Moriarty the Patriot is a show that walks a ton of fine lines. Somewhere between adaptation and subversion, tawdry vengeance and cunning capers, message fiction and adventure – at the intersection of those dividing lines, you find this show. That puts it in a promising yet perilous position, since balancing on any one of those lines is also balancing between success and failure.
On the whole, Moriarty the Patriot presents as the story of Professor James Moriarty, the legendary villain from Sherlock Holmes stories, retelling many of those tales, in twisted forms, from Moriarty’s point of view.
Moriarty both is and isn’t the character you might think you know. In fact, there are three of him: the one most familiar to the canonical character is William James Moriarty, the younger brother of the Moriarty house… though we see in a fairly early set of flashback episodes he’s actually a never-named genius orphan who stole William’s identity after conspiring with the other brothers – biological Moriarty’s elder brother Albert James Moriarty and “William”’s also-adopted brother Louis James Moriarty – to kill their family because frankly everybody with a hereditary title in this show had it coming.
Before we get to that, we do get some vignettes of how Moriarty the Patriot and the characters operate. In the opening episode, there’s a serial killer targeting little boys to torture and kill and quite likely eat as well, a killer who Moriarty (which I’ll use to refer to Main Show William unless otherwise noted) pins down to being a particular nobleman. He uses this information to do his job as a “Criminal consultant” giving the father of one of the boys the perfect scene for bloody revenge and making sure the cleanup after goes well, aided both by his brothers and his contacts like sniper Sebastian Moran.
Another sequence shows us Moriarty moving to a new town to take up his famous teaching position, and coming into contact with a local lord who didn’t lend his gardener’s family the services of his on-call doctor, resulting in the death of their child. Moriarty more or less arranges his fatal poisoning, again in a way fitting with the character that keeps his hands very technically clean, and then we’re free to do things like get that flashback that explains who these characters are.
This stretch, the opening acts of season 1, are some of the roughest times for Moriarty the Patriot. There’s nothing but Mastermind Moriarty’s of course flawless plans bringing gratuitous ruin onto people who gratuitously deserve it, set to the issues of the period British Empire but reading as a transparent proxy for more modern angst about the “privileged class” with a veil of unreality from the extremes to which a good deal of it goes.
This seems to continue into the next arc, where Moriarty’s mark is a corrupt nobleman (like all of them) who hunts people for sport. His designed downfall is set for a cruise aboard a ship known as the Noahtic, where a first seaboard opera will be performed. The bad guy is as outrageously bad as you could expect, and his downfall on an open stage is properly arranged, but the show’s salvation from the angst morass also appears in the form of Sherlock Holmes, the slightly deranged but incredibly sharp consulting detective who would be the protagonist in the orthodox telling of these stories and who here… kind of up and steals the show to become it anyway. Holmes doesn’t disrupt the plan this time, but he proves intelligent and involved enough that Moriarty takes a personal interest.
Thus, we skip to Holmes’s story, starting with the arrival of Dr. Watson since Sherlock is in dire need of a roommate, and continuing into this show’s version of A Study in Scarlet. Instead of “Rache”, “Sherlock” is written in blood, making him a suspect and forcing his involvement in the case. He gets to the end of the mysteries despite the handicap of being a wanted man and brings in the true culprit… along the way (and barely, by force of Watson) declining the opportunity to kill the culprit for information on his backer – Moriarty, whose deeds are becoming known under the alias “The Lord of Crime”.
The next arc actually gives Moriarty screen time – quite a lot of it in fact – but he’s interacting with Holmes as his math professor… acquaintance? Friend? They have good on screen chemistry but it’s almost impossible to tell what kind of chemistry it is for most of the show. In any case, he’s not operating in his capacity as the Lord of Crime. The two end up being set to solve a locked room murder mystery on the train they’re on, with Watson stuck as default accused. Holmes pulls off the solve, but Moriarty uses underhanded means to ensure that the criminal is properly fingered, establishing the difference between them in Holmes being about the chase and Moriarty about achieving his goal.
From there, we move to the marathon arc “A Scandal in the British Empire” (the title clearly tying it to “A Scandal in Bohemia”). Holmes is faced with two desperate split needs. One is an order to retrieve some stolen documents, no matter what. This is given by his brother, Mycroft Holmes. The other need is his impetus to protect the thief, an actress named Irene Adler, since the government will likely try to rub her out for what she did.
