Sherlock Character Analysis

1. Starting premises

To make sense of the rooftop scene and its place within the narrative of the show, there are a few important starting premises that we need to lay out.

(1) First: TJLC. BBC Sherlock is a romance between Sherlock and John, and the entire show is structured around the narrative of Sherlock and John’s love story. Viewers are supposed to have fun with the show by trying to decode the subtext, thus cracking the mystery of Sherlock and John’s love story (see LSIT’s meta here for more on this). I believe that the writers initially planned to end the show with an on-screen, fully actualized romantic relationship between Sherlock and John, and that belief is a guiding light for a lot of my analysis of the show. This leads us neatly into point #2.

(2) 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 achieves this brilliantly all throughout S2! (This is an idea that I’ve written about in much more depth in an enormous meta project that I have fully drafted and that I hope to post at some point.) This is crucial to Moriarty’s plan for the rooftop, as I’ll explain.

(3) The writers initially intended to bring Moriarty back after S3. There’s lots of evidence for this: the “Miss Me?” message at the end of HLV, but also the myriad clues throughout S3 indicating that Mary is the Sebastian Moran character from ACD canon and works for Moriarty, and the fact that TAB is pretty thoroughly committed to the idea that Moriarty is still the show’s central antagonist and that the plotline surrounding him has not yet been resolved. For one interpretation of Moriarty’s long game and some speculation on what the writers might have originally had in store, I highly recommend LSIT’s M-Theory meta.

For some reason that we’ll probably never know, the writers changed their mind before making S4 and scrapped their original plan for Moriarty—or S4 is John’s alibi for how he and Sherlock killed Mary, S4 is Sherlock’s coma dream after Mary shot him in HLV, etc., take your pick, and the writers did actually intend to bring Moriarty back in the unmade S5. For this meta, the main point to keep in mind is just that I believe that when they wrote the rooftop scene in TRF and then Sherlock’s fake explanation in TEH, the writers intended for Moriarty to have faked his own death on the rooftop, too, and were planning to bring him back after S3. (Sherlock didn’t realize this, though—he believed that Moriarty actually died in TRF.)

(4) Put these first three points together, and you get my personal take on where the show was initially headed. Since Sherlock is a love story and Moriarty is the central antagonist, I think that in the original ending for the show, one of two things was going to have to happen: either (a) only after Sherlock and John had defeated Moriarty once and for all could they become a romantic couple, or (b) only by becoming a romantic couple could Sherlock and John defeat Moriarty once and for all. This idea is also important to my take on the rooftop scene, as I’ll explain.

Okay, I hope you’re with me so far. Now that we’ve got some ground rules, let’s keep going.

2. An explanation of what happened in TRF—how and why Moriarty faked Sherlock’s death

First off, I think it’s important to understand that throughout TRF, Moriarty was always several steps ahead of Sherlock. At no point does Sherlock appear in control of events; he’s always reacting to Moriarty and not the other way around. 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. Over the course of the episode, Sherlock starts to realize that he’s become trapped by Moriarty’s plan and starts searching for a way out.

The night before the rooftop scene, Sherlock thinks he’s found it when he believes that he’s figured out Moriarty’s computer key code.

After leaving Kitty’s flat and talking to Molly (which I’m going to talk about more in a bit), Sherlock goes to one of the labs at Bart’s and texts John to ask him to join him there. When John arrives, Sherlock is genuinely fixated on the code. As soon as John walks in the room, 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, he says, then they can defeat Moriarty by using it to destroy his Richard Brook persona. A moment later, Sherlock then has what he thinks is an epiphany—he’s thinks he’s figured out the code, and that it’s the rhythm that Moriarty tapped out on his knee when he visited 221B. Immediately after realizing this, Sherlock texts Moriarty to invite him to the rooftop so that he can confront him.

There are two very important things to note about this. First, Sherlock invites Moriarty to the rooftop as soon as he thinks that he’s figured out the code. Sherlock genuinely believes that the code is how he can beat Moriarty, so once he’s got that figured out—and not a moment before—he thinks he’s ready to confront Moriarty. Second, Sherlock doesn’t tell John that he thinks he’s figured out the code or that he’s texted Moriarty and plans to confront him. Why? Because Sherlock wants to keep John safe, and he doesn’t want John there for his showdown with Moriarty.

