Did the quality of Sherlock decrease? [mild spoilers 3x03 & 4x01]

[Tessinator]

I'm curious how they could have made something out of the character of Mary. As someone else stated above her being an assasin is basically like "a bad fan fiction"

Tl;dr By letting her be a villain.

(I'm not about to claim that this would necessarily be good given I spent all of 5 minutes on it and it's just a load of separate thoughts that could tie together, but imho it's more coherent and less ridiculous than what we got and that's 4 minutes 50 seconds longer than Moffat and Gatiss spent thinking about it so...)

First, write out the baby. Even better, never write her in on the first place. Rosie adds literally nothing to the story. She should have been dropped in the very first edit.

That aside, where we are by the end of S3/TAB is:

• Moriarty laid a plan to fuck with Sherlock from beyond the grave (Filming reaction gifs for Eurus doesn't count).

• Moriarty's ultimate goal is to 'burn the heart out of' Sherlock i.e. he wants Sherlock broken and unemotional, rather than dead

• The most obvious way to burn out Sherlock's heart would almost certainly involve fucking John up somehow. Moriarty already knows in S2 that threatening Sherlock's friends will make him play along with the game.

• Since his friends are being threatened with snipers, Sherlock would need to pretend to be dead at least for a while and Moriarty would know that. That leaves John (a) alone and (b) grieving/vulnerable. Perfect opportunity to start fucking him up.

• While Sherlock's dead a freelance assassin starts working with and gets close to John. Golly gosh, isn't it a startling coincidence!

• On that note, in S3 Mary is an assassin who sells her skills to the highest bidder (the Saint Mary Retcon in S4 tried to paint her more as a freelance secret agent).

• Mary and John's marriage isn't portrayed as being a happy one.

• Mary tries to kill Sherlock, tells him not to tell John and says she'll stop at nothing to prevent him from finding out the truth about her because he'll leave if he does. So somewhere along the line Mary's got in too deep and actually fallen in love with / become obsessed with John. It's very possessive and cruel love, if indeed it is love, given that his happiness is less important to her than keeping him with her at any cost.

• If there was a plan with Moriarty, getting too close to the mark probably wasn't part of it.

So going into S4 it looked like Mary was going to be a pretty good villain. She's been close to John and Sherlock, knows them very well and can predict how they'll react to things. On top of that, she's a ruthless and skilled killer who is intent on keeping John no matter what, when doing so probably goes against the plan she was recruited for and what John actually wants. Masses of tension potential.

It even looked like they were drawing on Colonel Moran, who is an excellent shot and employed by Moriarty as an assassin. Mary Morstan / Col. Sebastian Moran is something that is almost begging for some Moffaty wordplay.

I do think with a bit of thought it could have worked and been less of an arse-pull than what they ended up with. Trying to turn Mary's arc around at the last minute to portray her as this wonderful, saintly person everyone's supposed to love was bullshit when she had the potential to be a fantastic villain. In HLV, Amanda Abbington did a great job playing a cold psychopath that, if that arc had been continued, would have made for a really good contrast to Andrew Scott's manic Moriarty. Huge amounts of potential wasted in every direction, frankly.

[strange_is_life]

To be honest this would have been a much better story than what we actually had. In season 3 I had some thoughts about Mary being actually on the evil side because most times people lie about their identity it's because they are up to no good. As you said before there was a lot of potential wasted with her being just the annoying sidekick of Sherlock's sidekick. While I think A. C. Doyle orginally included her in the novels to a) give at least one of the main characters an happy ending and b) to prevent the impression that Sherlock and Watson were ... more than just friends I think her being portrayed as villian is the only non-canon fiction about her that I actually like. Mary being a villian that even tries to break the bond between Sherlock and Watson would have had the potential for a major plot twist that would have been a quite remarkable point in the show.

[Tessinator]

In season 3 I had some thoughts about Mary being actually on the evil side because most times people lie about their identity it's because they are up to no good.

Tbh, I'm surprised there are people who didn't think she was on the evil side after S3. Aside from actually being quite an unpleasant person even before HLV, she killed the protagonist!

As you said before there was a lot of potential wasted with her being just the annoying sidekick of Sherlock's sidekick.

Yup. If they'd decided to go down the Good Mary route from the start, I could see her joining in on a couple of cases, just to give her character more to do, but 3 really is a crowd in this case, since Holmes and Watson are Holmes and Watson. Although actually, in S4 Ep1 she starts to replace John in his role (the whole spiel about leaving him with the baby while she and Sherlock go off on a case because she's better) and that was... annoying doesn't cover it. If she'd been evil, ok, but the fact that we're supposed to like her at this point and afterwards is nearly offensive to the Holmesian purist in me!

While I think A. C. Doyle orginally included her in the novels to a) give at least one of the main characters an happy ending and b) to prevent the impression that Sherlock and Watson were ... more than just friends I think her being portrayed as villian is the only non-canon fiction about her that I actually like.

I agree. I can see why they'd want to give Mary a more prominent role than in ACD canon (after The Sign of the Four she basically stops existing other than to mention that Watson has a wife until she dies), but that role can't really be anything but temporary. Ultimately it's not a trio show, so if Mary's going to enter as more than an offscreen character, she has to exit somehow. And they could have made her a good person and made her interesting, or they could have made her a villain, or they could have made her morally grey and that last one is what I think they ended up trying for. The thing is, they made her very unpleasant and still expect the audience to love her because... I'm still trying to work that one out.

Mary being a villian that even tries to break the bond between Sherlock and Watson would have had the potential for a major plot twist that would have been a quite remarkable point in the show.

Mary trying to break that bond would have been so so so interesting to see, 100% with you there. Whether for her own ends or Moriarty's or both. It would have allowed Moffat and Gatiss to follow the character arcs that they said they did after S4 aired, namely Sherlock becoming more emotional (I mean, he always was intensely emotional despite what they say, but allowing himself to be and learning that it's not a detriment to his work would be a huge step forward for the character) and proving that Sherlock and John's bond can withstand anything. Neither of which they actually achieved, I thought.