besleybean wrote:

John has always been there when it mattered.
But he's human and has his little stomps.

Yes, he has been.  He has always been there for Sherlock, helping him and supporting him (I'm not counting those weeks following Mary's death, when he was angry at Sherlock and blaming him for her murder).  I want Sherlock, Mycroft, and the others to return the favor to John on the next go-around, and be there for him. 
 

Last edited by kgreen20 (May 21, 2017 7:37 pm)

In his own beautiful way!

Coming back to Mary for a moment - these are some thoughts I had about her story arc:

What Were The Bad Things Mary Did?

The Tbilisi operation is the only detailed information we get about Mary’s past actions, an anti-terror operation in which she herself became a victim of treason. There is nothing in it that would explain this:

- bad, bad girl
- If you love me, don’t read it in front of me. Because you won’t love me when you’ve finished and I don’t want to see that happen.
- The stuff Magnussen has on me, I would go to prison for the rest of my life.
- They were always such reliable killers.

The thing is we are never really shown Mary’s bad sides, at least not where her professional work is concerned. Her actions are mentioned in passing but John is never really confronted with them. He learns about the one story in which she herself became a victim. 

- Team of agents, the best. 
- AGRA were very reliable; then came the Tbilisi incident. They were sent in to free the hostages but it all went horribly wrong.

This is what we are told about AGRA (and that they worked for the highest bidder which is not a crime in itself.) They were meant to free hostages - where is the crime in that? 

So Mary’s one really bad action we observe and which John knows about is her shooting Sherlock. And for this she is forgiven by both Sherlock and John. Which results in a logical problem: As long as we do not learn about the bad things she did and wanted to hide from John, her shooting Sherlock is not justifiable and she does not deserve forgiveness. 

The writers seem to realise this and let Mary sacrifice herself for Sherlock. Quid pro quo. 

But this is does not work either because now John blames Sherlock and eliminates him from his life. The problem is that John ignored what Mary really did and that we - the audience - were not shown either. Even after TST John can keep ignoring her past. He saw what became of Ajay but this was not Mary’s fault but Norbury’s. So the fact that with Mary we get the exact opposite of “show, don’t tell”, that is “tell, don’t show”, makes it impossible to really understand the whole Mary arc. And it does not explain either why in TLD she suddenly embodies John’s kinder, more rational side. 

Good thoughts, thank you. I wrote this to explain to myself what for me the central problem with her character is. 
 

I think that Mary probably didn't get much worse than what we see.  She almost gets it right, that John won't love her - he does say that he used to like "Mary", once he finds out about what we know of her past in TST.   (I think that's more about her lying - but in Mary's defence, she did give him all the information and he chose to burn it!).   Yes, I'd like to have seen more of Mary's past too, but I think what we saw was enough to tell the story. 

I think Mary in TLD is how John sees Mary (rather than what we see as viewers in previous episodes), which maybe goes some way to explaining why he forgave her and wanted to stay with her, and why he was so devastated by her death.  However, I do think Mary always did have that side to her.   She was lovely to Sherlock in TEH, for instance, and did her best to talk John round and get them together - which is kind of what he sees her as doing in TLD.

No, shooting Sherlock was not justifiable, but it turns out was forgivable (by John and Sherlock, and possibly Mycroft, but maybe not by Mary!).  We were given the reason why she did it (which is different from a justification). 
 

The way Mary dies now completely contradicts S3 - she dies a hero, sacrificing herself for Sherlock, shot by a criminal woman who had done Mary wrong before. This is exactly what people are criticising - that facts are established in one series and overthrown in the next as if the writers had forgotten their own scripts. There is something called continuity, not only in a technical sense but also where plot is concerned. Mary is inconsistent as a character. 

SusiGo wrote:

The way Mary dies now completely contradicts S3 - she dies a hero, sacrificing herself for Sherlock, shot by a criminal woman who had done Mary wrong before. This is exactly what people are criticising - that facts are established in one series and overthrown in the next as if the writers had forgotten their own scripts. There is something called continuity, not only in a technical sense but also where plot is concerned. Mary is inconsistent as a character. 

That is true. They built her up as a grey character who is said to have done terrible things at the end of S3. And then suddenly she is the poor victim.

So you can either believe the writers did not give a damn for consistency, or that there are still some very dark secrets hidden in her past.

I hope for the later and can only repeat myself: there are so many lose ends, and one could swallow them easier if they had announced S5 or a special to be done in the furture.

besleybean wrote:

But I always hoped and believed Mary would be redeemed, she did exactly what I expected her to do.

Me too.   I wrote down my predictions for TST before it aired and one of them was that Mary would be redeemed.  It seemed a natural progression of the story. 
 

Well, if we ever get a S5...

tobeornot221b wrote:

We will.

Yes we will!