Thanks for your character analysis here, very interesting!
Mary may not be a reformed character - but she is on the road to reformation and this is why I personally like her. She is very flawed and very human. She shows us all that the road to redemption is rocky and littered with failure, but we can get there.
I'm not really sure, though, that the show treats her like a person who is only beginning her redemption journey. I think one of the things that bothered me most about the episode was that in the scene at Baker Street with Sherlock, John, and Mary where they discuss the shooting, Sherlock seemed to be telling the audience that what Mary did was basically necessary and not that bad. Sherlock changes the narrative from her shooting him to her 'saving' him. She says "I'm sorry" to Sherlock at the moment she shoots him, but clearly what she meant was "I'm sorry it came to this," not "I'm sorry, I should never have done what I just did and I repent of my action." The latter is what she needs to say in order for me to get past what she did -- she needs to admit that what she did was wrong and that her safety and inability to trust did not justify her in causing Sherlock's terrible pain and near death. She doesn't. And the episode doesn't seem to feel that she needs to repent for what she did. In the end, John says her past is her burden to bear and that her future is one he still wants to share, but he never addresses what she just did to Sherlock. She never retreats from the "morally neutral" view of what she did, as you put it, and the episode along with Sherlock and John seem to accept this view. As an audience member, I could not adopt this view, which is why I found the 'forgiveness' arc of the episode unsatisfying. In summary, to the extent that the script addressed what she did to Sherlock it seemed to excuse her rather than have her repent and be forgiven, and that disturbed me.
Mary is a master of the shadowy word of violence and intimidation, she is doing what she knows and what she does best. There was never any doubt in her mind that she could make Sherlock keep silent.
Yeah. Again, she needs to change this attitude/behavior before I can like her. Her sadness all seemed to be rooted in being found out by John, not in regret over the way she herself had morally regressed into assassin-like behavior towards her innocent friend.
In order to have a redemption arc, I need her and the show to acknowledge the seriousness of the ways in which she went wrong, not in the distant past, but in the present, in this episode.
P.S. -- I just want to say thank you again for your very thoughtful articles. It's really great of you to create a respectful and welcoming environment for fans to chew over some of the most controversial and complicated elements of the show. I know from some of the things you've said before that it can be emotionally wearing to be in the middle of so much heated debate, and I just want to make sure you know that, just because my subjective reaction to this storyline was different from yours, I in no way dismiss your own take on things -- thank you for sharing your interpretation and your personal reaction; I'm glad you enjoyed Mary's character throughout.
Even in my own head, there's no clear logic behind which kind of fictional flaws work to make a character more interesting to me and which damage my appreciation for a character. For example, I had the same negative reaction as you did to Sherlock's emotional manipulation of John at the end of The Empty Hearse. I know many other fans who were able to enjoy the train scene and read it in their own way, seeing Sherlock's manipulation as a sign of how important John was to him in much the same way that many fans read Mary's actions in this episode as proof of her love for John. For me, because I liked and cared about both Sherlock and Mary, watching them be unexpectedly cruel (Sherlock in TEH, Mary in HLV) was a disappointment which I felt emotionally, and that colored my view of their flaws in a way which put them more in the 'problematic for my enjoyment' category, rather than in the 'deliciously increasing their complexity' category, which I imagine is what the writers were aiming for and which clearly worked for many other people.
And yet I am totally capable of accepting Sherlock shooting Magnussen without losing my love for his character, even though in real life we all know vigilante murders are never okay. I don't understand my own approach to morality in fiction, sometimes :) At the end of the day, we all see what we see and feel what we feel! Thanks for letting us all talk it out with you!
I have a reeeeally hard time coming to terms with Sherlock shooting Magnusson... but I can think of three things that might make it easier to forgive him than Mary: 1) We know Sherlock better. We had 8,8 Episodes to grow attached to him before he shoots someone. We know what he's been going through to protect John, and what it must cost him to see that threatened. 2) We see him suffer for it. We see the look on his face after the shooting, when he knows that he has just sacrificed his freedom, his work, possibly his life for the well-being of the man that is most important to him. We see him saying goodbye for John for the last time, boarding a plane that he thinks will bear him on a suicide mission. In short: There are consequences (or at least there would have been, if not for the last-minute twist). 3)Sherlock's shooting is being made much more palatable by making Magnusson as revolting as possible. True, you don't get to shoot someone just for being vile, but it does make it hard to get worked up about it.
