Another brilliant discussion I seem to have missed long ago. :) Yes @ebaeschnbliah - I can only agree; Sherlock is asking himself a question about what to do. Or maybe it’s already hindsight and he’s trying to figure out what went wrong?
In any case, the subtext reading makes a lot of sense. And I think you’re right, @ebaeschnbliah, that Sherlock presents three options to himself and tries to opt for the third, but I’d guess the ‘real’ events are actually not described at all, not in any of his three scenarios. Perhaps, as you say in your ‘The big question’ meta, he’s afraid of risking that his and John’s friendship might be destroyed by the options of Love and, in particular, Sex. Maybe in that moment, Sherlock couldn’t even imagine the Love option would work because it seemed too soppy and un-realistic to him? And the Sex option outright frightened him in its cruelty (=indifference towards John’s friendship)? So he (thought he) went for the brain option, the ’rational’ one. Except that’s actually the least realistic one - partly because this one meant the biggest and most outrageous form of betrayal and deception (which Sherlock might have realized if he’d used his empathy there, but he probably didn’t), and partly because - quite logically - this scenario didn’t take into account all the many things that were likely to just go wrong (as Fanclub!Anderson - another John mirror - points out).
So - since Scenario #3 isn’t really plausible either, I believe what really happened (the text, not the subtext) might have been something slightly different. I think it’s interesting that The Fall, as we see it in TRF, isn’t actually confirmed by other media - why? It does say in these two news videos (X, X) which were embedded in John’s blog posts, that Sherlock Holmes jumped to his death from the roof of St Bart’s hospital. But nowhere does it say that John witnessed it, and John hasn’t written anything about TRF on his blog, except for the fact that Sherlock had saved two kidnapped children, and that he was now dead. And nothing whatsoever is said about Moriarty’s body. For all I know, John could just as well have received Sherlock’s phone call and then been told that Sherlock jumped to his death. And did the encounter with Moriarty on the rooftop even happen?
But the most interesting thing with the Love option depicted in TEH, in my opinion, is this: What is Derren Brown doing there?
He’s playing a magic trick of suggestion on John, isn’t he? Just like Sherlock has been accused so many times of doing on people, and just like Sherlock (supposedly) told John that he was doing right before the Fall:
And yet this Love option is dismissed in favour of the ‘brain’ one (sub-textually it’s Sherlock’s work - Lestrade - that dismisses it; “all that matters to me is the work”). But which one is more likely to succeed; a staged suicide involving a giant inflatable cushion unseen by both John and a sniper following him, a series of successive events that needed to happen exactly as planned without the slightest miscalculation, an extremely Sherlock-like, recently dead body, a skilled army doctor who lets himself be stopped from examining his best friend’s body and 25 homeless people helping out without being detected, or a simple, ‘magic trick’ performed on John? Balance of probability? So I think the ‘truth’ must have been different still. But I can sympathise with John on one point: how Sherlock actually pulled off this trick isn’t really that interesting; the important thing to figure out is why.
