He helps. Criminals but maybe he had already planned this...

To be fair we don't actually know she's on the phone to Moriarty and if she is she'd be discussing it within earshot of 'her highness'.

I think those shots are established to have us believe that's what is going on - it could very well be different.

-m0r

She was standing outside the bedroom with door closed so not really 'in earshot' of her Highness and Moriarty had just finished his phone conversation. Of course she could be phoning the baker to order a cake, but what purpose would that have to the story?

As Gatiss said ' people ask how come Dr Who conveniently turns up in places where something mysterious is going on, to them I say "why would we tell the story otherwise?' Translated : they have 90 minutes of action packed things to tell us, are they really going to litter that space with useless things? Yes, some are red herrings, but those red herrings are either humorous or a call back to the original canon.

This is where I think people are getting 'lost', by the end of 12 months heavens knows where some will find themselves.

I think goings mad quicker :D

I think she might have had some photos of her and Moriarty on her phone! Or recordings! Just a thought.

It seems that Moriarty knew that Irene had some information of value that needed de-coding. She says she has the photos as 'insurance' but if it was as simple as that then she would just make the people concerned aware she has them. It seems more likely, going back to my original point, that Moriarty knows that if the Royal connection is exploited then it will hopefully act as bait to drag Sherlock in to the affair. Irene has already tried to get the information decoded remember, without success. Sherlock is the most likely to be able to decode the information.

Later on the aircraft Irene says that Moriarty told her 'how to play the Holmes boys' The Iceman and The Virgin. It is Moriarty to whom she sends the information, surreptitiously behind her back, about the flight. Then he sends a text to Mycroft about the Jumbo Jet 'oh dear Mr. Holmes.' presumably he then sends this information, via his criminal web to the terrorists.

It can also be seen as an early stage in Moriarty's attempt to discredit Sherlock as the whole affair certainly tarnishes his image, especially with the American and British Secret Service. No doubt it also had an adverse effect upon Mycroft's reputation as well.

Just some thoughts to  ponder.

SussexieVampire wrote:

kazza474 wrote:

She rang him to say she had the photos of her & the Royal person. He is a consulting criminal, so criminals call him to get help on their next 'evil doings'. She said at the end of the show that she didn't know what she was going to do with the photos until she consulted with Moriarty.

So, what did Moriarty told her to do?

Ok, so what do we have to start with?
- Irene has a collection of photos of this royal person & her in compromising positions.
- It would be fair to say she has some of others as well, she's mentioned detectives/police, etc
- She has a picture of an email with a code she can't crack, but it seems to be important
- She also mentioned she had other pictures of plans, important documents.

Irene knows these things would be 'valuable' to these other people, it could destroy them if they became public. However she isn't interested in money. She has said all she wants is security. She's a single woman, no-one to depend on & no-one to 'help' her as such. So those items could be used as leverage to force people to give her what she wants, which could be a safe place to live/escape to if things get 'too hot' and she is in danger at any stage. Let's face it, she's peeved off a few people! The evidence for that is at the very end- the 'beheading'. Now she must have done something pretty bad to someone for that to happen.

But she doesn't know the best way to use what she has; bribes for money are usual in these cases but that does not make her safe.
So she consults an expert - enter Moriarty.

Now, what advice did he give? Well #1 they had to decide what it is that SHE wanted to gain. The answer - security. Those things would have been in her list that she gave Mycroft near the end. It probably contained things like a new identity, new location, maybe a position of power within the Government; all kinds of things like that.

So , now she has a goal; how does she achieve it?
Threatening to expose someone close to 'the highest in the land' would be the obvious place to start.

So that is what Moriarty would have decided was best to do with that information.
He would have looked at all on the phone, but she would NOT have 'sent' it to him. It is too valuable to her, so there would be no other copies of any of that information at all, not even in Moriarty's possession.
When he looked at the information, he would have seen the coded message about the plane and THAT could have been what he wanted 'his payment' would have been getting that code cracked. And he knew there would be ONE person who could crack that code - Sherlock.
Now being resourceful, he figured the best weapon against Sherlock would be 'THE woman'. So this would be a give & take partnership that Moriarty & Irene had. She'd get her security and he'd get a cracked Government code.

And THAT is why she pursued Sherlock the way she did. All to get him to crack the code so she could 'pay' Moriarty his consultation fee. Because Moriarty is one person whose bills you would want to pay, in full and on time.

And thinking about that last line, the payment resulted in being useless because the mission was aborted. I wonder then if Moriarty felt that the agreement between him & Irene wasn't worth what it should have been? If that were the case, her 'payment' didn't 'pay the bill' . Irene could 'out' Moriarty to the police, or worse to Sherlock because they obviously met & she would have information on him.
Maybe Moriarty set up the 'beheading' to get Irene out of the picture so that she couldn't be used against him. After all, she DID end up falling in love with Moriarty's arch enemy.

Last edited by kazza474 (March 29, 2012 2:38 am)

Sherlock Holmes wrote:

Interesting ideas...I never thought about Moriarty's possible involvement in the beheading before, but he's been involved in so much else so why not? It's true the information turned out to be pretty useless in the end, unless he was pleased to use it just to annoy Mycroft for screwing up his plans (he was forced to abandon the flight) and to make Mycroft annoyed at little brother. Moriarty enjoys playing games for the games own sake...

No, no - it wasn't useless.  The government had cracked the terrorists' code, but it didn't want them to know it.  That's why they were blowing up planes of dead people rather than simply stopping the flights.  Moriarty told the terrorists that the government had cracked the code.  He won that round, thanks to Sherlock's help and Irene forwarding the message to him.

Here's what I wonder - Moriarty went to all this trouble to get Sherlock to decode the message?  He couldn't have known what the message would contain, and what to do with the information, unless he knew what was in the message.  I think Irene had to have already decoded it.  Otherwise, they couldn't have 'played the Holmes boys' the way they did.