A man in Tokyo has exploded. But why? He died mid-conversation with his mentee Wato Tachibana, a sweet-faced young surgeon. The violence seems to be without cause; the explosion has no clear mechanism. Stumped, the cops call in a mysterious young woman. She wears high, cruel stilettos and her affect is a little creepy. Tachibana is not sure what to make of this newcomer, but she tags along to help solve the strange case of the exploding man, since she wants to see justice done.

The young woman is neither police nor medical examiner. Who is she, and how does she know as if by magic that Tachibana has just come home from volunteering as a doctor in Syria? The pair work to solve the mystery, eventually retiring together to the odd consultant’s address: 221B.

Miss Sherlock is a new adaptation of a much-reprised tale. You might recognize Tachibana’s Syria story as an update to Dr. Watson’s return from the Second Anglo-Afghan War. 221B is, of course, an address in Baker Street, in London. The strange young woman’s name is Sherlock. A great deal more is recognizable as original Arthur Conan Doyle material, but tweaked: Sherlock, played by Yūko Takeuchi, is slender and eerie and brilliant, but unmistakably female. She plays the cello, instead of the traditional violin. Tachibana (Shihori Kanjiya) is the straight man in the relationship. Listen closely, and you’ll hear her referred to as Wato-san—her first name, plus an honorific.

So, we have our Sherlock and our Watson, two attractive young women solving crimes in contemporary Tokyo. In these facts alone Miss Sherlock injects Holmes’s old white corpse with new energy. Shows like Elementary and Sherlock have brought Conan Doyle’s hero back to our screens over the past few years. Elementary even had one woman in a starring role. But two? Miss Sherlock has crossed a rubicon.

Of these two recent comparisons, the closest analogue to Miss Sherlock is undoubtedly the BBC’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. As with Sherlock, the new show takes cues from Conan Doyle stories but changes the twists. The first episode picks up the theme of pills and blackmail from A Study in Scarlet (1887), which we saw done a little differently in Sherlock’s “A Study in Pink.” The second plays on the motif of Stradivarius, whom we learn in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1893) made the very violin that Holmes owns.