Summary
Young Sherlock arrives at a twisty but satisfying ending, setting up Season 2 – obviously – but also providing enough payoff for the journey to have felt worthwhile.
As seems fitting for a show in this universe, Young Sherlock has quite the mystery to unpack. As if conspiracies winding all the way through the corridors of British power weren’t enough to be going on with, the ending also has to set up an inevitable Season 2, since that’s simply the age we live in. It’s a lot for Episode 8 to be going on with, but luckily, many of the revelations are teased out during the twisty, energetic first season.
This, then, is a breakdown of where things end up. I’ll outline the key storylines and character dynamics in their entirety for ease of reading, since I’m kind like that, but there is quite a lot of interlocking drama at play here, which isn’t all that easy to parcel off into isolated silos. One thing about Sherlock seems to be that everything he finds himself embroiled in tends to be deeply connected to his entire life. Talk about bad luck.
The Gist of It
The basic idea of the plot finds Sherlock at Oxford University, where he’s working as a scout – arranged by his brother, Mycroft – to keep him out of trouble. Trouble finds him nonetheless, though, when he meets his future nemesis, James Moriarty, and the two of them are accused first of stealing some scrolls brought to campus by the visiting Princess Shou’an, and then Sherlock specifically is on the hook for the murder of a professor.
The thrust of the first season, then, is about Sherlock and Moriarty clearing their names while also getting to the bottom of who really killed the professor. In the process, they uncover a pretty wide-ranging conspiracy and unearth some tasty family secrets involving Sherlock’s father, Silas, his mother, Cordelia, and his presumed-dead sister, Beatrice.
Princess Trap
Firstly, it’s important to note that the murderer of the professor is Princess Shou’an, who, it turns out, isn’t really a princess but instead an imposter who took the place of the real princess while she was on her way to Oxford. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Shou’an is on a revenge mission, you see. She’s targeting a group of professors – Thompson, Malik, Robert, and Enright – and planned to take them all out in one fell swoop by planting a bomb in the walls of the library, which would detonate during a ceremony to celebrate the construction of a new building in honour of Professor Bucephalus Hodge. Since all the professors would be in attendance, the bomb would take them all out at once. The “theft” of the scrolls was simply a ruse as part of the bombing plot, though Sherlock and Moriarty characteristically foil both.
Shou’an was right to be annoyed. Her village in the Gansu corridor was butchered after Malik found a mineral in the land that could be turned into a weapon. The development of that weapon was funded by the British government and aided by the aforementioned teachers, all of whom had specialist expertise. Shou’an was enlisted by a man from Constantinople (now Istanbul) named Esad to get her revenge on Malik, who had sold the weapon, and the others, who had contributed. But it also later turns out that Esad was working with Malik and a third party – Sherlock and Mycroft’s father, Silas Holmes.
Talk About A Messy Breakup
Silas turns out to be a very bad guy. Even away from his whole penchant for selling deadly weapons, what he has done to his own family is particularly heinous, and his villainy ties up a few of the season’s threads, including Cordelia’s supposed mental illness and Beatrice’s supposed death.
So, check this out. Silas staged Beatrice’s death in order to break Cordelia mentally and get her committed to a mental institution, which he paid off to keep her drugged and record her 24/7. This was so he could claim her family fortune, which was left by her father for Sherlock and Mycroft, and he used that money to purchase the weapon from Malik, with designs of selling it on to the French. He also had grand plans to build rocket delivery systems to improve the distribution of the weapon, a chemical weapon meant for use in wartime, thus improving its value.
Oh, and on top of this, he also kept Beatrice around as a spy and helper, poisoning her against her family and using her to get access to the people he needed to manipulate. Nice guy.
Fall From Grace
Naturally, by the time the ending of Young Sherlock comes around, Silas’s plans have been thoroughly foiled. His attempts to groom Sherlock as his successor tipped Beatrice off to the fact that he was using her all along, and Shou’an destroyed his lab, along with killing Malik. With his conspirators done for, no product to sell, and everyone having completely turned against him, he was beaten.
It’s only through Sherlock’s sense of morality – the prime differentiator between himself and Moriarty, but more on that in a minute – that Silas isn’t taken down unceremoniously by Beatrice and Shou’an. Sherlock’s efforts to capture him alive so he can face justice give him the opportunity to seemingly take his own life. But you can never be sure.
While it isn’t confirmed whether Silas Holmes is dead or not, I’m going to err on the side of “didn’t see it, didn’t happen”, which is generally good form in streaming mysteries. Expect him to show up in Season 2.
Moriarty Is A Villain, Remember?
James Moriarty is the most iconic villain in Sherlock Holmes lore, so it’s a little weird to see him and Sherlock in such cahoots throughout the majority of this season. They do remain allies until the end, but Moriarty’s villain arc is at least teased, mostly through his differences in perspective and priority when compared to Sherlock.
In short, Moriarty kind of gets a taste for the action. He’s forced to murder someone to defend Shou’an, which he later claims to have rather liked, and far from being appalled by the plot as it’s uncovered, he’s instead impressed by its intricacy and by the potential deadliness of the weapon. He’s even in possession of the equation that creates it, ostensibly to prevent it from being replicated. But it becomes increasingly obvious that Moriarty has designs on putting that formula to other uses, and he begins to see the much more morally fluid Beatrice as his closest confidante instead of Sherlock.
This is almost all setup for Season 2, and there’s no last-minute heel turn moment to whet appetites. One of the show’s strongest elements is the organic relationship development between Sherlock and Moriarty; it’s just in the finale where we happen to see most clearly that the two of them are heading in radically different directions.
A Key Detail
During Silas’s “death” scene, he slipped Sherlock a bloody handkerchief, which eventually led him to a key hidden in one of Silas’s books. The show doesn’t reveal what it’s for, but Mycroft is peculiarly adamant that Sherlock leaves the matter well alone. Is this just brotherly concern to protect Sherlock from whatever other nefarious schemes their father might have been up to? Or is something else afoot here?
Historically, Mycroft isn’t a “bad guy”, per se, but he’s usually depicted as being quite morally complex, emotionally cold, and politically ruthless, enough that I could quite easily see him knowing more than he’s letting on about the key. This, though, like the Moriarty stuff, is setup for Season 2 more than anything else.
