molly212 wrote:

I believe this shooting scene tells us everything we need to know about Mary. 
1. The top floor of the building has 7(?) layers of security, 2 of which are illigal in the UK. Mary entered and exited quite easily.
2. As Sherlock approached the bedroom, we can faintly hear CAM begging for his life: "please, think of your husband, he is an honorable man..."  It's no small feat to make someone like CAM (who is arrogant and always treated Sherlock and John with contempt) on his knees begging for mercy.
3. Mary does not plead or accept help. As such, Sherlock's offer to help is almost an insult to her.

In sum, Mary is deadly, extremely able and intelligent. She shows no remorse, no fear and she will accept no help. The only time she showed vulnerability or even fear was when John discovered the truth. This shows her feeling for John is genuine. To me, there is no question that she spared Sherlock's life. If she wanted to kill him, he'd be dead 10 times over.

1: Agreed (I believe it´s 14 layers of security..)
2: I don´t think it takes much to make CAM´s contemptuous attitude crumble, he´s only strong as long as he has people under his thumb. He has no moral backbone, if caught alone and unguarded he will probably break down and do everythin in order to survive. 
(Also it´s a strange thing to say, "Please, think about your husband, he´s an honorable man..", in order to beg for his life. CAM supposedly doesn´t know John´s in the building, so if Mary shot him right there it wouldn´t have affected John at all. There´d be no connection, on the contrary, with CAM gone John would be much safer. So why does he say that, and why does he bring John´s honour into play here? Honestly wondering..)
3: A friend´s offer to help is only an insult to people who value their pride above everything else. Sherlock is proud like the devil, yet he never refuses John´s help. He doesn´t always rely on it, but he´s genuinely grateful everytime it´s offered. Does that make him any less competent and intelligent? Of course not. If anything being insulted by Sherlock´s offer would show that she doesn´t consider him a friend at all and that she´s got to have it her way at all costs. That´s no criterion for competence but for stubbornness and self-centeredness.

My sum would look a bit different: Mary is deadly, extremely able and intelligent. She shows no remorse, no fear and she will accept no help. The only time she showed vulnerability or even fear was when John discovered the truth. This shows she is motivated by selfish reasons like pride and keeping John, she doesn´t consider Sherlock a friend at all . To me, there is no question that she willingly put Sherlock´s life in grave danger. If she wanted to spare him she seriously miscalculated the chance she left him,  because even with the ambulance in time and him falling in the right direction (which completely relied on chance and his own ability to stay focussed even with a bullet in his chest) he flatlined and his survival was a huge medical miracle. I find it hard to believe an extremely intelligent, cold-blooded and competent crack-shot-ex-sniper would make such a serious miscalculation because she was so stressed out and under pressure in that moment.

Liberty wrote:

If Mary had shot him and made a run for it, then she'd have avoided the whole difficult situation, and Sherlock wouldn't have known the truth. 
 

Killing a man who has papers incriminating you hidden somewhere in the building or in his house (or so you believe at that moment) without making him confess where they are would be a stupid mistake. Mary can´t shoot CAM because she doesn´t know yet where he has hidden them - and it would be a disaster for her if they are discovered during the investigation of CAM´s murder. (Of course, no papers actually exist, but Mary has no way of knowing that.)

Liberty wrote:

Yes, I thought that Mary was trying to get the files from him, rather than to kill him.  But at 221B she seems to say that she was planning to kill him (that's why there are people like her).   And Sherlock says that the reason she didn't kill him was so as not to incriminate John. 

Anyway, Magnusson suggesting that he's going to get her through John gives her more reason to kill him, not less.  It's not a wise move, but I suppose her arrival was unexpected.  I do believe Magnusson was expecting Sherlock. 

Oh, I think she planned to eventually kill him - she certainly wouldn´t be opposed to the idea - but before that, she really needed to know what exactly does he have on her. It would be stupid to go through all that effort, burgling his office and disposing of various people in it, only to be arrested later, because somebody found an incriminating material on her.
 

The interesting thing about that is that had Sherlock not interrupted her, she would have been in the same situation he finds himself in Appledore. So in a way Sherlock "saved" her from killing Magnussen. 

Liberty wrote:

True, and come to think of it, if she knew Magnusson wouldn't give her away (because it suited her purposes), she should have just run for it when she heard Sherlock's voice.  Magnusson would have kept quiet, and Sherlock wouldn't have known (he'd have suspected Lady Smallwood and might have got to the truth when he realised it wasn't her, but in the short term it would have worked.  His only clue to Mary's identity was the perfume and I'm sure more than two people wear it).

Or, I have to say, she should have worn a mask like a proper assassin.  She didn't need to hide her identity from Magnusson, but she didn need to sneak up on Janine, so it might have been a sensible precaution.

I agree there are probably tons of alternative ways for Mary to carry out her plan, but don't forget that this is Moffat. 

Please refrain from taking this to a personal level. 

Sorry, but I cannot for the life of me see how a character who nearly kills the protagonist of the show that is named after him can turn out the good guy. Mary may be an ambivalent character and she may be redeemed partly in the next series but what she had done to both protagonists of the show clearly does not make her a good person. 

And I really do not like the way you reduce John to a patient and medical case. He has been betrayed by his best friend (even if it was for his own good) and his wife (not for his own good), the two most important people in his life. This is a lot of trauma. But for me this is still fiction, entertainment, drama, and not a documentary about abusive behaviour and domestic violence. 

