Fringe and Sleepy Hollow star John Noble will be joining the cast of CBS’s Elementary as a series regular for the show’s fourth season. The veteran genre actor will play Sherlock Holmes’ often-mentioned but never-seen father, whose choice to hire Lucy Liu’s Joan Watson to serve as a sober companion for his son kicked off the show’s plot.
Noble recently finished up a stint as another potentially antagonistic relative on Fox’s Sleepy Hollow, where he played man-out-of-time Ichabod Crane’s warlock son, Henry Parrish. The fact that Noble is now moving on to a series regular role on another show may provide some hints about how that filial relationship ultimately played out, especially since the idea of there being two John Nobles running around at once is clearly ludicrous.
It remains to be seen whether the relationship between Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock and his father will resolve any more amicably; the elder Holmes has been presented in the past as a concerned but controlling force in his son’s life, using his wealth as a means to keep the eccentric detective’s destructive habits in check. In any case, it’s always fun to see Noble on TV again, whether he’s chomping on Red Vines, bringing about the apocalypse, or just trading ridiculously detailed observations with his genius detective son. Elementary was renewed for its fourth season back in May, and is expected to return some time this fall.