Anonymous asked prettyarbitrary:
What do you think about them killing off a new, and scary in a whole new way villain, to return to Moriarty?
I think that:
1: it’s an assumption that it’s actually Moriarty. Could be somebody using his identity. He is somewhat infamous now, after all.
2: CAM…is interesting. There’s a lot lacking in his characterization. He’s got a lot of potential, but the episode did not join the dots for us.
What does he want, exactly? And how precisely does he manage to have such incredible reach over EVERYONE? How does he manage to have all the right information in his head about everybody he meets to be able to blackmail them? (A mind palace is a great memory technique, but it is not a computer database.) And exactly how does he manage to apply leverage to all those people? Libel is one thing, and can certainly destroy a politician’s career…but not everybody is susceptible. And most people don’t have enemies like Mary.
What we have is the outline of a man who could be truly horrifying. A man who—beyond any material gain he can get from them—fundamentally gets off so deeply on possessing people that his whole life is basically built around this megalomaniacal fetish. This is a man who has refined rape to a high art form (with my apologies for even using that term.)
But I don’t feel that the extent of his control over people was ever quite made tangible to us, and sans a better-drawn vision of his goals, desires and means, I feel he was more of a potential threat than a real one.
A waste, basically. If they had given him more room in the narrative (and there was quite a bit of wasted space in the last two episodes that they could have used for other things), he could have been a starker, more potent threat.
But oh boy, will he be fun to use for fanfic.
