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Well, call me crazy but much of what we saw throughout the special seemed like it was getting us ready for the return of Moriarty — which I still firmly believe would be better for the series than sticking with the idea that a brilliant arch villain did his enemy a big favor by just killing himself.
 
And let’s remember that the crazy Victorian women faked her suicide, committed murder, then actually killed herself.  How does that parallel Moriarty’s straightforward “Well, good luck with that”?  Bang. 
 
The exchange of dialog at the end can’t really be taken too literally, can it?  I mean, look at the contradictions.
 
“Sherlock, hold on.  Explain.  Moriarty is alive, then?”
 
“I never said he was alive, I said he was back.” 
 
(Right. He’s not dead-and-gone. Just dead. But not gone.)
 
“So, he’s dead.”
 
“Of course he’s dead.  He blew his own brains out.  No one survives that.”
 
(Okay, a simple statement of fact. No argument there. Thank you, God. )
 
“I just went to the trouble of an over-dose to prove it.”
 
(Oh dear, wait a minute . . . a long drug-induced mind palace session proved . . . what exactly? )
 
“Moriarty is dead.  No question.”
 
(Ah-ha!  We’re back to reason and sanity.  Jim is not only really dead, he’s really most sincerely dead.  And his little dog, too, if he had one.)
 
“More importantly . . . I know exactly what he’s going to do next.”
 
(Oh dear oh dear oh dear.  Cue the Lollipop League.  It’s their turn now.)
 
Friends and neighbors, I’ll stick my neck out and say that the special was designed to keep the debate alive, not to end it (and to give loyal fans on message boards many happy hours of typing practice).  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.  Meanwhile, somebody please just shoot me, ‘cause I’m going to end up on drugs too before this series ends

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James Norrington wrote:

I just have to take on the 'out of character' thing because I think it's not true. Actually, Moriarty mentions death quite a lot and always seemed to be at ease with it, and he often sounded as if dying was much nicer than staying alive (which was boring). Never did he even flinch, even if a gun was pointed at him or he was hung over the edge of a roof, he just didn't care..

 
Well, ya got me, Constable Norrington.  Slap on the cuffs and lock me up.  Jim Moriarty did indeed talk about dying on several occasions.   I see your point.
 
I guess I should clarify my remark.  When I said he was acting out of character, I meant not only the character of Jim Moriarty but also the literary character he reflects, Professor Moriarty — a raging egotist who fancied himself smarter than anybody, even Sherlock Holmes.  But Professor Moriarty only became concerned about Sherlock when Moriarty’s criminal schemes were affected by Sherlock’s actions.
 
Consider this quote from The Final Problem.
 
“You stand in the way not merely of an individual, but of a mighty organization, the full extent of which you, with all your cleverness, have been unable to realize.  You must stand clear, Mr. Holmes, or be trodden underfoot."
 
With Jim, however, it was more personal.  It was a competition, a battle of minds. And Jim was enjoying the game immensely.
 
On the rooftop, Jim talked about how he’d been searching for “distractions”, and that Sherlock had been a good one for a while.  But now he was certain that he’d beaten Sherlock and he’d have to go back to “playing with the ordinary people”.  His disdain for just “staying alive” was a condemnation of those ordinary people who took on no real challenges and enjoyed no real victories.
 
Remember how Jim looked at the trial as he gazed at Sherlock: smug and confident, delighted to be on the verge of making everybody else look ridiculous when they eventuall

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I can make a strong case for the idea that Moriarty was able to fake his own death much easier than Sherlock did.  Here’s how.
 
 (1) Sherlock did not actually see the gun fire or the back of Moriarty’s head blow off, because Sherlock lurches backwards and closes his eyes a split second after Moriarty stuck the gun in his mouth —


— and (2) Moriarty did not fall straight back and land hard on the rooftop, which would have caused Moriarty too much pain to allow him to lay still and pretend to be dead.


