I hope we get more Moriarty backstory in Young Sherlock's next season. Dónal Finn is absolutely eating up this part.
My only minor disappointment with the character (and maybe we'll get this if we have more Moriarty backstory), is this:
Here we have Dónal playing this man like the most Hibernian thing in nature with all the mannerisms he's choosing and that wonderful Cork/Kerry accent. (He's a Cork man putting on a Kerry accent. I hear both when he talks.) He's giving much more than a 2D Irish character, no question.
The only thing that feels egregiously missing is his character's politics. A Cork/Kerry man in England just two decades after the height of the Famine and there's not a single hint or implication of the tense relationship between these two cultures. The south is rebel country. He has no family (supposedly). He's living in England.
The connection is screaming to be made.
That political conflict does not mean he and Sherlock can't be friends. Sherlock is an individual, not a government. But an Irish character and an English one, spending so much time together and building so much mutual respect, are also required to navigate the complexity of their countries' relationship, internally or externally.
Who knows, I hope we'll learn more about the character later. Moriarty clearly keeps things close to his chest, so I'll be very interested when/if he opens up to someone.
I bring it up because it's something a lot of movie/tv writing avoids - the politics of the token Irish character. We saw it with Tom Branson in Downton Abbey. And I understand that show runners probably see it as creating potentially intractable conflicts between Irish and English characters, or that it would shift the focus too much. But for a viewer who is acutely aware of the politics of the time, it feels like erasure, neatly neutralizing the character's history, trauma, and reality for the sake of convenience and the audience's comfort.
I believe there are nuanced and interesting ways to approach the Irish reality of the time without it becoming a tangent or a barrier.
Not only would it make the character feel more real and fully fleshed out, it prevents Moriarty from feeling too much like a sidekick or simply an extension of Sherlock's world. I also hope that, despite the brief moments of darkness we see in Moriarty this season, that they make him a sympathetic villain. The audience and the character deserve to have meaningful connections made between his past and where he's going.
There is so much pain in 1850s-60s Ireland. Cork and Kerry got hit so terribly with death and emigration that it broke the culture for a while. They certainly haven't recovered by the 1870s, when agrarian violence got worse and worse. There's a reason Moriarty's home county became a rebel hotbed.
There's a reason Irish James Moriarty is what he is, and isn't the tragedy of what his culture endures in his childhood a glaring possible reason for that?
I'm not necessarily criticizing what they've done with the character so far. I love what they're currently doing, but I was waiting the whole eight episodes to see if anything was ever going to be touched upon, because for me it's been like "so is anyone going to mention the giant elephant in the room? No?"
We'll see what choices they make next season. I suspect I'll probably be disappointed, but I can hope.
TLDR: if you're a show runner/writer that's going to choose to give Moriarty a Cork/Kerry accent in the 1870s, you should be responsible with that choice by not ignoring the reality of Irish people from that region at that time. Ignoring that for the sake of having a quirky charming character is nothing more than window dressing, and all the great character work that Donal is giving him won't be enough to patch up a hole like that.
Just want to add that Moriarty is in fact an Irish surname originating from Kerry.
Despite this we have seen Moriarty portrayed most often as English, and occasionally Irish (very light Dublin accent from Andrew Scott).
There's been over two dozen iterations of this character, so my point is, they could have done almost anything with it, but this was the choice they made.
I'm glad they made it because I adore what Donal is doing. I just hope they respect the character, and their choice, enough.
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