Matt Smith reviews episode 23 of Elementary…
It’s the penultimate episode of Elementary and things are getting serious, because it’s the penultimate episode and that’s what happens in penultimate episodes. That’s what’s always said, right? In the ads and promotions, it always says ‘penultimate episode’ followed by the main character looking sombre or contemplative? That’s why you don’t get as many ads for ‘penultimate episodes’ in a comedy series. Also because it has the word ‘ultimate’ in it, and that lends itself better to serious drama. I don’t have any hard data to back up my claims; I just get paid for every time I use the word ‘ultimate’. Double if it’s in single ‘quotation’ marks.
And as it’s the penultimate episode, that means we’re one step away from the final time we see Holmes for a good while. It’s been a good run, but it feels like we’ve only just gotten to know Holmes in any deep sense. Now we’re just going to up and leave him just as the party was getting started. And that brings me to Irene Adler, free as I am to talk about her without spoiling things.
We got a brief glimpse of her in last week’s episode, as Sherlock Holmes broke down at the sight of the woman he thought had died. Now this isn’t the usual response from our detective. But that’s probably down to Adler being the first person Sherlock ever got close to having a real relationship with. We get flashbacks of their relationship back in London, explaining why we get the new Sherlock Holmes in the present. Who is the exact opposite of the Holmes we know, all emotion and inaction. And it turns out she’s a real mystery to him.
With all the focus now on Holmes and Adler’s past, it’d take a wild imagination to say Moriarty gets any time at all. Watson takes over the puzzle as she attempts to solve the mystery of who kidnapped Irene and what their plan was. What with this being the penultimate episode though, it feels like Moriarty has been somewhat painted into the background. Moriarty has just become another character, another name to be mentioned, another mystery for Holmes.
Not to say this episode doesn’t bring intrigue. And it’s nice to see Holmes in a new light, though giving the reason he fell into depression and addiction physical form does somewhat take away from the mystery that is Sherlock Holmes. He’s slowly becoming not Holmes, the greatest detective, but Sherlock, a real person. What does that mean for the character and the series overall? There’s not really enough time to answer that question, one more review is probably needed. This week’s about other things.
Holmes is now almost paralysed, helping Irene Adler at every waking moment instead of helping find her kidnapper. But then this is Holmes, and even when we thinks he’s not working at it, a small part of his brain works it out, makes that imaginative leap needed to solve a case and, almost, cracks it. He probably needs one more episode to do it.
The focus is going to more obviously be on the twist at the end. And if you’ve seen it, you can’t argue that it’s in the vain of originality when it comes to the Sherlock Holmes universe. It is, however, a little… disappointing. It’s a twist that a viewer might think is too outlandish or trivial for producers to take seriously. It’s a twist because they needed a twist at the end of wherever they were in the plot.
It’s also a little cheating, perhaps even unfair. While previous mysteries have been solved by Holmes before the audience, thus bringing the enjoyment of watching him at work, this one provides no clues. No teasers that we can reference back to, just a reference to birthmarks that you know will feature in some way. But the producers don’t give the audience enough, so it feels like the mystery was there waiting to be solved in front of our eyes all along. They just throw the solution at us, and Holmes, in the final scene and expect us to remain intrigued.
If they can pull it off, great, but it ended the episode in an underwhelming fashion. Hopefully they have enough time for the payoff to be better than the setup when it comes to next week’s finale.
Matt Smith – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published May 23, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