There's probably more, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Good points. Personally, I think a major factor for me was also that I have known the original ACD story for twenty years. In "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," though Sherlock does not pull the trigger himself, he watches the murder take place without interfering, he allows the murderer to escape, and afterwards when Lestrade asks him if he wants to work on the case he flat out refuses, even though he's already deduced the identity of the killer, and says explicitly that he's on the killer's side and morally approves of what they did.
So it's actually been canon for 100+ years that Sherlock was complicit in this character's murder and morally approved of it. It was not a very large step, in my mind, from that to having him pull the trigger himself. They actually presented his action as much more troubling and morally serious than the original story ever did. So, I guess I had a long time to be prepared for it and I was also expecting something like that to happen ever since they announced what story they were adapting for episode 3. In ACD, vigilante justice is generally presented with a lot of sympathy.
Thank you very much for being instrumental in starting up wonderful debates. I really love LJ because people are generally respectful, rational and we can have direct debates. I always enjoy reading your comments, they give me lots to think about so please keep posting!
Mary and a lack of actionwellingtongooseFebruary 3 2014, 19:58:39 UTC
Before The Sign of Three came out, I wrote an extensive piece on how Mary is a central character and yet she never does very much in her own right. I never published it because Sign of Three came out and I was too busy laughing that the murder method.
I completely agree with you that Mary never did anything to atone or redeem herself for what she did to Sherlock. Unfortunately this is a consistent pattern whereby Mary (even though she is supposed to be a central character) end up as a sideshow for the never-ending dance consisting of only Sherlock and John.
John and Sherlock are central characters, but they don't have to be the central characters. I was very excited about the introduction of Mary because we have for the first time a female central character in her own right. Except Mary never was as a character in her own right. She certainly had a lot of potential but it was wasted.
Her back story existed only for the purpose of ultimately allowing Magnussen to blackmail Mycroft. Although she finally does something independent from John and Sherlock, we never see that momentum of independence carried forwards. Like you pointed out, Mary did nothing afterwards apart from own up to her past. The issue of her shooting Sherlock is not dealt with well.
As much as I agree with Sherlock that Mary didn't intend to kill him, she still shot him in the liver. That is not a morally acceptable thing to do, and she knows that.
As a central protagonist, Mary also goes on the archetypal hero's journey. Except the writers took her back story to the extreme. I mean what is a more extreme way of revealing Mary is an assassin than by having her dress up in black and shoot the main protagonist? It certainly served a dramatic purpose but in using her as a dramatic plot device the writers have made her take a huge step back and never gave her the opportunity to then make up for lost ground.
As much as this story is about Sherlock's hero journey, its simply not gratifying for him to be the only character that progresses. I think the writers really loose sight of the fact that both John and Mary need progression. Whilst John got to have some demonstrated progression in his forgiveness of Mary, which I felt showed incredibly moral courage. We never see the same progress in Mary.
As much I love the setup of her character as someone on the journey to redemption, I find that the shooting is one huge bump in the road that Mary's characterization never really recovers from.
Of course its very easy to criticize the writers as I'm not responsible for writing the script. However I really do believe that the entire shooting scene and then over-dramatic resurrection of Sherlock wandered into the territory of the melodramatic and it really didn't have to. The whole point of the scene was to dramatically reveal that Mary was an assassin. There are other ways of doing that than having Sherlock walk in on her about to kill Magnussen and then get shot. It was merely the best way to wring a big emotional response from the audience and I personally do not enjoy shows that almost blackmail me into experiencing emotions and give me no choice in the matter.
As the seasons have progressed Sherlock has definitely lost its previous subtly. Although ACD often wrote action packed and dramatic scenes, he kept a tight reign on his drama. A lot of his best scenes were breathtakingly simple and devoid of exotic setting. They don't take place in dark glass office with a psychopath and an assassin, they take place in Baker Street by the fire - no one gets shot but the tension is even more palpable.
I think my main problem with season three really is the fact that it has to hammer everything home as though we are incapable of enjoying nuances and instead must be told exactly how to feel and when to feel it.
