Cultural Apologetics Column

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 49, number 02 (2026).

When you support the Journal, you join the team and help provide the resources at equip.org that minister to people worldwide. These resources include our ever-growing database of more than 2,500 articles and Bible Answers, as well as our free Postmodern Realities podcast.

Another way you can support our online articles is by leaving us a tip. A tip is just a small amount, like $3, $5, or $10, which is the cost of a latte, lunch out, or coffee drink. To leave a tip, click here.

[Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Young Sherlock.]

Young Sherlock

Created by Matthew Parkhill

Inspired by the Young Sherlock Holmes series by Andrew Lane and the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle

Developed by Peter Harness and Guy Ritchie

Starring Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Dónal Finn, Zine Tseng, Joseph Fiennes, Natascha McElhone, Max Irons, Colin Firth, Numan Acar, and Holly Cattle

Television Series (TV–14)

(Amazon Prime Video, 2026)

Sherlock Holmes occupies a peculiar place within the Western literary canon, being at once unmistakably popular and yet structurally foundational.¹ Introduced by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, Holmes helped consolidate, refine, and disseminate a narrative form that would become one of the dominant modes of modern storytelling — the detective story. While antecedents certainly exist in the work of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, whose C. Auguste Dupin tales first articulated the figure of the analytic investigator, it is through Holmes that the genre achieves both formal stability and cultural saturation. The Holmes stories establish the central conventions of the mystery narrative (the puzzle structure, the delayed revelation, the interplay of concealment and disclosure), as well as the character type of the consulting detective, whose interpretive authority organizes the world of the text.

To recognize Holmes’s importance, however, one must move beyond the observation that he is “influential” and instead consider the specific conditions under which he emerges. The late nineteenth century witnesses a convergence of intellectual, social, and technological developments that fundamentally reshape how reality is perceived and narrated.² Urbanization produces unprecedented density and anonymity; advances in science and early forensic method generate new confidence in empirical observation; the expansion of print culture circulates information at a scale that is both illuminating and overwhelming. Within this context, Holmes functions as a kind of mediating figure. He solves crimes, yes, but he does so by interpreting a world newly experienced as complex, layered, and partially opaque. His methodology, grounded in observation, classification, and inference, renders intelligible what might otherwise appear chaotic and unwieldy. In this sense, Holmes is less an eccentric anomaly than a literary response to modernity itself.³

Equally significant is the way the Holmes stories reconfigure the relationship between narrative and knowledge. The detective tale, as shaped by Doyle, is less concerned with “what happened” than it is how one comes to know what happened. This epistemological emphasis is embodied in Holmes’s reasoning, which frequently moves beyond strict deduction into what is more properly understood as abductive inference; that is, reasoning toward the most plausible explanation given a set of clues. The narrative thus becomes an exercise in disciplined interpretation, inviting the reader to participate, however imperfectly, in the reconstruction of hidden events. The presence of Dr. Watson as narrator further stabilizes this structure, providing a vantage point that is at once observant and limited, thereby preserving both the intelligibility and the suspense of the case.

Holmes’s durability through more than a century of adaptation across literature, theater, film, television, and interactive media attests to the elasticity of this underlying form. Each new iteration isolates and amplifies particular aspects of the character, whether intellectual authority, psychological intensity, social estrangement, kinetic improvisation, or self-regulation. Yet these variations, however numerous, do not displace the core function Holmes serves. He remains, fundamentally, a reader of signs within a world that conceals as much as it reveals. It is this function, rather than any single canonical portrayal, that accounts for his continued relevance.

Amazon Prime’s new series, Young Sherlock (2026–), is situated within this broader literary and cultural trajectory. As such, we’ll consider it within the context of its contribution to the evolving Holmes corpus as well as its attempt to narrate the formation of a character who has come to define the modern fictional detective.

It’s a Baby! Guy Ritchie’s return to the Holmesian canon, though unconnected to his duology of films starring Robert Downey Jr.,⁴ may be seen as drawing upon them as spiritual forerunners, and represents one of the more deliberate attempts to explore the formation of Sherlock Holmes as a particular kind of mind. The series situates Holmes at nineteen years of age in 1870s Oxford, before the eccentricities and intellectual authority associated with Baker Street have fully cohered. At this stage, he is explicitly undercooked and unfiltered, lacking much of the refinement that will later define him, and drawn into a first murder investigation that expands into a grander conspiracy. The series has received mostly positive reviews, and has already been renewed for a second season.⁵

This emphasis on incompletion is crucial. The Holmes of Doyle’s stories appears already formed. Young Sherlock instead treats that formation as a problem. Its protagonist is not yet a “consulting detective,” but a rather unstable convergence of traits. He’s brilliant but lacks discipline. He’s perceptive without hierarchy. He’s endlessly curious but has no restraint. The narrative therefore hinges less on solving a mystery than on learning how to think in a way that can solve mysteries. In this respect, the series aligns itself with modern origin storytelling while attempting to preserve the essential Holmes premise that the world is legible — but only to a mind trained to read it.

