Happy pride month! Here's a bunch of wips from the last few months

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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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祝日 / Permanent Vacation

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@serenpeia
Happy pride month! Here's a bunch of wips from the last few months
its the first of the month
soooo.. how did I not remember that it was Sherlock Holmes day??
just thinking about how john (up until TAB) never gave a direct love confession to Sherlock (or at least anything similar to Sherlock's best man speech in TSOT) but in Sherlock's mind palace/delusions he does,,
when the non-rpf explanation is weirder than the rpf explanation
Am I… Pretty?
- A johnlock fanart by 一安er
*Disclaimer: This fanart belongs to 一安er and her only, please do not repost or commercialize without her direct consent. Support provided directly to her by using the source link below is much appreciated.
Deciphering the Romance Arc: Many Happy Returns & The Empty Hearse
This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.
~
Opening Thoughts on Series 3
In S3, we see Sherlock’s vulnerability and gentleness shine through much more frequently than we did in the first two series of the show, to the point where it often feels overwhelming. I think this results from two shifts.
First, the overall arc of S1-S2 was mostly told from John’s point of view. As viewers, we’re encouraged to identify with John as he meets Sherlock for the first time, gets caught up in Sherlock’s world, and begins to share his life with him. In contrast, S3 tends to forefront Sherlock’s side of the story. Of course, in all three series we get scenes that are told from different characters’ points of view; what I’m describing is the general narrative orientation of the series, which I think leans towards John’s perspective just a little bit more in S1-S2 and leans towards Sherlock’s just a little bit more in S3. Since we’re seeing things from Sherlock’s perspective more frequently in S3, we see the more vulnerable and gentle sides of his character more frequently.
Somewhat related to this, @ivyblossom has a meta about how in the mind palace scene in HLV, we see that Sherlock sees himself as an ordinary man—someone who needs the help of others and who feels fear, pain, and heartbreak intensely. In S3, we see more of this because we’re seeing the world as Sherlock does.
Second, and just as importantly, Sherlock’s time away from John and his experiences upon his return to London affect Sherlock deeply, and this leads Sherlock to let the vulnerable and tender sides of his personality rise to the surface much more readily than he did in S1-S2. There’s a genuine shift in his character, and this is part of Sherlock’s character arc as he changes from someone who used to believe that he needed to hide his softer emotions in order to shield himself from harm to someone who is more willing to let his emotions shine through as he forms relationships with other people. These aspects of Sherlock’s character were always there before in S1-S2. Think of his genuine smile and warmth when he cured John’s limp in ASIP, the expression on his face as he listened to Soo Lin’s story in TBB, his tenderness as he comforted Sarah in TBB, or the domesticity and care that he shares with Mrs. Hudson in ASIB. In S3, we just see these elements of his character even more clearly.
Making this side of Sherlock’s character more visible in S3 also helps us see just how much Sherlock’s heart breaks over the course of the series.
Sherlock returns to London nearly bursting with eagerness to see John and entirely certain that John will welcome him back with open arms. Sherlock believes that Moriarty is truly dead, and without Moriarty’s threat hanging over him anymore, he finally feels ready for a romantic relationship with John. After his return, however, the consequences of Sherlock’s fall and his long separation from John combine to keep the two of them from being together. In many ways, S3 is the story of Sherlock’s heart breaking over and over again as John pulls away from him and chooses a relationship with Mary over one with him.
My personal take is that in S2, Sherlock did two especially important things that kept him and John from being together: first when he chose not to tell John that he loved him after the Battersea scene in ASIB, and then when he jumped off the roof of Bart’s in TRF and disappeared for so long without telling John that he was alive (although obviously that last one wasn’t his fault, if you read my last meta). In S2, it’s Sherlock’s actions at critical moments that keep them apart. In S3, however, the initiative has shifted to John, and it’s John who makes the crucial mistakes that prevent Sherlock and John from being together. Most importantly, John decides not to leave Mary for Sherlock immediately after Sherlock’s return. Then, throughout the rest of the series, John repeatedly fails to allow himself to see how much Sherlock loves him. John seems to be feeling a volatile mix of loyalty to Mary, guilt that he’s so strongly attracted to Sherlock when he feels that he’s supposed to be with Mary, and uncertainty regarding Sherlock’s feelings. All of this makes it very difficult for John to admit to himself that what he really wants is to be with Sherlock, and it combines to prevent him from confronting the truth about how he and Sherlock feel about each other, even as Sherlock demonstrates that he will do absolutely anything to protect John’s safety and happiness.
We receive a great deal of evidence in S3 that John was never in love with Mary the way he was with Sherlock. I do think that before he discovered her identity as an assassin, John cared for Mary. And I think that by the time he was ready to consider proposing marriage, John felt a strong sense of loyalty and commitment to her that it was difficult for him to walk away from. Perhaps more importantly, I also think that John was drawn to the idea of Mary, especially because she seemed to offer him a safe future away from what John saw as the intense emotional danger of Sherlock. John is terrified of how deep and consuming his love for Sherlock is and of how much power that gives Sherlock over him, as this great meta explains. As a result, he tries to convince himself that he can make things work with Mary—before her identity as an assassin is revealed, she appears to be the safe, stable option who won’t break his heart.
But that said, all throughout S3, we’re given piece after piece after piece of evidence that whatever John felt for Mary was never the same as what he felt for Sherlock. I think John knew this the entire time, and that’s why I think he made a terrible mistake by not leaving Mary for Sherlock. In my breakdown of the episodes, I’ll point out many different pieces of evidence that support this. I think I’ve caught a lot of them, but I’m sure that there are even more that I’ve missed.
To start us off, however, I submit the following: John never looks at Mary the way he looks at Sherlock. I mean, just look at John’s face in this scene at the very end of TEH. I’m going to talk about this scene again at the end of my discussion of this episode, but for now…wow.
Many Happy Returns
Like the ending of TRF, MHR serves to establish just how devastated John was after Sherlock’s apparent suicide.
When Lestrade comes over to John’s flat to give him the uncut birthday video Sherlock made for him, Lestrade pointedly asks John how he’s been doing and looks at him with an expression that clearly demonstrates that John hasn’t been doing very well in recent memory. Then when Lestrade gives John the uncut video, there’s a heartbeat sound, and then another when John tries to reassure Lestrade by saying that he probably won’t even watch it.
After Lestrade leaves, John has to pour himself a drink to even contemplate putting the disc in. But from the unchanged natural lighting entering the room from the window and from John’s unchanged outfit, we see that he probably poured himself the drink and steeled himself to watch the video almost as soon as Lestrade left. John is desperate to see Sherlock again, even though thinking about him is incredibly painful.
On a lighter note, in the birthday video Sherlock says that all of John’s other friends hate him and that he’s written an essay on suppressed hatred based entirely on John’s friends. S2 Sherlock was so jealous! Sherlock also seems incredibly nervous about what he’s going to say to John and clearly wants to get the video right. Sherlock has always been so far gone on John!
The Empty Hearse
In TEH, Sherlock returns to London after having missed John terribly for the year and a half that he was away. After his fake suicide, it seems that Moriarty mostly left Sherlock to his own devices and let him dismantle a good amount of his network so that he could lure him into a false sense of security. As Sherlock did so, he seems to have firmly believed that John knew the two of them had something incredibly special together and that John would wait for him. And I have to cut Sherlock some slack here. In S2, the two of them were so close to finally bridging that divide so many times. Just think of the tension of the New Year’s Eve scene after Battersea and the bottle of wine the day afterward, the magnetic moment in the car after they leave Baskerville for the first time, and then John playing the part of Sherlock’s attentive spouse in TRF. They were definitely on the verge of something more, even if they never quite got there. On top of that, all of John’s relationships with other people had quickly fizzled out, to the point where John had given up on dating anyone else entirely.
When he returns, however, Sherlock finds that John has tried to move on from him. Even worse, John doesn’t immediately leave his new fiancée to return to his life with Sherlock after Sherlock reveals that he’s still alive. Over the course of the episode, we see Sherlock gradually coming to the realization that John isn’t going to come back to him the way he had expected. And it breaks Sherlock’s heart.
Before we get into the details of the episode, allow me to tell you a little about the ACD Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.” In this story, Holmes takes a case that centers around a couple who once lived a rough, dangerous life together and fell in love, but then had to part because of reasons beyond their control. The husband went off on his own to complete a task that will allow him to return to his beloved, but then he got captured. He escaped from his captors and tried to return to his wife, but by that point she had believed him to be dead for more than a year. He followed her to London, only to find out that she’s about to marry someone else.
Seriously, I’m not making this up. You can read the full story here.
When the husband approaches his wife and she catches sight of him, she realizes that he’s still alive and immediately resolves to leave her new fiancé for her first, true love. Later on, once Holmes has solved the case and reconstructed this sequence of events, he tells Watson that he doesn’t think the wife did anything wrong by leaving her new fiancé for her first husband. And the new guy was kind of an asshole, anyway. The story ends with Holmes saying to Watson (in reference to the abandoned fiancé) that they should “thank our stars that we are never likely to find ourselves in the same position.”
I swear to God, the writers must have modeled TRF and TEH on this story, but with John making the exact opposite decision from the wife in the original story. Of course, Holmes does leave Watson for several years in the original canon, but the writers made a deliberate choice about when and how to introduce their version of Mary Morstan, and this is what they decided on. In the original canon, Mary enters the picture as one of Holmes’s clients, and she and Watson are married for several years before Holmes’s confrontation with Moriarty and presumed death in “The Adventure of the Final Problem.” Moreover, by the time Holmes returns to London, Mary has died, and Watson immediately sells his medical practice and moves back in with Holmes.
Obviously, the writers decided to take things in a very different direction in Sherlock, and it really seems to me that they looked to “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” for inspiration when they sketched out Sherlock and John’s romance arc and decided how they wanted to use Mary Morstan’s character within it.
So, the writers quite possibly borrowed a love triangle from ACD canon for S3. With that out there, let’s get into the events of the episode to talk about how Sherlock’s heart gets broken several times.
First, we have the scene in Mycroft’s office right after Sherlock returns to the UK from Serbia. Mycroft tries to get Sherlock interested in a terrorist plot against London, but Sherlock clearly isn’t having it. Instead, he’s totally focused on the prospect of making a triumphant return and sweeping John off his feet. Sherlock probably thinks that once he reveals to John that he’s still alive and gets to tell him all about how he saved his life and dismantled Moriarty’s network so that they could be together, they’re going to fall into each other’s arms at last. It’s going to be soooo romantic. It’ll be everything Sherlock has ever wanted!
Sherlock keeps talking to Mycroft about John while trying to make himself look as hot as possible for John. He even dresses himself in white like it’s their wedding night and he’s about to offer himself to John for John to take his virginity. (I think I saw an interview with Mark Gatiss at one point where he said that they deliberately dressed Sherlock in white for this scene. I hate them.)
Mycroft, however, tells Sherlock that John doesn’t live at Baker Street any more and pointedly tries to tell him that John has “got on with his life.” Right then, there’s a very loud heartbeat sound as Sherlock’s expression changes. There are heartbeats all over this episode, so get ready for those!
Sherlock stares and Mycroft and replies, “What life? I’ve been away,” but this isn’t an arrogant quip. Sherlock pauses before saying it and looks very insecure as he says the words: he’s genuinely hurt and unsettled by Mycroft’s suggestion. As I saw someone on here say once, Sherlock thought that since John was his whole life, he must have been John’s, too. The show creators also deliberately cut this episode so that this scene where Sherlock and Mycroft discuss John is interlaced with the scene where John tells Mrs. Hudson that he’s met someone else and is moving on from Sherlock. Stitching these two scenes together emphasizes just how wrong Sherlock is.
Still, Sherlock gets Mycroft to tell him where John will be that evening. After Mycroft does, Sherlock rubs his upper lip with one finger contemplatively, as if he’s imagining what it will feel like to kiss John. (Thanks to @loudest-subtext-in-tv for pointing out that detail to me.) Then he dismisses another warning from Mycroft—Sherlock’s got this, really! It’s gonna be soooo romantic!—and puts on his big swirly coat to feel all strong and impressive.
Meanwhile, John clearly isn’t over Sherlock at all, no matter what he tries to say to Mrs. Hudson or to anyone else.
The first time we see John again in this episode, he’s standing stock-still and staring at Sherlock’s grave with a blank look on his face that makes his grief seem even more intense than it would seem if he were crying. Then while Sherlock is busy getting himself cleaned up and talking to Mycroft, John goes to visit 221B and…lets himself into the building with the key…on his keyring…that he apparently never removed, even though Mrs. Hudson makes it perfectly clear that it’s been a very long time since he’s even called her, let alone been by to see her. When John first steps into the building, he remembers laughing with Sherlock in the hallway after the cab chase on the night when he and Sherlock first started to fall in love with each other. He also hears strains of Sherlock playing “Irene’s Theme” on his violin—you know, the love song Sherlock wrote for John while he was pining for him in ASIB. That one.
When Mrs. Hudson asks John why now—what’s changed and made him want to come back to 221B now, when he’s avoided the flat for so long—John starts to explain that he’s met Mary and he’s planning to propose to her. This means that John deliberately chose to visit Sherlock’s grave and to visit 221B in order to prepare himself to propose to Mary. John feels that before he can commit himself to someone else, he needs to gain some sort of closure from his relationship with Sherlock—closure that he very clearly hasn’t yet achieved. He might even need to feel like he’s “told” Sherlock about his engagement and asked for and received Sherlock’s permission. All of this emphasizes that for John, Sherlock was the one—the person who comes first for him, and someone who he hasn’t been able to let go of.
Even though John is attempting to “move on” from Sherlock, he doesn’t seem to be able to truly put his heart into the effort at all.
I mean! John is so excited about proposing to Mary that when he gets ready to tell Mrs. Hudson about it, Mrs. Hudson thinks he’s about to say that he’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Great job, John! When John says no to that, Mrs. Hudson’s next guess is that he’s emigrating. Apparently, Mrs. Hudson thinks it’s more likely that John will feel the need to leave the country to get away from his memories of Sherlock than it is that he’s actually moved on. Lol.
Eventually, John says to Mrs. Hudson “I’m moving on” and explains that he’s met someone and is planning to propose. As many other people have pointed out, Molly is a mirror for John, especially in S3. At the end of this episode, Molly will say brightly to Lestrade “I’ve moved on!” after bringing around her new fiancé Tom for everyone to meet. Yet it’s very obvious to everyone in the room that Molly has not moved on from her crush on Sherlock at all, and her engagement to Tom doesn’t last. The direct parallel drawn by having both John and Molly say “I’ve moved on” when talking about their fiancé(e)s gives us yet more evidence that John hasn’t gotten over Sherlock, and won’t.
Later on at the Landmark, John says at the start of his proposal to Mary that he and Mary haven’t known each other for very long. Mary shows up in the comments on John’s blog for the first time on April 20, ten months after Sherlock’s apparent death and about six months before Sherlock’s return in early November. The post Mary comments on is John’s first since the one he made shortly after Sherlock’s fall, saying “He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him.” In the April 20 post, John says that he’s trying to “move on to new things,” but that he needs to talk about Sherlock before he can. John is clearly struggling with his grief, and in the post he implies that he fears he may become depressed and suicidal like he was before he met Sherlock if he doesn’t talk about Sherlock and face his immense grief head-on. After this, he makes a handful of posts about cases that he and Sherlock solved together in the S2 era, in an attempt to remember his life with Sherlock.
At most, then, John and Mary have known each other six, maybe seven months. It’s implied in the April 20 post and then very clearly in John’s attempted proposal that meeting Mary is what prompts John to try to move on from Sherlock. I think John probably became deeply depressed after Sherlock’s death and Mary was what finally offered him a way out of it. John was desperate for anything that would help, and he latched onto her immediately. This is why he’s rushing into marriage with Mary so quickly, even though it doesn’t seem that his heart is truly in it—he’s frightened of what will happen if he doesn’t grab onto the lifeline that Mary seems to be offering him. I think John cares for Mary and feels grateful to her, but we’ll receive more and more evidence as the episode goes on that he doesn’t love her the way he loves Sherlock. Sherlock came first, and John’s love for Sherlock is still what’s driving his actions.
