Series 4 News

[Arcadia]

Oh, dear, my long-suffering moderator and shadowy teddy bear: has any member of your family tried to shoot your best friend in an almost-fatal way and leave them bleeding?

 

Not lately but you never know with my clan. :d

 

[Bluebell]

This just surfaced on Twitter...

 

 

Excellent - yes, I saw an ad in the shopping mall (they have a sort of news-tv-thingy going on there) that it is to be broadcast in Germany on new years.   

 

My only problem is at the moment that I need to find a spot where I can watch, because I am currently at home without tv connection (I have a tv, but only for DVD watching), and since my computer went down I can not see internet stuff either. Hopefully someone gets me a new laptop for christmas....*sigh* (otherwise there should be a 'public viewing' thing for Sherlock - they do it during football championship season, so why no Sherlock? :lol: ) 

[T.o.b.y]

But it will be dubbed... I think I will wait until Amazon has it up for streaming. They were really fast with The Abominable Bride.

[Boton]

 has any member of your family tried to shoot your best friend in an almost-fatal way and leave them bleeding? 

 

Many of us like to call that "Thanksgiving Dinner." 

[Arcadia]

[Bluebell]

But it will be dubbed... I think I will wait until Amazon has it up for streaming. They were really fast with The Abominable Bride.

 

That's true. Yes, the used media store I usually buy my stuff from had The abominable bride as UK-Import long before it was broadcast here, so I hope they have the season out on DVD soon after again.

[Inge l-w]

Bluebell, I hope it's cheaper than Amazon.co.uk , where I have pre-ordered my copy. But if Mary Dear survives this season, it may be my last pre-order!

[besleybean]

I'm fairly certain she won't survive!

[Pseudonym]

The only way she'll survive is if she's forced into hiding in a way that means she won't ever be back. But yea, I think she'll die. 

[Boton]

I think she'll die too.  They've already done the "forced into hiding" thing with Irene Adler, so having Mary on the lam is a little repetitive. (Plus it starts to sound a little bit like that song from Avenue Q, "My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada.")

 

I'm kind of sad that I still have that opinion, because, in spite of my lack of love for Johnlock fan fics, I've really grown to like Johnlockary.  But I think the show will actually use a version of the implied out from ACD and get rid of Mary permanently.  Probably for the best -- this is a buddy show, not a show about a kooky couple and their crazy friend.

[besleybean]

I just think :  Canon.

[T.o.b.y]

Funny, I am almost willing to bet that Mary will not die. My impression is that they like the character too much and if they want to continue the series sometime in the future, they would still want her around. Besides, it seems so predictable.. . I think they will play with our expectations that she will die but she won or it will be unclear what happens to her.

[bedelia1984]

Besides, it seems so predictable

 

 Agreed!

 

I always see Mary as non-canon in origin, in the sense that she isn't actually Mary Morstan, the real Mary of our universe is likely dead, and this woman has just assumed that alias. 

 

I think the writers have a more fluid way of working than people assume. Molly, for example, could easily have become Mary early on (maybe they wanted to leave that door open in the early days), except I think they had more fun writing her in other directions in the end. In Molly they saw a character have more potential on screen than was expected from their pages, and gone on to exploit that further. Why not do the same for Mary? Perhaps the character has more potential than the original stories were able to suggest, and our Sherlock team are going to find a way to show that.

 

I don't want to see loads of Mary next season, honestly, but I'd be downright disappointed if after waiting all these years we just got some pedestrian retread of ACD's version, where she ends up definitively dead. I hope the writers will surprise us a little bit more than that.

 

If they do make the series much longer (I hope they may, at least occassionally), Mrs. Hudson will likely be semi-retired, we might hope to see more of Molly, but who knows, so do they really want to get rid of the most obvious choice of strong female supporting character available? If they do, I think the balance and contemporary feel of the show will suffer accordingly.

 

The message that I got from The Abominable Bride was that our version of Sherlock wants to give women more of a chance (despite some fairly clunky feminist overtones), and I'd be shocked to see them so much diminish the female element of the cast so soon after. I suppose if they gave Mary a really fabulous episode for her send off it wouldn't be so bad, but what kind of a show will it leave behind? Plus, I could do without any episode being that Mary-heavy. Can't they just leave her in the crime-tinged background, where she belongs?

 

I think people assuming it would be the good old days for the boys again are not considering how much John will have lost and how that might change him. We only get three episodes here, how much do we really want to devote to all that dead Mary business when we've already discussed every possible outcome? I'd rather they stunned us with something else.

[Boton]

I could go with this:

 

(Please forgive the NSFW expletive; I couldn't get it cut off or blurred.)

 

  

[Pseudonym]

I think in order for the show to get back on track John and Sherlock need to be living together, and the only way I can see John being with Sherlock in 221B again is if Mary and baby are completely out of the picture. I think it will be harrowing, I think of John's face after Sherlock's fall, that understated but utterly destroyed expression he manages to pull off. I don't like Mary, I hate the thought of the baby, but I think their death will be agonising. John will be a mess, and will end up back in 221B because that's all he has left. 

