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.
Canon Watson is incredibly nuanced, which is why Martin’s acting style was perfect for the modern role. Any warping or diminishment of the modern character is the fault of the writers, not the actor.
oh sorry let me clarify – this post is 100% intended as a defense of the modern bbc character, not as a renunciation of it. i am basically short-handing the “john” version of this post: sherlock holmes would be a boring character without flaws.
acd’s stories are written from john’s perspective, and therefore he is at the advantage with himself – he can edit, basically, and leave out that which makes him look weak or ill-tempered or what have you. he can scoot over the depth of his emotions and hide the call of his heart simply by skating over events relying on dialogue between characters instead of inviting us into an inner dialogue with himself. he is, in short, the quintessential unreliable narrator, and the most successful one of all time: he tells us what he wants us to know, and for the last hundred+ years, sherlockians have been satisfied with his interpretations of self.
not so with bbc. moftiss has previously been lauded for this “catching out” of the character, specifically in asip – that while acd’s john takes sort of a clinical, self-recriminating approach (lumping himself in with those “idlers and lounger” which are irresistibly drained into london, etc etc), and almost laughs at himself (that same paragraph: “I was as free as air – or as free as eleven shillings and sixpence a day will allow a man to be.” but the modern character confronts what john watson must really have been going through at the time – lost, alone, broke, without work, without health, without purpose. our john watson has nightmares, our john watson cries, our john watson contemplates suicide. and it is into this dark, grief-stricken truth that sherlock holmes comes crashing in.
so that tells us right from the off that this adaptation is an interrogation of character, and of the canon. first step to bbc is to really dig in and see what acd’s john failed to say. and that continues throughout – the fall, for example. acd’s john basically writes himself, in the face of holmes’ revelations of betrayal and deception, basically clapping his hands and saying “goodness! how wonderfully smart! right on chap!” bbc’s john feels the full weight of the consequence. he is allowed to be betrayed. he is allowed to be angry. feelings which acd’s john must have felt and which have been denied him. the audience basically is left to fill in the gaps with acd john’s emotional state, because characters who don’t feel betrayal when betrayed, who can’t feel righteous anger when appropriate, are one-dimensional dullards and a bore.
we have also previously lauded moftiss – and before them, granada holmes’s watson – for bringing john’s intelligence and competence to light. many adaptations over the years have basically reduced john to cartoonishly buffoon-ish sidekick (tplosh, howard, etc), and we recognise now that of course this interpretation is not supported by the canon. and yet the canon does contain elements of exclamation and wonder – john writes himself as being stunned and shocked by holmes’ brilliance, even as he allows holmes to tell him that he discounts himself and never gives himself credit.
but competence and intelligence are not the end of watson’s nuance, and bbc has explored that and allowed that. grief, betrayal, irritation and annoyance, anger, even violence. things that the depths and nuance of real people generally allows for, considering background, history, context. we can sit around and say well i’ve never hit my best friend! ya, well, my best friends have also never faked their deaths for literal years and then revealed themselves in a fake french waiter outfit in the middle of my marriage proposal, so i guess i can’t really say how i’d react! extraordinary circumstances beget extraordinary reactions, right? what bbc has allowed john to do is to lean into these reactions, to explore the depth of them, and to disallow john to continue hiding behind his narration. out in the open. bringing the truth of john out into the open.
