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Moriarty's Ghost: Or the Queer Disruption of the BBC's Sherlock

Judith Fathallah
Television New Media published online 17 July 2014
DOI: 10.1177/1527476414543528

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TVNXXX10.1177/1527476414543528Television & New MediaFathallah

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Television & New Media
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Moriarty’s Ghost: Or the © The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476414543528
BBC’s Sherlock tvnm.sagepub.com

Judith Fathallah1

Abstract
This article argues that the BBC’s Sherlock is outwardly a conservative text sedimenting
the historical function of Sherlock Holmes as a model of hegemonic British masculinity.
However, queer disruptions in the performance of masculinity may be read as, after
Butler, destabilizing and revealing the groundlessness of gender constructions. For
as Butler has argued, hetero-masculine performativity is “constantly haunted by that
domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to
produce itself.” Referencing Laclau’s perception of “hauntologies” to texts (adapted
from Derrida), I posit that the presence/specter of the queer villain Moriarty can be
read as a caesura challenging performed hegemonic masculinity. With the possible
death and promise of Moriarty’s return at the close of the current season, the series
now stands at a crossroads. It may either revert to the queerbaiting of previous
seasons or foreshadow a more radical text.

Keywords
cult TV, cultural politics, critical media studies, gay, sexuality, gender, queer, television,
the United Kingdom, masculinity

Cult TV is often praised for its transgressive politics, including posing narrative pos-
sibilities outside the structures of heteronormativism (Gwenwillian-Jones 2002).
However, the prominent BBC show Sherlock has been criticized by a range of aca-
demics as an essentially conservative, indeed, regressive narrative (Basu 2012; Busse
and Stein 2012; Lavigne 2012). As Balaka Basu (2012) has perceptively demonstrated,
there are strong arguments for reading this critically acclaimed show as an

1Cardiff University, UK

Corresponding Author:
Judith Fathallah, Cardiff University, Bute Building, King Edward VII Ave., Cardiff, CF10 3NB, UK.
Email: fathallahjm@cf.ac.uk

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2 Television & New Media 

unchallenging celebration of the special individual. Its neo-colonial fantasy of a slick,

shiny, post-everything London at the center of the world is still invested in the social
hierarchies of its Victorian source. Sherlock thus sits comfortably in current
Conservative socioeconomic discourse, privileging individual talent and effort and
eliding structural inequalities and social issues. Basu concludes that Sherlock performs
newness and edginess through its aesthetic and the paratextual comments of cast and
crew yet, in fact, does “exactly nothing to challenge the dominant paradigm.”
One part of this performance of edginess is encapsulated in the never-ending stream
of “gay jokes” between Sherlock and Watson. These are always warded off with
Watson’s insistence that he is, as he puts it in episode 1 of season 2, “not actually gay”
(2012). Sherlock may “talk about queerness openly,” Basu observes, “but it is never
really on the table as a feasible alternative.” Likewise, the show has been heavily criti-
cized in fandom and the blogosphere for queerbaiting. Queerbaiting may be defined as
a strategy by which writers and networks attempt to gain the attention of queer viewers
via hints, jokes, gestures, and symbolism suggesting a queer relationship between two
characters, and then emphatically denying and laughing off the possibility. Denial and
mockery reinstate a heteronormative narrative that poses no danger of offending main-
stream viewers at the expense of queer eyes. As fan scholar Lynn Zubernis says of
Sherlock’s audience, “People now are like, ‘You know, if you’re gonna tease us,
where’s the follow-through? Why wouldn’t you follow through? Is this homopho-
bia?’” (Maloney 2014). The possibility of queer identities and desires are dismissed as
a joke, or a fantasy in the minds of a less-valued minority. Blogger Lan Remple (2013)
writes that “queer-baiting is even more painful than erasure, because it dangles fair
and equal representation in front of your eyes, and then snatches it away. And then it
tells you that the whole thing was in your imagination all along.”
Sherlock has been complicit in this strategy. While I do not wish to exonerate such
writing, I wish to investigate alternative methods of reading its queer textual moments
that open rather than foreclose queer possibilities. Queer moments onscreen, I will
argue, can be read as ruptures in the performance of heterosexual masculinity. These
“occasional discontinuit[ies]” can “reveal the [ . . . ] contingent groundlessness of this
ground” (Butler 1990, 141). I will be using Butler’s (1990, 1993) foundational work
on gender performativity, especially the notion of citationality (Butler 1993, especially
12–16), which is highly pertinent to an adaptation. Citationality establishes that gender
performativity is not some free-ranging play of the agent but enabled and constrained
by signs and gestures repeated from the cultural archives of femininity/masculinity or
straightness/queerness, any of which may inflect, parody, critique, or consolidate those
constructions.
For as Butler (1990, 139) herself writes, the meaning of any citation is context
dependent. Parodic or subversive citations may be revolutionary; yet they might also
“become domesticated, and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.” I am
going to suggest that the queer performances of Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, and
Irene Adler are ultimately domesticated within the BBC text, but that there remains, in
the terms Laclau adapts from Derrida, a “hauntology” of queerness to Sherlock, a
“constitutive dislocation” (Laclau 1995, 86) courtesy of the villain/specter Moriarty.

