Television: Elementary, "The Eternity Injection"

Holmes gets out of going to a recovery meeting by adopting a case meant for Watson.

Basically, a young woman knocks at the door of the brownstone. She's a nurse who used to work with Watson, and now she has a case . . . But Watson's old address. Holmes takes the opportunity to poach a client, not because he's mean like that but because he doesn't want to go to his meeting.

The nurse is there about a missing person's case; another nurse has disappeared. In short order, Holmes finds the body in a Dumpster. And it doesn't take them long to identify the killer, either, thanks to skin under the fingernails of the corpse. But that guy has also gone missing.

The upshot is a cascade of information about people disappearing and turning up dead, all of them having been paid $150,000 by some strange corporation. And the bodies that are found all have severe brain damage. Plus weird drugs in their systems. Illegal pharmaceutical trials, etc.

It's an episode that doesn't play fair because the ultimate culprit is someone we don't even meet until he's revealed to be the hand behind it all. (Unless I missed something? I'll admit at one point I was somewhat distracted.)

And it's an episode that has more interesting subplots than the chief one, though that one is also fairly solid, the lack of fairness notwithstanding.

For example, Holmes's sudden reluctance to attend sobriety meetings. Watson naturally chalks it up to his still being irritated about the guy using his words as blog fodder, but it goes deeper than that, touching on depression and an empty feeling . . . It's a lovely scene, Holmes articulating as best he can how he feels. Watson even offers to come back and stay at the brownstone for a while if it will help, but Holmes acknowledges that would only be a temporary solution. And by the end of the episode he agrees to attend a meeting with Alfredo.

The details in this episode are fun as well: Holmes being coerced by Everyone to write a treatise on why Bella should have ended up with Jacob instead of Edward and read it aloud at an upcoming convention; the momentary return of the computer genius kid; the bugle; and Holmes dealing with a new kind of car alarm.

In short, it was the littler things that made the show rather than the overarching plot. But on the whole, this was one of the sturdier episodes all around, maybe because of all the supporting columns of secondary material.