I’ve read the original stories, and don’t get me wrong–I did enjoy the second ep of this series. (Same for the second ep of last series, again generally thought to be the weak member.) But I don’t think the pseudo-supernatural worked as well as in the original story. Possibly this is just a story that doesn’t adapt well, or possibly it could’ve been done better–who knows.
**StarvingButStrong **reminds me–what was going on with the coded flashes in the ep? I don’t recall how that got sorted out either.
This is what I need a plausible explanation for. Sherlock clearly jumped off the building. Having it later somehow be that he swapped and pushed a body off will not work as a good explanation. But, that is a 4 or 5 story building. That’s not something that a few bags of leaves or a mattress or two will do any good. He’s going to need a sizable layer of soft stuff to land on. And we clearly see that when Watson shows up, there are workers below, but there is no large inflated stuntman bag. Ergo, whatever is deployed has to be quickly deployed and quickly retracted.
Next, Watson cannot see the actual landing, and is bumped enough to hit his head and delay his arrival on scene. There are plenty of other onlookers around, checking the body, by the time he gets over there. Clearly plenty of other people saw something. Whatever clever explanation is going to need to explain how nobody managed to witness the changeout. How did some other body hit the pavement and Holmes not?
Also, from the view looking down, it seems impossible that Holmes could have made a large enough jump to make it to the street, to land in the garbage truck (if that is what happened). Did the truck back up, then drive off? :dubious:
As far as the body being on its side when Watson arrives, it was being checked by several other people in hospital scrubs when Watson made it to the scene. Clearly they turned the body over.
I’m curious how they make this plausible. I understand the intent is to make it look impossible, so that Holmes’ powers of reasoning are supported. But it just looks a bit too impossible, and they really need a good explanation to cover their daring ploy.
I did catch the request to Molly for help, so clearly she is involved. I also caught the point where the girl thought her abductor was Sherlock, so somehow someone faked looking like Sherlock in order to do the abduction. I could see that somehow being involved in the body switcheroo.
This actually is a bit off. So, there are three assassins waiting for Sherlock to jump. How did the other two (i.e. the ones not watching Watson to see the fall) alerted? I could argue the one going to shoot Lestrade is there (because Lestrade’s office is in the building), but what about the guy waiting for Mrs. Hudson? How did he get the message?
I’m also lost as to how Sherlock deduced that Moriarty had a method to call off the murders. He came to that realization when Moriarty walked away to give him a moment of privacy. How does that lead to the deduction that there is a way to call it off? How does he not think Moriarty might have a way to call it off before that point?
The killers are waiting for Sherlock to jump. I assume he has to keep up the ruse of his own demise until he can determine who the shooters are and neutralize them. Otherwise, he could fake the fall, the killers stand down, then he turns around and announces “Ha ha, just fooling”. Clearly he needs a way to make sure they don’t act on their orders later. That would explain his going along with the demand that he claim to be a fake and making sure Watson believes he died.
Yes, Holmes convinced Moriarty that Holmes was cold-blooded enough that he could extract the signal from Moriarty. Thus, Moriarty claimed victory by assuring that Holmes would not be able to extract that signal. But it’s a hollow victory, dying before you can enjoy it. Which shows just how psychopathic Moriarty was.
I think he was a genius. Perhaps not Sherlock’s equal, but much closer to Sherlock than anyone else. Thus his ingenius plan to ruin Sherlock’s reputation. And it was a brilliant plan, because the only people who wouldn’t believe it were tainted as far as the world was concerned. So what if Watson doesn’t believe Sherlock was really a fake? “He’s just duped, poor boy. Can’t believe he could be taken in, so he won’t believe it. Tut tut.” Even Lestrade was at least questioning it. Like they said, everyone that Sherlock made look like a fool had a vested interest in seeing Sherlock was a clever faker instead of a brilliant deducer.
I was also glad that they did the twist with the code. I could accept that the brilliant mastermind Moriarty somehow came up with the key code software. I was really irked that he somehow had it reduced to a string of beats that he could pop out with one hand in a couple seconds. No. Software that sophisticated and complex would not be a couple lines of binary. It would be an extensive string of code. So when Moriarty turned around and laughed that he had tricked Sherlock, there is no code, I was happy. I mean, Sherlock should have been able to deduce that, but at least they got rid of the ridiculous part.
I’ll have to rewatch the jumping scene tonight, to re-study the truck’s departure, which I completely missed. I do remember Sherlock looking down and laughing, and then hopping back to re-engage with Moriarty for awhile longer.
I was just reading Moffatt’s and Gatiss’s discussions of this scene over at Wikipedia, and quote it here:
"Steven Moffat felt that he and co-creator Mark Gatiss had outdone Conan Doyle in their version of Holmes’ fall and Moffat added that, in that much-discussed sequence, there was still “a clue everybody’s missed.’”
A clue everyone’s missed, eh? I have DVR; I’ll just see about that.
I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but when Moriarty was describing the horrible situation Sherlock was in he said something about how there was no way Sherlock could stop the assassins, and he (Moriarty) wasn’t going to do it. Not couldn’t, but wouldn’t.
Well, I’ve replayed the scene over about a dozen times now. I do indeed see just the edge of a truck which contains bright plastic puffy things held in a cagelike enclosure. It pulls away just as everyone starts to cluster around the body on the sidewalk.
However, before that, when Sherlock’s looking over the edge, there are a couple of the typical red London double-decker buses parked there instead. There are people passing by on the sidewalk; one is an apparent blind man, who’s tapping the bus with his cane. A few seconds after we see the buses is when Sherlock looks down and laughs.