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Fathallah 3

The term hauntology aptly captures the sense of something that is undeniably present
without being part of the official, rational “being” (ontology) of a thing, the self-pre-
sentation or performed holism of a text. As Butler (1993, 125) has argued, hetero-
masculine performativity is “constantly haunted by that domain of sexual possibility
that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself.” As embodied by
the openly gay actor Andrew Scott, Moriarty’s violent jouissance opens a caesura in
the heteronormative order with Sherlock, which as a text colludes (cf. Edelman 2004).
Since the teaser at the end of season 3 implying that Moriarty might return despite
literally having blown his own brains out, this image of a queer specter that haunts the
text is entirely appropriate.
I should make clear that I am not using “queer” strictly as a synonym for gay char-
acters or relations but in the theoretical sense explicated by Halperin (1995, 62) as
“whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” It is a “horizon of
possibilit[ies]” for “reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identi-
ties, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation.” This is
particularly congruent when we recall that the constructions of proper white masculin-
ity in which the character of Sherlock Holmes has historically partaken depend upon
the triumph of rationalism as an order of knowledge and a logocentric regime of enun-
ciation that renders everything readable, knowable, and master-able to the master
detective. Sherlock—and Sherlock—is invested in an epistemological regime of pro-
ductive readability, notably the readability of social actors with a view to their modifi-
cation. As Eléni Lavën (2013, 36) puts it, “the detective is primarily a kind of rarefied
social diagnostician, the perfect antidote to the social disease of crime.” The year of
Holmes’ first appearance in A Study in Scarlet also saw the publication of criminolo-
gist Alphonse Bertillon’s “anthropometric system of bodily measurements that he had
devised to classify and identify criminals” (Lavën 2013, 32). Nor has the BBC’s cur-
rent incarnation much departed from this ultra-rationalist Conservative dream, though
he now relies more on the mastery of digital technology in his diagnoses. This “offers
viewers an appearance of familiarity, which ultimately stems from long-standing cul-
tural tropes that structure narratives about securing urban space, and separating crimi-
nologists from criminals” (Kustritz and Kohnen 2012).

The Straight-Faced Masculinity of Sherlock

Moffat has described his conception of Sherlock as “a show that celebrates a clever
man” (Brown 2014). This quotation nicely encapsulates the series’ investment in a
well-known model of white British neoimperial masculinity and the triumph of the
individual over the social. As Butler (1990, 1993) has established, gender and
sexuality are best understood as a series of citational performances—bodily and
speech acts that cite a cultural repertoire of intelligibility. This is how I use the
flexible term masculinity in the context of this essay. With reference to the televi-
sion series, such citationality is highly evident, as the show cites not only the
original construction of Sherlock and Watson by Arthur Conan Doyle, but all the
iterations since.