These two points are incredibly important because they show that Sherlock’s actions at the end of TRF are an exact repeat of his crucial 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 that he’d beaten Moriarty at his own game by finding the missile plans before Moriarty had contacted him about them and started a timer. Sherlock also didn’t tell John what he was doing or ask him to come with him in TGG, which led to John getting kidnapped and Sherlock getting trapped in a position where Moriarty could use John against him as leverage. The exact same thing happens with the rooftop in TRF. Sherlock thinks that he’s figured everything out by discovering the computer key code and arranges to meet Moriarty without telling John. But once again, Moriarty is way ahead of Sherlock, has a plan to use John as leverage 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 gives him. Remember, in TGG, Sherlock and John escaped only because Moriarty got the call from Irene and decided to let them go.

Here’s another important point. Once Sherlock texts Moriarty in TRF, Sherlock isn’t in control of the timing for what happens next. Sherlock has to wait for Moriarty to announce himself ready to meet, and we see that he stays up all night waiting. In the morning, Sherlock only leaves for the rooftop once Moriarty has texted him to say that he’s ready. This means that Moriarty is the one who picks the time for his and Sherlock’s meeting in the morning and Moriarty is the one who has control over the timing for everything that happens after Sherlock goes up onto the rooftop. We are directly shown that Sherlock could not have timed any of that.

Once he’s ready to meet Sherlock that morning, Moriarty draws John away from Bart’s with a fake phone call about Mrs. Hudson getting shot. This was not Sherlock’s doing, it was Moriarty’s! How do we know? Several ways.

(1) First, it’s literally in the final shooting script. The final shooting script for TRF 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 them 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 that it wouldn’t be too obvious to the viewers that Moriarty lured John away, and thus to make it just a little harder for us to figure out that Moriarty orchestrated everything.

(2) The timing for the phone call and Moriarty’s text to Sherlock only make sense if Moriarty were the one who called John away. Sherlock texted Moriarty the night before, as soon as he had his false epiphany about the key code. If Sherlock had a plan to send John away, then it would have made sense for him to do it immediately after he figured out the code and for him to have arranged to have met Moriarty right then, rather than giving Moriarty time to prepare. But that’s not what happens, because Sherlock isn’t in control. Sherlock has to wait for Moriarty to make the next move.

The timing makes perfect sense if it were Moriarty. Literally as soon as John leaves the lab, Moriarty texts Sherlock to say that he’s waiting on the rooftop. This means that Moriarty must have been responsible for the phone call. He got everything set up around the rooftop for Sherlock’s fake suicide overnight, then went up to meet Sherlock there. When he was ready, he had someone make the phone call to John, waited a minute or so for John to take the call and leave, and then texted Sherlock. If Moriarty wasn’t the one behind the phone call, how could he have known to text Sherlock right after John left? The timing can’t be a coincidence…because remember what we say about coincidences.

(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 at all 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 ACD Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” 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 does this by sending Watson a message that says 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, 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 Holmes, Watson finds a letter from him left by the edge of the cliff where he’d faced off against Moriarty. In the letter, Holmes says that Moriarty allowed him to write the note as a final goodbye and admits that he suspected that the message calling Watson away was a hoax, but implies that he allowed Watson to leave because he wanted him to be safe.

The events of TRF are basically an exact replica of this. Since the writers kept so much of this the same, I think we can safely conclude that it’s Moriarty who draws John away.

Sorry for going on about that a bit, but I think Moriarty drawing John away is really important because it helps demonstrates that Moriarty was the one in control of events that morning.

Anyway. After John leaves and Sherlock gets the text from Moriarty, Sherlock grabs his coat and heads up to the rooftop to meet him.

As Sherlock and Moriarty talk, Moriarty reveals two important things, both of which seem to completely shock Sherlock and totally throw him off balance. First, Moriarty shatters Sherlock’s theory about the computer key code by telling him that there was never any code at all. Then he reveals that he intends to force Sherlock to fake his own death.

