The Missing Reichenbach Solution 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

Moftiss et al love a cliffhanger, don’t they? It’s an old trick, beloved to writers and filmmakers since the early days of serial adventure dramas. In its most classic form, the hero is shown hanging off the edge of a literal cliff as the episode comes to a close, leaving the viewer desperate to find out if he will live or die in the next installment. Of course, the sophisticated viewer knows that the hero will almost always live (unless the actor’s contract has been canceled). But that doesn’t necessarily detract from the drama.

The last scene in The Great Game is a good example of this – our heroes are in a deadly situation, snipers behind them, explosives in front, and a semi-suicidal madman presiding over it all. How will they possibly get out of this? Tune in two years hence!

From a distance, the end of The Reichenbach Fall looks like another standard cliffhanger, the viewer breathlessly anticipating the promised resolution. But it’s doing something a bit different.

Contrary to tradition, this cliffhanger doesn’t end with our hero on the cliff. Instead, we get to watch him fall. We watch him hit the ground. And even more remarkably, we watch him come back to life.

Roll credits.

That’s not the usual order of things when creating a cliffhanger, but in this case it was necessary – this was a nod, of course, to the fact that the audience has known for over 100 years that Sherlock Holmes survives the fall. Moftiss have shifted our emotional energy from, “what is going to happen?” to “how did he do that?” That in itself is a neat trick, but that’s not all that’s happening here. Sherlock’s appearance at the end of The Reichenbach Fall marks a shift in the way this story is being told. A shift that was anticipated as early as the first episode, but is only now coming to full fruition. The Reichenbach Fall is a crucial moment not only in the narrative, but in the meta narrative of the show: Moftiss are forcing us to examine what it means to update this hero to our own era.

In the first season, it was possible to watch the show and believe that all you needed was a handful of mobile phones to bring the iconic Victorian detective into the modern age – very little else had to change.

But already in series 2, Moftiss started showing us the cracks that result from this uneasy melding of the old and the new: something about Sherlock Holmes doesn’t quite fit with our world. Mobile phone in hand, he nonetheless remains a bit of a throwback, not quite in step with the way we tell stories today.

Why is this? Season 1 Sherlock is the very model of the rational, coherent subject. This creature is a fantasy that has been with us since at least the Enlightenment, and was much beloved by Victorians as well. The rational subject may not have achieved complete mastery of the world around him, but he knows it to be possible. He (and he is always, necessarily a white male) believes in science and technology and progress, and that these tools will be enough to eventually unlock every mystery. The rationalist trusts his reason and he trusts his senses, especially vision – to properly see something is to understand it.

JOHN: Yes, how did you know? 
SHERLOCK: I didn’t know, I saw. 

Those who fail to understand have failed to see. The rational subject is also stable – he knows who he is, he understands himself, and he behaves predictably, reasonably, and coherently.

With the development of the Moriarty arc in season 2, we see that rationalist fantasy start to fall apart. We could argue the end of A Scandal in Belgravia marks the beginning:

The first sign of the irrational creeping into Sherlock. Then in The Hounds of Baskerville, we see a Sherlock who no longer understands himself.

He is not in control of his body, and can no longer trust his senses – particularly his eyes. He is becoming fractured, and he doesn’t handle it well. Then in The Reichenbach Fall, Moriarty, the imp of the postmodern, steals the show by deconstructing the mythology of Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty robs Sherlock of his good name, but even more damningly, demonstrates to him that his reason and intelligence cannot protect him.

Sherlock saw, but he didn’t hear – his reason failed when up against the clever, unpredictable madness of Moriarty.

Given this deconstructive narrative, what kind of “solution” to The Reichenbach Fall could we possibly have expected? As viewers, we like to imagine that we would have been satisfied with a single, coherent, perfectly explicated solution. But I’m arguing that such a solution would have been a betrayal of the larger critical work the show is doing, and would have been a disappointment in its own right. Many fans wished for a solution that brought us back to S1 Sherlock, perhaps to reassure us that reason will triumph over madness, and Sherlock Holmes may once again be the iconic, crime-solving master. But that was never really possible, nor should we want it to be – any more than we should want to return to the simplistic, dishonest, phony rationalism of the Victorian era.

Instead, Moftiss challenged us with a series overlapping, contradictory and unresolvable explanations for Reichenbach. We are teased with two that seem patently ridiculous before getting a third which *seems* like it will satisfy our yearning for a simple, straightforward “truth”.

And left unexamined, it does – a casual viewer can walk away from The Empty Hearse feeling like he got the answer to the problem.

But anyone who looks more closely will discover that even the third solution, in all its wondrous complexity, simply doesn’t work. The S1 fantasia of a Sherlock who can always explain what happened with perfect, rational precision has been broken down into fractured perspectives, a tension between public and private truths, logic that isn’t logical, mania (in the form of Anderson) that may be quite sane… Everything Moftiss taught us to trust about this universe has been questioned and unsettled.

Which brings us to the fourth Reichenbach solution – the one that was right in front of us all this time, but is rarely recognized or acknowledged:

Of all the solutions, this is the only one that “works”, but it’s anything but rational. And what’s most telling about this solution is something that happens only a few moments earlier:

In this moment, Sherlock is dwelling in undecideability. He doesn’t like it, he tells us he doesn’t like it. Rationalist that he is, he wants there to be answers. And yet, in this moment he is acknowledging that there aren’t always answers. Not merely that he hasn’t figured out the solution yet, but that the truth may not be certain – that there may not even be a single, coherent truth.

And so it’s no surprise that when John finally demands to know what really happened when Sherlock jumped off the roof, the answer is both impossible and inevitable – what we didn’t want to accept and yet knew all along: Sherlock Holmes is indestructible. Even his own creator couldn’t kill him. And writers like Moftiss, and like me, and like you, will keep reviving him until the end of time.