The ending to The Final Problem reminded me a great deal of The Usual Suspects. In it, Kevin Spacey’s character plays a bumbling accomplice to a group of criminals. However, Spacey’s character is actually just acting, and is in reality the organizer and mastermind behind the various crimes of the movie. At one point, before permanently disappearing, Spacey’s character says “The devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he doesn’t exist”. I think it is at least possible that Holmes and/or Moriarty survived the struggle. The lack of concrete evidence and witnesses adds an air of suspicion to the the events surrounding the disappearance of Holmes and Moriarty. In fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would go on to use these ambiguities/openings in order to bring Sherlock back in a later story, The Adventure of the Empty House.
However, maybe I’m lying to myself. It’s easily possible that rather than live with the fact that Sherlock is dead, I would rather imagine a happier ending in which he figured out a way to escape, and chose to live out the rest of his life anonymously rather than returning to England. When authors leave ambiguous endings, or even endings with just a few holes in them, it leaves readers the opportunity to imagine other possibilities. Does a reader have an obligation to themselves to see things for how they are, or are they allowed to see things for how they wish they were?
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