Young Sherlock Review | Murders, Mayhem And A Gentler Genius

Young Sherlock is less interested in recreating the familiar silhouette of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective and more concerned with examining the boy who lived before he became the myth. The effect is a Sherlock who is more wholesome than shrewd or cynical, unlike the other renditions that have been resurrected before.

Adapted from Andrew Lane’s novels and directed by Guy Ritchie, this eight-part Amazon Prime Video series positions Sherlock Holmes at 19. Here Holmes is still green behind the ears, still becoming. He has not yet donned the signature deerstalker and cloak—a look we see on Simon Delaney’s Detective Fitget instead. Sherlock’s “mind palace” is referred to simply as his “imagination”, one he can enter with his companions.

Hero Fiennes Tiffin’s Sherlock is largely vanilla but rather sincere. He is battling his demons over losing his younger sister when they were mere kids. His Sherlock takes his time (the entirety of this season) to look beyond the perceived good in others. He accepts help openly, works with a motley crew that helps him crack his first case. And he hasn’t yet succumbed to using substances to deal with his demons. However, he does still pout when indignant. Some things do not change.

Sherlock’s vivid visions are a guiding force for him here as well. From spirits to mixed-up memories, his dreams and waking hallucinations come steeped in symbols and coda waiting to be deciphered by the young sleuth. This psychological interiority replaces the hyper-rational coldness of his other versions.

Hero and Max Irons’ Mycroft embody a different kind of chemistry than what Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Gatiss shared in Sherlock (2010). The bond these two have is sweeter, though perhaps a little less crackling.

Mycroft is not the only familiar face around. There is Lestrade (Scott Reid) as well as Moriarty (Dónal Finn). Their friends-to-foe (and vice versa) equation with Sherlock is quite topsy-turvy as of yet.

There’s also no Watson here. That absence gets Moriarty to fill the void. Young Sherlock meets young Moriarty at Oxford. Finn plays Moriarty as the working-class counterpart to the far more prosperous Sherlock—an inversion of later canon where Moriarty often embodies elite criminal intellect. Here, they develop a kind of young Grindelwald-and-Dumbledore dynamic. Moriarty helps a naive but sharp Sherlock develop an edge. Initially, he really wants Sherlock to stop getting punched bloody every time, but this intention eventually transmorphs as the story goes on.

Their partnership is uneasy but formative. Moriarty befriends Sherlock not out of villainous destiny but curiosity and camaraderie.

This Moriarty is also in his formative days. A privileged Oxford boy on scholarship, he also harbours sharp instincts. The scene where Moriarty gets his first taste of blood, Finn enacts the layered reactions with plenty of punch. The future Napoleon of crime briefly looks like a frightened schoolboy who has crossed a moral Rubicon he never knew he wanted to waltz through all along.

The Oxford setting anchors the mystery. There’s been a string of murdered professors, and Sherlock is the prime accused. He must put on his detective hat to clear his name. The story builds slowly over the first couple of episodes. The show lingers in collegiate corridors and drawing rooms, establishing atmosphere more than urgency. But things pick up pace episode five onwards. For a change, the big twist is not a letdown. It is rather intriguing and scales outward into something far larger than a campus whodunnit.

We have scheming husbands and the so-called “mad woman” trope that is turned on its head. Once rescued, this woman promptly ditches her “Victorian hysteria” and becomes gloriously more adventurous. And there is more.

From the grey skies of London to colourful Paris—mid-revolution on the streets and partying behind the scenes—and finally to chaotic Constantinople where the climax is staged and secrets revealed, the geography widens alongside the stakes. Sherlock and Moriarty stumble upon a bigger mystery, one that involves the Holmes family and the British colonial empire’s genocidal history.

The setting taps into the British detective’s long-held orientalist obsession. On one hand we have the empire and the Holmes, and on the other we have Zine Tseng’s Princess Shou’an, the martial arts heroine who doesn’t need saving and can match Sherlock wit for wit. Tseng’s presence is the most electric and fascinating part of the eight-part series. She destabilises the traditional imperial gaze. The show consciously plays with the 19^th-century British orientalist mood—exoticism, mysticism, imperial entitlement—while critiquing it softly.

The series brushes against early chemical warfare anxieties. Nerve agents, as we know them, were first synthesised in the 20^th century, but the show plays with proto–weapons of mass destruction as imperial experiments, where it treated its colonies as their original laboratories.

Colin Firth’s Sir Bucephalus Hodge is every bit slimy, drifting through scenes taking credit for everything everyone does around him. Joseph Fiennes, Hero’s real-life uncle, plays Silas Holmes and he is just as squirrelly.

There are stylistic flourishes. A scene featuring a young street-urchin spy network uses a zoetrope effect—those pre-cinema spinning drum animations—to create rhythmic visual storytelling. It is fun, though not quite as flamboyant as Ritchie’s other works. His lens is less flashy and more playful here. However, the music leaves much to be desired. The main theme is too modern, and especially Shou’an’s motif, which is rather annoying.

It might take time to get into Young Sherlock, but ultimately it is a fine enough detective series to dig into for a cosy watch, especially if you love mystery and adventure fiction like Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989-2013) or The Mummy (1999) franchise. It does not reinvent the detective genre, but it takes context clues from modern political readings of the past and even though it does not dive too deep in this season, there is promise for more.

Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.