The Final Problem

Several Anons had asked me about why I think Jim was the one who arranged for the phone call about Mrs. Hudson. Hopefully I addressed most of what they were asking about in my last post.

They did have some other questions attached to that main one, though, so I’m going to snip those out and tackle them all in one big, messy post.

Anon question #1:

Despite the canon, I’d been thinking it was Sherlock largely because seems careless to let John just run off into a possible trap set by THIS version of Moriarty. Even knowing the point is to get him out of the way for a while, really, it’s quite an assumption that Jim’s going to go about that in a non-deadly way.

This version of Moriarty thought of John as something akin to a pet. Jim didn’t really care about John except for how he related to Sherlock.

The point of Jim’s plan was to get Sherlock to die, and Sherlock knew it. Jim may have been insane, but the way he went about achieving his goals consistently made a hell of a lot of sense. Randomly murdering John wouldn’t help Jim’s goal, it would only make Sherlock less likely to agree to the fake suicide. The way for Jim to use John was to keep him alive and threaten him unless Sherlock went through with the fall. Sherlock having a plan to go through with the fall was him protecting John as best he could.

And of course I think John was the countdown timer, and that Sherlock picked up on that right away. The countdown timer doesn’t get murdered while the countdown is still happening.

(Also, on a boring realistic note, Sherlock wouldn’t have been able to keep John alive for long no matter the circumstances if Jim had simply wanted John dead. Not without… giving up their lives and moving to an underground bunker or something. Smart can only stop snipers for long.)

Anon question #2:

Was risk of arrest just glossed over in favor of giving us a chance to see gunman 1?

They could’ve cut to Gunman 1 any time they wanted, just like they did with the other gunmen, so I don’t think that was an issue.

One thing to remember is that Sherlock took John as his “hostage.” The police may not have been all that concerned with arresting John. He’d punched someone and then been taken away against his own will. Yes, the person he’d punched was important, but that same important person also wouldn’t look very good if he got too hung up on taking revenge on someone who was “kidnapped” due to police incompetence while he was supervising.

But really I don’t think the risk of arrest factors in at all, because the story just doesn’t work very well if the police were actually on top of things and trying to find Sherlock and John.

How many places does Sherlock go on a regular basis? Not many. Two of them are Baker Street and St. Bart’s. The police weren’t watching for him in either of those places that morning.

You can decide whether it’s because Sherlock did something to trick them or because Lestrade or Mycroft or even Jim had the police called off. Or maybe the writers simply decided to remove that obstacle and didn’t expect us to worry too much about it with everything else going on. I certainly can’t tell you why the police stopped trying to find Sherlock, but it seems very much like they did.

Anon question #3:

Should I worry that SH seemed to pick the side of the building he jumped from without input from Jim, making tricky for Jim to have known where to put gunman 2 to have a view of both SH and John? Should I assume he had plans in place for all sides of the building in case Jim had a preference, and that this is possible because he’s SHERLOCK FUCKING HOLMES, full stop?

The building Sherlock fell from only has one side that’s good for jumping to your death in public.

Anon question #4:

another question: I know it’s meant to be a clue for Sherlock, but why did the kidnapper’s footprints contain all that information about the sweet factory BEFORE the took the kids there? had he been there before?

Jim’s plan was to make it look like Sherlock had set up the kidnapping as a crime for himself to solve. That meant the kidnapper had to leave traces in his footprints that would allow Sherlock to find the building where the children were being held.

You can read the situation in two main ways, I think.

1. The kidnapper had been to the building ahead of time and made sure to get chalk, asphalt, brick dust, vegetation, and PGPR on his shoes.
2. The kidnapper carefully arranged for the footprints to be there and made sure all of those things were mixed into the linseed oil as clues. (And it’s possible he did this the morning after the kidnapping.)

Thanks for all the questions, Anons. If I’ve missed anything else you wanted me to address, you can always throw me a new question. Otherwise I’ll consider the Mrs.-Hudson-phone-call block of questions answered.