Thoughts about Mary

 (Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

Anonymous asked:

I'm sure you've answered this but what are your thoughts on Mary: her relationship/feelings for John and Sherlock, any motives she might have, her level of sanity/other issues, her background, any other personal take on her. Also do you think Sherlock actually trusts her as a person, with himself, and especially with John? How do you think Sherlock felt about Mary's betrayal, especially because not only did he fail to deduce whom/what she was , but because prior to this he actually liked her?

Ivy Blossom:

Hmm. At the moment I’m sticking to what we know or can easily presume based on what we see. This is largely because there are so many big giant unanswered questions, and so many things that look glaringly false but aren’t actively contradicted at the end of series three that I genuinely haven’t got a clue how to start answering stuff without pitching headlong into pure fantasy speculation. I like to work from the perspective of these things logically follow, and that’s genuinely hard to do after series three.

Now, let’s see how many words I can write when the only thing I can really say is I don’t know.

Mary’s feelings for John

I think she loves John, I really do. I don’t think that part’s a lie. I don’t know why she’s lied to him. I don’t know why she’s turned herself into something he wants to love but doesn’t ultimately satisfy him. Since she could have turned herself into anything, she might as well have turned herself into a perfect female Sherlock replica. She certainly has the skills. I’m not sure why she didn’t do that. There must be a reason.

I don’t know why she hooked up with him initially. It was a whirlwind relationship, she engineered it carefully. I don’t know why. There’s nothing there to tell us why. It could be just because she really wanted to, or he could have been some kind of cover for her. Given that she was absolutely lying to him from the start, we know something’s got to be up. She must have had some sort of plan. But I have no idea what that might be!

Mary’s feelings for Sherlock

I think Mary genuinely liked Sherlock, too. I don’t think she had a big plan to shoot him. I think she felt mildly badly about killing him, but only mildly. I don’t know where they stand at the end of series three. I don’t understand how the pieces actually fit together. It seems clear to me that she had every intention of killing Sherlock, and I have doubts that she called an ambulance for him. If she didn’t, she knows Sherlock is lying. If that’s true, then she knows there’s a war going on between them that both of them are keeping from John. I find that very interesting, and I would love to see that play out, but it’s pure speculation at this point. There are just too many things we don’t know yet to be certain. There are hints that could go various ways, and that’s all we’ve got.

Mary’s level of sanity/other issues

Mary is definitely a psychopath, that much seems really clear to me. Not only because she admits to being one, but because she has two very distinct personalities through series three, and we know they worked hard to make sure those two personalities are extremely distinct. We’ve seen fake!sociopath before, and the comparison between the very emotional fake one and the stone cold real one is pretty stark. Mary is as cold as they come. She’s an excellent actor and has a brilliant mind. I think she is exactly what Sherlock aspires to become, in fact. She is perfectly in control of her emotions, which he is not. It’s pretty interesting that, without realizing it, John hooked up with someone who is what Sherlock is trying to be!

Mary’s background

I don’t know anything whatsoever about Mary’s background. Obviously, we have been left to wonder about that one. There is exactly zero information about it. I will make no arguments based on information that isn’t there, nor will I find any argument based on speculation about Mary’s background particularly compelling. We simply don’t know. Sherlock is a drug addict who yells at traumatized victims to make them speak faster and isn’t averse to causing people physical pain to get the answers he wants, and he comes from a very loving family. Mycroft is a cold and brilliant bureaucrat who, apparently, sacrificed one of his siblings without hesitation, and he comes from that same loving family. I can’t make any suppositions about what led Mary to become an assassin except that it seems pretty easy for her to shoot people with terrifying accuracy and lie. She’s not English, we know that. She worked for the CIA. Does that mean it’s more likely she’s American? I have no idea. She’s a blank page, as far as I’m concerned.

Does Sherlock Trust Mary?

I don’t know, but I don’t think so. The evidence on this is too thin on the ground. We have Sherlock’s dialogue, but I feel like “I’m not John, I know when you’re fibbing” was there for a reason. If they wanted Mary to be genuinely sorry for shooting Sherlock, I just don’t think they would have shot the actual shooting scene the way they did. There is some emotion on her face when she does it. There’s a tinge of regret there, because I think they were actually friends and liked each other. But it’s only there for a second. There’s no crisis of conscience there. I think Sherlock is probably fibbing in his explanation about what Mary did and Mary knows it. But it’s hard to know for sure. We’re not meant to know yet. We’re meant to be left wondering, and I really, really am.

In some ways I feel like Janine and Sherlock are in parallel here. Janine says, “You lied and lied,” and “We could have been friends.” But now, no. Now they will not be friends, because Janine knows what kind of man Sherlock is and will never trust him again. In fact she will go out of her way to hurt him and humiliate him. She lies to the press, she screws with his morphine. They were friends. They liked each other, but Sherlock lied to her to serve is own ends in spite of that, and now everything’s changed. I feel like this is exactly where Sherlock is with Mary. That’s hella speculation, but we know these writers always use minor characters to parallel the subtext of their storylines. That’s some weak foundations to build an argument, though! So I’ll rest with: I don’t know.

As for Sherlock trusting Mary with John’s safety, well: Mary must not have anything to gain from John being hurt (physically, at least). She sought Sherlock’s help to save John the first time, but wouldn’t seek his help on her own to deal with Magnussen. I think John’s safety is important to both of them.

But Sherlock thinks John is in danger, and that brought Sherlock back to life. So we now know that zombie!Sherlock’s only interest is in protecting John at all costs, and he sees Mary as a danger to him. So I would presume that if he’s lying to Mary and John, he’s doing it to protect John. But at that point we’re veering into speculation again (though based on the evidence of Sherlock’s conversations with himself, which are unlikely to be untrue, but still). I’m not comfortable speculating with so little evidence. To me it seems we only have some vague fingerposts on all of this. Nothing definitive enough to feel completely certain.

How does Sherlock feel about Mary’s lies, and not having sniffed them out himself?

Probably pretty dumb, I would imagine. But I don’t know. We don’t see him react to his failure. Sherlock doesn’t beat himself up for failures all that much, though. The only evidence we have about his reaction to his own failures is that he doesn’t like John to write about them. He seems to take his own mistakes in stride in real life. I find that a bit surprising, but perhaps it’s part of the way he’s pushed his emotions to one side. Maybe he’s just really good at putting his feelings of disappointment and inadequacy in a box when he has work to do. He must have felt inadequate all the time growing up with Mycroft, after all.

We don’t get to see his reaction to his grand failure to work out Mary’s true persona and motives in time to stop his own murder. He doesn’t seem to kick himself for it. Even Mycroft in his head doesn’t give him a hard time about it. Though, to be fair, he had other things to worry about at the time. So I have no idea. I feel like there’s another shoe left to drop on that front, but again, speculation.

In sum: I really don’t know anything at all about Mary, or how Sherlock feels about Mary. It’s a quagmire of what ifs and ill-supported speculation, and that is all.