BBC Sherlock Fan Forum - Serving Sherlockians since February 2012 » Mary

Schmiezi · May 29, 2017 8:08 pm

SusiGo wrote:
An interesting question about Mary:

https://howverypeculiar.tumblr.com/post/161210843307/a-mary-watson-question-i-havent-seen-brought-up

Very good questions indeed, with interesting attempts to answer it. I need to think about it for a while but deeply appreciate that there are intelligent fans out there to ask questions like that.

Vhanja · May 29, 2017 8:24 pm

Oh, and this is relevant for this discussion:

http://nemoholmes.tumblr.com/post/161178282666/marcespot-mofftiss-on-mary

Liberty · May 29, 2017 8:29 pm

I think they'd hinted at this several times before S4: that they felt ACD completely glossed over Mary's death. I'm glad they didn't stick to that.

nakahara · May 29, 2017 9:01 pm

Liberty wrote:
I think they'd hinted at this several times before S4: that they felt ACD completely glossed over Mary's death. I'm glad they didn't stick to that.

Mary played a nice role in "The Sign of Four" but no other story past that.
So why not gloss over her death?
It completely makes sense that you don´t want to unnecessarily bring such details into your work when you are writing a detective story.

besleybean · May 30, 2017 5:42 am

Well actually a show about Sherlock, his work, his life, his relationships.

Liberty · May 30, 2017 5:55 am

I don't think it would have worked, if, for instance, they'd started S4 with Sherlock just mentioning John's bereavement and them carrying on as normal from there without further reference to it. I'd have felt cheated! I think we needed to know what happened to Mary, and also to see the characters react to her death. I understand not everybody agrees. But this was something Moftiss brought up in interviews before.

Vhanja · May 30, 2017 9:28 am

Yeah, the way Mary was written in S3, it would have been odd if they had started in S4 with a side remark of "Oh, by the way, Mary is gone. So - new case?"

And they managed to "use" her death as a tool for the development of Sherlock and John, and their relationship. Which I think was quite clever.

Liberty · May 30, 2017 9:49 am

I agree: I thought it worked very well!

I suppose it comes down to what they said about writing a story about a detective, rather than a detective story. The focus is much more on the characters (particularly Sherlock) than the cases.

Schmiezi · May 30, 2017 10:55 am

I think it does not work well (as you all know by now). There was so much they could have done with the character to make her believable but they didn't. And when I hear that she was not meant to be an ambiguous character I can only say that for me they failed. :-/

But that is only my opinion.

Vhanja · May 30, 2017 11:11 am

I would have preferred that her role wasn't as big as it was. I wasn't too fussed that so much of TST revolved aorund her. Then again, it was good to have more background on her as a character.

And seeing as this is what we got, I am happy with how they decided to solve it. I don't mind that she was redeemed the way she was.

I am not sure what they meant with her not being an ambigious character. They built ambigiuity into her character more or less from the start. Perhaps they meant that in the end, she was revelead to not be a bad character, and so by the end the ambiguity was gone?

I can see what they mean (if that is indeed what they meant), but I am not too fond of labelling characters as "good" or "bad". Especially in Sherlock, many characters seem to be various shades of grey (Sherlock, John, Mycroft, Mrs Hudson, Mary...), something I find much more interesting.

Liberty · May 30, 2017 11:16 am

The thing is, I think we all wanted answers about Mary, and one thing I loved about S4 is that we were given them! If they had ignored her in S4, people wouldn't have been happy either.

Schmiezi · May 30, 2017 11:24 am

Liberty wrote:
The thing is, I think we all wanted answers about Mary, and one thing I loved about S4 is that we were given them! If they had ignored her in S4, people wouldn't have been happy either.

Sorry, I think the most important question us still open. What terrible things did she do in the past that would make John stop loving her? Working as a mercenary with a sense for family to free hostages is nothing bad John could not forgive. She did something bad but we are not to know what. We can only know the partly illegal but basically good thing she did.

Liberty · May 30, 2017 12:25 pm

But I think we are shown it: it's her work with AGRA (the memory stick that John burns is the AGRA stick). Maybe it doesn't seem too bad if we've imagined worse, but it's reasonable that Mary might think John couldn't cope with it. She had already said that she thought that finding out the truth would break him and she would lose him. It does turn out that he's more accepting than she thought, but it's kind of a close shave - he is not happy about it in TST.

It would have been good to have more detail: I would like to have known more about her past before AGRA, and how she got involved with the CIA and so on. But I think it would have been too much for this episode or for the series in general. I think we just have deduce from what we're given how bad she actually was! (And I think the answer is, not as bad as we suspected she might be!).

Vhanja · May 30, 2017 12:57 pm

Schmiezi wrote:
Sorry, I think the most important question us still open. What terrible things did she do in the past that would make John stop loving her?

Why is this question so important?

Schmiezi · May 30, 2017 1:07 pm

Vhanja wrote:
Schmiezi wrote:
Sorry, I think the most important question us still open. What terrible things did she do in the past that would make John stop loving her?
Why is this question so important?

Because that changes how good she really is, especially as we never hear her regret anything.

Vhanja · May 30, 2017 1:16 pm

To me, that leaves the question of how good she is open. Or to put it better - it leaves the question of how bad she can be, open. (Although shooting Sherlock at point blank to keep John with her gives us a pretty good idea, I think).

It would be interesting to know, but we don't need to know that to follow the rest of her storyline in the show.

Liberty · May 30, 2017 1:20 pm

I think that we've got to accept that we've been given the information we need. It looks as if Mary's story is being left as is: they all adored each other, both John and Sherlock were OK with her "failings" and forgave her for any wrongdoing, and she went out saving Sherlock's life. If there was a supposed to be a revelation that she'd done something so terrible that it would change all that and maybe even maker her a villain, then we would have been shown it, surely?

Schmiezi · May 30, 2017 1:35 pm

Liberty wrote:
If there was a supposed to be a revelation that she'd done something so terrible that it would change all that and maybe even maker her a villain, then we would have been shown it, surely?

Apparently not. ;-)

Liberty · May 30, 2017 2:39 pm

But the thing is, I think you're starting from the point that Mary did something terrible that would make her a villain, but they've just decided not to tell us about it, while still expecting us to know and think she's a villain. But that would be terrible story-telling! The alternative explanation is that she didn't do anything that terrible, and she isn't a villain. That's the most likely, given everything we see.

Schmiezi · May 30, 2017 3:35 pm

Liberty wrote:
But the thing is, I think you're starting from the point that Mary did something terrible that would make her a villain, but they've just decided not to tell us about it, while still expecting us to know and think she's a villain. But that would be terrible story-telling! The alternative explanation is that she didn't do anything that terrible, and she isn't a villain. That's the most likely, given everything we see.

But then it is terrible story-telling too, because they made a huge thing by telling John he would stop loving her if he knew about her past.

I believe that it is up to the viewers how grey they want to see her