nakahara wrote:

Sherlock looked lonesome yet at the same time relieved that his role as a best man is finally over (he hates marriages so it was probably a live torture for him). He was determined to fulfill his duty, he managed that perfectly and it was time for him to leave when his work was done.
 

 
Also, it gave him the opportunity to look seriously cool, and I, for one, am grateful to the writers for including it

There is also the fact that Mycroft works 16 hour days already; there isn't the time...

SherlocklivesinOH wrote:

 John may have been unknowingly attracted to Mary because he sensed her capacity for violence, though I am exceedingly dubious about that idea; I do worry that it's close to arguing that a woman in an abusive relationship actually chose a man she knew would beat her up because deep down she wanted it to be like that. I don't want to touch that one with a sixteen feet barge pole.

Leaving out the "capacity for violence" and the good/bad debate, Mary had already, bythat point, shown herself to have certain traits in common with Sherlock (i.e., cleverness - remember the tracking of John when he was in the bonfire; her "working" of the boys to get them to go work a case). I like the idea that John chose a woman who is a lot like Sherlock. 
 

But she's not.

Mary is clever, but not nearly as clever as Sherlock is, and the scene you refer to, very early in TEH, isn't her tracking of John; instead of doing it the way most likely to save John, via  consulting Google, and heading straight there to rescue him, she chose, instead, to waste precious time driving into central London in search of Sherlock when she could have texted, or emailed, or, Heaven forfend, rung him.

Which suggests to me that she was the person who set it up for CAM, who wanted to know whether  Sherlock would go into the fire for John...
 

RavenMorganLeigh wrote:

Swanpride wrote:

Actually Magnussen says something along the line that it seems like she "freelanced"...meaning either he wasn't sure about it, or he can make it look like she did. It's entirely possible that she went on a more or less legit undercover mission which went badly wrong. And I am pretty sure that she had a silencer beforehand too...I doubt that any operative would work without one.

So, why would she tell John that the information on the flashdrive A.G.R.A.-- would send her to prison for the rest of her life? If it's just a mirror of Sholto's situation, why couldn't she just come clean? Sholto not only took the responsibilty for his actions, but also shouldered the blame-- even though he didn't deserve to be scapegoated as he was. 

Sherlock takes responibilty for killing Magnussen; and shields John from being implicated, by making sure that he does it in front of a lot of witnesses. And he submits to punishment for the crime. 

All I see Mary doing is lying and running, and hiding, and harming anyone that threatens her cover, it just doesn't say to me that she was *ever* on the side of the angels. 

Yes: we never see Mary showing the slightest interest in the consequences of her actions beyond those which directly affect her; everything else is collateral damage which she ignores, because, as long as she has what she wants, everything's fine.

And I do feel that the test of 'what would Sherlock's loved ones think' of what she has done is a valid one since it punctures the bubble of sentiment which, at least some, fans erect around her with the old familiar mantra of 'because she loves John'' as if anything and everything can be disregarded 'because she loves John'. 

For example, Molly loves Sherlock, but she has never displayed any desire to kill John to give her a better chance of taking his place alongside Sherlock solving cases; the notion is so selfevidently ludicrous when you spell it out in black and whi

Swanpride wrote:

Sherlock certainly does have an arc which is designed to determine if he will be a great man or a good man. It is hinted more than once that he had a shaky past, for multiple reasons (drugs being the most obvious one).

I'm not pointing this out to defend Mary. But it is an interesting parallel. When Sherlock meet John he had apparently just managed to turn his life around, and meeting John helped him to stay on this path. John's blog gave him fame, and John's friendship gave him an understanding for sentiment.

When Mary meet John, she had already started her new life with a new identity, doing her best to leave her past behind her. And John's love and understanding as well as Sherlock's forgiveness and sacrifice gave her the chance to be Mary Watson instead of A.G.RA.

Lestrade already accepts that Sherlock is a great man; his question is whether Sherlock will someday become a good one as well, but at no point does Lestrade suggest that Sherlock has been an actively bad man. There is a difference between passive and active; the only thing we know of Sherlock's past is that he took drugs. Taking drugs is not a criminal offence; killing people is.

John's blog did not give Sherlock fame; Sherlock's abilities brought him fame because John blogged about it but, oddly enough, many people don't want fame. Sherlock doesn't; it's boring. Sherlock really isn't interested; he wants stuff which stimulates the mind, and whatever else can be said about interacting with journalists, mental stimulation isn't high on the list.

As for leaving her life behind her, Mary had either retained her gun or acquired one on the black market. Someone who has left her past life behind her doesn't risk a mandatory five year prison sentence for possession of a hand gun without a licence, and Sherlock did not trust her with his drugged parents and brother, which gives us some indication of what he thinks about her...
 