which brings us to series four, which seems to be the crux of the whole issue. there are a lot of hints about unreality in the series, but even if you don’t buy that and you take the whole thing at face value, there’s really nothing to imply that john and sherlock’s relationship has been irrevocably harmed and that the path john’s character takes is in some way diminished in sherlock’s life. so john pulls away from sherlock when mary dies. if you take it at face value, john reacts not just to losing a wife but also to the exchange of one life for the other – that mary chooses sherlock’s life over her own, when john struggled with that choice and struggled with mary and failed to make a decision himself. so of course he pulls away from sherlock. that makes sense!! that. makes. logical. reasonable. sense. having an emotional reaction to your own life is not a betrayal of your friends. denying help from someone with whom you are currently having some emotional upheaval is pretty normal!! and yet he still comes when sherlock shows up in tld and says that he needs him. follows him. and of course i am of the opinion that taking the morgue scene at total face value is the warm-paste version of watching the show, given that it is preceded generally by one-on-one therapy sessions with a mind-controlling genius that wants to kill and/or harm sherlock and is preceded immediately by an implication that td-12 was ingested and subsequently revealed to be told through john’s statement to police – that is to say, stepping back into the unreliable narrator for a moment. to me, face value must include all these considerations. but even if the morgue scene happened that way, it’s immediately followed by john taking responsibility (admitting it to lestrade in an official statement to police which obviously began as a report of assault), john’s subsequent goodbye to sherlock at the hospital which imo reads as intended to be a permanent “i can’t do this anymore, for either of us” goodbye, and then john’s submission to mycroft’s will – mycroft calls, says for john to get into the car waiting, and john goes, knowing that mycroft could totally be about to black-bag him for crimes against his little brother. and john still saves sherlock’s life, and throughout tfp you have john and sherlock on the same side. john is family. there is never any doubt to sherlock and mycroft that sherlock will choose john. sherlock is desperate to save john throughout. any diminishment of their relationship in tfp is actually on sherlock’s part when he ignores vatican cameos. by series end, face value, they are utterly together – and although it’s platonic, there’s really absolutely nothing in series four that implies that they couldn’t or won’t ever be romantically attached, and plenty to imply that being romantically attached “would complete them as human beings” – that is to say, would bring their characters fully to life.
i’m getting away from myself. the point is: bbc john interrogates the text of acd’s john and brings forth the things that acd’s john didn’t want us to know. to read john watson as always the devoted, always the loyal, always the follower, always the supporter, always the dear watson, is boring. it’s oatmeal. warm paste. it’s a much more interesting story to give that boy some heckening nuance and let him be complicated. that’s when a character passes from stereotypical sidekick into towering, incandescent light. bbc john is an attempt to ease acd’s john out from behind his pages and his edited narration and to breathe life and truth into him. and you have to interrogate his character and interrogate his true depth of emotion in order to discover what is hidden within – that is, that john watson is capable of more than simple warm-paste levels of devotion. he is capable of adoration, and of being adored. he is capable of passion, and passionate love, and being passionately loved. and that’s really one heck of a story.
Canon Holmes and Irene Adler had literally three interactions. In two of them, he was in disguise. In one of them she was in disguise. They didn’t even have a conversation. Canonically happily married to a man. Literally moved Holmes out of her way using just her pinky finger.
Fuckbois throughout the ages : HE LOVES IRENE ADLER. HE TOTALLY WANTED TO SLEEP WITH HER. THAT’S WHY HE ADMIRES HER. #TRUELOVE #SOULMATE #STAR-CROSSED LOVERS
Sherlock Holmes in ACD canon : I wanna fly out of the window and over London holding Watson’s hand. My Boswell. My conductor of light. IF YOU TOUCH WATSON I WILL KILL YOU AND YOUR ANCESTORS.
People: They are friends. #NOHOMO #PLATONIC #JUST BROS
Heteronormativity is a powerful drug.
Holmes’ canon reaction to Irene Adler getting married:
Putting his hands into his pockets, he stretched out his legs in front of the fire and laughed heartily for some minutes.
“Well, really!” he cried, and then he choked and laughed again until he was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the chair.
“What is it?”
“It’s quite too funny.”
Holmes’ canon reaction to Watson getting married:
“I get
a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what
remains for you?”
“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still
remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his
long white hand up for it.
Irene getting married made Holmes laugh for literal minutes until he choked, and then laugh again until he could laugh no more.
Watson getting married made Holmes reach for his drugs.
