Enola Holmes Isn't The Only Holmes Sister You Never Knew About
As blank slates for fan fiction go, you could do a lot worse than Sherlock Holmes. Read every novel and short story written by Arthur Conan Doyle and you'll walk away with basically no information about the consulting detective's life prior to his stay at 221B Baker Street. His parents are never named, his childhood is barely mentioned, and Mycroft, Holmes' older brother and only close canonical relative, isn't exactly a bubbling fountain of cheerful family memories. What Doyle might not have realized was that by leaving his protagonist's past nebulous, he was inviting hundreds of writers to try and fill in the blanks over the course of the next century or so.
With Millie Bobby Brown's turn in Enola Holmes as Sherlock's previously unmentioned sister currently receiving critical acclaim, a ravenous fan base once again turns its eyes to the Holmes family tree that might have been. The master of deduction has been assigned a fair number of extracanonical relatives over the years — the exact number is mighty difficult to pinpoint, given the absolutely bonkers numbers of adaptations and reinterpretations through which the character has slogged in his 130-year history. Setting Eleven aside, however, there's one Holmes sister who stands out as the most infamous and controversial of them all. And when you're talking about infamous controversy in the extended Arthur Conan Doyle-iverse, you just know you're talking about Sherlock, the BBC's answer to the question, "How can we create an even more divided fanbase than the one already watching Doctor Who?"
Sherlock Holmes' other sister
Debuting in 2010 and then listfully shelling out handfuls of episodes over the next seven years, Sherlock was created by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, who also worked together on Doctor Who and Netflix's reimagining of Dracula from 2020. The pair accomplished a lot over the show's four seasons — they helped to make Benedict Cumberbatch a very British household name, contributed innumerable GIFs to the internet's visual lexicon, and, in a fat twist, introduced audiences to Eurus, the third child in the Holmes household.
First alluded to in the series 3 episode "His Last Vow," Eurus was the youngest of the Holmes siblings, separated from the family during childhood after she murdered Sherlock's childhood friend Victor. Beyond intelligent, she seems capable of almost hypnotic domination over those close by, and manages to wrest control of the prison facility in which she's locked away, turning it into a Jigsaw Killer-style torture maze for her brothers. Eurus, who shares a name with the Greek god of the East wind, possesses a terrifying, if asymmetricaly developed, psyche, forcing intelligent men to commit suicide while at the same time apparently just wanting a hug from her brother.
Response to the Eurus reveal was, like all things Sherlock-related, met with impassioned and polarized reactions, but praise was heaped on the performance of British actress Siân Brooke. It's just a shame that we'll never get the chance to watch her square off against Brown's Enola Holmes persona.