Watch the scene closely and you’ll see that as Moriarty falls (and goes out of frame) he bends his knees and turns to his right, with his arm stretched towards the roof behind him to cushion his fall.  If you watch Moriarty’s fall very closely (with some freeze frame pauses to study it) you’ll see that it appears he actually landed on his butt before falling onto his back!
 
Sherlock may-or-may not have seen this, because his eyes were closed as he lunged away from Moriarty (use your freeze frame to verify this, too).  But that doesn't really matter because I'm sure Moriarty did a convincing job of looking like a dead men falling down.  From about twelve feet back Sherlock stares at the motionless body with blood oozing onto the roof — from a  bag of blood taped to Moriarty’s back, under his clothes.  A tube would led up up to his collar at the back of his neck.
 
As soon as he laid on his back, the pressure would squeeze the blood slowly from the end of the tube (which would have been loosely plugged until that moment) and ooze out around his head just as we saw it do.

[img]http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb106/Allscifi/Sherlock/Moriartys%20dead%

Oops.  You got me.  Or THEY got me, to be exact.  Sorry . . . and thanks for setting me straight. :D

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I don't know if it means anything, but there is a quick shot of Moriarty in the "Sherlock Season 4 Official Trailer" on YouTube at this link.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6OdClmlVMU

It looks like this.


Certainly makes you wonder, doesn't it? 

And two years ago I concocted a very plausible theory as to how Jim faked his own suicide right in front of Sherlock and then was arrested by Mycroft's men moments after Sherlock jumped off the roof. (They were waiting in the stairway for that very reason). 

Mycroft didn't tell Sherlock about this, so Sherlock didn't know Moriarty was in custody the whole time Sherlock was traveling the world while he dismantled the master criminal's network.  Therefore, Moriarty hasn't return from the dead — he just made a clever escape from the high security cell Mycroft had him in.

My reason for being so certain about this is actually very simple:  two brilliant men went up to the rooftop, each one intending to outwit the other.  Both of them had plans that dealt with every contingency, and neither of them had the slightest intention of dying, because that wouldn't be the victory they desired.

Elementary, my fellow members!  :D
 

maryagrawatson, you cut right to the heart of the matter when you said:

“In this series, Sherlock is trying to fit back into his world and come to terms with his two years away. He cannot possibly be the same person he was before. The single biggest realisation he has in this series is how much he matters to the people who matter to him and how much his behaviour affects their lives. Series three is very much about Sherlock growing up.”

Ditto for KeepersPrice’s comment:

“He is becoming that "good man" Lestrade predicted he might become all the way back in the first episode.”

I’m a 65 year-old teenaged boy (so to speak), and I’ve watched myself change in both good and bad ways for the last six decades.  Some of the good things about myself have tried to slip away, and some of the bad things have tried to creep up from behind.  It’s a constant struggle to pat my soul back into shape each year.

Despite all the ways Sherlock is above average, he’s still a human being, and what human beings do is start out life one way and then constantly change, whether they like it not.

What Sherlock is doing is the same thing we all do – evaluate our personal priorities each day and then make compromises every time we realize we can’t have that damn cake and eat it too. Life is comprised of choosing the best option from the good ones, or the lesser of two evils from the bad ones.

Fans tend to want a beloved characters to stay just the way they were when they fell in love with them. Sadly that just doesn’t work if the series last long enough to include a sizable chunk of the characters’ lives.  Stuff happens, people are affected by it, life goes on, and nobody looks exactly the same in the mirror as they did last year.

So, we all know Sherlock will learn hard and valuable lessons from life, love, and everyone around

Great points, MartaSt.  That makes two serious drawbacks to my suggestion that Moriarty faked his suicide right in front of Sherlock.  (1)  A pistol firing a blank inside someone's mouth would be almost as bad as a bullet, and (2) a person falling straight back onto a hard surface would land with enough force to cause considerable pain and injury.
 
My only defense for these real concerns would be to say that if Sherlock could devise a way to leap from a six story building, land safely, and fool both a sniper in a 2nd floor window and John Watson on the other side of the ambulance station, then perhaps the brilliant Moriarty could solve these two problems as well.
 
