This adaptation of Holmes’s (intended) death at Reichenbach Falls is Brett’s masterpiece. The episode amplifies Conan Doyle’s subtext: Holmes and Moriarty as doppelgängers. Brett plays the lead-up with trembling hands and hollowed eyes, suggesting a man pushed to the brink of madness. The cliffside fight—shot on location in Switzerland—replaces Paget’s static illustration with a brutal, rain-slicked brawl. Brett insisted on performing his own stunts, resulting in a raw, gasping performance that blurs the line between actor and character. Notably, after Moriarty falls, Brett’s Holmes does not exult; he collapses, weeping. This addition (absent from the text) transforms the episode into a meditation on self-sacrifice and isolation.

Brett’s episodes unflinchingly address Holmes’s cocaine use. In this adaptation of the 1891 story, an extended opening shows Holmes in a opium den, not as a detached observer but as a participant, eyes rolling, voice slurred. The episode reframes Holmes’s deduction as a form of addictive high: when the mystery unravels, Brett’s face cycles through ecstasy, relief, and then empty boredom. Literary scholar David L. Ulin argues that Brett “plays Holmes as a recovering addict who substitutes crime for drugs.” This interpretation adds moral complexity—Holmes is not eccentric but self-destructive.

By the early 1990s, Jeremy Brett was suffering from severe bipolar disorder (manic depression) and later heart failure. His later episodes— The Master Blackmailer (1992) and The Last Vampyre (1993)—show a gaunt, breathless Holmes. While some critics lament the “sadistic edge” Brett introduced (e.g., prolonged psychological torture of suspects), others argue that this mirrors Conan Doyle’s own late stories, where Holmes becomes more cynical. Tragically, Brett’s physical deterioration ended the series before he could adapt all 60 stories. In a 1993 interview, Brett admitted, “I gave Holmes my own madness. I could not separate us.”