Television: Elementary

Still catching up, but I have now watched all of Elementary through last Thursday only to learn it's moving to Sunday? This worries me for the show, as the industry generally considers Sunday a dumping ground.

Here are the episodes I am to cover, albeit briefly, here:

"Down Where the Dead Delight"
"A View with a Room"
"A Study in Charlotte"
"Who Is That Masked Man?"
"Up to Heaven and Down to Hell"
"Hounded"

So "Down Where the Dead Delight" was interesting enough in that it explored, kinda sorta, the issues with jurisdiction—namely what happens when a murderer strikes in two separate ones so that it's not immediately clear the two cases intersect. My chief complaint with the episode was that it began with Eugene (the medical examiner guy we sometimes see) bantering with and then getting up the courage to ask out a co-worker only to have it all end in an abrupt explosion because a body had a bomb in it. While we know Eugene as a character somewhat, I'm not sure it's fair to try and make us sympathize with him on this when this girl who dies in the first few minutes is not someone we know. What I mean is, some forethought into character development would have gone a long way here. This woman should have been planted many episodes ago so that we had the "aww" of them finally getting together before blowing it apart. Literally. And btw, in immediate subsequent episodes the morgue is just fine. Um, excuse me? Takes a while to fix that kind of shit, amiright?

I don't even remember anything else about the episode, which tells you something right there. Oh, I think this was the one where that female cop comes back to bug Watson again and maybe try to get her to do some vigilante stuff? Whatever.

In "A View with a Room," Holmes and Watson are asked to help infiltrate a drug-dealing motorcycle gang. Meanwhile, the B plot ends up being about Fiona, the "neuro-atypical" woman from a previous episode, asking Watson to do a background check on her new boss because, after her old boss turned out to be a villain, Fiona just can't even. I have mixed feelings about the Fiona thing, but that's for personal reasons. The plot goes on to be about Watson figuring out that Sherlock likes Fiona. Likes her likes her, I mean. Which makes the whole thing even more awkward. Stranger still is the fact that Fiona has since disappeared, not so much as a mention, so . . . ::shrug:: Maybe he didn't like her like her after all? Or she didn't like him?

"A Study in Charlotte" is about people dying from bad 'shrooms. The whole thing gets traced through a woman named Charlotte who provided said mushrooms and also ended up dead. Points for use of the Doyle story's "Rache." But those are immediately deducted again for the very obvious answer to the whole thing, which I had pegged early on. This show is never any fun when you're just waiting for them to get around to what you already know.

We go into the Chinese underworld—okay, we really just dabble—in "Who Is That Masked Man?" Another one in which the answers were very obvious. But the use of mortician's putty and masks was interesting at least.

Then for some reason we segue into Gregson's private life in "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell." I'll be honest; I didn't pay much attention to this episode. It was about a wealthy woman who was murdered and had something to do with a building project that was 20 stories too tall. Meanwhile, Gregson has a hidden girlfriend named Paige (played by Virginia Madsen) who dumps him when Watson accidentally runs into them. The ostensible reason is that Paige worries she could tarnish Gregson's career as she left the force herself after being implicated in some underhanded doings. But the real reason is she has M.S. and doesn't want to put Gregson through that. Their relationship is relatively new, after all, and Paige doesn't think it's fair to saddle Gregson with what's coming. I have to wonder, though, if someone at CBS has a particular interest in M.S. or the name Paige because both have also been prominently featured on Scorpion.

Truth is, much as we love Aidan Quinn, none of us care that much about Gregson's personal life. In the words of Cinema Sins: "Skip!"

Finally! "Hounded" is Elementary's take on Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Charles Baskerville is chased while out for a jog in the middle of the night and he ends up falling in front of an oncoming truck. Then an attempt is made on his brother Henry. What was thought to be a huge dog turns out to be a weird engineering project created by Stapleton Industries. (If you're familiar with the original story, you'll remember Stapleton.) The whole thing boils out in a way that is pretty plain, and the "Gus" robot thing is underwhelming. The B plot brings Eugene back to the center of things as Sherlock confronts him over recent errors in his work and the fact Eugene doesn't seem to be playing chess very well. Eugene is still suffering from that morgue explosion (even though the morgue is incomprehensibly fine, see above), and by the end of the episode he has decided to take a leave. Um . . . Bye, Eugene, we hardly knew you.

Somewhere in all this, too, Sherlock continues to investigate the attempt on his father's life. Although IIRC he did at least figure out the assassin? I don't know, this show hasn't done a great job of holding onto all its threads lately. Or it hasn't done a great job of holding onto my attention. Maybe both. I really do wonder about its being booted to Sunday. That Thursday time slot has become a bruiser, so maybe Elementary will do better after having relocated.