You already know how this friendship ends. Young Sherlock makes you hope you're wrong.

Rating: 8/10 ⭐️

There's a scene in Young Sherlock where James Moriarty kills a French soldier in Paris. Not in self-defense exactly, not in panic. He does it, and then you catch something in his expression that isn't guilt or shock. He's curious. About the act, about what it felt like, about himself.

That's the scene that tells you everything this show is doing.

Until that moment, you've been watching two nineteen-year-olds at Oxford fumble their way through a conspiracy involving stolen scrolls, murdered professors, and a bioterrorist hiding in plain sight. It's fun, it's energetic, it's got Guy Ritchie's fingerprints all over it. But it's also, essentially, a buddy show. Two smart guys who complement each other and genuinely seem to enjoy each other's company.

And then Paris happens, and you remember: you already know where this ends.

That's the tension Young Sherlock is playing with, whether it means to or not. Every scene where Sherlock and Moriarty are laughing, scheming, covering for each other is shadowed by the knowledge of what they eventually become. The dramatic irony isn't just baked in. It's doing actual work.

It works because Dónal Finn's Moriarty is the more interesting character.

Hero Fiennes Tiffin is good as Sherlock. He's got the intelligence and the physicality, and he plays the naivety well. This isn't the cold, calculating Holmes we know from a hundred other adaptations. He's still enjoying life, still genuinely surprised by people, still not weighed down by the compulsive need to fill every silence with a puzzle. But Finn gets the more interesting job. His Moriarty is already complete. Street smart, physically capable, socially ruthless when he needs to be.

While Sherlock is still figuring out who he is, Moriarty is quietly deciding.

The Paris scene is one signal. Another is smaller: when he needs information from a clerk, there's no elaborate distraction, no clever misdirection. He just threatens the man. Clean and efficient. Sherlock would have come up with something clever. Moriarty doesn't see the point. It's the kind of detail that tells you more about a character than any monologue could.

What he's doing is leaning into his nature. Sherlock is still resisting his.

Guy Ritchie's direction does a lot of heavy lifting in making all of this feel alive rather than dour. The show is stylish in the way his films always are: kinetic camerawork, quick cuts, a general sense that the whole thing is slightly too pleased with itself, in the best possible way. That energy keeps the friendship feeling warm and genuine rather than tragic. You're too entertained to dwell on what's coming. Which, I think, is exactly the point.

Anyone who's seen his Sherlock Holmes films with Robert Downey Jr. will recognize the DNA immediately, which adds another layer of irony. You're watching the origin story of a relationship you've already seen the middle of.

Colin Firth's Sir Bucephalus Hodge is a generous bonus. He plays the pompous university benefactor with exactly the right amount of self-satisfaction, and there's something genuinely useful about having a shared target. That's how a lot of real friendships work. You bond over the person in the room you both can't stand. Sherlock and Moriarty spend a fair amount of time silently communicating their contempt for the same people, and it works every time.

I'll talk about where the mystery goes from here, so if you haven't finished the season, maybe stop now.

The central mystery goes somewhere unexpected. The reveal that Sherlock's own father is the antagonist (a greedy, dangerous man who faked the death of his own daughter to seize his wife's fortune and fund a chemical weapon) is well-set-up in hindsight, and the final confrontation on the cliffside lands harder than it has any right to given how breezy the early episodes are. There's even an echo of Reichenbach Falls in how it's staged, which feels intentional.

By the end, though, what I kept thinking about wasn't the conspiracy. It was Moriarty quietly studying the formula for the nerve agent while Sherlock was focused on stopping it. A small detail, slipped in almost as an afterthought.

That's the show doing its best work.

8/10. And I'm hoping, probably naively, that Season 2 doesn't rush to make them enemies. Young Sherlock is better when it lets them be friends. The tragedy will come. I'd rather they earn it slowly.

Young Sherlock is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. All eight episodes of Season 1 are available now.