In the end, Irene and Holmes alike have to cut deals with the Lord of Crime, the former buying her presumed safety and the latter taking that into account when deciding whether or not to pursue him to the end. Mycroft gets the documents back, and their contents form the backbone of the show going forward. On the whole, the arc was maybe 90% Holmes, with very little out of the Lord of Crime until the end, but it sets the stage for Moriarty getting back to business after seven episodes of Holmes.
The file presents, we suppose, damning evidence that the French Revolution was an operation carried out by a British spy, operating as Robespierre. To Mycroft, this is a grave crime that cannot be allowed to come to light and that he, as a relative of the spy (who was, in fact, a Holmes) must work to atone for. To Moriarty, who gets the chance to read the file, it presents the template for his own work. Supposedly, Robespierre acted for the benefit of all in turning the violence on himself. Thus, Moriarty hopes to save the British Empire by uniting the commoners and nobles alike against him, and then dying to secure that future of cooperation.
Again, it feels like there’s something of a proxy here for less historically grounded matters, as folks who tout the glories of the French Revolution seldom mention Napoleon… but that’s aside from the current topic. In story, it provides a good enough principle for Moriarty’s grand plan, and it’s hardly the only time the “present a common enemy” ploy has been the idea.
And what of Irene Adler? Well, she joins Moriarty’s crew after he fakes her death, but under a new identity. Being a consummate actress, she’s comfortably an absolute master of disguise, and transforms herself into a new pretty boy persona. In this mode, she’s given the name James (shared with the Moriarty brothers) and takes the surname “Bonde”. From then on, she plays the presumably first James Bond for the rest of the show… and does it pretty darn well.
Speaking for a moment of adaptations in this, it’s interesting to see how the familiar characters are re-written. Moriarty is, ironically, possibly the interpretation I like the least. He’s what he must be for this story to work, but I deeply don’t want to accept that as a good “Professor James Moriarty”. William’s his own character and a fine character, but I only see shades of Moriarty. Holmes, on the other hand, is perfect. The Sherlock Holmes in this show captures the characters flaws and mania in a way that would be easy to leave out, and paints a picture of him that’s affable and watchable, intelligently true to his canon portrayal, and interesting rather than distilled as many supposedly Holmes-like “Master detective” characters can be. And Irene Adler as James Bond(e)? I’d rank her somewhere between Roger Moore and Daniel Craig. She absolutely oozes the character’s style and themes, even getting a Q-prototype to make her some gadgets, a fancy car to drive recklessly in one episode… I think they even give her some of the famous catch-phrases to say and they’re nailed. He (referring to the Bond character) is about what you’d want to see.
The next arc ups the drama, as Jack the Ripper begins to run rampant in Whitechapel. Tensions between the locals and police are reaching a boiling point, and Lord of Crime Moriarty comes back as a major mover on realizing that the incident both threatens to ruin what he’s built and could be used as a test run for the final Moriarty plan. He brings in an old military man who happens to have the same nickname as the serial killer (earned for wetwork while in the army), and they fake the appearance of the serial killer Jack the Ripper, turn both the mob and the police against the phantom, and clean up the real killer conspiracy before disappearing the Jack the Ripper character more or less along the lines of history (if with a great deal more of a shootout in Whitechapel). There’s more mayhem and a pass back to Holmes as the fallout roots out corruption in Scotland Yard and Inspector Lestrade, a good man and friend of Holmes, ends up left with authority.
Following that, we get an arc that’s centered, more or less, on neither of our leads, but that commences the endgame. It follows a young and idealistic politician who is marked for a downfall by the House of Lords and their chief agent, the master blackmailer Milverton, who was set up as an enemy in the Jack the Ripper arc. Milverton ends up having the politician’s whole family killed by a man he had over a barrel, who the politician then kills, completing what Milverton has arranged to be his downfall. Before the grisly murders can be blamed on the politician, though, he ends up meeting with Moriarty, who reveals his nature as the Lord of Crime and offers to take charge of everything to ensure the politician’s ideals live on.
