Saturday 1 November 2014


The Sense of an Ending
 (Sherlock Meta by ivyblossom)

As far as I can see, there are roughly three ways to end this story.

There’s no question in my mind that John is head over heels for Sherlock, and that Sherlock is head over heels for John. There is way too much evidence for both of those arguments. And it’s not only that they adore each other. They are also romantically and physically attracted to one another. To me that part is not even in question. It’s there, it’s a tension between them, it’s unspoken, but drives most of their decisions about each other. You may disagree, but I remain unconvinced by any dissenting arguments on this.

So how might it all end up?

I’m not in the business of predicting how fiction ends, and even though I’m writing about this now, I’m still not making predictions. I have no idea what they’ll do. But in my mind, there are three general options at this point:

Option 1: They Hook Up

Obviously, they could resolve the romantic and sexual tension by hooking up. This makes the most sense. I mean, in real terms, when you’re so in love with him that you’d rather die than see him hurt, when you actively complain about how sexy he is and ask him to cut it out, when you characterize him as a drug you’re completely addicted to, hooking up is a really logical and reasonable option.

Since all of this is apparent but completely unspoken, we can still imagine that they aren’t aware that the feeling is mutual. But we’re not even at that point yet, I don’t think. This story started with one of the principals apparently not realizing he was having a feeling in the first place and certainly not wanting to entertain one, and the other one claiming a different sexual orientation than the one in question, so they were starting from pretty far back behind the starting line.

We have a ways to go yet before they can simply misunderstand each other. Sherlock has a lot to work through personally before he can bring himself to admit that he might be interested in or capable of pursuing something, which the show is clearly going out of its way to explore. John obviously has his own commitments to attend to before bringing himself to consider whether Sherlock could actually be his one and only. He has issues to settle in his head, his heart, and in his life choices. Nothing is easy here.

These writers are currently in the business of creating more barriers to keep Sherlock and John apart. So it seems that even if they both twigged on the tarmac at the end of series 3, they still wouldn’t run off into the sunset together. It’s too complicated, they’re not ready, they might still be in a bit of denial while sober. There’s quite a ways to go yet.

Resolving romantic and sexual tension has a narrative impact that might be hard to overcome. If you hook them up, the story is sort of over. This is a story about a relationship, so as long as that relationship has somewhere to go, this story can keep on. No point in rushing through it, is there?
A good storyteller can hook characters up while keeping enough of the tension to stay interesting, and I have faith that we are dealing with good storytellers. But doing so turns the story into a different kind of narrative. I don’t know if resolving that tension is in the best interests of the narrative. At this point, anyway.

Hooking them up eventually seems like the kindest thing to do, if you love these characters. They are made for each other, and we want them to be happy. They will only be happy together, I am entirely certain of that. Hooking them up in the end makes sense.

Option 2: They Never Hook Up, and their Intense Attraction Chills Out into Legit Platonic Affection

Maybe this sexual and romantic attraction is flash-in-pan. Maybe it’s just John’s fascination with the work. That would become apparent should Sherlock stop being a consulting detective for some reason, and John realizes that he’s not actually attracted to Sherlock at all. I’m sure that would be a relief to him. Maybe Sherlock’s sexual/emotional feelings just spontaneously burst out of him and John was the closest target. All this tension between them is just circumstantial, and they are able, at some point, to laugh about it.

This is incredibly unlikely.

But it’s an option. Imagine that: they confront the tension between them only to discover it’s what they pretended was the case was actually true the whole time: their feelings are intense but platonic! They’re just friends.

I don’t even want to write any more about this, it annoys me. It’s made of lies. It’s like the ending of Little Women.

Option 3: They Never Hook Up, but Remain Intensely In Love with Each Other

The tension that never ends: maybe they stay pretty much as they are, without ever resolving the tension, and without ever completely revealing themselves to each other.

This is a painful but fascinating option. The desire to see a resolution (in a word, frustration) is what drives us to turn pages or stay in the theatre, or watch the next episode or season. Building it and maintaining long-term frustration sounds bad but is great storytelling.

On the upside, this option leaves a tremendous amount of room for fanfiction writers. If the relationship never actually resolves, it means we get to redefine how that resolution would happen, and we get to do it a million different ways. You may not not consider that much of an upside.

It’s narratively dangerous. If the tension doesn’t change, it gets boring. The level of tension between these two characters has to change, one way or another. It can get more intense, get flattened out, resurrected, brought to a boil, but it has to change episode by episode. We’ve already seen that happen several times, and I can’t imagine that stopping.

Tension exists to be resolved, so leaving it completely unresolved long term might seem like a cop out. But it’s not unheard of. It’s the choice of artsy, edgy, sophisticated storytelling. Lots of high brow literature prides itself on not providing resolution to things, as if the frustrated gloom it leaves you in is more intellectual than a happy ending.

I don’t get the sense that these writers are the sorts of people who require a sad or frustrated ending in order to feel like intellectuals, though. They seem to be happy ending people to me. (I think happy endings are just as smartypants as sad endings, myself.)

But it could be that John genuinely can’t reconcile being in love with Sherlock with his presumed sexual orientation, who knows. Maybe his marriage, or his child (?) somehow prevents him from taking that step. I don’t find any of those arguments especially compelling, I have to admit.

Far more likely, Sherlock may decide that letting his emotional and sexual desires live in a too easily accessible a part of his brain is unacceptably detrimental to his work. I mean, it obviously is. Series 3 as proven that. Maybe that’s the choice he makes: his emotional well-being, or the work. He did start out telling us he was married to his work, and we know the Great Consulting Detective remains what he is through his life. He’s capable of compartmentalizing and deleting things; maybe that’s how this tension resolves. Maybe he will shut John out completely when it comes to these sorts of matters, choosing to remain logical at the cost of a fuller and more honest relationship with John. Not because he doesn’t love John, but because the world needs Sherlock Holmes. They would remain desperately in love and desperately attracted to each other, but unable to act on it.

Or, they do act on it. Once. And then never again. Because of the work.

It’s horrible, but it’s kind of beautiful at the same time. I mean, if you like your tension intense and with a diamond-hard finish, of course.

Solving crimes together in order to cope with not being together. I can’t imagine that would ever get easier.

That’s as far as I can go down the prediction trail. Possibly I should stay away from it entirely from now on. I’m really no good at it.

*My apologies to Julian Barnes for the title. (I love Julian Barnes.)

Monday 27 October 2014


The Lie of His Last Vow
 (Sherlock Meta by archipelagoarchaea and mild-lunacy)

archipelagoarchaea:

[This was intended as the last chapter of my Big Long Meta, but I’m getting itchy and want to post something; this is the section least in need of editing and most able to stand on its own, so here you go! For the record, this is meant to come after chapters detailing (a) general character development of John and Sherlock, and (b) what I perceive as the underlying romantic structure of the show. There will be one or two mentions of this romantic structure, but one need not agree with Johnlock as endgame or ‘TJLC’ in order to follow or even agree with the logic I lay out here. Once I finish the other sections, I may come back to edit the intro so it will return to its rightful place as the final chapter.]

It’s time to take down the surface reading of His Last Vow. This is the episode that purports to end with Mary’s past revealed, her lies and actions forgiven, and her role in John’s life firmly established, while Sherlock’s role is diminished by a combination of unborn child and his new criminal record. The casual viewer will probably take it at face value, sweeping any inconsistencies under the rug. However, there’s ample evidence they shouldn’t.

To start, the baby plot line is dubious at best. Babies are notoriously difficult to work with on screen. There are strict laws about their use [pdf] and — to be quite frank — they’re not generally good actors. It’s highly unlikely that the writers intend to keep a baby around if it necessitates even once-per-episode infant-wrangling. Regardless of the centrality of character and relationship development to the show, crime solving is the framework on which that development is built. This is a pulpy adventure and mystery show, not a domestic drama. Even beyond the lack of narrative space for that storyline, a baby would not mesh well with this stylistic conceit. And even ignoring real world concerns about the irresponsibility of needlessly risking one’s life with a baby at home, or the time-consumption of raising a child (particularly a newborn), it defies belief that a modern mother like Mary would look kindly on having little to no help because her partner is running around having adventures with his best friend. Indeed, such a future would boil down to the highly problematic trope of the wife as docile reward and accessory rather than partner. Finally, the concept of Mary as a stay-at-home mother is completely at odds with His Last Vow’s surface characterization of her as a feminine counterpart to Sherlock, the doctor’s ‘bored’ wife. Adding in a nanny would just complicate the show — with it’s fairly small regular cast — even further. Therefore one or the other of Mary’s identities almost certainly has to go, and the baby needs to be written out or out of the way as well. How the baby goes I can’t predict, but that’s not necessary to understand the fundamental direction of the show.

Next: this is a season finale. It requires a cliffhanger. Cliffhanger endings exist to draw the viewer in, to make them feel something, to bring them back for the next season so that they can get closure, no matter how long it might take for the next season to come. If we take the ending of His Last Vow at face value, then the only possible cliffhanger is Moriarty’s return. But what value does this have as a cliffhanger? Sherlock is a sort of proto-superhero. He doesn’t have any special powers, per se, but his senses are unusually acute. He can see, smell, taste, and hear things that most of us couldn’t even if we tried. His abilities are based in reality, but stretch belief. Likewise Moriarty, while not strictly speaking super-human, is written in the vein of a super-villain. He’s campy, charismatic, and larger than life, the villainous genius who illuminates Sherlock’s heroism by showing us what Sherlock could have been and is not. But super-villains, unlike the villain-of-the-week, are not intended to be permanently defeated. Their role in a hero’s story is too important. Besides serving as Sherlock’s foil, Moriarty is responsible for every major obstacle that Sherlock must face in order to become the man he is ‘meant’ to be, from the pool to Reichenbach. Even Irene was sent by Moriarty.

Mary may be an exception, but there’s evidence she’s not. She’s already been given the role of the assassin confronting Sherlock in ‘the empty house[s]’ — a role assigned in ACD canon to Moriarty’s right-hand man, Sebastian Moran. It’s a direct link, whether it remains a mere reference or is textually confirmed in Series 4. Reminder that this is fiction: Moffat chose to assign Mary a role that originally belonged to Moriarty’s most trusted associate. While it’s possible that this was intended as a mere reference, the fact is that the writers went through the trouble of creating a ‘Lord Moran’ with no resemblance to ACD canon, and delayed this confrontation two episodes from when it should, canonically have occurred. Indeed, had they handled the confrontation differently, Mary could have been made more sympathetic (more on that later).