Re: Mary and a lack of actionrachelindeedFebruary 4 2014, 05:21:45 UTC
Very interesting thoughts!
I suspect that John and Sherlock actually are the only central characters in the show -- that doesn't mean that other characters can't at times play important roles, and it certainly doesn't excuse poor characterization or lack of agency in secondary characters, but I personally consider everyone but the two leads to be secondary characters (Mycroft, Lestrade, Molly, Mrs. Hudson and now Mary being the most important ones, and not counting guest characters like Magnussen or Irene who are central for a single episode).
Her back story existed only for the purpose of ultimately allowing Magnussen to blackmail Mycroft.
You may be right about this. However, I assumed (perhaps over-optimistically, only time will tell) that the writers gave Mary that backstory as a way of solving the problem with ACD!Mary. ACD!Mary was a character who was written under the influence of ACD's Victorian gender expectations, and he never envisaged her as being able to participate in the kind of adventures that Holmes and Watson pursued. As a result, once he serialized the Holmes mysteries she became a literary roadblock which he had to dispose of before he could get his plots started. She was forever away visiting relatives, or ACD would set his stories in the time period before Watson's marriage, or he would write a quick scene at the Watson breakfast table where John would get a terse telegram from Holmes and Mary would tell him to go ahead. But it was cumbersome to have to get Watson back to Holmes at the beginning of every story, and eventually Doyle just killed her off because it was simpler to just have Watson living at 221B as a full-time assistant to Holmes and not having to constantly skive off from another relationship and profession.
I think the BBC writers may have given Mary the background they did to make it very clear that she is willing and able to participate in future adventures/excitement/danger along with John or Sherlock, and that she is not going to become a roadblock either to the plots or to the John-Sherlock friendship. I think they may also be planning to use the baby both as a way of giving her a reason not to participate in every adventure (because they know people want to see their fair share of Sherlock-John as a duo), and as a way of showing that this is a permanent change in John's life and a simple kill-her-off decision wouldn't put a no-strings-attached John back at Baker Street the way it did in ACD. In short, I think perhaps they have characterized Mary this way as a message of intent: I think they will probably depart from the canon and not kill her off. Or if they do eventually kill her, I think it won't be for a long time, and that there will still be the baby to deal with.
This speculation may all be proved laughably wrong very quickly, but that is how my expectations are leaning at this point.
However, I don't think it was at all necessary to give Mary such a melodramatic backstory in order to accomplish those ends. She didn't have to be an assassin in order to take part in John and Sherlock's adventures. And as we've discussed, it was a mistake to reveal everything by having her shoot Sherlock and then try and excuse her for having done so. That meant we were getting her backstory at the cost of her characterization as a decent person on the road to redemption and at the cost of badly damaging her relationships with Sherlock and John.
As much I love the setup of her character as someone on the journey to redemption, I find that the shooting is one huge bump in the road that Mary's characterization never really recovers from.
I completely agree. I also agree with your comments on how the series has lost subtlety as it has gone on. Very regrettable.
Re: Mary and a lack of actionswanprideFebruary 10 2014, 13:29:56 UTC
Ironically though, when "Mrs. Watson" was still around, the beginnings of the cases were more interesting. Because ACD had to work to get Watson involved in the case, he came up with some interesting scenarios. Later on it was the ever repeated "we were in Baker Street and a client showed up/forgot something/Holmes told me about an old case".
Re: Mary and a lack of actionrachelindeedFebruary 4 2014, 05:45:16 UTC
I have just a few small thoughts on this question of Mary's lack of action. As I think more about it, I remember the famous Sherlock Holmes deduction about the dog that didn't bark in the night-time, and the lesson that sometimes we need to think about actions that aren't taken as well as actions that are.
The one thing I will say for Mary is that, after her secret was discovered and she was forced to come clean, she actually gave John two things that he deserved: space and time. She did not push him for quick forgiveness, she did not attempt further lies or emotional manipulation, she did not manufacture a crisis or use the baby as leverage to guilt John into coming back to her. She accepted his silence and waited for him to make his own decision in his own time. She clearly wasn't happy about having to do that, but she did it.
