Young Sherlock First Impressions: When Holmes and Moriarty Were Friends
I had watched only the opening episodes of Young Sherlock when I first wrote these impressions, so this is not a verdict on the complete season. Even so, the series left me with enough to consider—especially its decision to introduce Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty not as adversaries, but as friends.
Sherlock Holmes has been adapted so often that every new version arrives already surrounded by ghosts. It must compete not only with Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, but with more than a century of actors, costumes, catchphrases, deductions, deerstalkers, and attempts to explain why Holmes became Holmes.
That last part is where Young Sherlock becomes both promising and dangerous. An origin story can add emotional weight to a familiar character. It can also explain so much that the character begins to feel smaller.
Editorial update, July 2026: Prime Video renewed the series for a second season on 14 April 2026. This article preserves my first impressions after watching the opening episodes.
A Holmes Who Has Not Yet Become Holmes
The series follows a 19-year-old Sherlock before Baker Street, Watson, or his reputation as the world’s greatest consulting detective. After finding himself implicated in a murder investigation connected to Oxford, he begins applying his powers of observation to what becomes his first major case.
The show is inspired by Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes novels, although it also carries the unmistakable imprint of Guy Ritchie’s earlier Holmes films: physical energy, rapid editing, irreverence, and a Sherlock who is as likely to leap into danger as to study it from across a room.
This Sherlock is not yet the controlled and emotionally guarded figure readers recognise. He is defiant, impulsive, socially unfinished, and not always sure what to do with his own intelligence. The method exists in fragments, but the persona has not yet hardened around it.
That creates room for genuine development. The adult Holmes often appears almost fully formed: a mind arriving in each story with its habits, expertise, and emotional defences already in place. A younger version allows us to watch those defences being constructed.
But there is a trap here. Holmes should not become Holmes merely because a sequence of formative incidents activates each familiar feature in turn. The deductive method, emotional reserve, eccentricity, solitude, and distrust of ordinary authority should not feel like items being checked off an origin-story list.
Some mystery should remain. A character famous for seeing through everyone else ought not to become completely transparent to the audience.
Moriarty Before “The Final Problem”
The most intriguing choice is Dónal Finn’s James Moriarty. He enters not as Sherlock’s hidden enemy, but as a companion—intelligent, charming, adaptable, and apparently capable of understanding Sherlock in ways few others can.
Anyone familiar with Conan Doyle knows where the name is supposed to lead. In “The Final Problem”, Holmes describes Professor Moriarty as the “Napoleon of crime,” a mathematical genius who has become the organising intelligence behind a vast criminal network.
Conan Doyle gives us remarkably little of Moriarty’s personal history. He functions less as a fully developed character than as Holmes’s dark counterpart: another exceptional mind, equally systematic, but directed towards domination rather than detection.
Young Sherlock fills that absence with friendship.
The dramatic irony is immediate. The audience watches two young men discover an intellectual affinity while already knowing that they will eventually define themselves through opposition. Every moment of trust carries the shadow of Reichenbach Falls.
This could give the rivalry a tragic dimension that many adaptations lack. Holmes would not merely discover a criminal worthy of his attention; he would lose someone who once understood him.
Yet this idea carries its own danger. If Moriarty’s future criminality is explained through one betrayal, grievance, or ideological disagreement with Sherlock, the legendary rivalry may become too neat. Moriarty is compelling partly because he represents a possibility rather than a diagnosis: what intelligence becomes when it treats other people entirely as pieces on a board.
The friendship will work best if the series allows both men genuine choice. Tragedy requires the possibility that events could have gone differently. If every early scene simply points towards their predetermined roles, the story becomes foreshadowing rather than development.
Dónal Finn and the Supporting Cast
Dónal Finn will be familiar to many viewers as Mat Cauthon in The Wheel of Time. His Moriarty initially feels lighter and more socially flexible than Sherlock, which makes him an effective companion and foil. Sherlock analyses; Moriarty improvises. Sherlock’s intelligence isolates him, while Moriarty appears better able to turn intelligence into charm.