During the 221B scene, Mrs. Hudson acts surprised that John is seeing a woman (even though she saw him bring both Sarah and Jeanette to the flat in S1-S2—apparently Mrs. Hudson never took John’s half-hearted attempts to date women seriously). In response, John angrily insists that he’s not gay. For John, it’s infuriating and humiliating that people always seem to think that he and Sherlock were together when they weren’t. We know from John’s conversation with Ella at the end of TRF that John regrets that he never told Sherlock that he loved him. John was never able to have the life with Sherlock that he wanted, and it feels like Mrs. Hudson is rubbing it in his face. He’s trying to get over Sherlock, so why won’t people take him seriously? Oh, well. John will just have to propose to Mary this evening and see how it goes.
Now we get the disastrous scene at the Landmark.
Before Sherlock even reveals himself to John, this scene is full of clues that John is not in love with Mary the way he is with Sherlock.
First, @pastelcolorsandrain has written a wonderful meta that points out two callbacks to Sherlock and John’s first dinner together at Angelo’s in the Landmark scene, both of which serve to demonstrate that Sherlock and John’s story is the real love story here, not John and Mary’s.
In ASIP, Angelo told Sherlock and John that having a candle on the table was “more romantic.” In the scene at the Landmark, John and Mary’s table doesn’t have a candle, even though most of the other tables in the restaurant do. Moreover, when Sherlock first sees John from across the room, there’s a candle placed in the middle of the frame so that Sherlock sees it when he looks at John.
In addition, when John is looking at the champagne list, he says to Sherlock “it’s not really my area,” which is a direct callback to Sherlock telling John that girlfriends are “not really my area” in ASIP. Yeah, Mary isn’t really your area either, John!
Also! @victorianpining has pointed out that the Landmark is within very close walking distance of 221B Baker Street (which I saw for myself when I visited London last fall). John chose to propose to his girlfriend right near where he used to live with Sherlock. He is so not over him.
Do I even need to talk about how obvious it was that John’s heart wasn’t at all in his totally lackluster and awkward attempted proposal to Mary? It’s like he’s getting his teeth pulled. In particular, the way John stops and then starts again when he tries to say that meeting Mary was the best thing that could have happened to him makes it sound like he’s trying to convince himself that it’s true. Even as he’s proposing to Mary, John seems to be nervously trying to convince himself that doing so is actually the right decision.
While we’re speaking of Mary, I’ll take this opportunity to point out that the first two times we see Mary in TEH, in the graveyard and then descending the stairs at the Landmark, she’s introduced from behind and with her back to the camera. All of the villains on Sherlock are introduced like this: either from behind, or in shadow or in some other situation where we can’t clearly see their face. As soon as we meet Mary, we’re given subtle clues that she’s an antagonist in this story.
@221beemine has a very interesting meta about the lighting in TEH, which points out that after Mary sits down at the table with John at the Landmark, Mary is shot with dramatic lighting that gives her face a great deal of shadows. John isn’t shot in the same way, even though they’re sitting at the same table and realistically should be sitting in similar lighting. 221beemine also explains that female characters usually aren’t shot in dramatic lighting like this. I think we can take this as another subtle hint that Mary is a villain; she’s presented in a deliberately foreboding way from the very beginning, from the first scene where we see her face.
Meanwhile, when Sherlock first walks into the restaurant, he’s incredibly confident. He’s got this! He’s been waiting for this moment for a year and a half! He’s about to sweep John off his feet, John will be completely “delighted” to see him, and then they’ll run off and kiss passionately and have sex and it will be soooo romantic, the fulfillment of all of Sherlock’s dreams. But then when Sherlock sees John across the room, he stops in his tracks and sucks in a deep, nervous breath right as there’s another heartbeat.
(gif from here)
Seeing John again after all that time literally takes Sherlock’s breath away. And it’s in that moment that he panics and comes up with the idea of dressing like a waiter to surprise John—you can see Sherlock immediately regain his confidence once he comes up with this plan. The waiter gimmick seems ridiculous at first, but when you notice how nervous Sherlock is when he sees John, it actually becomes kind of heartbreaking, because we have to watch Sherlock bungle this moment so terribly out of nerves. More gifs and some brief commentary on this here.
Speaking of heartbeats, a few moments after this, there is another heartbeat after John finally looks Sherlock in the face, realizes it’s him, and stands up to face him. Of course, seeing Sherlock for the first time in a year and a half and realizing that he’s still alive makes this an incredibly emotional moment for John. But the heartbeat sound is there to remind us that this moment is all the more important for John because he’s in love with Sherlock. With the two heartbeat sounds—one from Sherlock’s perspective when he first sees John and one from John’s perspective when he first sees Sherlock—the soundtrack establishes that this is an important emotional moment for both of them because they reciprocate each other’s feelings.
And speaking of the soundtrack, the song that plays in the background throughout this scene is a cover of the song “¿Dónde Estás, Yolanda?” performed by the band Pink Martini. The Spanish lyrics to this song are about searching for a long-lost lover, which is fitting for the scene where John sees Sherlock again for the first time since his fall. Notably, though, the show’s creators didn’t use the first of the two versions of this song that Pink Martini has released. The band’s first version appears on their 1997 studio album Sympathique and features a man singing about a woman. Instead of using that version, they used the version from Pink Martini’s 2011 compilation album A Retrospective, in which China Forbes performs most of the vocals. So the creators deliberately chose a remade version of the song in which a woman sings about a woman. They chose a gay song about searching for a long-lost lover for Sherlock and John’s reunion.
So. Sherlock approaches John and tries to surprise him. LSIT pointed out to me that as Sherlock starts talking, we get another hint that he was initially planning to confess his feelings to John upon their reunion: Sherlock says “Bit mean, springing it on you like that, I know. Could have given you a heart attack, probably still will.” The “probably still will” suggests that Sherlock has something else to say that’s monumental, beyond revealing that he’s alive.
John, of course, takes this terribly. By this point, TRF, MHR, and TEH have thoroughly established that John went through hell after Sherlock’s apparent death and grieved Sherlock deeply. When Sherlock reveals that he isn’t dead at the Landmark, John feels a deep sense of betrayal and anger over the fact that Sherlock let him grieve like that for almost two years. John stares at Sherlock and says “I thought…you were dead. Hmm? And you let me grieve. How could you do that. How?” John says this because he has known since Battersea that Sherlock knows that he’s in love with him. He’s furious and heartbroken because he’s asking, “How could you let me grieve like that when you knew I was in love with you?”
Throughout the show as a whole, Sherlock and John frequently resort to humor to diffuse the tension between the two of them when they get into emotionally-charged situations that they don’t think they’re prepared to handle. For example, in the pool scene after John offers to sacrifice his life to save Sherlock’s and Sherlock is freaking out about it and rubbing the back of his head with his gun, John tries to calm things down a bit by cracking this joke: “I’m glad no one saw that. You, ripping my clothes off in a darkened swimming pool. People might talk.” And it works! Sherlock makes an answering reply and smiles at John.
When Sherlock realizes that his big reveal at the Landmark isn’t going well, he tries to fall back on their pattern of resorting to humor by continuing to joke about John’s mustache and acting all nonchalant and smiley. But in this instance, it doesn’t work at all, and it makes John furious instead. As a result, in this scene and in the two other restaurant scenes that follow, John lashes out at Sherlock in anger.
Of course, I get where John is coming from, and I want to be fair to him and respect the emotional turmoil that he’s clearly experiencing. But his behavior in the string of restaurant scenes really isn’t okay. He doesn’t treat Sherlock fairly by trying to hurt him and by refusing to listen to him.
Like ASIB, TEH is an episode of miscommunications and things left unsaid. Part of the tragedy of Sherlock and John’s love story is that throughout the show, they keep hurting each other and themselves because of their inability or unwillingness to be fully honest with each other. And of course, this pattern gets so much worse in S3, starting with TEH.
Sherlock, John, and Mary keep getting kicked out of restaurants as John keeps trying to hurt Sherlock. At each restaurant, they keep talking about Sherlock’s fall…but not really talking about it.
As I mentioned in the TRF section, at the first restaurant after the Landmark, when Sherlock starts to explain to John how he faked his death and survived, he seems to be trying to tell John the same story that he later tells Anderson towards the end of TEH. If John had wanted to hear it, Sherlock would probably have told John the truth about the technical details of how he survived the fall—the inflatable, the corpse, and the squash ball—but not about the most important parts of the story. At the restaurant, Sherlock doesn’t tell John that the fake suicide plan was a dreaded Plan B that he didn’t want to use. Instead, tries to tell John that he was completely in control and had planned for every eventuality, that he’d been working with Mycroft on a grand masterplan to outsmart Moriarty, and that his fake suicide was a part of that larger plan.
Most importantly, Sherlock doesn’t tell John about the snipers. When John interrupts to demand that Sherlock tell him not how he faked his death, but why, Sherlock answers “Why? Because Moriarty had to be stopped.” This is a strangely evasive response that doesn’t actually answer the question. Sherlock could have said something much more straightforward, like “Why? Because Moriarty had snipers prepared to kill you, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade if I didn’t jump.” This is a moment when Sherlock could have shown John how much he loved him by telling him that he jumped to save his life—and that he even went undercover for a year and a half to take down Moriarty’s network to make sure that John would be safe. But Sherlock doesn’t take the opportunity.
I think Sherlock didn’t tell John the truth in that moment because he was scared of revealing that he was in love with him. At the Landmark, Sherlock had been prepared and even eager to finally confess his feelings to John because he thought John would embrace him with open arms. But John didn’t react to Sherlock’s return at all how Sherlock had expected and hoped he would. Sherlock thought they were going to have this beautiful romantic reunion, but John reacted with cold anger and even tried to hurt Sherlock. When Sherlock saw John’s furious initial action and then John tried to beat the shit out of him, Sherlock might have started to doubt that John had ever truly been in love with him, even given what he’d overheard at Battersea. And if Sherlock still believed that John had been in love with him once, he might have started to doubt that John still felt that way. Sherlock also sees that John is with Mary now, which complicates things.
As a result, Sherlock probably felt a lot of doubt when John asked him for the why, and he didn’t feel confident enough to tell John the truth. I think telling John that he jumped to save his life felt too close to a love confession for Sherlock, and after the Landmark, Sherlock just couldn’t do it.
This is very sad, because I have to believe that John would have behaved very differently in S3 if he had known. Relatedly, Sherlock also doesn’t seem to ever tell John that he wasn’t exactly having fun while dismantling Moriarty’s network and that he got captured and tortured in Serbia. Did John think Sherlock was off on a grand adventure without him, and just didn’t value or trust him enough to bring him along? Was that part of why he was so angry about Sherlock’s deception? Probably.
John does later write this on his blog: “Turns out he’d faked his death because Moriarty had threatened those close to him. Including me.” So Sherlock must have told John something that at least hinted at the presence of the snipers. But we never see it happen on screen, so we don’t know what Sherlock told John or how he phrased it. Who knows what he said. I mean, saying that Moriarty “threatened” John isn’t the same as telling him that there was an actual sniper right there that day, ready to take John out if John didn’t believe that Sherlock’s death was real. It also doesn’t communicate that Sherlock suspected there were other members of the network (Mary!) watching John in the months and years afterwards to make sure that Sherlock didn’t make contact with him. That thin scrap of information—that Moriarty had “threatened” John—also doesn’t explain that Sherlock had never wanted to use the fake suicide plan in the first place, that he never intended to make John watch, and that he never intended to be “dead” for so long without telling John.
In addition to hiding the full truth about the snipers, Sherlock also lies by saying that he and Mycroft planned everything out ahead of time. Sherlock doesn’t want to admit to John that Moriarty outplayed him so thoroughly. In Dartmoor especially, Sherlock seemed to worry that John is enthralled by him only because of his mysterious detective persona and his incredible smarts. As a result, at this point in TEH, Sherlock wants to seem far more cool and capable than he actually is. He knows that John is attracted to that, and he’s worried that John will think less of him if he knows how fallible he is in reality. Moreover, if Sherlock has started to doubt how John feels about him at this point, then he’s probably feeling especially anxious about how John perceives him. Sherlock wants to appear as impressive and in-control as possible, and he may fear that if he reveals how badly he failed, John will be even less likely to forgive him and to continue their friendship.
As Sherlock, John, and Mary keep getting thrown out of restaurants because John keeps trying to hurt Sherlock, Sherlock continues to appear outwardly confident throughout the evening. But we know Sherlock better than that, so we know that what he’s displaying isn’t necessarily what he’s feeling.
In the third restaurant, Sherlock even admits “I’ve nearly been in contact so many times.” He tries to make this light-hearted by adding “I worried that, you know, you might say something indiscreet,” but this is nevertheless a sort of heartbreaking admission from Sherlock. We know that the real reason why Sherlock didn’t say anything to John wasn’t that he was worried about the rest of the world knowing he was still alive; he was worried that if John said or did “something indiscreet,” John would get murdered. But even while he was fearful for John’s safety, Sherlock almost couldn’t stop himself and thought about getting in contact with John “so many times.” Sherlock was thinking about John constantly during his time away and wanted to talk to him so badly.
When Sherlock realizes that he isn’t getting anywhere with John as they keep talking about his fake suicide, he reverts back to his tried and true method of trying to bring John back to him by drawing him into a case. In the third restaurant, Sherlock tries to change the subject from the suicide by telling John about the terrorist attack, and he says that he needs John’s help.
When that doesn’t immediately work, Sherlock breaks a little and gets more personal. It seems like he genuinely can’t understand why John isn’t happy to see him—they were in love with each other, damn it!—so he says to John, “You have missed this. The thrill of the chase, the blood pumping through your veins, just the two of us against the rest of the world.” This is such an intensely romantic thing to say? I think it’s Sherlock’s way of asking, “You have missed me, haven’t you? Just the two of us together, doing what we do best together?” And John answers by headbutting Sherlock in the face and giving him a nosebleed. The next day, when he’s talking to Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock says that John also told him to “fuck off.”
After this, Sherlock talks to Mary outside while John hails a cab. In the moment when Mary says “I’ll talk him ’round,” Sherlock’s expression changes. Mary’s comment initiates a shift in how he sees her, and he looks at Mary quizzically and begins to deduce her for the first time. Sherlock starts to take her seriously as he realizes that she’s different from John’s other girlfriends from before. In this moment, it seems like Sherlock is starting to realize that instead of him being John’s one and only, Mary might have taken his place; now, she might be the one John listens to and who has the ability to “talk him ’round.” This happens so soon after Sherlock said “just the two of us against the rest of the world” to John with such confidence that he and John would always be an unshakable pair. The change in Sherlock’s expression as he regards Mary shows his first horrible moment of realization, the moment when he starts to see that this might not be true anymore. The look on Sherlock’s face as he watches John and Mary leave in the cab together is absolutely heartbreaking…
(gif from here)
…as is the shot of him turning and slowly walking away down the darkened street on his own.
So. Sherlock returned thinking that he and John would have a really romantic, joyous, and fulfilling reunion, but it doesn’t go that way at all. Before Sherlock can confess his feelings, John reacts with anger at what he perceives as Sherlock’s betrayal and callousness towards him, because John doesn’t know the full truth. After that, Sherlock chooses not to tell John the full truth about the fall and his time away, and he doesn’t confess his feelings to John when he could have. John leaves with Mary, and Sherlock begins to fear that John is no longer in love with him—if he ever truly was in the first place. Sherlock probably even fears that John doesn’t even want to be friends with him anymore.
The next morning, Mycroft comes to visit Sherlock at 221B and we get more evidence of how heartbroken and lonely Sherlock feels after John’s rejection of him.
As Sherlock and Mycroft play board games together and make deductions based on the client’s hat, Sherlock tries to tell Mycroft that he must be lonely without friends. When Mycroft directly disagrees with this, Sherlock leans in deliberately and says heavily, “How would you know?” This is a callback to the exchange in ASIB where Mycroft replied to Sherlock’s confident “Sex doesn’t alarm me” with a smug “How would you know?” Sherlock is basically telling Mycroft something like this: You haven’t had friends, so you don’t realize that you’re lonely. Now that I’ve had John as a friend and lost what I had with him, I know that I’m lonely. Maybe you’ve had more sex than I have, but when it comes to friendship, emotional intimacy, and loss, I’m more experienced than you are.
