Moriarty the Patriot is at its core a simple revenge fantasy. The villains of the week are all cartoonishly evil beyond parody, characterized only by things like yelling about how much they hate the poor. The purported central theme of Moriarty is that the ills of society lay solely at the hands of the rich elites, yet we take out one bad police commissioner and then treat police corruption as a solved issue. Power structures? No, it's all the work of a few bad apples.
Season 1 at least has the merits of short contained episodes where Moriarty has some funny murders under his belt, like tricking a guy into eating his fruit allergy or baiting another guy into stabbing someone onstage in a fully occupied concert hall. I guess in season 2 though he got tired of coming up with ways to kill people, where all he does is stab a few people in the last few episodes. Instead, the story concerns itself with setting up longer arcs, and the pacing suffers massively as a result. Plans set into motion are immediately accompanied by a flashback explaining every step of the plan, and then followed up by subsequent flashbacks of everyone explaining their own parts in the plan to themselves. It's pretty obvious the animation staff needed to fill time (the final episode had five separate recaps, including a flashback to what happened earlier that same episode), but it comes off as the show having absolutely no faith in its audience. If the show wants the audience to know something, it gets explicitly spelled out to the letter every time.
Season 2 also has a pretty bad character bloat problem, which is only exacerbated by how the show undermines every possible competent antagonist as soon as they appear, so it keeps needing to invent new ones. The British government is on to us? Oh never mind, Mycroft says he'll look the other way. The police is after us? Oh never mind, we got rid that one bad commissioner, so now we're friends. The media mogul is trying to blackmail us? Oh never mind, we gave him two episodes to pretend to be a threat and hyped up the confrontation as the epic battle between pure evil and necessary evil, and then we killed him off in the next episode where William Moriarty himself is mostly plotting off-screen.
A lot of season 2's runtime is spent on discussing political maneuvers and William's master plan, which is not only dull but also meaningless, as in the final arc William reveals his actual secret master plan which is completely different from what had been discussed for the past 22 episodes. The real master plan gets rid of any remaining redeeming quality of the show. You wanted a revenge fantasy? Sorry, William just revealed he feels very bad about all those unrepentantly evil men he's killed (begging the question of why we even made a conventional villain the hero of the story), and the only way he can atone is by dying himself. He doesn't die of course. If there's anything the show won't abide, it's letting anything of consequence happen to its main characters.
The only thing the show has going for it is how stupid it is, like when it reveals that no, the French Revolution and Reign of Terror was all a secret British plot, instigated by secret government agent Maximilien Robespierre. None of this actually factors into the plot at all beyond being government secrets Britain doesn't want to get out, although by absolving the French monarchy of any wrongdoing it's just more proof we don't believe in power structures. If you want to see how dumb this show can get, by all means watch season 2. For everyone else, just look up the scene where a machine gun is defeated by kicking a coin into the line of fire so another bullet we shoot gets deflected into the gun chamber on sakugabooru and move on with your life.
