There’s a terrifyingly subtle detail hidden in Season 4 of Sherlock: Moriarty was actually taken out by Sherlock’s sister, the “Goddess of the East Wind”—Eurus Holmes!
Let’s reason it out step by step (there’s a lot of wild speculation here, so read it with the same “major misinterpretation” standards as Zhihu Daily, okay?)
After Season 4 ended, I think everyone should have reached one consensus: Eurus Holmes is basically invincible.
But the Holmes family are all wonderfully twisted, and Eurus is no exception. In some ways, she has an even more pronounced split personality. One personality loves tormenting Sherlock; the other—the little girl on the plane—longs to play games with Sherlock, is attached to him, and wants him to save her.
The trap in S04E03 was the product of both personalities pushing things along. Since that second personality exists, Eurus could never truly want Sherlock dead.
So in S04E03, Eurus wasn’t even using her full power. If she had gone all out, I doubt the Holmes brothers and Moriarty together would have been enough to keep her entertained.
Eurus has an almost surreal ability to hypnotize and brainwash people. It’s practically an unbeatable move: anyone who stays close to her for a few minutes gets manipulated, without exception. (I’ll write another article analyzing whether someone whose IQ is orders of magnitude above that of ordinary humans could really possess this ability.)
So here’s the question: who in the world is the exception? Who can withstand this kind of mental attack?
It should be only the brothers Sherlock and Mycroft.
Let’s start with Sherlock. The reason I think Sherlock can’t be brainwashed is that he once possessed an equally powerful, almost surreal ability to brainwash people himself.
The evidence is that after the Redbeard incident in childhood, Sherlock rewrote his own memories, making himself completely forget his sister Eurus, and rewrote Redbeard from a person into a dog.
The rewrite was so thorough that even when Mycroft repeatedly used probing phrases like “east wind is coming” to provoke Sherlock later, he showed no reaction at all. In other words, a person can rewrite their own memories almost down to the roots. What a terrifying ability.
Isn’t this exactly Eurus’s brainwashing killer move? Sherlock’s ability to rewrite his own memories unquestionably came from Eurus.
How did it happen?
Either Eurus taught him, just as she taught him the violin:
Or Sherlock secretly taught himself. Why would he learn? That’s easy enough to explain too. Don’t forget, Sherlock is just as twisted. On one hand, he was terrified of Eurus, so he rewrote his childhood memories; on the other, he secretly worshipped her! Deep down, Sherlock may always have wanted to become like Eurus. That’s why, after rewriting his memories, Sherlock went from an adorable little curly-haired boy to an antisocial high-IQ genius almost identical to his sister—a low-spec Eurus.
It’s even possible that this wasn’t a subconscious impulse at all, but the clear intention of young Sherlock: he wanted both to forget how terrifying Eurus was and to become her:
So little Sherlock accomplished both goals at once by rewriting his memories:
- Forget Eurus,
- And turn himself into Little East Wind”—that is, the later high-IQ antisocial Sherlock.
Then why did this Sherlock never show any brainwashing ability after growing up? That’s easy to explain too: rewriting his memories was the last time little Sherlock possessed that ability. To forget Eurus completely, he even erased the ability itself, so that his future self would have no awareness that he had ever erased a memory.
Little Sherlock was a seriously tough character!
All right, after saying all that, I’m really just trying to make one point: although present-day Sherlock can’t brainwash people, he did master this divine skill as a child. He was a professional, and his memories are now recovering, so he could probably withstand Eurus’s brainwashing assault for a while.
Therefore, Sherlock is one of the people immune to brainwashing attacks.
The other immune person is Mycroft. Mycroft is the person who has studied Eurus’s abilities the longest:
And he is also that terrified of Eurus. So it’s reasonable to infer that Mycroft worked out a method of resisting mental attacks.
All right, then here comes the next question: does Moriarty have the ability to resist brainwashing?
If my analysis above holds up, the answer is: of course not!!
The Holmes brothers gained their immunity through extremely unusual childhood experiences. Before entering Sherrinford, Moriarty knew nothing about Eurus and had no preparation whatsoever for her superhuman abilities.
