#the empty fall

Disclaimer

Look, I will say this right up front. It seems like it should be obvious, but there’s always someone who doesn’t get it: I can’t prove this. If I could prove this at this point in the storyline, it would actually mean the Sherlock writers had screwed up pretty badly.

Do I think the writers left clues to this without making it confirmable? Yes. Do I think this is where the balance of probability points? Yes. Do I personally believe it to be true? Yes. Do I care if there isn’t enough proof for you personally to get on board with this theory? No, not really. You are probably very good at scrolling past things you disagree with, and I am definitely very good at just waiting to see what happens in the show. So I think we’ll all survive. ;)

Also: As always, I am writing this with the idea that the “Lazarus” explanation of the fall Sherlock gave in The Empty Hearse was a lie. Yet another currently-unprovable thing. You know the drill.

The Reichenbach Fall

After TRF aired, of course we were all trying to figure out how Sherlock survived. Long story short, at one point I decided to take a good look at the crowd that gathered around Sherlock’s body, and I noticed something. Or someone. Or noticed someone was unnoticeable? Here, I’m talking about this:

After Sherlock’s body was on the ground, he was circled by a first wave of Homeless Network members who were in on the scam. And yes, I did think they were part of the Homeless Network even back then, because if you paid attention you could see they had jobs--block John, keep him from checking Sherlock’s pulse at his neck, etc.

But by the time John made it over to Sherlock’s body, a few more people had joined the crowd. They didn’t seem to have jobs, so they may have just been bystanders.

One of them particularly nagged at me--the one wearing the leather jacket and marked with the yellow arrow in the stills above. Even though he was part of the second wave of people to surround Sherlock, he’d gotten himself into a perfect position for getting a good look at the “corpse,” and particularly for having a clear view of John’s genuinely pained reaction.

I’m not going to gif the whole sequence, but I recommend you go back and watch the video. Pay attention to the camerawork. The man in the leather jacket--I call him “Mystery Man”--is right there with his back to us. But no matter how the camera swoops and swings and gives us glimpses of the rest of the crowd, it always stops short of revealing his face.

The only time we get a fuller view of Mystery Man is in the overhead shot:

Still no face visibility. But it’s interesting to note that Mystery Man holds his position until John has collapsed on the ground and Sherlock’s apparently lifeless body has been loaded onto the trolley for removal. Whoever he was, he saw the whole show.

The Empty Hearse

As I mentioned in the disclaimer, I think the explanation Sherlock gave Anderson of how he survived the fall in TEH was a lie.

That said, I do think the Lazarus explanation had some pieces of truth in it. The use of the Homeless Network and squash ball, for example, were pretty clearly hinted at in TRF. I don’t think the real explanation for Sherlock’s survival is going to “undo” those bits.

So long as we can have some truths mixed in with the lies... Let’s consider the shot in the gif at the top of this post, which appears just after Sherlock explains the squash ball trick to Anderson:

Because it looks like nothing at first, but is actually SUPER-INTERESTING.

The Lazarus explanation, as you’d expect, is a mix of old footage that appeared in The Reichenbach Fall and new footage they shot for The Empty Hearse.

But this shot--this one and only shot--was actually footage from when they filmed TRF but shown to us for the very first time in TEH.

Sidebar: How did I know this shot is from 2011 and not 2013? The honest truth is that I accidentally memorized the TRF fall sequence well enough that I could ID this on sight.

But if you want to double-check for yourself, here are a couple of things you can use as starting points:

There’s a piece of white litter by one of the front feet on the bench on the left, and a bottle sitting on the bench on the right. You can match both of those up perfectly to footage from TRF. (And no, the crew didn’t bother replacing every little thing for TEH. They didn’t even worry about the fact that a completely different bus shelter had been installed since TRF was filmed.)

So we’ve got one brand new piece of TRF-era footage popping up in TEH. For no particular reason. It doesn’t add anything to Sherlock’s story, and there was tons of other previously-seen and newly-shot footage still available if they were just really desperate to fill two extra seconds.

Why add this one shot now?

Look who’s there:

Not only does this otherwise-pointless shot give us our clearest look so far at Mystery Man (alas, still no face), but it seems like that’s its whole purpose. The camera actually moves away from Sherlock to end up centered on Mystery Man instead.

In TRF, they established Mystery Man was there. In TEH, they snuck in just enough bonus footage to help us figure out who he is.

Canon

The Adventure of the Empty House is the Arthur Conan Doyle story that told the original version of Holmes’ return from the dead.

Having avoided death by waterfall, Holmes decided to let everyone think he was dead anyway because he’s an ass he knew some of Moriarty’s men would be out for revenge. But something went wrong with that plan almost immediately.