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4 Television & New Media 

From his conception, the character of Sherlock has played a crucial role in the con-
struction of a particularly British masculinity. The authority on this topic is Joseph
Kestner (1997), who demonstrates in his monograph Sherlock’s Men how Conan
Doyle’s stories worked to (re)construct, stabilize, and negotiate masculine gender per-
formance across the forty years of their original publication. For the late nineteenth
century produced an acute crisis of masculinities in a British context (Showalter 1990,
8–9; Adams 1995). The BBC text makes intelligent use of key citations to invoke cul-
tural knowledge based in the Victorian sources, from the framed close-up of “221B”
on the apartment door in “A Study in Pink” (2010), the rounded silhouettes of cars and
evocation of Victorian costume through cut and color (cf. Basu 2012). The deerstalker,
which Sherlock comes to don reluctantly in “The Reichenbach Fall” (2012), consoli-
dates a sense of inevitability to the sequence of citation—though the text and character
may evade Victoriana in some ways, it is almost necessary that any modern portrayal
return to some mythic essential fundament, which Butler (1993) argues is the very
illusion that citation creates. If the modeling of masculinity is crucial to the initial
conception and reception of Sherlock Holmes, the modern text’s evocation of its own
history gestures to some mythic construction of an essentially British man: a mascu-
line hero for our time that sustains the illusion of an essential rational masculinity for
all time.
Cases have been made against the hegemonic-masculine functions both of Conan
Doyle’s Sherlock and the BBC manifestation (Lavën 2013; Marinaro and Thomas
2012). These build their arguments around the detective’s “eccentric behavior, nar-
cotic habits and uncanny degree of familiarity with the criminal underworld of
London” in addition to the undetermined sexuality his perpetual Bohemian single-
male status permits (Lavën 2013, 36). Although neither are ultimately convincing, the
better case is made for the original stories, particularly as Lavën demonstrates the
erotic/exotic symbolism enmeshed in Conan Doyle’s detailed description of cocaine
usage, as Sherlock administers the imported threat to proper English masculinity
directly into his veins “with a long sigh of satisfaction” (Lavën 2013, 39, quoting
Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four). Marinaro and Thomas’s argument rests largely on
the socially improper pleasure the BBC’s (sober) Sherlock takes in crime, being
delighted by the prospect of some unsolved murders to a degree Mrs. Hudson pro-
nounces “not decent” in “A Study in Pink” (2010). But Sherlock’s delight is not here
in death, but “the Game”—in other words, in winning the game, by reading the signs
and restoring order to London. Moreover, the BBC’s Sherlock as a text espouses a
postcolonial celebration of British power and influence traceable to its Victorian
source. This is evident from the title sequence of London landmarks, to sequences set
in Buckingham Palace, to the unfortunate coda where Sherlock dashingly saves Irene
Adler from beheading by a group of anonymous, menacingly burka-clad terrorists.
Moreover, the character of Mycroft Holmes retains his traditional role as an indispens-
able and highly mysterious government agent. His appeals in the interest of urgent
national security frequently send the duo off on their next adventure. The updated
Watson, meanwhile, embodies an everyman/every-day-hero persona: Martin Freeman
has a history of playing archetypal “ordinary nice guys” who get pulled into

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Fathallah 5

adventures and emerge as unlikely heroes, including Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit
films (2012, 2013) and Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005).
Just as in most iterations of Sherlock, this Watson is offered as our point-of-identifica-
tion character as we follow Sherlock on his cases. But, lest we doubt for a moment that
John is a sufficiently masculine man, he is also a doctor (rational scientist) and action
hero (former soldier, wounded in Britain’s controversial conflict in Afghanistan). As
seen in “His Last Vow,” he is as capable of physically disarming an enemy as Sherlock
(2014). He is also, as he repeatedly asserts to the skepticism of supporting characters,
“not gay.” He prickles each time a slight on his heterosexuality is perceived, quoting
the newspaper in episode 3 of season 2: “‘Bachelor John Watson?’ Bachelor? What the
hell are they implying?” (2012). As Lavigne writes, this “predictable and well used
buffer” against the queer is typical of the buddy show format, with its vacillation
between homoeroticism and misogynist homophobia. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(1985) famously argued, relationships between Western men are compelled and cir-
cumscribed by the necessity of the strong male–male bonds upon which patriarchy
depends, and so must navigate and exorcize the specters of homoeroticism.
This performance might be called straight-faced, citing all the referents of proper
masculinity—yet disruptive moments in the texts may open failures of proper male
identity that call that essential category into question. I have adapted, thus, usage of
“straight-faced” from Duvall’s (2008) helpful theorization of “white-face.” White-
face is a performance of proper whiteness by white-skinned fictional characters who
cannot be easily identified with whiteness in the culturally legitimate sense theorized
by Dyer (1997), by virtue of, for instance, their class or sexual identity. The coinage
“straight-faced” stresses the performativity of straightness, while the lack of a subject
to the phrase emphasizes that the performativity of sexuality is not a deliberate free
play but a cultural structure of citation that limits and enables subjectivity. It is a code
of behavior rather than a freely chosen act (cf. Butler 1993, 83).
The fan coinage for the predictable shipping of Sherlock and Watson is “Johnlock.”
A homoerotic relationship between the characters has been suggested since the first
episode, in textual moments that we might read either as disingenuous queerbaiting, or
as disruptions that reveal the performances of masculinity, knitted (or knittable)
together as a queer hauntology that runs disruptively along and through the text. As
noted, other characters perceive Sherlock and John to be a couple in “A Study in Pink”
and “A Scandal in Belgravia,” which is immediately denied by Watson. It appears that
the surface inscription of their relationship, or the way it is perceived from outside,
fails to accord with the inherited citations of masculinity the characters perform.
Occasionally, these performances themselves are commented on, as John tells Sherlock
in “The Hounds of Baskerville” to stop “being all mysterious with your cheekbones,
and turning your coat collar up so you look cool” (2012). This disruptive moment has
been much cited and repeated in the fandom, and it is easy to read it as a rupture throw-
ing the essential “nature” of masculinity into question. The collar is an aspect of per-
formance, an inscription through which we are supposed to read the enigmatic
detective (Marinaro and Thomas 2012). But if masculinity were real and essential,
men would have no use for such show. Moreover, contemporary hegemonic

