No Lola, you certainly didn't discourage me. The so far available facts don't allow to draw a conclusion with any certainty ;)

besleybean wrote:

.......But Mary is NOT telling Sherlock to go to hell as in ' get lost', she's warning him of what he will have to face to save John and this is the mission she is giving him...so she can hardly to tell him to get lost, when she wants him to complete a mission for her...apart form the obvious!........

In all fairness, we don't know for sure what Mary's telling Sherlock when she said go to hell, or why, do we. We also don't know if the "go to hell Sherlock" appeared on the DVD that Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson watched or if it was something only the viewers saw, maybe something Mary said while making the DVD.

If I gave Sherlock an after-my-death assignment that I knew would be extremely difficult, I wouldn't stand there and say yeah, and by the way, "go to hell, Sherlock" in such a grim way. To do so would be not in keeping with the trust Mary apparently had for Sherlock to save John from himself in the grim time after her death. I would say, "I know this will be very hard, Sherlock. John's hard to save when he doesn't want to be saved, Sherlock. I'm sorry it's going to have to be you who has to go into the cemetery and drag his sorry ass out of there and back into the land of the living, Sherlock."  I wouldn't say "go to hell Sherlock".

I believe we English speakers mean only one thing when we tell someone to go to hell, and it ain't "walk through hell for our cause" but rather an "eat shit and die" kind of message.

Puzzling. I could not believe they added that at the end...  good grief, these writers have it in for us, lol.

 

Last edited by ancientsgate (January 4, 2017 2:00 pm)

besleybean wrote:

Incidentally, do we know if the episodes will be repeated on the Friday evening, as they were last time?

Maybe on BBC.  Here in the States, it seems to be a Sunday PM only thing on PBS, but in my market (Boston) there are three shows on Sunday PM, one at 9, one at 10:30 and another in the middle of the night, like at 2AM or something.
 

besleybean wrote:

....... I really do not believe Mary is literally telling Sherlock to go to hell...why bother commissioning him on the mission to save John, then?...........Well unless Mary knows something we don't, that Sherlock is party to her death.

Brit or any other kind of English-speaker, it's an odd thing to say to someone's face, just because you know something's going to be hard. In my world, when someone tells someone else to go to hell, the words never carry a positive message or an encouraging one either.

I think she's up to something. I don't have any doubt that Mary is actually dead, but I think she will have put something in motion that will do its best to harm Sherlock, so that she will in effect be reaching out from the grave to make his life a living (or even a dying ) hell. She has always been envious of his relationship with John and the importance of his life in John's own---  Sherlock looms large to John, and when Mary married John, she married that relationship, too. No wonder she would have some resentment. But even apart from that, I've never trusted Mary as far as I could throw her, she's just been too much of a double agent in too many areas of her own life. The writers have never written her as doing anything in a straightforward manner that I can remember.
 

Last edited by ancientsgate (January 4, 2017 2:18 pm)

But she's just taken a bullet for him, why would she tell him to go to hell?
She obviously thought enough of him to sacrifice herself for him.
I cannot see that Mary has any intention to cause harm to Sherlock, it just doesn't make sense.
They seemed to really care for each other and had a good relationship.
I have never seen any kind of envy from Mary, she seemed to be the one trying to keep them together.
She also knows Sherlock is important to John.
 

besleybean wrote:

But she's just taken a bullet for him, why would she tell him to go to hell?
She obviously thought enough of him to sacrifice herself for him.
I cannot see that Mary has any intention to cause harm to Sherlock, it just doesn't make sense.
They seemed to really care for each other and had a good relationship.
I have never seen any kind of envy from Mary, she seemed to be the one trying to keep them together.
She also knows Sherlock is important to John.
 

I have no explanation except that this is the way these writers write. They don't write the way real people would act or how they would talk. It's a TV thing, as you said.

There are nut cases in the world who will sacrifice their own lives for what they perceive as the greater good, a greater goal, if you will. If Mary thought that her own death would hasten Sherlock's own (the go to hell wish), then she might be nutty enough to have done what she did.  Maybe she was just waiting for an opportune time to do exactly what she did, after all, knowing she could hurt Sherlock and John once and for all.

The existence of a now-motherless child is a conundrum. Because if Mary did indeed sacrifice herself to hurt Sherlock and John, even from beyond the grave, then that doesn't speak too well of her having any kind of natural love for her child. Since I first heard that there was a baby, I wondered what would happen to the poor wee thing. I'm still wondering. Maybe Molly will adopt her. (and yes, that's a joke, but with this show, who knows)

 

Lola Red wrote:

ancientsgate, I fail to see any kind of envy from Mary. She is, if anything, encouraging the relationship between John and Sherlock, which given her past, brings on a whole different set of puzzles. In fact, from her point of view, using the tension between John and Sherlock in TEH would have  made the most sense, but that is not at all what we are shown

Mmmm. I don't know. Just thinking out loud, as always. But I didn't say envy; I said resentment, which in real life (maybe not on TV) can smolder along under a very accepting and calm exterior. Mmmm. I don't know.
 

besleybean wrote:

You honestly leave me just about speechless.
I am aghast.
Where on Earth in the show are you seeing all this hatred from Mary towards Sherlock?
She tells John she likes him, they have shared jokes, she hugs and kisses him.

I didn't say hatred, I said resentment. And I said someone would have to be a nut case to sacrifice themselves to hurt someone else, if indeed that's what Mary has done. So not a rational act born out of simple hatred or resentment but an act that's several steps beyond those simple and very common emotions.

Mary's a double agent, and a very good one. She can play a role; she has, and she does. Are we to believe that when the wedding ring went on and the child grew in her uterus, she put away all of the mindset and skills and double-agentness that have driven her entire adult life?  It doesn't make me aghast to think of her still playing her double agent role, because Mary is just a plot device in the ongoing story of Sherlock and John, after all, a character to be manipulated by the writers to advance their plot agenda. She doesn't need to be above board and An Honest Woman to accomplish what they want from her.

I guess I think she's a faker. An actress. A double agent. It's what they do. I just don't know who she's working for anymore....  but Moriarty or his cause isn't unthinkable. Sherlock deduced she was a liar from the first time he met her.

But as someone else said, next Sunday PM will reveal more, we should wait till we see it!
 

I've never seen any envy or resentment from Mary to Sherlock or John, either. 

My take is that it means "you will have to go to hell and back to save John Watson", but that it's cut in a way to make it seem that she's telling Sherlock to f- off, just to play with our minds.

Then again, I am not completely ruling out that it could be something more sinister. We will just have to wait and see.

I know we tend not to believe anyone involved in the creation of this show (and with good reason), but Amanda said it was more or less an instinctual reaction from Mary: having the possibility to save someone she cares about and thus doing it, not really having the time to consider the consequences.
If we thus except that in the Sherlock-Universe you can jump in front of an impeding bullet to safe someone you care for, here is a sinister little detail: Mycroft did not move.

edit: sorry for going off-topic, I'll stop now

Last edited by Lola Red (January 4, 2017 4:12 pm)