And there it is 🙌
It’s also an important distinction to me, and one that I’ve never been happy about in terms of Moftiss’ use of this, that in Victorian England, the use of opiates was considered purely recreational, and Holmes is referred to as a light, casual, recreational user – not a desperate, out-of-control addict. The fact that they “updated” it to be more on par with heroin use than, say, recreational marijuana, makes it far more ominous in the BBC-verse than it ever was in ACD-verse. And yet they made that choice for him.
Irene Adler, in their canon, worked for Moriarty – Sherlock’s arch-enemy, the person who tried repeatedly to kill John. That’s not a playful, light-hearted rivalry or something – that’s serious. Irene extorted men for information, which she then used to sell out her country and betray anyone it took as long as it meant covering her own ass. I agree that she was a fun character, but as a partner for Sherlock? Nope nope nope. And John recommending it, when he was so jealous of her in ASIB that veins were practically popping in his forehead? John, who nearly died serving the country that Irene so casually sold out – to the very sort of terrorist that he and Sherlock spend all of their time working to bring to justice? Sorry, no. That just doesn’t work, no matter how desperate one is to heterowash everything in this show.
Like we get it that she lied to John about the whole assassin thing, but all she ever wanted to do was to protect him by going as far as to hurt Sherlock. In the end, she takes the bullet for Sherlock so that he and John can have each other companionship. I mean she risked her daughter’s future so her husband could be with his friend. The last time we hear her voice is remarking their friendship. What I mean is she ships Johnlock.
She didn’t “hurt” Sherlock to protect John. She nearly killed an unarmed man offering her help, all so that she could continue to lie to her husband and keep him in the dark. And in fact put him in more danger because he didn’t know about her past, and that people may want to hurt her by going after him. She then threatened to kill Sherlock again if he told John the truth, all so she could “keep him”. Then she abandoned her husband and daughter, again not trusting John to figure out how to deal with the AJ situation together (you know, how married couples should do). And how the hell is Rosie at risk by Sherlock being in John’s life, or any more at risk than the risk she herself brought to their family.
“Mary” taking the bullet for Sherlock was not some noble sacrifice (it was poor writing) she knew her past was going to catch up to her sooner or later (and her marriage to John was headed for disaster), and she took the opportunity to be a martyr and manipulate John yet again by forever being “the wonderful woman who gave her life for Sherlock” instead of the fact that she lied to John at every turn, never trusted him, and never treated him as an equal partner. Not to mention those manipulative, and dangerous videos she sent. She told Sherlock, a recovering addict who everyone with eyes knows would do absolutely everything for John, to essentially kill himself all so that John could save him. She was manipulating them and pulling their strings, playing with their lives, even in death (and intentionally used Moriarty-esq wording to get their attention, which is frightening and could trigger past trauma in anyone who dealt with him.)
So yeah, pardon me for not looking back fondly on a woman who brought nothing but pain and suffering to the show’s heroes.
I posit for discussion that anyone who does not see Mary as cruel, narcissistic and emotionally manipulative from the moment she was introduced, has perhaps never been unfortunate enough to be emotionally manipulated by an experienced narcissist themselves.
I think if one has been, one sees it: if one hasn’t, all the smiles and the sugary sentimentality, and the verbal and body language put-downs, the gaslighting and the control, the ruthless disdain for the needs, wishes and desires of others are not immediately recognisable for what they are … as they are not, in fact, immediately recognisable for what they are when one is first groomed by an emotionally manipulative narcissist.
I wanted to like Mary: she was part of Canon. But from the moment in TEH when I saw the way the character was subtly monitoring/controlling the primary relationship of the Holmes/Watson dyad – which for many of us should always have been the primary focus of the show anyway – there was an undercurrent of unease in my mind which increased over the episode to the point at which I realised what I was looking at was emotional manipulation.
And that’s where the character lost me. The show lost me when the writing became totally incoherent, but that’s another issue.
