The Trouble with Mary
Dec. 16th, 2018 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marsdaydreamThe laundry list of problems with Sherlock’s last two seasons is long and convoluted, but one person seems to crop up on it frequently: Mary.
Unfortunately, Mary’s character seems to be the wrench that first threw the show out of alignment in S3. It’s not that Mary Morstan shouldn’t have been introduced, or that Amanda’s performance wasn’t well done. It’s that Mary was inserted into the show and then manipulated in a way that broke the logic of the plot, not to mention the dynamic of the two leads. More than that, the writers used her repeatedly to bait-and-switch the audience, without ever following up on the ideas they planted.
More rambling on this, below the cut.
To be fair, the writers had a worthy goal for Mary: female anti-hero. There aren’t nearly enough female anti-heroes, and had they executed this successfully, Mary would have been awesome – strong, sympathetic, yet ambiguous in morality. But in execution, Mary was too many things at once, and the plot that surrounded her never made sense.
When we met her, Mary was snarky, sweet, and sassy: the classic Moffat female. She was all about witty banter, and disarmed the audience by declaring her like for Sherlock. We could tell she had a secret, but all was well until the rug pull in HLV, when she turned out to be an assassin.
I’ve already written about this at length, but this was one of the most problematic events in the entire show. It’s impossible to follow the logic of why Mary would shoot Sherlock, and S4’s additional revelations made Mary’s decision even more absurd in hindsight. It’s equally impossible to believe that Sherlock didn’t guess her profession, and that Mycroft stood idly by. At the end of the day, Mary shot Sherlock because it made for exciting TV. It didn’t make for an understandable character.
But in truth, what’s really problematic about Mary: the writers planted heavy-handed hints about Mary’s past, and about the Watson marriage, which, in the end, they totally ignored.
Once Mary was revealed to be an assassin, one thread of logic was that she was somehow connected to a greater or more evil plot on the show. Moriarty was the most obvious connection, and the sinister hints were not subtle:
What this meant, all through S4, was that many fans continued to believe that these plausible Evil Mary theories could turn out to have merit. Was Mary on the side of the angels, or not? We were all hoping that answer would be far more interesting than it turned out to be. But not a single one of these obvious hints was acknowledged in the show.
Ultimately, it just wasn’t that deep. Mary turned out to be someone who fell in love and discovered that Mrs. John Watson was all she ever wanted to be. No Moriarty connections at all. The writers told us this, point blank, as if all of the suspicion and intrigue had never existed at all. As if they had not been whispering “Moriarty” in the background from the moment she appeared.
The problem is, if you introduce a big idea like “Mary might be allied with Moriarty” and then never make the characters aware of it, it’s obviously only for the benefit of the audience. It becomes just smoke and mirrors, a storytelling trick.
That’s what happened again with the Watsons’ marriage: constant hints of doom that went nowhere. To create drama, the writers repeatedly showed us that John and Mary’s relationship was troubled and that their trust was compromised, but in the end, all this trouble didn’t amount to much:
In the opening of HLV, John’s dissatisfied with life with Mary. He’s dreaming of Sherlock and eager for a fight, although his marriage is still very recent.
After Mary shoots Sherlock, the Watsons have an epic fight and separate, with John deeply betrayed.
John leaves Mary for some mysterious amount of time. Does he stay with Sherlock? We never find out. He takes her back in a teary reunion scene, but since we don’t know what happened when they were separated, we can’t be sure if he’s genuine or not.
In TAB, John and Mary are shown at odds, with Mary sneaking out, and John fighting with her. And see above - Mary’s image is overwritten with the actual words “The Abominable Bride.”
In TST, Mary and John are constantly shown sitting far apart, with plenty of visual space between them. They sit an entire seat apart on the airplane. They are shown sleeping apart in bed.
John cheats on Mary.
image
And yet – this entire setup goes nowhere. Mary jumps in front of a bullet, leaving John bereft as if their relationship had been perfection itself. John has to deal with his own infidelity, but never admits that his marriage might have been part of the problem. But wait, was it?
Once Mary dies, it’s as if all the Watson marriage woes fade away. The show transforms, painting Mary as the angel on John’s shoulder, guiding him to understand himself so that she can leave him at last. His love for her is shown as deep and all-consuming. Moftiss, we saw very little of this love while Mary was alive. Why did you spend so much time showing us that their marriage sucked, if this is how John really felt?
Wait, let me guess: Drama.
