Swanpride wrote:

Let's see...Sherlock's plan to break into the office was a fake engagement. Mary climbed through the window and if not for Sherlock, she would have been able to kill Magnusson with noone being any wise.

Sorry, but I think when it comes to spying, her skill-set is better than Sherlock's. He is better in deducing, though.

This is not a question of intelligence but of skill set. I wouldn't expect Sherlock to bake a cake either - that's something Mrs. Hudson can do. That and typing.

We have no evidence that Sherlock wants her assistance in murdering people, and that is all that she has a skill set in.

Strangely enough, ninja assassins climbing skyscrapers in order to climb through nonexistent windows do not feature prominently in Sherlock's life; for that matter they do not feature prominently in anyone's life. Should he need one at any point in the future I'm sure that Mycroft would lend him one, but it's ludicrous to suggest that Moffliss would destroy the canon by turning Sherlock into a man capable of behaving like Mary.

They play games with it but they never tarnish the essential core; that is why we love it...
 

I hope they all would!

The problem is that Mary sees killing people as the best solution to her problems; on the most banal level I don't think that Sherlock could live with himself if he let her anywhere near one of his cases knowing that her idea of being a troubleshooter is shooting the person who's causing trouble.

For that matter, Mycroft would be exceedingly vulnerable if she was allowed access to state secrets, and that is pretty much what at least the beginning of the next series is about. Once the plane turns back, because England needs Sherlock Holmes, it is a matter of State, and Mary cannot be allowed anywhere near it. That's a best case scenario; on a worst case scenario she is linked to whoever has arranged the apparent return of Moriarty, and she really needs to be quarantined for everybody's safety...

Let's assume, that Moriarty is dead and stays dead, has no one wondered, that they have to introduce a completely new villain again next season, since CAM, while promissing, was killed of pretty quickly. We hardly knew him. But Mary was featured in all new episodes, and she would make a great adversary , as I wrote in my comment above.
I'm in the faction, that assumes, the Moriarty show was an elaborate trick to get Sherlock back from exile. And, while I first rejected this thought, I'm coming round to the theory, that Sherlock has arranged it himself, since he cannot fulfil his vow to protect the Watson family, if he's on a suicide mission in Eastern Europe. He came back from near death, when he realized, John might be in danger. Do you really think, he wouldn't find a way out of exile pretty quickly? The question is of course, who, if he was behind it, helped him to pull off that trick?

Last edited by sherlocked (January 17, 2014 7:20 pm)

besleybean wrote:

Mycroft?

He's one candidate, but I'm not a friend of always having Mycroft as deus ex machina, when something happens, that can't be easily explained. Though he certainly wouldn't want Sherlock on a suicide mission.

sherlocked wrote:

BTW, is there anyone else, who feels, there's something totally off with with the Chrismas at the cottage scene, when they all fall asleep? We know, that Sherlock drugs people left and right, if it suits him, he even admits to it at his best man's speech But come on! Drugging a pregnant woman, and having this engineered and superwised by a dopehead (or reformed dopehead)?  That's a bit much, even for Sherlock's standards....*thoughts trail off in a certain direction*

Given that the pregnant woman in question is a hired killer with an apparent obsessive devotion to one of the people about to get into a helicopter, I think that drugging her is the safest course of action. Alternatively John could have given the memory stick to Lestrade and Mary would have been spending Xmas in a top security prison; I think she probably preferred the first option.

Worst case scenario would probably be Sherlock telling his mother who shot him...
 

Willow wrote:

sherlocked wrote:

BTW, is there anyone else, who feels, there's something totally off with with the Chrismas at the cottage scene, when they all fall asleep? We know, that Sherlock drugs people left and right, if it suits him, he even admits to it at his best man's speech But come on! Drugging a pregnant woman, and having this engineered and superwised by a dopehead (or reformed dopehead)?  That's a bit much, even for Sherlock's standards....*thoughts trail off in a certain direction*

Given that the pregnant woman in question is a hired killer with an apparent obsessive devotion to one of the people about to get into a helicopter, I think that drugging her is the safest course of action. Alternatively John could have given the memory stick to Lestrade and Mary would have been spending Xmas in a top security prison; I think she probably preferred the first option.

Worst case scenario would probably be Sherlock telling his mother who shot him...
 

