This one takes all the guesswork out and lays everything out flat (ooh, bad choice of words there, Bec...) I wanted to get all the information down in a nice, clean way before the May premieres here.
SPOILERS FOR SHERLOCK SERIES 2. STOP HERE IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE REICHENBACH FALL...
LAST WARNING!
The Conspirators
Mycroft -Had Moriarty in his clutches, broke the Geneva Convention to get information from him by having him beaten and kept in pitch darkness and solitary confinement for months. The only way that Moriarty would give Mycroft what he wanted was to have all of Sherlock's history given to him on a silver platter. Mycroft doesn't want to make a martyr out of the consulting criminal by having him killed in secret. Mycroft and Moriarty then exchange information-Mycroft sells Sherlock's life story to Moriarty for a few lines of code.
Of course, the code is bogus. Mycroft must know that. Maybe he does, and the best way to take down a mastermind like Jim is to let him do it to himself. Even if he doesn't, there's full disclosure going on between the Holmes brothers in this one. Don't believe for a second that Sherlock didn't know exactly what was going on. Mycroft is an overprotective pain in the neck and I would be terribly surprised if he gave up Sherlock's entire life story to the greatest criminal mastermind in the world and didn't tell his little brother that he'd done it, even if he realized that the code had been a ruse. Even Mycroft isn't too proud to admit to Sherlock that he made a grievous mistake, not when it could mean his death.
I also have had the idea that Mycroft could have fed Moriarty's cronies a bullshit code in the first place, making it only work a couple of times, or that it exposes whoever uses it to getting caught in the act. Moriarty would have put the thing up for auction to those assassins, then found out it was crap, but he's already got the damn thing up for sale. He's cornered if those guys find out that the code is fake. What can he do now but turn around and attack Sherlock, his "final problem?"
I know, I know. Mad theory. But I just don't want to believe that Mycroft could be as disloyal as to sell out his baby brother without a damned good reason.
Dr. Molly Hooper-Molly is a useful person to Sherlock Holmes.
1. She's a coroner-Like John, she has a medical license. Molly doesn't probably work with living bodies all that often due to her current position, but it stands to reason she knows how to use a needle and can fake records.
2. She's not on Sherlock's buddy list-meaning that Moriarty would always, always overlook her because he doesn't see her as anyone significant to Sherlock. He only dated her in the first place because it got him into Bart's and closer to his prey.
3. She can get rhododendron ponticum if Sherlock can't do it himself. With only 8 hours of planning time, it might be hard to get a poison like this unless you had a contact willing to get it for you. It's possible Mycroft could get some, but Molly would ensure that the poisoning was done right so as not to really kill Sherlock.
Sherlock-Moriarty's whole plan is to "tear his heart out." Beginning with his reputation, continuing with his closest friends, and ending with Sherlock's eventual death, Moriarty doesn't want to just kill Sherlock. He wants him torn apart into little pieces and spat out of a woodchipper. He wants nothing left of him. Killing him is boring. Destroying him is much more interesting.
Moriarty-Jim is what Sherlock would be without a heart; cold, calculating, lonely. Jim has no friends, no confidants. He understands violence, hatred, and rage, but love, feelings, and caring for someone besides himself is foreign to him. Sherlock may not always understand his emotions, but at least he bothers to have them at all.
Moriarty also doesn't understand loyalty without money/power involved. His minions are paid or cowed to be loyal to him, they grovel at his feet because he's smarter than them and can have them killed in interesting and excessively painful ways. They're loyal because they fear him, and probably loathe him just a little for having the strength that he does.
Sherlock engenders loyalty because John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson see a great man trying to be a good man. Molly is on that list, too. They want to help him, to be at his side and support him because they care about him. Mycroft cares in a different way because his ties are familial, but he's watching out for his little brother all the time in various and unsubtle ways.
Moriarty doesn't understand this caring lark. He doesn't get why these people give a damn. He sees them as potential targets to get through Sherlock's armor and weaken him. In short, he sees them as (forgive the metaphor, Benedict, I really couldn't help it!) open unprotected spots on the underside of the dragon.
Recall Sherlock saying alone protects him. That's what Moriarty thinks. Funny enough, it's Sherlock's connections, his friends and family that get him out from under Jim's plan. In the end, Mycroft and Molly will save Sherlock from the death that Moriarty dies-a lonely suicide on a rooftop.
The Setup
Targets are John, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade. None of them know that Sherlock actually survived the fall off the pathology building. They all have to appear to be grieving the loss of him because if they aren't, all three of them will be dead. Not a one of these three are good enough actors to be told in secret and keep their mouths shut and their actions appropriate to the situation.
The only one who witnesses Sherlock's death in full is John, because he's the one that needs the most convincing. The others will take it at face value-John would want real, physical, tangible proof.
