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.