In death, Saintly Mary becomes a one-dimensional source of goodness. She gets to be the reason John returns to save Sherlock’s life, as we’re told John Watson wouldn’t have saved a dying Sherlock Holmes without her. (Really?) She gets to close out the show, declaring that John and Sherlock are *her* Baker Street Boys. Never mind that we spent half of Mary’s existence suspecting her of evildoing, or wondering if she’s right for John – we’re supposed to adore her in the end. Because it turns out our ambiguous antihero was just a nice girl who loved her nice boys. It was as simple as that.
Sorry, Mary. You could have been so cool.
The writers wanted Mary to be All The Things. A source of mystery, a villain, a hero, a strong kickass woman, a happy housewife, a bad match for John, the love of John’s life. And of course, everybody’s favorite. But you can’t just throw all of that at a character and expect it to happen because you say so.
Moreover, you can’t really expect viewers to enjoy a character when you force her to come between a beloved duo, and then give her exorbitant amounts of screentime in an effort to do all of the above.
That’s how Mary felt: forced. We were forced to spend so much time with her, and none of it meant anything. In all of that time, we never got explanations or answers for so many of the questions her character provoked. We were instead shown that she was spunky and clever and could do funny accents and break into Mycroft’s security system. We were never once shown any of the reasons why she and John were a good match – we were just forced to believe it after she died.
image
Every time Sherlock and John might have been alone, she was there, because we’d damn well better like her. If she jumped in front of a bullet, if John was crying about her, we were supposed to cry too. We were supposed to forget all our suspicions and questions on cue.
I didn’t forget.
That’s why her character didn’t work for me. Her questions weren’t answered. She left a trail of red herrings everywhere she went. We were supposed to love her, hate her, love her again, just when we were told. And her illogical plot made every character who touched it behave illogically too.
666 notes (note: seriously?)
Unfortunately, Mary’s character seems to be the wrench that first threw the show out of alignment in S3. It’s not that Mary Morstan shouldn’t have been introduced, or that Amanda’s performance wasn’t well done. It’s that Mary was inserted into the show and then manipulated in a way that broke the logic of the plot, not to mention the dynamic of the two leads. More than that, the writers used her repeatedly to bait-and-switch the audience, without ever following up on the ideas they planted.
More rambling on this, below the cut.
To be fair, the writers had a worthy goal for Mary: female anti-hero. There aren’t nearly enough female anti-heroes, and had they executed this successfully, Mary would have been awesome – strong, sympathetic, yet ambiguous in morality. But in execution, Mary was too many things at once, and the plot that surrounded her never made sense.
When we met her, Mary was snarky, sweet, and sassy: the classic Moffat female. She was all about witty banter, and disarmed the audience by declaring her like for Sherlock. We could tell she had a secret, but all was well until the rug pull in HLV, when she turned out to be an assassin.
I’ve already written about this at length, but this was one of the most problematic events in the entire show. It’s impossible to follow the logic of why Mary would shoot Sherlock, and S4’s additional revelations made Mary’s decision even more absurd in hindsight. It’s equally impossible to believe that Sherlock didn’t guess her profession, and that Mycroft stood idly by. At the end of the day, Mary shot Sherlock because it made for exciting TV. It didn’t make for an understandable character.
But in truth, what’s really problematic about Mary: the writers planted heavy-handed hints about Mary’s past, and about the Watson marriage, which, in the end, they totally ignored.
Once Mary was revealed to be an assassin, one thread of logic was that she was somehow connected to a greater or more evil plot on the show. Moriarty was the most obvious connection, and the sinister hints were not subtle:
- Mary, professional assassin, appeared in John’s life when Sherlock disappeared to hunt Moriarty.
- Mary’s crack shot ability suggested that she could have been a sniper. Moriarty used snipers repeatedly, in TGG and TRF.
- She shot Sherlock.
- Once shot, Sherlock believed that John was in danger because of Mary. It was the reason Sherlock struggled to come back from near-death.
- The show skipped over the missing months when Mary was estranged from John. Were John and Sherlock plotting against her?
- Moriarty was linked to magpie imagery and music; Mary and John’s wedding had magpies all over it, as did Rosie’s nursery.
- In TAB, Mary’s image is clearly connected with the title “The Abominable Bride.” Later, Moriarty appears under a bridal veil, just like Mary.
- Mary’s shown to be working for Mycroft in Sherlock’s TAB fever dream, but the “M” on her letter also suggests Moriarty.