You might be right, and there's a lot of fridge logic involved here. But having a pregnant woman (doesn't matter, if she's an assassin, she's still pregnant) drugged by a dopehead stuck like a crow's foot in my throat.... and you wonder, how John as a doctor could just leave, without investigating this any further. I know, this flight to CAM's house was for his and Mary's own good, but the whole scenario is really hard to swallow for me.

sherlocked wrote:

Willow wrote:

sherlocked wrote:

BTW, is there anyone else, who feels, there's something totally off with with the Chrismas at the cottage scene, when they all fall asleep? We know, that Sherlock drugs people left and right, if it suits him, he even admits to it at his best man's speech But come on! Drugging a pregnant woman, and having this engineered and superwised by a dopehead (or reformed dopehead)?  That's a bit much, even for Sherlock's standards....*thoughts trail off in a certain direction*

Given that the pregnant woman in question is a hired killer with an apparent obsessive devotion to one of the people about to get into a helicopter, I think that drugging her is the safest course of action. Alternatively John could have given the memory stick to Lestrade and Mary would have been spending Xmas in a top security prison; I think she probably preferred the first option.

Worst case scenario would probably be Sherlock telling his mother who shot him...
 

You might be right, and there's a lot of fridge logic involved here. But having a pregnant woman (doesn't matter, if she's an assassin, she's still pregnant) drugged by a dopehead stuck like a crow's foot in my throat.... and you wonder, how John as a doctor could just leave, without investigating this any further. I know, this flight to CAM's house was for his and Mary's own good, but the whole scenario is really hard to swallow for me.

Yes, I certainly see your point of view.

I see this not as a good idea but as the 'least worst' option; John spent more time checking on Mary's state than he did when Sherlock was bleeding to death in front of him, and in an ideal world neither of those events would have happened. But it would have been grossly irresponsible to leave a conscious Mary in a house with Sherlock's parents and elder brother; her reactions to perceived danger are abnormal, and she knows she could extract a very high price for their safety.

So really it does come down to a choice between a series of bad options, and the person who paid the price for it was Sherlock; his 'Tell Mary she's safe now' can be read in a number of ways but one very obvious one is that when Mary feels threatened she tends to react in lethal ways. But I certainly accept that there may have been a better option...
 

sherlocked wrote:

BTW, is there anyone else, who feels, there's something totally off with with the Chrismas at the cottage scene, when they all fall asleep? We know, that Sherlock drugs people left and right, if it suits him, he even admits to it at his best man's speech But come on! Drugging a pregnant woman, and having this engineered and superwised by a dopehead (or reformed dopehead)?  That's a bit much, even for Sherlock's standards....*thoughts trail off in a certain direction*

A dopehead may not be such a bad choice of a person to engineer and supervise this. People who have been around hard drugs for long enough are often very knowledgeable and capable of managing overdoses. Problems start to arise when they all shoot up at the same time and there is not one sobber person around to monitor the situation. A reformed dopehead would do just fine I think.

John's reaction to this plan just confirms in my mind that he is not only surrounded by 'psychopaths' but not exacly 'normal' himself.

Swanpride wrote:

That's what I call selective argumentation...for example, the writer totally ignored the fact that Mary was the one who called the ambulance. Or that John would have realized that the stick is empty if he looked at it, and even if he decided against it, there was a high likelyhood that Sherlock might do it at one point (in fact, perhaps he did). And yes, naturally Mary does look worried when Sherlock wakes up...she didn't have the opportunity to speak to him, yet. And why should Sherlock push Mary and John together if he doesn't trust her with John?

wrt "Mary saved my life" I have real trouble with this - Sherlock came very close to dying and IMO it was an odd shot for a "trained assassin" - there are better ways to incapacitate someone without killing them but also better, quicker ways of killing.  Medicine in show doesn't work the way it does in the real world (I'm a pathologist) but in this case it was a narrow call in show too.  I'm working on the theory that she was conflicted on whether or not to kill Sherlock.

wrt why Sherlock would push John and Mary together - because of the baby, at least in part?  Possibly he does think she's still working for someone and is trying to get to them through her?  As a remote possiblity Sherlock thinks she's a true psychopath and would have gone after John once convinced she'd truly lost him.

As I see it we know very little about Mary for sure - the information about her being a freelance killer came from Magnussen who is not reliable.  Mary could have been exagerating the 'you won't love me after you read it' bit so that John be expecting something awful and find whatever she'd done better than he feared.  She could have been involved in something else he'd have trouble with (drug running, prostitution).  Of course whatever was on the key could have been fake...

to add to my problems someone on Digital Spy pointed out that the key we see a close up of in the fire has slightly different writing on it to the one Mary gives John and he shows her just before throwing it in the fire.  I think that's a prop error myself (the fire shot presumably being done by the second unit) but it might not be.  It's not my image and I'm too new here to post link, the ds post is # 1655 in the DS BBC Sherlock (3) thread.