Why the Watsons can't make it to 

"Happily Ever After" 

(Sherlock Meta by wimpytentacle)

When His Last Vow begins, John and Mary have been married for a month, and have a baby on the way. They’ve only been back from their Sex Holiday for a few weeks. And already there are a few cracks in their domestic bliss, before the action of the episode ever gets started.

As viewers, we all seem to understand something about John Watson that the good doctor himself just cannot seem to accept: He is ill-suited to living life as a normal middle-class suburban family man. A month into his marriage, he’s not having nightmares of dangerous situations; he’s dreaming of them. As in, he wants them. They are lacking. He’s bored out of his mind.

When Mary’s friend Kate shows up at the door at an early hour, John fails to invite her in until Mary reminds him, he can’t remember whether Isaac is Kate’s husband or her son, and John is blunt and insensitive about bringing up Isaac’s drug problem. Mary is annoyed with all three transgressions; seems she’s much more comfortable with leaving her old life behind and settling into domesticity, and she’s a bit miffed at John’s failure to conform. When John mentions Sherlock Holmes and then says that he hasn’t seen Sherlock in ages, Mary points out that there are people who don’t know who Sherlock is, and specifies that it’s been a month since John has seen him. She’s pointing out that there’s life beyond Sherlock Holmes, and that she doesn’t think a month qualifies as “ages.”

Once the source of Kate’s troubles has been adequately determined, John of course sees his chance to get out of the house and go in search of his adrenalin fix, and he clearly has no intention of taking Mary with him. When Mary tries to stop him, he chafes at the restraint and snaps at her. And when John says he’s “being neighborly,” Mary asks, “Since when?” which is yet another indicator that the lifestyle he and Mary are trying to live is absolutely not agreeing with him. He’s made no effort to get chummy with the other normal, domestic, family types in the neighborhood.

Basically, a month in, and he’s bored, antisocial, moody, and a bit rude. Sounds familiar.

This is just the backdrop against which their major conflict occurs (and really, for most people, I’m pretty sure this would also be the last conflict of the relationship): Mary shoots Sherlock in the chest, and John finds out his lovely new wife is actually a former assassin who has assumed a false identity and deceived him from day one.

In Magnussen’s room, Mary had no qualms at all about pulling the trigger on Sherlock. Sure, she didn’t, say, go for the instant kill shot. But the shot she took still had a very high chance of killing him, in spite of her “benevolent” decision to call an ambulance after shooting him. But taking the shot at all was an act of cowardice: She had to incapacitate Sherlock Holmes before he could spill the beans to John. Her choices were to either a) shoot no one and leave, at which time Sherlock would undoubtedly tell John, b) shoot both Sherlock and Magnussen, thereby making John a suspect, and c) to shoot Sherlock to put him out of the action and leave Magnussen alive as a witness to clear John of any wrongdoing. She literally shot her husband’s best friend because she felt it was the best bet for her to keep the life she wanted and avoid the consequences of her deception.

It’s worth pointing out here that before she chose her course of action, she asked Sherlock whether John was with him. That is what made her decision for her. If John were not there to be implicated in the shooting, she would absolutely have killed both Magnussen and Sherlock and made her clean getaway. John would have never been the wiser that his own wife had murdered his best friend.

Next up, Mary stoops to the level of going into the hospital room of a man she shot, a man who has been revived from death, a man who is basically still half-dead in a hospital bed and barely conscious, and immediately starts making demands of him to keep her secret, her extremely large lie which nearly resulted in his death, from his best friend. Stay classy, Mrs. Watson.

Mary’s ruthless selfishness surfaces again when she meets Sherlock in the empty house. She doesn’t hesitate to draw her gun on what she thinks is Sherlock lurking in the shadows. Why? Because she’s more than willing to sacrifice Sherlock if it means she gets to keep her man. She straight up says she will do anything to keep John from finding out her secret and leaving her. It is a threat.

There’s a sharp contrast between Mary and Sherlock here: Mary is willing to do something which she knows will bring John lasting unhappiness (killing Sherlock), in order to secure her own happiness. Sherlock, on the other hand, facilitates a clearing of the air between John and Mary and then starts the ball in motion for them to patch things up if John chooses. It’s a selfless act that he thinks will give John a chance at long-term happiness even if it’s at the expense of his own.