All of this is important because it means that Moriarty — or at least his machinery — should not be permanently defeated at least until the end of the heroic arc, likely the end of show’s run (one-off specials excepted). And most of the audience, having been raised on these sorts of stories, will understand this subconsciously. As a result, Moriarty himself does not present an obstacle in need of immediate resolution. It is his schemes, rather, that require defeat. His Last Vow does not give us a scheme — only Moriarty’s apparent return — therefore most people will not much care. Which means that Moriarty cannot be the intended cliffhanger. This leaves us with two possibilities: the uncertain state of John and Sherlock’s relationship (not merely in a romantic vs. platonic sense), which is a running theme of the show and cannot be satisfactorily resolved in a single episode; and the true nature of Mary, who despite having neither personal nor narrative redemption has been presented — at first glance — as forgiven and accepted, Sherlock’s pain and suffering swept under the rug in service of her own desires.

Redemption, in both the narrative and general (non-religious) sense, is atonement. It is the process of compensating for past misbehavior or mistakes. Redemption is not simply stopping the thing that is bad — one is not redeemed from thieving by buying things — it is making up for it. In fiction the process is often poetic to some degree. For example, Sherlock’s redemption mirrors his ‘sin’ in some ways. Sherlock’s empty chair was a symbol of John’s grief over his loss of Sherlock twice: at the end of The Reichenbach Fall and the beginning of The Empty Hearse. Likewise, John’s empty chair is twice a symbol of Sherlock’s grief over losing him to marriage: once in The Sign of Three and once again in His Last Vow when he actually has it removed from the sitting room. As his sin was faking his death, he had to truly die in order to complete the process. Mary, on the other hand, never apologizes, never expresses regret for what she’s done (either lying or shooting Sherlock or, for that matter, being an assassin), and makes no effort to atone or make up for her actions. Her separation from John was not her choice. She’s outright scornful at John for being upset with her and, with Sherlock’s (likely reluctant) help, even pushes blame for everything she’s done onto John himself (‘You saw that’, ‘It’s what you like’). Even the tiniest things John asks of her in return — like letting him name the baby — she refuses. She hasn’t even recognized the need for redemption, much less begun the process. This is not a good start for a character that’s supposedly meant to be on the protagonist’s side.

Importantly, we should always keep in mind that Mary is not a real person when discussing the choices of the writers. Writing is inherently contrived. It is built within a human mind, not bled from human veins. When people complain of ‘contrivance’, it’s only the obvious and the jarring that they actually care about. Mary does not control events in the story and does not make decisions herself. It is her writer who makes decisions for her, hopefully with the skill to make them seem natural. A well-written character can take control of a story, but in a show like this, with a very clear and established main character (or two), a secondary character is not going to be allowed such freedom. In other words: Moffat did not have to write Mary the way he did. He chose to write her shooting Sherlock and threatening Sherlock once more in Leinster Gardens (this is not meant to be ambiguous: she steps into the shadows as she makes the threat), rather than committing another, less emotionally traumatic and morally suspect action. He chose to make her past darker than either John’s or even Sherlock’s. He chose to have her fail the test that Sholto passed — to ‘do that to John Watson’ and risk inflicting the same terrible grief that broke him once before. He chose to have both Mary and Magnussen imply that her career as a contract killer involved actions that John would find unforgivable. He chose to write in a flash drive supposedly containing her secrets, yet not tell us what they were. He chose to give her a role originally assigned to Moriarty’s right-hand-man. He chose not to write her asking for forgiveness or explaining her actions or even displaying a modicum of regret. He chose not to give her any redemption whatsoever. He chose to have her selfishly cling to John to his mental detriment when Sherlock selflessly gave him away believing it was what John wanted. Moffat did not need to write Mary this way to make her interesting or morally ambiguous on a level commensurate with John and Sherlock.

Imagine this alternative: a past in which Mary fell into crime unwittingly, perhaps through a loved one, and regretted her actions yet stayed at least partly out of choice (thus creating moral ambiguity rather than simple victimhood). She did nothing particularly cruel, but was indirectly responsible for the suffering of others. Sometimes she did things that weren’t, strictly speaking, immoral or unethical, but would still get her labelled in our culture as ‘damaged goods’. She could have left her past behind completely, rather than keeping the accoutrements of a job that made other families suffer. She could have opened up about her past willingly and taken part in undoing the wrongs she had a part in. Imagine how romantic it would have been for her to come to John like this, apologizing about her lies and believing that he will leave her for them — because that is what society teaches — but instead he reaffirms his love for her and tells her he forgives her past. Now remember that Moffat did write this exact background (if not the romantic follow-up) — for Mrs. Hudson.

There was absolutely no need to give Mrs. Hudson this kind of color unless it was to illuminate someone else’s by comparison. On the surface this is presented as evidence that John surrounds himself with extremely flawed personalities (which has some truth to it, though likely not for the reasons implied), but what it really does is invite us to look more closely at the comparison. And what we find, then, is that Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock are indeed similar on a few levels, but that Mary — who harmed people for money (as an assassin) and personal gain (Sherlock, at the least) — is darker than either. In other words, Moffat wrote two morally ambiguous women so that we could see that not all moral ambiguity is equal. For those who believe Mary will still get her own complex redemptive arc in Series 4, keep this in mind: Mary is a secondary character, one whose relationship with John Watson was deemed unworthy of more than minimal development, whose own episode (The Sign of Three) was devoted to Sherlock instead. She will not be getting a character development arc equivalent, much less superior, to the title character’s, and nor should she.

In truth, Mary is Schrödinger’s character: her personality and motivations broad, more probability than certainty. It will be Series 4 that resolves the question of who she really is. For now, there are only three things we know about her: she had a past as a contract killer both government and freelance, she’s willing to risk Sherlock’s life to preserve her secrets, and she doesn’t want John to leave her — and even then her motivations are uncertain. Everything else is well of ambiguity.

When Mary apologizes to Sherlock immediately after shooting him, is it genuine or mocking (nothing of the sort is ever repeated)? Did she call the ambulance, or did Magnussen (or John)? Did Mary intend to kill Sherlock in Leinster Gardens, or was she merely prepared for self-defense? Does she really believe the revelation of her past would hurt John worse than Sherlock’s death (after all she was the one who said ‘do you have any idea what you’ve done’)? Is her fear when Sherlock collapses for him or for herself (John looks murderous, and it’s him she’s looking at)? Does Sherlock believe she meant him to live, or is it only an act? We’re deprived of all the months between the confrontation and Christmas — there’s not even a post-honeymoon blog post to go by — adding ambiguity to both John’s and Sherlock’s behavior at the end. Does John genuinely want her back in his life, or is he sticking around for the baby, or because Sherlock told him to? Did he really not read the flash drive? Did Sherlock? What has Mycroft been doing? — his brother was shot and the shooter’s still at large. What did John and Sherlock tell Lestrade? Does Mary know something about Moriarty? We only see a manipulation of his image — is Moriarty’s return even real?

Our new information about Mary also casts ambiguity over The Empty Hearse and The Sign of Three retroactively, as well. Her characterization is precisely likable enough to make her betrayal in His Last Vow shocking yet not unbelievable — likely a deliberate move. There were a lot of people on that hate list; is anything about Mary’s ‘kinder’ personality real, or is it manipulation to keep John tied to her? Or something in between? Did she ever care about Sherlock, or did she keep him close so that he would be discouraged from digging into her past? Was ‘I agree, I’m the best thing that could have happened to you’ cheeky self-confidence? or the subtle opening salvo of a months long campaign to convince John he can’t do better, culminating in: ‘He’s right. It’s what you like’? We know nothing about Mary as a person. This is not the setup for a character who is intended to remain as presented. In other words: one does not film in such a consistently ambiguous fashion if one wishes the surface reading to remain in place forever. Ambiguity is created to hide things in plain sight, to distract those who are willing or prime to be distracted, not to be ignored for the rest of the show (at least not this kind of show). Most, if not all, of the surface reading of His Last Vow’s latter half must be false, or else everyone involved in making the show wasted considerable effort on pointless ambiguity rather than giving the characters a proper emotional arc. If we want to predict what is wrong with the surface reading, our best bet is to compare it with the previous eight episodes of characterization and plot development.

The Sign of Three makes repeated reference to John and Sherlock being in denial about what John’s marriage will do to their relationship, then ends with the final proof: Mary’s pregnancy, which neither can deny means Sherlock has little to no place left in their life. Sherlock himself implicitly refers to this when he says they ‘don’t need [him] anymore’ because they have a ‘real’ baby on the way. Besides the fact that this paints a depressing portrait of the place he sees in their life (not at all resembling how he saw himself with John alone), it nearly explicitly conveys that he sees this as the end of their partnership. His Last Vow did nothing to fix this issue. In fact, it did quite the opposite. Even if we accept Mary’s ‘redemption’, this means that we still have an enormous block toward the continuation of the show. One cannot reasonably expect that Sherlock will be about Mary, John, and baby, or about the Watson family and godfather Sherlock. It can’t even be about Sherlock with John occasionally popping in, as John is too important a character and too central to Sherlock’s development (indeed, they’re the only two characters with significant complexity and development). The show is about John and Sherlock and their life together solving crimes. One need not believe their attraction is romantic to see that this is the case.

His Last Vow itself is a logical mess on the surface. Mary, whose supposed empathy for John’s grief was what drew them together in the first place, shows absolutely no concern for his mental well-being after her exposure. She never apologizes, expresses regret, or even admits that she may have made a decision or two that was not in his best interests. She’s critical of Sherlock in The Empty Hearse, saying ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done to him?’, yet makes no acknowledgment that she nearly ‘did’ exactly the same thing to protect her marriage — only this time near-permanently. And while she claims that shooting Sherlock was necessary to ‘protect’ John from the truth, she has no trouble taking Sherlock’s claim that John is attracted to dangerous people and twisting it even further to her ends: claiming both that John secretly knew what she really was (‘you did see that’), and that it’s ‘what [he] like[s],’ thereby adding even more psychological pain in the form of victim-blaming. She then goes on to say that she’d rather he not read her flash drive in front of her, because he wouldn’t love her when he’s finished, yet also claims that what she does is right, because people like Magnussen ‘should’ be killed. This is an utter mishmash of assertions, almost ludicrous in their inconsistency. If Mary shooting Sherlock was meant to be a misguided act of love, then she shouldn’t have explicitly, textually, and verbally acknowledged the pain that John went through the last time Sherlock ‘died’. And if Mary’s concern was for John’s mental well-being and not her own interests (i.e. their marriage), then she should have continued to show concern for his mental well-being even when she no longer seemed likely to get anything in return. And if John is truly meant to love the new Mary through-and-through, then they shouldn’t have spent three seasons establishing his concern over Sherlock’s apparent lack of empathy for victims, his disapproval of a vigilante murderer in the immediately preceding episode, or his ‘strong moral principle’ in not shooting a serial killer until he believed he had no choice in one of the most important establishing scenes of the entire show.

