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

Whisky · June 19, 2015 11:06 am

I have a highly-lauded self-defense book for women (!) here that seriously maintains that women are not to take the last bus or train, never to use toilets in trains

I just hope it's not written by a man.
Okay, drop that, a woman as author would make me even sadder.

Last edited by Whisky (June 19, 2015 11:08 am)

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 11:09 am

It is.

Whisky · June 19, 2015 11:16 am

I assume he just means the best for all women. Ugh.
but I have to admit, to judge any further I would have to read it myself. it's difficult to judge just by a short review.
edit: I just checked, one of the authors is a feminist. there must be something more to it.

back to mary? :-)

Last edited by Whisky (June 19, 2015 11:22 am)

Vhanja · June 19, 2015 11:38 am

Whisky wrote:
A miscalculation shouldn't end deadly. And also I think that Sholto acts very responsible in warning the others of his reflexes. Mary could have done so as well. She could have said "I'm stuck here, Sherlock, I don't know what to do, your appearance here puts loads on pressure on me, so don't move because I don't know what I will do". But she doesn't. If she cared about him, she should have done. I think she could have gone for "get out of here and don't say a word to John, I'll explain, Sherlock, I promise". He might have even done it. He even kind of trusts her after she has actually shot him - why wouldn't he before that.

I think "should-have-done's" are the easiest thing to do in hindsight.

(And she did warn him. Very clearly).

Last edited by Vhanja (June 19, 2015 11:39 am)

Whisky · June 19, 2015 11:42 am

I'm just saying she had possibilites for another outcome but didn't use them. Sholto showed responsible acting, Mary didn't. Her warning comes without explanation, and you can see how Sherlock is still struggling to accept her new identity. It was visible on his face. It was therefore visible for Mary.

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 11:45 am

This is true. If they had wanted to find excuses for her, the writers could have done so. They chose not to. This goes for the way Mary is shown throughout the episode.

Kittyhawk · June 19, 2015 11:52 am

"Plus jamais victimes!" is written by a man, with some famous tv women applauding it, one posing for the pictures and the other writing the foreword. I was rather shocked by the content - it's a mixture of antideluvian advice like the above-quoted (I also very much hated the "get somebody to accompany you home/to your car at night" - just a few pages before mentioning that, statistically, few rapes are committed by complete strangers), encouragement to dare to defend oneself (which I'm all in favour of) and techniques of which I'm not sure whether they would work - I'll let you know if I ever get into a situation where I have to rip somebody's ear off. (You can find the book on Amazon.fr if you want a closer look.)

I completely agree with all of you on the women's lib aspects of above discussion and I've lived it for decades, including travelling alone on all sorts of public transports and using all sorts of public toilets, cycling through war zones with a bit of semi-wild camping thrown in - all without problems (well, I slapped a guy a few years ago, but that was Saturday morning in the middle of Rennes when I was doing my work). That's what self-defense courses and Taekwondo practice is for, after all (IMO Whisky's self-defense teacher is right: A show of self-confidence puts off potential perps looking for an easy victim.)

Back to Mary: Of course in the eyes of the law she would be 100% guilty and her behaviour inexcusable. Possession of an illegal handgun (that alone is 5 years in prison), breaking and entering, threatening a person with the gun, shooting another one, causing bodily harm to CAM (she knocked him out, didn't she?) - probably there's a few more on the list, I'm not a specialist in UK law. At a rough guess that would add up to a few decades or life in prison...

But I still like her - lots of film heroes behave in exactly the same way, just not normally to people we like! Instead it's the hero who kills the baddy and all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Here the heroine (isn't that Mary was in TEH?) almost-kills the hero and immediately people see her as the villain. Instead of as the script-writer's victim...

Last edited by Kittyhawk (June 19, 2015 11:53 am)

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 11:57 am

Can you really separate Mary the character from Mary the script-writer's victim? She does not exist outside the Sherlock universe. We have to accept her the way she was written and I think, contrary to some of Moffat's critics, that he and Mark and Steven have an interesting variety of female characters. I loved Sarah, btw. So why is it so difficult to accept Mary as a heroine revealed as villain?

And another thing about her being morally grey or not - they could have found so many ways of showing grey nuances, especially in HLV. She could only once have said sorry or shown true regret or said that she loved John. But we get nothing from her, just silence.

Last edited by SusiGo (June 19, 2015 11:58 am)

Vhanja · June 19, 2015 12:01 pm

To me, she doesn't have to be either a hero or a villain. There is a lot of interesting nuances between those two. I find pure heroes and villains are boring.