Just like he told Sherlock at the pool, Moriarty’s plan in TRF isn’t to actually kill Sherlock yet. It’s still too early in the narrative for that, and Moriarty is still saving that up for whenever he returns in S4-S5. Instead, Moriarty purposely planned for the suicide in TRF to be fake because the fake suicide is his way of burning the heart out of Sherlock.

By forcing Sherlock to fake his own death in front of John, Moriarty sets into motion the events of S3 that prevent Sherlock and John from becoming a romantic couple and that lead to them both getting their hearts broken over and over again. Moriarty forces Sherlock to deceive John and leave him behind, separating Sherlock from John for 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 (nearly) engaged to someone else. Meanwhile, John’s efforts to move on from Sherlock by starting a relationship with Mary and his deep 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 both 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.

I think there’s a very good case to be made that in canon, Sherlock and John never fully recover from the consequences of the fall. Indeed, if we accept the events of S4 at face value and treat them as the ending to the show, then Moriarty comes out on top as the ultimate victor in the show, even though he never returned. In such a reading, Moriarty achieves his ultimate goal as the story’s central villain by breaking Sherlock’s heart and preventing Sherlock and John from ever becoming a romantic couple. Instead of killing Sherlock, Moriarty destroys him by damaging his relationship with John to the point that Sherlock and John are never able to be together. (Enter alternate S4 interpretations and post-S3 fanfic here.)

It’s honestly a very clever evil plan. Peak villain behavior.

This means that 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; he had to arrange for Sherlock to survive the fall so that his heart could be broken afterwards. Moriarty intended for this to be a fake suicide all along.

We learn in HLV that Moriarty faked his own death on the rooftop, too, and that the writers planned to bring him back as the main villain. Remember that Moriarty’s plan all along, as he said at the pool, was to burn the heart out of Sherlock and to then kill him after that. So Moriarty intended for Sherlock to survive this particular confrontation in S2, and then to try to kill him later, after he returned in S4-S5.

That’s the why. But how did Moriarty do it? Well, the writers never told us outright, but I think it’s likely that when Sherlock came up with his own fake explanation, he used a few elements of truth. Perhaps Moriarty really did use a giant inflatable and really did make sure that John was positioned on the other side of the ambulance bay so that he wouldn’t see Sherlock fall on it.

When Sherlock stepped up to the edge of the rooftop and looked down, he would have seen whatever was below him to break his fall and he would have understood that Moriarty intended for him to survive. But from Moriarty’s threat about the snipers, Sherlock also would have known that John was meant to believe that he had died, and that John wouldn’t be safe from Moriarty’s people if he knew that Sherlock had survived. For this reason, Sherlock believes that he can only return to London and reveal himself to John after he’s dismantled Moriarty’s network. Remember, in TRF, 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 puts his gun away. The sniper was paying attention to John’s reaction, not whether or not Sherlock jumped.

But wait! you say. Why would Moriarty just let Sherlock go after the fall, and why would he let him dismantle his network? Well, because allowing Sherlock to dismantle part of the network—Moriarty is too good to have let him take down the whole thing, of course—supports the deception of Moriarty’s own fake suicide and lures Sherlock into a false sense of security. Moriarty is obsessed with Sherlock and with destroying him, so I think he’d be perfectly willing to sacrifice part of his network to his overall masterplan by letting Sherlock take down a few strands of the web. Letting Sherlock think that he's actually dead and his network eradicated also puts Moriarty in an excellent position to take Sherlock completely by surprise when he returns later on. (LSIT writes about all of this brilliantly in her M-Theory meta, so you should definitely check that out if you’re curious about Moriarty’s overall masterplan involving Sherlock.)

Sherlock didn’t see any of this coming when he stepped up onto the rooftop, and he lied to John and Anderson in TEH when he claimed that he had arranged the fake suicide ahead of time with Mycroft, Molly, and several members of his homeless network. Obviously Sherlock did ask Molly to help him somehow (I’ll discuss that in a minute, promise), and in TEH we see that he got in touch with Mycroft at some point after his fall. But I think it’s clear from TRF that Sherlock didn’t have a plan with Mycroft beforehand.

That’s the general outline of what I think happened! The next two parts explain in more detail why I’m confident that Moriarty planned the whole thing and Sherlock did not.

