thewhitelily

One question I was left with after watching TFP, and the Five Minutes That Changed Everything, was: if Moriarty knew about Eurus five years ago, why did he never say anything to Sherlock, or to the world in his tell-all as Richard Brook?

Now is probably the time to mention that I don’t believe Moriarty was Eurus’s puppet. (And if you still do, or are completely bloody confused about who was in charge of whom, go and read Five Minutes—yes, go on, right now—oh, what, you’re back already?—no, it’s fine—absolutely, you’re very welcome.) But really, it doesn’t matter for these purposes if he was or not. Because if he was Eurus’s puppet, then he had to behave as though he wasn’t, or Mycroft would have realised that something serious had happened in those five minutes. Mycroft and Sherlock predicted Moriarty’s behaviour in arranging the fall. Therefore, Moriarty’s behaviour had to be outwardly logical and unnaltered by any secret plan he may have made with Eurus.

So why would Moriarty, free agent or at least seeming so, gifted with this horrendously painful way to get at Sherlock, fail to use it, even up to the moment of his death—and of Sherlock's?

After a bit of thought, I’ve decided there were a number of reasons.

The first and most obvious one is that Moriarty clearly enjoyed having Sherlock’s focus. Letting Sherlock find out about Eurus may well have put Sherlock further off balance, but it would have distracted him from the game he was playing with Moriarty. He'd gone to great lengths to pique Sherlock’s interest and get his undivided attention. And what’s the point of playing a game if your opponent doesn’t even turn up?  But I think there's even better reasons than that.

Mycroft and Moriarty spent months exchanging childhood stories… AFTER the five minutes. Apparently this was with Sherlock’s permission—but Mycroft can’t have been sharing only the stories that Sherlock thought he was, because Moriarty knew about Eurus. I really can’t imagine Moriarty being satisfied with only the sanitised versions of those stories—the lies that Sherlock believed—he would have wanted the real thing. Although probably the lies, too. I can’t imagine Mycroft believing he’d be satisfied with anything less.

But getting Mycroft to tell him the stories wasn’t only about getting the public to believe him. Anything that wasn’t on the public record or obtainable from other sources couldn’t be proven false anyway—he could have just made up enough detail to make his story believable. His primary purpose in learning and using those stories in the tell-all was to hurt Sherlock and Mycroft.

Why not use Eurus to do just that?  I think the tell-all works better for to achieve all its purposes without revealing Eurus.

The aims were threefold:

1. To convince the public that Moriarty was a lie
   —by reporting events that could only have come from someone who’d known Sherlock personally. If it was obviously false to Sherlock (even if it was actually true) then he would believably protest that the story was rubbish, that they didn’t even have a sister. If it turned out to be provable that they did have a sister, he’d look pitiably insane, not like the evil mastermind that Moriarty had intended. And if Mycroft had sufficiently erased her tracks that it looked like they didn’t have a sister, then the tell-all was easily ‘disproved’.


2. To get to Sherlock
   —by making it clear that his brother had betrayed him. Of course he could have hurt Sherlock more and made that betrayal deeper by releasing his suppressed memories, making it clear Mycroft had been hiding Significant Things from him all his life, but… well, there was a chance Sherlock’s memories were locked down enough that it wouldn’t be sufficient to release the memories, and Sherlock wouldn’t believe the story or even realise that he was meant to glean from it that Mycroft had betrayed him.  If Moriarty couldn't be certain he could completely awaken the painful memories, all it could possibly do was lessen Sherlock's belief in Moriarty's absolute control over the situation and make it more difficult to acheive his aim.


3. To get to Mycroft
   —by making it clear his seemingly harmless storytelling had come at a genuine cost. Of course, the papers’ story being the sanitised version would have made the entire thing worse for Mycroft, at least as far as Moriarty knew, because Mycroft could easily have disproved the story and cleared his brother’s name at any point by revealing Eurus’s existence… but if he did that it would hurt Sherlock by forcing his suppressed trauma to the surface. Moriarty would have loved making Mycroft choose between hurting Sherlock by letting the story stand or hurting Sherlock by releasing his repressed memories. He would surely have been able to predict that Mycroft would never compromise his secret for anything so paltry as Sherlock’s reputation as a detective—he's never had much respect for Sherlock's career choices, after all—the sweet result being that it was not only Mycroft’s tete-a-tetes with Moriarty, but his hesitance to reveal his secret that led directly to Sherlock’s death.

Of course, Sherlock and Mycroft were working together to feed Moriarty stories, so the betrayal couldn’t hurt either of the Holmes brothers the way Moriarty expected. Even if Mycroft was keeping a few cards back from Sherlock as well as Moriarty.

But from Moriarty’s perspective, his actions in keeping Mycroft’s secret all the way to his grave are consistent and in character with furthering his plan—or Eurus’s, by hiding her plan within his, if that’s your way of looking at it—and entirely based in his usual brand of cruelty.