How much was Mrs. Hudson faking in the scene where she was tied up?

She was visibly upset when Sherlock came in, and kept apologizing to him. Was that real or just a distraction of some sort?

And when Sherlock came in, he very coldly told her to stop snivelnig which seemed like an atttempt to act as though he didn't care about her but then he ruined it by going right up to her and sort of inspecting her for injuries.

Afterward he implies that he left the phone with Mrs. Hudson on purpose and she says she managed to sneak it out when they thought she was having a cry. Why did she sneak it out? Did he tell her to do something? How did she know what was going on?

Did she recover quickly because she was faking most of it anyway?

What if they picked up the story when the baby was a bit older (1-2ish)? By that time the novelty would wear off. I genuinely think they could pull it off and just have them both kind of in the periephery.

To be honest, I think half the reason I don't want mary/baby to die is that I don't want to deal with any more John angst.
But I think the baby was written in for a reason. Maybe because they want more drama or maybe because they're actually planning on keeping it. If they do keep it, I think Mary has to be around because otherwise you have John raising the baby as a single parent (which leaves little room for gallivanting around with Sherlock). The baby has to move things forward rather than get in the way of Sherlock/John. John being tied to Mary via their baby even after Mary has broken things off romantically is sort of messy. Why would they plan to put Mary and the baby on a proverbial bus rthan just put Mary on the bus and skip the pregnancy entirely?

There are plenty of fans who think she is going to die because of canon and the fact that the show is supposed to be about Sherlock and Watson. But let's pretend for the sake of discussion as though Word of God says that Mary will make it to the final episode of S4 alive.

To me, either you can get rid of both (via death or running away or whatever) or you can get keep both. You can't keep the baby and get rid of Mary, because that means that John is the sole parent for this kid and would be both too angsty and too sitcomy. You can't get rid of the baby and keep Mary, because then it would be more of a story circle than a story arc. John/Mary get married, John/Mary concieve baby, baby dies before birth, John/Mary return to previous state of affairs but with more angst.

So in summary: If we assume that Mary lives, then we must assume that Baby Watson lives.

As far as S4 plotlines go, I don't think very many fans would want an episode that focuses on the birth of Baby Watson, and that's a very difficult thing not to focus on, since it's a major event in all of their lives that would be happening only 4 months after the last episode of S3. So either they skip past the birth entirely or they turn it into something dramatic like "Mary's having contractions while we're chasing down a murderer." or "John is about to miss the birth of his child because he's being held at gunpoint by Moriarty's brother."

My initial assumption was that they wouldn't open with two years later as they did with S3, but to be honest I would rather have a 2-year-old baby watson than a 1-month-old baby watson. If skipped over the birth and first few months, the characters don't have to go crazy every time she (??) comes into the scene.

 I believe someone on here mentioned that the show runners said that Mary's talents as an assassin would not be relevant. In which case, I could see her being part of the team socially, and it was kind of set up that way but she doesn't need to be part of

Study in Pink starts with the first 3 murders, but everything after Sherlock is introduced is limited to about 48 hours. I'm guessing it's late spring because of the rain in the first scene and the fact that the characters don't seem particularly warmly dressed. Let's call it Spring 2010.

The Blind Banker tells us that Sherlock is 8 years removed from university, making him 29-30. There's definitely indiciation that time has passed since the last episode, but it doesn't seem to be very much based on the fact that  interactions b/w Watson and Sherlock are still a little stiff and they're both getting used to each other.  Let's say late Spring 2010.

The Great Game definitely seems to pick up later, but I don't think there's anything that allows us to put a date on it. Maybe early 2011?