Although Sherlock and Mycroft are talking about friendship, the fact that this dialogue is a direct callback to Mycroft needling Sherlock about his virginity also serves to imply that there’s long been the potential for something more than platonic friendship between Sherlock and John, something that Sherlock has never been able to reach. Sherlock may now feel that he’s lost that potential. And there’s a desire there that Sherlock has found it hard to admit to, just as he and Mycroft have long found it hard to admit that they’re lonely without friends.
Moreover, the fact that Sherlock’s question of “How would you know?” references Mycroft’s earlier quip about his virginity serves to demonstrate that the reason Sherlock is lonely now is because he wasn’t able to turn his relationship with John into something more than friendship back in S2. Sherlock wasn’t able to tell John that he loved him and wasn’t able to truly make John his own before his fall, so that John may have waited for him and would still be his now.
Here, I’d like to return to “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.” In that story, the wife directly says to Holmes and Watson that her first husband had a prior “claim” to her, since they were married. In TEH, however, Sherlock doesn’t have a similar claim to John, since he never made a move and he and John weren’t together before the fall. Ouch.
Things don’t get better for Sherlock in this episode.
Sherlock is lonely, so after Mycroft leaves, he invites Molly to solve crimes with him. Molly accepts, and Sherlock tells her “You’re not being John—you’re being yourself.” Sherlock has certainly come to appreciate and to respect Molly much more than he did in S1-S2, and he wants to establish a real friendship with her. But at the same time, he’s clearly still thinking about John.
In the scene where Molly and Lestrade watch Sherlock deduce the fake Jack the Ripper crime scene, Sherlock is not at all his usual confident self at a crime scene. Instead, he can hear John telling him off and criticizing him in his head. This demonstrates just how crushed Sherlock feels and how sharply his self-confidence has tanked after John’s rejection. Instead of John’s usual praise and encouragement at a crime scene, all Sherlock can hear is John’s criticisms. Sherlock seems to be starting to wonder if this is what John really thinks of him.
After Sherlock and Molly finish talking to Howard (the client with the hat who likes trains), Sherlock suggests that the two of them get dinner together. Molly isn’t very receptive to this idea, though, and their conversation shifts and becomes more serious as Sherlock thanks Molly for helping him and congratulates her on her engagement. After they finish talking, Sherlock looks extremely sad as he walks out of the building on his own. Instead of him and Molly leaving together, they exit separately so that we can see Sherlock’s heartbroken expression as he steps outside and then another shot of him walking away all alone, similar to the shot from the night before. That this comes right after he and Molly have talked about Molly’s new relationship serves to emphasize Sherlock’s loneliness without John. Moreover, in the next scene at Baker Street, we see that Sherlock went out for fish and chips on his own after Molly indicated that she didn’t want to get dinner with him. As @asherlockstudy has explained, Sherlock consistently uses food as a metaphor for emotional intimacy. Sherlock actually did want to get dinner with Molly so that they could share closeness as friends, but Molly turned him down because she’s still in love with him and getting dinner together would be too much for her. The fact that Sherlock ate dinner alone after working on a case gives us more evidence of his emotional isolation and loneliness without John; he and John used to always get dinner together after cases, but now he doesn’t have anyone to share emotional intimacy with in the same way that he once did with John.
Also. In TLD, Sherlock tells Faith “You’re suicidal, you’re allowed chips. Trust me, it’s about the only perk.” So when Sherlock gets chips on his own the day after his disastrous reunion with John, that’s a hint that Sherlock might be feeling borderline suicidal after John’s rejection of him. At the very least, he’s devastated and heartbroken.
As Sherlock is getting ready to eat his feelings to try to stave off suicidal thoughts, Mary turns up and shows him the skip code that indicates that John has been kidnapped. Sherlock panics and rushes off to try to save John, and he ends up running into the bonfire to pull John out of danger without thinking of his own safety at all. The bonfire scene is one of the many times in S3 where we see Sherlock’s single-minded determination to always protect John, no matter what.
Of course, the motorcycle/bonfire sequence is really emotionally intense for Sherlock. There’s a loud heartbeat sound right when Sherlock sets out to save John, indicating that this is all about Sherlock being in love with John. Then as Sherlock gets closer to the church and John struggles underneath the kindling, the soundtrack is laced through with several more heartbeat sounds and similar-sounding drum beats. These occur in the shots that are from Sherlock’s perspective and the ones that are from John’s, since they’re both in love (like how we heard a heartbeat for each of them at the Landmark). Also, remember “Amazing how fire exposes our priorities,” and “I will burn the heart out of you”? John getting trapped in a fire that Sherlock has to save him from is meant to hit us over the head with the fact that this is a scene of major romantic significance for Sherlock because Sherlock is in love with John.
There are also a lot of parallels between Sherlock rushing to get to John in the bonfire scene and John rushing to Bart’s and trying to get to Sherlock in TRF. The bonfire scene is sort of like a flipped version of the fall, one where Sherlock and John have switched places and Sherlock actually is able to save John. This comparison demonstrates the depth of Sherlock’s love for John and the emotional significance of this scene for Sherlock—it’s like Sherlock is experiencing the fall from John’s perspective.
The next day, John comes to visit Sherlock at 221B. And even after Sherlock and John have just had this incredibly intense and emotional scene where Sherlock saved John’s life, the two of them still don’t open up to each other about how they feel. They’re both rather awkward during John’s visit, and Sherlock is clearly very nervous.
When John shows up, Sherlock anxiously shoves his parents out the door so that John won’t talk to them. By rushing his parents out when John turns up unexpectedly, Sherlock is trying to hide the parts of him that are vulnerable—and especially that are ordinary, as John calls Sherlock’s parents after they leave. It’s the equivalent of Sherlock approaching John in his swirly coat the morning after their fight in Dartmoor. He’s trying to slip back into the impressive detective persona that he thinks John is drawn to because he thinks that’s the best way to get John back.
John becomes upset that Sherlock’s parents knew he was alive when he didn’t, and Sherlock says “Sorry, sorry again!” in a slightly frustrated and exasperated voice. But when John doesn’t say anything to that, Sherlock looks down before nervously looking up at John again, biting his lip, and saying “Sorry” again in a much softer voice that sounds very genuine.
Still, though, Sherlock feels like he’s stepping on eggshells with John. John doesn’t thank Sherlock for saving his life the night before and doesn’t say anything else especially forgiving, so Sherlock is still nervous about where he stands with John. And as a result, when John tries to ask Sherlock why someone kidnapped him—even asking “Is it someone trying to get to you through me?”—Sherlock still doesn’t tell John about the snipers and the way that Moriarty was able to back him into a corner by threatening John. He also doesn’t tell John anything about how terrified he was the night before.
Instead of revealing his more vulnerable side to John or confessing his feelings, Sherlock tries to draw John back into his life by talking about the terrorism case. We’ve seen this before, again and again: when confronted with an emotionally difficult situation with John, especially one where he’s worried that he’s made a mistake, Sherlock will try to pull John back to him by pulling him into a case instead of directly telling him how much he loves and needs him.
Heartbreakingly, Sherlock is missing crucial information about John’s side of the story, just as John is missing information about Sherlock’s. From what we see on-screen in TEH, it seems like Sherlock never realizes that John tried to visit him at 221B the day after their disastrous night of conversations in the restaurants.
Let’s back up for a bit. I’ve mostly been talking about the scenes after the Landmark from Sherlock’s perspective so far, so let’s rewind to talk about the events after the night of Sherlock’s return from John’s perspective.
After going home with Mary, John lies awake in bed that night staring at the ceiling, obviously thinking about Sherlock. The next morning, he shaves off his mustache. When Sherlock asks him about it later, we get this exchange:
Sherlock: See you’ve shaved it off, then. John: Yeah. Wasn’t working for me. Sherlock: Mm, I’m glad. John: What, you didn’t like it? Sherlock: (smiling) No. I prefer my doctors clean-shaven.
There is so much queer subtext in that exchange.
John’s line is a callback to Molly’s “it wasn’t working for me” comment about her lipstick in ASIP after she failed to get Sherlock to say yes to a date. Molly’s “it wasn’t working for me” line confirms that she put on the lipstick to try to attract Sherlock romantically, but she failed because he rejected her when she asked him out. Since Molly is a mirror for John, John’s “wasn’t working for me” clarifies that he shaved the mustache off in an effort to get closer to Sherlock romantically.
There’s even more to it than that, though. As @weeesi has explained in this awesome meta, in the Victorian era, being clean-shaven was a homosexual signifier for men, and having facial hair was seen as a sign of normative, heterosexual masculinity. John’s decision to grow a mustache after Sherlock’s apparent death is therefore important symbolically. It shows that John was attempting to move on from Sherlock by burying his same-sex desires and embracing a traditionally masculine, heteronormative lifestyle with Mary. As soon as Sherlock came back, though, this “wasn’t working” for him anymore! With Sherlock back, John recognized that he couldn’t just bury his attraction to Sherlock and pretend that it doesn’t exist. So he gave up part of the façade by shaving off his mustache. Wow!
Moreover, the fact that Sherlock is always clean-shaven (even in TAB) and says to John that he “prefers my doctors clean-shaven”—aka, prefers men to be clean-shaven, aka prefers gay men—demonstrates yet again that Sherlock is gay, very much aware of it, and very comfortable with it. Sherlock has never even tried to conform to normative masculinity.
After shaving, John leaves for work and we get a “back to work” montage that cuts between shots of Sherlock working on cases at 221B and John working his job at the clinic. Although Sherlock tells Mrs. Hudson during that montage that John made his feelings quite clear the night before by telling him to “fuck off,” as the audience we see that John actually cooled off quite quickly. The day after Sherlock came back, John resolved to visit Sherlock after work and spent the whole day watching the clock while visibly lamenting that his job is so boring compared to the life that he used to have with Sherlock. Seriously, the main point of this scene is to show us that John hates his mundane job and that he wants to be solving crimes with Sherlock instead.
There’s also a lot of sexual imagery in the “back to work” montage, which gives us additional insight into what’s going on in John’s head. To loosely quote LSIT from her M-theory meta, John has a busy day of performing prostate exams and rejecting heterosexual porn…while the camera keeps cutting back to Sherlock. Again, seriously, we’re getting shots of John touching another guy’s genitals and then shots of Sherlock looking all innocent and demure as he stares at his crime wall in 221B. It’s pretty clear what John wants to happen here, even if he’s struggling to admit it.
At the end of the work day, John gives Mary a perfunctory kiss and they go their separate ways so that John can finally go over to Baker Street to see Sherlock. When he arrives outside 221B, John pauses and stares at the door for several moments, trying to decide whether to go in. This is really significant because of something Sherlock says in TSOT. In TSOT, there’s a scene where John stands at the window of the sitting room and watches a potential client trying to make up her mind as to whether to come in. As John narrates her movements, Sherlock says “I’ve seen those symptoms before. Oscillation on the pavement always means there’s a love affair.” John’s hesitancy on the pavement in TEH thus shows that he’s still in love with Sherlock, even now that he’s in a relationship with Mary. He’s essentially caught up in a love affair, and he’s feeling conflicted about it and unsure of what to do. John wants to be with Sherlock and knows that he’s in love with him, but he also feels loyal to Mary because of how serious their relationship is.
There’s also another heartbeat right when the camera transitions from showing us Sherlock thinking about the train case to John oscillating on the pavement. Love! Affair!
(gif from here; you can also see the comparison with TSOT here)
So to recap, here’s what we have of John’s side of the story so far. Before Sherlock returned, John was still mourning Sherlock and trying to convince himself that he should move on by embracing his relationship with Mary, which he was struggling to do. When Sherlock first came back, John was initially angry at Sherlock for deceiving him and didn’t immediately run into Sherlock’s arms, but he also calmed down very quickly and became eager to see Sherlock again the next day. John is still desperately in love with Sherlock and can’t keep away. But at the same time, he’s not ready to open up to Sherlock. He feels conflicted about what to do because he’s in a relationship with Mary, and he doesn’t want to just drop her.
Before John can go in to try to talk to Sherlock, though, he gets kidnapped by Magnussen’s men out on the pavement. (And Sherlock wasn’t home anyway—it’s still light out when John gets there, and it’s dark by the time that Sherlock gets back with his chips later that evening. That’s why Sherlock didn’t notice John getting kidnapped. Although he also didn’t notice in TBB when he was standing nearby lol.) When John and Sherlock see each other for the first time again after the bonfire, John doesn’t say anything about having tried to visit Sherlock the day before. So Sherlock might have never realized that John actually cooled off very quickly after his initial outbursts in the restaurants and tried to see him less than twenty-four hours later! When John showed up the day after the bonfire, Sherlock might have thought that John was only willing to talk to him again because he had just saved his life, but in reality, John only needed one day at work to cool off! An episode of miscommunications and things left unsaid!!
When John finally makes it to 221B to see Sherlock the day after the bonfire, Sherlock and John talk for a bit in the sitting room and start to edge closer to discussing things seriously.
Sherlock is clearly very, very nervous in this scene, but he’s also fairly gentle. Sherlock very tenderly asks John how he’s feeling. John tries to make a joke about it (“a bit…smoked”), but then he turns serious and demands to know why someone targeted him by putting him in the bonfire. Specifically, John asks, “Is it someone trying to get to you through me?”
That hits a bit too close for comfort for Sherlock, who must still be reeling from John’s harsh rejection two nights before. And to be honest, John doesn’t come across as all that warm to Sherlock in this scene, even though Sherlock just saved his life the night before. You can hardly blame Sherlock for not understanding where things stand between the two of them and for getting so nervous.
When John asks that question, which directly probes at Sherlock’s feelings for him, Sherlock steers the conversation away. At this point, Sherlock must be seriously starting to freak out about the fact that John got put in a bonfire as soon as he returned to London. Sherlock really thought that he got all of Moriarty’s network and that Serbia was the last link. But after he got back to London and told John that he was alive, John got kidnapped and almost murdered the very next day. Sherlock doesn’t know who kidnapped John and put him in the fire, so he’s probably starting to worry that he missed part of Moriarty’s network and that there are still people watching John and ready to hurt him. (Thanks to LSIT for talking some of this through with me.)
Sherlock doesn’t want to admit to John that he’s in love with him, and he also doesn’t want to admit that he’s starting to fear that he might have missed part of Moriarty’s network. So he doesn’t answer, and he tries to draw John back to him through a case. Sherlock starts talking to John about the imminent terrorist attack, and John is receptive to this approach, as always. The two of them have a video call with Howard the Train Guy, and then they set off for the unfinished underground station at Sumatra Road.
The scene between Sherlock and John in the train car is probably the most important scene in TEH. It’s also the most devastating, because it’s when we see real vulnerability from Sherlock and when John makes a crucial choice that carries significant repercussions for the rest of S3.
My understanding of this scene has been informed by this post with commentary by @monikakrasnorada and @asherlockstudy, as well as abrae’s analysis of the scene in their S3 meta here. Thanks to all of them for their metas!
These authors have different takes on how much Sherlock knows about John’s feelings at this point, and I come down somewhere in the middle. I think that by the time of the opening montage of ASIB, Sherlock knew that he and John had an incredibly special friendship. After the Battersea scene, he started to believe that John might return his feelings for him and might be in love with him, too. Sherlock held out hope for years after that, but then when he returned to London in TEH, he realized that his fake suicide hurt John far more than he had expected and that John wasn’t ready to accept him when he came back. Sherlock has also had to experience John’s anger at his deception. Although John has calmed down a bit by the time they go to the underground station together, he hasn’t apologized to Sherlock for trying to hurt him the night when Sherlock returned, and he certainly hasn’t come anywhere close to telling Sherlock that he loves him and wants to be with him now that he’s back. So at this point, I think that Sherlock is really doubting John’s feelings for him.
In the train car scene, Sherlock tries to figure out whether John is still in love with him and whether he would be willing to leave Mary for him. Sherlock knows that John is terrible at talking about his feelings and that he’s extremely unlikely to reveal them willingly. So, he hopes that if John truly believes that they’re both about to die, he will finally open up, tell Sherlock how he feels about him, and maybe—hopefully—also say that he wants to be with Sherlock instead of Mary.
