlock Holmes fandom from private obsession to a habit now feels ordinary: treating fiction as shared ground, arguing over details, and keeping a character alive through more stories. That angle gives the piece its edge.

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Why you'd press play

You want a second-episode throwback on how Sherlock Holmes fans helped invent modern fandom.

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