I really need to talk about how Molly has repeatedly been used to represent the logical part of his brain, the part of him that is calm and in control no matter what the situation is and it makes me so ecstatic that this character who people still want to undermine and pass off as a silly girl with a pathetic crush on the main character is canonically one of the people Sherlock thinks of when he needs to focus. And it’s not only in HLV, where she and Mycroft help him concentrate on surviving, but when she steps out of a crowd of brides and makes sure he knows exactly why they’re doing what they’ve done. He seems surprised to see her because he doesn’t even realise that subconsciously Molly Hooper is the person in his head that represents calm, controlled, methodical work which is made even clearer when he can’t even replace her in a Victorian morgue no matter how unlikely it would be for her to be there realistically. No matter how you view it, whether you ship them or not, you absolutely cannot deny that Molly Hooper is one of the most important people in Sherlock’s life.
Why does the idea persist that John has PTSD? He demonstrably doesn’t have PTSD.
He has the opposite of PTSD. His characterization hinges on the fact that rather than needing to process fear and trauma, John needs more fear and trauma to be psychologically healthy. Mycroft diagnoses it in ASIP, Sherlock cures John of his supposed PTSD with danger and fear, and his supposed limp with running and jumping over cars. His symptoms only come back when he gets so bored and restless that he gains 7 pounds and takes up cycling (at least a bit of daily danger in an urban environment) to try and cope.
Why take it as read that John has PTSD?
Hmm I might have to question this a bit. Sherlock certainly improves his symptoms in a ideal way only fiction can possibly muster, but John does rather show a lot of traits commonly found in sufferers of PTSD, the ASIP night terror notwithstanding. It’s nothing so explicit as his breaking down into a non functional state, but his bouts of ostensible anxiety, irritability, aggression and yes the hand thing, the thing that is a clear giveaway everytime John is in a truly uncomfortable situation, one he doesn’t feel control in (unlike those moments with Sherlock in the face of danger where he does) are all, when together grouped easily as remnants of a mild to severe anxiety disorder likely stemming from, if not PTSD.
Given that away from Sherlock, his fictional stabaliser, his drinking increases (curly dad says: there’s a subtext with John’s drinking), depression, his night terrors return and his temper is shown to break quite a few times via shouting or violence, I’d say he is a right candidate for PTSD. PTSD doesn’t demonstrate in everyone in a universal fashion, and in this case in place of actual treatment we suspend out belief to allow Sherlock himself to be John’s medicine. John may very well not have experienced his trauma in the height of battle, which may be one theory as to why it manifests like it does.
See, the thing about this story: John did not have a night terror in ASIP. We thought he did off the bat, because that is how a normal person would react in his place and that’s what it looked like, but the story then corrects us.
John doesn’t cry after his dream because the dream scares him, he cries because he woke up. His current situation, alone in a bedsit with a limp, a tremor, nothing to do and no enemy to fight, scares him. Being awake is the terror, not the dream.
You say “his night terrors return”. His dream about Sherlock in HLV actually underscores my point; those aren’t night terrors, they’re happy memory reels. He dreams about the good times with Sherlock, then wakes up miserable and shouty.
Everyone thinks John’s traumatized by what he’s seen in the war, but he isn’t. That’s a major point in his characterization. Seen terrible things? Yes, dreadful, far too many. Want to see some more? OH GOD, YES.
John is not a normal person. He pretends he is, much the same way Sherlock pretends to be a sociopath, but neither of them are being completely honest. They both project what they wish they were, but cannot be.
I can argue that John doesn’t have PTSD because his characterization and the plot of the entire show demands it, but I don’t have to, because Mycroft tells us that John doesn’t have PTSD. And John agrees with him, which is why he stops seeing his therapist about it. When he does see his therapist again, it’s about something else. (Grief.)
John wasn’t traumatized by the war. He misses it. And now he’s addicted to Sherlock and his battlefield. That’s who John Watson is.
No PTSD …. Yes!!! By losing his job, John thinks he’s lost his utility too. That’s why he is depressed.
I agree. And I seem to remember that Martin does the “hand thing” in other films as well, so it is not necessarily to be read as a symptom of John’s PTSD.
