Swanpride wrote:

@lil Putting her life in the hands of a blackmailer? It is not like Mary contacted CAM and told him what he needed to know. He trapped her. And Mary didn't resign herself to CAM. She choose to stick around for John (really, the logical move would have been to give CAM the slip and start anew elsewhere. Telling John about CAM wouldn't have resolved nothing when it comes to the blackmail. So she befriended Janine and attacked. The attack might have even worked if Sherlock hadn't turned up.

Again, we are a bit short on facts.

We don't know what the connection between CAM and Mary is, or when it started; we do know that shortly after Sherlock's return CAM had a text message sent to Mary's phone, which means that he must have known by then what she was- a person who knew that it was a code - and what her phone number was. He must have known about her relationship with John since he had him kidnapped, and he must also have known that Sherlock was alive and back and he could therefore test his theory about John being Sherlock's pressure point. Sherlock's return was not common knowledge at that point, so Mary could have been CAM's source for that; we just don't know.

We do not know that CAM trapped her, nor, for that matter, do we know that their only relationship is blackmailer/victim; Moftiss have left it ambiguous. After all, SusiGo has demonstrated that her lines, on arriving at the fire, are pretty odd for someone apparently deeply in love; urging someone inside a bonfire doused with petrol and set alight to get out seems eccentric, given that John would, presumably, have already come out if he had been able to. We cannot logically conclude that she didn't do anything to help because she was frightened because she is supposed to be a super assassin with nerves of steel; that does suggest that her concern for John didn't extend to running the risk of getting burned herself. In fact she acted in precisely the same way that she would have done if she was CAM's agent; the test run demonstrated what CAM wanted to know.

We are left with many unanswered questions, but in my view it's preferable to recognise that these are unanswered questions rather than assume that we know everything. At least that way when Moftiss pull the rug from under our feet we will be able to say that we saw it coming. The rug, I mean, not the plot






 

@Zato@SS
Mary doesn't say John won't love her if...he reads the memory stick.
She says John wont love her if he knows..." who" I am , not "what " I have done.
Thats an interesting and leading distinction.

@Swanpride: Exactly. Therefore it was not really helpful to tell him to get up. Sorry, cross-post.

@Willow: Agreed. There are many things we do not know. Some may be explained, others not. And as for the rug - they are brilliant in doing that. 

Last edited by SusiGo (February 24, 2014 8:50 pm)

She knew Shelock would get him out.

SolarSystem wrote:

To me that doesn't really make a difference, John was in a fire, and two people might get him out faster than one person alone.

Indeed; many hands make light work, as the saying goes.

And the speed with which they got him out would determine the severity of his burns; we see, in TSoT, that Sholto had been badly burned, and again I think that is an intentional reference to the bonfire where John himself might have died. We are left with John tossing the memory stick into the fire in the Holmes' sitting room, which again is, in my view, a deliberate echo.

I seem to recall Moriarty threatening to burn Sherlock's heart out as well; obviously a favourite with Moftiss
 

Tinks wrote:

I can't get past the brutality of what she did to Sherlock ....

I think they did a disservice to both the character and the Actress in the way they went about it.

Same here. 

I also don't feel that the clues given in the first two episodes (except perhaps her ability to help Sherlock find John) were really good clues.

The lack of friends and family...this is a series where everyone is presented as being alone

The scene where she changes the seating of someone at the wedding because they don't like her...just shows she isn't a pushover - that could have been a positive quality.

Remembering Sholto's room number...someone said "the number of a random guest"...that's a Sherlockian feat. To me, it said, "John chose a female Sherlock." OR perhaps she knew Sholto's number because he WASN'T a random guest, to John.

Manipulating the boys into going on a case together...that just made her seem like the perfect Johnlock fangirl. She always seemed like she was going to include Sherlock in their marriage.

And then there was the song lyrics "I didn't even know her name" playing while she was on screen...I didn't even catch that.

Part of what is disappointing us so much is that this was a woman who was clever, normal-looking, normally-behaving, and not using sex to get her way.


 

Willow wrote:

Swanpride wrote:

The main reason why Sherlock got him out is because the show is called "Sherlock", not "Mary", so they made sure that he was faster there to help. But she was right behind him.

No. She didn't go into the fire for John, and the lines she spoke, as SusiGo noted, are very odd. Trying to explain it away on the basis that Sherlock is the hero doesn't work because there's plenty of scope for them both to dive in after him, and it would have shown that she really did care enough for John to risk burning herself.

If the writers wanted to convey that then they would have done; they chose not to.
 

