Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes TV Series Can Finally Answer A Big Question About The Detective & Moriarty

Summary Young Sherlock TV series can explore Holmes & Moriarty's rivalry origin story.

Professor Moriarty wasn't expected to appear, but Young Sherlock offers a chance to explore their backstory.

Recent adaptations failed to show how Holmes and Moriarty met, but Young Sherlock has the opportunity to fill that gap.

Sherlock Holmes is returning to TV with the series Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie, and thanks to one character, it can finally answer a big question about the famous detective and his equally famous archenemy, Moriarty. Guy Ritchie is no stranger to the world of Sherlock Holmes after directing Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in 2009 and 2011, with Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. Ritchie is now returning to the world of the Great Detective, though not as expected.

Ritchie is directing Prime Video’s TV series Young Sherlock, based on the book series Young Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lane. As the title says, the TV series will explore the young years of the famous Sherlock Holmes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), who in the show will be a 19-year-old student at Oxford University. This version of Holmes is not yet the highly skilled detective everyone knows, and he’s unfiltered, raw, and undisciplined. Thanks to its setting, Young Sherlock will introduce new characters, but it’s also bringing a younger version of James Moriarty, through which it can answer a big question.

Related Young Sherlock Is Solving The Biggest Mystery About The Detective That Even Arthur Conan Doyle Didn't Reveal Two additions to the cast of Young Sherlock show the TV series is solving a big Holmes mystery, but this might not be as good as it seems.

Young Sherlock Can Explore How Holmes & Moriarty's Rivalry Began

Young Sherlock Is The Best Chance To Explore Holmes & Moriarty’s Past

Professor Moriarty is a criminal mastermind and thus the counterpart of Sherlock Holmes.

Young Sherlock will kick off with a murder at Oxford University that puts Holmes’ freedom at risk, and so this becomes his first murder mystery. What Holmes isn’t counting on is that this case will lead him to a global-level conspiracy. Accompanying Holmes in Young Sherlock will be Princess Gulun Shou’an (Zine Tseng), a young Chinese princess and martial artist, Sir Bucephalus Hodge (Colin Firth), and Holmes’ parents, Silas (Joseph Fiennes) and Cordelia (Natasha McElhone). Now joining Young Sherlock is Dónal Finn, who will play none other than James Moriarty.

Professor Moriarty is a criminal mastermind and thus the counterpart of Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty was originally created by Arthur Conan Doyle as a device to kill Holmes, but he ended up becoming the detective’s archenemy. Moriarty uses his intelligence and resources to advise criminals and provide them with strategies and even protection. Given that Young Sherlock will focus on the younger years of the detective, before he became famous for his deduction skills and more, Moriarty wasn’t expected to appear, but the series can now explore how their rivalry began.

The Sherlock Holmes Books Didn't Explain How Holmes & Moriarty Met

Holmes & Moriarty’s Backstory Is A Mystery

Moriarty became a consulting criminal mastermind, and Holmes ended up meddling in many of his plans.

As he was created to end Holmes’ stories, Moriarty doesn’t appear often in Conan Doyle’s stories, but he made sure to establish him as a figure to fear. Moriarty only appeared once, in the short story “The Final Problem”, in which he fell to his death along with Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. Due to fan pressure, Conan Doyle brought Holmes back some time later, but Moriarty remained dead. However, he had a role in the final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, though he didn’t appear, and was mentioned in five other stories.

Read More Sherlock Holmes' Original Death Was A Bigger Deal Than People Realize The reaction of fans to Sherlock's death in other media can't be compared to that of readers when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed him in 1893.

According to Conan Doyle’s canon, Moriarty became widely known at the age of 21 for writing “a treatise on the binomial theorem”. Unspecified dark rumors in the university town led Moriarty to resign from his teaching post and move to London, where he became a private tutor to officers preparing for exams. Some time later, he became a consulting criminal mastermind, and Holmes ended up meddling in many of his plans. However, Conan Doyle’s books didn’t go further into Moriarty’s backstory and his relationship with Holmes, leaving it to the audience’s imagination.

A young Moriarty in Young Sherlock gives the show a chance to go deeper into his backstory, his transformation into a criminal mastermind, and how he met Sherlock Holmes. Given the show’s setting, and if it follows canon, Moriarty would be around 21 years old during the events of Young Sherlock, right when he was starting to make a name for himself in the field of math.

Young Sherlock Can Do What Recent Adaptations Never Did

Moriarty’s Backstory Hasn’t Been Explored

Close

What most adaptations have in common is not showing how Moriarty and Holmes met.

Sherlock Holmes and his stories have gone through different adaptations on film and TV in recent years, but what most of them have in common is not showing how Moriarty and Holmes met. In Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies, Moriarty was already a well-known (and feared) consulting criminal, and Holmes already knew about him. In the BBC’s Sherlock, Moriarty was also an established consulting criminal who had been messing with Sherlock for a while, but how exactly that started is unknown. Young Sherlock can do it differently and show the beginning of their rivalry and how they met, thus building a stronger foundation for their future encounters.