Davina wrote:

It won't be shown in the UK til I think late Summer 2013 at the earliest. Filming starts January 2013 but that takes a few weeks and then they'll be loads of post-production stuff to do.

In that random fan encounter some gal in New Orleans had with Ben a few days ago, he said the new series will be seen "in the fall" (do Brits use the word fall? maybe the gal was paraphrasing?)  Meaning Fall 2013. Sigh. That just seems like so, so long from now. How will we stand it?  Anyone got a waiting pill we can all take to make this more bearable?

Davina wrote:

We say Autumn but we understand the word Fall. That's ages away isn't it.

Fall/Autumn 2013 is about 10 years from now. Sigh.
Davina, I have sent you a PM through the forum mail thingie, or at least I will in about 5 minutes. Just wanted to give you a heads up.

I agree Sherlock had been waiting for the call in the lab. I also like most of your houghts, Lupin, but:

3. The loud ringing John Watson hears when he's disoriented after being knocked over by the bike after getting out of a cab that Sherlock seemed to know he was getting out of.

Such a ringing is quite typical for people getting into shock, as John's body starts to shut down due to the enormous emotional load his hearing would change, leaving him with cotton in his ears, a ringing and his own heartbeat.

4. The blood splatter of the corpse is only the head area. If it were a live person falling, one would expect there to be more of a splatter, but the rest of the sidewalk is spotless.
I had to deal with several suicides as a medic, and it is actually possible to jump from a 14th floor, smash nearly every bone in your body, and yet bleed only a little initially. The person in question  never woke up, and the machines were switched off after a few days but I never got over the fact how little the body looked damaged from the outside.

However, I like the way your sharp observations go!

Maybe I'm missing something here - but I didn't take the hound drug and I saw Sherlock drop off the roof.  I didn't see Moriarty being dressed in Sherlock's coat and dropped from the roof.  The camera 'allowed' me to see Sherlock plummeting toward the ground, arms flailing, but did not allow me to see a full view impact.  I did not see Moriarty's dead body plummeting. I saw Sherlock on the ground with blood around his head.  I did not see Moriarty on the ground.

So are you saying the view of Sherlock falling and Sherlock on the ground with blood was all from John's drugged point of view?  In other words, are you saying that when all is revealed the Moftiss is going to tell us, "Guess what folks, what you saw was all a dream."   

I suppose that could happen but I'm going to feel mighty ripped off if it does.

Another yes to " It was Sherlock on the edge, Sherlock in mid-air, Sherlock on the ground, Sherlock with blood all over his face, Sherlock on the stretcher. "

It was Sherlock who fell, the question is how did he arrest his fall (I favour a tarp from the 2nd level window - after the fall we can see some pigeons flying out of that area), then lying back on the ground with blood making sure John could see his eyes.. and then the disappearing from official records.

Lupin wrote:

To me, it seems a bit implausible that he fell.

But he did. We all saw it. John saw it. The gunman saw it (and believed it). Everyone saw it.

If he did, he did it in a manner that is not advised to survive a fall, landing flat on your stomach with your head hitting on impact.

A fall of 70 feet was to make it believable. Not so far that one could jump into a net or into an air bag and take a chance on missing it, or not surviving. After all, no one falls from 20 stories into a net and lives unscathed. But a fall from 4 stories, maybe.

Why did he have to keep John at a distance, telling John to go back and stay where he was?

Because John takes care of him, always does, about everything. Have you ever heard anyone say "you okay?" to anyone else so much in your life?  S knew that if J could stop him, he would. He had to get John back behind that small building down there, so J's view of the landing place on the sidewalk would be blocked at the time of impact-- it wouldn't do for J to see the net/air bag, whichever. John HAD TO believe it, or else Moriarty's goons wouldn't be called off.

It was also very important for the gunman not be able to see that he didn't actually hit the sidewalk.. The gunman saw the fall, saw the result, and that was all that mattered to him. He wouldn't have questioned how Sherlock actually reached the ground.

Did he need to have John specifically as a witness to his fall? If he did jump, how would it compromise his plan if John were in the building at the time trying to get to the roof?

John specifically witnessing was for our benefit, mostly, I think. Angst, pulling at the heart strings. Also to get Sherlock to verbalize his last words-- that's what people do, right, leave a note? and for him to get to say good-bye to his only friend in the world.

John would have stopped him if he could. AND it was necessary to keep John from running into the bldg, rushing up to the roof and over to the edge (too late to prevent a fall) and then looking down and seeing the net/airbag, someone pouring blood on Sherlock, etc. Easier to keep John across the street, behind that small building, getting knocked down by the bicyclist, etc.

He chose the top of a hospital after saying explicitly that he thought he was going to die, Moriarty's means of finishing the game by having him die in disgrace. It seems if the trick is a means of surviving a jump, which he did in a manner ineffective to surviving such a fall, he could have chosen an adjacent building which had a lower height and was still close enough to the hospital to have the paramedics arrive immediately. How he emerged without a scratch after such a plummet onto a sidewalk would also have to be explained.

