#elementary 3x15

[liunaticfringe]

Short (ish) Review of Elementary 3x15 "When Your Number's Up" Grade: C-

The good: Watson comes up with the clue that solves the crime. Joan is emotionally off kilter (understandably), Sherlock treading rather lightly/being thoughtful. 

The bad: But G-d, are we ever gonna see Watson shed a tear over this poor guy? He wasn't the love of her life, okay, but still. How tough would've it've been to have her come across a picture or other item of his while she was unpacking and have her react emotionally to it? 

Her setting up office in that dank, dingy basement really threw me at first. She seems so happy about it. But then, I realized. She's in a dark emotional place, whether she wants to admit it or not. She could've chosen several other spaces in the brownstone that would've worked just as well for an office. But she's unconsciously sentencing herself to life in this low-ceilinged dungeon, separate of Sherlock and her life upstairs "in the light."  Doubt it'll play out anywhere, though.

The ugly: 

When a show chooses to go off format, it's usually for a good reason -- there's some special guest star to feature or some deep personal connection between the killer vs. the detective. But this was just another dull, obscure case. There were no emotional stakes, no suspense, no diabolical genius trying to best Sherlock, no nothing.

And geez, these freaking crime-of-the-week stories have gotten so deadly boring, with all their corporate gobbledygook. Who can follow it, much less care about it?

Alicia Witt's performance didn't help, and neither did the usual plot holes. You're gonna tell me that a murder happens in the middle of the sidewalk of the financial district, and there are NO security cameras that catch the crime? Why not just shift the killing to an alley? Because it's prettier to shoot on the NY street? SHEESH!

I would have given up on this show long ago were it not for Liu/Miller -- and the wardrobe department.

[amindamazed]

sanguinarysanguinity's tags to the "is that a nailgun?" reblog : #Joan's uncle was a contractor#I loved that moment fiercely#one shining moment before it all descended into#is anyone else as upset and disturbed as I am right now?#and#if I was Sherlock I would find nothing reassuring about this at all

Joan has acknowledged that she isn't sure what she's doing or what she wants, that she might be reacting to traumatic events, that she finds comfort in the brownstone as home for now, and that she does want to maintain some of the balance (and boundaries) she'd found on her own. Doylistically, that's more than I expected we'd get and sadly likely to be the last word on the subject unless somebody remarks on the inevitable removal of those nails. I'm resigned rather than upset by this means of getting her back to the brownstone.

Sherlock seems reassured by her reclaiming her things and by her making the space for herself. I think it's significant that she didn't ask him for the basement nor did he offer it as anything other than storage; she took it. I'm not sure what to think of the way she talked about the entrance, that it was important that they'd both have to go outside to make the transition from their space to hers, and that she's not going to stop him from coming and going as needed. That might backfire. I'm curious to see how much longer she has her own clients, and how much longer before "their collaboration" becomes a partnership again.

[amindamazed]

"It took me a while to get my balance again, and I don't want to lose that. I don't want to give it up."

Joan isn't talking about Andrew here; she's referring to the balance she found living in her apartment (not that we've really been shown this life she supposedly had outside of work) in the months after Sherlock left her. After being kidnapped, held at gunpoint and forced to operate on a patient later killed in front of her, after having her captors shot in cold blood around her. All that after a year of radical self-redefinition and shedding of the previous skin of sober companion, and that two years after the last time she cut and ran, fleeing from the ruins of her life as a surgeon.

The apartment she claimed to want so badly back in 1x14 was perhaps the last place she'd once felt balanced and yet she chose a new career that kept her away from it and ultimately ended up "abandoning [her] belongings as if leaving the site of a contamination." Perhaps her sublettor's porn film was the excuse she needed to forget that life ever existed. It's also easy to imagine she held onto the idea of wanting it because it was the thing expected by "polite society." I wish we knew something more about her pre-surgical life; did this pattern of drop & run start with Gerald Castoro? With Liam? Or has she not had a home (claims of her own sanctum sanctorum aside) for longer than that?

[amindamazed]

Big news tonight for the brownstone floorplan: addition of the basement as a new space presumably to be seen regularly for the rest of the season (?). I speculated it might exist early on, but I don't think it's ever been mentioned on the show before 3x15 and definitely not seen until now. 

It's a little early to be certain, but it appears that the spatial anomaly that shifts the kitchen level out of alignment with the upper floors does not continue below. That is, the layout of the basement looks to match that of the main floor, with the STAIRCASE OF MYSTERY in the middle of the floor rather than shifted toward the back of the house as it is on the kitchen level.