The fourth – and potentially final – season of Sherlock had to be the most controversial run yet of the hit BBC detective drama. As well as featuring the death of one major character, a massive revelation about Sherlock’s past and, most of all, John and Sherlock falling out, one thing that fans didn’t like was the lack of material for Molly Hooper.
The only central character on the show not to be derived from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, the timid pathologist had become a firm favourite of viewers over the years. In season 4, however, Molly only appeared in a handful of scenes.
It turns out that the fans weren’t the only ones who were disgruntled at the lack of the lovely Miss Hooper last season, either. Louise Brealey, the actress who plays her, has now admitted that she also agrees Molly wasn’t in the show enough.
“I think [the fans] were a bit pissed off because she didn’t really have anything else to do. And that, I concur with. I thought she should have been in it more.”
Brealey then went on to say that she understands the series is called Sherlock not Molly and so her character had to take a backseat to the friendship between Holmes and Watson – which she’s right about.
“The context is this: this is a story about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson solving cases. And I, my character, can only ever be entirely serving that. It can’t be about Molly. Obviously, egotistically you’d be like, ‘Brilliant, let’s just have an episode about [me]’ … No, it doesn’t need to be that.”
“But yeah, I felt like I wasn’t in it as much as… I would like to have more of her. But that has to be countered by [the fact that] I get it. I’ve read a lot of scripts. I understand that everyone has a part to play. And you have to serve the story as well as the series elements.”
While the actress’ comments about the show having to focus on Sherlock and John are most definitely correct, it’s fair enough that she’d like to have had more to do as Molly. For one thing, Sherlock season 4 left the character without any resolution. Due to a complex mind game by his evil sister Eurus, the titular detective had been forced to make Molly admit her feelings for him and we last saw her completely distraught and an emotional wreck. If this really is it for Sherlock, then she certainly deserved a much better ending than that, don’t you think?