Yes, I know a few other people who are frustrated by the bad rap John seems to be getting. I feel pretty mellow about it myself, since we’ve got a year or two to think things through and all, but it seems like a terribly kneejerk reaction in light of what the rest of the season delivered.
Also, though, it’s partially powered by something the narrative does this season, that is kind of pernicious in the way it focuses on Sherlock. And it’s a good kind of pernicious, potentially. It’s a stepping-up of how intensely the POV is bringing us into the POV character’s head, and of how unreliable our narrator is. It’s not only that this season largely delivers Sherlock’s POV; it does it in a way that takes away the other characters’ voices.
I’m going to need to dive a lot deeper into the visual media elements that are going on here to figure out where I’m picking up on this (or maybe I need to grab acafanmom and beg her to give me some insights), but I think that (perhaps because it is Sherlock’s POV, and we’ve seen that he does think this way and see people this way) in this episode especially the other characters are being presented and framed in a way that takes away from their humanity and offers them up to us more like the black boxes that Sherlock tends to see people as.
And I think that, in John’s case especially, seeing him through Sherlock’s eyes is robbing us of a level of understanding. (This is extra-ironic given where last season left us hanging, and it’s a sort of cruel silencing thing to do to John, insofar as he’s, you know, a fictional character; we left him with dead Sherlock and then switched POV when Sherlock came back, and John got steamrolled and never really got an opportunity to tell us his emotional story. He’s so repressed that even the narrative refuses to allow John to truly express his feelings.)
Sherlock loves John, he adores him, but he keeps John in his head. He not infrequently favors the John in his head over the actual John in the physical world. And when he is delivering the narrative, the physical John in the physical world can just…vanish on us sometimes. We saw this in Scandal, too, and also in TRF (although it was less evident, because TRF shared a dual narrative where, when Sherlock lost track of John, the story would as often as not also deliver us John’s POV).
So I think it’s possible that when people are criticizing John in this episode, what they’re really responding to is Sherlock’s conception of John.
I’m going to need to break things down a lot more to figure this one out, but if it’s the case then it’s hella interesting, and we may have found out where the production and writing teams spent the bulk of their effort in putting this episode together.