Sherlolly Rambles post s3

 (Sherlock meta by novyzivot)

Lets talk about Molly because I love her.

So, in my opinion, it doesn’t seem like Molly gets many lines. Really, when she’s in a scene she mostly acts through reaction shots. When she does speak, it’s always something important. That’s why, recently, I’ve been thinking about Molly’s father. She mentions that she can see that Sherlock is hurting, because she watched her father pretend to be cheerful while he was dying.

Like John, Molly has the gift of being able to observe human emotions. Unlike John, Molly has a hard time understanding what is and what isn’t appropriate to say. When she gets nervous, she makes jokes that no one laughs at, and sometimes mixes up her sentences in such a way that often she is used as a comedic device. We love her for it, because we’ve all been there. Of course, she spends all her time around a slowly-maturing narcissist savant and dead people, so her version of normal conversation is naturally skewed.

This is one of the reasons I really love Sherlolly, because we have two intelligent people, who are quietly outsiders, and yet beloved among their friends. Sherlock has limited body-reading ability, which causes trouble with all his love interests. Molly’s job is taboo in that she enjoys working with corpses, and has a different way of viewing people and situations. The job therefore attracts abnormal lovers (we know that Molly has had a string of unsuccessful lovers, despite her obvious infatuation with many of them).

I wonder how often Sherlock used to visit Molly, before he met John. He seemed at home in her lab, and it must have been such a comfort and a thrill for Molly to meet an attractive man who not only shared her interest in work, but accepted the work she did as something that was “normal”. Although people saw her as a doormat, it was Molly who moved in first and asked Sherlock for coffee. She really valued Sherlock’s companionship, and she wasn’t afraid to ask for more.

Although everyone else thinks of Sherlock as a the strange one, to Molly, she is the outsider in his world. She wants to give back to him the friendship and comradery that she felt when he visited her all the time in the lab. Not to say that she was lonely before he came along–I’m sure she had other friends–just that all the extraordinarily nice things she does for him go beyond the fleeting feelings of a crush. She likes him as a person and as a friend, she respects his opinion, and above all, she believes he has a kind heart. These are the ingredients for something a bit more long term.

I think it must have been very sad for Molly to have gone without that particular brand of social connection for the whole of two years, and even harder to have kept that he was still alive from the rest of her friends, like John, who was always kind to her. She must have felt extremely isolated. To her, a person who can read emotions so clearly, it would have been devastating to watch them mourn. She was mourning too, in a different way. She lost a good friend, she probably realized he may never come back.

Her fiance Tom was clearly an unconscious response to the isolation of knowing that a man she had admired, and perhaps even loved as a friend, was still alive and may choose to never come back.

The first couple of weeks in the quiet lab without Sherlock–she did feel a bit abandoned? Did she hope for texts, or mail, or an anonymous phone call? When he showed up in the mirror of her locker, was her first thought that she must have been mistaken? She reacted as if she had seen a ghost.

The screen cuts away and we are invited to invent our own versions of their first greeting. I like to think she may have unconsciously moved closer to look at his face. I think he must have noticed and given her his tight-lipped, adoring little smile. I think that must have been enough for both of them, in that moment.

So Molly moves on, and John moves on, and Sherlock realizes that he was actually the only one who had stayed stagnant. Cue the Holmes Midlife Crisis Episode where Mycroft worries about his weight and Sherlock obsesses over napkins. They both realize they may want something more then what they had always been comfortable with before. Sherlock realizes it before Mycroft, in my absolute favorite moment of the whole series, where he fools Mycroft into admitting that different does not equal isolation. Then he echos this sentiment again when he asks his brother if he has found a “goldfish”.

In a roundabout way, Sherlock admits in this moment that without his friends (John and Molly) he gets lonely. He misses them, he wants to be on their level, and he’s willing to see John’s wedding as another chapter in life in order to stay by their sides. He’s even willing to accept Molly’s boyfriend, who looks exactly like him, in order to keep in her good graces. It’s a truly beautiful moment in Sherlock’s maturation. Maybe he was able to tell, with certainty, that Molly and Tom would break up, but because he didn’t wish ill on her, he let her handle her own business.

We can read him kissing Molly’s cheek and leaving into the cold in two ways: 

In the first, Sherlock has realized over the two years he’s been gone that he misses Molly on par or a bit lower then his missing of his best friend, John. He realizes that she stuck her neck out for him, could get fired from her job for him, and isolates herself for him. He is in awe that someone would ever go so far for anyone else. He begins to respect her on the same level she has respected him all this time. When he sees her engagement ring, his heart sinks in his chest and he is incapable of making an excuse for it. He kisses her cheek and leaves, defeated.

In the second, all the first bit is still true, but when he sees her engagement ring he realizes he’ll have a more difficult time approaching her even though he’s absolute convinced she’s loyal to him.
To test his theory, he invites her out for fish and chips. She doesn’t say no. At first, he is glad, excited, and he smiles and teases her. Then, he feels a bit bad. He notices that she is fighting herself. He points out to her that he knows she’s engaged. They share a moment where they both realize something has changed between them. He tells her his real feelings because he feels safe knowing she will reject him. He isn’t actually ready for a real relationship, although he has realized he wants one.

Sherlock leans in to kiss Molly, and she feels it as a goodbye. Sherlock experiences it as something else, he is trying to comfort her for whats to come: her eventual breakup with Tom. He leaves, and he feels conflicted and confused.

When he meets Tom again, he is not threatened at all by his appearance or his relationship to Molly, but is rather shocked on Molly’s behalf. Sherlock is too intelligent not to realize that she’s fucking someone who looks like him because she missed him when he was gone. He has a moment where he tells John not to talk about it–the tables have turned here quite a lot if he’s asking John to do the socially appropriate thing. Here we see Sherlock waiting patiently for Molly to be able to see him again.

What would a relationship between Molly and Sherlock look like? We don’t need to wonder too much because they already have one. It’s complicated, it’s honest, it’s a bit funny, but overall it is based on mutual respect, and at least for Sherlock, complete trust.