A question about Molly and her 'bad day'

 (Sherlock meta by rosamund–mary, half-past-chaffinch and vulgarweed)

rosamund–mary: 

So when Sherlock calls Molly and she says she had a bad day what defines a bad day as a mortician ? Would it be having to do an autopsy on a child? ??? I’m really curious and would love to hear your thoughts!!

half-past-chaffinch:

I love this question! Thank you so much for posting it!

To answer your question: maybe you’re right…having to do a difficult autopsy would be tough. Or maybe (harkening back to TAB) she had to deal with some hospital administrator or some doctor being dismissive with her for some reason. Or something else going on with work or with her family (we know her dad died, but don’t know much or anything else)

But Molly’s comment about her “bad day” it is almost a throwaway line, and it’s one that usually gets passed over as folks jump to analyzing the “meat” of the scene. So that’s why I’m glad you brought it up.

In the world of Sherlock, everything by definition revolves around Sherlock. That’s what we see, that’s what the show presents. But in that scene, with that line, the show lets us know that Molly exists, on her own, as a whole functioning human being even when Sherlock isn’t in the room. She has her own highs and lows, unrelated to the Great Detective. She was having a bad day before her phone rang, before Sherlock entered into it. She had something else going on in her life, and her emotional life, unrelated to him.

Sure, maybe some will say she was upset because she’d heard about the Baker St explosion, and hadn’t heard from Sherlock since then, so she was upset. But that didn’t seem to be it. If she was worried about him, wouldn’t she have answered the phone when she saw it was him? Or at least registered some visible relief that we could see even if she acted annoyed to Sherlock? But she didn’t; she ignored his call the first time he rang, and only picked up when he rang again. So it seems her “bad day” * was completely unrelated to Sherlock and his drama.

And I love that we got that little hint, that indication of the fact that the Molly we see with Sherlock is just the tip of the iceberg of who Molly is; there is a whole other part of her existence that we never see. But that is still there out of sight.

And I also love that when we see her, upset from her bad day, she is taking care of herself: she’s in her lovely kitchen, making herself a cup of tea (with lots of oranges apparently…don’t go near that woman when she is armed with a sharp knife :D ). She is not wallowing, she is not being self-destructive. She is upset, but she is doing something nice for herself.

*oh and Molly saying she’s having a “bad day” is just one of several dozen little callbacks Mofftiss gave us to S1 and particularly to A Study in Pink. It recalls her (I think) very first line in the who show, when she asks Sherlock “Bad day, is it?” when she finds him flogging a corpse in her morgue.

vulgarweed:

I just figured she had a bad day like any other person might have a bad day. She had a fight at work. She had a family problem. She had a conflict with a friend. She’s out of spoons and weary and had bad transit luck. She got bad financial news. She’s been a little bit ill and didn’t sleep well. Her rent got raised. Her cat is sick. Who knows? it’s not relevant to the plot directly - but she is a human being who exists in her own right 24 hours a day, she’s not just an auxiliary (or, god forbid, a fucking “mirror” for some other character, omg is that line of thinking hateful to me) so she has bad days.

Not everything DOES revolve around Sherlock. Nor should it. Pay attention to the women characters in their own right, and you will see evidence of their own independent lives. Mrs Hudson is probably the strongest example of this, but Molly definitely has her own existence and her own agenda.