Last edited by SusiGo (September 9, 2014 3:52 pm)

maryagrawatson wrote:

Schmiezi wrote:

Now I am trying to get my mind around the fact that apparently Mary is not to blame for shooting Sherlock (she was programmed and it's Sherlock's own fault that he got shot because he took a step in her direction), but John is to blame for beating Sherlock at the reunion (and will most likely show domestic violence towards his future baby).  How can a nice girl like Mary even love an atrocious man like John?
 

Wow. Just wow. I've been sitting here trying to decide if it was even worth responding to a post like this. I'm just flabbergasted by the inability to understand nuances in characters and the black and white vision of the world.

As I've said over and over again, we don't have enough data on Mary yet to know if she's an antagonistic ('bad guy') or a protagonist ('good guy'). That her actions make perfect sense to me do not mean that I condone her. It does take a certain kind of personality to become a government operative, assassin or not, and a certain deviation from society's code of ethics (eg. the justification of assassination or torture for the 'greater good' of the free world).  Series 4 will tell us if she wants to continue to live by that code of ethics or not.

As for John, as I've said over and over again, he needs a better therapist. He is a morally good man who has a reprehensive way of dealing with his emotions, using violence. The use of that violence is escalating and worrisome. He's not a pathologically violent person who has no hope of rehabilitation. He just needs to take a harsh look at who he is becoming and make a choice to heal before he crosses a line from which there's no turning back.

Mary

For the record, I love this post

maryagrawatson wrote:

Harriet wrote:

What kind of programming are you speaking of? Is it your own definition or are you relying on some other theory?
 

It's the same sort of psychological conditioning you see in many fields, especially the armed forces and intelligence agencies, that teaches you to respect the chain of command, to be loyal, how to react in certain situations, how to handle certain ethical dilemmas, etc.

It's part of the training. I've worked alongside the RCMP, CSIS, the CIA, MI5, DHS, ICE, etc. and have had an inside glance at what goes into the training, especially with CSIS (Canada's CIA/MI5) since I actually started the recruitment process with them. You definitely lose a part of yourself to be part of something bigger. I don't see this as being something necessarily negative, just not for me.

If you can understand that no one can just walk off the street and become a government assassin overnight, that such a person is built from the ground up, then Sherlock's shooting makes a lot more sense.

Mary

So are you talking of conditioning instead of programming now? I was trying to find some scientific background and still have no idea what theories it's based on. The only thing I found about programming in a psychological context was NLP, a pseudo science.

I suppose violence is kind of normal.  A fact of life.

SusiGo wrote:

The interesting thing about that is that had Sherlock not interrupted her, she would have been in the same situation he finds himself in Appledore. So in a way Sherlock "saved" her from killing Magnussen. 

I'd been thinking of it as Sherlock finishing off her work for her.   But I like your way too.  (And it works both ways - Mary would have inadvertently saved Sherlock from killing Magnusson if she'd been left to get on with it.  And might have saved Lord Smallwood from suicide, if I remember the timing correctly).

Maybe it's slightly redeeming if she doesn't kill anyone during her five years of new identity and her time with John.   Mary says with some irritation that the world needs people like her (to get rid of people like Magnusson), and then Sherlock comes to the same conclusion later, as a stand-in for Mary. 

Harriet wrote:

maryagrawatson wrote:

It's the same sort of psychological conditioning you see in many fields, especially the armed forces and intelligence agencies, that teaches you to respect the chain of command, to be loyal, how to react in certain situations, how to handle certain ethical dilemmas, etc.

It's part of the training. I've worked alongside the RCMP, CSIS, the CIA, MI5, DHS, ICE, etc. and have had an inside glance at what goes into the training, especially with CSIS (Canada's CIA/MI5) since I actually started the recruitment process with them. You definitely lose a part of yourself to be part of something bigger. I don't see this as being something necessarily negative, just not for me.

If you can understand that no one can just walk off the street and become a government assassin overnight, that such a person is built from the ground up, then Sherlock's shooting makes a lot more sense.

Mary

So are you talking of conditioning instead of programming now? I was trying to find some scientific background and still have no idea what theories it's based on. The only thing I found about programming in a psychological context was NLP, a pseudo science.

I on the other hand heard about such programming or training or conditioning - or what is the right term to use in this matter. It is something that is even taught to people at some schools - especially the infamous and controversial School of Americas, nicknamed School of Assassins:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas

Because normal people have inhibitions which prevent them from hurting someone or even kill them, training at such school instills a certain level of insensivity into their trainees, so that they gradually loose their normal sense of humanity and the barriers that prevents them from hurting other people are broken within them. To cite an example, their programming includes watching videos of military slaughter accompanied by aggressive disco music as if it was great fun and adrenaline ride and not the criminal act to do such stuff. With such brainwashing, the people trained gradually loose a sense of empathy with others and finally become killing machines whose concience is absolutely untouched no matter what atrocity they are currently causing. Count in the propaganda that dehumanises their "enemy" and here you are - those people won´t stop nor feel guilty for their actions no matter what.

Of course, the people who train such scum or the members of various "agencies" like Blackwater/Academy (the organisations of cut-throats for hire) don´t make the stuff about their training public - we are pretending that we live in democratic countries where such atrocities are supposedly impermissible. That´s why most people never hear about such things. But the existence of such programming and training and the agencies specialised on performing military atrocities which cannot be performed by the regular armies because of the rules of waging war - that is the fact.

So it would not be a surprise if Mary Morstan was programmed like that. Her behaviour in the shooting scene and her consequent coldness in the scene where she is confronted with her actions in Baker Street certainly matches that pattern.