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Irene is Moriarty.

Sherlock found her interesting which means she must be hella weird.

Narrative causality means she's alive: anyone mentioned that often should at least get a flashback or something. If she's alive she must at the very least be in cahoots with Moriarty, and being the same person is more interesting.

Moriarty has never tried to kill Sherlock.

Irene "died" like all of M's other victims, meaning all Sherlock would have found is a pool of her blood. So all she had to do was store up her blood a little at a time in a freezer (EDIT: Apparently this wouldn't work in real life, see the comments. Does tend to work in TV land though...) Maybe faking her own death was the whole point of the exercise, a distinctive method of death which often leaves no corpse but allows for definite identification of the victim.

And if she is coming back and there is going to be complicated black romance between her and Sherlock then it's definitely better there be no romantic relationship between Sherlock and Joan, or there'd be an icky "women fighting over a man" vibe, rather than "woman trying to protect her platonic male friend from his TERRIBLE ex". Thus the creators' insistence that Joan/Sherlock isn't going to be a thing.

One thing that confuses me about Moriarty is why they didn't predict Sherlock talking to Moran long enough to realise it was all a setup. And if Moriarty did predict it, what was the point? To get rid of a henchman who'd passed their usefulness and mess with Sherlock's head? I guess we'll see!

And now I wait for tomorrow's episode to totally prove me wrong.