In Defense of Sally Donovan
Sally is one Sherlock character people love to hate. Some people hate her directly, claiming she was unjustifiably mean to our hero. Others claim she is poorly written, and thus direct their ire at the writers. But I maintain that Sally Donovan is not only a great and fully comprehensible character, but that she is *essential* to the universe of the show.
Sally is the *only* recurring character on the show who doesn't like or trust Sherlock Holmes. And she's right to feel this way!
Consider Sherlock from Sally's perspective: here is this posh white dude who shows up at her place of work and acts like he owns the place. Even though he has NO official training and NO professional experience (and, significantly, no legal right to be there), he waltzes in, calls everyone an idiot, and launches into his own amateur theories that, in most cases, will not hold up in a jury trial. In fact, if this were the real world (which, granted, it isn't, but Sally doesn't know that), his very presence could get all these cases thrown out of court. On a professional level, Sally is absolutely right to object to him.
But Sherlock is right! He's brilliant! He solves the cases the police can't! Yes -- *sometimes*. But let's not forget that Sherlock is wrong a lot too (necessarily, or else the show would get very boring). And from the way Sally says, "He'll always let you down" in ASiP, it's pretty clear she has seen him get very important stuff wrong at some point. Stuff that probably made her job a lot harder.
As for calling him a freak -- consider that this is a guy who gleefully shows up at crime scenes and claims to "love a good serial killer". People like that exist in the real world, and "freak" is one of the *nicer* words for them. As for predicting that he will one day start murdering people himself... well, she's not wrong there either, is she?
And why is Sally so essential to the universe Moftiss have built for Sherlock? Because she and she alone acts as the conscience for the whole show. Not Mycroft, not Molly, not Mrs Hudson, not Lestrade, and certainly not John -- all of them love Sherlock too much. For all that Sherlock claims to be friendless and misunderstood, in fact, almost *every* character we get to know on the show adores and admires him. Hell, even the big villains are desperate for his attention. So Sally is left on her own to stand up for the perspective of the normal, decent, rational, responsible citizen -- the kind of person who thinks amateur vigilantes with a semi-erotic attraction to crime should maybe *not* be a part of the justice system.
It's easy to lose sight of that fact, because the *show* loves Sherlock, and so of course do we, the fans. But despite the fact that this version of Sherlock Holmes is brilliant and funny and charming and deeply compelling (not to mention devastatingly sexy), he's not actually a very good person. And Sally's entire purpose on the show is to remind us of this inconvenient fact.
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