Sherlock’s behavior toward Mary is likewise inconsistent. He drags himself from the brink of death out of love and fear for John’s life in a long, painful, and profoundly romantic miracle, contemplates Mary’s true identity with his pain-killers turned low, and escapes the hospital early in his recovery despite the massive risk to his health to confront Mary and expose her to John, then (supposedly) shrugs off all his concerns with a single well-aimed bullet and a statistically ludicrous assessment of ambulance response times. And he does so by calling himself a ‘psychopath’ while simultaneously sacrificing his health for John (whether for his marriage or to protect him from Mary — either way it’s John). If Sherlock is not lying, then his internal thoughts are a mass of contradictions — and not the good kind. But there is a very logical reason for him to lie.

Regardless of Mary’s actual motivations, Sherlock has every reason to — and is explicitly shown to — consider her a threat to John. This means that he has to neutralize her somehow before she decides that the risk of exposure is too great and kills both John and Sherlock to cover her trail, regardless of whether the actual Mary would consider that an option; Sherlock would not leave John’s safety to mere deductions. Since Mary is pregnant she can’t be neutralized physically, and attempting to send her to prison could result in her escape with the child, or otherwise harm to the fetus. Therefore, Sherlock must have had a plan to convince her she was safe before he confronted her. While it’s possible he scrapped this plan in favor of trusting her, the fact is that his behavior as it stands is in keeping with a scheme to keep her docile while he recovers. The confrontation in the Empty Houses, therefore, was not intended to find proof that she didn’t mean to kill Sherlock, but to give him something to work with in spinning his lies (as well as making sure John is aware of the danger he’s in) just as Mary allows him to give her ammunition when she asks what he knows rather than offering up her own version of her past. And while it’s possible that Sherlock is unconcerned about his own well-being — I’ve written about this myself — it is far less likely that he’s willing to leave the one person he loves the most permanently in the care of someone who would stop at ‘nothing’ to keep him. It’s particularly unlikely that he would make this decision based on nothing more than Mary giving him a sliver of a chance at survival.

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is the damage to characterization. Sherlock being a drug addict who solves crimes as an alternative fix isn’t fascinating on its own. It’s the interplay between Sherlock’s’ many desires — the compulsion to solve puzzles regardless of the cost, the compulsion to save lives and be a force for good, the compulsion to know, to tease out the answers, the compulsion to be a force for justice, the compulsion to protect the weak and the ‘different’ regardless of personal gain or personal risk — that makes Sherlock so interesting. Sherlock the ‘psychopath’ erases half his soul in favor of justifying John’s marriage to selfish lover.

Likewise, John being a danger addict whose true love is a proud killer more in love with herself than her husband (‘I’m the best thing that could have happened to you’ vs. ‘It is a tiny bit sexy’*) wouldn’t be some tantalizing glimpse into a ‘new’ darker facet of the doctor. We’ve known about his ‘darker’ impulses from the words ‘Oh God yes’, from ‘Could be dangerous’, and from the moment he shot the cabbie without a tremor in his hand. What this new idea would do is flatten his character, smudging out his desire to care for and protect — impulses Sherlock, not Mary, has allowed him to indulge — to stand beside while Sherlock solves the case, to stand forward when the life needs saving. It would erase his ‘strong moral principles’ that allow him to break the law, but only for a higher standard of good than Mary herself professes. All he’d have left is bland, tasteless adventure beside a man he no longer recognizes and a woman he never chose to marry, his heart excised to warm someone else’s by comparison, three seasons of character development cut off at the knees for shock value. And there’s nothing daring or satisfying about that story.

If we are to accept the tale that Moffat has woven with the confrontation scene and the reconciliation scene, it would mean that John can’t tell when someone’s lying (‘I’m not John. I can tell when you’re fibbing’) but still recognized and was attracted to an aspect of Mary’s character that Sherlock himself missed. It would mean that the previous episode, in which Sherlock repeatedly rejects the puzzle in favor of saving the life and in which John is both strong and non-violent, was meaningless: nothing more than a red herring. It would mean that Sherlock and John helped arrest a man who nearly murdered an innocent (Bainbridge) in his desire to kill someone he felt deserved death (Sholto), then welcomed a woman who nearly murdered an innocent (Sherlock) in her desire to kill someone she felt deserved death (Magnussen). It would mean that mere days after dragging himself back to life for love, Sherlock still thinks he’s a sociopath. It would mean that Sherlock bestowed ‘Mary, when I say you deserve this man, it is the highest compliment of which I am capable,’ on a nurse — a healer — who once served as a balm to John’s grief for Sherlock, then promptly transferred the same compliment to a killer for being willing to inflict precisely this grief on John once more to selfishly preserve her secrets. It would mean ‘And I know I speak for Mary as well when I say we will never let you down, and we have a lifetime ahead to prove that,’ was not foreshadowing but clumsy misdirection — a jeering taunt at poor John, as if he deserves constant betrayal — and that Sherlock is easily convinced that ‘the bravest and kindest and wisest human being’ he has ‘ever had the good fortune of knowing’ prefers amoral killers for lovers. It would mean that the main character suffered for his redemption and still lost the most important person in his life, while a secondary character does nothing yet gets everything she wants anyway. It would mean that John and Sherlock’s relationship development must essentially come to a halt as Mary and baby take over John’s life. All this so that a woman who never even got a proper romantic build-up or characterization, a woman who unapologetically inflicted terrible pain on Sherlock and John both, could be considered ‘part of the team’. All this even though John and Sherlock were never a team at all, but a partnership: in Irene’s words ‘a couple’. There was never any room for a third person in the first place. That’s not a judgment on anyone who tries; it’s just the nature of their relationship. And it will be the nature of their relationship to the end of their days.

* This is literally the only remotely positive comment — even implied —I could find by Mary about John in the entirety of Series 3, unless you count ‘my husband’ as a positive comment. And yes, this blew my mind a bit. By contrast, in The Empty Hearse she implies he’s unreasonable for yelling at Sherlock. In The Sign of Three she implies he’s bad at telling when others are lying and he’s a drama queen. And in His Last Vow she implies (albeit indirectly) that he can’t handle the truth about her, would be happier with Sherlock’s death than her betrayal, and secretly perceived and liked her for her violent nature.

mild-lunacy:

I know we’ve all talked and talked (and talked!) about this, but I honestly, genuinely think this is probably the best-argued meta I’ve read on dismissing the surface reading of His Last Vow. The thing is, the clincher is that it’s not about Mary; the real reason it’s worth driving a stake in a surface reading of His Last Vow is because it would actually play merry hell with John and Sherlock’s characterizations and with all the best parts of The Sign of Three. I actually, seriously consider this an ironclad argument, to the point where I’m interested in rebuttals, but only those that would go back and review both The Sign of Three and John and Sherlock’s overall characterizations. When you think about it, it becomes increasingly clear that The Sign of Three was really set up as a sort of ‘antidote’ to His Last Vow, in terms of John and Sherlock’s behavior. I’ve written before that The Sign of Three was an interlude in narrative terms, while His Last Vow was the first chapter in a ‘new story— a bigger adventure’ (as Sherlock predicted). Viewed through that lens, The Sign of Three was meant to directly foreshadow and contextualize this new story, and provide justification for its ultimate resolution. Seeing The Sign of Three as a ‘red herring’ would be manifestly untenable as a reasonable narrative choice, regardless of any predictive ambiguities (which firstdrafted has noted).

Essentially, yes: The Sign of Three underlines John’s nature as a strong but nonviolent, even nurturing character, someone who’s capable of expressing himself and trying new things (‘I don’t mind’). He reiterates his need to demand more of Sherlock, pushing Sherlock to ‘save the life’, even as Sherlock himself admitted that John was right all along in valuing the human factor over pure deduction. On the surface (as I think it’s overwhelmingly important to underscore), His Last Vow does contradict this John Watson. Likewise, His Last Vow contradicts Sherlock’s own emotional development (and we’ve all developed theories about Sherlock’s regression, such as deducingbbcsherlock's reading of Sherlock’s leaning more towards his inner Moriarty now that John’s unavailable). However, seen in another light, this is a very serious regression. Just accepting that Sherlock is okay with seeing himself as a psychopath who solves cases as an alternative to getting high, and sees love as a ‘human error’ creates many inconsistencies within His Last Vow itself, but also basically retcons The Sign of Three altogether. Either Sherlock didn’t really mean it when he said ‘it’s always you’, that John keeps Sherlock right, or… he was lying to Mary at Baker Street. There is actually not a whole lot of wiggle room, except in the kind of language being used, as eiael-thinks has said.

The major point to make is that Mary could go either way— being a grey character and nearly a blank slate— but if there isn’t to be a major reveal (in line with antagonist!Mary), then a lot of the choices made in John and Sherlock’s (and Mary’s) characterization are suddenly rather blatantly untenable, in terms of character continuity. There’s a very clear division between which way the narrative does and does not make sense, so that the ambiguity is actually quite artificial. Like, yes, a surface reading would require reimagining The Sign of Three to the point where it’s a farce:

"It would mean that Sherlock and John helped arrest a man who nearly murdered an innocent (Bainbridge) in his desire to kill someone he felt deserved death (Sholto), then welcomed a woman who nearly murdered an innocent (Sherlock) in her desire to kill someone she felt deserved death (Magnussen)."

I love the Mayfly Man/Mary parallel (or mirror) because I haven’t thought about it but now it jumps out at me; he even was deceptive to his romantic partners (though granted, only for one night rather than a marriage).The writing is on the wall.

Tuesday 7 October 2014


Regarding Harry
 (Sherlock Meta by thenorwoodbuilder)

Dear reader, I feel compelled to start by warning you that THE TRAPEZIST IS BACK! Because I’m going to write an entire post of ramblings about a character we have not even seen in the episodes (no, not Sebastian Moran – not yet, at least…).

That is, I’m going to address the subject of John Watson’s mysterious sibling: Harry.

(Dear fellow mycroftians, don’t worry: I’ll find a way to link my analysis of the Watson Siblings to the study of the Holmes Brothers. Just be patient an follow my delirium reasoning.)