3. How we know that Sherlock didn’t see the fall coming

To me, Sherlock’s reactions and facial expressions throughout the rooftop scene offer some of the strongest proof that he was not in control of the events that unfolded that morning and did not come to the rooftop prepared.

First, when Moriarty reveals that there’s no key code, Sherlock literally sways on his feet. I’m not kidding. He looks completely thrown by the revelation that there was never a key code, because he truly did believe that the code was his best weapon against Moriarty. I think the fact that Sherlock looks so shocked and devastated when Moriarty reveals that there isn’t a code offers proof that the code was Sherlock's only plan when he headed up to the rooftop.

When Moriarty then reveals that he plans to make Sherlock jump off the roof, Sherlock does not act like someone who saw this coming. Both asherlockstudy and LSIT insist that whenever we, the audience, see a character’s face when the other characters can’t, then that character’s expressions must be genuine. I agree! There is no reason for a character to be acting when all the other characters have their backs turned. And remember, Molly even told us earlier on in this very episode that Sherlock looks sad when he thinks John can’t see him. That serves to remind us that Sherlock reveals his true feelings when he thinks other people aren’t looking.

Moriarty says “Glad you chose a tall building—nice way to do it” to indicate that he plans 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. Take a look at Sherlock’s face in this moment:

asherlockstudy points us towards this moment in their meta here, which is also where the gif is from.

Look at the way that Sherlock raises his eyebrows ever so slightly, blinks rapidly, and pulls his head back as the implication of what Moriarty has said finally washes over him. 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. I mean, you can actually see the moment when Sherlock feels that terrible rush of horror that you experience when you learn something awful.

If you watch the rooftop scene closely, there are several other shots like this: moments where we see Sherlock express 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 he did not expect this before he stepped out onto the roof. (asherlockstudy explains this well in their main rooftop meta.)

As one example, when Sherlock steps up to the edge of the roof for the first time, he’s literally shaking. He looks terrified. Another great example is Sherlock’s horror and panic after Moriarty shoots himself (or appears to shoot himself, anyway). 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 and then realizes that he has to jump to save John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson. Moriarty is, for all appearances, dead to the world. The snipers are obviously watching the rooftop to see if Sherlock jumps and to see if John seems to believe it, but they’re not standing there on the roof with Sherlock to see his facial expressions. Since he’s alone, there’s no reason for Sherlock to look as panicked and terrified as he does—and for as long as he does—except for the simple reason that he actually was losing his shit as he realized that he had to jump.

Sherlock’s shock and horror after Moriarty shoots himself

Sherlock freaking out after he realizes what he has to do

(screencaps from here)

Clearly, Sherlock did not expect to have to jump off a roof that morning. And he was genuinely panicked and terrified when he realized that he’d have to do it, and that he’d have to conceal his survival from John. This was not the plan that Sherlock showed up with, and it wasn’t one that he wanted. But it was the only course of action that Moriarty left him.

Relatedly, I think that Sherlock’s emotional behavior during his phone call with John was entirely genuine. Even if he knew that he would survive the fall and would eventually come back, Sherlock 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. Sherlock also understood that John needed to believe that he was dead in order for him to be safe from Moriarty’s network during his absence, which is why he tried to lie to John on the call by saying that he was a fraud, to make his suicide more believable. But Sherlock knew that he was forcing John to experience something awful during that phone call, and he was deeply upset about it.

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 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. By comparing these scenes, I think we can conclude that Sherlock isn’t actually a very good actor, and he wasn’t acting when he had that phone call with John.

So that’s Sherlock’s behavior on the rooftop and how it shows that he wasn’t prepared.

Before the rooftop scene, there’s even more evidence in TRF that Sherlock was worried about Moriarty, but didn’t understand the details of Moriarty’s plan and didn’t have a masterplan of his own.

Some of this evidence comes from Sherlock’s interactions with Molly. Most importantly, in this episode 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: You look sad, when you think he can’t see you. 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 the scene, if you want a refresher.)

Sherlock and Molly’s conversation here reveals that before the rooftop, Sherlock was genuinely fearful of what Moriarty had planned for him and John and that he chose to hide that fear from John. Moreover, Molly’s dialogue in this scene suggests that she thinks that Sherlock thinks that he’s going to die. (Because she compares him to her dad when he was dying.)