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6 Television & New Media 

masculinity performance does not include observation of and comment on other men’s
cheekbones. Other “Johnlock” moments tend to take the form of looks, gestures, and
touches, which are compiled into fan videos.
Notice how queer disruptions appear at moments of comedy and/or extremity, mak-
ing use of double meaning and gaps in language. In “A Scandal in Belgravia” (2012),
as John literally tucks the comedically doped Holmes into bed, he tells him, “I’ll be
next door if you need me,” to which Sherlock asks, “Why would I need you?” and
John replies “No reason whatsoever” before closing the door. The dialogue opens and
gestures toward closing queer possibilities, but the affection and loss of control per-
formed in the drinking sequence highlight the contingency of their everyday citations
of straight, proper masculinity. More extreme and more comedic still, when the two
are summoned to a case by Mycroft in the same episode, they sit side by side on a
bench in Buckingham Palace with Sherlock dressed in only a sheet. He has childishly
refused to get dressed in protest at his brother’s apprehension of him and admits
frankly to Watson that he is not wearing underwear. Apart from the obvious queer
charge, this scene performs a literal unmasking of the straight-faced masquerade in
which Sherlock momentarily declines to participate. The performance is dependent on
exteriors: in this case, appropriate clothes. Mycroft recognizes the refusal for what it
is, urging his brother, “you are to be engaged by the highest in the land. Now for God’s
sake put your clothes on!” Resume, in other words, the performance by citation of a
proper, straight masculinity, of the archival Holmes canon from which this citation
most definitely departs. These comedic moments, including the giggling fits John and
Sherlock are occasionally prone to, reveal the citation of proper masculinity as a
straight-faced performance that cannot help but on occasion crack a smile.
Yet with two key moments, the text reverts from the opening and disruption of pos-
sibilities to a heavy-handed reinstatement of boundaries. True, Moffat and Cumberbatch
have denied from before the first episode any possibility that Sherlock could be gay,
with Cumberbatch adding the odd assertion that he is also “very male” (both quoted in
Connolly 2010, as though perhaps to assert an essential category, as opposed to a per-
formed one. Yet the modifier itself is disruptive, suggesting that there exist degrees of
maleness that the character could theoretically inhabit). But authors do not determine
the meaning of the text, and Sherlock’s queer hauntology remained productively open.
With the airing of “A Scandal in Belgravia,” however, the text began its own exorcism,
simultaneously introducing its first self-identified gay character then unceremoniously
straightening her out. We could call this performance “queerface,” which I adapt from
“blackface,” to describe another appropriative and damaging performance of a minor-
ity identity assumed by hegemonic—in this case heteronormative—culture.
The updated characterization of Irene Adler has received criticism from feminists
as a retrograde step from Conan Doyle’s work in 1891, reducing her intellectual chal-
lenge to Sherlock Holmes to a sexual one (Jones 2012). Moreover, despite the fact she
frankly admits to Watson that she is gay, her attraction to Sherlock allows him to out-
smart her and ultimately save her from a gratuitously orientalist death. Lesbianism is
reduced to an immature state: once Adler meets the right man for her, that rare man
who can outsmart her, she miraculously turns straight for him. Granted, this could be

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Fathallah 7

read as a disruptive moment that challenges the essentialism of the homo/hetero

divide, but as Butler observes, performative citations need to be assessed in context.
Adler’s citation of lesbian identity is comfortably “domesticated, and recirculated as
[an] instrument [ . . . ] of cultural hegemony” (Butler 1990, 139) in a painful episode
coda that manages to compress several white-masculinist, orientalist fantasies into one
short sequence. This caricature of queer identity can only be described as queerface.