I’m sure one might argue that Mary was desperate and in need of help. Yes, that is true. And yet, instead of coming clean with John early on, or at least perhaps once they found out Sherlock was alive and well (or pretty much any time before letting a man marry a lie) and letting Sherlock and John help her, she chose the cowardly way out. In fact, by not telling John the truth, she actually endangered John (as evidenced by him ending up in a bonfire in TEH), because… she was afraid if she told him, he would leave her. So that’s two people whose lives she’s endangered so that she could selfishly secure her own wants.

In the flat, Mary continues to astound me by trying to pawn off some responsibility onto John, by telling him, “You did see that. And you married me.” Sorry, Mary, but assuming that your husband must have subconsciously sensed the danger vibe does not absolve a person from the responsibility of being honest. It certainly doesn’t make it okay to deceive a man into marrying a woman he actually knows nothing about. And if his attraction to danger was so obvious, then why not be honest with him early on? The man’s been to war. It’s not as though he wouldn’t have understood career killing in the name of queen and country. Trying to put it on him for being attracted to danger is an attempt to manipulate him into accepting the fault and staying in the relationship.

And then the flash drive. As I’ve just said, a past as an intelligence agent and assassin for government agencies would be really unlikely to put off someone like John, so what can we infer from the statement, “You won’t love me when you’re finished?” No, there’s some other stuff floating around on that flash drive. I suspect there are specific things that Mary knows John could never forgive (if I had to guess, I’d say involvement with Moriarty, but I suppose I’ll be waiting a while to find out).

At any rate, the shake-up with Mary leads John to give her the silent treatment for months. So, at this point, they presumably had a decent Sex Holiday, followed by a few weeks of chafing domestic life, followed by several months of not speaking to each other. During this time, we’re not sure where John stayed; Sherlock had clearly made Baker Street available to him, but Sherlock and John apparently did not arrive at the Holmes Christmas dinner together, so I’m just not certain. We are also not certain whether John has been actively involved in any of Mary’s pre-natal doctor’s appointments or anything while they’ve not been speaking. A problem this major, causing this level of rift, this early in a marriage, does not bode well for future married bliss for anyone, especially when the problem in question is a level of dishonesty that will sow seeds of distrust for years to come. Especially when the man who has been lied to is already known for having “trust issues.”

And yet, after the months of silence, John decides to destroy the flash drive, wipe the slate clean, and forgive Mary. Forgive her so thoroughly, in fact, that he can stand on an airstrip holding her hand while Sherlock Holmes is flown into exile for saving her skin in order to make John happy. Wow, John.

If John really thinks that something this major can just be swept under the rug, that this giant clusterfuck of deceit, cowardice, selfishness, and ruthlessness is not going to rear its ugly head again, and that nothing on the flash drive he so kindly refused to read is likely to come back and bite them, then he is really, really living with his head in the clouds. Mary has already illustrated that she won’t even confide in him when he’s in danger if it means she’ll have to sacrifice her own wants. So if anything is lurking in her past that could be a threat, he’s going to end up finding out the hard way.

And then John tells her that if her false name is good enough for her, it’s good enough for him, too. This is pure denial, plain and simple. There is a kind of life he thinks he’s supposed to be living, and he’s willing to completely ignore Mary’s true identity in order to go on living with a fictional persona who doesn’t actually exist. He’s agreeing to living a lie. With a woman who, deep down, he cannot possibly trust. And even if nothing ever goes wrong again, John was already not happy with their life together. So now on top of his original discontent, there is the added lingering distrust.

Basically, everything about this relationship spells doom. Mary did not trust John with her secrets, and now John cannot trust Mary with pretty much anything when the chips are down. No matter what John tries to tell himself, his doubts about Mary will continue to nag at him, and they’ll get worse anytime anything goes wrong in the relationship (and will be there for him to dwell on whenever he’s discontent about mundane married life). And I’m about 5000% certain there is going to come a time when John wishes he had read whatever was on that flash drive. I’m also betting Mary’s words were more true than even she thought when she told Sherlock, “I’ll keep him in trouble.”