“I.O.U."  What does it mean?  As we count down to Series 3 in Episode 12 of the Three Patch Podcast, due out December 1, have one last take on decoding one of Steve Thompson’s signature ciphers.

The Meaning of I.O.U.

The phrase “I.O.U.” or “I owe you” recurs in “The Reichenbach Fall” at least nine times and once more by omission, starting with Moriarty’s bitter threat to Sherlock over tea:  “I owe you a fall.”

In the Reichenbach Fallout segment of episode 6.5 of the Three Patch Podcast, we considered the possibility that “I.O.U.” was a red herring and concluded that it could not be.  We see “I.O.U.” carved into an apple and tagged onto buildings; Moriarty, Sherlock, Molly, and John all utter the phrase; Sherlock conspicuously lies about it when John asks if Moriarty touched anything (“An apple”) or wrote anything (“No”) in their flat.  Clearly, Steve Thompson, who wrote the script for this episode, intended “I.O.U.” to mean something.  But what?

LJ user maryme2 pointed out a clue from one of Steve Thompson’s other works, the play Roaring Trade, first performed in 2009 at the Soho Theatre.  It turns out that “Reichenbach” wasn’t the first time Steve Thompson wrote about I.O.U.s.  Act One, Scene Four of Roaring Trade contains this bit of dialogue between a boy named Sean and his father Donny, played by Andrew Scott – yes, the Andrew Scott who plays Moriarty.

SEAN.  You told me what a bond is.  It’s like an IOU or something.

DONNY gestures for him to elaborate.

Coca-Cola needs to make money… they sell bonds to people.

DONNY.  Which are?

SEAN (finding trouble with the definition).  Bits of paper… promising money.

DONNY.  Precious bits of paper that tell the whole world you made Coca-Cola a loan.  And these IOUs – these bonds – they get bought and sold.

Donny is a trader, like the characters in “The Blind Banker.” Thompson dedicated Roaring Trade partly “For my dad, who worked in Liverpool Street” as a trader, so we know that Thompson grew up with the concept of I.O.U.s.  Perhaps he meant that Moriarty was threatening Sherlock with payback.

But payback for what?  Whatever it is, it has already happened by the beginning of “Reichenbach.”  Is it payback for Sherlock’s interference in Moriarty’s crimes?  Unlikely; Moriarty is still committing them on his own terms.  Is it payback for the torture Mycroft put Moriarty through?  Probably not; as we see in Mycroft’s flashback, Moriarty is indifferent to the torture.  Moriarty says he owes Sherlock “a fall.”  What fall?  When did Sherlock make Moriarty fall?  We haven’t seen Moriarty take a literal fall; with the wing imagery in the episode, and the talk of angels and hell, we’re looking for a Biblical fall, then.

The final clue, as ever, is John. 

It is John who utters the last iteration of “I.O.U.” in the episode:  “I was so alone, and I owe you so much.”

“I.O.U.” is about loneliness.  It’s about friendship, about the bonds that give meaning to life, about the meaning that provides the solution to the Final Problem.  It’s about John’s gain and Moriarty’s loss.

John and Moriarty have engaged in a tug-of-war for Sherlock’s allegiance throughout the Moriarty story arc.  When Sherlock delights in Moriarty’s “interesting” crimes in “The Great Game,” John says with disgust, “I hope you’ll be very happy together.”  Moriarty has argued to Sherlock, “You’re just alike, you and I, except you’re boring.”  By the time of the rooftop confrontation, both Moriarty and Sherlock have realized that the two of them are not alike.  The ordinariness that makes Sherlock “boring” means that Moriarty has lost to John.

Ever since the Carl Powers murder, Moriarty believed that he was not alone in the world because there was someone else who understood him, someone else who experienced the same cycle of boredom and distraction, someone else unable to connect to ordinary humans except as “pets.”  This belief kept Moriarty company when he contemplated his indifference to his lack of love and his frustration with the Final Problem, the problem of how and whether to live or to die because “That’s what people do.”

