2.3

The Reichenbach Fall

WRITTEN BY Stephen Thompson

DIRECTED BY Toby Haynes

ORIGINAL AIR DATE January 15, 2012

Jim Moriarty returns to make everyone question everything they ever thought they knew about Sherlock.

“Oh, I may be on the side of the angels, but don’t think for one second that I am one of them.”

We’ve giggled at Sherlock’s arrogance, laughed out loud at his putdowns directed at the police force, and shaken our heads when he mocks John for being a less intelligent life form than him. But in “The Reichenbach Fall,” Sherlock’s hubris turns out to be his (almost) fatal flaw.

When people first meet Sherlock, they can’t help but be impressed. When he looks at John’s phone and deduces John’s situation, his personal wealth, and family secrets, we’re all amazed. John is in awe, and Sherlock basks in the pride of knowing he just mesmerized his new friend. But very quickly it starts to get tired. Some of Doyle’s stories begin with Holmes staring at Watson and saying something that would suggest he’s reading his mind. By the time he explains that Watson looked up from his paper, checked his watch, looked out the window, stared at a painting, looked back at the paper, and then glanced at the bookshelf and therefore must have been thinking of the Afghan war, every reader’s patience is growing a little thin. Similarly, we see John trying to get Sherlock to stop “showing off” all the time. In “The Blind Banker,” Sebastian mocks Sherlock and says people hated him for doing his thing. In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” Sherlock begins deducing things about Henry’s train trip and John tells him he’s showing off, to which Sherlock (suffering through nicotine withdrawal) bellows, “Of course, I am a show-off. That’s what we do.” Henry, on the other hand, is wonderstruck by Sherlock’s genius.

Moriarty loved watching Sherlock in action in the first season. Moriarty’s closest interaction with Sherlock was through Jeff the cab driver in “A Study in Pink,” but in “The Great Game,” Moriarty speaks indirectly to Sherlock by forcing others to repeat his words, like some deranged Cyrano de Bergerac. He tells Sherlock — through one of his bomb-laden victims — that he loves to watch him dance. He puts Sherlock through one test after another, delighting at seeing the great detective at work. When he meets Sherlock at the pool, he seems to enjoy every moment, and even tells Sherlock he can’t bring himself to kill him (he’s saving that for another day). Moriarty can’t stand the thought of being the only person on the planet so ingenious, so when it’s Sherlock’s time to die, Moriarty wants to make it special.

In “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock revealed to Adler that he had taken her pulse, and that was how he knew what she was thinking when she was coming on to him. But when she agreed to help Moriarty decode a message by going through Sherlock, she was allowing Moriarty to take Sherlock’s pulse, to size up the situation and see if he would fall for her tricks. What Sherlock does for Irene is show off. As Mycroft later said, Sherlock is so caught up in trying to impress Adler that he doesn’t pause to consider what information he might be giving to her. Realizing that with a little bit of praise, Sherlock’s pride would be so strong he’d lose sight of his morality, Moriarty uses that hubris against him.

As Sherlock’s fame grows and he becomes more recognizable — to John’s chagrin, since a private detective’s very occupation relies on anonymity — he becomes more aloof and distant, tossing aside meaningful gifts from people and making snide remarks about their usefulness. John has to play the good cop to Sherlock’s bad one more and more, and when Sherlock encounters Kitty in the men’s washroom, he doesn’t have John nearby to soften what he says. He’s vicious in his deduction of who she is, becoming more menacing as he leans in and says, “You … repel … me.” By the time he gets to Moriarty’s trial, all Sherlock does is scoff at the jury and the judge and show off, even correcting the barrister questioning him, much to Moriarty’s delight. The villain stands in the dock, chomping on gum and smirking as he watches the room become more uncomfortable in Sherlock’s presence than in his own, until Sherlock, unsurprisingly, goes one step too far and ends up in the cell beside Moriarty. There’s a wonderful cinematic moment when Sherlock’s back is to us as he enters the cell, and Moriarty is on the other side of the wall, facing us. Sherlock turns to look forward, and Moriarty turns his back on us. Yin and yang indeed.

