It Still Stings: Sherlock’s Biggest Cliffhanger Led to Its Downfall
Photo Courtesy of BBC
Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:
For my 12th birthday, I got a pillowcase. The cover was the design of the walls of a fictional flat, namely 221B Baker Street from the BBC series Sherlock. There was a spray painted yellow smiley face on it, the same design as the one Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes shoots out of boredom in Season 1 Episode 3 of the series, “The Great Game.” I never used the pillow case, I didn’t like the texture, but I was thrilled to receive it.
The year was 2012 and Sherlock was becoming an inescapable cultural force on Tumblr. The modern day reimaging of the Sherlock Holmes stories created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss had garnered a large fanbase of teenage girls and young women. Some were passionate about Johnlock, the popular shipping couple of Holmes and John Watson (played by Martin Freeman). Others were brought in by the supreme power of Superwholock, a mega-fandom combining fellow BBC series Doctor Who, Sherlock, and The CW’s Supernatural.
But if Sherlock had one defining joke of 2012, it was the hiatus. Season 2’s finale “The Reichenbach Fall” aired in January 2012 and Season 3’s premiere “The Empty Hearse” premiered in January 2014. Those two years provided the gestation period for the Sherlock fandom to become larger than any BBC drama series consisting of three, 90-minute episode seasons would be thought to have.
The hiatus was referenced time and time again. It was used in comparison against other popular Tumblr fandoms, with Supernatural fans enjoying their luxurious 22-episode seasons that repeated every year (which now seems like a dream in the current age of eight-episode streaming series). The joke was that the two years of waiting was driving its fans insane. They were writing excessive amounts of fanfiction, making wacky gifs. But they had one activity to keep themselves entertained the most during those two years.
Episode 3 of Season 2, titled “The Reichenbach Fall,” was a loose adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story “The Final Problem,” and ends with Sherlock and Moriarty (played by Andrew Scott) on a rooftop. Moriarty tells Sherlock he needs to kill himself or a sniper will kill Watson, who’s standing on the ground below. Moriarty then shoots himself in the face and Holmes jumps. Watson races to Sherlock’s body, rolls it over and sees Sherlock dead, blood dripping from his head. Cut to Watson giving a tearful speech at Sherlock’s grave, the camera turns around, and reveals that Sherlock—very much alive—is watching. Main music theme plays. End credits.
This finale episode gave Sherlock fans a mystery to solve: how did Sherlock fake his own death and survive the fall?
Every fan had a theory. The final sequence was analyzed frame by frame. There were many popular options. A garbage truck drives by right as Sherlock falls—did he jump onto the top and a body double was used? Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), a recurring morgue worker, would have access to a dead body to throw down as a decoy. A lot of the people on the street rushing to Sherlock’s body were inferred to be in on the plan. Some thought the body might have been Moriarty’s. Some thought Moriarty himself was alive, faking his death just like Sherlock.
This theorizing was only helped by an interview Moffat gave where he said fans theorizing about his death have “missed a clue,” and he does something “very out of character, but which nobody has picked up on.” Suddenly, it wasn’t just the ending but the whole episode that needed reanalyzing. Every acting decision Cumberbatch made was put under a microscope; a certain movement of his hand could be a signal. Sherlock cries on the phone to John, something he’s never done except to fool others throughout the show. The tears must be a signal for something too!
I even proposed my own theory, spending an afternoon of summer break scrubbing through frames, seeing a slight round pouch in Sherlock’s jacket as he falls and posting that it might be a stash of blood that he pours on his face to make it look like his skull was actually fractured. I posted my theory on my fandom Instagram account. It got 22 likes.
Theories were the bedrock of the fandom during this time. The show constantly purported to be about being smart; about picking up clues the police don’t notice and putting them together. The show, like Sherlock, was more clever than normal people. Especially for fans who were less interested in the shipping world of the show, embracing the mystery element made us feel like we were watching the show in a deeper way. In a smarter way.
After 2 years, Sherlock returned. The episode builds to the moment Sherlock reveals to John he’s alive after 2 years, almost casually in a restaurant. Sherlock begins to explain to John how he faked his death before being interrupted. “I don’t care how you faked it,” John says. “I want to know why.”
The episode aired to 12.72 million viewers in the UK and 4.0 million in the US, making it the most watched episode of the entire show. The mystery of Season 2’s cliffhanger and the work of the fandom increased the interest in the show, especially in the US where viewership rose by almost 40%. But John is Sherlock’s heart, and his moral point of view is framed by the show as the right point of view. And the right point of view, delivered by Moffat and Gatiss, is that it doesn’t matter how his death was faked.
To further hammer their point home, we have the transformation of the character of Anderson. Anderson is an annoying member of the police’s forensic services who Sherlock hates. He is a minor recurring character, mostly to demonstrate that he is stupid and not as good at his job as Sherlock is. In December 2013, the series released a short webisode showing Anderson had been driven mad by Sherlock’s death and has devoted himself to proving he’s alive by proposing a slew of improbable theories that makes him look insane, complete with a conspiracy board with photos and string.
