WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 6 of Moriarty the Patriot, "The Noahtic, Act 1," now streaming on Funimation.
Moriarty the Patriot has brought the Criminal Consultant's arch-nemesis into the mix, and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts are sure to have gotten a chuckle from his introduction. The detective is only given a brief scene in the anime's latest episode but naturally, given it's his name in the overarching franchise's title, it's a real limelight-hogging moment.
In Episode 6, Moriarty and his crew -- his brothers Count Albert and Louis, sharpshooter Colonel Moran and the informant Fred -- board the luxury cruise liner known as The Noahtic. As part of their ongoing mission to uproot the elitist rot in upper-class British society, they're tailing Lord Blitz Enders (possibly a reference to both the bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany and the residents who lived in London's East End, which was heavily affected by it). Enders, as we later discover, enjoys the time-honored tradition in socio-political fiction of rich people hunting humans for sport. For this legitimately awful crime, Moriarty and his gang board the ship to administer his punishment.
As they continue to indirectly antagonize Enders, it becomes clear that they're planning to entrap him -- get him fired up enough so he has to let off steam by indulging his sadistic hunting habit on-board. Though they don't know it yet, Sherlock Holmes' presence on The Noahtic could present a big problem.
The pony-tailed Sherlock is doing his classic Sherlock thing when we meet him: figuring people out based on-sight and sound alone. Observing Moriarty examining the ship's spiral staircase, Sherlock deduces that the blonde man is a mathematician, entranced by the golden ratio of the architecture. The trick impresses a gaggle of woman around him and, not to be out-done, Moriarty does the same in return. Criticizing the mystery man in front of him for "forcing" a conclusion, Moriarty works out that he plays the violin (but isn't a musician), has impressive physical skills for close-quarters combat and dabbles in science. But then he goes in for the kill: he's clearly an Oxbridge man but his dialect indicates some working-class pride -- in honor of his mother's ancestry -- and he has a "chemical dependency."
In short, Moriarty nails most of the skills, quirks and backstory details that many of us are familiar with concerning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed detective; including, in true adversarial style, calling Sherlock out for being a drug addict and a momma's boy. It's a suitably prickly exchange for two of literature's best-loved opponents, given new life via the dramatized medium of anime.
Unfortunately, though the antihero gets the last word in, he dismisses Holmes as being unlikely to hinder his plans for Enders -- an underestimation that we're sure he'll regret in the second part of the story.