Sherlock wants the world to see how smart he is — a vulnerability Moriarty is only too happy to exploit. It’s why he sent Adler to get Sherlock to decode the seat numbers on the Bond Air jet, because he knew Sherlock would want to impress her. Sherlock’s face is all over the papers, whereas Moriarty traditionally works anonymously, using conduits to act as his mouthpieces. When Moriarty pulls off the perfect criminal trifecta at the beginning of the episode, breaking into the Tower of London (Andrew Scott is marvelous in this scene as he dances his way up to the glass case), the Bank of England, and Pentonville Prison simultaneously, he risks having a more recognizable face than Sherlock’s. But even with these high-profile stunts, he redirects attention back to the detective, first by writing “GET SHERLOCK” in giant letters on the glass, then by having his lawyer call him to the witness stand in his trial. At this point he’s got all of the puzzle pieces together to reveal the end of his long con: pinning everything on Sherlock. Moriarty knew cops like Anderson and Donovan suspected Sherlock anyway; he knew when he let him go at the pool that Sherlock’s hubris would put his face in all the papers; he knew that everyone perceives the sleuth’s deductions to be almost like magic tricks. So it was time to reveal the biggest trick of all: that Sherlock was Moriarty all along.

The scene where Jim reveals that he is actually Richard Brook, a small-time actor who has been used and abused by Sherlock, is superb. Jim cowers in the corner, holding his arms in front of him, his hair messy, his shirt unclean, looking like a man who is exhausted by having to play the villain when really he’s just “The Storyteller.” At first the viewer scoffs at Kitty’s gullibility and the nerve Moriarty has to think he can so easily do away with Sherlock. But then Kitty pulls out Richard Brook’s CV, press clippings, interviews, and “Richard” begs them to look at the DVD as his voice wavers in fear before the dark specter of Sherlock. The real magic of this scene is looking at the faces of everyone in it. Kitty is smug, because she is thrilled to know that the man so repelled by her is actually a master villain. John just looks confused, never wavering in his belief in Sherlock. Jim looks terrified, with his back against the wall and his eyes wide with horror. As Kitty rushes over to the corner to get the CV and John is talking to her, Jim rubs his hands over his face, then pulls his hands aside and looks at Sherlock, a goofy smile spreading over his face as if to say, “Gotcha!” And Sherlock’s reaction is the best of all. He stands as if in awe, the reality of what Moriarty has done dawning on him, a “why didn’t I think of that first” look on his face. He stares at Jim, mouth slightly open, as Jim grins at him, and a smile twitches in the corner of Sherlock’s mouth.

He is impressed. Really impressed.

But the awe quickly passes, and the fury sets in. He growls at Moriarty and yells at him the way a parent would a child to “Stop it NOW!” before he chases him up the stairs. It’s a fantastic scene, capped by Kitty’s haughty “You repel me” line hissed at Sherlock as he runs out the door.

Since Moriarty works alone, there’s no one who could refute his charges (except for Sherlock). Tell the world that you’re a nobody, and all eyes are suddenly upon the detective and off you. We live in a society that takes great pleasure in seeing celebrities fall. No matter how much we love them, everyone loves a good scandal more. And now Sherlock, the man who seemed to know everything, who could solve cases like magic, who was superior to everyone else in the room … now that man is nothing but a con artist and a liar. He’s not superhuman, he’s just ordinarily corrupt.

However, where Moriarty works alone, Sherlock has friends. Moriarty sees them as a disadvantage, as does Mycroft. But it’s these friends who help Sherlock kick his addictions, who give him an apartment in which to live, who shoot cab drivers trying to give him poison pills, who put up with his arrogance, who pick up the groceries for him, who pay people to watch and protect him, who love him. (Yes, they often loathe him as well, but they mostly love him.) If season one was about Sherlock and John getting to know one another, season two is about the humanization of Sherlock. Through examinations of love and fear, we see that, despite his protestations to the contrary, he is not a sociopath but a human being who has trouble socializing. He is capable of love and fear, of apologizing to friends, and of caring about them. When a thug beat Mrs. Hudson and put a gun to her head, Sherlock’s retribution was swift and violent. When Moriarty strapped a bomb onto John, Sherlock was willing to do whatever it took to save his friend’s life. When he realized he had humiliated Molly Hooper beyond reason, he immediately became humble, apologized, and kissed her on the cheek. Aside from the occasional hiccup, he seems to be trying harder with her this season than before.

No one has been humiliated by Sherlock worse than Molly has, and yet in this episode she continues to stand by him. No longer fawning over him, this quiet, shy person is the one who meekly deduces Sherlock, silencing him in the process. Sherlock constantly tells everyone that they see but they don’t observe. Molly steps up and surprises Sherlock with her declaration that she has been observing him, and notices that he looks sad when he thinks no one is looking at him. She draws a connection between Sherlock and her father, who acted the same way, and when Sherlock counters with “You can see me,” she quickly brushes him off, saying, “I don’t count.” Sherlock is speechless and looks at her like she matters for the first time. It’s as if he thought Molly was a speck of lint that he kept trying to sweep off his exquisitely tailored coat and now he realizes she’s actually a thread that helps hold that coat together. Her assertion not only shows Sherlock that he has underestimated her, but it also says something about his own personality: he’s willing to put up a positive front for the sake of his friends and slumps into sadness only when he thinks they’re not looking. Molly offers herself to him if he ever needs her, immediately editing her statement in case he mistook her words for a sexual advance, then she leaves the room before he’s able to say anything further to her.

