The "she’s unbelievably hot" scene as a parallel for John and Mary

 (Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

More thoughts on this subject…

I suppose on the flip side you could read the “she’s unbelievably hot” scene as a parallel for John and Mary. I mean, John says it himself: Sherlock is trying to show him and Mary and model of a stable couple. That isn’t exactly why they’re visiting the Holmeses, though. as it turns out. But logically, it works. To a point.

You could say that Mary herself a flake (someone who can’t be trusted). Mary is also brilliant. The bit of dialogue that doesn’t really fit the Sherlock and John parallel, but seems to possibly fit Mary and John, is the idea of “giving it all up for children.” Is this a hint that Mary is set to really give up her exciting and murder-drenched former life for her as yet unborn child, to genuinely turn over a new leaf and put her assassin outfit and silencer in the bin for good? Maybe so.

While we have a long history of seeing John rail against Sherlock’s flakiness, and watching him admire Sherlock’s brains (and, somewhat more subtly, his beauty), we have no such history with Mary. There’s a number of hints that what attracts John to Mary is similar to what attracts John to Sherlock, but we don’t really see that in action, making the parallel feel a bit hollow. I don’t get the impression that the Mary John fell in love with is a flake, nor a genius. And she isn’t played as a femme fatale, or as unbelievably hot.

John doesn’t know that Mary is as brilliant as she is until he sees it in the worst possible way. Mary hides her genius from him, along with her penchant for violence and crime, which is, arguably, the thing that John finds sexiest of all (when done the right way, of course). John isn’t thrilled by her brilliant manipulation of him and others the way he is (however unwisely) with Sherlock’s. John would rather Mary hide all that, keep her past in the past, and proceed into their shared future as this fake person, Mary Watson, nurse, the less brilliant, less exciting”facade” he has come to know.

While Amanda Abbington is a beautiful lady, Mary is not tarted up and played as a cover girl in series three. It seems to me they had to work hard to make her look less attractive than she actually is (devil’s horns, for instance). While Sherlock dazzles everyone with his cheekbones and his Belstaff, Mary is a much quieter presence. She wears practical, not sexy, clothes. She wears flannel to bed. She’s not Irene with her brazen nudity and fancy coif. She doesn’t ooze sex. Sherlock, perched on the top of a building in the moonlight, absolutely does.

Are Sherlock’s parents meant to be John and Mary, or John and Sherlock? I can only imagine that the dual reading is deliberate. It’s kind of daring you to see it both ways. It almost looks like a gotcha! getting ready to spring out at you.