maryagrawatson wrote:

But why does it have to be something negative? Why can't it be that, hey, Mary likes him with a little stubble so that's just a little way of saying he's come back to her?

At this point, anything's possible...

This show has SUCH an attention to detail and is very consistent with how certain symbols (yeah I think we all agree John's mustache is a symbol worthy of merit 😏) are displayed and how those symbols are consistent and don't change in meaning throughout each episode. So if John's mustache was first shown to us as a symbol of his "inner turmoil" so to speak, I think that it's fair to say that any sort of facial hair is a decision that was made by the writers to include. It was intentional, I'm sure of it.

So I know that John says he's forgiven her, but to me the forgiveness scene just didn't sit well with me. Theres two different theories swirling around in my head.

1. John really has, in his mind, forgiven her.

or

2. His forgiveness is utter BS, and part of a larger plan we don't know about. Let me explain:
John has serious trust issues. We learned this from the very first episode. The fall and Sherlock's return certainly didn't help matters much. And as of his wedding John is still seeing his therapist (could be for many reasons but we are told over and over again that he has big trust issues). And here John is not knowing who his wife is, essentially. He doesn't know her real name, where she's from, nothing about her family or past. All he really knows is that she used to be a trained assassin. It is DEFINATELY a larger scale lie than Sherlock's fake suicide, and I don't think Sherlock's lie and Mary's lie are seen as equals in John's eyes on terms of being able to forgive (as someone mentioned above). John did struggle to forgive Sherlock in TEH. It was a huge betrayal of trust, despite how much he'd missed Sherlock, and John has a hard time getting past that. Didn't he say, "I don't care how you did it, I want to know why." John eventually does get the whole truth of why, as shown in his blog (link here: http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/blog/07november). John does say "of course I forgive you" at the end if TEH, in what he believes are his dying moments, but this is clearly a huge, huge deal for John and again a massive setback in terms of his trust issues. But I think he truly did forgive Sherlock, and knowing WHY he did it really helped him with that. It was justified in John's eyes. But after spending months apart from Mary to come to terms with her enormous betrayal... we're supposed to believe that John just tosses out the hard drive supposedly containing her history, essentially tells her they've get a clean slate, he doesn't care what she's done -- whi

I personally think that the best solution to the baby problem would be if Mary had an affair. Honestly, that David guy was  introduced in TSOT, and was given a good 2-3 minutes screen time. Sherlock was basically trying to 'scare him off' of interacting with Mary in any way. After all, they used to be lovers. To me, this makes me think that Sherlock felt some sort of obligation to warn him off because he believed, to some extent, that Mary COULD cheat on John. He wouldn't waste his time threatening him otherwise. I know some of you may think that this scene was just a bit of comic relief, but whenever something in this show strikes me as "funny" I sometimes think the writers are just trying to distract us from a deeper meaning (they're master's of subtext after all). Plus, as I've already mentioned, David had a good 2-3 minutes allotted to him. This is a 90-minute show where virtually every minute counts. It may not seem like a lot but if they were aiming for just a bit of comic relief they would've figured out another way to do it that wouldn't take up so much time. This makes me think that David might be a little more important than we're led to believe. He was introduced and then his character "arc" kind of just fizzled out at the end with little payoff. I think we're going to be seeing him again, possibly as the father to Mary's baby.