Indeed, after leaving Kitty’s flat later in the episode, Sherlock seeks Molly out at Bart’s, tells her that he thinks he’s going to die, and asks for her help. This might seem like evidence that Sherlock did plan the fake suicide and enlisted Molly to assist him beforehand, but I don’t think it is. With everything else that we know, I think it’s more likely that Sherlock went to Molly for help in dismantling Moriarty’s network. asherlockstudy speculates on what Sherlock may have asked Molly to do here, and although I don’t agree with everything in that post, I really do like the idea that Molly may have been able to provide Sherlock with important information that helped him take down part of the network. That’s where my money is for how Molly helped Sherlock. Perhaps Sherlock realized that Molly had useful information about Moriarty because she’d briefly dated him, and perhaps Molly was able to tell Sherlock about some of Moriarty’s bolt holes or other pieces of his network in London specifically.

After he saw Moriarty at Kitty’s flat, Sherlock panicked, and he knew that Moriarty was closing in on him. I think, then, that Sherlock went to Molly for help and told her that he thought he was going to die because he really did think that Moriarty was going to try to kill him, and he was trying to prepare for a situation in which Moriarty really did manage to do it. (After all, at the pool, Moriarty told Sherlock that he would eventually try to kill him.) If Sherlock thought there was a real chance that he might die, he would have wanted someone to take down at least part of Moriarty’s network in London in an effort to keep John safe.

There are two more aspects of Sherlock’s second conversation with Molly that I think are interesting. Here’s what we actually hear the two of them say:

Sherlock: You’re wrong, you know. You do count. You’ve always counted and I’ve always trusted you. But you were right. I’m not okay. Molly: Tell me what’s wrong. Sherlock: Molly, I think I’m going to die. Molly: What do you need? Sherlock: If I wasn’t everything that you think I am—everything that I think I am—would you still want to help me? Molly: What do you need? Sherlock: You.

Sherlock’s line in the middle there—“If I wasn’t everything that you think I am—everything that I think I am—would you still want to help me?”—indicates that he was planning for a situation in which Moriarty’s plan, as he perceived it, had actually worked. In the situation Sherlock was imagining, Moriarty would have managed to destroy his reputation and kill him.

If Sherlock had a masterplan all worked out ahead of time, then there would be no reason for him to say this because there would be no reason for Molly to doubt him and to think that he hadn’t always been “everything that you think I am.” Sherlock would have told her about his plan, and Molly would have known he wasn’t a fraud. But if Moriarty succeeded in ruining Sherlock’s reputation and then killed him? Then Sherlock would need Molly to look past all of that, shelve whatever doubts she had in the wake of Moriarty’s misinformation campaign, and still help Sherlock by helping protect John. So this line, to me, gives us a small piece of evidence that Sherlock didn’t have a grand fake suicide masterplan that he involved Molly in.

Sherlock also tells Molly that he needs “you,” which I think indicates that he needed help that only she could give. He didn’t just need access to a corpse, like he later tells Anderson in TEH, which isn’t really that Molly-specific when you think about it. Instead, he needed Molly’s knowledge about Moriarty, knowledge that only she had.

Taken together, I think all of this can easily be taken to show that Sherlock was worried about Moriarty, thought Moriarty was trying to kill him, and thought there was a chance he might succeed. Sherlock didn’t have a grand masterplan to outsmart Moriarty by faking his own death.

To close out this section, I’ll circle back to the moment in the lab when Sherlock thinks he’s figured out the computer key code. When Sherlock thinks he’s discovered the code, there’s a noticeable change in his expression. I think this is because before that moment, Sherlock truly feared that everything had slipped out of his control. It’s only when he thinks he’s worked out the code that he recovers his confidence.  

That moment is even accompanied by a heartbeat, which is the sound the show uses to indicate moments of significance for the characters. (LSIT explains this here; see “Reply lindefishway Heartbeat soundtrack.”) This moment wouldn’t be significant to Sherlock unless he truly believed that the key code was his last best hope. The key code was his only plan heading up to the rooftop.

In short, Sherlock completely underestimated Moriarty and got swept along in his plan, not the other way around.

