"9. The crowd, half of them paramedics, supply the necessaries to stage the death (blood, stretcher, etc.).  Sherlock's rubber ball is under his right armpit, preventing a readable heartbeat from his right wrist.  Fake doctor ensures the right wrist is the one John checks (btw, fake doctor has a stethoscope on him but dresses like that?  And if he was already clocked in at work, where's his lab jacket?). "

buuuuuut doctors don't wear lab coats necessarily in Britain. Also-especially given that Barts does not have an A&E department he might actually have been, I dunno, a dermatologist. Or a midwife.

Or he could just have been freaking incompetant. What if Sherlock said, "listen Molly, when I fall I especially want you to make sure that guy with the multiple negligence suits against him" is sent out.. Oh and tell him to make sure he shakes my shoulder as much as possible.".

Well it would work  :-)

Ah ETA ignore this. Anthea also wears a ring on the right hand. Interesting. Do the masons not wear a ring on their right hand?

__________________________________________________________________________________

He wears a ring on his right hand

In Britain this mainly indicates a same sex marriage

But it can, I believe, indicate widower status.

Either are possible, I guess (though I think its obvious which the show hints at). What I find interesting is that a. he has or has had a significant relationship b. he wishes to be open about this and c. if it is a same sex relationship it is highly unlikely, even in uber-tolerant Sherlock alternative reality world, to be one of conveniance. 

In Britain men do not always even wear wedding rings. He could certainly be married without wearing a ring, so the only reason to wear it is a. either that he sees it as politically helpful or b. that he cares enough to take the hit.

All this falls away if he is widowed, I guess, or if he's using widowerhood as the pretext for the ring. But, yk, on seeing a ring on the right hand I think most in the know Brits would assume a same sex marriage.

So this says to me that there is someone he cares about as well as Sherlock. Given this its interesting that we never see this person, that they are never referenced. Every single character that meets him must wonder and wonder how this intergrates with him as the "Ice Queen". 

And given this, why do Irene and Moriaty use Sherlock to get to Mycroft? Not whoever this person is he wears a ring for?

(I've read that it was actually a production mistake-that the ring was left on by accident. But note he's still wearing it in later scenes, and still on the right hand. I've just run a check on google images and he's wearing it whenever we see his right hand, so my guess is that they decided to run with it and I want to see where they are going. Aside from anything, the idea that the man who "is the British government" i

I don't want her to be Harry because I really want Catherine Tate to be Harry. But if for some reason (and I cannot think of a single good reason for that ;-) ) that were not possible, I think that would make an interesting plot twist.

But I do think, dramatically, John needs to have moved on and settled down and all the rest and he needs to be married to someone, really. TBH I don't see much dramatic tension in the idea that he's spent two or three years mooning around after Sherlock. My sense is that the story arc is really, mainly, not about Sherlock in some ways but John's journey. His person jouney from wounded war vet, of reintergration into society, the whole sexuality question that is kind of a joke but also very insistent. He's gone from a very regimented world in terms of both morality and ethics but also just having a structure round him and a clear sense of what is expected of him-and he loses that pretty much overnight when he is invalided out. The implcation is that he's pretty much cut himself off from society in order to join the army, including being estraged from his sister-and he has to reintergrate to this. His whole world, every part of it is shaken to the core by Sherlock and those few years after I think need to be about him consolodating this knowledge, this roller coaster he's been on. So he needs to do what most people in their forties do do, which is settling down, marrying, raising a family perhaps (they won't have kids though-too complex). To put it another way, given he's not disinterested in the ladies, and given that now Sherlock is out of the way and so not preventing him either emotionally or practicallly from committing, then unless the wildest slash dreams of tumblrs everywhere are about to be realised, he needs to be married (or long term relationship).

ETA to put it another way. John is Sherlock's foil. Without Sherlock, John is ordinary. (ish). So for dramatic constrast, we need to see John with

OK I posted this on the other thread but I have a new favourite theory now, and I want to hear whether you think it might fly. Haven't seen this anywhere else so...maybe its a bit far fetched. Ok

Here's it in a nutshell cos below I'm thinking out loud.

