I think you might be absolutely right about cinderella being the third part. In the beginning I was really sceptical, and in certain ways I still am.
But more about this later.
"Aschenputtel" is about a prince trying to find back the girl he danced with at a ball. The princess lost one shoe and now he is travelling the country and asking all girls to try on this one shoe.
And I really think the key to understanding the timeline of the end scene are the shoes.
When Sherlock receives Ms "I am waiting" message in the lab, one can see his flat, soft soles on the table.
Up on the roof, he is wearing shoes with heels and 'capt-toes', meaning an extra layer of leather over the toes. When he steps onto the ledge the first time (ledge number one, without steel edge), still the heeled shoes. When he jumps back onto the roof, when realized he did not need to jump off it immediatly, you see these shoes again.
Later, when he steps back onto the ledge (ledge number two, more flat and with steel edge), he is wearing the soft, plain shoes again.
So, there is definitely no direct connection between the lab scene and the meeting of M and S "afterwards" I would conclude.
Later, we see S standing on the ledge #1 (heeled shoes again), throwing away his phone. He leans back. Cut. No shoes can be seen at the very moment he jumps.
But if you pause exactly at the moment when he jumps, you can see the flat soled shoes again up in the air.

So I think, these are two different scenes. Perhps two jumps, but we can only see one.
I have other video stills underlining this theory (basically containing lots of pictures of finger nails), but I'm not entirely sure, what to make of them.

Problem with the whole theory being, I O U is a riddle from M.for Sherlock. The different shoes belong to the cliffhanger though, the riddle that was given the viewers from the writers...
 

This is very thorough and interesting, Swanpride!

But there's one more allusion to a fairytale - and my favourite idea for the fall: Rapunzel.

You know, the prince, leaping off the tower in despair after the "which/good-old-fashioned villain has mocked him. He survives the fall and afterwards there's a tearful reunion with his beloved Rapunzel.

sherlockian111 wrote:

There's also Rumpelstiltskin. In fact, Moriaty is very much alike Rumpelstiltskin. Also, when Mrs Hudson says, "funny name, like the fairytales", what name was on the envelope? It could've been rumpelstiltskin but I don't know.

That's also what I had to think of immediately when I saw TRF for the first time. It probably is the funniest name in all of Grimm's fairy tales.
It would make sense in the way that in Rumpelstiltskin it's all about guessing Rumpelstiltskin's name. That reminds me of Moriarty vs Richard Brook. Who is he really, Moriarty or Brook?
If they don't get his name right, then he will come and get the queen's child. In Sherlock this could mean that the lives of John, Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson are taken.

Loved reading that analysis. The thing with the show is that it makes an enormous amount of references to popular culture. Actor shout outs, films, books, celeb culture, fan culture, the Bible etc - there is a reference to Dragon slaying, Smaug, Archie is a small ringbearer, John stares at a ring in HLV .It's surely intentional or also accidental and kept in - not so much for fans, no, but becuase the writers really want to do it.

Check this website for their own explanation. :D http://eva-christine.tumblr.com/post/27733467733/iou-explanation-53-8-92-grimms-fairy-tales-cipher

I like the idea of Tom kidnapping the children & that's why the girl thinks it's Sherlock.  He just needed the same coat & she'd be easily fooled!

I apologize for digging up an old thread but I think I've come up with something that may add to this theory.
To begin with, I think the story of Cinderella is simply meant to parallel Moriarty's plan to portray Sherlock as a fraud. Cinderella involves deceiving people into believing that the main character is something different than she normally is.

On rewatching the episode, one thing that kept bothering me was the constant emphasis on the word "you". Mostly from the rooftop scene, the lines that stuck out were:
I O U (obviously)
I am you
You are me
Without me, you are nothing

Switching to symbols, I think its just a basic logical substitution:
I O U
I=U
U=me (also URme)
Without me, U R nothing (or, URme - me = UR, or UR(nothing))
extending that, the original message becomes UOme or You Owe Me, the commonly used opposite of IOU.