And remember Moffat and Gatliss came right out and said (in the Sherlock special which aired on BBC) that the explanation by Sherlock given to Anderson was their way of just “pulling the rug out one more time at the end” – one last ridiculous description of how Sherlock did it.  So, we still don’t really know how Sherlock faked his OWN suicide, much less how Moriarty faked his!
 
I wrote a long post on the “how Sherlock did it” thread describing the many, many reasons Sherlock’s little joke on Anderson couldn’t possibly be the real explanation, covering things like the fact the big blue airbag would have been in full view of the sniper across the street while the airbag was being inflated and while it was being hidden from John afterwards at the other end of the ambulance station.




I still maintain that a simple fireman’s safety net could have been pulled from the laundry truck, set up, used to catch Sherlock, and then stowed back before the truck drove off – all done so quickly that by the time Moriarty looked down (if

I re-watched all nine Sherlock episodes during the last few days, and while watching The Reichenbach Fall I had some interesting thoughts about Moriarty’s death scene.  Up until today I never seriously entertained the idea that Moriaty was not really dead.

The idea seems far-fetched in view of what we saw.  But then I realized just how much we DIDN’T see, along with what we never heard anybody say.  Here’s what I mean.
 
Moriarty whips out that shiny pistol, sticks in his mouth, and supposedly blows his brains out.  Only one thing is missing.
 
The brains.
 
We all assume that the BBC simply chose not to get too graphic by showing a pink cloud of blood and brain matter spraying out the back of his head.  But what if that’s not the case. If Moriarty was faking, we didn’t see the departing brain matter because . . . it wasn’t there.
 
So, what about the spreading pool of blood that oozed out the back of Moriarty’s head?  If Moriarty was faking, where did the blood come from?
 
Actually, that would be easy to rig up.  Moriarty could have attached a wide, flat, plastic bag filled with blood against his back (under his shirt, of course) with a tube leading up to the back of his neck, plugged at the top. When he fell backwards, the impact on the bag popped the plug out and allowed the blood to squirt onto the rooftop the way we saw it do.
 
What about that big loud bang we heard from the gun?  Would any sane person actually stick a gun in his mouth and fire a blank?
 
Hmmm.  That question kinda answers itself.  If anybody is nuts enough to fire a blank into his own mouth, it’s Moriarty.  But articles I’ve read online clearly state that a blank cartridge fired from a gun pressed against any part a person’s body will cause serious damage.  And Moriarty had the muzzle close to the roof of his mouth, if not right against it.
 
I have no answer for that one – but I’m working on it.
 
And, of course, we must face the fact that Sherl

Oops, sorry.  Though it was in the right section. 

Well, here in North Carolina I've enjoyed three days of blissful laziness while I gazed out my windows at a glorious snow storm that allowed me to sit on my sofa and chat on Facebook with friends in other Southeastern states while we watched one movie after another by synchronizing our DVDs.
 
(What?)


 It's really easy.  Just pause on the studio logo at the beginning of the movie and wait for the "Go" message from whoever wants to start things off. Everybody hits "play" at the same time. Miraculously, the movies stay together from beginning to end. We've been doing this for years.  It's fun.


 Yesterday I wrote a song dedicated to the joys of watching movies while being snowed in, and after recording it, I put it on Youtube.  It's a variation on the classic, "Let it Snow, let it snow, let it snow."
 
It's called Let 'em Show -- (referring to the movies you watch while you're snowed in.)


 The lyrics are below, and you can click on the Youtube link to hear my golden voice showing Wayne Newton how to deliver a powerhouse song.
 
Enjoy.
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Let 'em Show (the movies you love to watch.)
 
Oh the weather outside is frightful
But our movies are so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let 'em show! Let 'em show! Let 'em show!

It doesn't show signs of melting                    
And the beers, we are a' belting
The lights are turned way down low             
Let 'em show! Let 'em show! Let 'em show!

When we finally hit the sack             
It's a shame that it had to be stopped