 
All the evidence and all common sense points to Mary being Magnussons messenger in the bonfire plot. She had to do as she was told and allow Magnusson to run his test.
Marys collusion in the bonfire plot is something that becomes very obvious after hlv.
Magnusson arranged the kidnapping..the drugging..the spy cams..the specific time and the specific place..it would be stupidity on his part not to arrange the delivery of the messages and the start of the test at the specific time he had everything in place.
Please..the idea that he randomly sent the code to Mary in the hope a woman he knew as a trained agent/assasin wld run crying to Sherlock for help after setting all this up is ludicrous.
Likely Mary was blackmailed and maybe was told John wouldn't be harmed..Magnusson ordered..Mary obeyed.
For me Marys collusion in the bonfire thing is an obvious fact left for us to find.
She cracked the code, she knew where John was..why did she waste time going to 221b?
She had to let Sherlock take the test.

Last edited by lil (February 25, 2014 1:05 am)

Willow wrote:

lil wrote:

Willow wrote:

No. She didn't go into the fire for John, and the lines she spoke, as SusiGo noted, are very odd. Trying to explain it away on the basis that Sherlock is the hero doesn't work because there's plenty of scope for them both to dive in after him, and it would have shown that she really did care enough for John to risk burning herself.

If the writers wanted to convey that then they would have done; they chose not to.
 

 
All the evidence and all common sense points to Mary being Magnussons messenger in the bonfire plot. She had to do as she was told and allow Magnusson to run his test.
Marys collusion in the bonfire plot is something that becomes very obvious after hlv.
Magnusson arranged the kidnapping..the drugging..the spy cams..the specific time and the specific place..it would be stupidity on his part not to arrange the delivery of the messages and the start of the test at the specific time he had everything in place.
Please..the idea that he randomly sent the code to Mary in the hope a woman he knew as a trained agent/assasin wld run crying to Sherlock for help is ludicrous.
Likely Mary was blackmailed and maybe was told John wouldn't be harmed..Magnusson ordered..Mary obeyed.
For me Marys collusion in the bonfire thing is an obvious fact left for us to find.
She cracked the code, she knew where John was..why did she waste time going to 221b?
She had to let Sherlock take the test.

 
I can find no other logical explanation of the facts presented to us by the writers than that Mary was part of the plan created by CAM to test Sherlock's pressure point; she concurred, knowing that John would be kidnapped, drugged and placed in imminent danger of death by being burned alive.

I must disclose a personal interest here; when I was 36 weeks pregnant I was blown up by an exploding oxygen regulator, and, having survived miraculously that intial explosion, I was trapped in a room where a fire was being fed by pure oxygen. I still feel some personal guilt for praying frantically that the cylinders would explode, thus providing me with a far easier death than being burned alive; if the cylinders had gone it would have taken out a lot of people, hence my guilt. There are no support groups for people surviving that, since very, very few people ever survive it, so I finally ended having to have a lot of therapy from a CBT before I could manage to even walk into a hospital without needing to be heavily sedated.

So, I am not the person to view the bonfire as a jolly little outing; I've been where John is, trapped, in terror of being roasted alive, and it most certainly isn't fun. But obviously I am not impartial observer, either, because I have been there....

That sounds absolutely horrific. Yikes. 

nakahara wrote:

Looking at the way that bonfire is built in that scene it really is almost impossible for Mary to help Sherlock in any productive manner. Sherlock is tearing bonfire apart from the side (where you can take the logs out without any difficulty) but there is no place for two people at the side of the bonfire, just for one. Mary coming into his way at that moment would slow down John′s rescue, not quicken it. And Mary definitely can′t dismantle the bonfire from the front – such an act would result in a) her being badly burned, b) the bonfire collapsing on John and trapping him under the ton of burning wood.
 

I'm having difficulties in following why you think it's almost impossible; there seems to be space to me for more than one person. That is a big bonfire.

Equally, shouting get up to someone trapped under a 'ton of wood' seems to me to be distinctly bizarre, as SusiGo has noted; why would anyone imagine that someone was deliberately staying inside to be burnt alive?
 

Swanpride wrote:

Honestly, Sherlock is lucky that he manages to remove just enough of the wood that he can pull John out but not so much that the whole thing collapses on him.

Though, if you really think about this scene...is that allowed in Britain? I have never seen an Easter or St. Martin fire without fire fighters standing by, just in case. In reality, I guess, someone would have reacted and put out the fire the moment the crowd realized that someone was trapped in there.

The bonfires are actually supervised before they are lit – people are checking out if some hedgehogs didn′t get inside.
 
Some fans were even joking about this – Martin Freeman is being compared to hedgehog quite often, so it was hilariously funny that it was him being trapped in the bonfire in that scene.