Yeah, John almost never seems 100% happy. He does look happy in that last scene in TFP, though, when Sherlock hands Rosie to him.

 

Liberty wrote:

I don't think the tracker is about mistrust, but about being able to predict Mary - she HAS to deceive them at that point. 

John and Sherlock aren´t just anyone, they are men more than capable to deal with danger and risk.
That Mary has to deceive them and leave and to deal with a dangerous situation on her own is a telling sign that she does not trust in their abilities and that she underestimates them.
Her past is not a shocking surprise to them anymore. She could sit down with them and come together with a plan how to capture AJ.
But no. Her first impulse is to leave John without a word of explanation and to drug Sherlock who offers to help her.
To me this seems like a complete distrust, even contempt for both men.
 

I tend to agree with nakahara. I cannot help myself but I really, really dislike this "terrifying superagent" stuff. And I also dislike Mary belittling Sherlock and John constantly. This has never sat right with me, not in TSoT and surely not in TST. The problem for me is that with Mary the writing is terribly inconsistent - why does she name her daughter after herself, knowing only too well that she is a danger to all people around her, after trying all she could to hide her real identity from the world? Not to mention the frankly bizarre und unbelievable scene in the plane. Sometimes she does not seem like a SH character but more like a Marvel superhero. 

Sorry for deviating here but I am absolutely unsure what John really wants. He is not happy with a "normal" suburban family life but he does not want a wife who goes on adventures and leaves him and her child and causes danger to them all either. I honestly think there would have been no future for them but this is just my personal view. 

 

Yes to all this.

I think that with Magnussen gone, Mary believed there was less risk.  She thought she was the only one of AGRA who had survived.  But I think they were never going to have a long life together.  As Magnussen said, people like her tend to die (be killed) young.   She had her appointment in Samarra.

I think it's debatable whether she should have told John - he did seem to make it clear that he didn't want to know about her past.   So given that she thought Sherlock had dealt with the risk she continued ... and at that point, it wouldn't have seemed a risk to name her daughter after her.   In the end it was Sherlock and the wedding photos which caught up with her - well, mainly Sherlock inadvertently telling Ajay that he knew her.   Then after that, she knew that if she told John he'd try to stop her, but I'm sure she knew that Sherlock would tell John anyway. 

I remember after HLV that Mary was criticised for sticking around, because of the possible risk to John (although Mary was the one most at risk - John was at risk because of Sherlock/Mycroft rather than her).   Then in TST she's criticised for leaving to keep John and Rosie safe (she couldn't have protected Rosie in that way in HLV as she was still carrying her and she would have been at risk wherever Mary was).   She did seem to have been in a situation which was very difficult to get right.   And honestly, Sherlock and John were not really helping to protect her, despite their best intentions (I do think Sherlock kept his vow as well as he was able).   Sherlock put Ajay on to her in the first place, then led him to her, and put her at risk by insisting she return to his own turf - not his fault, but still, it does show that she wasn't far off the mark when she felt she had to work alone. 

As for John (getting back on topic!), I do think TLD shows his true feelings for Mary.  They did banter, as Sherlock and John did, but we see that John saw her as caring and understanding - and that she looked up to him, and he knew that. 

Last edited by Liberty (February 21, 2017 6:35 pm)

I think it's partly that, but I do think we see the heart of Mary too and how John responds to her.

Yes, it is.  It shows what John feels for Mary, and what she felt for him while she was alive.

 

No, but he wasn't content in S1 and S2. He kept dating women, so he was obviously again looking for "something more". And when he found a woman, he missed Sherlock. And when he had it all - a wife, a daughter, a job, a house AND Sherlock as a friend, he STILL wanted more. 

I do think he's happy with Sherlock as a rule (obviously not romantically!), but he has Sherlock in TST too - they're involved in each other's lives and going on cases together.   Sherlock is not any less devoted to him than he was in S1 and S2. 

I think part of the problem with Mary was that Sherlock was right - he did fall for her because of who she was.  But they don't actually fulfil that part of their lives together much - both have that thirst for adventure, but they're almost in competition over it.  Both feel tied to down to Rosie and struggle to deal with the less fun parts of parenthood and suburban life.    In a way, they rarely "consummate" (just the word that sprung to mind!) what drew them together, so their shared experience is mundaneness rather than adventures and danger.  I think that was changing a little in TST but never really had a chance to come to fulfilment. 

I actually got the impression that Mary was doing the bulk of the childcare, if anything (because we see John on cases with Sherlock), although it could have been more evenly split than we see.  It's only when Sherlock needs Mary's particular skills that the childcare swaps over to John, and that seems to have been a one-off (I don't get the impression from their conversation that it's something that happens regularly).   And even then, John just brings Rosie along with them! 

But I agree generally that it was doomed - we were pretty sure Mary was going to die in S4, and I think it was clear that Moftiss planned to set them up as the Holmes and Watson of legend, not as a threesome!