Let’s start, as usual, with the Canon. In the original ACD’s stories, we’re made aware that Watson had an elder brother only after the death of said sibling. In The Sign of Four Watson receives a watch and shows it to Holmes, who deduces from it that it had been his elder brother’s and that “he was a man of untidy habits – very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died”.



Incidentally, the same scene is featured in the first episode of “Murder Rooms”, but with Arthur Conan Doyle himself in the place of Watson, and Dr. Joseph Bell as the one who deduced from the watch Doyle’s father’s problems. I don’t know if this adaptation has any grounding in reality, but it’s quite certain that Doyle depicted Watson’s brother with many traits that belonged to his own father (as I’ve already briefly mentioned): the good prospects (in his case, an artistic talent, a middle-class background and a good marriage) that went wasted; the alternating of prosperity and poverty; the drinking (which, for Charles Altamont Doyle, was added to mental problems). Anyway, Watson is hurt by Holmes’ statement, as he initially thinks that his friend made inquiries into the history of his brother (and please do notice that the “researching” thing will come back in The Reichenbach Fall, but reversed, with Sherlock telling John that he “researched him” and his family); Holmes replies with an apology for having unintentionally hurt his feelings and the assurance that he “never even knew that Watson had a brother until he handed him the watch”.

(On a side note, you may notice that this episode is set in 1888, that is, seven years after Holmes and Watson firstly got acquainted: this makes me always laugh a little at Watson’s display of surprise in discovering only after several years that Holmes, too, had an elder brother – which he imputes to Holmes’ very private nature. As if he had not been very private about his own brother…!)

From this little exchange we may deduce that, albeit not being indifferent or enemy to his brother (his emotional reaction shows sorrow for his “unhappy brother’s” end), Watson, for some reason, had chosen long before to not be in touch with him (otherwise, Holmes would have most probably known of his existence before). He is pained by his sad life and – presumably – even sadder death as an alcoholic. So we might reasonably presume that they were mainly his brother’s addiction, and the unpleasant repercussions it had upon his character and his way of life, that had driven Watson away from him.




And now let’s compare the canonical Harry (well, actually all we know is that his name begun with an H, but let’s assume the name is the same) to his modern counterpart, that is John’s sister, Harriet (Harry) Watson. We don’t know, in this case, whether she is the elder or the younger of the two Watson siblings. I’d bet on her being the elder, anyway, mainly for two reasons: 1) because there was no narrative need, presumably, to change this detail; 2) because, as John is stubborn, and capable of handling even difficult customers (such as Sherlock, for instance…), if HE were the elder, he would probably have tried to impose himself upon his sister in a way or another, in order to make her quit drinking (such as Mycroft probably did with Sherlock and his dangerous “experiments” with drugs), while, being the younger, he had neither the authority, nor, presumably, the confidence to push her too hard. Anyway, we know she is an alcoholic, as her canonical counterpart, and that her addiction is affecting her life, as she got a divorce probably also because of her drinking habit (it’s not so uncommon that it is the party “at fault” to leave the other, as the sense of guilt and shame quite easily turns into rage and resentment). Here, however, the similarities end.



Because our John, unlike the canonical Watson, keeps in touch with his sister: he calls her quite regularly, he exchanges comments with her on his blog, he would even have spent (or maybe did spend at least part of) Christmas Day with her, if not for Sherlock’s reaction to Irene’s death. So our modern John looks more close to his troublesome sibling, despite their “not getting along”, than his canonical counterpart. Just in the same way as Mycroft is a much more present and significant figure  in Sherlock’s life than his canonical counterpart even was for Sherlock Holmes. So, the first conclusion we may draw is that the Mofftiss are very interested in their characters’ human interactions, and particularly in family relationships – which is one of the features of the show that I like the most.

But what is more interesting to me is how John’s “complicate relationship” with his own sister affects his relationship with both Sherlock and Mycroft – that is, the parallels and the influences between the “complicate relationship” of the Watson Siblings and the “complicate relationship” of the Holmes Brothers.



I’ll start with Sherlock’s attitude towards John’s relationship with Harry. We know that the scene of the “mobile phone deduction” in A Study in Pink ingeniously follows the pattern of the “watch deduction scene” in The Sign of the Four. But this is exactly what makes the differences more interesting. Obviously I’m not thinking about the different details which were required in order to adapt the chain of deductions to a different object in a different context; what is really interesting is what Sherlock says, that Holmes didn’t. That is: in the Canon, Holmes didn’t utter any deduction, supposition or comment about Watson’s relationship with his brother; in A Study in Pink, Sherlock, instead, extends his reasoning to John’s relationship with Harry, and quite interestingly his first hypothesis is that John has a sibling (of course we knows that here he makes a mistake and says “brother”) whom he “doesn’t approve of, possibly because (s)he is an alcoholic, more likely because (s)he recently walked out on his wife”; and again, in the cab, he remarks that it’s evident that John has problems with his sibling, maybe because he liked her wife, maybe because he doesn’t like her drinking. So our modern Sherlock provides much more personal remarks than his canonical counterpart – maybe just because he is less polite than a Victorian gentleman, but maybe (also) because the writers decided to draft him as more interested in human relationships and, most of all, having decided to give a lot more space to his relationship with HIS own brother, they wanted to show us that Sherlock is immediately interested in what he perceives as another “complicate siblings relationship”, with which he can to some extent identify.



The other interesting feature is, of course, that John’s and Harry’s positions are exactly mirroring Mycroft’s and Sherlock’s ones. John, albeit the younger sibling, is the one who is constantly worried for Harry, because of her dangerous lifestyle, that he would like to persuade her to abandon, and who is both pushed away by her addiction and driven to her by his affection; Harry, in this case the elder sibling, is the one who refuses his brother’s advice and keeps recklessly hurting herself with her drinking habit. While, between the Holmes Brothers, the elder, Mycroft, is the one who is constantly concerned about his brother’s recklessness (which ranges from the risk of a relapse into drugs, to the risk of Sherlock killing himself while pursuing excitement and adrenaline through his work as consulting detective), and who takes upon himself the responsibility of watching over him, being at the same time pushed away by Sherlock’s resentment (and maybe by the painful memories of his past problems with drugs), and bound to him by his affection; Sherlock, the younger, is the one who had (but the risk of a relapse is always present) problems with substances, who keeps having a dangerous lifestyle, because of his work, and who systematically refuses to listen to his brother – at least in his face.




But even more interesting, Sherlock seems to transfer on Harry the distrust (and maybe the dislike) that he perhaps feels towards himself as an ex-addict, and that he almost certainly supposes Mycroft feels toward him for the same reason. Consider, to this effect, also the exchange between Sherlock and John at the Christmas party, in A Scandal in Belgravia: John says that, for the first time in her life, she has made an effort and stopped drinking, she is clean; to this, Sherlock replies just “nope” – and John shuts him up. Here we see that John, albeit being a doctor and knowing that an alcoholic needs much more than good intentions to quit drinking, and that many relapses are probable before a true and firm decision to stop is taken (there is also this subtext, I think, in his “shut up!” to Sherlock), has decided to show trust to his sister, by accepting to spend Christmas Day with her, presumably in order to encourage her in her fight against her addiction. Sherlock, on the contrary, stresses how unlikely it is that Harry will keep faith to her word and really keep sober at least for a while. This sharp remark, according to me, is not only imputable to Sherlock’s annoyance at John’s decision to spend Christmas Day away (and therefore to be forced to spend Christmas Day alone: sentiment!) – which IS, of course, a component, as Molly quite awkwardly points out. It’s also a statement that comes out of experience: both the general rules of experience that tell us how an alcoholic generally behaves, AND – more significantly – HIS OWN experience with drugs. Sherlock knows that the craving for artificial stimulus is always present in him, whenever a “difficult” time happens, and he probably imputes his ability to resist it and stay clean to his own exceptional qualities (which is partly true and partly an umpteenth demonstration of his lack of modesty and his dangerous overconfidence…), qualities which he doesn’t admit in “ordinary people” in general and Harry in particular: hence his inference that she won’t be able to stay clean and will end up hurting his brother again by relapsing into drinking.



Another thing is maybe worth noticing here: Sherlock allows John to play a “big brother” role with him, much more than he allows it – al least apparently – to his own elder brother (to whom, anyway, then turns when things become really difficult for him, while quite literally shutting his door in John’s face in A Scandal in Belgravia). That is, Sherlock allows John to be much closer than Mycroft; he listens to him, at least to some extent, and he accepts from John advices, admonitions and reproaches that one would expect coming from an elder brother, while he generally answers to any remark coming from Mycroft with a bellicose attitude; he looks more openly for John’s approval than for Mycroft’s (which, however, deep down is quite important to him, I believe: just see his reaction – the look in his eyes – at Mycroft’s reproach on the “plane of the deads”, in A Scandal in Belgravia). It is as if he could accept from John observations and reprimands that he is not able to accept when coming from Mycroft because either of his pride, or of the “too much history between them”, or of both, while in John he recognizes as much resemblances to his own elder brother – his caring attitude, his desire to watch over him, his disposition towards tutoring him in human relationships – as to invest him with a sort of vicarious “big brother” role, without the “handicap” of a shared past.



At the same time, John, too, seems to transfer on Sherlock, at least to some extent, that caring and protective, but also authoritative, attitude he is not able to fully display with his own sister. Maybe it’s also because, between Sherlock and him, he is the elder, but I’d assume that, even in this case, their “fraternal” relationship is mostly eased by the fact that they don’t have to be constantly confronted with a shared past (and this includes also the fact that, when John firstly met Sherlock, he had already mostly overcome his problems with drugs, and therefore John had not to watch him hurt himself as Mycroft did, and as he himself had to with his own sister and her drinking habit). Besides, John could also possibly see in Sherlock both a hope that Harry, too, might one day be able to quit her addiction, and a way to make amends for not being able to help his sister more, by helping at least Sherlock to remain clean.



Probably for the same reasons, John empathizes to some degree with Mycroft (or at least this is my impression), and this is the main reason he finally agrees to help him watching over Sherlock. Because it’s quite evident, from his conversation with Mycroft at Christmas, as well as from his attitude towards (what he believed to be) Mycroft’s summon, in A Scandal in Belgravia, that they have been having an agreement for some time, and that this agreement concerns the best way to look after Sherlock’s wellbeing. The information John so sternly refused to give to Mycroft for money in A Study in Pink, he now is quite eager to share with him (even a little TOO eager, as I’ve observed before…), and this is because he now knows that Mycroft’s concern is real, and it’s mostly similar to the concern he feels towards his own sister. So, even if maybe he doesn’t fully trust Mycroft, he trusts him about caring for Sherlock. This is also the reason, according to me, why John then, in The Reichenbach Fall, looks so hurt by Mycroft’s (alleged) “betrayal” of Sherlock: he’s not only worried about the negative repercussions on Sherlock of Mycroft’s (alleged) leakage to Moriarty, neither he is offended by it just on Sherlock’s behalf; he feels also PERSONALLY betrayed, because he had believed till now (quite rightly, according to me) that Mycroft would have always kept faith to their agreement, would have always done his part in protecting Sherlock. (On a side note, I also suppose that Mycroft perfectly understands this, and this is another reason why I believe that his final apology, even if addressed to Sherlock, was actually meant mainly for John himself).



