So I honestly can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone talking about the art direction of this scene. If I’m repeating something, Ah,well. But I’ve honestly never seen it pointed out that this is the very first time we see Mary, and there are three important things here:
Mary reaches for John’s hand. John takes it, of course—he is used to being offered comfort for his loss, by now—but he is not reaching out to her for comfort in his sadness. She is inserting herself into his grief. Reflexively, he lets her.
We only see the back of her. It’s unusual to introduce a major protagonist any other way than by showing their face pretty much immediately. A major antagonist, however…a baddie…well, they often are introduced in a cloud of cigarette smoke, from a distance, in the shadows, as a mysterious voice on a phone, or in some other way that doesn’t tell us right away who they are. Our first glimpse of Mary gives us only the most vague information about her. Obviously a woman, obviously someone John is close to, as he holds her hand. Other than that…who is she? We don’t know.
Finally, it’s no mistake she is wearing a long, grey coat which flares slightly from the waist, and a blue scarf. But they are paler shades of those colours than Sherlock’s coat and scarf were, because Mary is but a pale imitation of the person we are used to seeing standing beside John Watson (even once, when they were handcuffed together, holding John Watson’s hand in a manner similar to what we see here). Her coat and scarf look cheap, “less than,” and her denim jeans are “less” than Sherlock Holmes’s designer trousers. Her dark hat is a visual echo of Sherlock’s dark hair. This whole shot is set up not only to remind us that Sherlock used to stand here at John Watson’s side, but also that This is some lesser, fake, replacement-Sherlock standing at John Watson’s side, and whether consciously or unconsciously, John has chosen a pale imitation indeed.
I was thinking about this post a couple months ago, which I wrote in 2014. I know there is a segment of fandom who accept Mary’s redemption arc, and that’s fine. For myself, though, I do still maintain that Mary was initially designed to be a villain, and was handled that way all through S3 and into The Abominable Bride’s present-day segments. I like her as a villain because she is interesting as a villain. A woman with agency who just fucks shit up for giggles, with power-over, even if ultimately defeated (as one assumes she would be) would have been fun to watch; that idea appeals to me much more than the “motherhood and the love of a good man turns a bad woman into a saint” trope we got in S4. Unfortunately at least one of the Sherlock writers has a long history of writing flimsy female characters, so perhaps it’s no surprise he fell back on old habits rather than do the interesting thing.
(Of note: I think there’s an argument to be made that not only was Mary meant to be a villain–she was meant to be Moriarty. The pink phone, woman’s handwriting, and “voice so soft” in The Great Game…all good clues Moriarty was a woman. Maybe Richard Brook really was an actor. Up until The Six Thatchers, I felt sure this was where it was going.)
I’m not trying to persuade anyone away from embracing Mary’s now-canonical redemption arc, I’m just pointing out that it’s not crazy of me (or anyone else) to have felt like it was a rug-pull. There was a lot of evidence from moment one with Mary that she was not designed to be a good guy, but that over the course of time, the early plan for her changed.
I guess one thing I will push a little on is something I hear from peeps who like Mary a lot: that those of us who think of her/write her in fic as villainous are always only doing so because she “got in the way of Johnlock,” so we demonise or fic-murder her out of spite. I, for one, never expected Johnlock to become canon, so I ain’t mad at Mary and never was. I’m mad at the writers for writing the beginning of one story only to write the end of an entirely different one.
The main problem I have with Mary’s “redemption arc” is that she didn’t GET a redemption arc. The exact thing that I was worried would happen post-s3 is exactly what happened: rather than letting her be a really interesting villain OR giving her an interesting, believable arc where she actually did things to earn redemption, moftiss gave us Sherlock’s assertion that John (and thus we) should forgive her, based on very flimsy reasoning… And then just assumed we’d done as instructed and proceeded into s4 as though the audience had clearly already forgiven her. Then made her fuck up AGAIN (but not in an interesting villain way even) and failed to adequately redeem her AGAIN other than by killing her and making her into a wise ghost.
