Remember the horns. 

lil wrote:

When you see your boyfriend/ have a huge protacted fight with someone...and then you take the other persons side saying.." I like him "
You are making the other person immediately think of all the reasons for the fight..and why you don't like them.

.....

 
I don't think so. Speaking for me, if I was in John's position I would reconsider the reasons why Mary likes him. It would calm me down. Because (at that state) it is quite important to John what Mary thinks.
So if I am angry at a person, but my husband tells me "I like him", I would maybe not stop being angry, but call my reasons into question.
Even more so in John and Mary's case as John never had a girlfried before who really liked Sherlock.

But then we know he is no angel. So I would not look for them. 

Be wrote:

I haven't found wings for Sherlock (yet) in series 3.  We merely got the symbolic crucification scene in the torture cell in Serbia.
Maybe we should look whether we can find something nice on Mary. One thing is the almost-there bow at the end of HLV. Let's not get biased.

Is it really bias if some of us consider assassin-Mary to be a more interesting character than lovely MarySue-Mary?

SusiGo wrote:

Remember the horns. 

 
Good point, and thank you for the reminder; Moftiss always lie but they also play fair, in their own strange way.

Oddly enough, my reaction to Mary was that she was too good to be true, and therefore something was badly amiss somewhere. I keep coming back to your analysis of those first few lines; I do wonder if we stopped the scene before Sherlock intervenes, and asked people to predict what Mary's answer to John's proposal would be, whether people would be sure that she was going to say Yes.

In some ways it's as if she's playing with him, in a not very nice manner; she could have made it easier for him, but she didn't. It's charming when a kitten is playing with a ball of string, but not so nice when an adult cat is playing with a live bird...

nakahara wrote:

Be wrote:

I haven't found wings for Sherlock (yet) in series 3.  We merely got the symbolic crucification scene in the torture cell in Serbia.
Maybe we should look whether we can find something nice on Mary. One thing is the almost-there bow at the end of HLV. Let's not get biased.

Is it really bias if some of us consider assassin-Mary to be a more interesting character than lovely MarySue-Mary?

Which is why I knew that something was badly wrong in the first place; Mary Sues are the staple diet of bad fan fic, and Moftiss don't write bad fan fic characters.  Super-assassin Mary is also a Mary Sue; the notion of her scaling an all glass skyscraper Mission Impossible style is also Mary Sue characterisation, and equally ludicrously implausible.

The problem with finding nice things about Mary is that Sherlock got it right when he likened her to the false houses in Leinster Gardens; she's all facade and no interior. We really don't know anything about her beyond the fact that she is a superb actress who kills people for money; the only thing she says about herself is that she kills people because they deserve to be killed.

This doesn't give us much to go on, other than a pressing desire to remove her as far as possible from people we do care about; I haven't a clue what criteria she applies, but I do know that she shot Sherlock and Sherlock died on the operating table.

Fortunately dungeon Moriarty did us all a huge favour, and Sherlock clawed his way back, but she still shot a man who had treated her with nothing but kindness, and who had offered to help her in the moments before she put a bullet into his chest.

And that man was Sherlock, who definitely isn't an angel, but is on the side of the angels...
 

Willow wrote:

I haven't a clue what criteria she applies, but I do know that she shot Sherlock and Sherlock died on the operating table.
 

Maybe I´m nitpicking here, but I just want to point out - because I read this very often and I did some research on that topic when I decided about organ donation - that Sherlock didn´t actually die on the operating table. There is a lot of discussion going on between doctors and medical ethics about how to define "death", and it´s still not finally decided, but flatlining is certainly not the only criterion. As long as there is any chance of returning, which mainly means electric activity in any part of the brain, the person is not considered dead. 
 

Zatoichi wrote:

Willow wrote:

I haven't a clue what criteria she applies, but I do know that she shot Sherlock and Sherlock died on the operating table.
 

Maybe I´m nitpicking here, but I just want to point out - because I read this very often and I did some research on that topic when I decided about organ donation - that Sherlock didn´t actually die on the operating table. There is a lot of discussion going on between doctors and medical ethics about how to define "death", and it´s still not finally decided, but flatlining is certainly not the only criterion. As long as there is any chance of returning, which mainly means electric activity in any part of the brain, the person is not considered dead. 
 

Actually, if you dig around a bit you will find the lengthy screeds I have already written about the legal definition of death, the concept of brain death etc etc etc, so I didn't repeat them yet again, and won't repeat them here; I was taking a short cut because in the situation shown the time of death is recorded as the time when the decision is made to cease attempts to resuscitate the patient. In Sherlock's case that would have been when they stepped away from Sherlock.

My daughter is a doctor who, amongst other things, leads the resuscitation team when she is on call, hence my knowledge of the time at which death would have been recorded. As I have mentioned before there are very rare cases where doctors genuinely, but erroneously, believe that a patient has died, and there is no legal requirement to check for brain activity before concluding that a patient has died.

In lay men's terms Sherlock died on the table; fortunately for all of us he clawed his way back since otherwise we would have no more Sherlock to look forward to. In emotional terms I think Moftiss intended us to know that the doctors had concluded that their attempts to resuscitate Sherlock had failed, and in moral terms that Mary had, indeed, killed Sherlock.


 

I am not a doctor and have none in the family, but what I found while researching the internet was that life-saving measures are only to be stopped after the blood circulation is interrupted long enough to cause irreparable brain damage. And when the brain is irreparably damaged there is no clawing back, not even for John Watson. So while the scene was very dramatic it was also not very realistic imo. But I will go and search for your lenghty screeds first before I´ll start arguing..

Zatoichi wrote:

I am not a doctor and have none in the family, but what I found while researching the internet was that life-saving measures are only to be stopped after the blood circulation is interrupted long enough to cause irreparable brain damage. And when the brain is irreparably damaged there is no clawing back, not even for John Watson. So while the scene was very dramatic it was also not very realistic imo. But I will go and search for your lenghty screeds first before I´ll start arguing..

It may speed your research if you look for Lazarus Syndrome; it has the added virtue of being a pun on the plan in the Reichenbach Fall, which would have made Moftiss laugh even more

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2121643/