I’ve listened to their conversation for clues, but if something important was divulged, I’m too dim to grasp it.
Well, I have no clue how sneaky Moffat thinks he’s being, so it may not even be anything in that scene, but something else. We know, for instance, that Holmes had a conversation with Molly about needing his help, that he feels he is going to need to die, or something. That is obviously part of it. There could be something else from another scene, like that scene, rather than something from the rooftop scene, that Moffat has in mind.
Okay, where was that from? I tried searching wiki on Sherlock Holmes and cannot find any ref to this tv series.
And here’s an excerpt copied out of a UK online newspaper:
"But for all the repeat views on iPlayer and hypotheses regarding rogue cyclists and unexplained conversations with pathologists, show creator Steven Moffat insists fans have missed a key clue.
He said: 'I’ve been online and looked at all the theories and there’s one clue that everyone’s missed.
‘It’s something that Sherlock did that was very out of character, but which nobody has picked up on.’"
What’s out of character for Sherlock? Being nice? Being humble? Shaking hands? Crying?
Here’s my rundown on the mechanics of the faked suicide.
It’s indeed Sherlock on the building. It’s he who jumps. It’s he who is on the sidewalk. But he jumped first into the back of the truck which had recycle bags full of bubble wrap or other shock-absorbing material. In the truck was blood provided by Molly with which he anointed himself with, or he had it with him all along. He then hopped out of the truck and fell the last few feet onto the sidewalk. Molly or another St. Bart’s accomplice drove away the truck.
He has contrived to temporarily stop his pulse, either with drugs (remember Irene Adler’s drug) or some physical device, not that John has but a brief moment to try his pulse. He’s quickly wheeled away into the very hospital from which he jumped - where Molly works as coroner - where she’s to be the one who produces his death certificate.
This scenario makes it so that petite Molly doesn’t have to fling a heavy body out of some window.
The worst part is how long we have to wait to find out. I’ve read that they’re thinking of filming season three “sometime in 2013”, and there might be another 18 month gap between seasons.
Filming of Series 3 begins in January, 2013. After filming comes post-production. BBC was rather quick in putting it on the air as soon as it was finished, but PBS needs to wedge the program into Masterpiece Mystery…
Aaaaahr! I may have to teach myself the secret of viewing BBC series sooner than they’re distributed to the American market. I have several months at least to learn.
Making a phone call, I would imagine. If I got a voice call from Sherlock, I’d assume either something was hinky, or both his thumbs were broken. He did it because he needed John to be standing yea far back, looking up, when he jumped, or he might spot the trick, not bolting up the stairs of St. Bart’s, eyes glued to the screen of his phone. Sherlock is generally making an effort these days to spare John pain; if he genuinely wanted to die, he’d have thought up some way to have his flatmate be completely across town while he did it, and have sent his “suicide note” via text (or email, seeing as that’s kind of what those Blackberry phones are for).
The cyclist who knocked John down was in on it, and did so intentionally so that Sherlock would have time to scramble down and play dead; the crowd right around the body that John had to fight through was probably there at Sherlock’s behest, too. He needed Molly’s cooperation so that when his “corpse” was brought into the morgue, he didn’t actually die from being jammed into a storage freezer overnight. He may have needed her help to either recruit some EMTs, or just nick some uniforms – how often do you look at the faces of emergency workers in those big neon coats?
He stopped his pulse using the rubber ball he’d been playing with previously. It’s an old magic trick. Tuck it under your arm at the right spot, and you can “magically” stop your pulse even as a (genuine, non-plant) volunteer from the audience holds your wrist. There are a number of drugs available in a hospital that could theoretically have stopped his pulse and respiration, but the rubber ball would be by far the safest, easiest way to do it.
He’d better have had two rubber balls; how could he tell which wrist John would take his pulse from?
But John did take his pulse from the arm that he was lying on, which would really have increased the pressure from the rubber ball and rendered that arm dead.
Yeah, the cyclist would have to be in on it. The passersby would have to be as well, or they’d have seen him scrambling out of the truck and onto the pavement.
And Sherlock initiated the phone call to John earlier reporting that Mrs. Hudson was shot. He contrived it when John was dozing in the lab. He wanted John out of the way for awhile to give him time to engage Moriarty and get all the other elements in place.
The DVD’s went on sale just after the show finished in the UK & I’ve got an all-region player. And I just got the BluRays from Amazon. Netflix & Cable keep my purchase of movies or TV shows pretty rare, but I’ll gladly fling money in the direction of Mofftis…
The episode was, in many ways, referential to Conan Doyle’s story, where Moriarty sets up a false medical emergency to get Watson out of the way, leaving Sherlock alone for the confrontation. Here, it’s Sherlock doing the ditto.
I did think that the Moriarty suicide was… well, inconsistent. “As long as I’m alive, you can force the code out of me” doesn’t do it; presumably, as others have said, the assassins weren’t going to wait for six days. Sherlock would have only a matter of minutes (perhaps an hour or two) to get the code out of Moriarty, and that seems unlikely. I think it was a cop-out, because they didn’t want Sherlock to actually kill Moriarty.
And, BTW, assuming that the death was a set-up with Molly, the bicyclist, etc: then clearly Sherlock knew long before he was up on the rooftop, what was likely to happen. So the bit about him standing on the ledge and “suddenly” figuring out that Moriarty must have a code, that was all silly pretense. (Although, if Moriarty was devasted that Sherlock outwitted him on this one little ploy, how much more so if he learned that Sherlock had anticipated him hours ago?)
