Is Moriarty really the villain in Sherlock Season Four?

The third series of Sherlock ended with the chilling image of Andrew Scott’s face smiling menacingly in a video being broadcast all over London, with the spine-tingling words ‘Miss Me?’ proving that Moriarty is not done playing games with Sherlock Holmes.

This prompted the Christmas Special ‘The Abominable Bride’ which saw Holmes, under the influence of drugs, recede into his mind palace to solve a mystery from the Victorian era and to work out if it is really possible that Moriarty could be back from the dead despite shooting himself in the head.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s detective concluded that it was impossible for Moriarty to be alive, but that he was almost certainly posthumously back with some great plan of revenge that he had engineered before his death. And that is basically the premise we were given in the lead up to the fourth season.

But with New Year’s Day’s return of Sherlock to BBC with the first episode of its fourth season ‘The Six Thatchers’ we would quickly learn that showrunners Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are in no rush to plough straight back into the deadly mind games between Sherlock and his iconic adversary. In fact Moriarty barely features at all, other than to give Sherlock a reason to keep investigating as many mysteries as possible.

Instead we were given a story that focussed mainly on the Watson family and Sherlock’s attempts to live up to his vow to always keep them safe, the same vow that saw him kill Charles Augustus Magnussen in cold blood and get sent away by his brother, only to return when Moriarty’s face appeared.

In the episode we saw new mother Mary Watson’s past catch up to her as her exploits in A.G.R.A, a government agency taskforce that she was part of. Most of the episode is focussed on AJ, another ex-A.G.R.A operative, who believes that Mary betrayed him, leading to his torture. He is smashing open busts of Margaret Thatcher in order to find another memory stick similar to the one John Watson burnt last season and track Mary down to kill her.

However, the mastermind behind the whole thing was Vivian Norbury a disgruntled secret service secretary. Norbury, of course, being a reference to Sherlock adventure ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’ in which Sherlock rushes to a conclusion in a case and misses the correct answer which was found in Norbury, a town in London.

This mistake costs Sherlock dearly as Vivian ultimately costs Mary Watson her life by trying to kill Sherlock. This creates a massive rift between John and Sherlock, as Sherlock had promised to keep them both safe but had failed thanks to his own arrogance and over-confidence. We see Sherlock having to visit a therapist to deal with the consequences of this, and he also instructs Mrs Hudson to say ‘Norbury’ if she ever thinks he’s becoming full of himself again.

So, no, at the moment Moriarty isn’t the villain, in fact Sherlock’s own hubris has been more ‘villainous’ than Moriarty. However he’s still ever-looming in the background and with two episodes left, one of which is titled ‘The Final Problem,’ there’s every chance he’ll wind up being the season’s big-bad again.

However my personal theory is that Sherlock knew that killing Magnussen would result in his expulsion from the country, and being sent on a suicide mission. Meaning that Sherlock himself is behind the broadcasting of the Moriarty ‘Miss Me’ video, as that was the only thing likely to lead to him being allowed to stay. This would also help to add to his guilt for Mary’s death, as it wouldn’t have happened had he actually gone.