mary could have been the most despicable villain everyone would have loved to hate but in the end she was just annoying, full of herself and kept hurting everyone trying to achieve her selfish goals. she could have been umbridge but she’s kind of accidentally lockhart now.
Tag: s4 commentary
I think one of Mofftiss big problems is that they think the success of Sherlock is due to them. When actually the success of Sherlock is mostly due to Ben and Martin as Sherlock and John and their fantastic chemistry and great acting.
You separate John and Sherlock or have a chaperone there the whole time, as was done in S4, and their pretty lackluster writing really starts to shine through.
Another big problem they have is that they think Benedict and Martin are stars because of their writing. Impossible to say, of course, but they failed at repeating the star-making with Amanda and Sian. Even though they tried very hard.
POINT.
I think that given the divide in show quality, we also have to give a fair bit of credit to Paul McGuigan, especially for the consistencies of s1-2. It was s3 when they switched to the Doctor Who model of a different director for each ep—and directors who admittedly were out to put their own spin on things and top each other—that the show seemed to begin sinking under its own weight. What works for the “top this!” episodic style of Doctor Who, where the narrative has fluctuated and tied itself in knots regularly, is not what works for the relatively short arc the writers attempted with Sherlock BBC and its sequel, Mary BBC. Such consistency as the latter had does build on the work of the actors, but it’s clear that they were receiving different direction by then as well as being indulged more in their favorite “bits” (BC’s waiter in s3 and drugged Shakespeare in s4; MF’s asshole hair and demeanor that he’s been playing a lot recently in things like Startup or Civil War). The lack of cohesiveness may have been there from the beginning, but I don’t think that the writing alone held it in check until s3.
When did they think it was a good idea for it to become ‘Mary’ versus ‘Sherlock’?
I can’t bring myself to reblog a post as I don’t want it in my archive due to the video, but this post shows the promo video for s4 that was shown at the BBC Worldwide Showcase in Liverpool at the beginning of February. Have a watch:
http://confirmedjohnlock.tumblr.com/post/157758418004/i-dont-think-op-would-appreciate-us-discussing
Somewhere, maybe on that bus during s3 filming, when the epiphanies started to occur and they obviously changed direction in how they were going to write s4 and 5, the idea sparked that Mary should be the main feature of the story. It could have been sparked by Amanda’s acting? But you know, they had Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch already pulling all the stops out, and with due respect to the competency of Amanda, I just don’t think she’s in their league. Was it the ‘Moffat can’t write women/is a misogynist’ reputation that is rampant out there? Could be, as Steven’s ego fights for dominance even over his own writing projects. It may have been a long felt sorrow for the canon character of poor wifey Mary, villainized for over a century because she came in between Holmes and Watson. A noble try to right the wrong and fix it. Nah….not these two writers on that particular issue, they just keep adding even worse female tropes as is evident in Eurus. So what the fuck went on? Because they did do this.
Mary the narrator, Mary the author God of the action and character development via DVD, ‘Mary’ the name it all came down to at the end [see the video linked above] Mary who could be all things; mother, wife, girlfriend, assassin, friend, liar, catlover, the most brilliant person in the room….Mary who could become Sherlock. Mary who transplanted Sherlock as wife to John, even in canon she only did that in name never reality. Mary who could out detective, out think and out manipulate Sherlock. Mary the Great Detective/Assassin/Woman [sorry Irene, she beat you]
They fucking killed their own show, their chance at history making television, their LGBTQ landmark, for….MARY?
That video is cringe worthy. And so lame. I really don’t know how they thought it would be a good idea to make the show about Mary. And funny thing some people even accept it. And when the other day I posted about the lack of johntent. Someone replied to my post with “Because the show is called sherlock.” So what the fuck is with all the unnecessary mary stuff ?
I agree with the above. But why did they think it a good idea to pimp Mary (the never once named wife in ACD canon, who perishes sometime during the hiatus) like this, to make her narrator, director, a female Sherlock?
As many have said, Gatiss is a gay man who’s formative years might have been the 1980s. Now, writing Mary into the show like this reminds me strongly of what happened to films and tv shows after section 28 came into force. As media wasn’t allowed to ‘promote’ gay relationships (to show them as something good and positive), many filmmakers decided to write a female character into a previously (male) gay film, to kind of un-gay the story. Did Gatiss apply this tactic to wipe out the homoerotic subtext he and Moffat toyed with in S1 and S2? I think they did. They gave John Watson a female love interest that strongly resembled Sherlock – but with a vagina, to make sex acceptable.
And then they played with her character as they went on. Make her an assassin. Let her shoot Sherlock. Make them all great buddies. Give her a baby. Give her a whump back story. Give her a hero death. Then make her a ghost. Make her the director. Give her the last word.
