Down and Out on Baker Street

h3rring:

baker-street:

Identity in The Reichenbach Fall

The theme that runs right through The Reichenbach Fall is that of identity.

• John’s discussion of their media image
• Sherlock is suspected of being a kidnapper after a little girl seems to recognise him.
• The children are fans of Grimm’s fairy tales, a recurring theme of which is identity and disguise
• Sherlock is accused of being a fake
• Both Jim and Kitty employ disguises
• Jim fakes a new identity and claims Moriarty is an invention
• In their final confrontation Jim describes himself and Sherlock as the same person

The idea that Sherlock was mistaken for the kidnapper intrigued me. If the little girls terror was genuine then someone must be disguising themselves as Sherlock to ruin his reputation. Sherlock visits the kidnappers hideout with John and Lestrade to recover the children. Could Sherlock have also found the kidnappers disguise?

Then there’s Sherlock and Jim’s final confrontation. Sherlock sends Jim a text to meet him on the roof and follows up with the text PS above. I first assumed that what belongs to Jim is the security code he stole to access all those IT systems but that text can’t refer to the code. For starters it didn’t exist and secondly why would Sherlock need to return something that Jim has memorised anyway?

Finally there’s canon. In the original story BOTH Holmes and Moriarty fall over the Reichenbach Falls. In Sherlock Jim tells Sherlock that they are one and the same person before shooting himself in the head. Who else do we see in that scene with a head wound? Apparently it’s Sherlock, but I’m starting to suspect it’s Moriarty, dressed in the disguise that Sherlock has returned to him, before simply walking or perhaps driving away from the scene.

Yes, this is something else I wanted to write about.  Finding the disguise and using it on Moriarty’s body would solve a bunch of problems.  Especially if they (Molly, homeless network, Mycroft?, etc.) just disposed of Moriarty’s body afterwards and then forged medical records.  Basically, I don’t fucking know what’s what anymore.  Illusion and mistaken identity seem to be important.  (I’m just not going to address it directly in any fiction I write…)

If that is Moriarty disguised as Sherlock at the end then it’s more than likely that he’s also buried in Sherlock’s grave which has a lovely kind of irony to it.

Just to muddy the waters even more, I gave brief consideration to the thought of Jim being an actor hired by Moriarty at the end of Season one but dismissed it almost straight away as over thinking the whole thing too much. Moriarty is rarely seen in canon, probably because he was largely an afterthought, and in previous portrayals has always been a shadowy figure lurking just out of sight. When he waltzed on to the stage at the end of season one it was quite a radical departure from previous versions of the character. If it turns out Jim wasn’t Moriarty at all, Jim really was an actor, but hired by Moriarty rather than Sherlock and Moriarty is still out there I wouldn’t be surprised at all. It would certainly explain his suicide as the idea that the real Moriarty would kill himself to get his revenge on Sherlock, thus depriving himself of the satisfaction of witnessing Sherlock’s final downfall, still doesn’t sit right with me.