Naming the baby

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

Q: Mary told John she gets to name their baby. Maybe he already suggested Sherlock and Mary vetoed it? That's why he's trying to play it off?

A: I assume this is a response to my earlier meta, Sherlock Is Actually a Girl’s Name.

What you suggest is possible, but… I don’t see any evidence for it on the show. Why would Mary veto the name? And why wouldn’t John just tell Sherlock that, if it were the case? It’s not that I can’t imagine plausible answers to these questions, it’s just that they aren’t in the show – it would be pure speculation.

It’s true that there is a scene in this very episode where John asks Mary for naming rights to the baby and is denied. So it’s not unreasonable to point to this as an explanation for why John laughs off Sherlock’s proposal in the tarmac scene – maybe John has no say in naming the baby.

But let’s look again at the dialogue between John and Mary.

image

JOHN: I choose the baby’s name.
MARY: Not a chance.
JOHN: Okay.

I’d say there’s more than one possible interpretation of this exchange. (Please indulge me in a bit of sarcastic hyperbole here.) Some fans read John’s line to mean, “I want a fair and equal part in raising our child,” and they read Mary’s response to John as meaning, “I hate you and am basically evil, and am therefore denying you any parental role at all. Also btw the baby isn’t yours, and I’m probably not even human, but an odious abomination released from the depths of hell for the sole purpose of thwarting pure, true, holy love such as that between you and Sherlock.” :P

There is another possible reading, however. Given the context of their relationship, and assuming neither person is angel or demon, but are complex, imperfect humans, we might conclude that what John means is, “I’m still really angry about your deception, so as payback, I’m demanding the right to name our child without consulting you at all, because I know that will hurt you.”

To which Mary quite reasonably responds, “Not a chance, we will name the baby together, and we both retain veto-rights over truly objectionable names. Your anger is fair, but it’s no reason to let our kid go through life with a name like Horsefeathers McMonkey just to spite me.” And John agrees to this.

If we assume the second scenario is more likely than the first, then the polite, grown-up response to Sherlock would have been, “I’ll talk to Mary about it.” Of course John shouldn’t unilaterally decide on a name without discussing it with the kid’s mother, but Sherlock wasn’t demanding a yes or no on the spot – he was just offering his name up as a suggestion. And given the precise situation (Sherlock sacrificing his freedom and possibly his life for their well-being), it seems likely to me that Mary would have agreed.

As it happens, I don’t believe Mary is the reason for John’s refusal to name the baby after Sherlock. I’m more inclined to believe (as many have suggested) that John simply isn’t comfortable with the larger implications, i.e. that Sherlock isn’t coming back (supposedly). It’s an emotionally-charged situation, and John isn’t handling it well. He is giggling and joking and relying on humor to get him through a difficult conversation, just as he did at the scene of his own murder. Sherlock, for his part, knows that’s all John is capable of at the moment, so he’s playing along with it.

Also it’s worth noting that Sherlock’s line (“That’s the whole of it, if you’re looking for baby names”) is a clear call-back to ASiB, when John offers up his whole name as a sardonic commentary on Sherlock and Irene’s flirting. Since the original line was a joke (albeit with an emotionally-charged undercurrent), it’s not surprising that John assumes Sherlock also intends the same line in a joking way. And I think Sherlock sort of does intend John to read it that way – he’s deliberately trying to keep the conversation light, and avoiding the kind of sentimentality that would make both of them uncomfortable.

But he’s not cracking just *any* joke. It’s my contention that Sherlock intends a serious undercurrent to his little joke – he brings up the baby names lightly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t sincerely important to him. My best guess is that, however John reacts in the moment, Sherlock hopes that in a couple of weeks, when the baby is born and Sherlock has disappeared, John will think back on this conversation and reconsider whether he might want to honor his friend in this way.

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