Hugin & Munin Journal

Fiction often gives us the smartest person in the room: the brilliant detective, master strategist or visionary scientist. More unsettling characters seem to operate in another cognitive order entirely. They perceive motives, systems or historical forces that everyone else experiences as confusion. When such a character appears, the structure of the story changes. Conflict becomes less a contest of strength than a struggle over models. Whoever understands the system can predict choices, shape incentives or arrange the board before anyone else realises that a game has begun. These characters are rarely more intelligent in every possible sense. Gurgeh understands games. Kellhus understands causal pressure on human behaviour. Paul Atreides sees possible futures. Bayaz understands institutions and time. Sherlock Holmes reconstructs events from physical traces. Hari Seldon models populations rather than individuals. Each possesses a way of making the world legible, and each becomes depe...

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, September 2026: Prime Video renewed the series for a second season on 14 April 2026. By late July, season two was in production, with no release date an...