So when he returns to her later in the episode, and he looks like someone who knows he’s going to die, the scene is so much more powerful because of the earlier conversation. The entire scene is written to look like a man sexually propositioning a woman on the eve of his death, causing our minds to wander back to Irene Adler’s question in “A Scandal in Belgravia”: “If it was the end of the world, if this was the very last night, would you have dinner with me?” Sherlock now believes this could be his very last night, and he appears to be asking Molly to “have dinner” with him. In the season two premiere, he told Irene, “I imagine John Watson thinks love’s a mystery to me but the chemistry is incredibly simple, and very destructive.” In “The Reichenbach Fall,” he’s not propositioning Molly for sex, but telling her that he truly does love her as a friend, and notices her, and that she means a lot to him. And that assertion from him probably means more to her than any tumble in the sheets. Like Sherlock’s other friends (and despite Sherlock’s protestations to the contrary in “The Hounds of Baskerville,” the word is plural in his case), Molly cares for him and wants to help him in any way she can.

And so, when his friends’ lives are threatened, Sherlock first comes up with a way to save them as he stands on the rooftop and faces Moriarty. And when that solution is taken away from him in shockingly graphic fashion, he’s forced to do the only thing he can: sacrifice himself to save them.

In “The Final Problem,” the story this episode is based on, Holmes and Moriarty fight to the death over the Reichenbach Falls, and just before falling to his (apparent) death, Holmes pauses to write a goodbye note to Watson. It’s rather formal and gives him the whereabouts of a report that will help convict Moriarty’s gang, but he also expresses his regret that his death will no doubt bring Watson much pain. Watson is not by Holmes’s side because he has been called away to see a sick woman (as a trick by Moriarty), and Holmes confesses that he suspected the call was a fraud, but he let him go anyway to spare Watson from seeing Holmes die. In “The Reichenbach Fall,” Sherlock is the one who plants the fake alarm over Mrs. Hudson and forces John away from the scene, but when John returns — as Sherlock no doubt knew he would — Sherlock calls him and says goodbye over the phone. “This phone call, it’s my note,” Sherlock tells him in a nod to the original story. “It’s what people do, don’t they? Leave a note?” What happens next is so shocking, fans were exchanging theories for the next two years waiting for the solution to be revealed in the season three premiere. The three themes of the season come together when Sherlock’s love for his friends allows him to overcome the fear of death.

Martin Freeman gives a tour de force performance in this episode. First, in the opening scene, as he sits in his therapist’s office several months after Sherlock’s death and can barely speak the words; then, as he flips through the materials that Kitty hands him at her flat, his mind racing about what all of this new information could mean; third, the way he reacts to Sherlock’s threat of suicide and actual jump; and finally, his total heartbreak standing beside Sherlock’s grave. Freeman has shown us time and again what a titanic dramatic actor he is. If we could sum up in one word who John was before he met Sherlock, it would be lonely. The strains of “Watson’s Theme” play whenever he fears being alone or abandoned again, returning to a dull life without Sherlock. And at Sherlock’s grave, he acknowledges that. “I was so alone and I owe you so much,” he says, with one hand on the tombstone. He is so utterly wonderful in this scene, stammering through his words, fighting back tears while expressing his deepest sorrow to a friend who is gone. He is broken. But he will not become the John that he was before Sherlock. Perhaps Sherlock has shown him there is more to life for him, and he will go out and seek it.

But without Sherlock, it won’t be half as exci—

Waitaminute … who’s standing behind that tree?

HIGHLIGHT John reassuring Sherlock that he believes he’s the real deal: “Well, nobody could fake being such an annoying dick all the time.”

DID YOU NOTICE?

FROM ACD TO BBC Moriarty’s repetition of “the final problem” is a nod to the story of the same title, from which much of this episode is taken.

At the very beginning of “The Reichenbach Fall,” Sherlock is credited with Peter Ricoletti’s capture. In “The Musgrave Ritual,” Holmes is recounting some of their problem cases, and mentions “Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife” among them.

When Sherlock is making deductions about Kitty, he looks at her wrist and says, “Those marks on your forearm: edge of a desk. You’ve been typing in a hurry, probably.” In “A Case of Identity,” Holmes similarly notices a woman’s wrist: “The double line a little above the wrist, where the typewritist presses against the table, was beautifully defined.”

When Lestrade is being interrogated by the superintendent, he says he’s not the only senior officer who regularly used Sherlock, and that Gregson did also. Gregson was the other main detective in the Sherlock Holmes stories; perhaps he’ll play a part on the series soon.

