Question on the Moriarty's snipers...

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

If Holmes was honest in the note he left at the Falls, and he had tied up all the lose ends and put all his worldly ducks in a row, then yeah....it seems like he was prepared to not return.

[Carol the Dabbler]

Or to let people think that he hadn't planned to return....  

 

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

And don't that show just how well Gatiss and Moffat know their Sherlock Holmes?  A hundred year old mystery right before our eyes. So, in "The Final Problem" the answer is just as convoluted as we get in Sherlock if we even get the right answer in Holmes' explanation to Watson in "Adventure of the Empty House". So, maybe what we see in "The Empty Hearse" isn't as choppy as much as a pointing out that really.....even in Canon....we don't know what really did happen because Sherlock Holmes never did tell us.

[Carol the Dabbler]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is one of the questions that's been batted around in Holmes fan circles for the past century -- so of course Moftiss would have picked up on it.  The Holmes brothers certainly could have orchestrated the whole original thing, just as they did in Sherlock.

 

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

Oh yes, put two genius heads together and you get down right scary stuff. But it makes "The Empty Hearse" a whole lot clearer.....well...as clear as we can get...which can still be pretty muddy with this lot. But a whole lot more fun.

[Jim Moriarty]

To answer the OP, Moriarty's network would've killed Sherlock & Friends if he hadn't have commuted suicide. The network wasn't fully dissembled for 2 years, hence his return.

[Caya]

Well, you've heard it from the man himself now .

 

Seriously, I don't think we're ever going to get a definite answer to this from Moftiss, sadly.

[Bakerstreet Irregular]

I think that's because even in canon there isn't one. Doyle's solution in "The Final Problem" is problematic in its self because in reading the ending carefully, Doyle left Sherlock Holmes an out and it indicates that something significant happened before Holmes wrote his supposedly last letter to Watson and I think Mofftiss hit on it and used it in "The Reichenbach Fall". 

[Arcadia]

I'm so happy to have found this discussion. That was the one thing about season 3 that really bothered me ... we never got an answer as to "why" John was kept in the dark for two long years. It still seems unneccesarily cruel to me, but I finally have an explanation I can accept. I still wish something like this had been somewhere in the scripts, but hey. Thanks James, live long and prosper! :-)