4. How we know that Sherlock’s explanation of the fall in TEH is fake

In TEH, we get three different explanations for the fall: 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 also the same as what he started to tell John in one of the restaurants earlier). We’re supposed to believe that the first two explanations are fake, while Sherlock’s is ostensibly presented as the “real” explanation.

But Sherlock’s explanation is fake, too. Sherlock lied to John about having arranged his fake suicide ahead of time, and then he spins out an entire explanation to Anderson that cannot be true. There are many pieces of evidence included throughout both TRF and TEH that we can use to refute Sherlock’s explanation, so let’s walk through them.

(1) First, we’ve already established in this meta that Moriarty was in control of the timing that morning. Moriarty was the one who had control of when things happened, and Sherlock had to react. This means that Moriarty could have easily arranged everything needed for Sherlock to survive before Sherlock stepped out onto the rooftop, but it sure would have been difficult for Sherlock to do that. Since Sherlock didn’t know when Moriarty was going to arrive at Bart's, how could he have had his people arrange everything so that Moriarty wouldn’t see? In contrast, once Sherlock suggested Bart’s rooftop as a meeting place, Moriarty had all night to come up with a plan in response and to get everything set up. He could take his time and then text Sherlock whenever he was ready.

(2) Sherlock didn’t know about the snipers ahead of time. Take a look at the shock on his face when Moriarty reveals that he has a sniper trained on John. And since Sherlock didn’t know about the snipers, there is no way that 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, would be convinced that he’d killed himself, and wouldn’t shoot John. (There’s a very good post that makes this point here.)

Sherlock tells Anderson that it was imperative that John stay exactly where he “put him” so that he would see Sherlock jump but wouldn’t see the inflatable. We know this is a lie because there is no way that Sherlock could have done the same thing with the sniper. To me, this blows up Sherlock’s entire explanation.

In reality, the sniper did see the giant inflatable or whatever other mechanism enabled Sherlock to survive the fall. But that wasn’t a problem because the sniper was working for Moriarty and knew that Sherlock was supposed to survive. For Moriarty, the point of forcing Sherlock to jump off the roof was to convince John that he had died. He didn’t need to convince the snipers.

More proof that Sherlock didn’t know about the snipers: if Sherlock had known, there is absolutely no way that he would have ever let John leave Bart’s and go out into the open. No. Way. Sherlock would have wanted John to stay in a windowless room inside the hospital, not go rushing outside where he could get shot, as LSIT points out in the M-Theory meta. Sherlock probably let John go because just like Holmes in ACD canon, he thought John would be safer if he were far away from Moriarty. It’s the exact same mistake that Sherlock made when preparing to meet Moriarty at the pool in TGG.

(3) When Sherlock and Moriarty first step up to the edge of the roof together and look down, there’s a huge white rectangle drawn out on the sidewalk, apparently to indicate where Sherlock needed to fall. (asherlockstudy notes this here.) Um. Guys. If Sherlock planned the whole thing and hid his plan from Moriarty, it would be pretty ridiculous for his accomplices to have drawn a big chalk rectangle on the ground right where Moriarty and his snipers could see it. We even see for ourselves that Moriarty did see it—he’s shown looking down at the pavement from the same angle that we do as the audience. Conclusion: Moriarty designed the plan for Sherlock’s fake suicide, so it wasn’t a problem for him to see the rectangle. His accomplices were the ones who put it there.

(4) Since Moriarty was the one who lured John away, this means that Moriarty was also responsible for John returning to Bart’s when he did. Moriarty would have known that John would leave, go to 221B, and then immediately try to return to Sherlock when he realized that the phone call was fake. Building on this, I think it’s fair to infer that Moriarty probably arranged for John to show up where he did in front of Bart’s, too. Sherlock tells Anderson that he placed John in an exact position on the pavement so that he would see him fall but not the mechanism that enabled his survival. In reality, Sherlock didn’t know where John would be standing, but Moriarty probably did. Moriarty probably had one of his minions posing as the cab driver who brought John back—he had Jeff Hope working for him in ASIP and he commandeered a cab for himself in TRF, so he probably had some sort of inside access to a London cab company. If that’s true, then it would have been easy for him to arrange to have a cab driven by one of his people waiting for John right outside 221B and he could have told the driver to let John out at a place where he would see Sherlock fall but not whatever enabled him to survive.