And another aspect: John is a doctor and soldier, but I think in order to feel really useful he has to be a doctor under stress, under extreme conditions. This is one point of the Bainbridge shower scene in TSoT – John is back in his element, saving lives under dramatic conditions instead of diagnosing strep throats in his surgery.
Who remembers the series 1 fandom theory that it’s not Sherlock who has sociopathic tendencies but John?
Misses the war, hates being alone when he’s alone but thinks most people are arseholes, hugely impulsive, charming yet grumpy, puts on an act of being civilised and socially acceptable but calls his new friend all sorts of terrible things, coolly murderous at a moment’s notice…
Then there’s the mini episode, in which Sherlock made it clear that John’s friends don’t really like him.
The BBC version of John Watson cannot get unrehearsed words of sincere affection out, is drawn to an assassin, text cheats with another woman after becoming a father, rages against Sherlock to the point of beating him up, abandons his baby while grieving and giggles at crime scenes when nobody “ordinary” is looking.
It’s absolutely nothing like ACD Watson, and it’s an unpopular view, but there is a consistent line for BBC John’s character if you squint in that direction.
Yuuup, I’m in the very small camp that John beating Sherlock up isn’t /that/ out of character. (With what we’ve seen on BBC Sherlock). An over exaggeration maybe of what John should have done in that situation, if I was writing directing I would have toned it down a bit. Anyways, at the time of the episode airing I didn’t think it was off until I saw everyone on tumblr talking about it.
That is to say what John did was a load of hot garbage. All the pressure and other shit that was going on doesn’t excuse it. But yeah, it’s not completely unbelievable.
The main reason I’m interested in the character is because we hardly know anything about him as a person from Canon. Sure, there is info, but it’s all second-hand (third-hand, if you include unreliable narrator Watson). And this is it:
Had an estimated total of 20 bank accounts, for money laundering (VALL)
Art collector, or at least had knowledge of famous painters, and Holmes claimed he did not steal La Jeune Fille a l’Agneau, but bought it (VALL)
Skilled teacher, and could come across as avuncular (VALL)
Paid his chief of staff 6,000 pounds a year, which was supposed to be more than the Prime Minister got (VALL)
Wrote a well-received treatise on the binomial theorem at 21 (FINA)
Wrote a book that, supposedly, no one dared review because it was too deep (FINA)
Stepped down as chair of mathematics at an unnamed university because of unspecified rumours (FINA)
Had that snake-like head-twitching tic (FINA)
Thought duelling/wrestling/baritsu-ing/whatever-ing Holmes above a waterfall was an appropriate way to get rid of him (FINA)
Had a brother, a colonel, also named James Moriarty (EMPT)
Had a younger brother who was a station-master (VALL)
Unmarried (VALL)
That still filled 12 bullet points, and there’s probably more I didn’t sift out of the text, but it’s not enough for me! There’s potential for a story behind each of those things.
Holmes was described in excruciating but contradictory detail. Watson was described in mostly contradictory detail. I want the same for Moriarty. (If Doyle had written more stories with him in them, would he eventually have said he had a wife who called him ‘John’?)
And I think of him as a maths-themed Adam ‘The Napoleon of Crime’ Worth about as much as I think of Holmes as a bohemian Joseph Bell: useful from a Doylean view, but far from the solution to my curiosity.
It’s not that I want him to be entirely sympathetic. I’m not against the ideas that he’s misunderstood, pursued personal goals other than crime for fun and/or profit, or was shoved into the role by someone else, though those wouldn’t be my first preferences. I don’t mind thinking of him as gleefully immoral, either. I just want to understand why he became/continued to be himself.
I recently read this quote from the author Jeffery Deaver:
I think every Sherlock Holmes needs a Professor Moriarty, James Bond needs his Blofeld – it’s the brilliance of the antagonists that bring out the brilliance of the heroes.
Ok, two things:
Moriarty was created relatively late, to further Holmes’ character only in the direction of death, so it’s lucky that he was convincing in his role, for someone who popped out of nowhere. Though, arguably, any character would have gotten a villainous status boost if they had been the one to kill Holmes.