[Carol the Dabbler]

I always see Mary as non-canon in origin, in the sense that she isn't actually Mary Morstan, the real Mary of our universe is likely dead, and this woman has just assumed that alias.

 

Thanks for the reminder -- that keeps slipping my mind.  So they can basically go anywhere they like with her, without violating canon.  Or, they've violated canon already by having the real Mary be stillborn (which still puzzles me, by the way), so what the heck.

 

And as you say, she's their strongest female character.  While she isn't guaranteed immortality like Sherlock and John are, I'd be surprised if they didn't choose to get a good bit more mileage out of her one way or another.

[Arcadia]

I confess that I don't think the show is particularly off track to begin with. And I agree with Bedelia; killing Mary off so soon is just too predictable. I hope they have something more unexpected up their sleeves.

[Inge l-w]

Hey, if all Mary defenders could look me straight in the eyes and repeat their syllogisms, we would have a very good round-table discussion of all the reasons she doesn't belong! Beginning with ACD canon and going all the way from the b/w versions to Elementary, through the RDJ films! Sherlock Holmes was created a loner, Dr Watson merely being a faithful narrator/blogger.

[sfmpco]

BC confirms both parents are in S4.

 

http://entertainment.inquirer.net/205546/this-strange-superhero-has-benedict-cumberbatchs-soulful-eyes

[Boton]

I confess that I don't think the show is particularly off track to begin with. 

 

I definitely don't think the show is off track; I think the show is very tightly written and plotted, especially for a periodic series like this.

 

Honestly, it isn't Mary that bothers me.  This show is about the Holmes and Watson relationship, but you could minimize Mary as much as you wanted to keep the crime-fighting duo intact, in lots of different ways.  It's the baby, I hate to say.  The minute Sherlock announced the pregnancy in TSoT, I just groaned, because it's the baby that fundamentally changes a 2016 John, and not for the better in this context.

 

I mean, 1895 John could have had a baby at home and not changed his work with Holmes one bit, because raising a baby wouldn't have been part of his expectation or skill set. But in 2016, John would be expected to be more hands-on; we already have those stupid shots of him with a baby carrier on his front, and that's no position to be in if he might be shooting at random serial-killing cabbies and the like.  (For one thing, that much weight on his front is going to totally mess up his center of gravity and his aim.   )

 

It's the baby I want gone, and then I feel like a horrible human being, because I can't think of a single palatable way to get rid of a baby character from a TV show.  And I don't want Mary pulling a "not his," because, unless the baby is actually Sherlock's, I don't see how that would restore our focus to the Holmes-Watson dynamic.

[Pseudonym]

 

And I don't want Mary pulling a "not his," because, unless the baby is actually Sherlock's, I don't see how that would restore our focus to the Holmes-Watson dynamic.

 

I know it won't happen, but that's an intriguing idea to think about - I'm surprised that I haven't actually seen any fics where the baby is actually Sherlock's, it always seems to be David's if anything. I kinda like the idea of apparently asexual disinterested Sherlock knocking up John's wife... but then I'm a sucker for angst. ;)

[Boton]

 

 

And I don't want Mary pulling a "not his," because, unless the baby is actually Sherlock's, I don't see how that would restore our focus to the Holmes-Watson dynamic.

 

I know it won't happen, but that's an intriguing idea to think about - I'm surprised that I haven't actually seen any fics where the baby is actually Sherlock's, it always seems to be David's if anything. I kinda like the idea of apparently asexual disinterested Sherlock knocking up John's wife... but then I'm a sucker for angst. ;)

 

 

Please write this fic.  I would read the heck out of it.   :D

[SherlockedCAMPer]

It would be an interesting dynamic if the baby was Sherlock's. As for the not John's trope, most of the fics I've seen has the baby being Moriarty's or Moran's.

[Arcadia]

The way I look at it is ... in real life, plenty of couples have babies, and then one spouse or the other, or sometimes both, still go on to do dangerous jobs. They do whatever they have to do to make it work. Or not, and then there's ... da da dum ... drama.

In addition, I always assume that just because we don't see something on screen doesn't mean it never happens.We don't see the weeks when there's not a single case, but I assume they occur. We don't see the hours Sherlock spends lying on his couch ignoring everyone, but I assume it happens. We don't see the days Sherlock spends educating himself about "stuff", but you know they take place, or he wouldn't know anything.

In other words, I assume the crime-solving has always taken up only a small portion of John's life ... (and I would argue, Sherlock's as well, but that's a separate issue...) So I think it's perfectly possible for John to be a modern dad and help raise his child and still have time to run around town with Sherlock from time to time, just like he always did. Even in S1 and S2 it was clear he didn't spend every moment of his waking day with Sherlock; quite the contrary. He had his own life, and I hope he still will.

[Boton]

It would be an interesting dynamic if the baby was Sherlock's. 

 

One day, John had a shift at the surgery, and he's pretty useless at wedding planning anyway, so Mary and Sherlock get to work.  And then they reached consensus on whether the bridesmaids should be wearing lavender or lilac, and they were so excited that things just -- happened.  ;)