I went the ballistic way to solve the mystery: what’s the end result - and then try to go back from there.
Assumptions:
1. Its truly Sherlock who is lying on the ground, not a puppet/fake
2. Something had to stop his fall. The only reasonable solution is the (laundry) truck
3. Sherlock was somehow faking being dead (with a ball, with drugs, …)
4. There was not enough time to climb out off the truck to lie perfectly positioned on the ground and look “dead enough”. (At least I would suspect that)
Obvious questions:
Why is the Sherlock on the ground rotated by 90degree to the right of the position we see in the fall? He is already in rotated position before he hits the ground, not after. (Look up the screenshots on the net).
Why does the “the hit” on the ground feels far less hard then we would expect from a fall from such a high place?
My theory is (and some had partly the same idea):
We see two timelines.
The first timeline is Sherlock on the roof, talking/recording to his cell phone, imagining a conversation between him and Watson. The whole scene between Watson and Sherlock sounded much more a monologue than a talk. There where lots of pauses. Sherlock is a insanely good mind. He knows Watson.
He never jumps off the roof (BC comments later that he jumped off 4 foot on a different roof is rather a misleading tidbit IMHO - they just needed someone who looks like him to jump off for _footage_, not because he did it storywise). Sherlock is simply not trained to do such a jump, it would insane to do it.
Molly prepares him to look dead and he gets a perfect timed drop off the truck to hit the street (for what we know he could already be there after Watson returned to the talking position, so the timing could be more lax).
But thats the reason the “hitting” on the ground doesn’t look so hard and he is correctly rotated for the end scene: dropping off the truck would look like that.
The second timeline is someone impersonating Sherlock, playing the previously recorded conversation and then jumping into the truck. Throwing the mobile phone away because it can’t be found on Sherlock, since he can’t having it already lying on the street. Maybe someone out of Mycrofts stable of hard trained soldiers who wouldn’t fear this risqué jump.
This way, we see two interlocking timelines played as one. Sherlock has enough time to be prepared dead by Molly, and the rotation/’hardness’ of the fall is accounted for. Moffat simply stitch them together in a very clever way.
…
Sure, Moffat could play it simple. Molly gave Sherlock the necessary drugs and prepared him before. Then he had something that stopped the fall; like an invisible net/cable, just enough to barely survive - but with serious injuries. That would then account for the rotation: the net/cable caused it. But we didn’t see much breaking between the fall and the ground hitting. There was nothing that could stopped the fall. !!!$#?.
Anyway, I’m probably too crazy with this one :D
