It brings me no shame to say that I’ve been eagerly awaiting the next chapter in Netflix’s Enola Holmes franchise. No, I can’t claim to be its target audience — these films invariably mean more to the tweens who grew up watching Millie Bobby Brown come of age as Eleven, the consummate heroine of Stranger Things, than to a 30-year-old who never quite clicked with that series — but still, somehow, these frothy little mysteries speak to me. Maybe it’s the substance of the mysteries themselves, which are miles easier to follow than anything Enola’s (Brown) older brother, Sherlock (played capably by Henry Cavill here), would busy himself with in a story of his own making. Maybe it’s the emphasis on romance: the plots are as much about Enola’s developing bond with Viscount Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), the hapless lord she gets stuck with in her first adventure, as the adventures themselves. Maybe it’s that Brown wound up feeling a bit like a little sister over time, which makes her latest outing as Enola all the more emotional.
That Enola and Tewkesbury’s nuptials form the backdrop for Enola Holmes 3, the third adaptation of the Nancy Springer novels, is admittedly another draw. Four years after Enola’s last mission, in the shockingly good Enola Holmes 2, Brown and Partridge have effectively grown up right before our eyes. It lends a more nostalgic vibe to what’s become an unlikely hit trilogy. Adolescence scribe Jack Thorne returns to shepherd Enola from teenhood to adulthood, but not without a lot of looking back. Enola Holmes 3 is positively pockmarked with flashbacks — some of which help our teen sleuth recall the facts she needs to solve her most personal case yet, others that stand in for the emotional gut punches we felt in the past. Four years might as well be a lifetime in the realm of streaming, so the reminders are sometimes apt. Even so, it’s hard to say if Enola 3 suffers more from its need to remind us of past impact than it does in its search for deeper, more grown-up themes.
