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.
I made this to be used for my roleplay journal but changed my mind, and figured I’d share it here. I just wanted something with happy Mary, because I think that’s how we should remember her.
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