This ends up with the politician, giving a crowd-rousing speech about his voting rights act, being murdered in broad daylight by the Lord of Crime himself, who loudly claims responsibility and escapes. Though his true identity is unknown still, Moriarty has made his play, as now all forces are looking in fear upon the Lord of Crime.
Milverton, meanwhile, makes the unwise decision to start messing with Sherlock Holmes. We get an episode that more or less does “The Sign of the Four”. It’s revealed that Milverton wanted the treasure, and if Watson’s future wife is to be safe, they’d better dredge the Thames for it.
Sherlock takes option B, confront Milverton. And, wouldn’t you know, he happens to run into Moriarty there, who is also facing Milverton’s blackmail, the man having figured out that William is the Lord of Crime. The confrontation, without Watson present, ends with Holmes apparently killing Milverton (shooting him as he falls from his manor down a sea cliff) and, the files on Watson’s fiancee destroyed, turning himself in.
Since Milverton’s body is never found Lestrade decides that a confession is not enough to create a crime, and Holmes is let free. Meanwhile, Milverton’s dead man switch fingers William as the Lord of Crime, and London enters a turmoil.
Though Moriarty plans to die to complete his plan, pretty much everyone he knows asks Sherlock to try to save him. Sherlock accepts, seeing Moriarty as a friend and understanding what he’s trying to do, and thus we have the last caper. London is set ablaze by the Lord of Crime, forcing noble and commoner alike to haul together lest the city be reduced to ash. Morairty stages for himself a dramatic death at the hands of the master detective, but Sherlock has none of it. Ultimately, after a battle of ideals, the two of them both end up tumbling off an unfinished bridge and into the Thames below, presumed dead. Almost everyone is wiser if sadder for it, Mycroft (who was in the know) picks up Moriarty’s crew to basically found MI6 because this is a James Bond prequel as well as a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, remember, and the British Empire is presumably on a healing path.
Of course, if you know anything about Sherlock Holmes, it takes more than a mutual fall with his arch-rival to take him out, and while they haven’t been seen in London again, the two are revealed to be alive and well, Holmes having followed Moriarty’s trail until their reunion encounter. The End.
So, how well does Moriarty deal with its balancing act?
On the matter of Adaptation, I mentioned already it’s a better Holmes take than it really is a Moriarty one… and a surprisingly good stealth Bond. Still, this is one that comes down on the good end by making something more or less new with familiar parts. As much as the idea of a “re-imagining” can be senseless drivel to sell a pointlessly loose adaptation, Moriarty the Patriot does feel more properly like that. It wants to both be its own thing and a take on Holmes, and it largely succeeds, especially in the Holmes-centered episodes that put old cases in new contexts with enough new facts to keep them fresh.
On the line between being an exploitation piece and more legitimate, I would ultimately call the full run of Moriarty the Patriot entirely legitimate. The first few arcs do feel more like exploitation material, and I’ve said before the show is a good deal weaker before Holmes is on the case. But those are needed, to an extent, to convey what Moriarty is and how the Lord of Crime works before we really advance things. There needs to be a baseline. Did it need to be as overwrought as it is? Maybe not, but I’ll forgive it. And the later material, once Holmes is on scene, largely dispenses with being sensational for the sake of being sensational.
On the line between message and fiction, that’s a tighter rope to walk. Moriarty the Patriot absolutely has a take, and it commits some of the typical message fiction sins in bringing it to you, like reducing complex problems to trivial categories by invoking “literally eats babies” sorts of cartoon evil. On the other hand, while the message never exactly tones down the way that the exploitation does… I don’t think it ultimately swallows up the fiction. It tries, and the two struggle bitterly at times, the fiction to show you something engaging and unique and the message to bludgeon the fiction until it can use the fiction’s battered body as a soapbox to shout from… but this time, I think the Fiction wins.
From those components, as you might expect, Moriarty the Patriot comes down on the side of quality rather than self-destruction, and I will regard it more fondly than not. I don’t forgive all its foibles, but I do think it gave us a compelling narrative with an overall good flow to it. This time around, that gets it a B+, which is fairly strong regards for something that came as close to losing me as this show did. If you’re up for the whole run of this stuff, I’d happily recommend it.