Sorry, Liberty, but a husband being more shocked and angry about being lied to by his wife about her identity than by the fact that she is an assassin does not make sense to me. It may be that Mofftiss have written this story but then the story does not make sense to me. Lying about being a killer cannot be worse than being a killer IMO. 

I agree, Vhanja. What we see about Mary's past does not explain what we heard from Magnussen. It may be that John does not know about that but the audience does. 

There is no indication that what Magnussen has against Mary is trivial. And her own reaction indicates the same. 

 

Also, he doesn't know she's an assassin at that point.   It's when she tells him that people like her are needed because of people like Magnussen that he guesses.

IIRC John hears most of what we hear from Magnussen.   The main points, anyway. 

Now it might not make sense to everybody, but it's just what's in the show - what John expresses anger about.  "My lying wife".  "You said it was your initials". "So many lies".  He even equates it to his texting.  It's the deception that seems to bother him the most.   That's what he takes personally, which I suppose I can understand.  "She wasn't supposed to be like that" is said before he knows about Mary's past or what she did, exactly, apart from shooting Sherlock.   It's just in response to Sherlock describing her as one of the dangerous people he's drawn to (putting her in the same bracket as Sherlock himself, and Mrs Hudson).

I agree that what John knows is important, but I think we've tended to mix up the timeline - perhaps partly because the timeline is mixed in HLV.   But briefly, he finds out things in this order:

Mary shot Sherlock, and has deceived him, but her past is uncertain.
Mary's past is on a memory stick, with her initials "AGRA" (Mary gives him it).
She was an intelligent agent (Sherlock tells him)
She was an assassin (she kind of says this outright)
She went freelance (Magnussen tells him)
Her freelance work was with a group called AGRA, not solo.   AGRA was not her initials exactly, but the initials of the group.  She gave their daughter her own name. 

This is the order in which John finds things out.   I'm just writing it like this because I think perhaps a clue that gets missed is that Mary wasn't saying "what's on this stick is even worse than me being an assassin".  That hadn't been mentioned at that point.  Mary was handing over the stick before John knew anything about her past.   What's so terrible about it, is that it shows that she deliberately lied - she had a whole secret life and identity that she'd covered up.  Now, I'm sure the fact that it was as part of a mercenary group is worse than if she'd had a secret life as a hairdresser!   But there doesn't need to be any extra secret bad deed hidden on the stick. As we see, later John seems to accept that she was an assassin, and accept that she went freelance, but struggles to accept her lying about the initials.

As Mary said "John can't ever know that I lied to him.  It would break him and I would lose him .." "that I lied to him", rather than "who I was", or "what I did". 

(Apologies for the overly long reply!)

Last edited by Liberty (June 4, 2017 6:25 pm)

Liberty wrote:

I don't have an article to hand, but Moftiss explained that they thought that Holmes killed Milverton in canon.   They thought that Watson was an unreliable narrator - obviously he was not going to expose Holmes as a murderer, so he wrote up the case with an unknown woman doing the deed at the end.   So in the Moftiss version, they just made explicit what they already thought had been implied!

Of course, our Mary is not much like the canon character, and her story is not an adaptation of the original book (although some elements are used).  But then neither is Eurus canon.  I don't think they are obliged to stick to canon, but can use it how they like.   However, I do think they've come closer to canon at the end of TFP.   The rest can follow on from there.   The non-canon elements which are a bit awkward are Eurus and Rosie (who I still suspect was originally added purely for the line about the "three"!).   But Mary is not so much of a problem: John is now the widower who will carry on having adventures with Sherlock. 

A widower and a single father, who's going to have a hard time continuing to have adventures with Sherlock unless something is done with Rosie.  He can't move back to Baker Street as he does in canon unless that happens.
 

Vhanja wrote:

It does seem that John is also upset about Mary being an assassin ("but she wasn't supposed to be like this!"). However, seeing as both him and Sherlock are sometimes on the grey side of the moral horizon - and John himself killing an unarmed, sick and elderly chap in the very first episode - I think it's understandable that he isn't as upset about the assassin bit as normal people would. He isn't normal.

An unarmed, sick, and elderly chap who is about to murder Sherlock.  In that scene, John had no other option, not if he was going to save Sherlock's life.  Had he been able to prevent the murder any other way, I have no doubt that he would have done it.

 

Vhanja wrote:

I do still think there are worse stuff on that stick than her freeing hostages, though. 

I fully agree with you.

Vhanja wrote:

And as I've mentioned prior to S4, I don't view Magnussen as a reliable source seeing as he was deliberately goading John at that point.

Magnussen repeats "bad, bad girl" while he is alone in his mind palace, though and is assessing things he has on Mary. So he doesn´t do this to only goad John.

Well as usual, that's just me trying to be nice and concessionary!
In reality, as some of you are aware, I remain perfectly happy with what we were shown and continually bemused over the obsession with Mary.

People probably don't see the AGRA work as dodgy because due to clever writing we were only shown the not so bad parts of it.

Somebody who tries to free hostages and is betrayed will always get sympathy.

Showing us the dirty aspects of it would not have needed more than two minutes screen time. You could have cut the scene with Toby for example without losing too much. But the clear goal of the writers was to raises sympathy instead of solving the "You won't love me / bad bad girl" expectations that were built up in HLV.

What you say about her initial choice is interesting, Liberty. Because John chose to be a soldier and a doctor, both honorable choices (provided you are not anti-military per se). Sherlock chose to solve crimes and deliver criminals to justice. Another honorable choice even if he did it mainly for the sake of the game. Mary chose to be an assassin and a mercenary. And we are to accept all three as being on the same moral level? 

Well, that's the interesting thing is that people are accepting the AGRA work as morally OK, and thinking that Moftiss should have shown something worse.  I think it might be because Sherlock, with his rather unusual sense of morality, accepts it, and sees them all as similar. 

But thinking about all your comments, I think it's partly an issue of how it's presented.   Actually, the relevant bad stuff about Mary was all in S3/HLV.  She shot Sherlock, and was revealed as an intelligent agent and an assassin who went freelance.   That was as bad as it got.   I think maybe some people were expecting "AGRA" to be something even worse than that, but I think it wasn't supposed to represent a worse crime, but a mystery.    What we needed in TST was not to have some further terrible deed revealed, but to find out what AGRA was. 

So HLV is the reveal about the "evil" side of Mary, and that's concluded there.  I don't think there was ever meant to be a further reveal.  There's a point where it looks like Mary could be evil in TST, but it turns out to be a false lead. 

Vhanja, I don't think we have to see her killing somebody, because we know that she did it, and we know that she was an assassin (i.e. probably sneaking up on people and killing them, rather than killing them in combat).    We get all that information in HLV.