Here’s the dialogue between Sherlock and John:
Sherlock: Forgive me. John: What? Sherlock: Please, John, forgive me, for all the hurt that I caused you. John: No, no, no, no, no, no. This is a trick. Sherlock: No. John: Another one of your bloody tricks. Sherlock: No. John: You’re just trying to make me say something nice. Sherlock: Not this time. John: It’s just to make you look good even though you behaved like… (He breaks off, and there’s a pause). I wanted you not to be dead. Sherlock: Yeah, well, be careful what you wish for. If I hadn’t come back, you wouldn’t be standing there and…you’d still have a future…with Mary. John: (pointing at Sherlock accusingly) Yeah. I know. (Another pause.) Look, I find it difficult—I find it difficult, this sort of stuff. Sherlock: I know. John: You were the best and the wisest man that I have ever known. Yes, of course I forgive you.
And that’s it. John doesn’t say anything more.
Sherlock’s facial expressions throughout this scene are absolutely heartbreaking. I think Sherlock’s expressions are completely real as he looks up at John, begs John to forgive him, and begins crying openly. We know from the timestamp on the bomb—which is 1:29, by the way, referencing the day when Sherlock and John first met and first saved each other’s lives—that Sherlock had already switched off the bomb before he initiated this conversation. So Sherlock is deceiving John here, and he’s trying to manipulate John into saying things that he might never admit otherwise. But I think that even though Sherlock chose to have this conversation, all of this is still incredibly painful for him. As the dialogue progresses, Sherlock’s expressions reveal his genuine remorse for what he has done to John, his desperate longing that John will tell him that he loves him, and his devastation when John chooses to say so little.
I’ve matched a few screencaps from abrae’s meta and some gifs with some of the lines of dialogue so that we can see this more clearly.
Sherlock: Please, John, forgive me, for all the hurt that I caused you.
After Sherlock says this, his face does this:
Sherlock: If I hadn’t come back, you wouldn’t be standing there and…you’d still have a future…with Mary.
John: Yeah. I know.
And Sherlock’s face does this:
He’s openly crying now.
John: Look, I find it difficult—I find it difficult, this sort of stuff.
Sherlock: I know.
(gif from here)
John: You were the best and the wisest man that I have ever known.
Sherlock’s face does this:
(gif from here)
John: Yes, of course I forgive you.
And after there’s a long pause, such that it becomes evident that this is all John is going to say, Sherlock’s face does this:
This gif gives us a closer look (gif from here):
More gifs here if you want to see John’s and Sherlock’s expressions lined up.
Benedict Cumberbatch is an incredible actor, but Sherlock is not. This is not what Sherlock looks like when he’s acting for a case. Even though Sherlock is manipulating John in this scene, I really do believe that the emotions we see from him are genuine. Sherlock chose to have this conversation, but it’s still overwhelming for him because he loves and needs John so much. He’s so desperate to hear that John feels the same way.
And Sherlock’s dialogue is also just so sad. There’s one line that’s incredibly important. Sherlock deliberately tells John that if he hadn’t come back, he would still have a future with Mary. Sherlock adds “with Mary” to the end of that sentence so deliberately, with a little pause beforehand, and then he really loses it after he chokes out those two words. Sherlock hoped that by saying this, he could prompt John to tell him whether it’s a future with Mary or a future with him, Sherlock, that he truly wants. As asherlockstudy writes, “Sherlock really hoped for a romantic happy end that night.”
But John doesn’t open up. When John says “Look, I find it difficult—I find it difficult, this sort of stuff,” he demonstrates that he’s still struggling to face the prospect of telling Sherlock that he loves him, even when he thinks they’re both about to die.
In response to that, Sherlock says “I know,” in a calm, accepting voice that’s heavy with sadness. He briefly looks up at John before lowering his head and casting his eyes down again, like this is too much for him. I mean, go back and look at that gif again and watch it until the end. This hurts my heart so much, because this is Sherlock acknowledging that he knows that John has been in love with him for a long time, and he also knows that John has never been able to fully face that and has never felt ready to say it.
John’s line—saying that he finds it difficult, this sort of stuff—makes it sound as if he’s about to reveal something big. But then he doesn’t. John simply says, “You were the best and the wisest man that I have ever known” and tells Sherlock that he forgives him. With this, John actually reveals even less about his feelings for Sherlock than he did at Sherlock’s grave in TRF.
I think asherlockstudy is right that Sherlock truly wasn’t prepared for how betrayed and hurt John would feel after his return. Sherlock was desperately hoping for more in this scene, but John wasn’t ready to give it. John may have forgiven Sherlock, but he still doesn’t feel ready to fully open up to him about his feelings.
Once it becomes clear that John isn’t going to say anything more, Sherlock looks absolutely devastated for several moments. Then he drops the deception and switches to humor to try to end the tense moment between the two of them. As I mentioned before and as this post explains, humor is one of Sherlock’s go-to methods for diffusing emotional situations that he doesn’t think he and John can handle. And unlike at the Landmark, this time it works! John starts laughing along with Sherlock pretty much immediately. John tries to act like he’s still angry at Sherlock, but he also keeps smiling and biting back laughter.
Just as things would have been very different in S2 if Sherlock had decided to tell John how he felt after Battersea, things would have been very different in S3 if John had decided to seize his second chance with Sherlock as soon as Sherlock returned. The initiative might have been Sherlock’s to take in ASIB, but it isn’t any longer in TEH, at least not in the same way. And I think Sherlock knows this. No matter what Sherlock had hoped for before he returned to London, after he sees John again and witnesses John’s initial reaction, Sherlock recognizes that he can’t just come back, reveal to John that he’s not dead, and then promptly confess his love to him after learning that John has a fiancée (well, almost-fiancée). Sherlock tries to manipulate John in the train car scene, but he does so in a way that ultimately leaves it up to John to make the decision about where things will go next.
I don’t want to be too harsh on John, since it’s clear that he’s experiencing a lot of emotional turmoil in the days immediately after Sherlock’s return. And for good reasons! But I think that even if he wasn’t ready to do it in the train car, John made a monumental mistake in S3 by not leaving Mary for Sherlock afterwards. I think John knew that what he felt for Mary was not the same as what he felt for Sherlock, and staying with Mary in spite of this was the wrong thing to do to Mary, to Sherlock, and to himself. Even if John didn’t really know what he wanted at the time of the train car scene—which would be entirely understandable, given how much of a shock Sherlock’s return was—he could have reflected on it and made different choices in the days or even weeks afterwards.
Why doesn’t John open up more, and why isn’t he willing to leave Mary for Sherlock once he realizes that Sherlock is still alive? I think there are three potential reasons.
First, by the time Sherlock returned, John felt fairly committed to Mary and most likely felt some sort of loyalty to her. Although John and Mary weren’t technically engaged yet, they were clearly at the stage in their relationship where they were discussing marriage. Mary didn’t seem very surprised when John started trying to propose to her at the Landmark. The fact that she even started laughing at John as he struggled through his proposal shows that she didn’t feel any nerves in that moment—she felt sure of her place in John’s life. John probably found it difficult to seriously contemplate ending a relationship that had reached that stage. Not impossible, but difficult.
Second, John might still be uncomfortable with his queer sexuality. John started to grapple with his feelings for Sherlock back in S2 and realized then that he was in love with him, but recognition and acceptance are two very different things. In S3, Mary offers John the respectable, heteronormative lifestyle that John probably thinks he’s supposed to want. Notably, by the time Sherlock returned to London, John had already started to seriously imagine a marriage with Mary, not just a relationship. John might find the conventional, heteronormative future that now appears to be within his reach very difficult to turn away from, even if he doesn’t truly want it. (And I think Sherlock might know that John is struggling with this. That’s another reason why I find this all so heartbreaking. As a gay man who’s very comfortable with that side of himself, this must be very hard for Sherlock to have to witness.)
Most importantly, though, John doesn’t know that Sherlock is in love with him. Sherlock has been consistently trying to hide the fact that he’s in love from John, and after John didn’t act overjoyed to see him at the Landmark, Sherlock felt too nervous and insecure to reveal his true feelings. As a result, John still thinks that his own love is unrequited, so he doesn’t see how confessing his feelings to Sherlock could do anything more than just get himself hurt. John knows how intense and overwhelming his love for Sherlock is, and Sherlock hurt him terribly with the fall. Even when John has forgiven Sherlock for the fall, it’s terrifying for him to contemplate opening himself up to Sherlock even more after that. It’s terrifying to imagine making himself so vulnerable to Sherlock by confessing his love to him when he doesn’t think that Sherlock feels anything like that for him in return.
I think the fact that John believes his love is unrequited is the most important reason why he remains so incredibly reluctant to admit his feelings for Sherlock in S3. John probably thinks that no matter what he feels for Sherlock, Sherlock will never love him back, so he should ignore his feelings for Sherlock as much as possible, consign Sherlock to the role of best friend, and pursue a much safer romance with Mary. And this is honestly so heartbreaking, because Sherlock has been so far gone on John since the day after he met him in ASIP.
So that’s where I’d place John at the end of TEH. John is still in love with Sherlock and knows it, but he’s struggling with it and he’s unwilling to reveal his feelings to Sherlock because he doesn’t realize that Sherlock loves him back. In TSOT and HLV, however, we’ll see that John’s willingness to make a move begins to shift as he faces down his imminent marriage and starts to face just how desperately he wants to be with Sherlock instead of Mary.
Meanwhile, Sherlock takes John’s statements in the train car as a final, definitive rejection. John has chosen a future with Mary. Even if he was once in love with Sherlock, he either doesn’t feel that way any more or is determined not to act on it because he believes that Mary is the better option. As a result, after the train car, Sherlock resolves to bow out gracefully and to stay out of the way romantically. He will let John marry Mary, and he’ll do his best to bury his own feelings so that he can avoid making John uncomfortable and can simply be the best friend to John that he is capable of being. I think that after everything that happened in TEH, Sherlock felt grateful that John was willing to take him back as a friend at all, and he didn’t want to do anything that would risk their friendship.
Sometime after Sherlock and John escape the train car and successfully foil the terrorist plot, Sherlock goes to see Anderson and gives him his super tidy Mycroft-and-I-planned-everything-perfectly explanation of the fall. Anderson was filming Sherlock as he spoke, so we can assume that Anderson intended to distribute the recording of Sherlock’s explanation and that the story Sherlock gives to Anderson is the version of events that he wants to present to the public. (I’ve discussed this explanation of the fall and what it does and doesn’t leave out in the TRF section of this meta.)
After this, the end of TEH leaves Sherlock and John in a tenuous place. John has told Sherlock that he forgives him and they’ve reconciled as friends. They’re also back to looking at each other absolutely radiantly. Here I will point us back to the hallway scene in 221B, which I am not going to shut up about and which you will be hearing about from me again in just a moment. And when Sherlock and John go to speak to the reporters in front of 221B, John is back to standing by Sherlock’s side and looking like Sherlock’s proud spouse, the way he did in TRF.
(gif from here)
But things between Sherlock and John are still unsettled and painful, as we see from their last conversation together in this episode. Before heading outside to talk to the reporters, Sherlock and John stand in the entryway and John asks Sherlock if he’s ever going to tell him how he faked his death and survived.
There are several things to note about this scene. First, John’s question suggests that John doesn’t believe the public explanation that Sherlock put out through Anderson. Like Anderson, John knows that something is off. He can tell that Sherlock is hiding something to appear clever, because he really is quite good at reading Sherlock (even if he often messes up spectacularly when it comes to Sherlock’s romantic feelings).
When John asks Sherlock how he did it, Sherlock has his back turned so that John can’t see his face, and he looks so. Incredibly. Sad.
(gif from here)
When Sherlock first returned, he was eager to tell John his sanitized and aggrandized story about how he did it. But after the train car, he’s now lost all of his previous enthusiasm for telling John this story to show off for him, because doesn’t think it matters anymore. John didn’t confess his love for Sherlock in the train car, and he’s chosen Mary. Although John forgave Sherlock and they’re friends again, Sherlock thinks that his fall and his time away have taken away his chance at ever having a romantic relationship with John.
Right before this in the entryway, John also asked Sherlock who put him in the bonfire, and Sherlock admitted that he didn’t know. Sherlock is getting seriously worried that there might still be parts of Moriarty’s network that he missed and that are a danger to John. So in this scene, Sherlock doesn’t feel triumphant about the fall any more. To paraphrase something LSIT said to me, at first Sherlock tried to portray himself as having achieved an impressive and decisive victory over Moriarty, but now he’s feeling heartbroken and he feels like Moriarty won.
Sherlock’s fear that there might still be parts of Moriarty’s network in London might be a reason why he doesn’t want to tell John the truth about the fall. But I still think the bigger reason is that he’s terrified to tell John that he would have done literally anything to save him from Moriarty. If Sherlock weren’t scared of revealing his love to John, he could tell John that Moriarty trapped him with the snipers, that he faked his death and hid his survival from John in order to protect him from Moriarty’s network, and that he’s now worried that he missed something and that John still isn’t safe. Then he and John could try to figure out what to do about it together. But now that he feels that John has rejected him romantically, Sherlock doesn’t feel like he can admit all of that.
Another thing to note about this: Sherlock’s explanation to Anderson is intercut with the train car scene. LSIT suggested to me that this might be meant to indicate that Sherlock’s reasons for not telling John the whole truth about the fall are connected to the fact that John didn’t reveal his love to him in the train car. Since John didn’t make a love confession, Sherlock is back to feeling like he isn’t ready to make one, either.
After John asks Sherlock if he’ll ever tell him how he faked his death, Sherlock tries to brush him off: “You know my methods, John. I am known to be indestructible.” John pushes harder, though.
John: No, but seriously. When you were dead, I went to your grave. Sherlock: I should hope so. John: I made a little speech. I actually spoke to you. Sherlock: I know. I was there. John: I asked you for one more miracle. I asked you to stop being dead. Sherlock: I heard you.
They look at each other, then Sherlock draws a deep breath and puts on a falsely cheerful air.
Sherlock: Anyway! Time to go and be Sherlock Holmes.
John opened up an opportunity for him and Sherlock to have what could have been a very deep conversation there in the entryway. They skirted the edges of it and Sherlock played along for a bit, but then Sherlock cut them off. Before this, John said to Sherlock teasingly, “Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this. Being back. Being a hero again. […] You’d have to be an idiot not to see it. You love it. […] Being Sherlock Holmes,” and Sherlock said in response “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.” So when Sherlock cuts off the beginnings of a very deep conversation with “Anyway! Time to go and be Sherlock Holmes,” this essentially means that he feels that it’s time for him to put on his mask. And he does so, taking a deerstalker down from somewhere near the door and putting it on before he and John head outside to face the press. Sherlock feels like he can’t reveal his true feelings to John, so he has to avoid getting into a real and intense conversation with him and he has to slip back into his cool detective persona instead.
I will try to end this section with two slightly more hopeful thoughts. As I mentioned in the TRF section, in S3 Anderson serves as a personification of the fandom, and in MHR and TEH, he was very busy theorizing about how Sherlock survived the fall even though other people didn’t believe him. This is one of the many subtextual clues throughout the show that directly references TJLC. It’s there to assure us that an on-screen, fully actualized romantic relationship between Sherlock and John is the show’s endgame.
Then there’s the hallway scene, before Sherlock and John go into the sitting room of 221B to talk to everyone else and then go outside to talk to the reporters. It’s a brief moment, but it’s absolutely beautiful and it’s one of my favorite moments in the show.
Please see the gifs here and here and these screencaps of John and Sherlock looking at each other as Sherlock walks down the hallway towards John.
(screencaps from here)
John’s and Sherlock’s expressions in this scene are very different from so much of what we see between the two of them throughout the rest of S3. In this moment, Sherlock and John are both unguarded and they allow their love for each other to shine through on their faces while they’re looking at each other face-to-face. There’s such gentleness, joy, and admiration in their expressions. It’s so much more like how they used to look at each other in S1-S2.
This scene takes place after the train car. In this moment, John has forgiven Sherlock for lying to him and for leaving, and they both believe that they have a chance at being best friends again.