- In S4, Mary made her own post-death videos, and left them with “Miss Me?” taglines in imitation of Moriarty.
What this meant, all through S4, was that many fans continued to believe that these plausible Evil Mary theories could turn out to have merit. Was Mary on the side of the angels, or not? We were all hoping that answer would be far more interesting than it turned out to be. But not a single one of these obvious hints was acknowledged in the show.
Ultimately, it just wasn’t that deep. Mary turned out to be someone who fell in love and discovered that Mrs. John Watson was all she ever wanted to be. No Moriarty connections at all. The writers told us this, point blank, as if all of the suspicion and intrigue had never existed at all. As if they had not been whispering “Moriarty” in the background from the moment she appeared.
The problem is, if you introduce a big idea like “Mary might be allied with Moriarty” and then never make the characters aware of it, it’s obviously only for the benefit of the audience. It becomes just smoke and mirrors, a storytelling trick.
That’s what happened again with the Watsons’ marriage: constant hints of doom that went nowhere. To create drama, the writers repeatedly showed us that John and Mary’s relationship was troubled and that their trust was compromised, but in the end, all this trouble didn’t amount to much:
In the opening of HLV, John’s dissatisfied with life with Mary. He’s dreaming of Sherlock and eager for a fight, although his marriage is still very recent.
After Mary shoots Sherlock, the Watsons have an epic fight and separate, with John deeply betrayed.
John leaves Mary for some mysterious amount of time. Does he stay with Sherlock? We never find out. He takes her back in a teary reunion scene, but since we don’t know what happened when they were separated, we can’t be sure if he’s genuine or not.
In TAB, John and Mary are shown at odds, with Mary sneaking out, and John fighting with her. And see above - Mary’s image is overwritten with the actual words “The Abominable Bride.”
In TST, Mary and John are constantly shown sitting far apart, with plenty of visual space between them. They sit an entire seat apart on the airplane. They are shown sleeping apart in bed.
John cheats on Mary.
image
And yet – this entire setup goes nowhere. Mary jumps in front of a bullet, leaving John bereft as if their relationship had been perfection itself. John has to deal with his own infidelity, but never admits that his marriage might have been part of the problem. But wait, was it?
Once Mary dies, it’s as if all the Watson marriage woes fade away. The show transforms, painting Mary as the angel on John’s shoulder, guiding him to understand himself so that she can leave him at last. His love for her is shown as deep and all-consuming. Moftiss, we saw very little of this love while Mary was alive. Why did you spend so much time showing us that their marriage sucked, if this is how John really felt?
Wait, let me guess: Drama.
In death, Saintly Mary becomes a one-dimensional source of goodness. She gets to be the reason John returns to save Sherlock’s life, as we’re told John Watson wouldn’t have saved a dying Sherlock Holmes without her. (Really?) She gets to close out the show, declaring that John and Sherlock are *her* Baker Street Boys. Never mind that we spent half of Mary’s existence suspecting her of evildoing, or wondering if she’s right for John – we’re supposed to adore her in the end. Because it turns out our ambiguous antihero was just a nice girl who loved her nice boys. It was as simple as that.
Sorry, Mary. You could have been so cool.
The writers wanted Mary to be All The Things. A source of mystery, a villain, a hero, a strong kickass woman, a happy housewife, a bad match for John, the love of John’s life. And of course, everybody’s favorite. But you can’t just throw all of that at a character and expect it to happen because you say so.
Moreover, you can’t really expect viewers to enjoy a character when you force her to come between a beloved duo, and then give her exorbitant amounts of screentime in an effort to do all of the above.
That’s how Mary felt: forced. We were forced to spend so much time with her, and none of it meant anything. In all of that time, we never got explanations or answers for so many of the questions her character provoked. We were instead shown that she was spunky and clever and could do funny accents and break into Mycroft’s security system. We were never once shown any of the reasons why she and John were a good match – we were just forced to believe it after she died.
image
Every time Sherlock and John might have been alone, she was there, because we’d damn well better like her. If she jumped in front of a bullet, if John was crying about her, we were supposed to cry too. We were supposed to forget all our suspicions and questions on cue.
I didn’t forget.
That’s why her character didn’t work for me. Her questions weren’t answered. She left a trail of red herrings everywhere she went. We were supposed to love her, hate her, love her again, just when we were told. And her illogical plot made every character who touched it behave illogically too.
666 notes (note: seriously?)
