Week 12: Eve and Moriarty
For some reason this was kind of my guilty ship because I felt like it was betraying Evlynn, especially when watching season 2 for the first time. Watching it back afterwards I don’t feel that anymore, but it is an interesting ship.
Obviously Flynn and Eve’s relationship is tense for most of season 2, so Moriarty showing up and attempting to woo Eve doesn’t help matters. Flynn being super stressed about Prospero completely renders his ability to think past that useless, which isn’t a new behavior, but it’s grating on Eve since now she doesn’t have the LiT’s to mother hen so much.
Side note: A lot of people get annoyed with Flynn, thinking he’s doing this on purpose, not willing to change, but he knows he’s straining their relationship; it’s his personality fighting him. He prioritizes his problems, and Prospero being loose is #1 because Flynn very much has an apocalyptic scenario ending in mind, so it didn’t matter if he stopped to repair their relationship if they weren’t alive later to enjoy it, thus his “fix the bigger problem first, then go and fix the little stuff after” mood the whole season. It wasn’t that he thought his relationship with Eve was little, it was that it wasn’t a possible source for mass destruction like Prospero.
Moriarty, however, wasn’t focused on completely serving Prospero like he was supposed to; his constant desire to defy him, figure out a way to free himself, is why Eve keeps working with him/he keeps showing up as he keeps being the sort of 3rd party in their fight of good vs. evil.
It doesn’t also help that Moriarty is quite similar to Flynn, but more put together, more manipulating, and more charming. Moriarty, despite being in a different century than he was written in, has much better social skills and is quite intelligent, which doesn’t help Flynn’s sort of bad social skills when he can’t bs his way through something. The fact that Moriarty actually gives her attention pulls on Eve’s annoyance that Flynn is being Flynn and neglecting their relationship.
In that car ride to find Ray and Flynn in “And the Hollow Men,” Moriarty ends up helping Eve sort her frustrations and mixed feelings with Flynn. By now she’s impervious to Moriarty’s charm besides a general sense of flattered sometimes, so he goes for ratting on Flynn, comparing him to Sherlock, a bit I always found weird because if Moriarty’s comparing them in terms of the relationship strain because of the difference of the solver/strategist personalities, what exactly is Moriarty attempting to suggest other than that he wanted to “settle down” with Sherlock the way he assumes Eve wants to settle down with Flynn?
Moriarty looks pretty smug at the end of that scene, but I think that’s when Eve realizes that yeah, Flynn’s a runner, but he’s doing what he thinks is right and he’s going all out on it which he did in season 1 searching for the Library, and does again in season 3 on finding a way to defeat Apep.
Since Flynn and Moriarty are comparable people in terms of skills and intellect, Eve and Moriarty would also be a pretty terrifying power couple, but it’d be very tenuous, if it lasted. Moriarty’s a bit too...morally ambiguous, or perhaps more focused on his own well-being, than Flynn by a long shot. No one in their right mind would trust Moriarty to do the right thing over what works out best for him per his nature (though I will say I love fics that redeem him on this because I like Moriarty breaking out of his written personality), so Eve would have to be the moral compass, and figure out how to control him while also being the muscle.
Sure, Moriarty actually plans stuff, which would take some stress off her, but she’d have to plan somewhat against him in case he decided to switch it up for change of interest or if he developed an overarching plan to not actually have any detriment to him at the cost of lives or such. Flynn she can trust to have the interest of the world in mind, though sometimes he forgets to think about his own safety in that, but that’s something she can work with much easier than out-planning Moriarty.
Eve and Moriarty had an important relationship in season 2. Without him, Eve would’ve had a much harder time coming to terms with who Flynn is and how he’s not going to change anytime soon, and Moriarty highlighted the fact that Flynn, while he can be pompous at times, genuinely cares about saving people and the world, which outweighs the annoying bits of his hyper-focus and minor problem avoidance. I think Eve changed Moriarty too; I think he realized at the end what it’s like to actually have strong feelings towards someone, that he was never going to needle his way between Eve and Flynn, and perhaps he realized that maybe it’s nice to care about someone that way, even if he never got to experience that.