But popping out of nowhere also increased his credibility. The best criminals don’t get caught. So he does come across as brilliant in Canon – but like an unidentified object shining from thousands of miles away. What is it? Somebody whip out a telescope.
And because I am neither satisfied with what’s in Canon, nor do I have any serious headcanons about Moriarty, I am on a slow, slow quest to appraise various Moriarties.
But I don’t have any Strong Opinions about who Moriarty should be, so I just go “mm, plausible… plausible… I see you’re having a good time, congratulations… doesn’t fit with Canon, but it’s fun… not to my taste, but whatever floats your boat… I don’t like it, so I won’t read… etc.”
So what this means is, I will never pin down Moriarty.
Nothing more than a distraction, a little scrap of ordinariness for you to impress, to dazzle with your cleverness. You’ll find another.
This was so painful to watch, because I got the sense that John really did believe Mycroft’s every word. If you assume that this was all happening in John’s head, you realize that this is how he sees himself, this is what he’s afraid of, and it gets even more heartbreaking.
What also breaks my heart is that John know that Sherlock will choose him over his brother. He knows without a doubt that Sherlock will always choose him, but the sad thing is that he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t understand why. He agrees with what Mycroft is saying. Every word. But why does Sherlock always choose him? Who does he bother protecting? Why?
Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock being in love with John is what he believes to be impossible. Now that he’s eliminated that, there’s nothing left. So, still John asks: Why?
Besides the fact that Mary is an abysmal wife (I could go on for years about that point), John’s not the best husband, and their relationship was doomed from the start. Obviously we didn’t get to see every single aspect of their dating life, but in regards to the show, their entire relationship pretty much revolved around Sherlock.
John was deep in grief over Sherlock when they met, and it was heavily implied that working through that grief is what triggered them to start dating. John even semi-referenced his grief when he was proposing (usually people focus on the happy excitement not dead best friends).
Much of their engagement was spent with Sherlock, mostly John and Sherlock on cases because John wanted to escape the wedding planning. Not to mention Sherlock planned their wedding.
One month post wedding, when they should still be in full blown honeymoon phase, and getting ready for stupid accident baby (I still really hate that stupid baby, worst plot decision ever!), John is beyond grump and literally dreaming about running off on an adventure with Sherlock.
Immediately Mary’s lies start to be revealed, and John presumably moves in with Sherlock for MONTHS! He sure as hell doesn’t talk to his wife for months. And again, they should be prepping for the stupid baby.
John “forgives” Mary, moves back in with her, yet still seems to spend all of his free time with Sherlock, to the point that he ignores his phone and almost misses the birth of his stupid child. Even after the stupid baby comes, he’s at Baker Street. Remember when he made balloon John to keep Sherlock company when he was downstairs helping Mrs. Hudson with Sudoku? He’s not helping Sherlock with a case, you think he’d be at home with his beloved wife and spawn, but no, he’s doing number puzzles with his former landlady.
More of Mary’s lies are revealed and she ditches her husband and child (who those after her should be fully aware of), and even in her goodbye letter, she references Sherlock. Let’s not forget that John anticipated that she’d ditch them before Sherlock even confronted her (Sherlock and John always trusting each other), and he and Sherlock worked out a plan together.
Then we have her “tragic” death complete with a guilt trip, and she leaves the ridiculous DVDs telling Sherlock to nearly kill himself, and that since she’s gone they can become “what they’ve always been and were meant to be” (I’m paraphrasing)
And I didn’t even talk about how John conducted an emotional affair with Sherlock’s sister (perhaps because she subconsciously reminded him of someone?) when anyone else would have been in full on happy family, “we have a beautiful new child” mode.
TL;DR: If we were meant to root for John and Mary, why the fuck did they make their relationship such shit, and have John running to Sherlock at every possible opportunity?
SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOF TOPS LOUD FIR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
Sherlock Fandom Archive 