Television: Elementary, "Step Nine"

The season two premiere takes Holmes and Watson to London in search of a crazed and AWOL Lestrade. It also introduces Rhys Ifans as Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's older brother.

I have nitpicky issues with some of the episode, but on the whole I actually found it pretty entertaining and a solid start for the season. Let's the get the nitpicky stuff out of the way first, though.

1. In my [quite extensive] experience of the place, Highgate doesn't look anything like that. (No, not even the cleared up bits toward the back.)
2. Why hadn't they slept in 20 hours? Why didn't Watson sleep on the plane?
3. Even if the acetone wouldn't have melted the nail, couldn't Pendry have still hidden the nail in the bottle of fake milk? I mean, how hard was Scotland Yard really looking? They clearly didn't open the milk bottle and take a whiff of the contents or anything. The nail would have settled to the bottom of the jar and been masked by the opaque liquid (I would think).
4. Seems to be popular to set Mycroft and Sherlock at odds with one another these days. I'd actually kind of like to see them get along in the old-school Holmes kind of way. I mean, they were never close, but their rivalry (if you could even call it that) was always good-natured. And they worked off one another, more together than against. I realize sibling rivalry makes for better drama, but . . .
5. And this last point is really just kind of a "huh" on my part. I'm not a surgeon, so maybe Watson saw and understood something I didn't, but when I see a cook with graft scars on his wrist, I mostly just think he suffered a really terrible burn. Still, I do like that they added this layer to things—Mycroft's illness, that is. And I like that they found someone with enough facial similarities to Miller that, seeing them sitting side by side on a bench, I can believe they might be related.
6. I'm not sure how I feel about the treatment of Lestrade, however. I enjoyed the character, but part of me thinks the whole "addicted to the limelight" thing is a bit of a stretch. It's not that I can't believe it could happen, but something about the way it was introduced and then treated made it feel pitted and uneven. Jury's still out on that one.

All right, but all these things aside, I did find the episode engaging. I liked the introduction of a couple new and interesting characters, and the 3D printer story was kind of fun and different. If this episode sets the tone for the season as a whole, I think it could be better than the first. An improvement. My big hope is they'll come up with some truly inventive stories rather than the rote procedural plots we had been seeing. We'll have to see how things go on once they're back in New York, I suppose.