The Game is Afoot

It’s interesting to think about which heroes of classic literature have managed to withstand the test of time and which have fallen by the wayside. Before the rise of superheroes into mass pop culture you could count on the likes of King Arthur and Robin Hood to lead the way to high flying adventure. But armor and arrows gave way to capes and cowls, and those same classic heroes now feel antiquated. Why see a guy hanging out in the woods fight against an evil sheriff with a bow and arrows when you could watch a costumed vigilante beat down thugs on a darkened city street… with a bow and arrows? It’s easy to see why the game has changed.

One character, though, that hasn’t seemed to lose his step has been Sherlock Holmes, the world famous detective who still regularly gets popular adaptations every few years. He had something of a renaissance with two concurrent TV shows, Sherlock and Elementary, all while two successful films by director Guy Ritchie, Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, played in theaters, and since then it’s felt like viewers were still itching for more Sherlockian adventures to come. Robin Hood and King Arthur be damned, people want the brainy detective for their viewing consumption.

Ritchie is back, working with a team on a new Sherlock Holmes adaptation, although this one has very little to do with his previous films. Set in a different continuity, the new Amazon Prime series Young Sherlock gives us, well, a younger version of our famous detective, one where he’s still trying to figure out his future and his place in his (very Victorian) world. But the core of the character is there, with his fast mind and his amazing, deductive reasoning, and when paired with the right mystery to solve and good cast around it, it makes a show that is very much worth watching.

When we’re first introduced to our younger Sherlock (played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin) he’s serving a stint in prison over petty larceny. He was caught stealing a man’s wallet (or, more specifically, returning a wallet he’s stolen) because, as he put it, he was curious about the mechanics and function of pick-pocketing (and not because he was actually a thief in the proper sense of the term). His brother, Mycroft (Max Irons), pulls some strings at his job, the British Foreign Service, to get his brother released, and even lines up a spot at Oxford for his brother. But Sherlock won’t be there as a student, instead getting the “lowly” job of a scout (one step below a porter, in the service class of the university).

Despite getting this job to gain some humility, Sherlock does seem to thrive. His mind whirls even as he does menial tasks, and he proves to be smarter than most of the actual students at the university. This eventually gains the attention of another student, James Moriarty (Dónal Finn) and the two strike up a quick friendship. Trouble comes, though, in the form of Princess Gulun Shou'an (Zine Tseng), a foreign national from China visiting the school. Special scrolls she brought with her from China are stolen, and because he’s a criminal, all eyes turn towards Sherlock. Then, when a teacher ends up dead, Sherlock is the natural suspect. It’ll take the combined insight and brain power of Sherlock and his new best friend, James, to figure out what’s going on and get to the bottom of this very twisty case.

Young Sherlock is and isn’t a Sherlock Holmes adventure. By that I mean that while it stars a version of the character, and we see him going off to solve mysteries, it doesn’t have the same case of the week format that traditional Sherlock Holmes cases tend to have. In television shows his cases take a single episode or two. In movies it’s the length of that feature. He’s not a character that has, in general, been used in long form storytelling. And yet, that’s exactly what happens here in Young Sherlock.

While the series starts off looking like a case of the week, with the first episode, “The Case of the Missing Scrolls”, seemingly tying up most of its plot threads before the credits roll, that first episode actually kicks off a much larger mystery, one that eventually takes up the whole eight episode season’s run. One case leads into another, and as the cast of characters builds and the mystery gets more twisty, it all leads to a big bad agent with a master plan for world domination. Swap the Victorian setting for Sunnydale (and sprinkle in a few vampires) and you could easily turn Young Sherlock into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has a very specific formula it’s following.

Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, but it is worth pointing out. Anyone looking to watch a simple case-of-the-week Sherlockian adventure would likely be disappointed here. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was getting when I tuned in for the show beyond, “this has a younger version of Sherlock Holmes and was directed by Guy Ritchie”, and it still caught me off guard a little. There are expectations for what a Sherlock Holmes adventure will be and this wasn’t it, but once I got settled in I found that I really enjoyed what the series was peddling.

That is, in large part, because of the charismatic duo at the center of the story. Hero Fiennes Tiffin is not your average Sherlock. He’s still finding himself, still developing that persona we all know. He’s young and brash and headstrong and it makes for a different version of the character we’re used to… but he’s played exceptionally well by the actor and it’s easy to want to hang out with him. He’s joined by Dónal Finn as Moriarty, although in this case Moriarty is taking on a much more Watson-like role. He’s the sidekick (as a character points out to him at one point), helping Sherlock with his adventures, and he’s played with a rakish spark by Finn. Together these two charismatically steal every scene and the series is at its best when it lets the two characters (and the two actors) play against each other.

Notably, although the series was co-developed by Guy Ritchie, his hand in the show is much smaller than many would have expected. Like with The Gentlemen, this series only has Ritchie in the director’s chair for the first two episodes of the run. It’s clear that he helped consult on the show, giving his input on story, setting, and action, and maybe advising during post-production, but this isn’t so much a Guy Ritchie series as a show with his name attached. It was created by Matthew Parkhill, who also helped write many of the episodes, and it does have a somewhat different feel from your traditional Ritchie story. Still street level, but much less about the criminal element than those that pursue them.

Still, Young Sherlock is a fun time. The series is slick and breezy, showing much care in its craft. It has a great cast with a couple of stellar leads, and its story twists and snakes around them without ever feeling heavy or sluggish. Maybe some of the mysteries are easy to guess (one particular character I zeroed in on early proved to be just who I suspected… and I’m not spoiling more than that), but overall the series has a great sense of what it wants to be. It’s a fun, early adventure for the world’s greatest detective, and it gives him enough meat that he can chew on for many seasons to come. And hopefully he gets it because, if this first season is any indication, Young Sherlock could easily have legs.