Being a Sherlock Holmes fan, it was fantastic to discover ‘Sherlock’ series 1 on BBC. It is a re-adaptation of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes placing him in a modern day avatar in 2010 London. It was one of my favourite series while I was pursuing LLM in UK (when I also developed a liking for British classic sitcoms like Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Yes Minister and Vicar of Dibley). When I returned to India to take up a teaching position at one of the National Law Universities, I waited for series 2 of Sherlock and like many fans around the world, at the end of series 2, have been trying to guess how Sherlock might have survived the five storey fall off the Bartholomew Hospital.
Well here’s my solution (I am sure many have also chanced on similar or same solution):
- Sherlock is given a chemical which can induce death like symptoms by Penny (to fool Dr. Watson).
- Sherlock injects it while he’s talking with Moriarty (1:09:15).
This trick of hand was already done once in Series 2 when Sherlock took pulse of Irene as shown below:
3. 3. After that Sherlock jumps onto the garbage truck:
The aerial view is as below:
However there are certain points which go against the theory above, Sherlock just slipped off the building he does not have the required lateral momentum to propel him to the garbage truck which is at least 15-18 feet from the building. Also the sniper assassin must have seen Sherlock jumping onto garbage truck and thus would have logically shot Dr. Watson (unless he is also blindsided by the building like Dr. Watson). Further the shots of hands, which I interpret to be injections, can easily be interpreted to be prelude to the tapping off the dud codes.
Anyway I am eagerly waiting for Series 3 and check how far my theory succeeds. Just a side-note I would have been much happier if S2E3 didn’t show Sherlock alive at the end, there would have been more speculation and then BBC could have suddenly sprung Series 3 in 2012 autumn.