“At last, when you had all formed your inevitable and totally erroneous conclusions, you departed for the hotel and I was left alone. I had imagined that I had reached the end of my adventures, but a very unexpected occurrence showed me that there were surprises still in store for me. A huge rock, falling from above, boomed past me, struck the path, and bounded over into the chasm. For an instant I thought that it was an accident; but a moment later, looking up, I saw a man's head against the darkening sky, and another stone struck the very ledge upon which I was stretched, within a foot of my head. Of course, the meaning of this was obvious. Moriarty had not been alone. A confederate—and even that one glance had told me how dangerous a man that confederate was—had kept guard while the Professor had attacked me. From a distance, unseen by me, he had been a witness of his friend's death and of my escape. He had waited, and then, making his way round to the top of the cliff, he had endeavoured to succeed where his comrade had failed.”

So in the canon version, Holmes faked his death, but Moriarty’s confederate was there as a witness who caught Holmes in the act.

Later in the story, we find out that dangerous confederate was--say it with me--Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Lord Moran, Meet Mystery Man

TEH introduced oddly-silent villain Lord Moran.

Same general hair and body type as Mystery Man.

And if we do a back of the head comparison?

Whether or not it’s an exact match (keeping in mind we are a couple years’ worth of haircuts down the road and Moran’s hair looks different depending on the lighting as seen above), I’d say it’s at least a highly plausible match.

Aside from this, there was already strong reason (besides his last name) to believe Moran was working for Jim during series 2.

So Colonel Moran was a witness to Holmes’ fake death in canon, and Lord Moran was a witness to Sherlock’s fake death in The Reichenbach Fall.

Let’s run with that and see where it takes us.

If Moran Was at the Fall...

1) He’d be fulfilling the role of his canon namesake.

Fandom tends to simplify Moran to “man with gun,” but the fact that he was Moriarty’s very-intelligent second-in-command who knew Holmes faked his death actually has more impact on the plot in the big picture.

Also note that, in fact, Moran wasn’t even “man with gun” when it comes to the canon fall. See the quoted story portion above. Moran was “man throwing rocks.” Considering that, it’d actually be pretty cute if the BBC Sherlock writers planted Moran at the fall the whole time but distracted us with a shiny sniper who wasn’t Moran.

2) Speaking of shiny snipers...

Jim: Three bullets; three gunmen; three victims. There’s no stopping them now. Unless my people see you jump.

In TRF, Jim referred to having “people” watching to see if Sherlock jumped.

Originally, there was only one person we could be reasonably sure was watching the fall for Jim--the sniper trained on John.

At the time, I said I’d forgive the writers some vague grammar if it turned out the sniper was the only designated watcher actually on the scene.

But now?

Screw that. Jim said “people” because he had people--plural--there watching. The sniper and Lord Moran.

And it does make Jim’s plan much stronger if he had his right-hand man do a close-up inspection to make sure Sherlock really seemed to be dead. (Solidified by John’s completely real display of grief.)

Also, rewatch the original fall again and take note of the sequence of events. Mystery Man / Lord Moran shows up and sees “dead” Sherlock and grieving John. He stays until Sherlock’s body is wheeled away and John is a sidewalk puddle, then begins to walk away. But it’s not until a couple moments later that the sniper stops aiming at John. As far as we saw, there was nothing special about the particular moment the sniper stopped aiming that would make him decide everything went to plan. BUT the timing of that moment to stop aiming at John would fit pretty well with the idea that Lord Moran sent a message to call off the snipers as soon as he cleared the site of the fall.

3) Where have you seen that face before, John?

John: I know him, don’t I? Sherlock: Lord Moran, peer of the realm, Minister for Overseas Development. Pillar of the establishment. John: Yes!

When Sherlock was describing his “rats” in TEH, John jumped in unprompted and said he recognized one of them.

Sherlock explained Lord Moran’s job title, which seemed to be enough to satisfy John and the audience that that’s why John recognized him. And of course, John and Moran never came closer than that photograph in TEH, so the issue didn’t come up again.

But...

Imagine rewatching this scene after a later reveal that Lord Moran was the one standing a few feet away from John, observing his grief in TRF. You’d smack your forehead and go, “That’s why John recognized him!”

It’s an “oh, those clever Sherlock writers” Tumblr post just waiting to happen.

4) It’s important to note that initially, Sherlock has Lord Moran mixed in with all his regular rats in TEH. There’s no bumping the guy who tried to help Jim murder Sherlock up to the top of the suspects list.