Perhaps I appreciate the actions she chose not to take in that instance because her 'passivity,' as some have seen it, contrasts so noticeably with Sherlock's problematic pushiness in The Empty Hearse. He didn't give John space or time, he manipulated him, he manufactured a crisis and he pressured John into quick forgiveness.
However, Sherlock also did what Mary did not manage to do: in The Sign of Three he publicly admitted both that he understood the damage he had done (he has suffered...tragic loss) and he straightforwardly and sincerely apologized (so sorry, again). And, in his talk with Major Sholto, I sensed that Sherlock had learned a real lesson about not repeating that kind of hurtful behavior. Sholto said that he thought he and Sherlock were similar, suggesting they both wanted to face death as a challenge they could meet on their own terms. Sherlock agreed, but stressed that they would never choose to make a dramatic, hurtful exit to satisfy themselves when the cost would be John's happiness (not at John's wedding. We would never do that, would we?) I read a subtext of reflection and reform regarding Reichenbach in Sherlock's behavior, and that went a long way towards helping me get over his bad treatment of John in TEH.
I think both Sherlock and Mary did some things right and some things wrong when it came to seeking forgiveness and redemption. Neither of their storylines felt satisfying on that score, which is a shame. But both of them got SOME things right, which is a consolation.
Mary may not be a reformed character - but she is on the road to reformation and this is why I personally like her. She is very flawed and very human. She shows us all that the road to redemption is rocky and littered with failure, but we can get there.
I'm not really sure, though, that the show treats her like a person who is only beginning her redemption journey. I think one of the things that bothered me most about the episode was that in the scene at Baker Street with Sherlock, John, and Mary where they discuss the shooting, Sherlock seemed to be telling the audience that what Mary did was basically necessary and not that bad. Sherlock changes the narrative from her shooting him to her 'saving' him. She says "I'm sorry" to Sherlock at the moment she shoots him, but clearly what she meant was "I'm sorry it came to this," not "I'm sorry, I should never have done what I just did and I repent of my action." The latter is what she needs to say in order for me to get past what she did -- she needs to admit that what she did was wrong and that her safety and inability to trust did not justify her in causing Sherlock's terrible pain and near death. She doesn't. And the episode doesn't seem to feel that she needs to repent for what she did. In the end, John says her past is her burden to bear and that her future is one he still wants to share, but he never addresses what she just did to Sherlock. She never retreats from the "morally neutral" view of what she did, as you put it, and the episode along with Sherlock and John seem to accept this view. As an audience member, I could not adopt this view, which is why I found the 'forgiveness' arc of the episode unsatisfying. In summary, to the extent that the script addressed what she did to Sherlock it seemed to excuse her rather than have her repent and be forgiven, and that disturbed me.
Mary is a master of the shadowy word of violence and intimidation, she is doing what she knows and what she does best. There was never any doubt in her mind that she could make Sherlock keep silent.
Yeah. Again, she needs to change this attitude/behavior before I can like her. Her sadness all seemed to be rooted in being found out by John, not in regret over the way she herself had morally regressed into assassin-like behavior towards her innocent friend.
In order to have a redemption arc, I need her and the show to acknowledge the seriousness of the ways in which she went wrong, not in the distant past, but in the present, in this episode.
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Even in my own head, there's no clear logic behind which kind of fictional flaws work to make a character more interesting to me and which damage my appreciation for a character. For example, I had the same negative reaction as you did to Sherlock's emotional manipulation of John at the end of The Empty Hearse. I know many other fans who were able to enjoy the train scene and read it in their own way, seeing Sherlock's manipulation as a sign of how important John was to him in much the same way that many fans read Mary's actions in this episode as proof of her love for John. For me, because I liked and cared about both Sherlock and Mary, watching them be unexpectedly cruel (Sherlock in TEH, Mary in HLV) was a disappointment which I felt emotionally, and that colored my view of their flaws in a way which put them more in the 'problematic for my enjoyment' category, rather than in the 'deliciously increasing their complexity' category, which I imagine is what the writers were aiming for and which clearly worked for many other people.
And yet I am totally capable of accepting Sherlock shooting Magnussen without losing my love for his character, even though in real life we all know vigilante murders are never okay. I don't understand my own approach to morality in fiction, sometimes :) At the end of the day, we all see what we see and feel what we feel! Thanks for letting us all talk it out with you!