He chose St. Bart's because it was where Molly could help him-- she had the access to the body/blood/etc he needed. He was familiar with that bldg and its lay-out. It was the right height for his fall to be dramatic but survivable. The BBC crew had permission to film on and around that building. *g*

As John said, he thought Sherlock was a super-human human being. "There were times when I didn't even think you were human."  And, apparently, a miracle worker. "One more miracle, Sherlock... for me... Don't. Be. Dead." I believe it will be explained in due time. But maybe the explanation will have a tinge of the miraculous about it.

tobeornot221b wrote:

ancientsgate wrote:

As John said, he thought Sherlock was a super-human human being. "There were times when I didn't even think you were human."

This sentence is clearly a nod to ACD/The Sign of Four:
WATSON: There is something positively inhuman about you sometimes.
Doesn't mean IMO that John thinks of Sherlock as a super-human creature.

No, intellectually, John would know better. But when someone's seen some damned unlikely, fantastic, improbable things come to pass, emotionally, he'd have to wonder.

Lupin wrote:

Holmes had two tasks for Molly. Sherlock figured out Moriarty's solution would be having him commit suicide before meeting Moriarty on the hospital roof. He confides that he thinks he's going to die to Molly when he meets her in private. He arranged the meeting on the hospital roof to take advantage of the method of death (jumping from a very high height) as well as access to Molly, a mortician. I believe Sherlock, much like in the Conan Doyle novels, knew Moriarty had contacts who would continue Moriarty's work had Sherlock somehow survived the solution to the Final Problem. Therefore, he planned to fake his suicide regardless of what happened on the roof to protect his friends and acquaitances. This is the second task Molly later helps with. Her first is helping to contact his homeless network (nice PC take on Baker Street Irregulars).

I agree that he had worked out what Moriarty had in mind. I think he knew this from very early on; certainly he worked it out at their 'tea party'. Sherlock had worked out he needed to 'die by suicide' to get out of the public eye also. Much easier to do what he needed to do (get rid of Moriarty's men) with no-one looking at him as the cause.

Another piece of evidence is that it looks like the silhouette of Mycroft driving the cab taking Watson to the hospital if one pauses the frame after the large man yells through the window. If true, this would be a bow to the canon in that Mycroft drove the hansom that took Sherlock and Watson to the train station in The Final Problem.

I hadn't thought of this nor noticed it but I will certainly take another look when I have the chance.

My theory on the order of events is once Sherlock threw over the body, he rushed downstairs to the morgue. The paramedics brought the body in immediately amidst the panic, with John still being disoriented during the whole scene, where Molly declared him dead. Once alone, Sherlock switched places with the body and disguises himself to appear like he had fallen for when Lestrade and Watson arrive. Watson would be so distraught he wouldn't question the death. He then goes into hiding with Molly's help to round of the rest of Moriarty's organization which will lead up to events similar to The Adventure of the Empty House.

End of insane theory... Conan Doyle planned on leaving Holmes dead until he had the epiphany that he could branch out as a writer in the context of Sherlock Holmes. This would suggest a less haphazard and convoluted answer than the one we find in The Adventure of the Empty House.

I doubt the part of Sherlock throwing a body over, the sheer weight for anyone to do that would be hazardous from that height.

I do think that Sherlock planned on taking Moriarty with him on the jump. Once landed, Moriarty would be taken away quickly to a hidden destination whilst 'dead' Sherlock finished his plan of dismantling the Moriarty web.

All in all, I agree with most of what you have suggested, and I shall certainly look more closely at the other points I disagree with & will be applying the 'compare this to the canon' deductive process you ave used.

Again, it is nice to have some solid & credible ideas to work backwards from.

@kazza: Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I hadn't considered that when thinking about him throwing the body over. Yet there seemed to be a lot of blood on the ground around the head area. As The Doctor pointed out, people who fall from a high height bleed surprisingly little on the outside. It's hard to believe he would have hemorrhaged that much through his wounds so quickly, given the paramedics fetched him immediately.

In the canon, Sherlock said he'd willingly die if it meant Moriarty's mutual destruction. I'm more than willing to believe he had this in mind when he went to the roof.

@ancientsgate: So wait? You're saying we all saw him fall and hit the pavement, so that discredits my theory... but the fact that we saw him fall uninterrupted into the pavement should discredit your theory of an air bag or net. John watched the entire fall. Any passerby watched the fall from the hospital. It was into the street. It seems that, if we limit ourselves to what the viewer saw and take it as truth, then any sort of device to dampen the fall should be ruled out too.

If there were an airbag or trick, John and others would've seen it There would be no reason for Sherlock to make that long, heartfelt call to John since John would know it to be a rouse. The sniper kept his sights on John as he was hired to shoot John. When the body hit, a crowd formed around it so quickly it would be difficult to assess who jumped. The sniper would then base the identity on John's reaction.

Last edited by Lupin (July 29, 2012 10:22 pm)

Yet John watched the whole fall. He would have known Sherlock might have survived and checked the body in the morgue if this were the case. Regardless of what we as the viewer could see, John saw the whole fall from start to finish.

In the canon, John believes Holmes is dead. It would hardly be outdoing Conan Doyle if John were an accomplice in his survival.

Last edited by Lupin (July 29, 2012 10:43 pm)