Here’s what I suspect. Just like in canon, Sherlock tried to fake his death and almost got away with it, but was caught by Moran somehow finding out Sherlock was still alive. (Presumably Moran saw or learned something that gave the trick away after calling off the snipers, but I don’t want to get into a huge digression about that in this post.)

Sherlock--or very possibly Mycroft--then got reason to believe a baddie knew or suspected the truth and now posed a significant threat to Sherlock and/or his friends. That’s when the plan went from “fool them long enough to get Jim’s gunmen to clear off” to “oops, guess we need to keep this game up for a while.” (Because the thing about Sherlock needing to be gone for years to eliminate Jim’s network is bogus--the very fact that he still hasn’t figured out the Moriarty-Moran connection proves he didn’t take out the whole network in that time.)

It’s very much speculation, but... Wouldn’t we all like to believe the Sherlock writers tried a little harder than ACD to give our hero a plausible reason to screw with all of his friends’ minds for several years?

5) In another nice piece of possible explanation for what the writers were thinking when they made certain choices... Lord Moran being at the fall but Sherlock still being in the process of working out the identity of the agents Jim had there (Sherlock couldn’t exactly look around while fake-dead, and CCTV would’ve needed to be disabled to protect Sherlock’s own trick) provides an actual reason for Sherlock to have lied about the fall, and something worthwhile enough to be gained that the writers can justify revisiting the scene one last time for the truth.

But that bit gets kinda detailed, so I’ll cover it more in a later post.

6) Again, it would explain that weird extra shot in TEH.

Because, really, this didn’t get there by accident.

But Can’t We Just Check the Actor?

Hahaha hah aha ha haa hah hah ahahaha ha...

Sorry.

It’s just... no. Part of the joy and terror of paying attention to Lord Moran is that in the years since The Empty Hearse originally aired, no one has been able to identify who plays him. Seriously. He’s the main villain in the episode, but his name’s not in the credits and the writers wouldn’t even say his name when complimenting him in the DVD commentary.

If we wanted any kind of confirmation about whether it’s the same actor, we’d have to do it the hard way. Unfortunately... TRF was filmed in 2011. There weren’t 10 zillion fans standing around watching filming at that time, so we don’t have very many behind the scenes photos. Especially when it comes to non-lead actors. I’ve looked and asked, but have never been able to turn up a behind-the-scenes photo of Mystery Man’s actor during Series 2 filming.

There were, on the other hand, 10 zillion people standing around taking photos of Series 3 filming in 2013. So I did manage to track down a picture of the guy playing Mystery Man for the new TEH footage. And you know what? I don’t think that actor is the same one who played Lord Moran.

BUT, that doesn’t really help. Because it’s well-documented that the writers expected the 10 zillion fans to show up for TEH filming, and intentionally set out to make things confusing for them. If they’d gone to all that trouble to sneak Lord Moran into the TRF fall scene, were they really going to blow it now? Nah. After all, we never saw Mystery Man’s face in TRF, Mystery Man was hardly in any new shots for TEH, and those shots were part of scenes that were imaginary or lies anyway. So why not just toss in a stand-in wearing the same clothes for TEH filming and keep the secret safe?

OR, maybe Lord Moran’s actor wasn’t even the one who filmed the TRF sequence. Maybe it was always a stand-in picked to match the specific person / general look the writers had in mind for Moran. (Let’s face it, he’s pretty generic-looking from the back.) All they’d need to do would be edit in a reveal shot later that showed the real Lord Moran’s actor’s face. In which case, actually tracking down a Series 2 behind-the-scenes photo of Mystery Man’s actor wouldn’t even do us any good.

And here we are, stuck in unprovability again. *shrug*

I did warn you.

The passers-by and laundry van were both referenced as being connected to the (fake) fall solutions given in the episode.

The red phone box was not. And I heard no reports of them messing around with the phone box for TEH even when they were filming fakeout footage to confuse onlookers.

Now, trust me, I am well aware that the fandom has taken over the phone box as a sort of shrine since Series 2 aired. But the fandom is the last group of people the information in a shooting script is for.

And as one of the original phone box fangirls (not an exaggeration—I was posting about it within 2 days of the original TRF airing) I can tell you that thing was just barely in Reichenbach. They showed it very minimally. So if one was simply naming objects to set the scene, there’s no reason the phone box was any more important than the benches or bus shelter (both of which I’d guess had at least as much but probably more screentime than the phone box in TRF).

No matter how much we may love the thing, within the world of the show, the phone box has been assigned zero significance so far.

Despite this, Gatiss sat down to write TEH and called out the phone box in a list of other fall-survival-ish things.