In the top-IQ club of Sherlock, I’d rank them like this:
Eurus>>>>>Moriarty>（Mycroft≈Sherlock ）>Magnussen>>Irene
Eurus leaves everyone else in the dust—the ultimate genius among geniuses. Of the rest, I think Moriarty is half a level above the Holmes brothers, because before his bizarre suicide (more on that later), he kept playing them until they were completely helpless and remained in control. But no matter what, Moriarty belongs in the same tier as the Holmes brothers. If Mycroft has to be extremely careful every time he sees Eurus to avoid being caught, there’s no reason to believe Moriarty could evade her brainwashing attack without knowing anything about her.
So if Eurus wanted to brainwash Moriarty, she absolutely could.
Did Eurus brainwash Moriarty? Of course she did.
Moriarty asked, “So what’s my gift?”
Eurus replied: “Redbeard.”
What does that mean? Was Eurus going to tell Moriarty where Redbeard’s body was? Or tell him the story of what happened between her and Sherlock because of Redbeard?
Neither. Don’t forget, Eurus is the goddess of metaphor.
So Redbeard is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
Redbeard went from a person to a dog because of “brainwashing”; it is the most conspicuous symbol in the entire brainwashing incident.
Redbeard = brainwashing
Eurus’s Christmas gift to Moriarty was brainwashing him!
So was this really a gift for Moriarty?
Obviously, it was a gift Eurus was giving Sherlock.
Eurus has only one bottom line: Sherlock absolutely cannot die. No matter how she toys with Sherlock, her second personality always treats him as her brother, remains attached to him, and hopes Sherlock will save her. So when Sherlock faces genuine danger, Eurus will inevitably become the Goddess of the East Wind and appear to protect him from harm.
And the only person who has truly threatened Sherlock’s life, from beginning to end, is Moriarty. Eurus would never allow Sherlock to die at Moriarty’s hands.
And so the goddess made her move!
Eurus’s brainwashing of Moriarty accomplished two things in one stroke:
- She controlled Moriarty into recording those idiotic videos, laying the groundwork for the grand spectacle of S04E03, The Final Problem.
- She implanted the idea of suicide in Moriarty’s brain!!!!!!
inception！！
From that point on, “Moriarty the Idiot Big Bad”:
Became:
“Moriarty the Idiot Big Bad with suicidal tendencies”:
Doesn’t everything make sense now?
Why did Moriarty kill himself?
Before his extremely bizarre suicide, he hadn’t shown much disgust with life. He merely felt bored from time to time, like Sherlock.
And did he really need to kill himself to force Sherlock to jump off the roof?
With Moriarty’s brains, he had ten thousand ways to drive Sherlock into a corner.
Moriarty had always played Mycroft like a toy. How could he have failed to anticipate that Mycroft would have agents identify his sniper?
Why arrange only three snipers? Watson, Mrs. Hudson, and Greg Lestrade. They even counted Greg Lestrade!
How could Moriarty possibly forget that Sherlock had a friend named Molly?!
Moriarty had pretended to be Molly’s boyfriend! How could he not know about the relationship between Sherlock and Molly?
Now everything can be explained. At that point, Moriarty was basically just a puppet carrying out a suicide command implanted in his brain. He was no longer the Moriarty he had been at the beginning.
He was bound to kill himself, because that was the Goddess of the East Wind’s command.
Why didn’t he plant a sniper beside Molly?
Because after being brainwashed, Moriarty simply didn’t remember Molly existed!
This was a back door Eurus deliberately left for Sherlock.
Even the entire plan to force Sherlock to jump—did it really come from Moriarty’s own free will?
In S02E03, shortly before his suicide, Moriarty met Sherlock at 221B.
The Final Problem! That clue was buried deep!!!
He was clearly acting as Eurus’s mouthpiece!
Could Moriarty already have had very little self-awareness left at that point?
Now look at the next line:
When we watched S02E03 back then, we had no doubt that this line was Moriarty predicting Sherlock’s jump. But who would have guessed that its true meaning was the crash of the plane in S04E03!
To sum up:
Moriarty’s suicide was Eurus’s grand gift to Sherlock.
Moriarty died of the Goddess of the East Wind’s love for her brother.
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