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"It&amp;#039;s been a week. The third series of Sherlock ended last Sunday with Steven Moffat&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;His Last Vow&amp;#039;, and now all that awaits is yet another painfully indefinite hiatus.  We&amp;#039;re promised that series four and five are in the works, but neither has yet been officially confirmed by the BBC, and Moffat certainly didn&amp;#039;t skimp on the cliffhangers with his finale. Replacing the overwhelming question mark of series two&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;How did he do it?&amp;quot; was a more general sense of &amp;quot;WTF?&amp;quot; Is Moriarty really back? Are John and Mary really going to have a child? Does anyone on this show ever stay dead? Below, we&amp;#039;ve pulled together our speculation on what&amp;#039;s to come at 221B Baker Street.   Moriarty Did you miss him? The strange thing about Andrew Scott&amp;#039;s Moriarty is that he was never an integral enough part of Sherlock in its first two series for his absence to be especially striking this year. He appeared only at the very end of the first series, and had cameo appearances in two out of three episodes in series two. So whatever your feelings on Moriarty&amp;#039;s apparent return, it&amp;#039;s hard to accuse Moffat and Gatiss of milking the character \u2013 if anything, he&amp;#039;s been under-used in all but name so far.  Given this, it&amp;#039;s easy to see the temptation to bring Moriarty back for real, given how spectacular Scott is and how much dramatic ground there still is to cover with him. The parallels between he and Sherlock \u2013 glimpsed briefly again in &amp;#039;His Last Vow&amp;#039; as a demented Moriarty sat chained in the basement of Sherlock&amp;#039;s mind palace \u2013 have barely been touched, and then there&amp;#039;s the curious way Gatiss squandered the character of Moriarty&amp;#039;s henchman Sebastian Moran in &amp;#039;The Empty Hearse&amp;#039;.  In the book, Moriarty and Moran are a kind of dark mirror image to Sherlock and John \u2013 the genius and his military sidekick, the brain and the muscle \u2013 and this feels like such fertile ground for exploration, given how focused Sherlock has been on the psychology of its leading duo. We also never really saw how Molly (Louise Brealey) reacted to the truth about &amp;quot;Jim from IT&amp;quot; (beyond the occasional joke about dating sociopaths), and we never saw Molly and Moriarty share the screen. So if Moriarty really is back, it will make sense in storytelling terms.  But what about in logical terms? We, and Sherlock, did apparently see Moriarty put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, and we saw blood pooling behind his head afterwards. But Sherlock seems too disoriented in the moment to take a really close look, and he doesn&amp;#039;t check Moriarty&amp;#039;s pulse. Since Moriarty used his own gun, it&amp;#039;s definitely possible that he could have fired a blank, but even a blank would have caused some serious internal damage at that kind of range if it hadn&amp;#039;t killed him. The blood really tells us nothing, since Sherlock was also covered in blood after his faux-fall and Moriarty could have done something similar, but Moffat&amp;#039;s still going to need one hell of an explanation to make this plausible. On balance, it feels more likely that the &amp;quot;Did you miss me?&amp;quot; thing is a bluff. Moriarty isn&amp;#039;t really alive, but someone wants the world to believe he is. That might be Moran (who we briefly saw getting hauled off at the end of &amp;#039;The Empty Hearse&amp;#039;), or Janine (who some have speculated could be Moriarty&amp;#039;s sister, based on her Irish accent and the slight physical resemblance between Yasmine Akram and Andrew Scott). Or it might be someone closer to home. Moriarty&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Did you miss me?&amp;quot; loop appears on every screen in the country. The one character in the show we&amp;#039;ve been led to believe might have that kind of power is Mycroft, and of course he&amp;#039;d want to ensure that his little brother wasn&amp;#039;t really going to be sent off to die in exile. Mycroft&amp;#039;s increased presence in series three, and the emphasis on his brotherly dynamic with Sherlock, felt as though it was leading up to something that never quite transpired in &amp;#039;His Last Vow&amp;#039;, and this would certainly qualify.  But here&amp;#039;s another idea: Sherlock himself masterminded the &amp;quot;did you miss me?&amp;quot; clip. Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be perfectly in character for Sherlock to make the grand, heroic gesture he did \u2013 sacrificing his own freedom by killing Magnussen in order to secure John and Mary&amp;#039;s safety \u2013 while actually knowing all along that he had a backup plan, and wouldn&amp;#039;t really have to leave London? This would be a distinctly dark twist, turning the Richard Brook plot in &amp;#039;Reichenbach&amp;#039; into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where Sherlock really does &amp;#039;invent&amp;#039; Moriarty. The idea of Moriarty being a figment of Holmes&amp;#039;s imagination has been explored in several pastiches \u2013 most famously Nicholas Meyer&amp;#039;s novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution \u2013 and this slant allows Sherlock to remain sane while resorting to desperate measures. The Mycroft option still feels more likely, but both angles are intriguing.  