Matt Smith reviews episode 23 of Elementary season 2…
Good detective stories always have to hold something back until the last minute. Ensuring that the audience doesn’t know what happens until a final turn that leaves everything seemingly shocking and inevitable all at the same time.
It’s here that Mycroft Holmes makes his mark. Last week came the reveal that, instead of the dumber brother to Sherlock, Mycroft was in fact working for British intelligence. In a change from other iterations, his intelligence and cunning were hidden. Like a good mystery, he fooled both the audience and Sherlock. As well as Watson.
This week, it’s back to the back and forth between brothers. Both funny and dramatic, as well as revealing their past, in the right amounts, the relationship is like the episode. Well balanced and having the right amount of light and dark to keep the tone of the Elementary series so far, the brothers bickering fits whether Mycroft or Sherlock are on top. But with MI6 being invaded, will this be a new kind of case? More likely, it’s just your regular, run of the mill impossible, bizarre case Sherlock Holmes was made to solve.
The two throughlines of this week’s story are the case and the fallout from Mycroft’s revelation. As mentioned before, the best detective stories normally link the two together and once again Elementary have done it well.
Every character has to react to the revelation, even Mycroft himself. Jumping on the potential emotion, Elementary shows Mycroft’s hidden anger from having to hide his own intelligence from Sherlock, everything coming to the surface and bubbling over. Who’d want to be seen as less than their brother in terms of intelligence for so long, especially when their brother’s as egotistical as Sherlock Holmes and especially when they’re playing a much smarter game in the long run? So while Mycroft is indeed smarter, Sherlock finds himself winning at points as insecurities shine through.
It’s all ably delivered, Rhys Ifans’ complimenting the script to show that Mycroft, while always in the background, wasn’t always so because he was in his brother’s shadow. He gives Mycroft an understated quality that perfectly hides what he really is. Even when he’s showing the truth, he’s still a character that’d rather be working than be seen working.
Like the show itself, Mycroft has held something back and given out only when he needs to. Just when you think he’s going one way, and that the show had him down as another betrayer of the great detective, it turns out Elementary had its own plan at the ready. By showing that perhaps a team of three could work in solving crimes, even if the cases involve the fate of the world, the show has left me waiting with baited breath as to what will come up next for the great Sherlock Holmes.
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Originally published May 26, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