This started way back in TEH. Mary pulled the strings even back then. It was all about her, she’s in all the dramatic scenes (apart from the train carriage, and even there she is mentioned). TSoT is about her wedding. In HLV she first kills Sherlock and then he has to rescue her. In TAB it’s Mary who solves the case. IT’S BEEN ALL ABOUT MARY SINCE S3!
But if we look behind the no homo apporach, I think the decline started way before: with Sherlock jumping. Reichenbach is the ultimate rift. Because they had no plan how to dissolve this. On the surface, it was the question how Sherlock survived – for which they had no answer. We still don’t know. That might be clever story telling for some – but if you hype something that much and then never deliver an explanation, I call it poor.
But if you go deeper, this jump did something with the characters no one was prepared for. Mofftiss have said that they kind of wanted to fix canon, where Holmes returns, Watson faints, and then everything goes back to normal crimesolving. This wouldn’t work in a somewhat realistic show in the 21st century. But in the end, Mofftiss didn’t explore this angle more than ACD did. Because in doing so they would have had their characters to acknowledge what they mean to one another. And that couldn’t be, because the homoeroticism was meant as a joke from the start. Only, characters tend to take a life of their own… The joke wasn’t funny. It didn’t work as a joke. And Mofftiss had no answer to this story line and its implications. Hence entrance Mary Morstan, to gloss all of this over with het love, a wedding and senseless action… and this continued in TAB as well as in S4.
But Mary is only the symptom, not the cause of the series failing. The cause is that they just didn’t want/dare to follow through where their very own story led them.
“Only, characters tend to take a life of their own…
“
and these characters had their own life and have had a life history for 130 years.
Yes i was sick of Mary from pretty early on, she was only bearable if viewed as a part of a ‘villain’ arc, as the centre of a ‘villain’ arc she was pretty well developed, as the ‘author god and narrator ’ she was just intrusive cr*p.
Introducing Mary infected ‘Sherlock’ like Moriarty’s virus. All she ended up doing was dragging John and Sherlock down to her level. Murder, assault, treason, all excused and sadly the only reason seems to be because she was a woman who married John – tell that to her victims and their families.
and yes I’m looking at you too Mycroft Holmes and John Watson, Sherlock is your family. Your loyalties are her victims.
Mary got no real character development, no real redemption arc and still ended up with the last word, how bloody condescending.
Great additional opinions here. A client who became a convenient ‘beard’ in canon became the smokescreen to deflect from their lack of resolution of the fall in BBC Sherlock. ACD at least gave a cogent explanation as to how Holmes survived, Mark and Steven just threw fan theories at the screen, making fun of several that were actually better than their own plan, and tried to make any theorist feel stupid. In retrospect they did this again in s4. They had the TAB Reichenbach and fireside scenes set up John and Sherlock being together romantically and then couldn’t deliver. So they threw a bunch of rehashed movie plots at us and made us feel stupid for expecting johnlock. Seems to be their MO. I now think we predicted things based on a wrong assumption of the writer’s worth. We should have looked at how badly they handled TRF follow through. But MARY? What were they thinking? Not once in the history of Sherlock Holmes canon and pastiche has anyone, including arrogant idiots like Baring Gould, resorted to having Mary transplant Sherlock Holmes out of his own genius, then have her destroy not only Sherlock but John too. Well done Mofftiss.
I agree with all of this. I would argue one point, and that is that they still ‘played gay’ through S3, or rather kept up the ‘jokes’. What was up with Vitruvian John, for example? The knee touch? The ‘anytime’? John making kissy lips at Sherlock? That’s JUST TSOT. Oh, TEH…’does yours rub off, too?’ I want to kick something when I think of all this.
This is all excellent analysis.
I don’t think it’s the fault of the fandom for thinking well of the lack of resolution for Reichenbach–blame mofftiss for that. After all, the lack of answers threw the attention back onto the core relationship of the show. It seemed like a reasonable conclusion that, because an intensification of the focus on John and Sherlock was the effect of TEH, that was also the point.
Likewise, the credit we gave to TSOT. We thought we were looking at something really smart–a plucky textual celebration hiding a subtextual queer tragedy. Like most of s3, it seemed to reward careful viewing and subtle interpretation.
The course correction these writers enacted in s4–throwing Mary into the central position, as this thread asserts–happened too late to erase the queer subtext–especially in light of TAB–and simply made a mess of the text it was trying to redeem, which I guess had something to do with women (???!?!?). If that was their point–seriously, wtf? Insert a Mary Sue who is mostly unlikeable and a classic Victorian Madwoman in the Attic type, stir, half bake, and, instant feminism? Did they really think they were fixing canon with that? Yikes. Yikes!
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