I think this moment shows that after Sherlock’s return in TEH, Sherlock and John still had a chance of recovering their relationship and of returning to what they had together in S2 before Sherlock had to leave. Moriarty didn’t actually have to win in the end. Everything goes to shit after this in S3, and Moriarty’s actions in TRF created the circumstances that drive Sherlock and John apart throughout the rest of S3. But Moriarty isn’t omnipotent, and he didn’t irrevocably seal their fates that day on the rooftop. Sherlock and John could have recovered from that. And if Sherlock and John could have recovered from what Moriarty did to them in TRF, then I think that if S4 hadn’t happened the way it did, Sherlock and John could have recovered from the rest of S3, too. So overall, I think this scene gives us evidence that Sherlock and John could have still found their way back to each other after S3 and could have ended up together. And it would have been utterly beautiful.
Next: The Sign of Three
Deciphering the Romance Arc: The Reichenbach Fall
This is part of my meta project Deciphering the Romance Arc, which offers my current reading of the romance between Sherlock and John on BBC Sherlock up through TAB. Find the table of contents and the introduction here.
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Back in September, I posted a meta that laid out the interpretation of Sherlock’s fall that I held at the time. After I posted that meta, @loudest-subtext-in-tv and I had a wonderful conversation about it in the notes, and we ended up coming up with a new interpretation together! This section includes my explanation of that revised interpretation, so, thank you to LSIT for talking things through with me. It was really fun to work through theories together 😊
Moving on to the episode!
Just like the pool scene at the end of S1, the rooftop scene at the end of S2 is another critical turning point in Sherlock and John’s romance arc. If we accept S4 as the ending of the show, then I think the rooftop scene is perhaps the most important scene in the entire narrative. Accordingly, I’ve dedicated most of this section to working through what happened with Sherlock’s fall. But before getting to that, let’s run through some other points about Sherlock and John’s relationship and how they were feeling about each other in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the rooftop.
The events of TRF start three months before Sherlock’s fake suicide. Based on John’s blog, which places the end of THOB around March 16 and Sherlock’s fall around June 16, this means that the events chronicled in the opening montage of TRF begin almost as soon as Sherlock and John get back to London from Dartmoor.
In the opening montage, we see Sherlock and John solve a string of high-profile cases that make them even more famous than they became when John’s blog first went viral over the summer. And just like over the summer, it’s obvious that Sherlock and John are an inseparable team. In fact, despite all the tension that we just witnessed between them in Dartmoor, Sherlock and John seem to have been able to recapture their earlier, pre-Irene dynamic quite easily. It’s wonderful to see.
John seems very sure of his place in Sherlock’s life now. We see this in the opening montage and it’s reinforced throughout the episode. Even though there’s still a great deal of unresolved romantic and sexual tension between Sherlock and John, John doesn’t seem to at all doubt the fact that he is a permanent fixture in Sherlock’s life, someone who is very close to Sherlock and whom Sherlock won’t push away. Honestly, throughout all of TRF, John basically acts like Sherlock’s spouse. During the press conferences for the first few cases that they solve, the cab ride to Moriarty’s trial, and the kidnapping case, John nags Sherlock about his social etiquette because he knows that Sherlock won’t tell him off for doing so. He sticks right by Sherlock’s side while working closely with him on the cases. He’s also fiercely loyal to Sherlock and very protective of him during his two meetings with Mycroft and then again in front of the police when Sherlock gets arrested at 221B.
I love the imagery of John standing at Sherlock’s side for the press in every single press conference and photo op.
(screencaps from here)
They are married.
It seems, then, that even after all of the turmoil of S1, the fiasco surrounding Irene, and their recent misunderstandings in Dartmoor, John feels very confident in his relationship with Sherlock. Even if it’s not everything that John wants, he knows that Sherlock is his best friend and that they’re partners in almost every sense of the word.
It’s likely that Moriarty arranged some or all of the crimes that Sherlock and John solve at the start of the episode. Moriarty later connects himself to the stolen painting case by reminding Sherlock that he used the name “Richard Brook” because it’s a play on the German “Reichenbach” from the title of the painting that Sherlock and John recovered. Then one of the newspapers shown on screen says that the kidnapped banker case “bore strange similarities to the Reichenbach case which made Sherlock a household name.” That suggests that Moriarty might have been behind that case, too. Finally, Lestrade says that before Sherlock and John caught him, Peter Ricoletti was “number one on Interpol’s ‘most wanted’ list since 1982.” It would be surprising that Ricoletti’s cover was somehow blown and Sherlock and John were able to track him down after thirty years of his eluding capture…unless his cover was deliberately blown by a more powerful criminal, like, say, Moriarty. (These points about the kidnapped banker case and the Ricoletti case come from LSIT’s M-Theory meta, so thanks to her for these observations.)
It seems, then, that Moriarty might be allowing Sherlock and John to solve his crimes again, like he did in TGG. Of course, it’s also possible that Sherlock and John really did foil Moriarty’s plans in one, two, or all three of these instances. But Moriarty might have deliberately let them solve them. Moriarty might be intentionally building Sherlock up in the press so that he can tear him down later.
Moriarty’s not doing so well for his clients, is he? Maybe it’s time for him to run a big splashy advertisement, to restore his good name in the criminal underworld!
On the morning when Moriarty acts out his daylight robberies, Sherlock and John are hanging out in 221B. John has just had a shower or a bath in the bathroom that connects to Sherlock’s room via a semi-transparent door while Sherlock plays around with his microscope in the kitchen. Sherlock’s phone keeps pinging until John, playing the part of the responsible and long-suffering spouse, finally checks it for him.
After John reads the messages, he walks into the kitchen, hands Sherlock’s phone over to him, and says “He’s back.” Right when this happens, there is a very loud heartbeat sound. Since the heartbeat is the sound effect that always indicates moments of emotional significance for Sherlock or John, we’re being reminded that Moriarty’s return is an important development in the romance arc.
Side note: There were a few heartbeats in THOB, and there are a lot of them all throughout TRF. The fact that there are so many heartbeats in S2 after ASIB proves that the heartbeats were never intended to be associated with Irene specifically—they have always been about Sherlock and John.
The next few scenes all concern Moriarty’s trial and are absolutely packed with subtext.
I’m pretty much convinced that when he wrote this episode, Stephen Thompson based the details of Moriarty’s trial on the real-life Oscar Wilde trials of 1895. johnlocktentacles has a meta that points out all the parallels, and it’s really something! I think that meta pretty much proves that there is no way that all the similarities can be coincidences, so Thompson must have modeled Moriarty’s trial and a few other elements of TRF on the Wilde trials deliberately. In addition to all the parallels that johnlocktentacles included in their post, I’ll add one more: Wilde was ultimately incarcerated in Pentonville Prison, which is the same prison that Moriarty targets during his string of break-ins.
Here are the broad contours of the real-life trials that I think we need to know in order to understand the subtext embedded into Moriarty’s trial. When people refer to “the Oscar Wilde trials,” they’re talking about three trials involving Wilde that took place in the spring of 1895. In the first trial, Wilde sued John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, for libel after Queensberry accused him of sodomy. (Queensberry was the father of Wilde’s male lover, Alfred Douglas.) Wilde lost this case, and it led to his prosecution for “gross indecency” shortly afterwards. The jury was unable to reach a verdict in Wilde’s first trial for gross indecency, but Wilde was tried a second time that spring, convicted, and sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labor.
In TRF, Sherlock takes the place of Wilde while Moriarty takes the place of Queensberry. Moriarty has been after Sherlock since S1 and wants Sherlock to be his psychopath boyfriend, but Sherlock isn’t a psychopath, only has eyes for John, and isn’t about to leave John for Moriarty. As a result, Moriarty sets out to punish Sherlock for his love for John, just as Queensberry sought to punish Wilde for his homosexuality. And like Queensberry, Moriarty is ultimately successful. As a result of Moriarty’s efforts to destroy Sherlock in TRF, Sherlock is forced to leave John for roughly two years, the same amount of time that Wilde was imprisoned. (From John’s blog we know that Sherlock was actually gone for ~1.5 years, but the characters always refer to it as “two years,” so close enough.) Notably, this is a change from the three years that Holmes was gone in ACD canon.
This show is crazy. I love it so much.
Sherlock’s first conversation with Kitty Riley also serves to emphasize that the antagonists in TRF are trying to punish him for his love for John.
When Kitty corners Sherlock in the bathroom during Moriarty’s trial, at first she presents herself as a potential ally. But when Sherlock (rightly) indicates that he isn’t interested in giving her an interview, Kitty’s language quickly turns threatening and homophobic. When Sherlock refuses her offer of an interview and makes to leave the bathroom, Kitty runs after him and stops him from leaving by threatening to print rumors about his relationship with John.
Kitty: You and John Watson—just platonic? Can I put you down for a “no” there, as well? There’s all sorts of gossip in the press about you. Sooner or later you’re gonna need someone on your side. Someone to set the record straight.
This is a very deliberate choice of words. Kitty not only threatens to write about Sherlock’s relationship with John, but also implies that Sherlock should be trying to hide the fact that he and John are something more than just friends from the rest of the world. Tellingly, Sherlock visibly scoffs when Kitty says “set the record straight”—he knows exactly what she’s implying. This is very sinister indeed, especially since Sherlock believes that if his feelings for John are made public, this will put John in even greater danger from Moriarty. As a result, it’s after this part of their exchange that Sherlock turns savage on Kitty and tells her that she repels him.
So, what we can take from Moriarty’s trial and from Sherlock’s confrontation with Kitty is that Moriarty and the people he enlists to help him in this episode (Kitty and her editor, who is probably Magnussen) are out to destroy Sherlock by using his relationship with John against him.
After being released from custody, Moriarty arrives at 221B and threatens Sherlock by telling him that he owes him a fall. Throughout the rest of the episode, Moriarty then slowly closes in on Sherlock, such that he ultimately leaves him with no choice but to jump off the roof of Bart’s.
Now that we’ve set that up, I’ll talk about how the rest of the episode ties into the rooftop scene.
Regarding Sherlock’s fall, I’m currently convinced of several points, which I’ll do my best to explain. First, Moriarty intended for Sherlock to survive the fall. Second, for most of the episode, Sherlock did not understand that Moriarty was trying to manipulate him into (fake) killing himself. Sherlock formed his fake suicide plan very late in the episode, and it was a last-minute, messy plan that he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to use. He definitely wasn’t prepared for everything that happened on the rooftop, and especially not for Moriarty to directly threaten John’s life with a sniper. Finally, Sherlock didn’t realize that Moriarty wanted him to fake his own death and intended for him to survive; Sherlock thought he’d defeated Moriarty by faking his death.
Moriarty’s plan
As the central antagonist of the show, Moriarty’s goal is to keep Sherlock and John apart romantically. This is a love story and Moriarty is the villain, so keeping Sherlock and John from becoming a romantic couple is Moriarty’s basic narrative role. And Moriarty has been doing a brilliant job of achieving this all throughout S2! Ever since the end of S1, the threat that Moriarty leveled at Sherlock at the pool and Sherlock’s knowledge that Moriarty is still out there have kept Sherlock from revealing his feelings to John, even in the moments when John seemed especially desperate to know how Sherlock felt. Moriarty also really did a number on John in ASIB through Irene. Following all of that, Moriarty’s plan for the rooftop is a continuation of his overall plan to destroy Sherlock by keeping him from John.
To make sense of Moriarty’s actions in TRF, we also need to understand that the writers initially intended to bring him back after S3. There’s lots of evidence for this: the “Miss Me?” message at the end of HLV, the clues in S3 indicating that Mary is the Sebastian Moran character from ACD canon and works for Moriarty, and the fact that TAB is committed to the idea that Moriarty is still the show’s central antagonist and that his plotline hasn’t been resolved. So the rooftop scene is not the end of the game for Moriarty. He faked his own death on the rooftop and intended to return later on.
Remember that in TGG, Moriarty told Sherlock at the pool that he planned to burn the heart out of him and then kill him. This means that in TRF, Moriarty’s plan isn’t to try to kill Sherlock. It’s still too early in the narrative for that, and he’s saving that up for when he returns. Instead, Moriarty’s plan is to burn the heart out of Sherlock by forcing him to fake his own death in front of John.
By forcing Sherlock to fake his death in front of John, Moriarty sets into motion the events of the hiatus and S3 that prevent Sherlock and John from becoming a couple and that lead to both of them getting their hearts broken over and over again. Moriarty forces Sherlock to deceive John and leave him behind, separating Sherlock from John for almost two years. By the time Sherlock is finally able to return to London, he finds that John has tried to get over him and has become engaged to someone else. Meanwhile, John’s efforts to move on from Sherlock by starting a relationship with Mary and his initial sense of betrayal over Sherlock’s deception work together to prevent him from embracing Sherlock as a romantic partner when Sherlock returns. And because John doesn’t go back to Sherlock wholeheartedly upon his return to London, Sherlock and John both get pulled deeper and deeper into their own despair over their inability to be together, and they get caught up in further events that work to push them apart for the rest of S3. The absolute hell that Sherlock goes through in S3 as his heart breaks over and over again is what Moriarty was describing when he said that he would burn the heart out of him. All of this happens even though Moriarty isn’t visibly in the picture in S3, and even though Sherlock might have finally been ready for a relationship with John when he first returned, because he believed that Moriarty was finally gone.
If we accept the events of S4 at face value and accept S4 as the ending to the show, then the rooftop scene is the most crucial scene in all of Sherlock because Sherlock and John never recover from the consequences of the fall. With the rooftop scene, Moriarty seals in his victory over Sherlock and John by triggering the events that “burn the heart” out of Sherlock and that prevent Sherlock and John from ever becoming a romantic couple. As a result, Moriarty comes out on top as the ultimate victor in the show, even though he never returned in that ending. Moriarty achieves his goal as the story’s central villain: instead of killing Sherlock, he destroys him by damaging his relationship with John to the point that Sherlock and John are never able to be together.
Crucially, Sherlock had to survive the fall for Moriarty’s plan to work: Moriarty needed Sherlock to still be alive after the rooftop so that he could suffer the pain of losing John. This means that in TRF, Moriarty’s plan is to trap Sherlock in a situation where Sherlock feels that he needs to fake his own death. Then Moriarty can just step back and let Sherlock shatter his relationship with John.
What Sherlock did and didn’t know beforehand
Throughout TRF, Moriarty is always several steps ahead of Sherlock. At no point does Sherlock appear in control of events, and he’s always having to react to Moriarty’s actions. Just think of Sherlock and John’s desperate and clearly unplanned flight from the police, or the way that Sherlock reacts to seeing Moriarty in Kitty Riley’s flat.
After Moriarty’s trial and acquittal, there’s evidence throughout the next chunk of the episode that Sherlock was worried about Moriarty but didn’t understand the details of his plan. It’s also clear that Sherlock didn’t have a masterplan of his own.
Some of this evidence comes from Sherlock’s interactions with Molly. Most importantly, in TRF we get Molly’s shining star moment in the lab at Bart’s when Sherlock and John are there to analyze the footprint from the kidnapping case.
Molly: What did you mean, “I owe you”?
When Molly asks this, Sherlock gives John a long, hard stare as John walks past silently. Sherlock is worried about what Moriarty’s “IOU” threat will mean for John’s safety.
Molly: You said “I owe you.” You were muttering it while you were working. Sherlock: Nothing. Mental note. Molly: You’re a bit like my dad. He’s dead. (Grimaces.) No, sorry. Sherlock: Molly, please don’t feel the need to make conversation. It’s really not your area. Molly: When he was dying, he was always cheerful. He was lovely—except when he thought no one could see. I saw him once. He looked sad. Sherlock: Molly…. Molly: You look sad, when you think he can’t see you.
Sherlock looks over at John again, then looks at Molly as she continues speaking.
Molly: Are you okay? And don’t just say you are, because I know what that means, looking sad when you think no one can see you.
(Here’s a gif set of part of the scene.)
Sherlock and Molly’s conversation reveals that before the rooftop, Sherlock was fearful of what Moriarty had planned, and especially about what it could mean for John. And as Molly so astutely notices, Sherlock chose to hide that fear from John.
