Moriarty the Patriot

Episode 4

No one can get everything right, and that includes Professor James Moriarty. That's not a statement about how well his plan works in this episode, but rather the fact that it works at all – a 1999 clinical trial by the College of Pharmacy at the University of Otago in New Zealand found that “The intake of grapefruit juice did not significantly alter the oral pharmacokinetics of quinine.” So brilliant as the plan was this week to use grapefruit marmalade and juice to counteract the evil viscount's heart medication, quinine, in reality the gardener would have been better off using the foxglove we got a clear shot of in the sweeping scene of the viscount's conservatory. (Not that foxglove poisoning happens as often as mystery novels would have it, because supposedly it tastes awful, but still.) So while William's research in the 1870s or 80s might have concluded that grapefruit and quinine didn't mix, the plan was unlikely to have come off.

Still, it's hard not to appreciate the smoothness with which this all works. The scene has shifted to Durham, home of Durham University, where William has just been hired to teach maths (yes, the subtitles use the British plural rather than the American singular) and where the brothers have all taken a house. As nobility, they're invited to dinner by the local viscount, where they learn about his heart problems and his love of exotic flora. William also manages to put together that this is the nobleman who refused to allow his personal doctor to treat his gardener's son when the local doctor was unavailable, condemning the child to death. The poor man has continued to work for the viscount because he frankly had few options, but his anger and resentment simmer just below the surface while his wife's grip on sanity has grown more tenuous with every passing day. (Kudos to the story for once again hitting on a trope of Victorian fiction – the woman driven mad by grief.) It isn't hard to see that there might be a need for the Moriartys' specific skills here.

Methodology aside, it does look like the brothers play a slightly more active role in this case than they did in episode one's. They're the ones who bring the grapefruit jam and feed it to the viscount; the gardener and his wife are in charge of the juice, with the gardener pouring the fatal glass. But William, Louis, and Albert's roles are more than just getting someone to the right place at the right time; they have to take deliberate advantage of their social status, feign enough friendliness to get invited back for tea in the conservatory, and ultimately hand the lord the food – and, presumably, contrive a reason or a time for the doctor to be absent from his patient, since we clearly saw at the dinner party that he was standing right behind the viscount. We may even be able to safely guess that Louis made the marmalade, since he's the most traditionally domestic of the brothers, although it wouldn't be unusual for them to have a cook. (In fact, it would be stranger if they didn't.) Perhaps more importantly, all three young men are there the whole time, watching things play out. In episode one only William was present, and he was safely outside the mausoleum where the tailor was enacting his revenge. That means that they're that much closer to the scene of the crime, and perhaps that much easier to be tied to it.

It's interesting that both cases of vengeance the Moriarty brothers have helped carry out involve dead sons. Both working-class families lost their boys due to the callous indifference or depravity of noblemen, and we can easily see how that would tie into Louis and William's experiences with Albert's parents, and perhaps even before they got to the orphanage. They're almost saving themselves in both of these cases, giving voice or vengeance to boys who were not as lucky as they were and maybe even doing what they wish someone had done for their birth family. We don't really know, but it feels important, even if they branch out from saving sons in their future cases, because after all, they had been somebody's lost or forgotten sons themselves before Albert came along. Who better, then, to speak for the forgotten than someone whose real given name we don't even know?

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Moriarty the Patriot is currently streaming on Funimation.