OOOoooh yeah. I'm trying to give it a generous reading, because the show *does* show John and Mary to have real affection for each other, but it's also just sort of... sketched, rather than really portrayed. Like they expected their audience to fill in the emotional life for the roles of 'generic husband and tragic wife' and then didn't notice that the show itself didn't flesh those two people out as much.

Part of my reason for re-watching is trying to tease out what the writers *thought* their show was about, and what parts they thought were too obvious to need to be shown clearly. Stumbling onto something like this, where they have such a generous reading of John's internal life that never *really* gets clearly on screen, has helped me make more sense of why the show keep portraying John as a "good man with some flaws" because, man, that was NOT the reading of him that I came away with.