Oooooooo. I have a lot of thoughts on Sherlock and Moriarty.
I think Sherlock is probably pretty repulsed, yeah. And also quite possibly sickly fascinated. Check it out:
So in the first season we see Sherlock totally being into the Mystery of Moriarty. This name he’s never heard before, that everyone’s afraid to say, fascinates him. Presumably he keeps digging and continues to find nothing about this person. A ghost so complete that he’s invisible to Sherlock Holmes, Master of the London Underbelly.
In Great Game, he’s so giddy about it that John and Lestrade both think he’s being inappropriate and maybe even questionably moral. But we see how it hits him when that old woman dies. We see that when he comes face to face with Moriarty, the memory of that is enough to make him raise his voice. “People have DIED!” I read that as both disappointment and moral revulsion. He’s angry! This was a game! This was a GREAT game! He was having so much fun with this mystery no one else could solve…and then, Jim, you went and broke his heart and KILLED PEOPLE. Solving a murder is fun because people are already dead. KILLING them is not fun. Watching them die, being PART of their death…Sherlock is not okay with that.
Because Sherlock’s damn questionable in many ways, and he doesn’t always value human life as much as many of us would wish, but he’s not evil. He doesn’t want to see innocent people killed for no better reason than someone’s entertainment.
At that moment, I think Moriarty goes from being the best playmate Sherlock’s ever had to being, in Sherlock’s eyes, rabid. A monster that needs to be put down. Or…
It’s still deeper than that.
Here’s the thing. Sherlock is a supremely narcissistic, self-centered person. We’ve seen that he largely sees the world in terms of his own convenience, his own entertainment (not to the point of COMPLETELY erasing the personhood of others, but…often to the point of erasing it SOMEWHAT). He has no patience with people, situations or rules that get in his way—not because he thinks what he’s doing is important enough to have an exception made for it, but simply because they’re in HIS way.
John Watson aside, we also see that the people Sherlock takes an interest in—the ones he shows some form of attraction to (not necessarily sexual, but some kind of fascination)—are the ones who are the most reminiscent of himself. Mycroft (whom we discover Sherlock sees/has seen as a kind of guide and mentor, if grudgingly). Irene (all but explicitly depicted by the show itself as a female Sherlock—looks like him, hair like his, moves like him, framed like him). And of course Moriarty.
Because Sherlock’s a narcissist. He’s in love with himself. He’s vastly, vastly vain, fussing with his hair, going out of his way to dress well, popping his collar because as John says, it makes him look cool (possibly to the point where ‘looking cool’ is so instinctive to him that he doesn’t notice). And he’s attracted to people who have qualities similar to the qualities Sherlock sees—and yes, admires—in himself.
To cover that ‘admires’ real quick: Sherlock’s in love with his own intellect. He knows he’s incredibly hot stuff. He’s used to the world not noticing him and hating him for being different, but as you’ll notice, he’s written it off for being stupid if it doesn’t notice he’s awesome and get out of his way. He likes John initially because John notices he’s awesome. I am pretty sure that Sherlock’s also in love with his own ‘sociopathy’ (in quotes both because sociopathy is an obsolete concept in the medical field and also because Sherlock wouldn’t realistically qualify even if it were still a thing). It’s a label he can give himself that keeps people away, and also…Sherlock is prone to drama, you might have noticed. He likes the dramatic and the darkly glamorous—like pirates.
So. I think one of the things that initially drew him to Moriarty was that Moriarty also has a flair for the dramatic. He’s cool, let’s face it. Moriarty knows how to work a brand, build himself a cult of personality. AND initially he seemed to represent what Sherlock admires most in himself: intellect, and ‘socipathy’—where ‘sociopathy’ is really code for ‘not like everybody else, not like the people who never question, never look around them, just do what’s expected of them; better than them, edgier than them, not a sheep who just obeys social limits.’
But that’s not the kind of thing Moriarty turned out to be. Moriarty turned out to a real monster, not a play one. The kind of person who TRULY doesn’t care what kind of damage he does, who he hurts, how badly he hurts them. The kind of person whose intellect has devoured him to the point where the world exists only as his plaything.
And I think the fact that we then discover Sherlock fears Moriarty more than anything tells us more about Sherlock. And when we find Moriarty chained like an animal in the basement of Sherlock’s own mind, that tells us more.
It tells us that Sherlock believes there’s a part of him that is so much like Moriarty that Moriarty becomes a workable symbol for it.
So then: what EXACTLY is it about Moriarty that Sherlock fears so much? He fears that Moriarty is right and that Sherlock is like him. He fears that he IS Moriarty, that he has Moriarty inside him and in fact that he believes that so firmly—and fears it so deeply—that he has gone to the effort of locking down that part of his mind so that it can never escape.
So the final question is, what does Sherlock think Moriarty represents? He represents intellect run amok. The brilliant mind, sprung all its borders and tearing like a wildfire through the world, devouring everything in its path.
Because Moriarty WANTED to feel. That’s what he’s telling Sherlock. He’s so bored, and he can’t find anything that can reach in and unlock this prison of crushing, mind-numbing depressive boredom. Maybe at one time—PRESUMABLY at one time there were things. Challenges that were enough. Quite possibly that’s why he turned to crime.
Sherlock fears that his own intellect will eat him alive the way that Moriarty’s maybe got him (though I disagree; I think that Moriarty was probably depressed, and definitely psychopathic, insofar as a minority of psych professionals still believe that’s a separate thing from ASPD, and that you can’t get there from here as easily as Sherlock likes to think). But it doesn’t matter if it’s true. What matters is that Sherlock believes he sees it in himself. He fears boredom. That everything will become too easy. That he might one day reach the point where nothing is enough to spark his brain to that intellectual high he needs.
I used the word ‘high’ here very deliberately, because this is Sherlock thinking like a junkie. He’s not addicted to drugs. Drugs aren’t what he wants, they’re only a substitute for when he can’t get his real high, the high he’s addicted to—the high of defeating a challenge. Sherlock is maybe even worried that what classically happens to junkies might happen to him: that one day nothing will be enough, that he’ll develop a resistance to his favorite drug—his own intellect—and he’ll stop being able to find something that can help him reach that high.
And finally, the last thing, the thing that actually surprised Sherlock and made him put Moriarty’s face on his own mind and then shove it chained into a basement.
From everything the show has shown us, implied to us, or even cut out, Sherlock historically tended to turn toward self-destruction when he was in a destructive mood. Hold onto that thought for a second.
Since he put Moriarty’s face on that part of his mind, that implies to me that Sherlock had not encountered anything like Moriarty before meeting him. It implies to me that before meeting Moriarty, Sherlock might quite possibly not even have IMAGINED following a path like Moriarty’s. I personally think that before meeting Moriarty, Sherlock’s greatest fear had always been that he would destroy himself with his own intellect. But after meeting Moriarty, Sherlock’s deepest fear changed: he now fears destroying OTHERS with his own intellect.
And that is character growth. Moriarty was one of the first things (after John—perhaps BECAUSE of John, because John was there that night, because their game almost destroyed John) that forced Sherlock out of his self-absorption, forced him to think about others, forced him to realize that the suffering of other people was even more alarming than the suffering of Sherlock himself.
And that is why I think Moriarty horrifies, sickens and queasily fascinates Sherlock. And also why he’ll never be able to completely shake free of his memory, and he’ll never be able to simply shrug and let it go if Moriarty ever seems to show up again. Poking Moriarty will always be like poking a sore tooth. Poking Moriarty will always be like poking that underbelly of his own mind, wondering what’s in there and hoping and praying he’ll never really find out.