And so finally we come to Mycroft’s perspective. He, too, according to me, recognizes in John a person with similar experiences and a similar attitude towards his own sibling as the ones he has in relation to Sherlock, and this is the reason why he relies so much on John when it comes to protect Sherlock from external dangers but also, and even more, from himself. Since A Study in Pink, after having “tested” him and, even more, after John saved Sherlock’s life by killing the cabbie, Mycroft knows that John is a trustworthy person; but, given his proclivity, too, towards risk and adrenaline, he is still in doubt about the fact that his influence on Sherlock will be really good (“this soldier fellow… could be the making of my brother, or make him worst than ever”). Even in The Great Game we may assume, by Mycroft’s attitude towards John as soon as he enters the flat, in the morning after the explosion, that he has not yet decided if the good doctor will be a valuable asset in handling his troublesome little brother; but I’d assume that, by the end of the episode, he made his mind up about it, and that their full cooperation started soon after the incident at the pool. And I also think that this cooperation, this agreement, is something more than Mycroft just USING Watson to watch over Sherlock; of course Mycroft is a master at manipulating people, and Watson is no exception, but my opinion his that, beneath this, Mycroft also feels a genuine affinity with John – an affinity that John, too, as I’ve said, recognizes and values.



Even more, I’m under the impression that, as for John his friendship with Sherlock and the role of his protector and caregiver he took upon himself are also a way to deal with various unresolved issues with his own sister, and to be, at least vicariously, closer to her, for Mycroft, too (and maybe even more for him), John is also a sort of projection of himself next to his little brother. Mycroft knows that, for various reasons we may only suppose, but which are linked to their shared background, Sherlock wouldn’t accept any attempt on his part to get closer, to be more actively present in Sherlock’s life; maybe, he himself is scared of getting closer to his brother, either because of the dysfunctional relation to emotions and sentiments the brothers developed because of the education they received and the kind of family they grow up in, or because of the unpleasant, painful memories linked to Sherlock’s problems with drugs, or for both these reasons and many more. Anyway, he is only human, and it’s quite evident that he deeply cares for his brother, and that he is linked to Sherlock by a very strong bound of affection, so – being him willing to admit it or not (and I’m for the “not”) – he probably suffers, at least unconsciously, for the rift that keeps them back one from the other. Thus, being able to watch over Sherlock by means of John, who shares everyday life with him, and getting information on Sherlock’s wellbeing directly from his best friend, is – according to me – also a comforting way, for Mycroft, to feel more close to his brother, to share more of his life, without being too directly intrusive and, most of all, without the risk of rejection which is a constant in their face to face interactions. And I wouldn’t exclude that Sherlock, too, might tolerate John’s regular interactions with Mycroft (which he is quite certainly aware of) mostly for the same reasons. After all, deviousness seems quite an holmesian personality trait…

Finally, a question for you all: do you think we’ll ever see Harry in the flesh? (I bet on “no”) Would you like to see her? (Me yes, greatly!) How do you think she will interact with John and Sherlock (and maybe with Mycroft)?


The Case Against John and Mary
 (Sherlock Meta by archipelagoarchaeamild-lunacy and graceebooks)

archipelagoarchaea:

So once again, my Long Meta is unfinished and I’m itching to publish something. It’s been bothering me that a considerable portion of the ‘romantic’ chapter of my meta has been devoted to yammering on incredulously about the way John and Mary’s relationship was written, so perhaps it makes sense to pull that out and post it separately, anyway. After, y’know, completely re-writing it. Without further ado, here is my opinion on John and Mary’s romance in the show.

It doesn’t exist.

Now, this might seem harsh, so let me word it another way: John and Mary have precisely enough romance for the viewer to assume, upon introduction, that she is meant to be John’s long-term romantic partner, but that the writers don’t care about romance (it’s a detective show! they think) and therefore didn’t bother with it beyond the bare essentials. The problem with this point-of-view, even ignoring the events of His Last Vow, is that the writers have been very much interested in writing John and Sherlock as a romance. A score sheet of romantic tropes should help illuminate this. Clarification: for unidirectional tropes (e.g. jealousy, rescue) the possible score is one per person for a total of 2. For bidirectional tropes (requiring both partners’ active involvement, e.g. meeting, kissing) the total possible is 1.

Romantic Trope Score Sheet

The ‘meet cute’ is almost obligatory to romance, and certainly helps the audience latch on to their relationship quickly. It’s that scene where the characters meet for the first time and we get to see how much chemistry they have from the very first moment.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1  

Domestic scenes always help reinforce romantic relationships, as they allow us to see how comfortable the characters are with each other even when tripping over each other’s socks. Personally I believe that John and Sherlock’s home life — and bickering — were more comfortable than John and Mary’s, but I’m going for relative objectivity here, so:

❤︎  John and Mary: 1        John and Sherlock: 1

I’ll go ahead and give John and Mary a freebie: kissing!

❤︎  John and Mary: 1        John and Sherlock: 0

Dancing is always romantic. Especially ballroom dancing.

❤︎  John and Mary: 1        John and Sherlock: 1/2 for being explicitly mentioned but not seen.

Shared interests! What do our happy couple do or talk about outside of work and/or Sherlock? No, seriously. What do John and Mary have in common besides the clinic and drinking? We don’t know. Meanwhile, we have references to and entire montages of John and Sherlock pestering each other about their blogs, eating together, reading together, playing board games together and generally just being happy around each other.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1  

The dragon slayer and the damsel in distress. Rescue is very romantic.

❤︎  John and Mary: 1/2        John and Sherlock: 2  Mary gets half credit for her involvement in the bonfire rescue, but that’s being generous.

The marriage proposal!

❤︎  John and Mary: 1        John and Sherlock: 0 if we’re being conservative, but the best man scene is very suggestive.

Exchange of vows. Almost obligatory for a wedding episode.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1  Wait, what?

Jealousy. Clearly not a healthy thing to act on in a real relationship, but a popular romantic trope nonetheless, as it allows romantic interest to be expressed implicitly in the narrative.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: Hahahaha 2

Finishing each other’s sentences. A good sign of intellectual intimacy.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1

Declarations of love in each other’s presence (and on screen), i.e. not described to another person.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 2

Descriptions of each other’s good qualities (not just their vague positive roles).

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 2

Shared understandings (e.g. John helping control Sherlock’s addictions, John helping Sherlock socially). Again, a sign of emotional/intellectual intimacy.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1

Playing music for / singing for each other.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1

Meeting the family.

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1 Harry didn’t even make it to the wedding!

Overcoming impossible odds (e.g. death) to save the other. This is incredibly romantic as a trope, but these scores are unweighted, so…

❤︎  John and Mary: 0        John and Sherlock: 1

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I’ve always felt it was unsportsmanlike to keep scoring in a blow-out, and the majority of the remainder are not in Mary’s favor. The total score of this brief list?

❤︎  John and Mary: 4.5         John and Sherlock: 17.5

Now, some of this difference might be excused by the fact that John and Sherlock have simply had more screen time together, but several occurred during what should have been Mary’s time to shine, e.g.  the exchange of vows. In fact, Sherlock and Mary are set against each other by the narrative multiple times, allowing us to make direct comparisons. Some are short: Mary doesn’t give John her real name, but Sherlock does. Sherlock apologizes to John even though he doesn’t understand what he’s done. Mary refuses to apologize even though she does. Mary is willing to make John miserable to keep him (shooting Sherlock). Sherlock gives up John to make him happy. Others are longer, but still very clear: both Mary and Sherlock are involved in the bonfire rescue, but Sherlock does most of the work and he’s the only one to actually risk catching fire. It wouldn’t have been difficult to show both of them pulling John out, so that they could be more ‘equal’. In fact, her failure to get unduly close to the fire puts her behind Sarah, who helped fight off Sherlock’s attacker despite barely having met him or John and presumably having no experience with a weapon. Other comparisons are more complex and tap into a broader story: Sherlock is the dragon slayer, John is his damsel in distress (at least for now: it’s been the other way around before). Mary is neither. Some are subtler: Mary shows how far she’ll go for John by shooting his best friend. Sherlock does so by shooting the man who’s threatening him and, more importantly, by dragging himself back to life.

John himself always places Mary on the same level as Sherlock when speaking of his love for her. This starts with Mrs. Hudson when he equates his relationship with Mary to ‘moving on’ from Sherlock. It continues when he asks Sherlock to be his best man and describes them as ‘the two people I love and care about most’, conveniently failing to actually say he loved Mary more. There was absolutely no reason for the ambiguity, either from John’s perspective or the writers’, unless it’s meant to conceal something. It would have been very easy for him to describe Sherlock as the person he loved second only to Mary. After all, it’s culturally expected that one’s spouse is the person one loves above all others. To be loved second only to a fiancee or spouse is tremendously flattering. And yet John uses an ambiguous phrase that allows Sherlock to infer the culturally acceptable ranking without forcing John to lie if it’s not true. This happens again when John describes Mary ‘turn[ing his] life around’, then goes on to say she’s not the only one to do that. These conversations in which John triangulates his feelings for Sherlock with Mary as cultural buffer are the only ones on the show in which John openly and willingly addresses his emotions without drinking alcohol first. (Aside from the reconciliation scene: and isn’t that interesting?)

For another simple comparison, have a look at the following picture.

image

Show this to someone who’s never seen Series 3 and ask them which faces — there are four, if you’d like to make it easier — are for John’s wife/girlfriend. Did they get them all right? Here’s the key:

1. John about to propose to Mary. He downed a glass of wine first. ✓
2. John hugging Mary, but only smiling like this when he starts talking about how ‘it’s always the unexpected’ with Sherlock.
3. John about to propose ask Sherlock to be his best man. He just walked in on Sherlock torching an eyeball.
4. John dancing with Mary while Sherlock plays violin. At least one glass of champagne was involved. ✓
5. John reacting to Sherlock inviting him on a case.
6. John’s face as he’s about to talk to Mary about the flash drive. ✓
7. John reacts to Sherlock’s best man speech. At least one glass of champagne was involved.
8. John seeing Sherlock walk out of his bedroom at the end of The Empty Hearse. The champagne hasn’t been opened yet.
9. John dancing with Mary. Yes, I had to use the same scene twice to get enough good pictures of John looking happy with Mary. Again: champagne. ✓

Bonus drunk round:

image
John smiling at Sherlock after telling him he’s important ‘to some people’.

