I adore your Moriarty and Moran. To me its maybe a suicide mission? As much as I dislike Holmes winning, the fall was supposed to be the both of them. Maybe th character had more belief in that than the masses that resurrected Holmes. I think we could have had so much more of Moriarty and Moran if ACD wasn't using them for Holmes "end." But as Holmes was brought back from the falls, us fans of the crime can bring back Moriarty, and Moran's failure means as little as the death
Thank you. :) There is something so odd and self-destructive about Holmes's behaviour and the way he leaves England before Moriarty is arrested and then how he confronts Moriarty (plus his disappearance afterwards for 3 years of course). Of course realistically it's just because ACD wanted to bump him off in order to focus on 'serious writing' but the way it appears as a result of that does make Holmes's behaviour seem very strange.
Other people have suggested he's basically baiting a trap to lure Moriarty out of the country in order to murder him. I don't think it's that coldblooded or calculating but I do think he was trying to lure Moriarty after him, rather than being willing to leave Moriarty for the English police and courts to deal with. And he seems resigned to the idea of dying. I think... Moriarty is similar, in that he doesn't just have Holmes killed when he could easily have done so. All of those supposed attempts on Holmes's life seem more like a message than serious attempts on his life. He let Holmes live and then follows him straight into a situation where he must see one or both of them may die. Although I don't think he's as resigned to dying as Holmes is (which I think was actually reflected in A Game of Shadows when they fall together - Holmes looks totally at peace even though there's absolutely no way he could know whether he'd survive or not, while Moriarty looks completely pissed off) but he is not afraid of death and there is that strange fascination between them and it does feel like he's compelled to follow Holmes and confront him face to face knowing he could die.
Meanwhile I think poor Moran is there knowing a great deal more than Watson about what is really going on and how Moriarty and Holmes have this strange obsession with each other that's highly likely to destroy one or both of them but being just as helpless really as Watson is to do anything about it. I really don't believe Moran simply forgot his gun or whatever; something else happened and it probably did have something to do with Moriarty and his fixation with Holmes and him being adamant he needed to face Holmes without any weapons. (Holmes/Moriarty shippers possibly have explored this idea and the whole Holmes and Moriarty dynamic in greater depth I'm sure.)
Realistically of course nothing much about The Final Problem or the resolution in The Empty House makes sense because ACD simply wanted Holmes gone, wasn't intending to bring him back and didn't care that much about how believable any of it was since he didn't consider it his "serious work" but as a result of that it has left all this room to interpret things that happened. Really as villains in fiction go, both Moriarty and Moran were wasted though. I think even ACD probably realised that, that he'd created Holmes's 'nemesis' and his right hand man, these two characters who so clearly parallel Holmes and Watson, but hadn't actually shown either of them doing much and he had rather wasted their potential, so he did at least squeeze them in to The Valley of Fear. It's not much but at least he tried.
He did seem to have an aversion to killing characters off conclusively too - whether he ever intended to make further use of them or that was simply down to him not wanting to show too much 'on screen' death I don't know but it does seem a little strange that Moriarty's supposed death is 'off screen' and he essentially outright states that there's no body found, and Moran is still alive years after his appearance despite being arrested for murder in it. Unfortunately though yeah it has been left to everyone else to make use of the characters further. It's not inherently bad, that the canon is so limited in content for them yet also so vague and thus open to interpretation at the same time, because it does leave so much room to create content for them, but I really wish more people would make use of them and actually create that content.
