Elementary: Family Affairs

by Amy K. Bredemeyer

I actually think that this drama is getting better. I know that tons of people have been fans since the beginning, but I've been a little slow to warm-up to this adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic. I was wondering how long Watson would be around as a "sober companion" before she'd need another excuse to remain around Holmes, and it looks like we'll get one shortly (unless, of course, the next few episodes take place in a short period of time). Before then, however, it's interesting to see Watson try to find a "sponsor" for Holmes, especially as he'll need one strong in patience and forgiveness to accommodate his sporadic personality. As far as the deductive reasoning used in the cases, I've been fairly impressed... I'm not so great with paying attention to multiple things and linking them together for later memory retrieval. Or, at least I didn't used to be... it's been quite a while since I've tried anything like that. What did you find most astounding about Holmes' logic in these episodes?

Elementary "One Way to Get Off" (S01E07): A masked robber kills two bound people, and the Captain believes the victims to be the work of a copycat murderer of someone he arrested in 1999. But, Holmes suspects that it's actually someone who helped the original murderer because of a missing shoe, a small detail from the original cases. [Psycho theme song as a ringtone?]

David M. Russell/CBS

Holmes pokes around in the basement of a suspect and hears someone crying - he breaks down a door behind a cabinet and finds a woman chained inside. [oh goodness!] She says that the guy slept with her the night before, so a sex slave is his alibi. [ha!] There's some deduction over where to watch Chechnyan football and what hotels are nearby and Holmes finds Victor's room, where he picks a lock and finds a loose floorboard under a torn carpet... where there's a gun. But, Holmes realizes that Victor is blind in one eye so he doesn't have the depth perception to shoot moving targets and has been framed. [eight minutes left? how are they going to solve this? sounds like a House problem.] And, the Captain calls with another incidence of a similar crime. The original killer has no records of taking reading classes, but he's gone from being illiterate to quoting Oscar Wilde in thirteen years. They figure out who that the inmate's son volunteered to teach at the prison, and that's how the inmate learned to read. His father talked him into killing, and he gives up where the shoes are, so he'll go to jail, too. [odd.]

Watson tells Holmes that her job is to overstep boundaries to help with the healing, so she goes to his rehab center and learns how uncooperative he was during his time there... except with a maintenance man who is into beekeeping. He's been holding a bunch of things that Holmes left behind, including a pile of letters from Irene. Watson turns them over to Holmes without reading them, and he eventually tells her that Irene died and he didn't take it well. [how true is this...?]

Also, we learn that the Captain's old partner is kinda dirty. Holmes does his own ballistics comparison and finds that the same gun was used in both the old and new murders, and then he realizes that in the old interrogation tapes, a mug was used to plant evidence that allowed the police to arrest the guy - they didn't have a good cause back then! [stuff like this is severely disturbing. what if it was seriously an innocent guy??] 

Elementary "The Long Fuse" (S01E08): A bomb goes off inside the air vent of an office building, and Holmes figures out that a pager was the detonator. They're able to figure out who called the pager, but that guy was just trying to call a deli that was a single digit off. Holmes then notices that the pager's battery has an old logo and finds the newspaper bits in the bomb were from 2008, suggesting that the bomb didn't go off on-purpose... it was supposed to be detonated long ago. The reason? There was no tower for that device's company at the time! [the person building the bomb couldn't have figured this out?] Holmes tracks down the new office of the company that inhabited the bombed office in 2008, and learns that they received several threatening letters around that time. Holmes recognizes the repeated wording in some of the letters and runs a fingerprint from that guy to those found on a bomb that went off in 2005. The guy admits to building and setting off five bombs and writing the letters, but he says he didn't build this particular bomb. Holmes believes him because the smell the bomb left at the office doesn't match the type of smell that an environmentalist's bomb would have, PLUS, there's indentations on the bomb's newspaper where the handwriting doesn't match the suspect's. [between things like this and the "inattention to detail" because the other suspect's fly was down are kinda iffy for me.]

Sherlock's new suspect is a guy who was greedy for power, inhabited the office where the bomb was planted, and disappeared in 2008, never to be found. At the home of the guy, Sherlock sends the wife out into the backyard with Watson while he checks the living room wall, as a photo of the living room has the paintings in slightly different places. He deduces that the guy is IN the wall, and his killer put up new drywall and everything to hide him. [holy crow!] The wife was in Mumbai at the time he went missing, so the guy was likely the target, not the bad guy. The body has a safety deposit box key in the pocket, which yields a VHS sex tape of the guy with his female boss, who used to be a prostitute. [small world!] The guy blackmailed her for raises, but when she wouldn't continue, she killed him. The bomb didn't work so she shot him and hid him herself, using the skills of hanging dry wall that she learned from her father, a contractor. [if this episode didn't already scream HOUSE because of the various dead-ends, Lisa Edelstein guest-starring as the murderer sure solidified that!]

Watson is leaving in three weeks and tries to set-up Holmes with a sponsor. Holmes writes off the first guy nearly immediately when the guy doesn't know chemistry. They go to a meeting and Holmes wants a young car thief-turned-druggie to be his sponsor, but he stands him up for coffee. When Holmes blows off Alfredo again, the young guy comes over with a fancy car, as he tests alarm systems now and knows Holmes is into lock-picking. [I love the idea of Sherlock Holmes having a sidekick named "Alfredo." haha! think he'll stick around, tho?]