Molly’s dialogue in this scene also suggests that she thinks Sherlock thinks he’s going to die. And I think Molly is probably correct. At this point in the episode, Sherlock hasn’t yet figured out that Moriarty plans to force him to commit suicide specifically. But when Sherlock does realize this later on, he will think that Moriarty is actually trying to get him to kill himself, not fake his death. Bearing that in mind, it seems very likely that after Moriarty’s visit to 221B and his promise to destroy Sherlock, Sherlock thought that Moriarty was going to try to kill him sometime soon—that he’d had his fun after the pool, and now he was ready for the kill. Sherlock might have thought his heart got plenty broken during the whole Irene disaster in ASIB, when John thought Sherlock had fallen in love with her and Sherlock had wanted to tell John that it wasn’t true but felt he couldn’t. So when Sherlock looks sad in the lab and Molly notices, it might be because he’s worried about John and he thinks that Moriarty is going to try to kill him soon, and he doesn’t know what to do about any of this.
I’m not 100% sure about this, though. During their conversation at 221B, Sherlock asked Moriarty “So how are you going to do it, ‘burn me’?” to which Moriarty replied “Oh, that’s the problem—the final problem.” Sherlock’s question makes it sound like he knows that the whole burning-the-heart-out-of-him thing hasn’t happened yet. So when Sherlock looks sad in the lab and keeps glancing at John during his conversation with Molly, it might be because he knows that Moriarty still intends to try to break his heart and that it’s likely that he’ll try to hurt John in order to do so. So, maybe Sherlock doesn’t yet fear that Moriarty is going to try to kill him. But idk, because in 221B, Sherlock answered Moriarty’s “Have you worked out what it is yet? What’s the final problem?” by saying “I dunno.” So who knows, Sherlock might not have caught on to very much. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Anyway, for most of the episode, Sherlock clearly has no idea what’s going on and is just reacting to Moriarty. He and John solve the Hansel-and-Gretel-esque kidnapping case that Moriarty arranged, and then when they’re at New Scotland Yard afterwards Sherlock sees the IOU graffiti on the building across the street and gets worried. He gets into a cab to think, then sees the video from Moriarty and is totally shocked when Moriarty turns out to be the cab driver. (This has always bothered me. You’re telling me that after the Jeff Hope case in ASIP, Sherlock didn’t look at the driver of every single cab he got into? That’s just as bad as him failing to set his phone to silent when he went to eavesdrop on John and Irene at Battersea. @thegildedbee suggested a possible explanation to me, though: this could be an intentional callback to ASIP, where it all began with Moriarty.) After Sherlock gets out of the cab, almost gets hit by a car, gets rescued by one of the assassins, and watches the assassin get gunned down, he starts talking to John about how he thinks that the assassins are trying to protect him because he has an important piece of information that they want. This is one of the first moments where we see that Sherlock is genuinely falling for Moriarty’s trick with the key code; as the episode goes on, Sherlock gets fixated on trying to figure out what the code is. Not long after this, Sherlock and John make their desperate flight from the police, which is pretty clear evidence of Moriarty having backed them into a corner. Sherlock even says that he’s “doing what Moriarty wants—becoming a fugitive.” Then Sherlock and John go to Kitty Riley’s flat and Sherlock totally loses his shit when he sees that Moriarty is posing as Richard Brook. So Sherlock is clearly reacting to Moriarty, and he never knows what Moriarty is going to do next.
Related to this, in the scene where Sherlock and John are running from the police together, John picks up a copy of the Sun and says aloud that Kitty’s source of information is a guy named Rich Brook. Sherlock visibly reacts to this (and there’s a heartbeat sound after John says it), but John doesn’t notice. On the rooftop, we learn that Sherlock recognized that the name “Rich Brook” was a play on the German “Reichenbach” from the name of “the case that made my name.” So as soon as John said the name aloud, Sherlock must have realized that Moriarty was behind the stories about him in the press, if he hadn’t realized that before. But Sherlock was still shocked and furious in Kitty’s flat when he realized that Moriarty was posing as Rich Brook himself—Sherlock knew that Moriarty was behind the stories, but he didn’t expect Moriarty to be Rich Brook. To me, this provides more evidence that even though Sherlock was worried about Moriarty’s plan in TRF, he was always several steps behind Moriarty and didn’t anticipate Moriarty’s every move.
Importantly, there’s no evidence that Sherlock was working with Mycroft in TRF to enact some grand masterplan against Moriarty. In fact, everything related to Mycroft that we see in this episode reinforces the idea that Sherlock and Mycroft weren’t collaborating on anything before Sherlock’s fall.
Early on in the episode, Mycroft reaches out to John to talk to him about the assassins gathering on Baker Street, rather than going to Sherlock directly. John asks the obvious question: “Why don’t you talk to Sherlock if you’re so concerned about him?” Mycroft essentially tells John that he can’t talk to Sherlock about it, so he’s talking to John instead.
Later on, when Sherlock and John are running from the police, Sherlock rejects John’s suggestion that they ask Mycroft for help.
John: What about Mycroft? He could help us. Sherlock: A big family reconciliation? Now’s not really the moment.
Right after that, Sherlock throws him and John in front of a bus so that one of the assassins will save them, and then the assassin promptly gets gunned down right in front of them. I know that whoever shot the guy was a super highly-trained assassin and was very unlikely to accidentally hit John or Sherlock, but this is still some risky behavior on Sherlock’s part. The fact that jumping in front of a bus made sense to Sherlock in that moment but asking Mycroft for help didn’t seems to indicate that Sherlock is very reluctant to go to Mycroft.
Of course, one could argue that Sherlock responded to John’s suggestion about Mycroft the way he did because he was intentionally deflecting, since he already had a plan with Mycroft that he didn’t want John to know about. But that just doesn’t seem likely to me when we consider John and Mycroft’s interactions in this episode. From those conversations, it really seems like Mycroft isn’t in close touch with Sherlock and doesn’t feel comfortable talking to him about Moriarty. LSIT also reminded me that when John goes to talk to Mycroft at the Diogenes Club after leaving Kitty’s flat and confronts him about giving Sherlock’s life story to Moriarty, Mycroft asks John to tell Sherlock that he’s sorry. Mycroft looks genuinely regretful after he says this, and especially in a moment when John can’t see his face. This heavily implies that Mycroft and Sherlock were not in communication before Sherlock’s fall.
In general, I think Sherlock and Mycroft had an extremely tense relationship in S1-S2 and there’s a genuine shift in their dynamic in S3, such that it’s only then that they become close. In S1-S2, Sherlock and Mycroft barely get along at all, and Sherlock always seems to despise having to deal with his older brother; he’s reluctant to take cases from Mycroft and resents Mycroft’s close supervision of his life. They’re so distant that on the rooftop, Sherlock doesn’t seem to think it’s weird when Moriarty leaves Mycroft off his list of people who will die if Sherlock doesn’t jump. But in S3, Sherlock and Mycroft appear much closer. Sherlock takes the terrorism case from Mycroft in TEH without much protest, and the two of them play board games and make deductions together to pass the time. In TSOT, Sherlock even calls Mycroft at the wedding reception when he’s feeling lonely.
So…Sherlock and Mycroft were always secretly close, but they intentionally hid this from John starting in ASIP so that they could eventually fool John and fake Sherlock’s death nearly eighteen months later? Definitely not. It seems that Sherlock and Mycroft actually did have some sort of sibling rivalry in S1-S2, but after Sherlock had to fake his death and disappear for two years, they came to appreciate each other far more than they had before. After Sherlock’s return, Mycroft got his younger brother back. Of course they became closer after that.
I haven’t been getting into this here because I’m just dealing with the romance arc, but LSIT’s M-Theory meta explains how we know that Mycroft has been working for Moriarty against his will for quite some time at this point, and probably for the whole show. With that in mind, LSIT reminded me that sibling rivalry aside, the main reason why Sherlock doesn’t go to Mycroft in TRF is probably that Sherlock suspects Mycroft is compromised and doesn’t think he can trust Mycroft to help him take down Moriarty. Since John figured out that Mycroft leaked Sherlock’s life story to Moriarty, Sherlock probably figured that out, too, and he therefore knew that it wasn’t safe to go to Mycroft for help. Otherwise, Sherlock probably would have gone to Mycroft for help before the fall. Sherlock really cares about John’s safety, and John’s safety is on the line, not just Sherlock’s. Even if Sherlock and Mycroft weren’t close in S1-S2, Sherlock would have known that Mycroft would help him in a life-or-death situation if he could.
In any event, the main point is that it doesn’t make sense to believe that Sherlock and Mycroft were secretly working together against Moriarty throughout S2 and hid it from John. Sherlock did everything in TRF without Mycroft, and he only went to him for help after he’d faked his suicide, as I’ll talk about later.
After Sherlock and John leave Kitty’s flat, Sherlock starts to pace around in the street agitatedly while talking out loud to John about Moriarty’s plan. Sherlock says: “He’s been sowing doubt into people’s minds for the last twenty-four hours. There’s only one thing he needs to do to complete his game, and that’s to—”, then pulls up short.
In that moment, Sherlock seems to have an epiphany. It’s right then that he realizes Moriarty is planning to force him to commit suicide. Sherlock has his back to John when he stops and looks startled, so John can’t see his face. This means there’s no reason for Sherlock to be acting—when he pulls up short like that in the middle of the street, it’s because he’s truly only just realized that Moriarty is planning to make him kill himself…and that he therefore needs to come up with a fake suicide plan of his own to try to fake his suicide in front of Moriarty. The fall music from the rooftop scene also plays during this moment, which gives us another indication that this is the moment when Sherlock starts to come up with his plan for how to fake his death on the rooftop.
Sherlock says that there’s something that he needs to do on his own and leaves John there outside Kitty’s flat. Then he seeks out Molly at Bart’s, and the two of them start to put together a very last-minute, very risky plan.
Before getting into Sherlock’s plan, there are two more things to note here. First, as I mentioned before, Sherlock must have thought that Moriarty wanted him to actually kill himself. As the audience and as people who can analyze Moriarty’s actions and intentions with more rationality than Sherlock can (Sherlock is not very good at this, tbh), we know that Moriarty intended for Sherlock to survive this particular confrontation. But Sherlock doesn’t realize that, he thinks this is Moriarty’s post-pool attempt to kill him. As LSIT helped me realize, if Sherlock had somehow suspected that Moriarty wanted him to survive, then Sherlock would have been much more suspicious of Moriarty’s own apparent death on the rooftop. He wouldn’t have been nearly as freaked out in TAB as he was when he started to face the possibility that Moriarty might still be alive.
Second, Sherlock realizes that Moriarty is going to try to force him to commit suicide, rather than try to kill him outright, because a suicide fits into the narrative that Moriarty has been spinning about Sherlock in the press. Sherlock says “He’s been sowing doubt into people’s minds for the last twenty-four hours. There’s only one thing he needs to do to complete his game, and that’s to—”. So Sherlock realizes he needs a fake suicide plan specifically, not just a plan to fake his death in general.
All of this means that Sherlock is playing right into Moriarty’s masterplan. Moriarty wants Sherlock to come up with a plan to fake his own suicide and still survive, and he wants Sherlock to think that he’s won when he survives. That’s exactly what Sherlock does.
Okay, on to Sherlock’s plan.
Besides that moment outside Kitty’s flat, there are two main reasons why I think we know that Sherlock must have had a fake suicide plan of some kind before the rooftop scene. There’s also a third small piece of evidence, which I’ll note later when it comes up.
The first is the squash ball. When John meets up with Sherlock again at Bart’s later that night, we see Sherlock bouncing a small rubber squash ball against the lab’s cabinets. The squash ball is included in the final shooting script, so it was very deliberately placed in that scene: it’s a clue, not just a random prop used to give Sherlock something to do with his hands.
JOHN comes back to Bart’s to find SHERLOCK sitting in the dark. A squash ball in his hand—bouncing it around.
This is from pg. 91 of the script here.
The presence of the squash ball means that after his revelation outside Kitty’s flat, Sherlock expected that he may need to trick someone—probably Moriarty—into thinking that he didn’t have a pulse.
The second reason is Molly. After leaving John outside Kitty’s flat, Sherlock seeks out Molly at Bart’s, tells her that he thinks he’s going to die, and asks for her help. In TEH, Sherlock thanks Molly for whatever she did for him. So, it seems clear that Molly helped Sherlock plan to fake his death somehow. They probably talked through various ideas for what might work, and we can probably assume that Sherlock and Molly came up with the main details of Sherlock’s plan together: the giant inflatable used to break Sherlock’s fall, the look-alike corpse briefly used as a body double for Sherlock, and the squash ball under the armpit to temporarily stop Sherlock’s pulse. We know Sherlock had the squash ball worked out by the time he finished talking to Molly, and they probably arranged the inflatable together because Sherlock suggests Bart’s rooftop as a meeting place for him and Moriarty. The corpse also makes sense as something that Molly could have helped with. I also think Molly and Sherlock could have talked about a plan for removing Sherlock to a safe part of Bart’s afterwards so that Moriarty wouldn’t immediately realize he was still alive. And, at the start of TEH, Lestrade tells Anderson that Molly was the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Sherlock’s body, so Molly completed the paperwork that was needed to officially confirm Sherlock’s death.
I’ll say more about this later, but I think the explanation of the fall that Sherlock gives to Anderson in TEH is a mix of lies and truth, and the technical details of how he faked his death are probably the elements that are true. So we can probably safely assume that Sherlock and Molly really did plan for the inflatable, the corpse, and the squash ball together.
Even if they worked all of this out, though, Sherlock and Molly’s plan is slap-dash and risky. They put this plan together in just a few hours, if even that, since Sherlock seems to have done whatever planning he intended to do by the time that he texts John to meet him at Bart’s later that night. The plan isn’t airtight, and there is a lot that could go wrong.
Even just the squash ball trick is super risky. LSIT and I talked about how Moriarty (or John) could have just checked Sherlock’s other wrist. So there’s a 50/50 chance that that piece could go wrong. (Also, on pg. 105 the final shooting script includes a doctor outside of Bart’s checking for a pulse in Sherlock’s neck. I think there’s a point in the scene where you might be able to see that happen? So I suppose that doctor was working for Sherlock or Moriarty. What a mess.) And when Sherlock and Molly planned the inflatable, Sherlock must have been imagining that he would somehow distract Moriarty or temporarily incapacitate him so that Moriarty didn’t just look over the edge of the roof and see the inflatable sitting there. We know that Sherlock didn’t expect Moriarty to kill himself/pretend to kill himself, and Sherlock doesn’t even try to act like he expected that when he talks to Anderson in TEH. So honestly, Sherlock’s fake suicide plan is pretty terrible.
We’ll see on the rooftop that Sherlock really didn’t want to use that plan if could help it: it was his back-up plan only. Sherlock was determined to figure out the computer key code so that he could use that as his Plan A, and the fake suicide plan was only ever a shitty and hopefully irrelevant Plan B.
Moreover, I think it’s clear from the rooftop scene that Sherlock did not plan to have to pretend to be dead for very long, and certainly not without quickly telling John that he was alive. Sherlock seems to have been imagining that he could use this plan to escape from Moriarty if he needed to, then quickly regroup with John to figure out what to do next.
Once he has things (sort of) figured out with Molly, Sherlock gets the squash ball and texts John to ask him to join him at Bart’s. John does, and when John arrives, Sherlock is genuinely fixated on the computer key code. As soon as John walks into the lab where Sherlock is hiding out, Sherlock says, “The computer code is key to this. If we find it, we can use it—beat Moriarty at his own game.” If they can figure out what the code is, Sherlock explains, then they can defeat Moriarty by using it to destroy his Richard Brook persona.
After watching John tap his hands against the countertop, there’s a noticeable change in Sherlock’s expression as he has what he thinks is another epiphany. Sherlock thinks he’s figured out the code and that it’s the rhythm Moriarty tapped out on his knee when he visited 221B. Sherlock’s moment of realization is even accompanied by a heartbeat sound. This moment is significant for Sherlock because he truly believes that he’s figured out the code, and he thinks that using the code is a much better plan than his fake suicide plan. Not only does it give him a neater, far less risky way out, but it also gives him an opportunity to take down Moriarty for good, not just escape from him temporarily again.
As soon as he thinks he’s worked out the code, Sherlock texts Moriarty and invites him to the rooftop so that he can confront him. Sherlock chooses the rooftop because it still lets him fall back on his fake suicide plan if he has to. But he really hopes that won’t be necessary.