Although we caught a quick glimpse of it in “The Hounds of Baskerville,” we finally see the inside of the Diogenes Club in this episode. In “The Greek Interpreter,” when we are first introduced to Mycroft, Watson and Holmes visit him at the Diogenes Club. It’s described as a place where the introverts of London, who hate social contact but want to get out of their houses, developed a society where they could go and read in peace. Holmes describes it as a place that “now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town,” and then admits he quite likes it there himself. There’s a strict no-talking rule in the club, because introverts don’t exactly react well to conversation. That’s why John gets hauled out of the room for talking.

When investigating the boarding school kidnappings, Sherlock is able to draw several conclusions from the footprints in the hallway. In several stories, Holmes looks at footprints and sees them as being just as telling as fingerprints: he is often able to deduce height, gait, gender, and other characteristics.

The boarding school case is taken from “The Adventure of the Priory School,” where a wealthy student similarly goes missing and Holmes follows trails of tire tracks to find him.

While investigating the disappearance at the boarding school, the clue that John finds is a book of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” Holmes receives a letter forwarding him a case involving vampirism, and he says to Watson, “We seem to have been switched on to a Grimms’ fairy tale.”

On Richard Brook’s CV, it says he’s represented by the Mountford Agency. Lord Mountford is a character in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlockian short story “An Impression of the Regency.” Also, the press clipping inside states that Richard is soft-spoken, which is how Moriarty is described in “The Final Problem.”

Mrs. Hudson talking graveside about all of the problems Sherlock caused for her is backed by Watson in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” where he describes Mrs. Hudson as a “long-suffering woman” and notes that Holmes’s “incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.”

Moriarty manages to convince people that Sherlock is indeed the arch-criminal based on the extraordinary knowledge he shows in various cases. In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” Holmes says to Watson, “I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal.”

INTERESTING FACTS

NITPICKS

OOPS

SHERLOCKIANS WEIGH IN

Charles Prepolec

Charles V. Prepolec is the editor of five Sherlock Holmes anthologies, including the Gaslight Sherlock Holmes series for EDGE SF&F. An active Sherlockian for more than 25 years, he was designated a Master Bootmaker in 2006 by Canada’s national Sherlock Holmes society. Recent publications include Beyond Rue Morgue: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1st Detective (Titan Books, 2013) and Professor Challenger: New Worlds, Lost Places (EDGE SF&F, 2015).

Do you think Sherlock is a faithful interpretation of the characters of Watson and Holmes? Why or why not?

Moffat and Gatiss have done the unthinkable with their BBC Sherlock series; they’ve managed to shake off 100 years of accumulated dust, as well as the perceived stodginess associated with the Victorian era, and put the characters of Holmes and Watson back where they belong, which is to say in exciting, contemporary, cutting-edge character-driven stories as Arthur Conan Doyle originally intended. Conan Doyle didn’t write quaint little period-piece mysteries, he wrote vibrant adventures, and that appears largely to be what we have in Sherlock. The writers get the universal nature of the characters and have done a superb job in dragging them into the 21st century and making them relevant to modern audiences.

What is your favorite aspect of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s reimagining of the stories? What is your least favorite?

The best element of the series is in the casting of the leads. Cumberbatch and Freeman are, without putting too fine a point on it, damn near perfect in their respective roles. They’d have made a fine Holmes and Watson had they been cast in a more traditional period take on the stories, but that they are equally excellent in a series without the usual trappings shows just how lucky, or canny, Moffat and Gatiss were in their casting. Where the series has gone a bit astray is in executing their stories. There was a charming, almost tentative “dare we do this” nature to the first series that has since given way to a self-satisfied smugness and fan pandering which has been detrimental to the good works achieved early on. One can only hope that a fourth series is more concerned with good storytelling than lip service to the massive online cult fandom that has grown around the show.

What has been your favorite film/TV adaptation of Doyle’s stories so far?

Picking a favorite Sherlock Holmes film or television adaptation is always a thorny proposition. Different productions have different elements of appeal at different times. Sometimes it can be about the actor playing Holmes, in other cases it may be about the look and feel of a production or in how cleverly an adaptation translates a story to the screen. When pushed though, I have to fall back on the 1987 Granada television adaptation of The Sign of Four with Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke as Holmes and Watson. It happens to be my favorite Sherlock Holmes story, so I have a bias towards it, and the Granada adaptation manages to successfully bring all the elements of adventure, creepiness, romance, and general sense of fun that I love about the story to the screen. Of the BBC Sherlock series I’d say “A Study in Pink” remains my favorite to date, although both “The Great Game” and “A Scandal in Belgravia” are near seconds.