Another extremely important element to a romantic story is that of ‘romantic obstacles’, situations which must be overcome for the couple to come together or to stay together, thus proving the strength of their regard and the narrative importance of their love. Aside from the reconciliation after shooting Sherlock — which Mary did nothing to contribute to, and which may not even be real — Mary faced no obstacles. In fact, she was given quite the opposite: a playing field skewed heavily in her favor from the very beginning. She starts by dating an emotionally compromised, grieving man who has isolated himself from at least some of his friends to avoid the reminder of Sherlock. She then distracts him from his grief with dating and (going by the blog posts) drinking, thus earning his gratitude and a potential source of emotional blackmail. When Sherlock returns, she alternates between taking John’s side and taking his, verbally reinforces her superiority to Sherlock when John is not around (‘I’ll talk him round’ implies that she has more emotional power over John than Sherlock does, though we have absolutely no evidence this is true) while simultaneously positioning herself as ally. This encourages Sherlock to see her as the gatekeeper to his relationship with John, thus also encouraging him to support their relationship. She is now the only romantic partner John has had whom Sherlock has actively supported, and she has the single greatest potential obstacle to their relationship on her side. She plays up her suitability as a partner by claiming to like Sherlock — something rendered dubious by her later shooting of him. At the wedding she further diminishes Sherlock (again when John is not around) by suggesting that he is not special, and later implying that he is holding back on saving Sholto because he’s a ‘drama queen’ (John’s words, but Mary’s suggestion), thereby further implying that Sherlock is incapable of understanding John’s feelings the way she does. She only starts openly showing her antipathy toward Sherlock to John after they’re married and she’s pregnant and he has a cultural obligation to make an extra effort for her (in addition to needing to support her so he can maintain his rights to the purported child). In short, she takes or is given every possible cultural bulwark against John leaving her. She faces the exact opposite of a romantic obstacle.

In fact, Mary never wins against Sherlock. Ever. There are two instances that are generally cited as John choosing Mary over Sherlock: the marriage, and his reconciliation with Mary at the end of His Last Vow. Even if we accept the reconciliation as real, however, this is objectively untrue for one simple reason: Sherlock isn’t competing with Mary, he’s supporting her. He supported John’s engagement to Mary both verbally and in the form of planning their wedding, and (if the forgiveness is real), supported their reconciliation using the confrontation scene in 221b. If you score a goal in a game, the person cheering you from the stands doesn’t lose. It doesn’t matter if they want to play the game or if the umpire wishes they were in the game, they’re still not in it. Subjectively (in my interpretation), John only ‘chooses’ Mary in the first case because he believes Sherlock is unavailable, and because she is the only love interest he’s had that has not clashed with Sherlock. It is, from his perspective, his best chance at happiness with both Sherlock and romance. Sherlock, likewise believing John unavailable, also supports the marriage because he thinks it’s the best thing for John’s happiness and their continued friendship. In case you haven’t noticed, miscommunication is a major theme in their relationship. In the second case, I believe the forgiveness isn’t real. However, if it is, then it is done under duress by a man who’s suffered severe psychological trauma and betrayal and who has been told by the two people he loves most, including Sherlock, that it’s what he wants. Again, I don’t think Sherlock truly trusts Mary, but if he did it would again be based on his flawed understanding of both John’s feelings and his own worthiness of them (relative to Mary).

One of the better arguments in John and Mary’s favor is that for ‘realism’. In other words, it’s entirely normal for people of John and Mary’s age to lack the same level of passion and flirtatiousness we expect from younger people (or romantic fiction). It’s also normal for reconciliations to be slow and awkward rather than eager or ‘Hollywood’ dramatic. And if this were a quiet drama, or a naturalistic love story focused on John and Mary and covering their whole lives together, then that would be a strong argument. Unfortunately for Mary, this isn’t a quiet drama and in the context of the actual show it falls flat. Sherlock, for the last three seasons, has been a show about ‘two men and their frankly ridiculous adventures’. It’s a genre show, a bit pulpy and styled with ‘heightened’ reality. There are no emotional conversations, not really. Aborted attempts and dramatic confessions fit, but none of the sort of rational, adult heart-to-hearts that always look so out-of-character in fan fiction. John and Sherlock’s relationship is fraught with miscommunication and reticence, their progress written mostly between the lines. That’s not to say it’s hidden — not at all — but it lacks the foreground it would be getting in a true relationship drama (think Downton Abbey). It’s also the central relationship in the show, regardless of whether it’s interpreted as romantic or platonic or something in between. In other words, John and Mary’s relationship is having to stand up against John and Sherlock’s — and John and Sherlock’s relationship has all the drama and passion and romantic iconography that John and Mary’s lacks. The writers will certainly not have missed this. So, had they wished to convey a sense of truly deep love between John and Mary, they would have let it win against John and Sherlock in some meaningful way. And they haven’t.

In short, Mary was introduced as a comfortable, loving partner, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to John and Sherlock being together. She’s given no particularly unusual traits compatible with John (claims of him loving psychopaths notwithstanding), but made to seem too kind and charming and comfortable with Sherlock for John to ever want to leave her. Then, slowly, this characterization is dismantled. Little negative traits are allowed to seep through, though perhaps not obviously at first. She takes Sherlock’s side against John when it’s clear she shouldn’t. She makes little digs at Sherlock that slowly dismantle his self-image in his relationship with John. Then, finally, we get to see the ‘real’ Mary: a woman who is irritated by her husband’s attachment to Sherlock, and who would — at the very least — rather risk Sherlock’s life than her marriage, proof that she is ‘unworthy’ of John’s love (or it would be in almost any story). This is not the characterization of a romantic lead. This is, in fact, a classic romantic false lead. Which implies rather strongly that there is a true romantic lead. Hello, Sherlock.

None of this is meant to suggest that John didn’t truly love Mary, or that he didn’t feel that marrying her was the right decision for everyone involved. It is meant to suggest that Mary wouldn’t have been his first choice, or even a serious challenger, if he’d thought Sherlock were available. In my opinion, Sherlock, to John, was the great love of his life, but also the aromantic, asexual, possibly even sociopathic best friend who would never want a romantic relationship. Mary seemed like a gift: someone he loved who also loved Sherlock, allowing John to have the best of both worlds: a stable, loving home life and adventure with his best friend. No doubt he thought he would grow to love her as deeply as he loved Sherlock, perhaps more so as the flame of passion dwindled. But John was wrong. He and Sherlock are binary stars, orbiting each other as inexorably as gravity, and Mary was only ever a satellite. She pulls John away from a Sherlock a little at times, but the perturbations are mild. John tried, but in the end his wedding wasn’t the magic bullet both he and Mary seemed to expect. Sherlock is crucial to John’s complete happiness in a way Mary simply isn’t. Their marriage, and relationship in general, only works when it revolves in some way around Sherlock. So while John and Sherlock have been set up for a great love story, the kind we’re meant to root for even when they screw up or hurt each other, John and Mary have not. Sherlock is simply in a league of his own, and the show runners told us this by minimizing John and Mary’s romance.

I’ll let the show sum it all up: when Sherlock and John dance, it’s alone, at home, working against social pressure rather than with it. When John and Mary dance, it’s to the tune of Sherlock’s violin.

mild-lunacy:

When the exact right mix of clarity and insight purifies the merely obvious until it’s self-evident, you might think, ‘omg I know this! of course!’— it’s still a revelation. That’s the pleasure of really good analysis, for me. Anyway, although there’s a certain purity to a finely proven, perfectly made point, my joy in life is messing with things like that, so. I was thinking about the idea that John and Mary are (literally, in The Sign of Three, and metaphorically in His Last Vow) dancing ‘to the tune of Sherlock’s violin’. I think it’s important: the larger question of, ‘who is in control of the narrative in Series 3’?

Because there’s a narrative in fandom, I think, where Sherlock is a passive subject or even a victim of the events in series 3 (of Mary’s manipulations and her relationship to John, of Mycroft’s schemes in The Empty Hearse, even of his own sentiment). And of course, his pain is rather obvious. But I think Sherlock’s learning to feel, not to fear his own pain with the Mind Palace!Moriarty was equivalent to him learning to use it; to control it and master the situation more consciously. I was always attracted to netherworldvineyard's reading of the wedding walk-out, for example: not because it minimized Sherlock’s pain, but because it emphasized his agency, his learning process.

Sherlock chose to organize the whole wedding, and then he specifically wrote their dance and deduced the baby into existence, pretty much. That is probably the biggest argument against the idea that Mary manipulated Sherlock into the deduction, and there is no baby, just as the AGRA treasure is empty: that’s not really the way this game has been played. It’s not Mary’s game-board. That doesn’t mean that Mary’s and Mycroft’s manipulations don’t still exist, but I don’t think either of them have been able to control the composition of the narrative. That’s Sherlock’s tune, quite literally (and also probably Moriarty’s). This comes up again in mid0nz's musical analysis of the Baker Street confrontation in His Last Vow; musically as well as thematically, then, the waltz, their talk at Baker Street and John’s reconciliation with Mary at Christmas are unified. Sherlock’s influence is everywhere, from the gun John carries to the suspiciously ‘prepared words’. All the confrontations in His Last Vow after Sherlock is shot are on Sherlock’s turf where he controls the variables (the empty house he owns, his flat, his parents’ house). I don’t think this is accidental.

John and Mary’s whole relationship is filled with references to deflections and facades: there’s the empty house, the (potentially empty) flash drive, and Mary Morstan herself is essentially a null set. Indeed, yes, their relationship itself is empty as well, not shown as valid or developed in the same way as John and Sherlock’s.  Of course, this connects to salsify's meta on ‘facades as both theme and method in series 3’, since violethuntress responded that Mary would work as a ‘metonym for the series as a whole’. As Sherlock said to John, ‘you can trust Mary’, except of course we can’t. Similarly, we can trust the relationship we seemingly see on screen between an ordinary doctor and veteran and a kind nurse, but of course we can’t: neither Mary, nor John, nor their relationship is really what they seem. And instead of the theory that Mary will be the conduit between John and Sherlock in Series 3, what we really have is Sherlock being the necessary conduit between John and Mary.