In short, it makes sense for Moriarty to have been able to arrange that, but it doesn’t make any sense for Sherlock to have been able to do it, since he wasn’t the one who called John away to 221B in the first place. Sherlock didn’t have a plan to shuttle John around anywhere and didn’t have any time to make one.

(5) In Many Happy Returns, Sherlock says in the birthday video for John that “only lies have detail.” This clues us into the fact that the very detailed explanation for the fall that Sherlock is about to provide us with is a lie. (asherlockstudy makes this point here.)

(6) Sherlock’s explanation to Anderson in TEH is slotted in between the other parts of the train car scene. This is the first time that we experience non-linear storytelling in S3, and it’s deliberately intended to disorient us as viewers. Since we’re eager to find out what happens in the train car, we’re expected to be somewhat distracted when we hear Sherlock’s explanation, and thus distracted from the parts of Sherlock’s story that don’t make sense. This is another little trick that the writers used to make it just a little bit harder to figure out that Sherlock’s explanation is fake.

(7) Even Anderson doubts Sherlock’s explanation. There is no reason for the writers to include Anderson’s doubt other than as a way of telling us that we also shouldn’t accept Sherlock’s explanation as wholly believable. And this fits so well, because Anderson is basically a representation of the fandom in TEH!

So what the writers take with one hand, they give back with the other. They want us to have enough clues that Sherlock’s explanation is fake for us to be able to catch onto the deception and work out the truth, but they don’t want to make it too easy. It’s all part of the fun of the mystery genre!

Also, in the moment when he first starts to doubt Sherlock’s explanation, Anderson makes a very good point: “That doesn’t make sense. How could you be sure John would stand on that exact spot? I mean, what if he’d moved?” Exactly, Anderson! This line tells us that we’re on the right track.

You might be wondering, then, why Sherlock told John not to move during their phone conversation and begged him to keep his eyes fixed on him. I think the answer is very simple: Sherlock was scared. He was terrified that if it looked like John was trying to approach him—which was John’s first instinct and exactly what he tried to do—then John’s sniper might shoot him. That seems completely reasonable to me. I’d have been terrified about that, too!

(8) This point is super small, but I’m adding it just for fun before my last real piece of evidence. In his explanation to Anderson, Sherlock says that the people who helped him fake his death put one of his coats on the corpse of a guy who looked like him so that it would fool John from a distance. “I have a lot of coats,” he says with a satisfied smile.

Nope. Even if the Sherlock costume department has several versions of the Belstaff, Sherlock the character has only one, and we learn this earlier in TEH. In the scene where Sherlock talks with Mycroft and Anthea in Mycroft’s office and prepares to make his dramatic reentrance into John’s life, he asks where “it” is, and then smiles when Anthea walks up with his Belstaff. So Sherlock only has one coat—“it”—and he lied to Anderson about this. If he lied to Anderson about one small part of his explanation, that indicates that he probably lied about the more significant parts, too. There’s really no reason for him to have included this small lie unless most of the rest of the explanation was already fabricated.

(9) Finally, there’s no evidence at all that Sherlock was working with Mycroft in TRF to enact some masterplan against Moriarty, and certainly not to fake his own suicide. In fact, everything related to Mycroft that we see in TRF seems to indicate that Sherlock and Mycroft still had a very tense relationship at that point in the show and weren’t collaborating on anything at all.

Rather than going to Sherlock directly, Mycroft specifically reaches out to John to talk to him about the assassins gathering on Baker Street. 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 him instead. (LSIT points this out in her M-Theory meta.)

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 this, Sherlock throws him and John in front of a bus so that one of the assassins will save them. Then the assassin promptly gets gunned down right in front of them. I know that whoever shot him was a super highly-trained assassin and unlikely to accidentally hit John or Sherlock, but, like, this is some risky behavior on Sherlock’s part. The fact that this seemed like a better course of action to him than asking Mycroft for help says something, I think.

