Wish our lot were half as good as you. The smoker in the café.

 (Sherlock meta by abidos)

Last part of the analysis of A Scandal in Belgravia. Main points:

*Irene was spying on the terrorists for Mycroft/the secret service
*It was impossible for Mycroft not to have known that Sherlock rescued her.



For the previous parts, go here.

And we arrive at the final part of the episode. Our hero has triumphed, evil, although not vanquished, has been defanged, and our dashing protagonist leaves the scene, after proving, once again, that nobody beats him at being a cold hearted bastard. Doesn’t it make you feel all fuzzy inside? I know it does for me.

So, now what? Sherlock has handed Irene over to Mycroft, to do with her as he pleases, imprison her or let her go, with the strong certainty that she will be dead shortly. I will add a third option, and that is to arrange for Irene’s demise himself.

Some people have pointed out that having Irene imprisoned wasn’t really an option for Mycroft. Even after losing her phone, Irene still has the damaging information about Sherlock’s involvement in ruining the Bond Air operation. I have already pointed out in part two how this information would put Sherlock in danger.
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That piece of information was indeed, very problematic on the plane, but a lot has changed in the last few minutes. It would have been one thing for Irene, after just having revealed the Bond Air ploy to the terrorist, to point a blaming finger on Sherlock. But now she is a beaten opponent, causing problems for the man, or men, who ultimately defeated her. Given her position, people are unlikely to take her word for it. Furthermore, if she had ever had any proof of Sherlock decoding the e-mail, it would have been on her phone. I don’t think Mycroft will be willing to lend it to her.
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Now, as for letting her go. Mycroft has little reason to feel kind to Irene, although the question remains if he would send anyone to their death for no other reason than that. There is also the problem of how this would look to his masters and colleagues. He would have to give a plausible explanation for such a move. Particularly since he also has the option of having someone kill her. Would he go through such bothers for a bit of revenge? Now, it might be possible that he finds some information on Irene’s phone that he doesn’t want anyone else to know about. Having Irene imprisoned might risk her telling others about it. This option would justify letting her go, but it is rather speculative and doesn’t really explain why, a few months later, Irene is about to be beheaded by terrorists. She is an intelligent woman, if she had enemies among them, or enemies who had ties to them, she wouldn’t go anywhere near them.
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I also don’t believe in simply discounting Irene. She isn’t just going to sit around and have him decide her fate for her. She no longer has her information but she has another asset. Well, she has several, but she is smart enough to know that flirting with Mycroft isn’t going to get her anywhere nice. But she has something else, her ability to gather information, her intellect. Mycroft already pointed out that he “(…) wished our lot were half as good as you.” So she offers her services to Mycroft, offers to earn his protection. By accepting he gains the possibility of acquiring a powerful asset and the risk of her double crossing him is small, since she needs him, she has powerful enemies, and no other place where she could rapidly gain such powerful protection. Furthermore, her feelings for Sherlock tie her to him. Mycroft has seen enough of her addiction to “the game” (and no doubt recognises it from having observed his brother for years) to know she won’t be able to just stay away from Sherlock.
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Using her against the very people she helped during Bond Air would appeal to him. Some people have forwarded the possibility that it is Moriarty whom Mycroft would want Irene to spy upon. I find this very doubtful because Moriarty would know that Irene’s plan didn’t work and was at the mercy of the elder Holmes, so he would be extremely suspicious of her, if he got news of her nosing around his organization.
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It appears to me that having her spy on terrorists seems to be a much more logical and is also better at explaining Irene ending up with a sword at her neck.
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It also gives a good explanation as to how Sherlock knew where she was, and that she was in danger. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and begin with looking at other aspects of her rescue. We have shown that Irene working for Mycroft at this point is more plausible, but it is still possible that he really decided to let her go. This also makes it harder to explain how she ended up needing to be rescued, but again, it could be possible.
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A lot of people have wondered how Sherlock would have gotten out of the country without Mycroft knowing. Even if Sherlock were able to get out unnoticed, his older brother would realise that the date that Irene was executed, Sherlock was absent from Baker street for at least a few days. He would suspect and would investigate further, perhaps his agents would pick on on the fact that the people who were supposed to execute Irene were all dead. A lot of suspicious activity.
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Wellingtongoose proposes an interesting theory, which is that the people who try to kill her are in Britain. The theory goes more or less as follows:
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There is a group of “home grown terrorists” somewhere in Britain. Mycroft and the secret service doesn’t have to much information on it an it’s members, suggesting it is relatively new, they also prove impossible to infiltrate and hide their activity so good that nobody really knows what they are up to. Mycroft hands over Irene to them in exchange for information, or, more likely, as some form of payment that helps one of his men infiltrate the group. The reason the terrorists want Irene is that she is an independent woman, so making a video of her execution and sending it to one of the larger groups in the middle east will gain them funding and support.
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In this theory, we have a group of people who are new to terrorism, haven’t gone to any of the training camps in the Middle East, haven’t even looked up the wrong type of site, bought the wrong type of book or the wrong type of items at a store or used the wrong type of words in their messages (all of which gets you on lists and makes it relatively easy for the government to guess what you are up to, once you catch their attention.). But, on the other hand, are so good at subterfuge and counterespionage that the police and the secret service are unable to infiltrate their organization, they can’t even tail them to figure out who the members of this organization are, where they get together and what resources they have.


