BBC Sherlock Fan Forum - Serving Sherlockians since February 2012 / The pager and the phones.

**Posted by Thinbeard** February 22, 2014 8:26 am

Does anyone know if Moriarty is supposed to be able to hear Sherlock? He seems to be able to hear the hostages but Sherlock can hear them as well. Could Moriarty have set up the pink phone for conferance calls?

**Posted by Willow** February 22, 2014 8:45 pm

Thinbeard wrote:
Does anyone know if Moriarty is supposed to be able to hear Sherlock? He seems to be able to hear the hostages but Sherlock can hear them as well. Could Moriarty have set up the pink phone for conferance calls?

Alas, I have no certain knowledge on this one; I had assumed that it was set up for conference calls, for the obvious reasons, but my knowledge of sophisticated smart phones is somewhere between slim and non-existent.

**Posted by fuf2** November 1, 2014 4:15 am

I came to this forum especially because of this question. It bugs me and I am unable to find any reasonable explanation.

The dialogue seems to indicate that the voice is responding to what Sherlock says, but through the pager there wouldn't be a way to hear him.

If an audio/data connection was made through the phone, then that connection could be traced to the caller and there would have been no need to use the pager in the first place (assuming that is why the pager was used).

I'm glad to see others noticed this as well, but I can't imagine this would have been overlooked by the writers. I assume there is an acceptable explanation, but because I couldn't find one while watching the episode, it kind of broke the suspension of disbelief for me trying to come up with possible solutions.

**Posted by lil** November 1, 2014 4:25 am

The hostages must of had some kind of ear-pieces to hear and then repeat whatever Moriarty told them to...gottle of geer etc. Likely it had microphone/listening capability that fed back to Moriarty. Probably left on the victims along with bombs.
I assume they / it was some kind of hands free device similar to the one Mary was given in HLV.

**Posted by fuf2** November 1, 2014 4:43 am

Another possibility is a conference call over Skype. He could have set up a conference call over Skype, to the hostages phone and Sherlock's phone. Then he would have heard what Sherlock says, he could have muted his own mic to avoid Sherlock hearing him and given the text instructions through pager.

Technically it could have worked that way, it's just hard to get one's head around why so complicated. :-)