Television: Elementary, "T-Bone and the Iceman"

A needlessly complicated story in which a young woman accidentally hits (t-bones) a white van and pays for it by being murdered with a crowbar. Seems the van was carrying "stolen" refrigerant. This plot thread leads to Cryo NYC, a sketchy company that freezes dead people with the idea of bringing them back at some future date. (And, hey, it's Mark Margolis again, just a few weeks after his Gotham turn. That guy is making the rounds. And he's still not the fool you take him for.)

At this point I knew the engineer at Cryo NYC was the perp. (I'm pretty sure they called him "Scott Resnick" in the episode, though IMDb has the character as "Terrence Resnick"?) A conspiracy involving a leukemia sufferer and a bizarre coverup pertaining to Manos: The Hands of Fate ensues, but I was really just waiting for them to get around to Resnick. Which they did.

There is also a painful subplot regarding Watson and her mother. It just felt very sudden to drop Watson's family back into the show after only having introduced them a couple times early on (and where have Watson's friends gone, either?). With a couple lines of dialogue we discover Watson has a standing date to eat lunch with her mother once a month, but this lunch has been moved up from its regular day. Watson's mother Mary believes Watson's brother is having an affair, but the deeper concern is that Mary might be showing early signs of dementia; she's been forgetful and sometimes confused, and it's pretty plain what she "saw" of Watson's brother kissing another woman might actually be a flashback to when her own husband was having an affair. Of course Watson fails to convince her mother to see a doctor. But at the end of the episode, Holmes arranges for Mary to get the help she needs. In his underhandedly helpful way, he convinces Mary she forgot Watson's birthday (she hadn't) and prompts Mary to see a doctor. He tells Watson, "That's how we do it in my family."

So while this subplot was awkwardly shoehorned into the episode, the ending almost saves it: Holmes has adopted Watson's family in his own way.