In Season 3’s premiere, “The Empty Hearse,” Anderson is in charge of a fan group of fellow Sherlock obsessives, each of whom takes turns proposing their own theories. It’s clear that these fan characters were written purely to make fun of the real life fans of Sherlock, who similarly spent those two years with their own string boards. One of them proposes a Sherlock/Moriarty theory, complete with a vision of Moriarty and Sherlock almost kissing, before being scolded by Anderson. At the end of the episode, Sherlock reveals to Anderson how he actually faked his death. The answer was a combination of various fan theories, including Molly’s involvement and the popular theory that a ball in the armpit can momentarily cut off someone’s pulse. When he turns around to ask Sherlock more questions about how his explanation doesn’t make sense, Sherlock is gone. Anderson starts laughing hysterically, tearing his photos and theories from the wall, before collapsing to the ground. It is left up to the audience to believe if the answer Sherlock gives is the truth, or if he was just lying to Anderson, or if he was even there at all.
Watching this episode live, through an unofficial livestream of the BBC’s broadcast at 2pm in California, was surreal. I had spent the last two years of my life eagerly awaiting the reveal. I was in denial. I started posting about the episode online. Sherlock was back. I was happy that Sherlock was back. I had a 221B Baker Street pillowcase. That’s what was important.
Sherlock went on to hobble through Season 3, a Christmas special set in the Victorian era, and a Season 4 that aired in 2017. Season 4 in particular was, uh, not good, even by the standards of fans of the show. And while it was never properly canceled, the nail in the coffin of Sherlock came in the summer of 2017, when YouTuber Harry Brewis (aka hbomberguy) released the video “Sherlock is Garbage, And Here’s Why.” The 1 hour 50 minute video (longer than any episode of Sherlock) ran through all the elements of the show that didn’t work and how the show tricked its audience into thinking it was smarter than it was. The video essay currently has 14.3 million views.
There is a quote from this video that I think about whenever I think about Sherlock, “If you’re a fan of mystery stories, Steven Moffat and his co-writers hate you. If you’re a fan of Sherlock, the show, Moffat wants you dead.” Hearing this line, in 2017, brought back all my repressed feelings about “The Empty Hearse” that 13-year-old me didn’t know how to feel yet.
Sherlock may have died after Season 4, but the sparkle was gone after Season 3. The show’s tricks just didn’t work anymore. The jokes about the hiatus just weren’t as funny. They were getting old. I didn’t rewatch Season 3’s episodes the way I did with the first two seasons. I had entire 30-minute segments of some episodes from Seasons 1 and 2 memorized from how much I rewatched them. I never rewatched “The Empty Hearse.”
The anti-reveal of how Sherlock faked his death was the first time a piece of media made me feel bad for caring about it. I thought I was playing along with the show by trying to figure out its riddles. I was a teenager obsessed with writing and mysteries and I thought the show was making me smarter. But the only person allowed to be smart in Sherlock is Sherlock, and to a larger extent, Moffat and Gatiss.
Steven Moffat is a very successful TV writer. He wrote one of the best Doctor Who episodes ever, “Blink,” which eventually earned him the gig of showrunning the series. He wrote Coupling, a very good British sitcom. He wrote Jekyll, a not very good BBC series adapting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which, if nothing else, displayed his desire to have a writing career playing around in other writers’ sandboxes. But it is clear he did not want the fanbase Sherlock gave him. He didn’t want to be accosted at panels by teenage girls in flower crowns asking if he thinks Johnlock will ever become canon. He probably didn’t want to know what Tumblr even was.
Doyle’s original Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” was meant to actually kill Sherlock. Sherlock and Moriarty fall off a waterfall to their deaths. He also didn’t want the rabid fanbase his stories had adopted. He wanted to be done with the character. But his fans were so obsessive he felt pressured to revive the character for more stories. Moffat didn’t want to kill Sherlock for real. Sherlock was a huge success and made Moffat one of the most powerful British TV writers. He wanted to kill the obsessive fanbase.
Moffat’s characterization of the fans in “The Empty Hearse” reveals more about the writer himself than levies any genuine critique of those that engaged with his series. To only have three episodes of TV a season and to waste a large chunk of one episode making fun of your show’s, heavily teenage, fanbase who thinks of you as a writing god is pathetic. Rather than write the show he wanted to write, he became sidetracked by making sure his audience knew that he didn’t like them and thought they were ridiculous.
With the cleverness of trying to construct a good mystery fizzled away, Sherlock couldn’t hurt me anymore. I watched Season 4 and felt nothing.
Sherlock Season 3 aired in January 2014. I left Tumblr in October of 2014. Over those months, I felt increasingly distant from a place I used to spend all my time scrolling on. Engaging in fandoms meant nothing to me. I didn’t care about speculating on Sherlock’s newest cliffhanger: that Moriarty might be alive. I already learned not to expect anything out of the show.
Unlike most TV disappointments, the anti-reveal in Sherlock doesn’t sting in the same way now. It stung to feel disrespected back then. But the thin and reactionary writing decision showed me my time was more valuable. And as the existence of Sherlock as a show fades further and further into obscurity, it’s rewarding to know other former fans learned the same lesson.
I spent years being annoyed about the solution to Sherlock’s faked death. But without it, I probably wouldn’t have left Tumblr when I did. I wouldn’t have spent years trying to put into words exactly why that ending bugged me so much. The truth is, I liked thinking about TV shows. Sherlock made me feel like that was a stupid way to spend my time. And here I am, writing 2,000 words about why that was a disappointing mistake; making a career about thinking about the media I consume. Sherlock’s ending stung, but I learned I can sting back.
Leila Jordan is a writer and former jigsaw puzzle world record holder. Her work has appeared in Paste Magazine, the LA Times, Business Insider, Gold Derby, TheWrap, FOX Digital, The Spool, and Awards Radar. To talk about all things movies, TV, and useless trivia you can find her @galaxyleila
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