Elementary “Be My Guest” left much of its comedy alone in this episode. Holmes helps to pull in a murderer who killed an employee for a valuable baseball card and a woman is found to be the victim of a sexual predator.
Holmes notices another employee reacting badly to the police being at his place off work. Sherlock can read the man’s lips and realizes that the murderers work colleague is holding a woman captive.
He steals the man’s phone and it contains a video of an Asian woman shackled to the ceiling. This starts a search for the captive woman by a sort of reverse engineering. Captain Gregson, Holmes and Watson begin to look for the woman in earnest.
Meanwhile both Holmes and Watson are less than pleased with Shinwell’s progress in terms of training. He fails to pick any of the locks that Watson has presented him with and Shinwell appears to be more interested in setting up a drug sting operation than his training.
The main storyline of Elementary this week was quite possibly one of the weaker in the entirety of the series. Decker, the man who kidnapped the Asian woman, Preeda Boonark, may have led the police and their investigators on a short merry chase but his accomplice was clearly the ex-wife.
From the moment they learned that Decker did not leave himself a “backdoor” entrance into the immigration database, the only person it could be was the ex-wife.
The case this week felt almost “tacked on.” It started well, with Holmes acting on his hunch and looking where the police could not. However, the questioning of the ex took any mystery out of the investigation.
Holmes’ interaction with Det. Bell had one amusing moment, the only real comedic bit in the episode, where Sherlock brings in two coffees. Bell reaches for one and Holmes pulls the cups back away from Marcus. “These are both for me,” he says, “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Be My Guest” did focus a little on Shinwell and both Joan and Sherlock’s displeasure that he was not taking the training seriously. Toward the end of the episode though, Johnson proves that he has been paying attention.
He unlocks all the padlocks, except for the rusted one, and picked the lock to get into the apartment. More importantly, he recognized that the man he was using to set up his old gang was hiding something.
Clearly Shinwell is paying attention to the lessons given him but at his own pace and in his own time. Johnson is still very keen to take his old organization down and he wants to do it quickly. He has learned that patience is a virtue though and he may start doing more for Joan and Sherlock and less towards his own goal.
Shinwell is the underlying storyline this season. He is slowly becoming a member of the team and it seems fairly certain that he will be part of a huge season finale. This penultimate episode seems to be setting that up nicely with Shinwell’s impatience to take down his old gang.
The main mystery, the kidnapping of Boonark and the murder of Decker was just so much window dressing. It was far too easy to solve and with the end of the episode revealing that Shinwell is paying attention to Joan’s lesson plan, clearly the gang is going to be the finale focus.
Elementary airs Sundays on CBS. Tune in next week for the season five finale.
Cast:
- Jonny Lee Miller – Sherlock Holmes
- Lucy Liu – Dr. Joan Watson
- Jon Michael Hill – Detective Marcus Bell
- Aidan Quinn – Captain Thomas Gregson
- Nelson Ellis – Shinwell Johnson
Guest starring Luna Tieu as Preeda Boonark
Mikes Film Talk 