And she doesn't have to only be nice and sweet for me to like her as a character.

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 12:09 pm

True, for me the most interesting character are not pure hero or villain either. Like Sherlock, who has his dark sides, or Irene, in some ways also John.
The thing with Mary IMO is that all through HLV she is never nice and sweet anymore and for me her development in this episode completely overshadows any sweetness she may have shown before. For me she is maybe the darkest character of them all because she is the only one who is introduced as a good person and then revealed to be something else.

Vhanja · June 19, 2015 12:10 pm

I think S4 and the future of her character, and her relationship with John and Sherlock (perhaps John in particular) will help me decide a bit more firmly what I think about her. I just know too little as of now.

Sherlock Holmes · June 19, 2015 12:11 pm

SusiGo wrote:
Can you really separate Mary the character from Mary the script-writer's victim? She does not exist outside the Sherlock universe. We have to accept her the way she was written and I think, contrary to some of Moffat's critics, that he and Mark and Steven have an interesting variety of female characters. I loved Sarah, btw. So why is it so difficult to accept Mary as a heroine revealed as villain?

And another thing about her being morally grey or not - they could have found so many ways of showing grey nuances, especially in HLV. She could only once have said sorry or shown true regret or said that she loved John. But we get nothing from her, just silence.

If she'd have done this - apologised or shown remorse - in the scene at Baker Street or the scene at Christmas in front of the fireplace, then I think a lot of her critics would feel a lot differently about her and we probably would have found it easier to forgive her as Sherlock and John (appear to) have done.

As it stands, the writers chose not to include this...It's one simple line, or even one simple word, yet they chose not to. You have to ask....why? They did that for a reason.

Kittyhawk · June 19, 2015 12:59 pm

I can separate anything from anything if I put my mind to it... And Mary does say sorry, as has been pointed out here repeatedly.

But I think where I disagree with you most fundamentally is in my attitude towards the script writers: I have seen so many mistakes in the show that I wouldn't be surprised at all if next season Mary was back as loving mother with a baby at her breast, with John the doting father and husband till a car crash kills mother and daughter. ("Oops, sorry, we forgot to include the scene with remorseful Mary in HLV...")

Or she might be developed into somebody really evil - so far we only have CAM's word for it that she ever was (and who is he to talk? I don't think I want to take CAM's word for anything). Shooting Sherlock - in the given context - on its own does not put her in the "evil" category in my book. So, like Vhanja, I'll wait for season 4 and in the meantime I continue to like Mary. (And skip all "evil Mary" stories).

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 1:12 pm

I was not just speaking with regard to Sherlock. Just look at the way she behaves towards the man she allegedly loves so much.

As for your finding the scripts obviously so badly written - I myself could not deal with something in such detail and for such a long time if I did not basically like and appreciate the way it was written. I know very well about the problem with the fall explanations but we never had an illogical connection between two series. So I trust that this will not happen next time either.

Last edited by SusiGo (June 19, 2015 1:16 pm)

Kittyhawk · June 19, 2015 8:23 pm

What "evil" has Mary ever done to John????

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 8:30 pm

I have not used the word evil. Let me see

She lied to him about her whole identity.
She never tells him she loves him.
She shoots and threatens repeatedly his best friend.
She is snarky and demanding at Christmas.

I think there is more but this should be sufficient for now.

Vhanja · June 19, 2015 8:31 pm

Did John ever tell Mary he loved her? To her face?

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 8:37 pm

No. But maybe you want to have a look at My thoughts about Mary where I have analysed who says what and to whom.

SolarSystem · June 19, 2015 9:10 pm

Kittyhawk wrote:
Or she might be developed into somebody really evil - so far we only have CAM's word for it that she ever was (and who is he to talk? I don't think I want to take CAM's word for anything). Shooting Sherlock - in the given context - on its own does not put her in the "evil" category in my book. So, like Vhanja, I'll wait for season 4 and in the meantime I continue to like Mary. (And skip all "evil Mary" stories).

Well, she basically says it herself. Granted, she doesn't say "Oh, and by the way, John: I'm an evil person", but what she says is that he will find things on that computer stick which will make him stop loving her.
I suppose that "evil" means something a bit different to everybody here. But the fact that she doesn't want to be present when John reads the content of that stick does at least insinuate that she did some things that most people would consider to be 'bad' and illegal and not easy to comprehend and forgive.

SusiGo · June 19, 2015 9:13 pm

True. And what is interesting - Mary knows that John has forgiven Sherlock, that he is able of such forgiveness if he really loves a person. So I wonder about the unforgiveable things she must have done.