Lil

I agree; we are watching, along with Lestrade, the process by which Sherlock becomes a good man, and not just a great man, and Moftiss are not going down the well trodden primrose path of saying that Sherlock was a bad man who becomes good because people love him, or he loves them.

He can strive not to let it drag him down, and that is what I think the writers are showing us; there was immense potential for bitterness and regret over his failure to believe what his mind told him about Mary, and yet he didn't go that way.

And as Oscar Wilde noted, forgiving ones enemies really annoys them

besleybean wrote:

For me, it's not even that.
It's the fact that Sherlock and John have forguven her, so we should.

I am somewhat dubious as to whether Sherlock has forgiven her, and even more dubious that Mary has forgiven Sherlock. Sherlock may not care, in a sort of 'it's all water under the bridge' way, but that is not forgiveness. He didn't trust her in the same house with his parents and brother unconscious; he made sure that she was unable to harm them by drugging her.

However, since this thread is about John I shall stick to the fact that I'm not convinced that John has forgiven her; we had his apparently sentimental tossing of the memory stick in the fire, but we also had him telling her that he was still really, really angry with her.

Having read somewhat further along the lines belis suggested, it does seem to me that John has some work to do in getting to grips with his anger and his impulses towards violence; with Sherlock prior to the Reichenbach plan John channelled those constructively. In Season 3, not so much. I should very much like to see a happy John, but I very much doubt that Mary is going to assist in that process.

Even John in his most extreme 'I don't want to know' mode is incapable of putting a blindfold on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is likely to force him to know whether he likes it or not. Somehow, I doubt that Mycroft is going to have any sympathy for someone emulating an ostrich and thereby endangering his brother; I doubt that Lestrade, Mrs Hudson and Molly would 'forgive' Mary either. They are not, after all, idiots
 

SolarSystem wrote:

Swanpride wrote:

If we only have a look at the first two episodes, I see a lot of evidence that there is something going on with Mary - but none that she might not love John, or that she is not supportive of Sherlock, quite the opposite in fact.

To be honest, even in the first two episodes I had the feeling that something wasn't quite right with Mary, because she just was too good to be true for my taste. She was so positive and so understanding and funny and witty... which is all good and fine, if not even: a bit boring. But at the same time to me it also signaled that it or rather: she wasn't meant to stay that way.
So what we got in HLV was just a logical development after TEH and TSoT - although I didn't really expect them to go with an ex-assassin-thing, and my first reaction to it was Oh please, really...?

 

Quite so; she was such an obvious Mary Sue character that it stuck out like a sore thumb because Moftiss don't write Mary Sues.

I loathe redemptive character arcs; they have been done over, and over, and over again and getting something fresh or interesting out of them is hugely difficult, particularly since, by definition, it would remove the spotlight from Sherlock.

Sherlock is called Sherlock for a reason


 

nakahara wrote:

I think it′s time for John′s sister Harry to appear.
She will seduce Mary with her charm (since she is probably similar to John) and Mary will abandon John and settle down with her eventually.
They will bring up John′s daughter together.
It wouldn′t be such a loss to John then – everything stays in the family.
 

That is deeply twisted.

It's also hilarious, which probably means I'm twisted as well, but, having watched Mary transformed into a scared little woman on the news of Moriarty's apparent return, I doubt that Moftiss are going to go for something as innovative as your solution. She is, after all, eminently capable of killing him, so it is likely to be about what Moriarty knew, rather than worrying about him going after them.

Incidentally, I'm wondering if Sherlock's deduction regarding the woman married to 3 identical triplets is a harbinger of Moriarty's identical twin brother...
 

belis

This is wonderful stuff!

So, to clarify, when taking the patient history you will no doubt want the full history because that's what doctors always want, unless someone is dying in front of them when other considerations prevail. You have noted elsewhere that personalities don't really change, so I assume that if you were considering a possible BPD then the absence of these features in earlier years would be the bit that says 'No'.

Is that assumption correct?

I had a tangentially related discussion last night about how to help bad doctors to become better doctors, and the consensus was that you can successfully tackle skill deficits most of the time; what you can't do is help the guy who offloads everything s/he can, doesn't bother, doesn't care, because that's the way s/he is, and s/he likes being the way s/he is, and sees no reason to change.

Going back to John, I can certainly see that the contract aspect of CAD would appeal to John; it's all there in black and white  and there are goals set. And, as you have pointed out, he needs structure so CBT is again a much better choice than psychodynamic therapy.

What sort of success rate do these therapies have? I appreciate that trying to extract reliable statistics is like wrestling with jelly, and that doctors are really difficult to treat, hence John's referral letter bringing tears to your eyes, but I live in hope of a happy John who has managed to be a bit more honest with himself about who he is and what he wants