Review :
Now that the “top secret beyond classified” D-Notice has expired on The Six Thatchers, we can drop the coyness: Mary Watson is no more. That’s the biggie the BBC didn’t want leaked and around which episode previews had to dance. Mary’s dead, John’s a widower and baby Rosamund is left a motherless child.
It was a glum end to an episode that started out as jolly as Christmas with Sherlock on ebullient, ginger nut-crunching form. The fast-paced frivolity of The Six Thatchers’ first half-hour was drowned out by grief before the finish. Amanda Abbington injected some characteristic Mary-ish levity into her death scene, but by the time she’d blinked her last, we were left with Martin Freeman lowing like a cow in labour and tears all round.
(This, after upright John’s role as Sherlock’s "loyal" outsourced human conscience had been tarnished by that extra-marital texting?) Perhaps Sherlock’s creators felt we’d all just been having too good a year.
More likely they wanted to pull off a surprise, tug at the heartstrings and remove a superfluous piece from the board. As Sherlock cavalierly explained to John earlier in the episode, Mary made a better sidekick than her husband. She was cleverer, more experienced, and had the whole ex-international agent thing going on. Not known for his sentimentality, why would Sherlock pick John over her? Killing off Mary alleviated the need to contrive reasons why, in future, John shouldn’t be the one left holding the baby.
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