One could argue, of course, that Sherlock was intentionally deflecting because he didn’t want John to know about his plan with Mycroft. But that just doesn’t seem likely to me when we consider John and Mycroft’s interactions earlier on in the episode. It really seems like Mycroft isn’t in close touch with Sherlock and doesn’t feel comfortable talking to him directly about Moriarty.

In general, I think that Sherlock and Mycroft had an extremely tense relationship in S1-S2 and that there’s a genuine shift in their dynamic in S3—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 Sherlock doesn’t even 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 then 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? Um, no. It seems to me that Sherlock and Mycroft actually did have some sort of sibling rivalry in S1-S2, but after Sherlock had to fake his own death and disappear for two years, they came to appreciate each other far more than they had before. This makes perfect sense to me. And even though Sherlock got in touch with Mycroft at some point after his fall, it’s not like Mycroft would have known that Sherlock’s suicide was fake right when it happened. Mycroft probably really did think that Sherlock had died. (Remember that shot of him reading the Sun article about Sherlock’s suicide in the Diogenes Club, and how blank he looks. It’s not really the look of a man who just read an article confirming that his clever plan with his brother went off without a hitch and the public swallowed it.) But after Sherlock’s return, Mycroft got his younger brother back. Of course they became closer after that.

Anyway, they don’t seem to have been working together on a masterplan in TRF.

Now, Sherlock’s explanation of the fall might not be entirely false. Like I said, maybe Moriarty did use a giant inflatable and maybe he purposely arranged for John to arrive on the other side of the ambulance station so he wouldn’t see it. I’m intrigued by asherlockstudy’s idea that the three different explanations for how Sherlock survived the fall in TEH all contain a mix of lies and truth. asherlockstudy suggests that taken together, the elements of truth in each theory add up to the real explanation for how Moriarty did it. I especially appreciate their point that the fangirl’s theory actually provides the core piece of truth that we need to know: that Moriarty was the one behind it all. Given all the subtext from across the show indicating that fans’ theories (hello, TJLC) will eventually be proven true, it’s very fitting that the fangirl provides that essential piece in TEH.

5. Concluding thoughts

Thank you for reading this far! I hope I’ve convinced you that Moriarty was the one behind Sherlock’s fake suicide. Before ending, I’ve got three more brief things that I want to address.

(1) All of this means that 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.

(2) Moriarty being the one who planned the fake suicide is important to the show’s overall narrative not only because it’s part of his role as the central villain, but also because Sherlock losing control of events in TRF is important to Sherlock’s character development and to the arc of his and John’s love story.

With this interpretation of the fall, Sherlock makes the exact same mistakes at the ends of S1, S2, and S3. At the end of each series, Sherlock attempts to confront a villain by himself, genuinely believing that he’s solved a puzzle and is now prepared to meet the villain, only to get 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 S1, 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 it 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. This pattern doesn’t really make sense if the end of S2 is an outlier, but everything fits perfectly if we accept this interpretation of the fall. (Also, its treatment of this theme is one reason why A River Without Banks by Chryse is the Johnlock fanfic of all time.)

(3) Why did Sherlock lie to John about the fall in TEH and say that he planned everything with Mycroft? I could write a whole other meta about this because I have so many thoughts. But I think the short version is that Sherlock was afraid to tell John that he was in love with him. Telling John that Moriarty came up with the idea of forcing him to fake his own death would have meant that Sherlock would have had to explain why Moriarty had any motivation for doing so. He would have had to reveal that Moriarty thought forcing him to deceive and leave John behind would be worse for him than death. I think for Sherlock, that was too close to a love confession, and he wasn’t ready for that.

John didn’t react to Sherlock’s return at all how Sherlock had hoped he would. I think that after seeing John’s reaction, Sherlock started to doubt what he thought he knew about John’s feelings after Battersea. Sherlock was worried that John may not actually love him back after all, or that he might not anymore, so he didn’t feel ready to make himself vulnerable by revealing to John that he was in love with him. And of course, when Sherlock returns he immediately learns that John is with Mary now, which certainly complicates things.

On top of all of that, Sherlock probably also didn’t want to admit to John that he’d been so thoroughly outplayed by Moriarty—especially since Sherlock sometimes seems to fear that his impressiveness as a detective is the only reason why John even sticks around at all.