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1) We know Sherlock better. We had 8,8 Episodes to grow attached to him before he shoots someone. We know what he's been going through to protect John, and what it must cost him to see that threatened.
2) We see him suffer for it. We see the look on his face after the shooting, when he knows that he has just sacrificed his freedom, his work, possibly his life for the well-being of the man that is most important to him. We see him saying goodbye for John for the last time, boarding a plane that he thinks will bear him on a suicide mission. In short: There are consequences (or at least there would have been, if not for the last-minute twist).
3)Sherlock's shooting is being made much more palatable by making Magnusson as revolting as possible. True, you don't get to shoot someone just for being vile, but it does make it hard to get worked up about it.
There's probably more, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
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So it's actually been canon for 100+ years that Sherlock was complicit in this character's murder and morally approved of it. It was not a very large step, in my mind, from that to having him pull the trigger himself. They actually presented his action as much more troubling and morally serious than the original story ever did. So, I guess I had a long time to be prepared for it and I was also expecting something like that to happen ever since they announced what story they were adapting for episode 3. In ACD, vigilante justice is generally presented with a lot of sympathy.
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I completely agree with you that Mary never did anything to atone or redeem herself for what she did to Sherlock. Unfortunately this is a consistent pattern whereby Mary (even though she is supposed to be a central character) end up as a sideshow for the never-ending dance consisting of only Sherlock and John.
John and Sherlock are central characters, but they don't have to be the central characters. I was very excited about the introduction of Mary because we have for the first time a female central character in her own right. Except Mary never was as a character in her own right. She certainly had a lot of potential but it was wasted.
Her back story existed only for the purpose of ultimately allowing Magnussen to blackmail Mycroft. Although she finally does something independent from John and Sherlock, we never see that momentum of independence carried forwards. Like you pointed out, Mary did nothing afterwards apart from own up to her past. The issue of her shooting Sherlock is not dealt with well.
As much as I agree with Sherlock that Mary didn't intend to kill him, she still shot him in the liver. That is not a morally acceptable thing to do, and she knows that.
As a central protagonist, Mary also goes on the archetypal hero's journey. Except the writers took her back story to the extreme. I mean what is a more extreme way of revealing Mary is an assassin than by having her dress up in black and shoot the main protagonist? It certainly served a dramatic purpose but in using her as a dramatic plot device the writers have made her take a huge step back and never gave her the opportunity to then make up for lost ground.
As much as this story is about Sherlock's hero journey, its simply not gratifying for him to be the only character that progresses. I think the writers really loose sight of the fact that both John and Mary need progression. Whilst John got to have some demonstrated progression in his forgiveness of Mary, which I felt showed incredibly moral courage. We never see the same progress in Mary.
As much I love the setup of her character as someone on the journey to redemption, I find that the shooting is one huge bump in the road that Mary's characterization never really recovers from.
Of course its very easy to criticize the writers as I'm not responsible for writing the script. However I really do believe that the entire shooting scene and then over-dramatic resurrection of Sherlock wandered into the territory of the melodramatic and it really didn't have to. The whole point of the scene was to dramatically reveal that Mary was an assassin. There are other ways of doing that than having Sherlock walk in on her about to kill Magnussen and then get shot. It was merely the best way to wring a big emotional response from the audience and I personally do not enjoy shows that almost blackmail me into experiencing emotions and give me no choice in the matter.
As the seasons have progressed Sherlock has definitely lost its previous subtly. Although ACD often wrote action packed and dramatic scenes, he kept a tight reign on his drama. A lot of his best scenes were breathtakingly simple and devoid of exotic setting. They don't take place in dark glass office with a psychopath and an assassin, they take place in Baker Street by the fire - no one gets shot but the tension is even more palpable.
I think my main problem with season three really is the fact that it has to hammer everything home as though we are incapable of enjoying nuances and instead must be told exactly how to feel and when to feel it.
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I suspect that John and Sherlock actually are the only central characters in the show -- that doesn't mean that other characters can't at times play important roles, and it certainly doesn't excuse poor characterization or lack of agency in secondary characters, but I personally consider everyone but the two leads to be secondary characters (Mycroft, Lestrade, Molly, Mrs. Hudson and now Mary being the most important ones, and not counting guest characters like Magnussen or Irene who are central for a single episode).