The Queer Specter

The queer hauntology of Sherlock, I would argue, the caesura that will not be closed,
is performed by the specter/presence of Moriarty. Recall that Halperin (1995, 62)
defines queer as an “identity without an essence,” and our first introduction to the
character is in performance. He poses first as the boyfriend of lab worker Molly
Hooper, and Sherlock (mis)diagnoses him as “gay” through (mis)reading signs of
campness in “The Great Game” (2010). These are his “level of personal grooming”
and designer “underwear [ . . . ] visible above the waistline,” in addition to the fact he
leaves his number under Sherlock’s microscope. But Sherlock’s ability to read the
world, indeed the readability of that world and the stability of an epistemological
regime based on such reading, is disrupted by the lack of a gay essence. Moriarty was
only “playing gay,” as he later admits, asking “did you like the little touch with the
underwear?” As Kustritz and Kohnen demonstrate, both the Victorian and the contem-
porary Sherlock “offer reassurance about safety in the city by decoding people and
places," ultimately relying on a “social and criminal typology,” which is not really
updated from the Victorian era. The essence of people is readable in signs of race,
class, gender. Moriarty is the wild card, whether “playing gay” or using his victims as
voice-proxies to avoid speaking to Sherlock. “Talk to me in your own voice,” demands
the detective in “The Great Game” (2010), but Moriarty refuses to present himself to
be read. This “identity without an essence” is most disruptive to Sherlock’s world and
rationalist regimes of epistemology. At a climax of performance, in “The Reichenbach
Fall” (2012), Moriarty denies his own existence, claiming that Sherlock hired an actor
to play his arch-enemy in the construction of his own identity as super-detective. Here,
the queer hauntology takes a meta-textual turn. For, of course, Sherlock is not real: the
model of masculinity does not and never has existed.
If masquerade constitutes one side of Moriarty’s performance, the other would be
violent, explosive, destruction. Bombs are his favored weapon. As Scott-Zechlin
(2012) notes,
Moriarty’s actions and words are almost always characterized by negation, whether
in the extermination of human life or the undercutting of other people’s claims, as
when Sherlock says, “I will stop you” or even just “Catch you later,” and Moriarty
replies, “No you won’t!”
I think we should observe the tone here, which is high and flippant to the point of
squeakiness, producing a rather hilarious effect as Sherlock and Watson remain in the
darkened buildings where Moriarty has just spared both their lives. I think we can
make sense of this in terms of the “embrace of negativity,” which Lee Edelman has

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8 Television & New Media 

called for as part of a radical queer agenda. Edelman’s (2004) No Future takes the
form of a manifesto for jouissance and embrace of the death drive. It disdains all forms
of assimilationist politics, calling for absolute and violent negation of homosocial
order. This is the queerness performed in that sequence where, where to the swells of
Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra (“The Thieving Magpie”), Moriarty shatters the crown
jewel case with a fire extinguisher, using a diamond chip in the glass to create the
crucial pressure. The visual smash occurs just as the score peaks in a moment of literal
operatic jouissance. Simultaneously, he uses his mobile phone to open the vault at the
Bank of England and unlock all the cells at Pentonville Prison. There is no point to any
of these crimes, apart from the demonstration that he is powerful enough to commit
them—and walk free.
The parallels between the world’s only consulting detective and the world’s only
consulting criminal have been played up from their first meeting. They are both mas-
terful intellects and strategists, bored by life and disdainful of the majority of human
beings, to the point that Watson, in a moment of disgust with Sherlock during “The
Great Game” (2012), comments that he hopes they will “be very happy together.” At
the scene of Moriarty’s apparent death in “The Reichenbach Fall” (2012), which opens
to the comically incongruent track of “Stayin Alive” by the Beegees, he has tempted
Sherlock to the roof of the Reichenbach hospital. Here, he confesses his deep disap-
pointment that Sherlock, despite his delight in the Game and general disregard for
most human life, has turned out to be part of the dominant order after all:

Sherlock: I am you. Prepared to do anything. Prepared to burn. Prepared to do what

ordinary people won’t do. You want me to shake hands with you in hell? I shall
not disappoint you.
Moriarty: Nah. You talk big. Nah. You’re ordinary. You’re ordinary. You’re on the
side of the angels.
Sherlock: Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that
I am one of them.

