#accidentally ended up griping about bad adaptation etiquette again

[tyrannuspitch]

Okay. Trying to put my Mary thoughts into words.

I don't hate Mary. I am not saying any of this because I didn't enjoy her presence on screen. I do, however, think that Mary embodies a fair amount of why post-hiatus Sherlock is no longer the same show, which, as we already know, is not a change I personally enjoy.

Mary comes with an unacknowledged genre shift. Pre-hiatus, Sherlock was a murder mystery drama with comedic moments. Post-hiatus, the comedy becomes a primary ingredient (mostly centred on married life), the interpersonal drama is significantly toned down, and the murder mysteries become more like action/adventure plots (including Mary's spy backstory). In some ways, the stakes are raised, but in others, they're reduced to almost nothing. For the most part, characters' main problems now come from external circumstances, often physical danger, rather than their own unresolved emotional problems.

Through John and Mary's relationship, we lose the sense that the show is fundamentally about dysfunctional, lonely people who don't fit in. Despite having lost his closest friend fairly recently, John is no longer the difficult, traumatised, mildly misanthropic character we originally met. Most of his rough edges have been sanded off in the timeskip, and his relationship with Mary is very nearly perfect - their only problems are spy problems or sitcom antics. They're not the kind of couple - or individual characters - to feature in a *drama*.

Mary's presence muddies the Holmes/Watson dynamic. I understand the intention here, but I just don't think it's well-written. This dynamic is a classic for a reason, and it's a two-person dynamic. Both roles are taken. There isn't a natural place for a new character to fit.

If you want your Sherlock Holmes story not to sideline women, then you should give them frequent, complex and interesting supporting roles (villain, witness, police, etc). If you want it to fundamentally centre women, then you have to make Holmes and/or Watson a woman. The original ones. You can't just retrofit an extra Watson and expect it to work.

Mary feels superfluous because she IS. The fundamental structure of the story STILL excludes her. Don't write a story with two male leads and then wonder why it feels male-dominated.

Yes, of course, in principle, if John Watson has a wife then she *should* be at least as important to him as Sherlock Holmes... But just because there's a narrative injustice in the original stories doesn't mean that applying a solution in the adaptation will feel earned or natural. Pre-hiatus John had a string of failed relationships because he kept putting Sherlock first, and that's not actually Sherlock's fault - that says something about John. Something that two years of grieving and meeting The Right Person are not likely to resolve. He either isn't ready for or doesn't truly want a long-term relationship with a woman. He had to undergo a lot of instantaneous character development to make this work... and then it still didn't work.

Mary feels out of place because she IS. Her very presence in the narrative is dependent on John's character development, and no effort has been made to organically develop John to a place where this makes sense. He's just being dragged along by the story, ticking off all the boxes of married life: a proposal, a wedding, a baby, arguments, separations, cheating (for some reason), and finally grief.

Mary's character is, in every way, dependent on John. She isn't introduced independently, and we don't get to see them fall in love - she just comes into being as John's fiancée. And she doesn't die as a culmination of her own story, but as one more crisis in John's. (And, worse, in Sherlock's.)

So basically: Mary is fundamentally tied to some major changes to the show (tone, genre) and to John's characterisation, and I can't like her as a piece of writing when I don't like those changes.

But her writing was also flawed because it was misogynistic, and she was essentially a prop in John's story. I still don't know that I would like the best version of her, but she could (and should) have been written much better than she was.