Much of this burden falls on Hero Fiennes Tiffin, whose casting signals a subtle but meaningful departure from more canonical visualizations of Holmes. Traditionally, Holmes is described and often portrayed as hawk-like: lean, sharp-featured, with a long nose, deep-set or piercing eyes, and a king of angular austerity that visually mirrors his intellectual precision. Tiffin, by contrast, presents a softer, more symmetrical facial structure — less aquiline, more conventionally youthful. His features lack the immediate severity associated with figures like Jeremy Brett, whose Holmes seemed almost carved by intellect itself. This is not a deficiency so much as a deliberate recalibration. Tiffin’s Holmes does not yet look like the finished instrument; he looks like a mind still housed in youth, still elastic, and not yet hardened into its eventual shape.

That visual difference reinforces the thematic project of the series. The familiar Holmes “look” is itself a sign of completion. Tiffin’s face, comparatively open and less harsh or severe, underscores the fact that this Holmes has not yet undergone that process. Even production decisions reflect this: Tiffin has noted he was encouraged not to bulk up physically in preparation for the role, preserving a lean, less imposing frame appropriate to a character still in formation.⁶

The series further grounds this formation in personal and familial context, expanding Holmes’s background beyond the sparse references of the Doyle canon. His parents, depicted as intellectually and temperamentally distinct influences, and his relationship with his brother Mycroft place Sherlock within a network of pressures rather than as a purely self-generated genius.⁷ Moreover, the narrative introduces certain elements of disgrace and instability, envisioning Holmes as a young man entangled in crime, even briefly imprisoned on some accounts, suggesting that his eventual clarity emerges from a period of disorder.

This emphasis on trauma, instability, and psychological formation invites a compelling comparison with the 2021 video game Sherlock Holmes Chapter One by Frogwares. That game similarly reimagines Holmes as a young man shaped profoundly by grief, specifically the death of his mother, and by the unreliability of memory and identity. In both Chapter One and Young Sherlock, Holmes is not simply “young.” He is fractured. His intelligence emerges as a compensatory mechanism, a way of imposing order on experiences that resist coherence. The difference lies in emphasis. Frogwares’s Holmes is introspective, almost inwardly haunted, with his deductive method tied explicitly to personal trauma and psychological reconstruction. Young Sherlock, while incorporating familiar tension and instability, places greater weight on external adventure and social entanglement, on the testing of Holmes against a world that demands interpretation.

In both cases, however, the central insight remains consistent: Sherlock Holmes was not born a man of Baker Street. He is, in fact, made. He is made through exposure to complexity, through confrontation with disorder, and through gradation that refines perception into method. Young Sherlock stands close to Chapter One in its contribution to this broader interpretive (or, perhaps, re-interpretive) tradition by visualizing that process at its earliest stages, offering the conditions under which the legend of Holmes becomes possible.

Child of Science, Man of Faith. Sherlock Holmes is, in many respects, a child of science. His habits of mind are inseparable from the intellectual currents of the late nineteenth century, which involve empiricism, classification, early forensic method, and a growing confidence that the physical world yields its secrets to close observation. He trusts what can be seen, measured, compared. He treats the smallest detail not as incidental but as meaningful. Nothing is neutral — everything is evidence. In this sense, Holmes stands as a distinct modern warrior: not a warrior, not a king, but an interpreter. His strength lies not in force, but in attention rightly trained.

And yet, for all that, there is something in Holmes that continues to resonate with readers whose commitments are theological, as well. The Christian does not find in Holmes a covert apologist or a hidden allegory. What the Christian finds is something more subtle and, in some ways, more useful: a patient and regimented posture toward reality. Holmes assumes that the world is not meaningless, that it can be read, and that careful attention will be rewarded with understanding. This assumption, while expressed in secular terms, aligns closely with a Christian view of creation as ordered and intelligible. The world is structured, not chaotic (Psalms 104:5; Hebrews 11:3). It speaks consistently (Psalms 19:1). The task is not to invent meaning, but to discover it.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Holmes has influenced readers engaged in disciplines far removed from detective fiction. One might think, for example, of the practice of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), where meaning is drawn not from isolated impressions, but from careful attention to language, context, structure, and detail. The interpreter of Scripture, like the detective, must resist the temptation to overlook what appears small or incidental. A word choice, a repetition, a shift in tense or tone are all things that carry interpretive weight. Holmes, in his own domain, models this kind of attentiveness. He refuses to allow the obvious to remain unexamined or the obscure to be dismissed. Where others stop, satisfied with partial understanding, Holmes presses forward, convinced that the truth has not yet been fully uncovered.