Sherlock doesn’t tell John that he thinks he’s figured out the code, though, or that he’s texted Moriarty and intends to confront him. Sherlock and John spend all night in the lab together, but not talking about anything of importance, as far as we can tell—Sherlock doesn’t tell John about his Plan A or his Plan B for the rooftop. Why? Because Sherlock wants to keep John safe, and he doesn’t want John there for his showdown with Moriarty. He doesn’t want a repeat of the pool, when Moriarty was able to threaten John’s life and use John as leverage against him. Haha.
This is important because it shows that Sherlock’s actions at the end of TRF are an exact repeat of his mistakes at the end of TGG. In TGG, Sherlock thought the flash drive with the missile plans was the final pip, and he invited Moriarty to the pool because he thought he’d beaten Moriarty at his own game by finding the plans before Moriarty had contacted him and started a timer. Sherlock also didn’t tell John what he was doing or ask him to come with him to the pool, which led to John getting kidnapped and Sherlock getting trapped in a position where Moriarty was able to use John against him as leverage. The exact same thing happens with the rooftop in TRF. Sherlock thinks he’s figured things out by discovering the computer key code, and he arranges to meet Moriarty without telling John. But once again, Moriarty is way ahead of Sherlock, has a plan to use John against him, and pulls the rug out from under him so that Sherlock is left completely at Moriarty’s mercy and with no way out but the one that Moriarty leaves him. Remember, in TGG, Sherlock and John escaped only because Moriarty decided to let them go.
What actually happened on the rooftop
Once Sherlock texts Moriarty, Sherlock isn’t in control of the timing for what happens next. He has to wait for Moriarty to announce himself ready to meet, and we see that Sherlock stays up all night waiting. In the morning, Sherlock only leaves for the roof once Moriarty has texted him to say he’s ready. This means Moriarty was the one who picked the time for his and Sherlock’s meeting and had control over the timing for everything that happened after. So even though Sherlock has a plan, he’s still not in control of everything and he’s forced to leave a lot up to chance.
Sherlock texted Moriarty in the middle of the night to suggest that they meet on the roof, and Moriarty spends the rest of the night getting everything in place for his own dastardly side of things. Moriarty gets in touch with the three snipers who will target John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson, and he gives them their orders so that they can be in position in time. He arranges for someone to make the phone call to John that will draw John away from Bart’s, and for the cabs that will take John to Baker Street and back to Bart’s again (more on this in a moment). Moriarty also comes up with his own fake suicide plan and gives the necessary orders to the accomplices who are going to help him enact it.
Interestingly, it seems like Moriarty knew what Sherlock’s fake suicide plan was ahead of time. He knew that Sherlock was planning to do something that would be visible enough to people who weren’t on the rooftop for the sniper plan to make sense (“unless my people see you jump”), and he was able to position John so that John would have to watch and would believe that Sherlock had actually died. Moriarty might have found out what Sherlock’s plan was through a leak in Sherlock’s homeless network, if Sherlock and Molly really did use the network as Sherlock says they did in TEH. Alternatively, he might have recording devices inside Bart’s, so that he overheard Sherlock and Molly’s preparations; posing as Jim from IT in TGG would have given him plenty of chances to install surveillance equipment. (The ideas about a leak in the homeless network or recording devices in Bart’s came from LSIT. Thanks!) Either way, Moriarty seems to have been very well-prepared for the plan Sherlock that used, and his sniper plan works perfectly to checkmate Sherlock into faking his suicide in front of John.
Once Moriarty has everything lined up, he sets his plan in motion by drawing John away from Bart’s with the phone call about Mrs. Hudson getting shot. This was Moriarty’s doing, not Sherlock’s! How do we know? Several reasons.
(1) It’s literally in the final shooting script. The TRF final shooting script initially included this short exchange between Sherlock and Moriarty during the rooftop scene:
Sherlock: You’re too obvious. Getting John out of the way. Jim: You realised? Sherlock: Please! Jim: Well…I just wanted us to be alone. No gooseberries.
This is on pg. 98 of the script here. I first saw this in @asherlockstudy’s meta here, so thank you to her for pointing it out!
Even though this dialogue got cut, there’s no indication that the writers changed their minds about this being what happened in TRF. I think they cut this exchange just so it wouldn’t be too obvious to viewers that it was Moriarty who drew John away.
(2) The timing for the phone call only makes sense if Moriarty was the one who was responsible for it. We already saw that Sherlock texted Moriarty the night before and then had to wait all night for Moriarty to tell him that he was ready to meet. Sherlock didn’t know when Moriarty was going to get to Bart’s to meet him, so he couldn’t have known when to send John away. The timing makes perfect sense if it was Moriarty, though: Moriarty gets everything ready overnight, gets to Bart’s and prepares to meet Sherlock, and then has someone make the phone call to John in order to get things moving. Moreover, Moriarty texts Sherlock to say that he’s waiting on the rooftop literally as soon as John leaves the lab. I think that means that Moriarty must have been responsible for the call. He had someone call John, waited a minute or so for John to take the call and leave, and then texted Sherlock. The timing doesn’t make any sense at all if it was Sherlock who was responsible for the call, because there’s no way Sherlock could have known to send John away immediately before Moriarty texted him.
(3) It makes sense for Moriarty to have been the one who lured John away because that was how he got John out of the safe interior of Bart’s and out into the open air so that his sniper could threaten to shoot him. The sniper plan wouldn’t have made any sense if John had stayed inside the hospital. Moriarty had to get him out of Bart’s somehow.
(4) Moriarty calling John away is consistent with ACD canon. In “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” the story where Holmes and Moriarty face off at the Reichenbach Falls, Moriarty deliberately separates Watson from Holmes so that he can get Holmes on his own. Moriarty sends Watson a message saying that a woman has fallen ill and needs the help of a doctor. Watson leaves Holmes to go help the woman, but when he gets to the hotel where she’s supposed to be staying, he realizes that it was a trick and immediately rushes back to try to find Holmes. He’s too late, though, and instead of arriving in time to save his friend, Watson finds a letter from Holmes left by the edge of the cliff where Holmes had faced Moriarty. In the letter, Holmes says that Moriarty allowed him to write the note as a final goodbye. He admits that he suspected that the message calling Watson away was a hoax, but he implies that he allowed Watson to leave because he wanted him to be safe.
The events of TRF replicate this almost exactly. Since the writers kept so much of this the same, I think we can safely conclude that it’s Moriarty who drew John away.
I know I’ve belabored this point, but I think it’s very important. So don’t forget about it! It will come up again later.
Like in ACD canon, Sherlock probably realizes that the phone call is fake and that Moriarty is behind it. That’s why he doesn’t act worried about Mrs. Hudson. Sherlock decides to let John go, though, because he mistakenly believes that John will be safer that way.
After Sherlock gets the text from Moriarty, he grabs his coat and heads up to the rooftop.
At first, Sherlock appears very confident as he talks to Moriarty. He thinks he’s got this, because he’s figured out the key code, so he doesn’t have to use his crappy last-minute fake suicide plan. While Moriarty walks around him, Sherlock stands straight and tall and wears a slightly smug smile as he taps out the rhythm for the key code on his hands behind his back.
But then Moriarty shatters Sherlock’s Plan A entirely by telling him that there was never any code at all. When Moriarty reveals this, Sherlock looks genuinely shocked. He literally sways on his feet, I’m not kidding. He’s completely thrown by this revelation because he truly did believe that the code was his best weapon against Moriarty.
Moriarty then says “Glad you chose a tall building—nice way to do it” to indicate that he intends to force Sherlock to commit suicide/appear to commit suicide by jumping off the roof. Sherlock replies bewilderedly, “Do it? Do…do what?” before comprehension slowly dawns upon him and he realizes what Moriarty means. Here’s Sherlock’s face in that moment:
(gif from here)
Sherlock raises his eyebrows ever so slightly, blinks rapidly, and pulls his head back as the implication of what Moriarty has said washes over him. It’s like you can actually see the moment when he feels that terrible rush of horror you experience when you learn something awful. Sherlock is facing away from Moriarty and Moriarty can’t see his face here, so there’s no reason for him to fake these expressions. Also, there’s a heartbeat sound! Which tells us that this is a moment of emotional significance for Sherlock.
Here’s what the final shooting script says for this exchange:
Sherlock: Do what? Silence. Sherlock stares. And then he ‘realises’ with horror. Sherlock (cont’d): Ah yes. Of course. My suicide.
(pg. 96 of the script here.)
Why does Sherlock look so shocked and horrified and why is there a heartbeat, if he already knew that Moriarty intended to make him commit suicide? It’s because this is when Sherlock realizes that he’s actually going to have to use his terribly messy fake suicide plan. Sherlock never wanted to use that plan, and he’s nervous about all the things that can go wrong. So when Moriarty reveals that there’s no key code and that he wants Sherlock to commit suicide, Sherlock is genuinely shocked and horrified.
The script puts the word “realises” in quotes, though, because the suicide idea isn’t new to Sherlock—he’d already figured out that Moriarty’s plan involved a suicide the night before. (The word “realises” being in quotes in the script is the last piece of evidence that I mentioned, demonstrating that Sherlock had some kind of fake suicide plan before he went up onto the roof.) On a first viewing, however, the audience is supposed to think that Sherlock is realizing this for the first time.
If you watch the rooftop scene closely, there are several other moments where Sherlock expresses shock, despair, and fear as he realizes how far Moriarty is willing to go to force him to jump. Sherlock reacts to Moriarty’s words and actions in real time, which shows that his responses are genuine. He really doesn’t want to have to fake his own death with his awful plan. So when Sherlock steps up to the edge of the roof for the first time, he’s literally shaking. He looks terrified.
Sherlock and Moriarty both go over to the edge of the roof and look down. When they do, we see that there’s a large white rectangle drawn on the sidewalk, apparently to indicate where Sherlock needs to fall. This is kind of crazy, because this means that one of the people helping Sherlock drew a big chalk rectangle on the pavement where Moriarty could see it! And we even see for ourselves that Moriarty did see it, because he’s shown looking down at the pavement from the same angle that we do as the audience. Sherlock’s plan is so incredibly messy!
In addition to showing us how messy Sherlock’s plan is, the highly-visible chalk rectangle is also a clue for us as the audience: it demonstrates that Moriarty knew that Sherlock was going to try to fake his death and wanted him to do it. Moriarty saw the chalk rectangle, but he didn’t do anything about it because he wanted to let Sherlock act out his plan.
Sherlock, however, freaks out because Moriarty just saw his chalk rectangle! He grabs Moriarty, swings him around, and hisses that he’s insane.
Then Moriarty really raises the stakes by telling Sherlock about the snipers. Moriarty says “Your friends will die if you don’t,” and Sherlock’s reaction is immediate: “John.” Sherlock doesn’t even think of anyone else at first. Everything for him is always about John. (Gifs here)
Sherlock did NOT see the snipers coming, and their addition into the mix ruins things for Sherlock. The snipers are the most important part of Moriarty’s plan for the rooftop, because they’re the reason why Sherlock ends up having to pretend to be dead for so long without telling John. Sherlock thought that he might have to temporarily fake his death in front of Moriarty in order to escape from him, but he didn’t expect Moriarty to have snipers watching his friends to make sure that his friends believed he’d truly killed himself. Because of the snipers, after he jumps, Sherlock can’t reveal to John that he’s still alive, because he knows that if there’s any minute change in John’s behavior that hints that he knows the truth, John will instantly get murdered.
This is the whole reason why Sherlock has to leave to take down Moriarty’s network. When Moriarty tells Sherlock about the snipers, he reveals that he has members of his network watching John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson and prepared to kill them if they realize that Sherlock is alive. But Sherlock doesn’t know who these people are, or who might be waiting in the wings to take over from them if they’re incapacitated. As a result, Sherlock believes he has to take out the whole network to keep his friends safe and to make it safe for him to return to London and reveal himself to them. Sherlock will only feel that he can tell John he isn’t dead when he believes that there’s no one left in Moriarty’s web to threaten John.
In TEH, Sherlock tries to tell Anderson that he knew about the snipers ahead of time and that he and Mycroft neatly neutralized them. This is completely false. If Sherlock’s reaction on the rooftop isn’t enough to convince you that Sherlock didn’t know about the snipers ahead of time, then I think the argument about why Sherlock had to take out the network without telling John should do it. But there’s more. If Sherlock had known about the snipers, there is absolutely no way he would have ever let John leave Bart’s and go out into the open. Sherlock would have wanted John to stay in a windowless room inside the hospital, not go rushing outside where he could get shot! (I originally got this from LSIT’s M-Theory meta. Thanks to her for noting that!)
After Moriarty tells Sherlock about the snipers and pressures him to jump, Sherlock asks for a moment of privacy so that he can stall for a bit and try to figure out how the hell he’s going to stop Moriarty from seeing the giant inflatable when it gets rolled out. Moriarty already knows Sherlock’s plan, so he thinks this is hilarious and smiles to himself as he answers “Of course.”
After a few more moments, Sherlock regains his composure, laughs, and tries to get Moriarty to call off the snipers. It doesn’t work, though, and Moriarty fakes his own death so that Sherlock won’t be able to attempt to reason with him.
In TAB, we learn how Moriarty did it. He stuck a gun into his mouth but didn’t fire it, then had a sharp-shooting accomplice (hello, Mary!) who was stationed somewhere out of sight shoot a blood packet to make it look like he’d shot himself in the head and killed himself.
Sherlock is absolutely horrified, so much so that he doesn’t even think to check Moriarty for a pulse…even though Sherlock had already thought about needing to stop his own pulse temporarily as a part of his own fake suicide plan. *facepalm* Unfortunately, Sherlock is not very good at thinking clearly when John is in danger.
Sherlock looks around desperately, makes a terrified noise, and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth in distress as he tries to figure out what to do. He looks panicked and terrified for several minutes as he realizes that he truly has to jump to save John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson.
Sherlock’s shock and horror after Moriarty shoots himself
Sherlock freaking out after he realizes what he has to do
(screencaps from here)
This is probably also when it starts to really sink in for Sherlock that he’s not going to be able to quickly bounce back from the dead after he jumps. As Sherlock starts to panic in earnest and then steps up to the rooftop’s edge for the last time, he must realize that after he’s faked his death, he’s going to have to do something about the snipers in order to keep John safe. And that means that he can’t immediately reveal his survival to John. That’s terrible! Sherlock never thought he was going to have to let John grieve him for weeks, months, or years. So when Moriarty appears to kill himself, effectively backing Sherlock into a corner, Sherlock completely loses his shit for a few minutes because he’s genuinely horrified by what he’s going to have to do.
I think this is the key point. When he stepped out onto the rooftop to meet Moriarty, Sherlock had a plan to try to fake his death if needs must. But he did not think that he was going to have to pretend to be dead for a long time without telling John.
Sherlock steps up to the edge of the roof and starts to mentally prepare himself to jump. At that point, John’s cab pulls around in front of Bart’s and John gets out.
There are several important things to note about John’s arrival.
Since Moriarty was the one who drew John away, I think we can safely conclude that Moriarty also arranged for John to return to Bart’s when and where he did. Moriarty knew that as soon as John got to 221B and saw that Mrs. Hudson was fine (Moriarty knows she’s home, because his sniper is there to keep an eye on her), John would immediately realize something was wrong and try to return to Sherlock. Moriarty probably had minions posing as the cab drivers who took John to and from Baker Street. We already know that he had Jeff Hope working for him in ASIP, and Moriarty also commandeered a cab for himself earlier in TRF, so Moriarty must have some sort of inside access to/control over at least one London cab company, and it would have been easy for him to arrange for a cab to be waiting outside 221B to bring John back to Bart’s and drop him off right around when Moriarty believed Sherlock would be about to jump.
As a result, John is there to witness Sherlock’s fake suicide. This is another huge part of Moriarty’s evil plan! Moriarty didn’t want to just force Sherlock to fake his death and then not be able to tell John that he was alive, he wanted to make Sherlock fake his death in front of John. He wanted to make John witness it and for Sherlock to know that John was witnessing it. He’s checkmated Sherlock into deceiving John and breaking his heart in the absolute worst way possible. This is so evil!
John starts to walk around the ambulance station so that he can approach Bart’s, but Sherlock desperately asks him to turn around and go back the way he came. John complies, which means that he ends up on the other side of the ambulance station and can’t see the ground right in front of Bart’s where Sherlock knows he has to fall. I’ve been to Bart’s in person, so I can confirm that if you’re standing behind the ambulance station like that, it’s true that you can’t see that particular patch of ground. The ambulance station shields it from view pretty well.