Its not the homeless network who saves him but the remaining assasins who are after the keycode. There are two left at this point and it could be either. He has not planned this in advance but is relying on it  in the way that he relies on one of them saving him after he throws himself in front of a truck. I don't know what exactly they do-maybe pushing a laundry cart in his way as this clever person suggests http://finalproblem.tumblr.com/post/16150992025/as-promised-heres-my-current-theory-on-how . Everything else is basically opportunistic-he chooses his place to fall because there is a laundry cart nearby and, logically, some wheeled means of getting the laundry there. As I've said above, his speed is slow enough that if his fall was broken he'd survive. Also, if he'd fallen from even a smallish height odds are that blood might be real. Head wounds bleed stupidly much, any parent knows this.

Still some flaws, not least that why did the doctors move him, especially the one young guy who is shaking his shoulder? You don't shake someone's shoulder when they've fallen 70 ft! The cyclist? I don't know.

Oh and just to ETA too...doesn't the female assain look remarkably like the woman playing who we think is Mary Morsten in the new series? Blond, scraped back hair, similar make up...just saying, yk?

___________________________________________________________________________________

leaving this in because its a pain when someone etas and deletes a thread in the process :-) 

I wonder if it might be not the homeless network but the assaisns. At the point Sherlock jumps, they don't know he no longer has the keycode. We've already seen that they will go to extreme lengths, even effec

I would love to see Harry Watson, John's sister, especially as I think there is general agreement that she is Catherine Tate. That would basically be awesome, serious comic relief. Clara too, though I don't have such a strong idea of what she's like. 

I'd also really like a bit more depth to Mycroft and so I'd love to see his significant other-who I assume is male (if for no better reason than that he wears a wedding ring and its on his right hand). Clearly has has, or has had, someone in his life (I do seem to remember that a right hand ring can also mean you are a widower). It would be interesting anyway because the implication here is that there are two people in the world he cares about-not just Sherlock but the person he wears a ring for. But then there are those Christmas Eve scenes when he is completely alone in Holmes Manor. Its an unexplained complexity and it would be interesting to see how he relates to whoever else there is in his life who is important to him. 

If the ring was on the left hand I'd assume a marraige of convenience to a woman and that would be the end of it, with no real comment either way on his actual sexuality because my god he would be able to pull that off. But no, presumably he's married to a man which to me, even in the uber-tolerant Sherlock universe, does suggest he's put himself on the line, albeit perhaps slightly, to declare that he loves someone. So this person is probably pretty interesting. (and we know that his whole "caring is not an advantage" speech is spiel anyway-he following it up with giving Sherlock a low tar cigarette.")

yeah I hope they stick to canon here. Mary Morsten was seriously kick -ass and also, I think, far more interesting than either canon or Sherlock Irene Adler who is a bit 2D imo...

well reasonably proper snow today/tonght here in Cardiff. So if there is a snowy scene it was probably filmed tonight :-)

No we really don't see the truck leaving straight away!

We see Sherlock's body fall to the bottom of the frame and we don't see the pavement

Then we cut to John and get him for a bit, running toward Sherlock and then with the cyclist and the rest. And somewhere in there we see the head of Sherlock and the truck.

And then we get an overhead shot of the body outside the rectangle with people rushing about and at this point, the laundry truck has pulled away.

(I'll tell you what else, I've watched that clip way too many times now and that cyclist is Sherlock, I'm convinced of it, Or his twin brother Have we consdered that theory ;-) ?)

 

just a thought

I've rewatched the video and we do not see the pavement where Sherlock falls.

This means it would be, I think possible for someone to place a landing cushion on the pavement

He'd still be injured I would have thought, and cartoon physics would be required because he'd still have landed at around 40 mph which is not something I'd have thought a thin crash mat would solve but hey.

So the truck puts out the mat, Sherlock falls onto the mat, rolls over (generally, when you've fallen 70 feet I don't think you are in a state to roll over), off mat, mat is pulled up by the truck which drives away.

The only problem is that this requires some kind of a magic crash mat.

"And at the very end I'll put a FUN FACT:
I know this because I am German: In German the word fall (Fall) has the same meaning as in English, but it does have another meaning as well. It can also mean "case" like the cases that Sherlock solves all the time! Which gives the words "I owe you a fall" an very interesting and funny ambiguity!"

German has been used a lot in the series too. Sherlock seems to be a German speaker. Its used to invert the Study in Scarlet clue (because that case was the opposite of revenge-it was truly senseless). So its interesting that it has the dual meaning there. I do think that the writers do play with this kind of thing in places actually.