Cold blooded murder takes on a different meaning when Elementary season 3, episode 17 takes on homicide within a sketchy cryogenic connection.
Familial strides are ones that Sherlock Holmes prefers to attack with a blunt object and dilute with large bodies of water. Joan Watson carries the troubles of her sparingly present family as a burden that she alone must bear. On this week’s Elementary season 3, episode 17, Watson begins to realize that her family looks to her for help and solace, but where does that leave her to turn in a crisis?
The brownstone is without electricity at the moment, due to a minor miscalculation during an experiment to create the perfect light bulb. The murder of Allie Newmeyer calls them away from life in the dark. Her accident left her not only with a smashed in head, but exposure to refrigerant that nearly mummified her face. The Bronx is the scene for this week’s murder, but we sense there was a missed opportunity to store cryogenically froze corpses in the actual Meatpacking District.
Deeming the case worthy of their attention, Joan and Sherlock venture to the medical examiner to confirm what they already know and get a better read on the type of refrigerant Allie was exposed to. Recognizing that the EPA is in the process of outlawing the specific R22 chemical, Sherlock and Bell descend upon black market of refrigerant vendors.
Joan heads off to confront an equally tasking battle in the form of a small vegetarian woman. Mary Watson saw her son kissing a woman other than his wife. Rather than get her hands dirty confronting Oren, she counts on Joan to make things right. When Sherlock is presented with the facts, rather than condone her decision to play referee with her family, Sherlock suggests Joan try a more Holmesy approach — cut them off entirely.
The ice rink manager Sherlock and Bell traced to the stolen refrigerant may have flown under the radar of other investigators, but Sherlock and Joan are able to spot a fake lock picking attempt where the manager claims the thieves broke in. Not a complete wash, though, as he is able to offer them the address the tanks were meant to be delivered. At the warehouse, Sherlock’s impatience gets the best of him and he stumbles upon a walk-in, that houses frozen bodies that are only slightly more chilled than the cast and crew filming on location in New York in February.
Cryo NYC, a sketchy company that takes in the bodies of the recently deceased and puts them on ice until nanotechnology advancements are made, is dealing with a bit of a space issue. Instead of raising funds for more sanitary means of storage, they rotate bodies in and out of their proper storage containers and into warehouses. One body in particular, and the only body to have been the victim of homicide, is missing from the facility.
Mr. Sullivan, a psychiatrist, was strangled to death in his home prior to a new client, Vance Ford’s, first meeting. He spotted the suspect, a man with a beard, cowboyish hat, and a scar above his eye fleeing the scene. Ford is ruled out as a suspect because his leukemia rendered him too weak to commit the murder of Allie Newmeyer, but his connection to Sullivan may still aid their investigation into Allie’s death.
One of the huge components of Elementary and any criminal procedural is the interrogation room scenes. This week’s episode raises the question, how can you spot a liar? We know from past episodes that it is easy to fool a polygraph and trick investigators during questioning. In “On the Line,” Lucas Bundsch bit his cheek on the control questions to elicit a heightened physical response and wore deodorant on his palms to eliminate sweating.
The hired assassin in “The Marchioness,” El Mechanico, paints an idea for them to chase rather than offering a physical description of a man. But for our case, Ford adheres to a rehearsed story using a number of unique words making his testimony easy to remember and repeat on demand.
Watson is not as thrilled with the breakthrough in their field after checking in on Oren who denies that the affair ever took place. Sherlock does the job of putting the state of Mary Watson’s mental health on the table, something Joan doesn’t want to consider. Mental health issues are tricky to navigate as Joan and her mother beautifully display at their second lunch meeting that Mary Watson walks out on.
Ford is strangled a short while later following yet another break in at Cryo NYC. The chance of asking follow up questions is out of the question, but a trip to Ford’s corpse reveals interesting bruising on his feet. This gives Sherlock enough to digging deeper into Ford’s medical and familial history uncovering that Sullivan and Ford were cousins. When Sullivan refused to donate his bone marrow to his ailing blood relative, Ford killed him while he still had the strength to do so. The shoes he wore, his cousin’s size nine, compared to his size 11 feet are what gave him the bruises.
He would wear the shoes anytime investigators came calling so that they did not match the footprints left at the scene of Sullivan’s murder. Since Sullivan was frozen, Ford saw another chance to claim his bone marrow and hired the two employees at Cyro NYC to paint the same story that turned out to be the face of an actor from a cult movie called, Manos: Hands of Fate. Allie was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ford was willing to murder and steal bone marrow because a member of his family did not see the obligation to their shared string of DNA. While Sherlock may not communicate with those members residing overseas, a form of extended family exists under his own roof. By extension that family includes Mary Watson. Sherlock places a call and convinces her mother through an elaborate tale that she forgot Joan’s birthday. Having someone willing to initiate the first strike with a crowbar is what a family needs.
NCAA basketball will air for the next three weeks. Elementary will return Thursday, April 2 at 10:00 p.m. ET on CBS.
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