Most importantly, though, I got to thinking of the significance of "R" and "me". Continuing with Joalro's method of substituting numbers for letters, we have 18 for "R" and 18 for "m(13)+e(5)". The 18th story in the Grimm's tales is the "The Straw, The Coal, and the Bean", the synopsis from wikipedia is as follows:
An old woman has got some beans that she intends to cook over her fire. Being in a hurry, she grabs some straw to make the fire light faster. She pours the beans in the pot and, being in a hurry, she drops one on the floor which lands next to a piece of straw. Soon the fire is burning nicely and a hot coal jumps out and lands next to the straw and the bean. They talk and realize they have all narrowly escaped the fire; they band together to flee. At a river, the straw lies down to let them cross. The coal, being hot tempered by nature, immediately sets across. But when the coal is halfway across, the water rushes underneath, and the coal becomes terrified of being drowned. So he stops, too afraid to go on. The straw catches on fire from the coal, and splitting in two, the straw and the coal are swept downstream.

The bean cannot help but laugh at the misfortune of his comrades, and indeed he laughs so hard that he bursts his side. He is in trouble, but luckily there is a friendly tailor nearby who sews him back up with some black thread, and ever since beans have had a black seam.
In the original Conan Doyle story, "The Final Problem", which Reichenbach Fall is based on, Sherlock fights Moriarty and both supposedly fall over Reichenbach Falls and are washed away down the river, leaving Dr. Watson on the shore.

Last edited by qnelvis (December 29, 2014 2:36 pm)

I forgot to mention, someone's reference to Rumpelstiltskin:  Wasn't that character after children for power, etc?  It made me think of Mary & John's baby.  Maybe this is a thread.

I thought about the I.O.U as a promissory note. If you owe someone something, you took something from him. Maybe Moriarty has stolen something from Sherlock?
I was also a bit suprised why Sherlock did not mentioned it to John. It seems to be that this words/letters means something to him. So propably it must be easier to solve as we expect.

I like Joalro's solution to this puzzle, but people seemed to have dismissed it back when it was posted. Not sure why- it's beautiful.

In his (her?) interpretation, the three fairytales all fit, even Cinderella, when you take it from the point of view of the media/press: Sherlock is the villain in all three stories. Every good story needs a good old fashioned villain, says Moriarty, but he wasn't referring to himself. Nobody sees themselves as the villain, do they? As John put it at the beginning of the episode: "They'll turn, Sherlock, they always turn, and when they do they'll turn on you." That was Moriarty's plan: to turn Sherlock into the villain. And he did- even had Hansel and Gretel screaming at the very sight of him!

As Joalro put it, on the matter of Cinderella:
"Now if Sherlock is the villain, then he is clearly the evil step mother.  The evil step mother neglected Cinderella, wouldn't let her go out, and would give her tedious tasks to do.  I think the clear choice for Cinderella is Molly. When Sherlock solved Moriarty's riddle, the first person he went to was Molly.  And then he told her "You were wrong, you do matter""

Indeed, that makes perfect sense to me. Sherlock tells her this directly: "The one person he thought didn't matter to me at all, mattered the most." A seemingly confusing line otherwise, unless you're a Sherlolly shipper. But what he's saying here isn't that Moriarty totally dismissed Molly as being important... but that he knew she was, to the story. She was the most important person at all: the protagonist. Cinderella. And this is precisely because Sherlock ignored her and used her so much (Nope, you're not going to lunch today Molly, you're having lunch with me because I need you to do stuff for me.)

And that, in turn, explains this line: "Don't think for one second I am one [an angel]." Up on that rooftop, Moriarty was convinced Sherlock was boring and dull and being slow and obvious and disappointing. Only after Sherlock convinced him he had figured out the fairytale -- that he was meant to be the baddie, not the goodie -- did he stop moping about Sherlock being wrong and boring, and his face lit up with glee. "Thank you, Sherlock." And then it lit up a bit more with exploding gunpowder.