If you still have some questions after reaching the end of the Netflix original movie Enola
Holmes, starring Stranger Things phenom Millie Bobby Brown, we're here to dive into the whys,
hows, and whodunits of the captivating caper. It's elementary, dear viewer...
The central mystery at the heart of Enola Holmes is kicked off by the disappearance
of Enola's mother, Eudoria. While Enola's older brother Sherlock arrives to investigate
their mother's disappearance, Enola isn't satisfied to leave it to him. She sets out
on a quest to follow the clues and solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance all
by herself.
Eventually, Enola's sleuthing leads her to a warehouse marked with her mother's distinctive
purple ribbon. Inside, Enola finds fliers for a meeting of the National Society for
Woman's Suffrage, along with a pamphlet headed "Protest, Unrest, & Civil Disobedience," and
containing instructions for constructing an Orsini bomb. Moments later, Enola uncovers
crates of these bombs within the warehouse, and worries about what, exactly, her mother
has gotten herself involved in.
We never actually learn the specifics of what Eudoria's group was planning, but it's safe
to assume that it was both dangerous and illegal. When Eudoria visits Enola at the end of the
movie, she remains vague about the specifics of her plans, but does mention that the reason
she didn't tell Enola where she was going was because it wasn't safe, adding that,
"You have to make some noise if you want to be heard."
Since we never hear of any sort of attack in Enola Holmes, it seems probable that whatever
Eudoria was planning is still in the works.
Enola's quest to find her mother kicks off when she realizes that the little box of gifts
Eudoria left her contains a cipher. Its encoded message leads her to where her mother has
hidden a large stash of money along with a cryptic note which reads "Our future is up
to us." Enola interprets this as an invitation to follow after her mother, and immediately
boards a train to London hoping to find her. As she searches, she leaves ciphers of her
own in a number of newspapers, then routinely scours the classified ads for a response.
Enola is positive that her mother has left her a puzzle that only she can solve, which
will explain everything.
But by the end of the film, it becomes clear that Eudoria never intended for Enola to come
after her, and that Enola's actions have in fact taken her quite by surprise. But if she
didn't want her daughter to follow her, why did she leave a trail of breadcrumbs for her
to follow? Well, she probably didn't think that's what she was doing. More likely, Eudoria
was hoping to reassure Enola that she was all right, and that no one needed to come
after her. Her short message was probably the closest Eudoria felt she could come to
giving Enola an explanation for why she'd left, without involving her in her dangerous
plans. As for the money, Eudoria probably wanted to make sure Enola was well provided
for once she was gone, and never dreamed she'd use it to track her down.
Much is made in Enola Holmes of Eudoria's fondness for ciphers and anagrams, and she
uses both to communicate with Enola. At first, when Enola overhears her mother talking about
"Ellie Houseman" she assumes that she must be a woman with some connection to her mother,
and resolves to find her. However, she eventually realizes that her mother was speaking in code.
"Our choices: Bankman Met, Entangle Herb, or Ellie Houseman."
All three of these names turn out to be anagrams for London locations: the Embankment, Bethnal
Green, and Limehouse Lane. The women were discussing possible locations for the next
phase of their plan, and ultimately decided on the warehouse at Limehouse Lane. When Enola
goes there to investigate, she finds activist fliers sitting alongside crates full of explosives,
indicating that whatever Eudoria and her allies are planning isn't exactly going to be a peaceful
protest. Enola never learns where the demonstration itself was going to be, since Limehouse Lane
is just the location of their staging headquarters. Wherever it is, it's going to have to wait,
since Enola destroys all the explosives in the warehouse while escaping the sinister
Mr. Linthorn.
When Enola first meets Viscount Tewkesbury, the Marquess of Basilwether, he appears to
simply be a sheltered young aristocrat yearning for a bit of freedom. But they both quickly
learn that someone has actually hired a hitman to kill him. Enola suggests that a member
of his own family may be behind the plot, reasoning that someone close to him has a
lot to gain by seizing Tewkesbury's vote in the House of Lords.
Enola's initial theory is that the culprit must be Tewkesbury's uncle, who would inherit
the estate in the event of Tewkesbury's death. His uncle would also have taken over Tewkesbury's
spot in the Lords, giving him a pivotal vote on the upcoming Reform Bill.
However, it turns out that Enola was wrong, it was Tewkesbury's grandmother, the Dowager,
who was plotting his demise, not his uncle. The Dowager tips her hand when she talks to
Enola after discovering her in Tewkesbury's treehouse. She tells Enola that the role of
an ancestral landowner is to protect and preserve old ideas in a rapidly changing world. This
extends, in her mind, to resisting political change, such as that contained in the Reform
Bill. Although the Dowager cares for her grandson in her own way, she thinks his progressive
ideas threaten her way of life, and the only way to safeguard the future of the country
is to stop him before he can begin pushing for change.
After Enola is attacked by Mr. Linthorn in his attempts to find and kill Tewkesbury,
she travels to Basilwether under the guise of being Sherlock Holmes' assistant. While
roaming the grounds, Enola comes across the tree branch Tewkesbury told her about.
"A tree branch broke above me as I was collecting wild mushrooms."