Mary When Sherlock deduced Mary&amp;#039;s pregnancy at the end of &amp;#039;The Sign of Three&amp;#039;, many viewers took it as final confirmation of the widely-held theory that Mrs Watson wasn&amp;#039;t long for this world. After all, Mary famously dies (in a rather perfunctory aside) in Doyle&amp;#039;s stories, and sticking close to the canon in this regard seems the smart choice: as charming as Amanda Abbington is in the role, Sherlock just isn&amp;#039;t Sherlock without its leading duo shacking up together, bachelor-style, at Baker Street. And it certainly isn&amp;#039;t Sherlock with John Watson changing nappies. But Mary didn&amp;#039;t die. &amp;#039;His Last Vow&amp;#039; ended with her heavily pregnant and Sherlock leaving the Watsons behind to start their family in safety. Which leaves us with the question of how on earth this is going to work going into series four.  If Mary actually has John&amp;#039;s child, it will be the single biggest departure from canon Moffat and Gatiss have ever made. In no version of Sherlock Holmes is John Watson a father, and having him be a father essentially makes it impossible for him to ever return to the risk-taking lifestyle he&amp;#039;s enjoyed with Sherlock \u2013 if he&amp;#039;s ultimately left a single father, all the more so. It&amp;#039;s not really clear at this point why the pregnancy was introduced at all, other than to make Mary&amp;#039;s betrayal sting more.  There are still ways Mary and the baby could be dispatched, since series four is presumably going to pick up immediately after &amp;#039;His Last Vow&amp;#039;. If Moriarty is really back, the combination of a pregnant Mary and his penchant for threatening Sherlock&amp;#039;s nearest and dearest feels like a no-brainer. But it&amp;#039;s hard to imagine a way in which killing a heavily pregnant woman and her unborn baby won&amp;#039;t feel utterly sadistic, to an extent Sherlock never has been to date.  And it&amp;#039;s equally hard to imagine an alternative \u2013 does anyone seriously want to see John Watson tied down to a family life? Want to watch a series four where the divisive middle episode is a &amp;#039;Three Men and a Baby&amp;#039; takeoff with Sherlock, John and Lestrade? Shudder.  The Moriarty reveal is clearly leading somewhere good, whereas the pregnancy just feels like Moffat and Gatiss have written themselves into a problematic corner. We&amp;#039;re nervous, but we&amp;#039;re going to employ a little blind faith on this one.   The stories The more routine question we have going into every new Sherlock series: which stories will be adapted this time around? With series four the question is trickier than ever before, because Moffat and Gatiss have now worked their way through a majority of Doyle&amp;#039;s best known (and most substantial) Holmes stories. Doyle wrote only four Holmes novels, as opposed to short stories, and three \u2013 &amp;#039;A Study in Scarlet&amp;#039;, &amp;#039;The Hound of the Baskervilles&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;The Sign of Four&amp;#039; \u2013 have already been done.  Going by precedent where each series includes one novel, we could well see a series four adaptation of &amp;#039;The Valley of Fear&amp;#039;, the story which features the first chronological appearance of Moriarty. An inspector from Scotland Yard enlists Holmes&amp;#039;s help to solve a murder in a Sussex village and Holmes, knowing that Moriarty is responsible, attempts to stop his agents killing again. The novel ends with Holmes vowing to bring down Moriarty, however long it takes. In the canon, this all takes place before Reichenbach, but if Moriarty is back then a version of this story makes sense.  Another strong story that Moffat and Gatiss are yet to touch is &amp;#039;The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax&amp;#039;, which inspired a famously dark episode of the Jeremy Brett-starring Granada series. Like &amp;#039;Hound&amp;#039;, this is one of the few stories where Watson takes centre-stage, as Holmes sends him to Switzerland to investigate the disappearance of a young, unmarried woman.  After various red herrings, it transpires she has been chloroformed and kept alive in a coffin in London by jewel thieves, and has been there for several days by the time Holmes and Watson realise. The Granada adaptation ends with a downbeat Holmes refusing to accept a reward for solving the case, because in his mind it was a failure \u2013 Lady Frances is portrayed as psychologically damaged by the experience and unlikely to recover.   Between his fall in &amp;#039;Reichenbach&amp;#039; and his near-fatal shooting in &amp;#039;His Last Vow&amp;#039;, it might be wise to veer away from Sherlock death plotlines for series four, but another story that&amp;#039;s begging to be adapted is &amp;#039;The Adventure of the Dying Detective&amp;#039;. This is one of the few canon examples of Holmes behaving in the callous, borderline sociopathic way that we&amp;#039;ve come to know from the BBC version; think Sherlock drugging John&amp;#039;s tea, only much worse.  Watson comes to Baker Street to find Holmes very ill; he&amp;#039;s apparently dying of a rare Asian disease contracted while on a case. He won&amp;#039;t let Watson treat him, or even come near him, and instead calls in a tropical disease expert called Culverton Smith. A horrified Watson essentially has to sit there and watch his friend slowly die, until it&amp;#039;s revealed that the whole thing has been a ruse in order to get Smith to confess to a murder. Very Sherlock. And if they do want to avoid faux-killing Sherlock yet again, maybe Watson could somehow be the &amp;#039;ill&amp;#039; party instead. &amp;#039;The Dying Doctor&amp;#039; is exactly the kind of name tweak they go in for\u2026 We&amp;#039;d also like to see a version of &amp;#039;The Red-Headed League&amp;#039; thrown in somewhere, because not only is that story is so brilliantly ridiculous, but it would create an excuse for Damian Lewis to be in Sherlock.  What do you want to see in Sherlock&amp;#039;s fourth series? Leave your thoughts in the comments! Catch up on all the latest TV and Movies releases in Digital Spy&amp;#039;s Screen Time:      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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