Without Sherlock’s tune to direct their movements, it would (it will) all fall apart.

graceebooks:

I love a lot of this but I just can’t cotton to the idea that Sherlock is pulling strings in any even remotely effective large-scale way by His Last Vow. Obviously he starts out the series seeing himself that way; the master manipulator, about to sweep back into John’s life after dismantling Moriarty’s network and have everything fall back into place etc. And obviously he is still trying to pull the strings in His Last Vow, but I think the point is that he drops back into London wildly in over his head and tries to play puppet master in a landscape of incredibly complex and fraught emotional dynamics that he can’t even begin to understand or navigate. I think that’s part of what Mind Palace Moriarty was telling him - that feeling and understanding these emotions actually has the potential to make him MORE effective, not less so. But he isn’t there yet.

There is a difference between a passive subject and an active but ineffective one. I would certainly never call s3 Sherlock passive, but I think a lot of his action was of a kind with icarus flying off toward the sun. He isn’t a passive subject; I wouldn’t even call him a victim, barring the obvious on Mary’s part, and I also think a huge amount of the characters’ true motivations’ during s3 remain unrevealed to us currently, but it’s extremely difficult for me to envision Sherlock as “in control of the narrative” represented by those three episodes, particularly since balancing the power and control in John and Sherlock’s relationship strikes me as an ongoing project the writers’ began in earnest in s3.

I think ultimately we’re meant to see Sherlock a bit like a phoenix burnt in the ashes of his own drastically unforseen ignorance and utter inability to navigate the landscape of the human emotional experience, which he has suddenly found himself thrust so mercilessly into. I think you’re right that Sherlock is in the middle of a learning process that has begun to and will eventually fully culminate in his regaining his confidence and agency in a new way that includes emotional consciousness and literacy, but I think his rising from those ashes has only just barely begun. This isn’t to say that Mary HAS manipulated Sherlock into deducing the baby - although I do think it’s one of a very limited number of strong possibilities, it isn’t the ONLY one - but I just don’t see the compelling macronarrative argument against it that you do. That isn’t how Sherlock THOUGHT the game was played, but Sherlock is coming to realize that he didn’t even know the rules.

Façades are definitely a strong theme throughout the series, and I think virtually every main character has on one kind of façade or another during this series (if not multiple), but my read on the main façade motif around Sherlock is his crumbling façade of sociopathy and sexlessness.

Misunderstandings have also long been a running theme in John and Sherlock’s relationship, so I don’t think conscious, intentional control/maintenance of John and Mary’s relationship on Sherlock’s part is necessary for his actions to represent the “music” by which the “dance” of John and Mary’s marriage is conducted. I think the point being communicated during the first dance scene is that John is dancing the moves Sherlock taught him to the music Sherlock wrote with an unsatisfying replacement partner. Combined with the establishment of dancing as a metaphor for romance/sex and Molly’s eyes on Sherlock throughout his piece, for me this is our clearest “Mary and Molly’s fiancé are mirrors” moment.

Reading back through this it kind of seems like I am trying to argue that Sherlock had no hidden motivations and/or wasn’t pulling any secret strings or controlling anything behind the scenes this series that we aren’t privy to yet, but that isn’t actually what I’m saying. What I mean is that I also expect - or at the very least, very strongly hope - that Sherlock has a seriously incomplete perspective, that there is also a lot going on that he is utterly clueless to, and thus that he still has another rude awakening in store. My feelings about whatever machinations Sherlock was engaged in that are as of yet hidden from us is similar to your take on those of Mycroft and Mary; it’s not that they don’t exist, and yes, obviously Sherlock’s fingerprints are everywhere in this narrative, but personally I expect him to have wildly underestimated the extent to which his own plans and manipulations represent the whole picture and to be unaware of what others are planning. I mean to me, his drastic underestimation of Magnussen and subsequent unplanned killing communicate exactly that idea and in my opinion represent his “burning phoenix” moment.

For all their faults, the writers have shown a strong grasp of the need for balance in John and Sherlock’s relationship, and from where I’m sitting another “hiatus clusterfuck” resolution in which Sherlock has pulled the strings and John has danced is just utterly narratively prohibitive if any emotionally satisfying reconciliation between these two men is ever to be reached. You may be suggesting a situation in which John is privy to Sherlock’s plans, which I do agree is possible. However, it just seems unlikely to me that their real reconciliation would take place offscreen, so if that’s the case I think we have some serious flashback ground to cover. Either way, at this point Sherlock has spent what little “manipulating and keeping John in the dark for his own good” capital he ever had, and he knows it. This is why I actually suspect that the events of s3, and of His Last Vow in particular, were in part a set-up to demonstrate that John DOESN’T just dance to Sherlock’s tune, and that sometimes he can even be the one pulling the strings.


Mary and Sherlock are ganging up on John
 (Sherlock Meta by silentauroriamtherealceywoozle and archipelagoarchaea)

silentauroriamthereal

One thing I absolutely hate about series 3, unreservedly: Mary and Sherlock ganging up on John. Not cool, Sherlock. Seriously not cool.

I'm a Sherlock-centric fan, meaning that 99.9% of the time I'll take his side if there are sides. The vast majority of the fandom are John-centric fans, I'd say (except of course for the Mary-centric fans, but that's a different kettle of piranhas), but in this one thing, I am 1000% on John's side.

I hated it in The Empty Hearse when Mary suddenly took Sherlock's side, first about John "overreacting" (which he wasn't, at all!), then about his moustache (admittedly horrible, nightmare-worthy, but come ON, the timing!), then about Sherlock himself. That revelation wasn't about Mary's opinions of Sherlock. Her view of him was completely irrelevant in that moment. This was about John and Sherlock, about their friendship, and John was clearly Not Good then. That was not the time to hang back with the new person on the scene while your lover/almost-fiancé goes storming off to hail a cab. That's the time to stand by him, let him rant and shout and rage and be there for him. Later, when he's calmer, that's the time to share your own opinion. I hated that. And I hated it when Sherlock makes John feel like he and Mary are talking about him behind his back - and about a humiliating thing like weight gain, too (note: that's not to say that I personally consider weight gain to be humiliating or that it should be, just that to JOHN it was, and that they both knew that). And of course, the Baker Street post-revelation discussion is the worst, with both of them gaslighting John. I would REALLY like to think that Sherlock was lying to John to keep him safe, because he didn't know what a cornered, desperate assassin might do if her husband walked about on her, which John was clearly on the verge of doing when Sherlock bulldozed him with "logical" reasons to stay (none of which Mary either supported or denied). If that was the case, though, then I wanted an explanation sooner rather than later. If there isn't one forthcoming, then I won't be happy with Sherlock about this at all, because what the fuck.

Anyway, moral of the story: loyalty is important. And John is such a beautifully, staunchly loyal person that to have these two outsmarting him and arranging his schedule and commenting on his weight gain and whatever else just makes me really angry.

ceywoozle:

Omg all the yes. This was a huuuuuuge problem for me in s3. I am a johncentric viewer (are there more of us? I always feel so outnumbered by the sherlockcentrics lol!) But I adore Sherlock. He’s such a bloody git but oh god I love him so.

But s3, I have never been angrier and it is exactly these scenes that you mention here. Sherlock jiving John and John jiving Sherlock is nothing new, but at THOSE moments, when ohn is at his weakest, his most vulnerable, to have the two people he loves the most in the world ganging up and making him feel worthless? I was so not okay with that. I AM not okay with that. This is not Sherlock hate, but oh god I wanted to slap him myself in these moments.

This is one of the reasons I had so much trouble with Mary even before she shot Sherlock, too. Just the fact that she was so clearly pursuing her own agenda instead of just being a decent human being towards the person she should most be caring about in these moments. It’s implied that she’s the one who got him through his grief, but where is her support of him now?

I’m basically the opposite of you. If there is a ever a point at which one needs to be taking sides, I am invariably on John’s. But usually it’s more a “tsk tsk Sherlock really?” These parts were more like “WTF SHERLOCK?!?”

They left me so angry and is basically the biggest problem with Sherlock’s fall, as well. Not the idea that Sherlock pretended to be dead and involved himself with Jim, but that he left John behind while doing it. There is nothing that John wants more than to feel that he is needed and wanted and being helpful, and when Sherlock jumped he tore that happy little bubble to pieces. And in these moments, when Sherlock is lying about Mary, when he is planning things without John and manipulating John behind his back…This is an exact replay of why Sherlock’s death and Sherlock’s return hurt John so much, and to think that Sherlock went through all that, came out the other end, and STILL doesn’t get that is….Heartbreaking. Which is why everything in me is hoping that John is in on it too.

archipelagoarchaea:

I’m, er, 99.9% Sherlock-centric, and I really struggle to get into John’s head, so I’m not as emotional about this as you guys, though I see your point and agree that it’s a terrible place for John. It’s made me want to get into Sherlock’s head, though, ‘cause there’s so much about what goes on in S3 with John, Sherlock, and Mary that I don’t think makes sense on the surface.

First of all: Sherlock conspiring with Mary. Maaaan, no, that can’t be right. If Sherlock’s going to conspire with someone, he’d much rather conspire with John. There is just no way he likes anything about Mary more than he likes the same thing about John. I really can’t see them being genuinely buddy-buddy. What I can see is Mary manipulating Sherlock into treating her as the gateway to John. I mean, it’s even right there in the text: Sherlock admits he’s not good at understanding emotions (‘human nature’), so Mary tells him ‘I’ll talk him ‘round.’ Rather than saying ‘He’s hurt and angry, try again when he’s calmed down,’ or ‘He just needs more time,’ or ‘I don’t think you understand how much you hurt him,’ she tells him that she’ll get John back for him. She might as well have said ‘Your access to John depends on me. I control his life.’ And I think Sherlock took this to heart. That’s why he gets so into the wedding planning thing: it’s a way to spend time with John even when John’s spending time with Mary. Before Reichenbach they’d had all their free time together, as long as John wasn’t visiting friends or on a date. Now that’s ‘John and Mary”s place, and Sherlock has to figure out what cracks he can — and is welcome to — fit into. I don’t think it’d occur to him to invite John over for ‘Bond night’ or anything of the sort, so that basically means (a) cases and (b) expanding his best man duties well beyond the norm.*

I think this might also explain, just a little bit, the whole ‘control your wife’ thing in tSoT. I mean, internalized misogyny is one answer — he certainly has some issues with that — but I wonder if he hasn’t also internalized some nasty ideas regarding marriage. He seems to believe that each spouse controls the other, rather than being partners who live their own lives together out of choice. When John is angry with Sherlock, Sherlock looks to his future wife to ‘fix’ the problem. When Mary turns on Sherlock, Sherlock looks to John to ‘fix’ the problem. Anyway, just a thought.

