[Irene] Adler’s power became, in [Stephen] Moffat’s hands, less a matter of brains, and more a matter of knowing “what men like” and how to give it to them; of having them by the sexual short and curlies, or, perhaps more aptly, on a nice short leash. Her masterminding of a cunning criminal plan was, it was revealed late in the day, not her own doing, but dependent on the advice of Holmes’s arch nemesis, James Moriarty. A move that, blogger Stavvers noted, neatly reduced her from “an active force to a passive pawn in Moriarty and Holmes’s ongoing cock-duelling”.