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.