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Furthermore, these people have no contact with any of the mayor terrorist organizations, and they believe that the best way of doing this is by making a video where they execute a woman, who has no ties to any terrorist group. Because she is independent and comfortable with her sexuality. Now, executing a woman isn’t particularly popular move in the culture where terrorist generally come from. It would be different if Irene were. for some reason expected to be submitted to the sharia, the law of Islam. In some regions there are infractions that are punished by death. There are also cultures where a woman can be killed if she is perceived to have dishonoured her family. Nice, lovely people, really. However, I don’t think Irene is Muslim, and in this theory she is somewhere in the UK. She is also not an enemy of a terrorist group, which would be a good reason to execute her. So killing her isn’t going to impress anyone, or make anyone particularly fond of you, with the possible exception of the people whose life Irene might have ruined before. If you are a budding terrorist, the intelligent way to get in the good graces of the big boys is to send them a very discrete message, and once they are convinced you are not part of a secret service operation trying to infiltrate them, you are golden. Because the most difficult thing to be, and the most valued, is to not have been noticed by the government. Also, if you want to execute someone who is supposed to embody all the vices of western civilization, it would be a good idea not to dress her in a hijab.
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The theory has further problems, and that is that, despite the fact that they have proved impervious to the infiltration techniques of the people specialized in terrorism, Sherlock manages to find out the threat that exists to Irene’s life and where she is going to be executed. Because Sherlock understands the criminal mind and has contacts in the criminal world. Things the entire secret service and his brother do not have, aparently. He also manages to do this without the people who are spying on this group noticing.
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For this theory to work we need to accept the idea of a group that is both powerful enough to warrant Mycroft’s attention, but so insignificant it thinks it needs a promo video, and are a curious mix of inexperienced and highly proficient at the same time. Or maybe everyone in the secret service, including Mycroft, is just a bloody idiot.
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Could the theory of the UK terrorist work in any other form? It could be a sleeper cell, whose presence is only suspected, who have managed to infiltrate the country. But these people aren’t going to blow their cover just to kill someone.



There is a second objection to Mycroft not knowing what Sherlock did, and it works no matter if you believe Sherlock and Irene were in the UK, Karachi or Siberia.
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The message Irene sends to Sherlock. When your phone makes contact with the network, either to send or receive information, the company records what cell tower you used. They use this, among other reasons, to charge you insane amounts of money if either you or the person you are contacting happens to be outside the country. So, even if Sherlock and Irene were only under minimal surveillance, Mycroft would have seen that, the moment Irene sent her goodbye message, she and Sherlock were close enough to each other to be using the same cell tower. We know neither of them changed their phone to a number to one that can’t be related to them, because if Irene had done so, her personal alert wouldn’t have sounded, and we know Sherlock didn’t, because how would Irene have known his number? Furthermore, we see that all of Irene’s messages appear together on Sherlock’s phone.
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From the fact that Sherlock didn’t bother to change his number, or even turn his phone off, we know that he knows Mycroft is aware of where he is, and Mycroft, of course, knows Sherlock knows.
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If Sherlock never tries to hide from Mycroft, it is not so farfetched that he is there with his brother’s help. This would also explain how he knew where to find her.
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So why would Sherlock be the one to rescue her? Why not send a professional team? Irene has failed her objective by getting caught, if Mycroft sends a team to extract her he’ll look incompetent for trusting her, and he’d have the same problem as before, imprison her or let her go to get killed somewhere. Easier all-around to let the terrorists kill her and be done with it.
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But I think he would tell Sherlock, he would give him the choice, and support him if he wanted to save her. He’d give Sherlock the chance to get some sort of closure on his affair with Irene.
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So then, why do Sherlock and Mycroft play the game at the café with John? I believe it is a test for John, Mycroft likes to test John. They are trying to figure out if he would chose to be truthful but cause pain or if he’d prefer to lie. I believe at this point, Sherlock and Mycroft have begun to plan on how to deal with Moriarty, and are trying to decide if John should be included. On one side he is a terrible actor and would be a liability if they need to rely on a subterfuge of some kind. On the other hand, he has shown great loyalty and would be severely pissed off after the fact. So they leave it up to him, in a way.