Because of Moriarty’s threat about the snipers, once Sherlock saw John show up, Sherlock knew that he had to convince John that his suicide was real. The sniper would kill John if it looked like John didn’t believe it. So for that reason, Sherlock asks John to walk back around the way he came, so that he won’t see the inflatable. But listen to how much his voice shakes when he says it. :(
I think Moriarty intentionally had John dropped off where he did so that it would be easy for Sherlock to get John to stand in a place where he wouldn’t see the inflatable.
Related to this, since Sherlock didn’t know about the snipers ahead of time, there is no way he could have known where John’s sniper was positioned. This means that there is no way that Sherlock could have arranged the giant inflatable so that the sniper wouldn’t see it. (There’s a post that makes this point here.) This wasn’t a problem, though, just like the chalk rectangle wasn’t a problem, because Moriarty wanted Sherlock to survive and must have told his snipers that. John’s sniper wasn’t there to make sure Sherlock killed himself, he was there to make sure John believed that Sherlock had killed himself. After Sherlock falls, we’re shown that the sniper assigned to John keeps his sights on him for a long time after Sherlock hits the pavement. It’s only as John seems to accept the reality of Sherlock’s death that the sniper pulls the gun back and puts it away. The sniper was paying attention to John’s reaction, not just whether or not Sherlock jumped.
Basically, Sherlock’s plan only “worked” because it folded right into Moriarty’s plan. Sherlock thought that he was fooling Moriarty’s snipers and convincing them that he had killed himself, but really all he was doing was acting out what Moriarty wanted him to do, which was to convince John that he’d killed himself.
God, it’s so messed up and evil. Hats off to Moriarty for successfully playing extreme mind games and enacting treacherous cruelty.
Truly, though, if you only take one thing away from this discussion of Sherlock’s fall, let it be this: Sherlock did not plan to make John watch him kill himself. Sherlock never would have done that, and he didn’t! That piece of cruelty was all Moriarty’s. Moriarty was the one who got John outside of Bart’s and maneuvered him into position so that he’d have to watch the fall.
As John gets out of the cab, Sherlock calls him. Sherlock already sounds like he’s on the verge of tears at the very beginning of the phone call, and he starts to cry in earnest as he and John keep talking. There are also tons of heartbeats threaded in throughout the phone call scene.
I think Sherlock’s emotional behavior during his call with John was entirely genuine. Even if Sherlock knew that he would survive the fall and would eventually come back, he also knew that he was about to leave John for some unknown amount of time, and having to leave John like that hurt him terribly. But far more importantly, Sherlock knew that he was forcing John to experience something truly awful during that call and by jumping in front of him. Sherlock understood that John needed to believe that he was dead in order for John to be safe from Moriarty’s network during his absence, so he tried to make his suicide more believable by lying to John and saying that he was a fraud. Having to lie like that definitely hurt Sherlock, too, but I’m sure that Sherlock was far more upset about the fact that he knew he was about to pitch himself off a building in front of John, which he had never intended to do—Sherlock did not plan to make John watch! Sherlock was deeply upset that he had to do that to John.
This seems to be an uncommon belief in the fandom, but I honestly think that in the scenes where we see Sherlock acting for a case in S1-S2, he’s not very good at it. So I think that in the scenes throughout the show where Sherlock gets emotional with John, he’s not acting. Sherlock’s tears on the rooftop, the breaks in his voice as he talks to John over the phone, and his shaky, pained laugh after “No one could be that clever” / “You could” are far more convincing to me than Sherlock’s acting when he talks to Ian Monkford’s wife in TGG or pretends to be a mugged vicar in ASIB. Sherlock wasn’t acting when he had that phone call with John.
Sherlock has his call with John, then he tosses away his phone as if he has to throw away his heart in order to do what he has to do next. (Thanks to @sapierror for this.)
Sherlock jumps and hits the inflatable. He and Molly and whoever else was involved do whatever they need to do with the corpse and whatever else, and by the time John gets to Sherlock, Sherlock has fake blood on his face. Sherlock sticks the squash ball under his armpit and uses it to temporarily cut off circulation to the rest of his arm so that John can’t feel a pulse when he grabs Sherlock’s wrist. Sherlock brought the squash ball to the roof in case he needed to use that trick on Moriarty, but he ends up having to use it on John. :(
Believing that Moriarty has actually killed himself, Sherlock then sets off to take down the rest of Moriarty’s network so that he can keep John (and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson) safe. And as I’ve already discussed, he knows that he can’t tell John (or Lestrade or Mrs. Hudson) that he’s alive until he’s taken out the whole network.
Could Sherlock have somehow sent John a message to tell him the truth, but asked him to act like he still thought he was dead so that he wouldn’t get killed? Well, no. ASIB already told us why:
John: Tell him you’re alive. Irene: He’d come after me.
(Thanks to this post by @softlylock for first helping me put this together.)
That’s it. Sherlock knows John incredibly well, so he knows that John would never let him try to take down Moriarty’s network without him. And if John tries to come after Sherlock while Sherlock is on his mission, then it will be obvious to anyone watching John that he knows Sherlock is alive, and they’ll kill him. Sherlock can’t let that happen, so he doesn’t tell John that he’s alive.
Mycroft wasn’t on Moriarty’s list of people who will die if they know Sherlock is still alive, though, so Sherlock probably goes to Mycroft for help immediately after faking his death. Sherlock was reluctant to go to Mycroft earlier, but now that he believes Moriarty is dead, he thinks it’s safe to talk to him even if he was compromised before. Sherlock pulled off his fake suicide plan without Mycroft, but he definitely needs Mycroft now because he needs assistance from Mycroft and the British government to take down Moriarty’s network. To dismantle the network, Sherlock is basically going to have to return to the type of work that he used to do for MI6 before the show started. He needs to work that out with Mycroft and MI6, just like he worked with them in ASIB to save Irene from the terrorists in Karachi.
So, Sherlock goes to Mycroft after his fake suicide. Mycroft is able to inform their parents that Sherlock isn’t actually dead so that they don’t freak out and don’t come to the funeral, and then he helps Sherlock with his undercover work for the next year and a half.
But wait! you say. Why would Moriarty let Sherlock dismantle his network? Well, because allowing Sherlock to dismantle part of the network—Moriarty is far too good to let him take down the whole thing—supports the deception of Moriarty’s own fake suicide and lures Sherlock into a false sense of security. Letting Sherlock think that he’s actually dead and his network eradicated puts Moriarty in an excellent position to take Sherlock completely by surprise when he returns later on to try to kill him for real. Moriarty is obsessed with Sherlock and with destroying him, and we’ve already seen that he’s willing to dispense a great deal of money and trash his client’s plans in order to mess with Sherlock. With that in mind, I think Moriarty would be perfectly willing to sacrifice part of his network to his overall masterplan for Sherlock.
Mycroft is still under Moriarty’s thumb, but Sherlock doesn’t know that. So it’s likely that Moriarty instructed Mycroft to help Sherlock take down the network, but only up to a point. Mycroft knows that Sherlock is allowed to destroy parts of it, but not the whole thing. Perhaps that’s why Mycroft wades into the field in Serbia to extract Sherlock when he does; Sherlock was meant to believe that Serbia was the last link, so Mycroft gets him out once he gets to Serbia and lets Sherlock believe that the Serbian operation was the last piece that he needed to take down.
When S2 was being filmed, some fans who were on set recorded a scene that shows Moriarty and Mycroft shaking hands, probably somewhere outside Bart’s. This scene was either cut from TRF or was intended to be used later in a flashback, and this is probably where it comes in. Mycroft and Moriarty had some sort of agreement regarding what to do next, so they shook hands on it after Sherlock and Moriarty both faked their deaths.
Overall, Moriarty’s plan works out beautifully for him. Sherlock had planned to fake his own death, but Moriarty backs him into a corner and turns Sherlock’s plan into an emotionally devastating disaster with far-reaching consequences for Sherlock and John by using the snipers to force Sherlock to deceive John and to leave him behind for an extended period of time without being able to tell him that he’s still alive. In S3, we see that it’s not the simple fact that Sherlock left that ended up being so devastating—it’s the fact that he lied to John and didn’t tell him he was alive. Even if Sherlock didn’t plan to include John in his fake suicide plan, he never intended to lie to John like that for so long; that was the part that Moriarty forced him into. So, all in all, the heartbreak that results from the fall is still Moriarty’s doing as the central villain.
Sherlock’s explanation of the fall in TEH
In TEH, we get three different explanations for how Sherlock faked his death and survived: the one Anderson gives Lestrade at the start of the episode, the one the goth fangirl gives the Empty Hearse fan club, and the one Sherlock gives Anderson towards the end of the episode, which is the same as what Sherlock started to tell John in one of the restaurants earlier. The episode presents those first two explanations as fake and presents Sherlock’s as the “real” one.
But several of the key elements of Sherlock’s explanation are untruthful, too. Sherlock did not know about the snipers ahead of time, he did not have a neat masterplan with Mycroft worked out weeks in advance, and he did not have an airtight plan that accounted for every eventuality on the rooftop. Most importantly, Sherlock did not plan to make John watch his fall and he did not intend to disappear for more than a year without telling John. Sherlock’s explanation to Anderson does nothing to explain why he did that, because it doesn’t get into the real reason why Sherlock jumped: his love for John.
But what do you do when you sell a big lie? You wrap it up in the truth to make it more palatable. So the details of how Sherlock survived the fall while concealing his survival from John are probably true: the inflatable, the corpse, and the squash ball. I suspect that the real explanation for how Sherlock arranged and survived the fall is somewhat simpler than what he spins out for Anderson, though. Sherlock’s plan likely included those three elements but was otherwise spare and risky, and he only got away with it because Moriarty already knew what he was trying to do and let him do it.
Interestingly, even Anderson doubts Sherlock’s explanation. There’s no reason for the writers to include Anderson’s doubt other than as a clue for the audience: a little nudge to tell us that we should see that there’s something off here, too. And this fits very well, because Anderson is basically a representation of the fandom in TEH!
In the moment when he first starts to doubt Sherlock’s explanation, Anderson makes a very good point: “That doesn’t make any sense. How could you be sure John would stand on that exact spot? I mean, what if he’d moved?” Yes, exactly! As I’ve been saying, Sherlock didn’t have the ability to make sure that John’s sniper wouldn’t see the inflatable, because he didn’t know about the snipers ahead of time. And Moriarty was the one who arranged for John to have to watch. Anderson’s observation points us towards both of these conclusions, so the writers have used Anderson to give us a nudge to figure out two of the things about Sherlock’s explanation that are false.
Why did Sherlock lie to John in TEH and say that he planned everything with Mycroft? I’ll say more about this in the TEH section, but I think the most important reason is that Sherlock was afraid to tell John that he was in love with him. He didn’t want to have to tell John that Moriarty backed him into a corner by threatening John’s life and that he would have done literally anything to save John. Nor did he want to have to tell John that he’d spent the last 1.5 years dismantling Moriarty’s network so that John would be safe and so that he could return to him, and that his fear for John’s safety was why he didn’t get in touch with him sooner. Saying all of that would have been too much like a love confession for Sherlock, and after John reacted with anger instead of joy when Sherlock returned, Sherlock didn’t feel ready to bare his heart to John so fully.
I think that at first, Sherlock intended to confess his feelings to John as soon as he got back to London. Sherlock thought that Moriarty had killed himself on the rooftop, so once he’d convinced himself that he’d successfully eradicated Moriarty’s network, Sherlock didn’t have the threat of Moriarty to hold him back anymore. And Sherlock thought that John would be “delighted” to see him! Sherlock probably thought that he and John were going to have an incredibly joyful, romantic reunion, and then they’d finally get together. But when he revealed himself to John, John didn’t react to his return at all how Sherlock had expected or hoped he would. After John’s anger at the Landmark, I think Sherlock started to doubt what he had thought he knew about John’s feelings. He became worried that John may not actually love him after all, or that even if he once had, he didn’t feel that way anymore. As a result, Sherlock didn’t feel ready to make himself so vulnerable by revealing to John that he was in love with him. And of course, when Sherlock returned, he also immediately learned that John was with Mary, which complicates things.
On top of all of that, Sherlock also didn’t want to admit to John that he’d been so thoroughly outplayed by Moriarty. We saw in THOB that Sherlock sometimes fears that his impressiveness as a detective is the only reason why John even sticks around at all, so Sherlock doesn’t want to seem incompetent and fallible in front of John.
So. Sherlock’s explanation of the fall in TEH likely provides us with the technical details of how Sherlock survived the fall, but the core pieces of the explanation beyond those technical details are untruthful. Ultimately, however, the details of how Sherlock faked his death and survived don’t matter. John makes this exact point in TEH, voicing what really matters: “I don’t care how you faked it, Sherlock. I wanna know why.” It’s not actually important to the story how Sherlock did it, but it is important why. The fact that Moriarty forced Sherlock to jump so that he would damage his relationship with John is the why, and that’s the piece of Sherlock’s fake suicide that is essential to the overall arc of the narrative.
One final point on all of this. Sherlock losing control of events in TRF and getting backed into a corner by Moriarty is also an important plot point within Sherlock’s character development and the overall arc of the romance.
Sherlock makes the exact same mistakes at the ends of S1, S2, and S3. At the end of each series, he attempts to confront a villain by himself, genuinely believing that he’s prepared to meet them because he’s solved a specific puzzle, only to have the rug pulled out from under him and for the villain to back him into a corner. This happens with Moriarty and the missile plans at the pool in TGG, with Moriarty and the key code on the rooftop in TRF, and with Magnussen and the “Appledore vaults” in HLV. Each time, Sherlock tries to take on a villain without confiding his full plan in John, and each time, it turns out that Sherlock’s cleverness isn’t enough. He can’t do any of this on his own: he needs John. Sherlock will only be able to defeat Moriarty and the other villains on the show when he is fully honest with John and commits to always doing the most important things with John. (Chryse’s masterful treatment of this theme in A River Without Banks is one reason why that story is the Johnlock fanfic of all time, and part of why I never shut up about it.)
The rest of the episode
TRF ends by showing us how deeply Sherlock’s suicide hurt John.
During John’s therapy appointment with Ella, we get this exchange:
Ella: The stuff that you wanted to say, but didn’t say it. John: Yeah. Ella: Say it now. John: (in a choked voice that’s barely there) No. I’m sorry. I can’t.
What John wanted to say to Sherlock and never did must have been “I love you.” There is no reason for this dialogue to be here if it’s not about a love confession. Moreover, the exchange between Ella and John parallels Sherlock’s aborted love confession on the tarmac in HLV.
Sherlock: John, there’s something I should say, I’ve meant to say always and then never have. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet again, I might as well say it now.
John was in love with Sherlock but never told him. And in this scene with Ella, we see that with Sherlock gone, John still can’t bear to voice aloud such an intimate thought, something that he was never even able to bring himself to share with Sherlock. Perhaps for John, speaking it out loud feels like it will make the fact that he lost not just his best friend, but the person he was in love with feel even more real. Maybe naming exactly what he lost when Sherlock fell would have made losing Sherlock somehow even worse.
We also witness John’s speech to Sherlock’s headstone at the graveyard.
John: You told me once that you weren’t a hero. There were times I didn’t even think you were human. But let me tell you this: you were the best man, and the most human…human being that I’ve ever known, and no one will ever convince me that you told me a lie. So…there. I was so alone, and I owe you so much.
This is a very beautiful statement of John’s love for Sherlock. It shows that John saw Sherlock for who he truly was, and he loved him for it.
Next: Many Happy Returns & The Empty Hearse
a study of phil bullying dan on the phodcast~
never beating the cat allegations 😸
NAMI and VIVI ONE PIECE season 2
ONE PIECE 2.02 "Good Whale Hunting"
really good stuff happening in opla s2
That one time I got so obsessed with @hazel-athena ‘s Facade that I blacked out for 2 weeks and woke up to a mountain of sketches
good rpf morning i hope everyone has a good rpf monday and a wonderful rpf week and a blessed rpf month and a heavenly rpf year
it's impressive that they have a way of feeding each other that makes me feel like i shouldn't be watching it
cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see etc etc



