Guy Ritchie’s Young Sherlock TV series is an origin story with a difference. Ritchie has developed a strong reputation for his more action-packed version of Holmes, a portrayal that plays a little fast and loose with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Detective. Young Sherlock is different, though, because Hero Fiennes Tiffin’s Sherlock is yet to become a detective at all. This is Sherlock before he became the private investigator we all know and love, and he’s deliberately presented as half-formed.
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He is also, in a striking twist, best friends with Dónal Finn’s James Moriarty. It’s a smart retcon of “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” and it actually fits surprisingly well with the original novels and short stories; Holmes was always a very private person, and it’s easy to imagine a scenario where he didn’t disclose university friendships to Doctor Watson. There’s a striking parallel between the end of Young Sherlock and Holmes’ final confrontation with Moriarty in the 1883 short story, hinting at further deceptions. But this origin story also implicitly makes Moriarty the man who shaped Sherlock Holmes.
Moriarty Was the Man Behind Sherlock’s Greatest Catchphrase
This surprising twist is most visible in Young Sherlock, when Moriarty – encouraging Sherlock to consider the possibility that his father is treacherous and his sister is still alive – utters some very famous words. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Variations of this line appear in several key Sherlock Holmes stories, including “The Sign of Four” and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier.”
There’s a sense in which this quote defines Sherlock Holmes. It presents Sherlock’s deductive reasoning as though they are a finely-tuned scientific instrument, eliminating options until only one – however improbable – remains. In context, this quote was given at an age where people trusted in science, and where the scientific method was just beginning to be applied to forensics (Holmes himself was portrayed as fascinated by everything from the study of different tobaccos to fingerprints). It lies at the heart of pretty much every detective story since.
Young Sherlock turns this upside-down, though, revealing the famous line was first spoken by James Moriarty. It doesn’t just write Moriarty into Holmes’ origin story; rather, it suggests that Moriarty came to define Holmes, that he gave his friend a relentless belief in the power of deductive reasoning. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presented Sherlock Holmes as a fully-formed character, caring little for his origin; Young Sherlock reveals that Holmes was created by Moriarty.
The Most Famous Sherlock Holmes Quote Is A Lie
There is a tremendous irony to this quote, of course; it’s basically a lie. It creates the image of a checklist of possibilities, with each one ticked off until only a single option is left. In reality, life is rarely quite so neat and tidy, and it’s frankly impossible to imagine anyone ever conceiving of some of the impossibilities Sherlock Holmes stumbled upon. But that’s the point; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t really buy into Holmes’ logic himself, and spent much of his life looking for spiritual things that defied rational explanation.
Young Sherlock may be a hit on streaming, but it doesn’t even try to interrogate the contradiction at the heart of the Sherlock Holmes mythos; that the core idea was considered flawed by its very creator. The show is content to re-contextualize Sherlock, to give him a fresh origin rooted in family drama and an unlikely friendship. It also ditches another core element of Sherlock’s character in the original stories, giving him a love interest and portraying him as very much interested in relationships with girls.
We don’t know whether there will be a Young Sherlock Season 2. If there is, it’s likely that story will continue Sherlock’s evolution into a more familiar form. Sadly, that will surely include a good degree of treachery and betrayal, the only possible explanation for why he becomes so cold and emotionally reserved. That deduction seems safe, even if the catchphrase is flawed.
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