Yet Sherlock’s actions bely his words. His desperate desire in this moment is to both
live and save his friends. If he is not an angel, in this episode’s heroic arc, which view-
ers know through the work of citation will not really lead to his death, he is as close as
makes no matter. It is Moriarty whom, to win the Game, is ultimately prepared to
embrace the death drive, shooting himself through the roof of his mouth in order that
the signal that would call the snipers off Sherlock’s friends can never be discovered.
This might be read as a closure of the queer possibilities in the series. In the third
series, Adler is absent, and John gets married to Mary Morstan, played for an extra-
heteronormative touch by Freeman’s real-life partner Amanda Abbington. She might,
as it turns out, be a criminal with her own shady and dramatic past, but ultimately all
she desires to be is “Mary Watson,” as she tearfully confirms in “His Last Vow” (2014).
At their wedding, Sherlock correctly deduces that she is pregnant, wrapping up the
episode like a romantic comedy. Moreover, the first episode of the third series cites
queer performance only to close it down and dismiss it as Othered fantasy. In “The

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Fathallah 9

Empty Hearse” (2014), what appears to be a flashback to explain how Sherlock sur-
vived his climactic jump from the Reichenbach hospital shows Sherlock faking the fall
with a dummy, which he then discards before laughing uproariously with Moriarty.
The music then becomes serious as the two regard each other, lean in, and are about to
kiss—before the screen is filled by a close-up of detective Anderson (Jonathan Aris)
exclaiming, “What?!” This queer disruption, it turns out, was the fantasy of a female
fan who is then dismissed by her male counterparts, gathered to discuss the ways
Sherlock might have survived. Such a kiss could not really happen, outside the fanta-
sies of women. As Zubernis expresses it, “They [the producers] were never going to
allow that kiss actually happen, but they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we know that you’re
talking about this online, so here, we’ll dangle this carrot in front of you’” (Maloney
2014). Anderson berates the fan to “take this seriously”: queer identities and desires,
apparently, are not a “serious” possibility. This is queerface, and there is something
disturbing and disingenuous about asking queer viewers to identify with and invest in
a text before such a dismissal.
Yet as Duvall (2008, 36) notes, once the performance of cultural legitimacy has
slipped, it can never be fully recuperated or made whole again. In his context of race
studies, “once white has mixed with black, it is no longer white.” In the wake of this
queer hauntology of disruptive moments, Sherlock’s queerness is paradoxically
inscribed through its incessant and ill-fitting invocation of heteronormativism, always
haunted by some excess, some problematic ghost, just as the performance of masculin-
ity is revealed as straight-face by inopportune giggling fits or Sherlock’s childish
exchanges with his brother. And finally, in “His Last Vow” (2014), which was the last
episode to air at the time of writing, Sherlock is recalled at the last minute from an
exile in some vaguely menacing “Eastern European” country by a phone call from
Mycroft. “England” apparently needs him. For the smiling specter of Jim Moriarty has
appeared on every screen in the country, his artificially filtered voice repeating, “Did
you miss me? Did you miss me? Did you miss me?”
The question is posed on advertising boards over the rounded cabs of central
London, historic buildings with flags flying, and to Mycroft in the security of his pri-
vate car. These institutions of the dominant order, which construct a London of power
and prosperity, seem challenged by the question. To those readers interested in queer
disruptions, caesuras in text, and persistent challenges that haunt the dominant order,
the answer is “yes, very much.” The return of Moriarty would literalize the queer
haunting of Sherlock, both in his performances of ambiguous sexuality and the unread-
able, unsolvable disruptions he enacts in the order of the City. If he does not, con-
versely, and the text continues to foreclose and elide queer possibilities in the pattern
of season 3, the broadcast of his challenge might be read as the ultimate in queerbait-
ing, a deliberate market-minded tease intended to hook viewers for another season,
rather than the genuine foreshadow of a more complex and challenging text.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

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10 Television & New Media 

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author Biography
Judith Fathallah is a recent doctoral graduate of the school of Journalism, Media and Cultural
Studies at Cardiff University. Her interests are cult media, transformative fanwork, discourse
studies, and intellectual property in the new media environment.

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