I don’t blame anyone for expecting her of be a villain, because it would have made worlds more sense than what we got. The only reason I didn’t expect it was because I’d already lost most of my trust in them with TEH.
This. Both of these.
I will not pretend I wasn’t hoping for Johnlock. I was. But I thought Mary was a fascinating read on Moran. She had the skills. She was even in the damn Empty House. And it felt like a shift. Maybe because Elementary made love interest Irene a baddie so they no longer thought it was clever and different enough? Anyways. I agree wholeheartedly with the above assessment.
Agreed. It’s not “misogynistic” to think Mary was a villain. It’s not “just cause she’s a woman,” or “just cause she’s in the way of two dudes fucking,” as certain extremely homophobic members of this fandom like to claim.
It’s because it’s the only interpretation of her character that made sense. Sure, if she had never done anything antagonistic and there were no parallels between her and Moran, then calling her a villain would be questionable.
But she WAS antagonistic. Plain and simple. That’s all there is to it. Redemption arc? Exactly what did she do to deserve forgiveness or earn redemption before her final moments? There was no “redemption.”
Why introduce her the way they did, make us question her morals and history and identity, have John forgive her for flimsy, questionable reasons, make us question her AGAIN, and then kill her? What was the point of her character arc, besides to serve as a prop to John and Sherlock’s story. She served her purpose, and then they killed her. She could have been so much more than a plot device if they had just let her shine as the antagonist they wrote her as. She could have been the most interesting adaptation of Mary Morstan ever written. Instead, as stated above, she was just a “bad woman turned into a saint by a good man.” Blegh. Boring.
Uber Driver Manuel Dias, 53, told The Sun, “I was taking Benedict and his wife to a club — but I didn’t know it was him at first.“
"I went to turn down into Marylebone High Street and we saw four guys were pushing around a Deliveroo cyclist. My passenger jumped out, ran over and pulled the men away. They turned towards him and things looked like they were getting worse, so I joined in. He stood there instructing them in the street, shouting, ‘Leave him alone.’ "
"Then it all got a bit surreal. Here was Sherlock Holmes fighting off four attackers just round the corner from Baker Street,” Dias continued. “I had hold of one lad and Benedict another. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He was very brave. He did most of it, to be honest. They tried to hit him but he defended himself and pushed them away. He wasn’t injured. Then I think they also recognized it was Benedict and ran away.”
Benedict Cumberbatch as Patrick Melrose, finally done. Graphite on sketch, so many pencils. Reference pic is a lovely @larygo edit. Open in new tab for a better view.. thanks for looking!
Some times experiments don’t work out. Sometime big projects include mistakes and it takes a lot of compromises to satisfy the real goal. So was the case with The Six Thatchers.
To a room of ~100 people, Rachel Talalay explained something of the complicated backstory to the first episode of Series 4 and shared with us a little of the amazing footage that had to be left on the cutting room floor.
In Mark Gatiss’s initial script, the story was going to be told with a complicated chronology. The story was supposed to start somewhere in the middle, with flashbacks inserted into scenes. This show has played with chronology before, but this plan was more ambitions and experimental than previous episodes. In the spirit of Sherlock’s cinematographic ingenuity, Talalay decided to demarcate these flashbacks with fantastic transitions in and out of the scenes into which they were inlayed.
The filming proceeded with this non-chronological order of scenes, but when the material was assembled in a temp edit, it became apparent that the narrative didn’t really work. Talalay had her doubts about how it came together, and Moffat and Gatiss made the call to change the sequence to the straight forward chronology we saw broadcast. Talalay took pains to explain that the switch was necessary for the sake of the story and that no one was at fault for how the experiment failed. They took a risk together and these things don’t always pan out.
The choice to reorder was the right one, but it was also a very difficult compromise for two reasons. First it changed the purpose of many scenes, and with no time to reshoot they had to work out new criteria to determine the best takes to make a cohesive narrative from what they had. Second, it meant abandoning these amazing transitions that were in and of themselves creative and technical acheivements that each took days to prepare and shoot.