Scandal in Belgravia starts by talking about John blogging cases we've never heard of, so clearly some time has passed. The one blog post shown on the screen includes the date May 30th. Time passes, and Lestrade mentions a plane crash in Dusseldorf the day before. They celebrate the holidays, and Irene gives Sherlock the phone at Christmas. She says she let Sherlock Holmes hold onto it for 6 months, so a year has passed since the start of the episode. When Mycroft is talking about Bond Air, he says that a passenger had "missed his flight" so to speak on a similar project with the Germans a "while back" (meaning the Dusseldorf crash). So this episode would go from early 2011 through xmas 2011 and into mid-2011.

Hounds takes place over a single weekend. Let's say it's still Summer 2011.

Reichenbach is kind of ambigous, there's a montage at the beginning where they're solving cases that looks like it builds over several months. Then Morarity breaks into the Tower of London. I got the impression that it was at least a few months before he went to trial but I might be wrong. After the trial, Sherlock is on-guard and assassins start moving in.

To be honest, I saw Janine as interested in Sherlock Holmes simply because she found him entertaining/interesting to be around.

Apparently I'm the only one who interpreted the "famous Sherlock Holmes" comment as an allusion to whatever John/Mary had told her rather than what she had read in the newspapers. She's supposed to be Mary's closest friend, and the fact that she's the maid of honor suggests that she must have known John/Mary before Mary actually became engaged (and therefore, she knew John/Mary when Sherlock was supposed to be dead). I'm not saying that Mary has been relaying every dirty detail, but "my husband's famous best friend faked his suicide and is now helping with the seating chart" would have come up in conversation.

I actually see some parallels between her and John. She's using Sherlock for entertainment/adreneline purposes in the same way that John does. Obviously Sherlock and John's friendship is on a different level, but still. There's a lovely moment in the first episode where John is openly impressed and Sherlock is rather pleased and says that most people just tell him to piss off. Janine appreciates his talent in the same way, she takes his deductions seriously and jokingly asks if she can "keep him" which is actually quite a compliment because it suggests that she enjoys Sherlock's company (whereas most people decidedly do not).

I got the impression that she liked Sherlock for the same reason we like watching Sherlock. It's interesting/entertaining to watch him "do his thing" so to speak, and time with him is never boring. Within a few hours of meeting him, she's standing there watching him solve a murder case and making jokes about handcuffs. She's just enjoying being a spectator.

And to be honest, I think that given the choice between a) enduring an angry/jilted Janine standing in his hospital room crying dramatically about how she had loved him and b) libel and a truce, I think he would have prefered the first option.

It seems (to me anyway) like Mycroft kind of molded Sherlock into someone that would keep him occupied. Over and over, he tries to discourage Sherlock from allowing himself to be influenced by emotions, and kind of discourages him from forming friendships with ordinary people. He says something after Watson gets married about it being just like old times, and I think he kind of likes feeling like he has a monopoly on Sherlock's companionship. I know there's speculation about Mycroft's private life, but he does seem to be pretty isolated. Think about the difference between the way Sherlock spent Christmas (a party with his flatmate/best friend surrounded by people that cared about him) vs the way Mycroft appeared to spend Christmas alone in a room in an armchair by the fire.

I think that if Mycroft hadn't existed, Sherlock wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of intellectual stimulation. I know that it's hard to imagine him living a normal life surrounded by normal people, but I think his childhood was sort of Sherlock/Mycroft vs. the ordinary boring people. When their parents were being dull, Mycroft and Sherlock could roll their eyes and stay above it all.

So by the time Sherlock starts school, he is rightly convinced that he is the smartest person in the classroom and does not feel any need to try to build friendships with any of these people because he believes that he doesn't need them or their petty emotions. Mycroft tells Sherlock that he can be successful and fulfilled without needing to engage with personal relationships with ordinary people. Sherlock doesn't have self-esteem issues about being a "freak" because Mycroft has taught him that the intellectual downsides of being ordinary outweight the social benefits of being ordinary.

And Sherlock knows that rejecting these people won't leave him completely alone because he'll always have Mycroft. They're not friends because Mycroft doesn't do "sentimental" and rejects that kind of relationship with Sherlo