At the time, Tewkesbury chalked up his near miss with death as a lightbulb moment, prompting
him to run away from home and seek out the life he truly desired. But Enola sees that
the branch has been cleanly sawed through, indicating that someone intentionally dropped
the branch on the boy.
She then finds Tewkesbury's treehouse, in which he'd planted the clues that led Linthorn
to Limehouse Lane. Enola quickly realizes that the Limehouse Lane clues were planted
to misdirect anyone who might pursue Tewkesbury. She discovers his real destination by looking
at which parts of his books seem the most well-visited, with pressed flowers between
the pages indicating his intent to reinvent himself as a flower merchant.
It appears as though Tewkesbury's number is up during the climax of Enola Holmes, when
his grandmother finally reveals herself as the mastermind behind the assassination attempts,
and takes it upon herself to shoot him in the chest. Tewkesbury is knocked flat on his
back, and Enola assumes he must be dead after taking such a devastating shot at close range.
But moments later, Tewkesbury sits up, revealing that the shotgun pellets were stopped by a
metal plate he was wearing under his shirt. Considering that Tewkesbury hadn't known they
were headed to Basilwether until Enola made a spur-of-the-moment decision, when did he
have the opportunity to don a makeshift bulletproof vest?
The last we see of Tewkesbury before he attacks Linthorn, he watches a bullet deflect off
the metal chestplate right beside his head. The plate came from a suit of armor that Linthorn
had shot previously, causing the scattered pieces to fall around Tewkesbury. Although
we didn't see it, Tewkesbury must have quickly grabbed the chestplate and tucked it underneath
his own shirt as protection before jumping back into the fight. It didn't help when Linthorn
was trying to strangle him, but proved pivotal when his grandmother shot him.
The plot to assassinate Tewkesbury all boils down to his vote on the Reform Bill in the
House of Lords. Before Tewkesbury found himself in his grandmother's crosshairs, his father
had been in favor of the Reform Bill, and had passed his ideology along to his son before
his mother-in-law had him killed. The Dowager is staunchly opposed to the Reform Bill, firm
in her belief that the best thing for the future of the country is to keep things just
as they always have been, and to actively resist significant change.
But what exactly was the Reform Bill, anyway? Although there are several noteworthy Reform
Bills in British history, the one at the center of Enola Holmes is the Third Reform Act of
1884, a real piece of legislation which extended the right to vote to male tenants and landowners
in the countryside, a right previously held only by men in the towns.
"If there's one thing this country doesn't need, it's more uneducated voters."
The Reform Bill significantly expanded the British electorate, making it an important
step on the road toward universal suffrage. However, despite its great strides forward,
the Reform Bill was far from perfect: It left 40 percent of men and all women without a
vote, and left Enola and her mother with a lot of work still to do.
Sherlock doesn't have many memories of his sister Enola as a child, but one has stuck
with him.
"You had a pinecone wrapped in wool. You dragged it with you wherever you went, calling it
Dash."
He later finds the wool-wrapped pinecone under Eudoria's pillow, and brings it to Enola when
he visits her at boarding school. When he gives it to her, he tells her that he finds
her extraordinary, and gives her some important brotherly advice.
"The choice is always yours. Whatever society may claim, it can't control you."
At the end of the film, Sherlock leaves Enola a coded message posing as their mother, in
the hopes that she'll come to meet him. As he waits, he asks Mycroft if he can be Enola's
guardian, to which Mycroft readily agrees. They both prepare to leave, but then Sherlock
notices that Enola has left Dash on the statue at the center of the courtyard. He looks around
for a minute, smiles, then replaces the pinecone and walks away. Given their earlier conversation
around the pinecone, this is likely Enola's way of letting Sherlock know she's chosen
to make her own way in the world, and his way of giving her his blessing.
When Eudoria and Enola finally reconnect at the end of the film, Eudoria says something
that could seem rather odd if you hadn't been paying close attention.
"Thank you for your irises."
Flowers play an important role throughout Enola Holmes, beginning when Eudoria leaves
Enola a collection of hand-painted flower cards, each with its own associated meaning.
When Enola is placing encoded messages in various newspapers earlier in the film, she
refers back to these cards.
"Thank you my chrysanthemum. Are you blooming? Send iris please. Iris means message."
While there's no need for Eudoria to still be speaking in code when she sees Enola in
person again, Eudoria keeps using their secret shared language to help show the close and
special bond between mother and daughter.
Although both of the cases Enola takes on have been solved by the end of Enola Holmes,
the film is still pretty open-ended when it comes to Enola herself. Her mother is still
in hiding, working with her fellow suffragettes to make a better world through political activism
and not-so-civil disobedience. Mycroft has gratefully passed guardianship of Enola to
Sherlock, and Sherlock has in turn decided to let Enola forge her own path instead of
forcing her back under his roof.
So what is that path? It's a little unclear, although it definitely seems like Enola will
be carrying on her detective work. She closes out her story by declaring,
"I am a detective. I'm a decipherer. And I'm a finder of lost souls."
After telling us who she is, she echoes her brother and mother's earlier words, saying
her life is her own, and the future is up to us. It definitely leaves the door open
for future Enola Holmes films, in which she could either team up with Sherlock or continue
to establish a name for herself independent of her famous brother. Whatever happens, we
can be sure that Enola will continue fighting for equality and justice no matter where her
journey takes her.
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