Sherlock: "The Reichenbach Fall" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 17) I watched the next episode in sequence of Sherlock, the sometimes wonderful, sometimes maddening, and sometimes both version of the Sherlock Holmes stories created by BBC Wales between 2010 and 2014. This one, the third in season two, was called “The Reichenbach Fall” – all the episodes had titles that somehow or other referenced the canon of Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – though the actual Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, which Conan Doyle chose as the site where he would kill off Sherlock Holmes as a character (only to be forced by public demand to revive him three years later), are shown only in the opening sequence as a painting by Turner (presumably William Turner, who specialized in spectacular landscapes, rather than his contemporary and namesake J. M. W. Turner, who did mostly portraits) which Holmes has helped the police recover after it had been stolen. Holmes scores a number of similar triumphs, all well publicized by the British tabloids, which make him a celebrity – much to his disgust. His big score is recovering a pair of pre-pubescent children, the son and daughter of the American ambassador to Britain, who were taken from their boarding school while the ambassador was back in the U.S. temporarily. Holmes is able to deduce their location with a lot of scientific help – after a while this starts to look like an episode of the long-running CNN Headline News series Forensic Files as Holmes and a woman assistant hunch over test tubes and announce their discoveries in breathless fashion – only it’s all a plot by Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott) to discredit and embarrass Holmes and ultimately drive him to suicide.

Moriarty in this incarnation of the legend is not a former mathematics professor turned boss of a web of crime (though Holmes’s image of Moriarty as the spider in the center of an international criminal organization is recycled in the script by Steve Thompson) but a rather annoyingly impish former IT guy who has turned his brilliant hacking of just about any computer system into an instrument of crime. Since virtually all security systems these days are computer-controlled to some extent, and since Moriarty is a genius-level hacker, he can open just about any security protocol in the world and help himself to the Crown Jewels (I’ve noted before what a big debt this show owes to the 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, second and best of the 14 Holmes films with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson, which also featured Moriarty as a mastermind of a plot to steal the Crown Jewels), allow prisoners to escape en masse from British jails and generally do whatever he wants. Holmes and police Inspector Lestrade (impeccably played by Rupert Graves) arrest Moriarty and actually put him on trial, but after a strange sequence in which Holmes is too inclined to express his low opinion of the British justice system to be an effective witness for the prosecution. Moriarty is acquitted – courtesy of threatening letters to each of the 12 jurors saying he knows where their families live and their families will be targeted for his revenge if he’s convicted. Moriarty also uses his command of computers to create a false scenario in which Holmes will look like a criminal himself. Like the fictional Baron Munchhausen, Holmes will appear as a person who commits crimes and steals valuable property just to pose as a great hero once he “recovers” the loot and brings it back.

Moriarty has also arranged for three of the world’s biggest hit-men assassins to rent rooms on Baker Street near Holmes’s flat. They’re each under orders to assassinate one of the only three friends Holmes has: Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman), his landlady Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs), and Inspector Lestrade. Only Moriarty can deliver the stop-code for the assassinations, and if he doesn’t return alive and free from his last appointment with Holmes (which takes place, appropriately enough, on the rooftop of the London hospital just above their pathology ward), they will kill their intended victims. Moriarty announces to Holmes that the only way he can save his friends is to dictate a confession saying that he was a fake and a criminal – which neatly fits in with the “line” taken by tabloid reporter Kitty Riley (Katherine Parkinson), who’s published a series of articles blasting Holmes after he insulted her when she crashed a men’s room to confront him, and whose main source was Moriarty himself in the guise of an actor named “Richard Brook” whom she’s been dating. Moriarty sticks a gun into his mouth and kills himself, announcing that this will ensure the murders of Watson, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade because he’s taking the knowledge of the stop-code with him. Holmes obligingly jumps off the roof of the hospital and opens a huge wound in his head that bleeds out, ostensibly killing him. There’s a predictably sad scene in which Watson and Mrs. Hudson pay their respects to Holmes’s tombstone – only Holmes isn’t dead: he’s in a bunch of trees hiding while he watches his friends mourn his passing.

The gimmick of a man faking his death and attending his own funeral incognito is probably even older than the Holmes stories themselves; the example I could remember is Puccini’s second (and worst) opera, Edgar, in which the eponymous protagonist fakes his own death, shows up in disguise at his funeral and disses himself in front of the mourners saying what a great guy he was. My husband Charles came home from work in time to catch the last half-hour of this 90-minute slice of occasionally interesting nonsense, and both he and I were predictably bothered by the lack of any explanation as to how Holmes survived Moriarty’s murderous attack on him. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at least provided one when he revived Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”; it wasn’t a great explanation and it depended on a lot of coincidence and back-writing (in the story of Holmes’s death, “The Final Problem,” he said that the sides of the cliffs at Reichenbach Falls were sheer; in “The Empty House” he had Holmes correct Watson’s account and say there were tiny but usable handholds that enabled him to climb up them), but at least Conan Doyle came up with something. Steve Thompson couldn’t be bothered. After the relative quality of the previous week’s episode, “The Hounds of Baskerville,” “The Reichenbach Fall” was disappointing, especially in the final act, and one wonders whether the Sherlock writers will similarly use authorial fiat to revive Moriarty as well.