just-sort-of-happened:

Why Mary Stands There

In the Baker St confrontation Mary immediately goes to stand next to the mantel.  Why?  Because there’s an open knife there.  She is ready for a fight and is not just armed with a gun but is also aware of this other weapon in the flat.  By standing to the left of the knife, she can easily grab it with her right hand and she can also prevent John and Sherlock from grabbing it to use against her.

Things that occur earlier in this episode enforce this idea.  Bill pulls a knife on John and John takes it from him, even asking if the knife is, ‘a clue’.  Here, with Mary, it most certainly is,

Only slightly earlier we get the idea of making do with whatever weapon you can find, here,

(*cough* pay no attention to the fact that Mary seems to be mocking his wang, here…)

Then, at Baker St, itself, we will have Magnussen’s henchman reveal that John has multiple weapons, 

(*ahem* pay no attention to the fact that Sherlock looks impressed as crap by John’s, ‘wang’, here, in stark contrast to Mary’s reaction…)

And soon after, Sherlock will mock him for it,

Except, there’s a clause, 

Now, that we know, ‘how the night’, went, we must wonder, is John armed during the Baker St confrontation?

In this nifty visual, we see Mary in relation to the knife and to John: she is a threat to him, but she’s looking away.  Maybe she doesn’t want to have to hurt him?

Ditto, here, with Sherlock, except she looks right at him in a penetrating way.  Maybe Sherlock she doesn’t mind hurting so much.  I mean, she did just shoot him,

With bonus: as Sherlock sits down, we see a sliver of Mary’s arm and the knife is seen as being right in his back.  She stabbed him in the back once and she would/will do it again,

Now, for poetic flare, let us harken to the sweet, sweet past of ASiP and see that this is a knife that Sherlock put here, on the mantel, the first time John walked into Baker St,

This is the knife he puts there because he’s, ‘straightening up’, for John.  He is trying to make his flat more appealing while also using a suggestive idiom for cleaning up.  Sherlock will do whatever it takes to have John in his life, including hiding his feelings and appearing straight.

This is the same knife that Mary will put in his back.  She is using his love of John against him.  She knows that he has a blindspot for her because he loves John and she has, up to this point, exploited this to her advantage, nearly killing him.

stephisanerd:

That’s it.  That’s the show.  

You’re probably think I’m being facetious and silly, but nope.  I’m not one to talk about cinematography and lighting, but I like talking about stories, so I’m going to tell you one.  

Series 3 of Sherlock is based pretty heavily on Through the Looking Glass—there are an inordinate number of parallels and references, and in a lot of ways, it’s the story that they were telling this series.   While writing about that, one quote in particular jumped out at me.  It’s about the Red Queen’s Race.   

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

From the moment Sherlock returns, he finds himself fighting to maintain his place.  He fell through the looking glass, and expected to find that his world was the same, but it isn’t.  Everything is different.  He spends most of The Empty Hearse fighting to return his friendship with John to anything resembling what it was before he faked his death.  He spends most of The Sign of Three doing everything can do for John.  He helps plan the rehearsal, the wedding, and the reception. He plans a stag night and gives a a speech, and all of it is clearly about as far from his comfort zone as it possible for him to be.  Before the fall, all of that effort probably would have deepened his relationship with John (however you view it), but here, it barely helps him maintain his place in John’s life.  

“I’ve never made a vow in my life, and after tonight I never will again. So, here in front of you all, my first and last vow. Mary and John: whatever it takes, whatever happens, from now on I swear I will always be there, always, for all three of you.”

In the end, it’s not even enough to do that.  It’s not enough for any of them.  

Think about Sherlock, John, and Mary in His Last Vow.  They’re not getting anywhere—they’re all trying desperately to maintain the place that they’re in, so they don’t send their whole house of cards tumbling down.  Sherlock tries to push John and Mary back together even though Mary shot him.  Mary doesn’t face up to her culpability and refuses to acknowledge that her past isn’t really behind her at all. John takes her back, though he refuses to know anything about her past. They’re all absurd decisions in our world—but we’re through the looking glass. It’s all they can do. 

Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  

How do you show us that visually? How do you tell us it’s the story you’re telling?  You put the Red Queen of the story on a treadmill.  

(shameless plug:  I’m starting at tumblr dedicated to story references in Sherlock.)