I don’t think I can emphasize enough just how much Elementary understood the core of Sherlock Holmes’ character, and the kind of cases and people he is drawn to, right from the very first episode.
The pilot opens with a wealthy woman’s murder. The prime suspect is a man who is a patient of the woman’s husband, a doctor, for help with his mental disorder. The man is desperately trying to avoid any triggers that may cause him to become violent, as he has been in the past. The doctor decides to use this man as a tool to kill his wife to collect her life insurance. He manipulates both his patient and his wife, alters the man’s medications, and ignores the man’s pleas for help, in order to set a scenario that is guaranteed to trigger the man’s violence - resulting in his wife’s death and later his patient’s.
When Sherlock pieces this together, he confronts the doctor, which leads to this:
And that’s what drives Sherlock to confront the doctor directly. There’s no smugness in being right, or for figuring out who the murderer was and how he did it. Sherlock realizes that this man’s patient was just another victim - someone who desperately wanted and sought help, only to be mistreated. Sherlock Holmes in this adaptation cares so deeply about people, especially those who are denied help when they need it most, and we learn all of this from the very first case.