It was these transitions that Talalay shared with us at Sherlocked USA 2018. They will never be released, so here are my descriptions of the transitions she shared. Some of them involve scenes that weren’t part of the final edit at all. I’ve done the best I can to describe what I can remember from seeing these only twice.
1. In and Out of Cars This seems to be on the way to the first case with Greg, on the way to the WELSBOROUGH HOUSE. John, Sherlock, and Greg are in a taxi in the middle of the day. Greg says “So how long has it been then” and John replies “Three months.” Sherlock rises from his right-forward facing seat and steps out of the passenger door into day light. The camera approaches his back until we only see the coat. Camera recedes and it is night. Sherlock steps back into the right passenger seat while typing in his mobile and Mary is wheezing in labour. The camera pivots to also catch John at the steering wheel, as seen in the show. There is another transition back to the original taxi shot and John repeats “About three months.”
2. Walking through Doorways: As Greg, Sherlock, and John approach the door to the Welsborough House, Greg says “…We thought we’d never see you again.” Sherlock replies “You weren’t the only ones.” As Sherlock steps through the doorway, he pass into the room where he and Mycroft are interrogated by Sir Edwin and Lady Smallwood. He sits down and takes off his coat. The scene that followed was the one used to open The Six Thatchers.
At then end of this scene, Sherlock says “Because I love it.” and walks out the door and back into the WELSBOROUGH HOUSE.
3. To and From the Christening: John is looking at bus shelter and a bus goes by and reveals that he is wearing church clothes at the Christening for Rosie. John says to Sherlock something along the lines of “You could come visit Rosie” and Sherlock replies “The conversation would be a bit onesided.”
Another shot of Sherlock approaching the camera down the aisle, framed by the arches of the church. I’m not sure if this transitioned to another scene.
4. Through the Mirror: In the sceen where Mary finds Sherlock in the Moroccan hotel, the shot begins with her standing by the table looking accusing and Sherlock sitting on the floor crossed-legged. Sherlock gets up and walks towards a mirror by a curtain in the back of the room. In the curtain we see a reflection of Mycroft’s underground office. Sherlock walks past the mirror into the scene where Mycroft begins by reciting the wikipedia article for “Agra”
When that scene ends, Sherlock rises from his seat and walks back to the mirror to pass back into the Moroccan hotel room and sits down on the floor again to pick up the conversation with Mary.
5. Lastly, one of the magical transitions that were kept was Ajay remembering his torture and then falling back onto the carpet. Apparently the sequence was initially filmed as a single shot, with four sets lined up side by side. Like wow.
***
I can’t attest that these are perfect descriptions of what was in these shots, and I know I’m missing some details. If anyone else remembers other things, please add them in.
Talalay had every reason to be proud of these transitions. They were breath taking (my descriptions do not do them justice!) and the audience gasped and clapped through the three minutes of footage that she shared. I am so sorry they had to make the compromise of removing these. I understand that it was deemed necessary, and Talalay was very clear that she agreed with the decision to change the order of the scenes, but it is a tragedy that we lost these beautiful tricky transitions.
So now please someone explain how johnlock somehow became TFP.
And as I am typing this it occurs to me, johnlock literally IS -still- the final problem.
I love how the search function on this site is absolute garbage. I can look up a post word for word and I will NEVER find it
Pro tip:
Wanna find a post?
Write out what you remember into a Google search.
After you write that out, end with site:tumblr.com
Google will search for your text on just tumblr
In my experience, it’s way more effective than searching through Tumblr
(you can use site:SITENAME.com to search any site btws)
This usually works but for some reason a lot of posts get indexed on google from a person’s URL based on the posts that were recently reblogged on page 1, meaning that this is only a tiny bit more reliable.
I HAVE a solution to this, you have to write down site:tumblr.com/post “ “
and then write a direct quote (could be a fraction of a sentence) into the quotations, I’ve been doing this for years, and it’s so useful, it works like 99% of the time
(the more popular a post is the more likely you’ll find it)
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