But if you are fighting boredom, you probably don't take the low maintenance path to pet keeping.

And the building looked about ten stories to me.

The building was St. Bart's. It's four stories tall.

But if you are fighting boredom, you probably don't take the low maintenance path to pet keeping.

You're trying to apply "ease of use" to good "life choices" for a psychopath. I don't see how what's easy is at all relevant. But I wanted to point out that sustaining animal life doesn't have to be challenging--you are setting arbitrary constraints on what that life consists of. You might not be spending time doing complex poodle cuts, but to Moriarty petting a dog and making topiary of its hair might be equally boring.

Getting reward out of suffering is a thing in and of itself, and trying to substitute for it based on a hierarchy of difficulty is a radical oversimplification of human psychology.

It may be possible to survive such a fall through landing on your feet, but you'd have significant ankle injuries. Now, we don't know how long the graveyard was after the fall, but he really didn't give that impression.

What we saw: Sherlock falling facing away from the building, so he'd be perpendicular to the walkway. Sherlock landing (well, sort of. We don't see him hit, but we hear it) (seemingly from a pretty short height, really) with his body parallel to the walkway.

How much time passed between those two shots, we don't know. Also, John did not see him hit, either. There was an outbuilding and a laundry truck in the way.

I...may have been having this conversation for a few months now.

It may be possible to survive such a fall through landing on your feet, but you'd have significant ankle injuries

I know someone who fell 20' or so and landed on her feet then dropped to her butt. No ankle injuries, but most of the metatarsals were broken and she had a small fracture in one of the lower vertebrae.

I think it's one thing to randomly survive such a fall with minimal injuries, but to plan to deliberately survive a fall is another matter.

But I'm sure Sherlock will have various and sundry facts to astound us with as to why he was assured of his survival, and survival in the best of terms, not just alive as a vegetable or a parapalegic or laid up for a year with every bone in his body broken.

If nothing else, it made for some immediately emotional fanart narratives.

I assume he landed on something that neither John nor the assassin could see because the view was blocked.

OMGWTF has Sela Ward done to herself? I didn't even recognize her on House!

I feel like in the tradition, it's fine for it to be an unsurvivable fall, because that's how Conan Doyle wrote "The Final Problem," with Holmes dying on the Reichenbach Falls for real, and then took it back.