What happens at the end of Enola Holmes 2? The villain reveal and the 221B surprise

The ending in brief

• The mastermind — Mira Troy (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), secretary to Lord McIntyre, is revealed to be Moriarty.
• The muscle — Superintendent Grail (David Thewlis) did the dirty work, including the murder of William Lyon.
• The cover-up — the match factory quietly swapped safe red phosphorus for cheap white phosphorus, then passed off the poisoning of its workers as typhus.
• The surprise — a mid-credits scene introduces a young doctor named John Watson (Himesh Patel).

The villain reveal

Enola's first solo case — finding missing matchgirl Sarah Chapman — turns out to be tangled up with Sherlock's own case, a web of untraceable payments. Both trails lead to the Lyon match factory, where profits soared after the switch to white phosphorus began slowly killing the girls on the factory floor.

Sarah had the proof, and William Lyon — the owner's son, who loved her — stole the document tying the scheme to Treasury official Lord McIntyre. Grail killed William to get it back.

The person pulling every string, though, was hiding in plain sight. Mira Troy, McIntyre's brilliant and overlooked assistant, had been blackmailing her employer and quietly siphoning the proceeds — and she is Moriarty. Underestimated her whole career, she built a criminal enterprise out of other people's corruption; Grail was merely the enforcer.

She's carried off in handcuffs after the theatre showdown, with every sign that Sherlock hasn't seen the last of her.

The strike that really happened

Sarah Chapman was a real person. The film's closing beat — Sarah leading the girls out of the factory — dramatises the matchgirls' strike of 1888, when around 1,400 women walked out of London's Bryant & May factory in a landmark of women's industrial action.

The film's version isn't tidy justice, either: Lord McIntyre burns the stolen evidence and strolls away clean. The women strike anyway.

The 221B surprise

Sherlock (Henry Cavill), rattled by Moriarty and more than a little lonely, asks Enola to become his partner. She turns him down — she has her own agency to run, and a certain Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) to keep — but she sets her brother up instead, arranging a Thursday appointment at his new lodgings. In the mid-credits scene, the visitor introduces himself at the door of 221B Baker Street: Dr John Watson. The Sherlock Holmes canon clicks into place.

Is there a third film?

There is — and it's already out. Enola Holmes 3 arrived on Netflix on 1 July 2026, sending Millie Bobby Brown's detective to Malta to marry Tewkesbury, only for Sherlock to be kidnapped on the eve of the wedding.

Philip Barantini (Adolescence) takes over as director, and he pitched the film as doing "what Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban did for the Harry Potter series."

For the record: the third film is set in 1886, and the wedding invitation names the date as 21 June, at St Paul's Cathedral in Malta.