You know, I was seriously looking forward to the continuation of Moriarty the Patriot and yet this follow up (second season/continuation of season 1) has so far been pretty dull. Moriarty isn’t anywhere near as interesting as he was and we’re getting very little of his presence at all. He even just full on goes to sleep for part of this episode leaving the support cast to do their thing only it isn’t all that interesting or believable as they take out a whole bunch of bank robbers and then convince all the potential witnesses that the security cop guy actually did it.
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Likewise Irene’s new character, Bond, is actually pretty dull compared to how she first entered the story. Possibly it is because she’s no longer playing off of Sherlock and trying to outwit him all the time, instead she’s playing safe and trying to work with a team, but it means that instead of being a source of entertainment she’s now just another in the ever expanding Moriarty crew.
That the entire bank scenario may have just been another ploy by Moriarty to get his team to work together doesn’t make it any more interesting a situation to have spent half the episode on and realistically we learn little about the team in the process. There’s not even a hint that the group might at any point fail or struggle so there is no tension whatsoever in the scenario and there’s no one that they are really trying to outwit so it all just feels empty.
Now that Moriarty is done on side quests that feel like filler…
We then move on to the rest of the episode as we’re introduced to the Moriarty brothers old teacher who apparently earned the nickname ‘Jack the Ripper’ once upon a time. Turns out he isn’t really enjoying a serial killer using his name and so they are now going to stop the killings that the yard apparently haven’t sorted out. Of all the reasons to get involved in such a big case, this one seems pretty petty and Moriarty adding onto the end that they can’t stand by while the weak are getting preyed on seems really too late. It’s an after-thought or a justification for the actions they intended to carry out regardless.
It is probably clear by now that I didn’t really enjoy this episode. I am curious as to what Moriarty The Patriot’s take on Jack the Ripper will be, but my expectations of this series are definitely lowering as it continues. The drive that Moriarty and his team seemed to have early in season 1 feels very much dissipated now and part of that is because of the shifting focus to other characters but part of it is because they don’t seem to be doing very much. All and all, I’m hoping this picks up again but otherwise it is watchable but not a lot else at this point.
Images from: Moriarty the Patriot 2nd Season. Dir. K. Nomura. Production I.G. 2021.
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Karandi James
Yeah, I feel like the show has lost whatever personality and grounding that made it so interesting in the first place. Now, the show is just running wild for seemingly no reason and it’s just “well, thing are happening I guess.”
Shame really. 2021 may end up as the year of poor sequels. Neverland, this one and even How Not To Summon a Demonlord have of all been pretty unimpressive.
Arthur Conan Doyle patterned Sherlock Holmes after a professor he had in college, Dr. Joseph Bell. He even dedicated “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” to Dr. Bell who is widely considered the father of modern forensics.
When JtR was terrorizing London, Dr. Bell and another colleague acted as consultants for the London police on the case. Legend has it that they had narrowed it down to one likely suspect, a particular butcher. It had to be a person skilled in cutting things up and a butcher or a surgeon best fit the bill. They analyzed the pattern and times of the killings and narrowed it down to a resident of a section of London and from there they looked for someone who had no verified alibi for any of the killings. This gave them a specific suspect. Not brilliant thinking, but rather a slow process of elimination sifting thru massive amounts of data.
Bell and his associate separately wrote down the name of a suspect on paper and then compared them. Both names agreed. Thru the clumsiness of the London police, the suspect discovered he was about to be arrested and committed suicide. Another version has him falling apart mentally and being committed to an insane asylum. The murders immediately ended. However, little of this was documented and officially the crimes were never solved.
So, in at least one accounting of the story, the crimes were solved by Sherlock Holmes in a manner of speaking.