A seminarian or Bible student worth his or her salt operates (or ought to) under a similar conviction. He or she does not rest content with translation alone, however faithful, but presses into the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek out of necessity (and not, incidentally, out of academic excess).⁸ Meaning resides in the texture of the text itself: in verb forms, in syntactical relationships, in lexical range, in patterns of repetition and variation that are often flattened or obscured in translation. To read Scripture well is to assume that nothing is wasted, that every word is placed with intention, and that understanding requires patience and attention at the smallest level. Both the detective and the exegete operate with the conviction that truth is coherent and that it can be known more fully if one is willing to attend closely enough. This does not mean that every mystery will be exhausted or that every question will be resolved. But it does mean that understanding is not arbitrary. It is tethered to what is actually there, waiting to be seen.

At the same time, the comparison reveals a divergence. Holmes’s confidence rests in the sufficiency of reason applied to the observable world. The Christian interpreter, while affirming the value of such discipline, recognizes the need for illumination by the Spirit of God. The text of Scripture is a medium of revelation. It can be examined with the same rigor one might apply to any text, but its fullest meaning is not reducible to method alone. Precision of language and clarity of structure are necessary, but they are not, in themselves, sufficient (Psalms 119:18; 1 Corinthians 2:10–16).

Holmes endures because he names a problem that has not gone away, which is how to discern truth in a reality crowded with detail and competing explanations. That problem is as much theological as it is modern. The Christian recognizes in Holmes the refusal to overlook, a commitment to read closely, a confidence that what is there can, in fact, be known. And yet Holmes also reminds us, by his very limits, that method alone cannot carry us to the end of truth. He can reconstruct events, expose motives, and bring hidden things to light, but he cannot supply the final illumination that gives those things their fullest meaning. In that tension, Holmes remains both exemplary and incomplete. Young Sherlock, in tracing his beginnings, makes that tension visible from the start, showing that the man who will one day read the world with such precision is himself first shaped by it. —Cole Burgett

Cole Burgett is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. He currently serves as the Assistant Director of Online and Nontraditional Learning at Corban University, as well as an Assistant Professor of Theology. He writes extensively about theology and popular culture.

NOTES

1. Vicki Delany, “The Enduring Appeal of Sherlock Holmes,” CrimeReads, January 18, 2022, https://crimereads.com/the-enduring-appeal-of-sherlock-holmes/.
2. For a more detailed look at the Victorian city of the nineteenth century, see Colin G. Pooley, “Updating Urban Geography: Understanding the Victorian City,” Teaching Geography 9, no. 1 (1983): 20–25, available via JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/23751064.
3. See John McGowan, “Chapter 5. Modernity and Culture, the Victorians and Cultural Studies,” in Democracy’s Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics (Cornell University Press, 2002), 141–64, available via JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/content/pdf/oa_chapter_monograph/10.7591/j.ctt207g6r2.10.pdf.
4. Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011).
5. The series became a “Critic’s Pick” at Variety, where it received a glowing review. See Aramide Tinubu, “Guy Ritchie’s ‘Young Sherlock’ Delivers a Perfect Origin Story: TV Review,” Variety, March 2, 2026, https://variety.com/2026/tv/reviews/young-sherlock-review-prime-video-1236674654/.
6. See Katie Hill, “Hero Fiennes Tiffin Says He Was Told to Stop Going to the Gym While Preparing to Play Young Sherlock Holmes (Exclusive),” People, March 9, 2026, https://people.com/hero-fiennes-tiffin-was-told-to-stop-going-to-gym-young-sherlock-exclusive-11919829.
7.  P. Claire Dodson and Kara Nesvig, “Meet the Cast of Young Sherlock, Prime Video’s 2026 Series Adaptation of the Iconic Detective at 19 Years Old,” Teen Vogue, March 5, 2026, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/meet-the-cast-of-young-sherlock-prime-video-2026-series.
8. For a simple and accessible case for why studying the biblical languages is necessary, see Meredith Lee Myers, “5 Reasons to Study the Biblical Languages,” Tabletalk, March 22, 2024, https://tabletalkmagazine.com/posts/5-reasons-to-study-the-biblical-languages/.