Sherlock knows his "death", however false, has to be dramatic and visible to ALL of London, to the snipers with their guns aimed at his friends. Sherlock would never die this way if given a choice; there is the possibility of survival and being left permanently crippled and disabled. Sherlock knows how to commit suicide properly thanks to his consulting detective job-he deals with the dead all the time, AND we know from the stories that he has an extensive knowledge of poisons and chemistry. There are far better ways of doing oneself in than falling off a building.
But chemical death isn't as graphic, so he has to settle for this.
Of course he has to know what's coming. He's preparing from the moment that he leaves Rich Brook's flat, the night before he "dies." He goes to Molly for help. John is away at the time, berating Mycroft at the Diogenes Club. Sherlock spends the ENTIRE night in the lab at Bart's, since he's actually running away from the law. He has nowhere to go-can't go home, won't go to Mycroft, Scotland Yard is full of people wanting to arrest him.
And so Sherlock uses his and Molly's extensive knowledge of chemicals and poisons to come up with a plan involving rhododendron ponticum, a poison that slows the pulse and gives the appearance of death. This plan could go forward without Mycroft, but it's still going to be bloody hard to get ahold of the ponticum without his help, since that doesn't seem like something they'd keep in the lab of a teaching hospital. Even with Sherlock's near-encyclopedic knowhow of poisons, how likely is he to have the one at Baker Street that he needs? There are a lot of poisons; unless he's got a collection of them, he won't have it at home so that someone could go get it out of his things. It's late at night, and they can't order it on overnight delivery because that's unreliable and it might not get there in time. Best bet's probably Mycroft, Mr. British Government, who could probably procure any damn poison his little brother wants. Thank the Lord for MI-6 connections...
Of course, Sherlock could have grabbed some rhododendrons off the boarding house lawn, but that's planning too far ahead. Different species of the plant can poison, and more than likely Sherlock would want to stick with the honey made from rhododendrons, not the plants themselves, because eating the honey doesn't usually kill you. Here's a line from hbg.org, describing the poison and its effects...
The intoxication is rarely fatal and generally lasts for no more than 24 hours. Generally the disease induces dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, nausea, and vomiting shortly after the toxic honey is ingested. Other symptoms that can occur are low blood pressure or shock, bradyarrhythima (slowness of the heart beat associated with an irregularity in the heart rhythm), sinus bradycardia (a slow sinus rhythm, with a heart rate less than 60), nodal rhythm (pertaining to a node, particularly the atrioventricular node), Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome (anomalous atrioventricular excitation) and complete atrioventricular block.
Also...
In humans, symptoms of poisoning occur after a dose-dependent latent period of a few minutes to two or more hours and include salivation, vomiting, and both circumoral (around or near the mouth) and extremity paresthesia (abnormal sensations). Pronounced low blood pressure and sinus bradycardia develop. In severe intoxication, loss of coordination and progressive muscular weakness result. Extrasystoles (a premature contraction of the heart that is independent of the normal rhythm and arises in response to an impulse in some part of the heart other than the sinoatrial node; called also premature beat) and ventricular tachycardia (an abnormally rapid ventricular rhythm with aberrant ventricular excitation, usually in excess of 150 per minute) with both atrioventricular and intraventricular conduction disturbances also may occur. Convulsions are reported occasionally. (Thanks to http://hbd.org/brewery/library/HonD.html)
Clearly this is not something Sherlock could just go and buy at a moment's notice. He would need Mycroft's extensive reach to get some of this stuff to poison himself with.
Sherlock has hours and hours, then, to set up a plan, to work something out with the homeless network, Mycroft, and Molly. By the time John is finished shouting at Mycroft and is headed back, a plan is probably mostly done, because Molly has left by the time John arrives at the morgue.
John comes back at some point and falls asleep on the desk across from where Sherlock is sitting. Remember John is supposed to have been arrested too, so he also has nowhere to go.
It is at THIS likely point that Sherlock takes the rhododendron poison, since it takes three to six hours to take effect. That would have him taking it somewhere in the early hours of the morning, while John sleeps at the desk.
John is woken by a phone call (who calls him is a mystery I would like solved but my guess would be Mycroft) because Mrs. Hudson has been shot and is dying. Sherlock refuses to leave. John accuses him of being a machine and not caring (a paradox if there ever was one-Sherlock isn't leaving Bart's because he cares too much for John, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson.)
Of course the whole bloody thing is a ruse to get John out of the way for a few moments while Sherlock goes and deals with Jim on the roof.
The Rooftop
So we assume Sherlock's had the rhododendron stuff in his system for a few hours already. When Moriarty takes a good look at him on the rooftop, he peers up at Sherlock, and sees something wrong with his eyes (pupils are way contracted, and it's awfully hard to see Jim's because Andrew Scott's irises are so damn dark).
And here, Moriarty takes Sherlock's pulse by shaking his hand.
And finds...nothing. No pulse. Sherlock's heart rate is so slowed by the rhododendron poison that he already would fool someone into thinking he was dead.
Moriarty GETS it, of course. He gets that Sherlock's loyalty to his friends means that he would die for them, blow his reputation for them, lose it all for them. But Sherlock doesn't walk into death blindly-he's already got an OUT set up somewhere.