It was the sight of the friendship between Sherlock and John at the pool that did it, the evidence that Sherlock had achieved a reciprocal bond so meaningful that an ordinary human would be willing to die to save Sherlock, to die together with Sherlock, to grieve if Sherlock died before him.  That was Moriarty’s fall:  a fall from innocence, the innocence of not knowing he was lonely, of not feeling the pain of his lovelessness.  So geniuses could know love and friendship; it was only Moriarty who could not.  Sherlock no longer experienced life as Moriarty did, now that Sherlock had someone who meant something to him.  So Moriarty was truly alone again and would die alone. 

Moriarty’s desperation to reassert kinship with Sherlock mounts throughout “The Reichenbach Fall” as his claims of their similarities ring increasingly false.  He tries to trivialize Sherlock’s friendship with John by saying he, too, should get himself “an ordinary one,” as though the profane mockery of a relationship he perpetrates upon Kitty Riley bears any resemblance to love.  He presumes that Lestrade would doubt Sherlock when there is no such chance.  He is completely alienated from the emotional reality of Sherlock’s daily life.  The once friendless Sherlock has left him so far behind that Moriarty must feel abandoned.

Moriarty must have hated Sherlock for making him feel these comfortless terrors.  No wonder he wanted to burn the heart out of Sherlock.  He has to punish Sherlock for the love in his life, to strike out at the brother whose genius means that Sherlock has never known aloneness, at the friends who know Sherlock for his true self, yet draw closer rather than backing away.  Nobody would grieve if Moriarty died, a fact that hadn’t pained Moriarty as much until he saw the riches in Sherlock’s life.  He has to punish Sherlock with an equivalent fall:  the most painful possible knowledge that his friends will suffer. 

For Sherlock, who can barely bring himself to acknowledge that he has friends at all, enduring this knowledge requires a degree of growth so great that he must become almost not himself – another recurring concept in “Reichenbach.”  Sherlock must fall from being almost like an angel, above it all, unsusceptible to ordinary sentiment, to becoming just a man, not more than a man as Moriarty is, shackled by the wrist to the lumbering pace of other mortals.

Moriarty is disgusted at the ordinariness of defeating Sherlock.  Everybody has their pressure point:  all it takes is a threat to John and Sherlock surrenders, just as the jury did. 

But there is a saving moment for Moriarty, too.  The tearful thank-you, the smile, the bizarre handshake on the rooftop:  those are frightening because they are genuine, a response to the gift that Sherlock gives him.  Sherlock says he is prepared to burn – to have the heart burned out of him.  He will knowingly accept the pain of causing grief to John, as Moriarty withstood the pain of torture, because they are both “prepared to do what ordinary people won’t do.”  He promises to shake hands with Moriarty in hell:  he may have chosen the side of the angels, to accept the supremacy of sentiment, but that does not mean Moriarty is alone.

When Sherlock accepts the fall that Moriarty owes him, he agrees to experience a pain equivalent to Moriarty’s and thereby be akin again.  Moriarty, the formerly unfeeling sociopath, fell from innocence by feeling mortal jealousy.  Sherlock, the formerly friendless genius, will be feeling a new and nearly unbearable degree of anguish by caring about the pain he will cause John.  Moriarty wants company in his fallen state; Sherlock will join him in this new experience of feeling hurt for want of love, like two angels cast out of heaven together.  At last, someone again will be experiencing the same things Moriarty does.  This state of being known, this companionship, is what brings tears to Moriarty.  This has been Moriarty’s aim, to pay back Sherlock with a fall so that Sherlock can hurt as Moriarty has been hurting and they can be each other’s mirrors once again.  When he holds out his hand and Sherlock grasps it, Moriarty must seize the moment and shoot:  this is the moment that means he does not have to die alone.

 - Drinkingcocoa.

Note:  This month’s Recreational Meta was going to be a celebration of Steve Thompson’s writing, but there was too much love to fit into one post.  Look for a Steve Thompson appreciation post for the January edition of Recreational Meta.