I would agree with that.  But I like what they did.   My hope for Mary was that she would be redeemed, and I got my wish.   My other hope was that if they made her into a villain, she wouldn't be one of Moriarty's minions, but something bigger and better, an arch-villain in her own right.  Well, obviously that didn't happen, but they kind of did it with Eurus, somebody else who was "family", instead.   It's almost like I got just what I wanted!  (I also really, really didn't want them to kill off Mycroft - I couldn't even post about it when people started talking about it after the foreshadowing in TAB.  So yes, I got my three wishes!).

But I don't think they have to follow canon at all.  I think they want to, some of the time, and I think the end of TFP is kind of leading them back to canon after their flights of fancy (!), but really, they are free to do what they want. 

I agree. And she was in seven episodes in some way which IMO is far too much. I do not think she deserved to have the last word. The montage at the end of TFP is beautiful, especially with the music, and her voice-over for me felt quite inappropriate. 

Well, I was not. I can love and appreciate something without always being happy with it. And the amount of critique shows that maybe, just maybe they went wrong there. Steven and Mark are not perfect. They are human. 

She did have a lot of screentime.  But I do think they used it fairly well.  To the extent that I had been itching for her to be gone, and ended up really enjoying her in TLD!   There are very different things going on with her in each of the episodes that she's in, I feel - except perhaps TEH and TSOT which blur together a bit more. 

Mycroft also got a lot more screentime than is usual, and a more important role, but again, I really enjoyed that, particularly towards the end! 

I feel it was about bringing the cases closer to home, so that we're more emotionally invested.  Both Mary and Mycroft are clients for a while, and Sherlock is on their cases with all the extra drama that that brings!   And that worked well for me - the relationship focus. 

I'm not 100% sure about Mary at the end, but I do think it ties in well with the ongoing theme of messages from beyond the grave, and was kind of a final goodbye from that character.   I don't really see any of the other characters speaking those words. 

I think Mary really wanted to be the person she was when John first met her, but circumstances intervened.
I think by the end, John understood this.

I can kind of see what you mean with this.
Was it that Mary wanted to include John, the second time?

Liberty wrote:

Ghost Mary in TLD was particularly moving.

I agree. But sadly this was the only thing that worked for me in connection with Mary. I hated all the action stuff they did with her in T6T (and that's one of the main reasons why I don't like the whole episode), it was so unbelievably conventional and boring. Same goes for the death scene. And having her speak the final words at the end of TFP (and possibly the end of the whole show) still makes me go What the F***...?!
 

Now that S4 had time to sink in, I still wonder about one thing:

What did we need Mary for? What was her purpose storywise?

She is a character from canon but was she only brought to the show so the writers could say they did? Or did she serve a certain purpose within the fiction of the show? Does that purpose probably change from S3 to S4?

I don't have answers for those questions and am quite puzzled. As a Johnlocker, I thought she would have been introduced to be the obstacle John and Sherlock had to overcome. I am not sure about that any longer but don't see where introducing the show helped the other characters to develope or something.

What do you think?

I agree. It is a fact that from S3 on and especially after S4 many fans were disappointed or even left the fandom. Note: I am not talking about extreme TJLC followers here but also about fans who cared about the 130-year-old dynamic between Holmes and Watson. Why did they leave? Because they said it was not the show they had come to love anymore. And the main reason for this was the changed dynamic. I know no other adaptation in which Mary Morstan became a central character - for a good reason. Because it is not Canon and because it is not what this story is about. 

We have discussed this alone in this thread on 250 pages, most of them written even before S4. So I would like to ask this: Why did they keep Mary even after she had been killed? Why turn her into John's "conscience" or whatever you wish to call it? Why give her the last word in TFP? Why did she have to become so important?

Reviews and fan reactions have shown that many people absolutely dislike the importance that was given to her. They had fallen in love with a show about two men and their frankly ridiculous adventures, two of them against the rest of the world and were given two men who for a time were not even friends anymore. Mary's death nearly destroyed their relationship, something that has never been Canon, that has never been as much as hinted upon by ACD.

I have more thoughts about this that I may share in other threads but these question still remain. And they have not been answered yet. Same goes for the question why Amanda was given the whole cinema special that preceded TFP. She got the prologue and the epilogue to an episode that might be the last. And I wonder whatever justified this decision. 


 

I had the same idea. Of course they are free to choose their actors but basing writing decisions upon this - writing decisions that change the direction of the whole show - is problematic. In a way I feel that they sacrificed what they had - and what people loved - for the wish to give Amanda a bigger part. As I said, there is probably no other adaptation in which Mary's part is so extensive. Not without reason. It is not what people expect from the Holmes-Watson-universe and I think that the writers sadly drove away part of their fandom by this.

If they had stopped at the end of TST, it would not have been perfect but okay. Mary dead, John mourning. But the whole Inner Mary thing plus the TFP DVD was just too much in my opinion. 

Last edited by SusiGo (May 3, 2017 9:13 am)