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    lizzindc replied to your quote: “I’ve been online and looked at all the theories,”…

People have been pointing out that he cried…but I would say that he’s done similarly emotional things before when he was lying/hiding things/on drugs. He also admitted that he was wrong. I need to watch again.

I don’t think it was either of these things. (Cut for the dashes of people who are tired of hearing people moon about a TV show.)

We’ve already seen teary Sherlock in Baskerville, and we’ve already seen Sherlock get over himself long enough to be gentle with Molly. 

I don’t know why I didn’t involve this in my Grand Unified Theory of Sherlock’s Fake Death before, because I kind of twigged on it the first time I saw it, but there are two things that stick out to me now:

1. Sherlock asks Moriarty for a moment of privacy. Hello, out of character. Also note when he does it, it’s right after Moriarty is looking at the sidewalk and telling him he has an audience. When Moriarty walks away, the camera perspective changes to farther back on the roof, so for a few moments, we don’t see the sidewalk, and neither does Moriarty. In fact, Moriarty never sees the sidewalk again, and I don’t think we see it again until there’s a body on it.

2. “Keep your eyes fixed on me!” This seems like kind of an odd phrase when you’re telling your best friend that you’re about to off yourself, but combined with his insistence that John stand in a particular spot across the street, I think it’s significant. 

So my Grand Unified Theory is now that Sherlock was trying to conceal from both Moriarty and John that Molly was getting into position with a spare corpse and/or something for him to jump onto (possibly with that truck?). Note that John loses sight of Sherlock when he passes behind that short outbuilding in front of the hospital, and all we really see is a body in a black coat hit the sidewalk. This also allows Molly to spirit Sherlock away in all the commotion while John’s attention is firmly on the body.

I continue to think that the bit where John gets hit by the cyclist and thrown to the ground was an intentional effort to disorient him to sell the illusion- the body would have to be officially identified, and John’s his roommate, so his ID wouldn’t be questioned, and by the time he’s got his head on straight enough to know there’s a problem, the deed would have been done. I don’t think that this plan *requires* that John be dosed with the Baskerville drug so that his mind fills in Sherlock’s face on the corpse, but I don’t see any reason that couldn’t have happened.

And finally, I don’t think the corpse on the ground is Moriarty’s. I think Sherlock actually was surprised when Moriarty shot himself in the head, and I don’t think Molly would have had enough time to drag Moriarty off the roof and dress him up like Sherlock without being seen by anyone inside the hospital. Also I think you couldn’t count on John not recognizing a familiar face.

Instead, I think Sherlock’s original plan was to take Moriarty off the roof with him, killing Moriarty and giving him a chance to lay low in case there were any unpleasant surprises set in motion. But of course, it didn’t work out that way, and fortunately he had some death-faking plans already in place so he went with it.

Edited to add: 

- In the Conan Doyle original, where Sherlock and Moriarty go plunging over the falls, Sherlock’s later return is explained by holes in the eyewitness accounts. Eyewitnesses, as any watcher of crime dramas knows, are unreliable. 

- The entire episode is presented as John’s recounting of Sherlock’s death to his therapist, so the entire episode is one big eyewitness account. So I strongly believe the answer hinges on John being an unreliable narrator. (Due to the combination of concussion, sight lines, trauma, and possible drugging.)