That contrast is more interesting than simply presenting two equally brilliant men. It suggests different relationships with power. Sherlock wants to understand the game. Moriarty may prove more interested in learning how to control the players.
Colin Firth appears as Sir Bucephalus Hodge, complete with formidable Victorian sideburns and the kind of polished authority he can make either reassuring or faintly threatening. His presence gives the Oxford world an additional layer of status and institutional weight without requiring a lengthy detour through his earlier roles.
The supporting cast matters because an origin story about Holmes cannot survive on Holmes alone. The adult detective is partly defined through Watson’s perspective. Without Watson, the younger Sherlock needs other characters capable of challenging his self-image rather than merely admiring his brilliance.
A Victorian Setting with Modern Energy
One of the things I appreciated most is the decision to retain a historical setting. Sherlock Holmes remains deeply associated with Victorian England: railway timetables, telegrams, newspapers, chemical experiments, social hierarchies, urban anonymity, and forensic methods that are only beginning to become systematic.
The setting changes what detection means. Information is available, but not instantly. Records exist, but are scattered. A person can disappear more easily, yet small physical traces may carry greater weight because there is no digital trail waiting to be searched.
This is why the BBC series Sherlock, despite being excellent television at its best, always felt like a more radical translation of the character. Smartphones, GPS, searchable databases, and digital surveillance do not make deduction unnecessary, but they change its texture. Holmes becomes partly an interpreter of information systems rather than an observer operating against informational scarcity.
The Robert Downey Jr. films retained the Victorian world but pushed Holmes towards physical action, elaborate visual prediction, and almost superheroic resilience. Young Sherlock appears closer to that branch of the family tree.
But period setting should not be confused with historical naturalism. This is Victorian England filtered through contemporary pacing and Guy Ritchie’s sensibility. The costumes and architecture are old; the rhythm, attitude, and action are deliberately modern.
That is not necessarily a problem. Every Holmes adaptation chooses which part of the original to preserve and which part to reinvent. The BBC series preserved intellectual play while modernising the tools. The Downey films preserved the period while transforming the detective into an action hero. Young Sherlock preserves the period and the names, then asks whether the legend can be rebuilt as a youthful adventure.
The Origin-Story Problem
The phrase “before he became the man we know” contains the central weakness of many prequels. It assumes that the destination is fixed and that the only task is to explain how each familiar feature arrived.
That can turn character development into archaeology. The audience recognises the first version of a habit, object, phrase, enemy, or relationship and receives the small pleasure of identification. But recognition is not the same thing as discovery.
Young Sherlock will be more interesting if its younger Holmes is not merely an incomplete copy of the older one. He should contain possibilities that disappear. Friendships that might have lasted. Values he might have retained. Versions of himself that the adult detective had to abandon—or chose to suppress.
Moriarty is crucial to this. Their friendship should not simply explain why they become enemies. It should reveal that they once had enough in common for enmity to hurt.
With a second season now confirmed, the series has room to let that relationship change gradually. The temptation will be to accelerate towards the famous rivalry. The better choice would be to make the friendship convincing enough that neither Sherlock nor the audience wants it to end.
Promising First Impressions
It was still too early, after the opening episodes, to judge the season as a complete mystery. The initial impression was nevertheless promising. The historical world is lively, the cast is strong, and the decision to place Moriarty beside Sherlock rather than opposite him gives the adaptation a reason to exist beyond simple brand recognition.
The question is whether the series can resist explaining too much.
Sherlock Holmes has survived for more than a century partly because each generation can reinterpret the spaces Conan Doyle left open. An origin story naturally wants to fill those spaces. Its success may depend on knowing which ones should remain empty.
The most interesting mystery in Young Sherlock may therefore not be how Sherlock became a detective. It may be how two young men capable of recognising themselves in one another eventually became unable to coexist.
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