Sob.

Yeah, we forgive you Susi!

I've read through this entire thread tonight, and I really can't wait for S4, to see where John and Mary will go. TAB didn't really give us much to go on. The only scenes set in real life show us nothing between John and Mary at all, so basically we don't know anything more about them than we did after HLV.

We do have that little nod after Mycroft's "Look after him", which I take to mean that John will stop his token resistance. I do honestly hope there will not, for a second, be John and Mary "babysitting" Sherlock. I wouldn't want that at all. 

But if John is to be as important part of Sherlock's life as he used to be, how can he balance that with Mary and a baby on the way? It just doesn't work, something has to give.

So, yeah, very excited about S4!

I read this interesting meta/analysis of John today. I'm putting it here as it seems to be the more active of the John character threads.

Of course, this analysis is pure speculation with what little we know from the show, so it might be all wrong. But I found it interesting and plausible all the same.

http://esterbrook.tumblr.com/post/104562523718/something-has-been-niggling-at-the-back-of-my-mind

Sadly I don't think John's that unusual:
I believe he's mourning dead parents.
An alcoholic sister will  be a strain.
He also suffers PTSD.
The more unusual part is coping with a rather different wife.
I think he holds together pretty well.

I would love to get more background on John. However, Sherlock is the main-est man character of the show, so not sure how much time Moffatt will spend on John's backstory if it's not related to Sherlock. 

I wish they'd left that scene in.  We could use a little back history on John, more than the show has given its audience up to this point.  We now know who Sherlock's parents are and what they're like, but we know absolutely nothing about John's parents.  It appears that they're dead, but again, we don't know for sure.  All we do know is that he has a sister and a cousin.
 

Last edited by kgreen20 (May 11, 2016 12:37 am)

When it comes to John's backstory, I think it could work quite nicely to give us more of that in conjunction with Mary's backstory - should Mofftiss decide to tell us more about her in S4. They could give us more information on John AND Mary and contrast both backstories with one another. 

I hope they will!  I really do.  Hint, hint, Moffat and Gatiss!
 

Vhanja wrote:

This thought just crossed my mind... out of the three main cast (as of now), I believe John is the one who we in the least have seen acting cold and cruel. With that I mean "with the explicit intention of excerting physical or mental hurt".

Now, in ASiP, Sherlock torture the cabbie to satisfy his own curiousity
In HLV, we see Mary threaten Sherlock, shoot him and making him pick up the coin, to appear threatening.

Do we ever seen John do any of this? Do we ever see him performing an action to explicitly hurt another human being?

I would say no. The closest we get, in my opnion, is his "One more word and you will not need morphine", which seems to be a very clear and cruel threat. However, Sherlock doesn't seem threatened by it in the least, he completely ignores it and John never follows up on it. Showing that it was only words without any intent behind it.

So it seems to me, that out of the three, John is the only one who has not shown any cruelty (with that definition) in the show.

John deliberately sprains the arm of Bill Wiggins. He later admits he did it as an adrenaline junkie who "needed the fix", not out of any real neccessity. He is as bad as the others, if you ask me.