BBC’s Sherlock included the Great Detective’s main enemy, Professor Moriarty, who came up with an elaborate plan to bring Sherlock Holmes down. One of those included the kidnapping of the children of the British Ambassador to the U.S., but the girl screamed in terror when she saw Sherlock – here’s why. Since his debut in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has been adapted to all types of media, most notably film and TV.
One of the most recent and successful adaptations is the BBC’s Sherlock, which brought the famous detective and company to modern-day London, adapting some of his most famous cases and adding new characters to his world, such as Molly Hooper. Of course, the series included the most important characters from Doyle’s stories, most notably Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott), a “consulting criminal” responsible for many crimes around London and whose intelligence matched that of Sherlock. Moriarty was either the mind behind or involved in some capacity in many cases from the first two seasons, and by the end of season 2, he had a whole plan in order to get rid of Sherlock, which included framing him for kidnap.
In the episode “The Reichenbach Fall”, Moriarty let himself be caught and later threatened the jurors into voting “not guilty”. Now free, Moriarty visited Sherlock and told him the break-in and arrest were all a publicity stunt to show how powerful he is and told him he “owed him a fall”. Sherlock and John Watson then took on the case of the kidnapping of the children of the British Ambassador to the U.S., but it was all part of a plot by Moriarty to make the world think Sherlock was staging his cases and was nothing more than a fake. Moriarty succeeded in making Sherlock a suspect of the kidnap when the girl screamed as soon as she saw Sherlock, who had to be taken away from her as she was terrified. The series never explained why she reacted like that, but fans have a couple of ideas.
The most popular and, to a point, obvious one is that Moriarty hired a kidnapper that looked a lot like Sherlock, hence why the girl was so scared when she saw the real Sherlock. Another explanation could be that the kidnapper used a mask of Sherlock’s face, which did happen at some point in Doyle’s stories. Given how far Moriarty could go to get what he wanted and mess with other people’s minds, he could have also used other methods to traumatize the children using Sherlock’s image, possibly with a combination of torture and photos of the famous detective. Whatever the method, it was enough for Lestrade to arrest Sherlock, though he escaped with John handcuffed to him as his “hostage”.
Moriarty’s methods can be either too complicated or simple, which makes way to all types of explanations as to why the girl screamed when she saw Sherlock, but what’s clear is that Moriarty’s people did something to make her believe Sherlock was responsible for what happened to her – the methods, however, are open to interpretation. In the end, Moriarty’s plans were a success… until Sherlock came back from the dead. Moriarty, on the other hand, was truly dead, but he continued to appear either in flashbacks, as part of Sherlock’s mind palace, or alternative scenarios, so in a way, he continued to mess with Sherlock’s head.