So His Last Vow, then! The prevailing opinion seems to be that Sherlock has been in contact with Mary behind John’s back. I have trouble with that idea. I certainly think it’s entirely in character for Sherlock to go into a snit and refuse to contact John because he wants John to prove he’s still important. In that case, it’s plausible that he would still talk to Mary just so he’d know what his best friend is up to. However, if that were true then why would he be surprised by the whole cycling thing? If he’s been in contact the whole time, Mary wasn’t telling him much. Also, I think the desire to know what John was doing would be outweighed by the pain of knowing that John was out living his life without Sherlock. He’s an emotional idiot, but he’s not that masochistic. Also, while Mary is very sneaky and a good actor, she’d have to hide from Sherlock the fact that she is fed up with him, and from John the fact that she is in contact with Sherlock even when he’s not. Can you imagine how angry he’d be with her? Bit risky, that.

So here’s what I think actually happened: Mary cornered Sherlock at Bart’s when John was in another room. She then told him that John had really just been so bored recently. He didn’t know how to entertain himself, anymore, without cases and he wasn’t getting out of the house enough. He’s even gained 7 pounds! The cycling to work just wasn’t cutting it. So could Sherlock maybe run him a bit? For Mary this would accomplish several things: it would get John out of her hair so she could make her little assassin run, it would subtly reinforce the idea that Sherlock is more important to John for the entertainment value than the emotional connection, and it would give John a temporary ‘Sherlock fix’ so that he’d be less irritating with her. I think this is pretty well reinforced by the scene in The Sign of Three where she manipulates John into ‘running’ Sherlock behind Sherlock’s back (and to a lesser extent vice versa).

As to why Sherlock didn’t basically tell John this: well, as much as I hate that scene in The Sign of Three, he is a drama queen. And he’s going to try to play the role of the hyper-aware and in-control consulting detective as hard as he can, if only to impress John. I don’t think it’d occur to him that he was being controlling. If you look over the rest of the show, there’s really no evidence for that. He doesn’t use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, but that’s just because he’s rude (and because he leads when on cases — he’s the commander, no need for pleasantries). The closest we get to him arguing with John’s independence is when the whole ‘not much cop, this caring lark’ thing, which had more to do with trying to prove his point than with making John do what he wants. If you look at The Blind Banker, for example, he ‘tells’ John they’re going out for dinner, but doesn’t really argue when John says he has a date. He tries to make the case that they’re going on a date, but he doesn’t say anything that would suggest he thinks John has no right to do what he wants. Yes, he crashes the date, but John could have still ignored him if he really wanted. Really, the only reason we don’t have much more evidence for Sherlock’s respect for John is the fact that John does whatever he wants anyway.  Which, of course, makes the whole manipulation thing even sadder, but… I don’t think this is Sherlock taking John for granted. I think it’s Sherlock seeing John as his partner, and (to him) of course they work well together and John will do what Sherlock says on cases just as Sherlock will do what John says when someone is dying.

That’s my headcanon, anyway.

So, the million dollar question: what’s going on in the confrontation scene? If Sherlock’s really hiding everything from John because John’s such a terrible liar, and John is obliviously going along, it really just seems like Reichenbach redux. And that’s not just problematic in terms of character development, it’s problematic in terms of a stagnating narrative. I think it could be rescued somewhat if John saw through Sherlock and/or Mary and had his own plan for dealing with her which he hadn’t told Sherlock. In fact, I think it’d be interesting even if John was half-in-on Sherlock’s plan, ‘cause it’d be Sherlock sort of getting a taste of his own medicine. What better way to really cement the lesson of Reichenbach? If John’s not up to something, I’ll be very surprised. Not just because it seems very out-of-character for him to forgive Sherlock’s near-murderer (except, possibly, if he’s so completely broken he’s not even trying anymore), but because it’d mean that the massive time gaps in His Last Vow and the missing bedside scenes really would just be bad writing. And I don’t like to ascribe things to bad writing until I have no other choice. I really really hope Sherlock told John something, though. Even if it’s just ‘follow my lead, whatever I say’. ‘Cause yeah, that’s one issue I really think they need to get over sooner rather than later. Sherlock’s got plenty of other character development to get done, he doesn’t need to save this one for later, too. And how much more of that sort of thing could John even take? He has to be in on it to some extent, or his loyalty will stretch credulity. He has to.

Aaaanyway, that’s my long-winded opinion.

*FYI, if you look closely at the ‘wedding planning wall’ you’ll see that Sherlock has an entire section on ‘security’, which makes me kinda sad.

ceywoozle:

I love your long-winded opinion so don’t apologise to me at least ;)

I actually pretty much agree with you completely, as odd as that might sound given my johncentric rant lol! But for me I think it’s less about not being able to understand where each character is coming from, and more just about where my greater emotional sympathy lies.

Like I love John. He is one of my favourite characters... Pretty much ever. And I have an unholy amount in common with him in terms of basic personality type and the way he reacts to things so I get him. I completely get him, and because I get him and because I see so much of myself in him, I do feel the greater amount of sympathy for him. I also think that out of the two of them, given what they’ve each gone through, John deserves more sympathy, but obviously I would think that, wouldn’t i? ;) But a great deal of that also comes from the fact that there are a whooooole lot of people out there who seem to think he’s an asshole. Like, a lot. I’m definitely not saying anyone on this post! But when people start complaining that he didn’t forgive Sherlock right away, that he didn’t leave Mary for Sherlock, that he didn’t dance with him at his wedding... I mean good lord. I’m sorry but good lord. Like I don’t even have to think about why those views are ridiculous because I absolutely understand his motivations behind them, which really isn’t fair to get annoyed with people just because they don’t, but I have to admit that pretty much the fastest way to get me to unfollow someone is if they post something awful about John. (Man, I’m not even sorry, I’m just such a terrible person.)

With regards to how Sherlock thinks that it’s through Mary that he has his only hope of getting back to John, I completely agree. I think the manipulation is happening on Mary’s side for the most part. We have her face in the restaurant when he first appears and she even says “do you have any idea what you did to him” (or something to that effect) so it’s not that she’s not perfectly aware of the effect Sherlock’s death had on John. I think she knows exactly what she’s doing when she suddenly turns around and starts playing them both, by subtly encouraging Sherlock into being as big of an asshole as he can (oh look, someone finds me hilarious and thinks John is overreacting so it must be true!) and john into feeling as isolated and humiliated as he possible.

(I love your explanation of the “control your wife” scene, btw. I think Sherlock is a sexist jackass at times, but I love this added layer that you give it. So much heartbreak ugh!)

I love your headcanon regarding Mary approaching Sherlock in St Barts. However, I still think Sherlock and Mary being in contact behind John’s back over text or something is also still plausible. In no way do I think Sherlock would ever approach Mary. I think he’s too proud but I also think he’s too scared. He’s written John off as beyond his reach. He doesn’t think he’s worth John, so he probably thinks of the idea of trying to get into contact with John as forcing himself on a man who doesn’t want him. Sherlock is such an odd combination of self deprecation and conceit and I understand that feeling of thinking “I’m not good enough” and covering it with a layer of “well what do I need them for anyway?” I think a lot of us can relate to that, if not now then at some point in our lives. (Both he and John are such gloriously complex characters my god.) I absolutely believe that it was Mary who approached Sherlock. She’s subtle and sneaky and so incredibly manipulative. She is so smart in the way she handles these boys it’s honestly terrifying in its subtly and quiet brilliance. I can’t picture the hospital scene you put together specifically, but I can easily picture her dropping short texts, small hints of how John is getting by. I’m still not sure if I believe whether or not she actually loves John, but I do think she feels possessive over him, and I also feel that she is under someone else’s orders other than her own.

Oossibly another way of looking at her impatience with Sherlock and John is her impatience with the situation itself. If she has no interest in being where she is at all, if she’s just there waiting out the final confrontation, waiting for her next order on when to move, and then suddenly surprise! Pregnant! I mean shit, that’s got to put a bit of a delay on things. Is she waiting for this baby to be born just as much as John and Sherlock are? (But honestly I’m just throwing ideas out here, I haven’t thought too deeply about them, just wondering if maybe there’s another way to look at it that we might have overlooked.)

As to Sherlock’s manipulation and use of John, while I think these things do happen, I think they happen because John lets them. John is entirely capable of standing up to Sherlock, the problem is is that he doesn’t want to. You’re right in just about everything you say about this. Yes, Sherlock is an annoying little git, but John loves it when Sherlock’s an annoying little git. He’ll never admit it, obviously, but he never ever stops it, either, and I think that’s hugely telling. John Watson is many things but a weak character is not one of them.

Which is why it is so incredibly important to me that he does get his agency back in the next series. Because all through s3 he was floundering in the wake of people who were cleverer than him and I think it’s because the brittle shields he had managed to build around himself at the end of s2 were utterly shattered by Sherlock’s “death” and I don’t think he’s over that yet. He can say he’s forgiven Sherlock, but I don’t think he’s in any way forgotten what that feeling was like and I don’t think Sherlock understands the depth of what he’s done to John Watson, either. I don’t think it’s possible for them to find that middle ground until they figure these things out, but it’s not the fault of one or the other. This is just who they are in all their bloody infuriating glory, which is why so many of us have this unholy urge to shake and scream at them to JUST TALK ALREADY.

So yes, I think John needs to rediscover who he is without reference to either Sherlock or Mary, but that’s for him to do. It’s no one’s responsibility but his own. Not even Sherlock can do this for him, nor should he. But while John’s still lost and building his life up around other people, he will never be able to be whole because the relationship between John and Sherlock as it stands now is just too uneven. Not because of anything Sherlock’s done or not done, but because John is still that broken man who limped home from the war and he needs to figure out how to fix himself before he can enter into any kind of equal partnership, especially with a personality like Sherlock’s.

With regards to what’s going on in the confrontation scene, that’s pretty much exactly how I feel. It needs to be different, because otherwise it’s just The Fall all over again in which case nothing has changed at all. And given the length and infrequency of the episodes, there’s just no room for that kind of repetition and lack of forward motion in the narrative or in the character development. Hell, s3 was all about character development. The plot certainly didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense on its own. And to circle right back to the beginning again is ridiculous.

What does make sense is if this is deliberately framed as a repeat of The Fall….With that one crucial difference. That—that—would be a beautiful narrative.