Her back story existed only for the purpose of ultimately allowing Magnussen to blackmail Mycroft.
You may be right about this. However, I assumed (perhaps over-optimistically, only time will tell) that the writers gave Mary that backstory as a way of solving the problem with ACD!Mary. ACD!Mary was a character who was written under the influence of ACD's Victorian gender expectations, and he never envisaged her as being able to participate in the kind of adventures that Holmes and Watson pursued. As a result, once he serialized the Holmes mysteries she became a literary roadblock which he had to dispose of before he could get his plots started. She was forever away visiting relatives, or ACD would set his stories in the time period before Watson's marriage, or he would write a quick scene at the Watson breakfast table where John would get a terse telegram from Holmes and Mary would tell him to go ahead. But it was cumbersome to have to get Watson back to Holmes at the beginning of every story, and eventually Doyle just killed her off because it was simpler to just have Watson living at 221B as a full-time assistant to Holmes and not having to constantly skive off from another relationship and profession.
I think the BBC writers may have given Mary the background they did to make it very clear that she is willing and able to participate in future adventures/excitement/danger along with John or Sherlock, and that she is not going to become a roadblock either to the plots or to the John-Sherlock friendship. I think they may also be planning to use the baby both as a way of giving her a reason not to participate in every adventure (because they know people want to see their fair share of Sherlock-John as a duo), and as a way of showing that this is a permanent change in John's life and a simple kill-her-off decision wouldn't put a no-strings-attached John back at Baker Street the way it did in ACD. In short, I think perhaps they have characterized Mary this way as a message of intent: I think they will probably depart from the canon and not kill her off. Or if they do eventually kill her, I think it won't be for a long time, and that there will still be the baby to deal with.
This speculation may all be proved laughably wrong very quickly, but that is how my expectations are leaning at this point.
However, I don't think it was at all necessary to give Mary such a melodramatic backstory in order to accomplish those ends. She didn't have to be an assassin in order to take part in John and Sherlock's adventures. And as we've discussed, it was a mistake to reveal everything by having her shoot Sherlock and then try and excuse her for having done so. That meant we were getting her backstory at the cost of her characterization as a decent person on the road to redemption and at the cost of badly damaging her relationships with Sherlock and John.
As much I love the setup of her character as someone on the journey to redemption, I find that the shooting is one huge bump in the road that Mary's characterization never really recovers from.
I completely agree. I also agree with your comments on how the series has lost subtlety as it has gone on. Very regrettable.
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The one thing I will say for Mary is that, after her secret was discovered and she was forced to come clean, she actually gave John two things that he deserved: space and time. She did not push him for quick forgiveness, she did not attempt further lies or emotional manipulation, she did not manufacture a crisis or use the baby as leverage to guilt John into coming back to her. She accepted his silence and waited for him to make his own decision in his own time. She clearly wasn't happy about having to do that, but she did it.
Perhaps I appreciate the actions she chose not to take in that instance because her 'passivity,' as some have seen it, contrasts so noticeably with Sherlock's problematic pushiness in The Empty Hearse. He didn't give John space or time, he manipulated him, he manufactured a crisis and he pressured John into quick forgiveness.
However, Sherlock also did what Mary did not manage to do: in The Sign of Three he publicly admitted both that he understood the damage he had done (he has suffered...tragic loss) and he straightforwardly and sincerely apologized (so sorry, again). And, in his talk with Major Sholto, I sensed that Sherlock had learned a real lesson about not repeating that kind of hurtful behavior. Sholto said that he thought he and Sherlock were similar, suggesting they both wanted to face death as a challenge they could meet on their own terms. Sherlock agreed, but stressed that they would never choose to make a dramatic, hurtful exit to satisfy themselves when the cost would be John's happiness (not at John's wedding. We would never do that, would we?) I read a subtext of reflection and reform regarding Reichenbach in Sherlock's behavior, and that went a long way towards helping me get over his bad treatment of John in TEH.
I think both Sherlock and Mary did some things right and some things wrong when it came to seeking forgiveness and redemption. Neither of their storylines felt satisfying on that score, which is a shame. But both of them got SOME things right, which is a consolation.
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