Written by Steve Thompson
Directed by Toby Haynes
“I knew you’d fall for it. That’s your weakness. You always want everything to be clever. Now shall we finish the game? One final act. Glad you chose a tall building nice way to do it.”
Definite, imperative, and monumental SPOILER alert…you have been warned most emphatically!
It’s the ending that’s making me feel…ambivalent.
Up until the climax, The Reichenbach Fall is content to present the destruction of Sherlock Holmes with devastating, surgical precision. It’s full of magnificent twists and turns, as Moriarty seems to have anticipated every (and I do mean EVERY) situation, every contingency, every move that Holmes makes. It is the story of an insane genius, unwilling to live in a world full of “ordinary” people…yet unwilling to depart until he has eliminated the one rival he has among the dross he calls humanity.
In fact, Moriarty’s suicide is the greatest shock of the series. Madness and Holmes machinations notwithstanding, I simply didn’t see it coming…and I can’t decide if Holmes was surprised or aghast by the madman’s decision.
In every respect, 90% of this episode is brilliant, and I’m not going to waste any more time trying to come up with a list of superlatives…especially when I’m still dealing with my ambivalence over the conclusion.
It’s too clever for its own good. It should have been solely about the emotion. It should have been told completely from the point of view of Watson, as he pieces together everything that happens, and watches the new world he has built for himself tossed into the rubbish bin. The genius of Conan Doyle’s original “Final Problem” is that Holmes WAS killed, no questions asked. The equal brilliance of “The Empty House” was to demonstrate the ultimate “get out of that” without sacrificing or compromising any of Holmes’ genius & courage.
But Reichenbach Fall has one problem: I can SEE the machinations. I can SEE the beats where explanations, solutions, tricks, sleight-of-hand & illusion can (and no doubt will) be added after the fact. All the clues as to what type of preparations have been made are TOO clear…and now it’s only a matter of next-season explanations. And I HATE HATE HATE the fact that Holmes shows up in the final moment. This episode should have ended with Watson at the graveside, dealing with his crushing emotional damage…NOT such an in-your-face statement that everything about Sherlock’s death was an obvious put-up job. It’s an ending that wants us to pat the production staff on the back and say “well done“…which is the LAST thing I desired. It’s a slap in the face.
The ending is salvaged by Martin Freeman, single-handedly saving the final moments with his best acting of the entire season. It’s a great pity it was employed for such a dubious conclusion.
So that was The Reichenbach Fall: an utterly mesmerizing & sublime final episode, sabotaged by an ending that feels so much less than what Sherlock is worth, as a character and as a series. Sherlock is all about genius. Simply being clever reduces the series to what Moriarty hates about everyone else in the world: being ordinary.
9