Sherlock may fake-die today and his reputation may be in tatters, but the snipers will be called off of John, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade. And that matters more to him than anything else.
Moriarty thanks him for a game well played and blows his own head off, forcing Sherlock into going forward with the "suicide."
The Fall
There are blatant, probably deliberate mistakes throughout this scene.
1. Position of Sherlock's body falling versus where he lands. He falls perpendicular to the building, but lands parallel to it. Not enough airspace to flip around in midair, so he changes position when he's out of sight behind the small building in front of the hospital. It's possible he lands on the rubbish truck, jumps to the ground, and rolls in a puddle of freshly-placed fake or real blood (doesn't make a difference whether it's corn syrup or the real stuff.)
2. Too much blood, too little time-There are mere seconds between Sherlock's landing and Watson reaching him, even with the well-placed cyclist. There's no more than a minute or two between the fall and Watson seeing him again. Unless there were terrible, terrible injuries, there is too much blood on the ground for someone whose bones are not broken and whose body appears fairly whole.
There is also the minor issue of Sherlock's left ear-he appears to be bleeding from it, but that's impossible, given the fact that IF he fell the way he was supposed to, he should have landed on his FACE. Even if he did land on his side, it still doesn't work, given that when we see him again, he's lying on his RIGHT side, not his LEFT. His injuries should be primarily on the side he lands on.
3. Given that, there are not enough injuries. A person who has fallen 70 feet off a building will have broken bones, open wounds, head injuries, a more than likely injured spine. Sherlock looks perfect save for his bleeding head, a near impossibility unless the man landed on a mattress.
4. That said, IF someone is injured in that way, the first thing you do NOT do is roll him over the way these people in scrubs do. You support the neck and head because he could be paralyzed if you shift him improperly. You check his airway secondary to that, breathing, and THEN circulation. They jump right over the first two and on to the third.
You would THEN get a neck brace on him and roll him onto the stretcher, keeping him lying straight as you put him on a backboard to keep his spine even. You do not DROP him like a sack of flour onto the stretcher. Any shift of the spine might make things worse and leave him without important functions like breathing or walking.
In fact, the way these people in scrubs behave, you would THINK they didn't know how to treat someone who's fallen off a building, or that that someone wasn't injured very much at all.
5. The amount of people in scrubs and how quickly they show up is too fast. Given that Bart's is under a refit, there shouldn't be a lot of doctors around. Ditto on that stretcher. Even in a good, busy, occupied hospital, it should take a minute or even two for someone to shout around for a stretcher, find one unoccupied, navigate it through the hospital corridors, and out the door to where Sherlock's fallen. This gurney comes whizzing out mere seconds after he lands.
6. The fact that even when Watson comes up claiming to be a doctor, the people around him pull him away. Even in a crisis like this, even an injured doctor offering to help would be allowed to aid his friend, and would be allowed to walk into the hospital with him. Remember: Watson was TRAINED at St. Bart's. He's WORKED there. He knows people who WORK there at the present MOMENT (Stanford for one, Molly for another.) If there were real doctors and nurses in that crowd, they would KNOW him and they would KNOW he was an army medic and they would LET him take care of Sherlock. The reason Watson is pulled away is that if he gets too close, he might feel Sherlock's heart trying to beat and his pulse, however faint, and he might believe that his friend could make it. He has to feel nothing and believe what he feels-that Sherlock's body is truly dead and that his friend has really gone.
So, around the corner Sherlock goes on a stretcher, with all the appearances of death.
They take him down to the morgue, and Molly receives his poor, bloodied form.
Molly injects atropine to get his circulation back to normal. It might take him time to recover, no more than a day or two.
Meanwhile, Watson is in hospital overnight to make sure his head's OK, Mycroft "identifies" his brother's body, Molly fakes the records.
Then there's the staging of the funeral. Sherlock's probably been cremated because it would mean less risk of John pointing into an open casket and remarking that the body in the box looks NOTHING like the guy's he's lived with for a year and a half. Also note in "Belgravia" when Sherlock mentions to the two little girls that their grandfather has not gone to heaven but that he's been taken to a special room and burned. This blatant description of cremation implies to me that Sherlock probably would have wanted to be handled this way after his demise.
However it goes, it ends with a tombstone in a graveyard. Sherlock is dead to the world, and only Mycroft and Molly know the truth.
I assume that the bouncy ball is a red herring. Sherlock wouldn't be functional enough with the rhododendron stuff in his system to hold the ball in his armpit, and he wouldn't need to anyway with his pulse slowed by the poison. So, bouncy ball=boredom of consulting detective.
I will admit to this-I have absolutely no clue what Moffat was talking about when he said there was something we all missed. Feel free to throw theories at that one.
So there we are again, all the way through another pile of theories. Hopefully I led you to some interesting ideas, and hopefully we can all work together to figure out what the hell happened. I probably won't post an update of this one unless someone in the know spills their lentils and gives us a decent clue.
Ta,
Bec
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