Believing is seeing. Unless, of course, you believe in something Sherlock thinks is bollocks! Our Elementary season 3, episode 20 recap proves that.
As Elementary approaches the final dash to May sweeps, tonight’s episode served the purpose of a typical bottle episode. It provided the perfect platform to remind viewers that Sherlock is working on a way to end Colony Collapse Disorder, by having him bring the bees inside the brownstone and casting Joan out for the evening. Expect to see this, and a clip from episode 14, make it into the “Previously On,” segment before an entire episode focuses on the bees later this season.
With no subplot to really further other than to lay some groundwork in the first five minutes, “A Stitch in Time,” turned its attention to Sherlock’s inability to let Joan see fifteen steps ahead of him and to reassert that being a detective isn’t about how many criminals you put away or what the news is saying about you. Enter Hannah Gregson, daughter of Captain Gregson, and aspiring detective in her own right. But she is not exactly looking to wait around for the rewards to start pouring in.
Joan takes Hannah’s case, three drug store robberies in her precinct, all pharmaceuticals with a high street value are taken, and there are three suspects. Hannah gives Joan all the pieces of the puzzle and steps away. Meanwhile, across the boroughs a car speeds to meet a train crossing until a man steps in a pushes what he suspects is just a drunk idiot to safety before the train passes. However, she did the legwork and failed to see the pieces come together. A blow to the head already murdered the driver.
The victim: Garrison Boyd, President of the Five Boroughs Skeptics. A professional doubter for a living, Sherlock admired Boyd for his work to disprove radical thinking. An unidentifiable object pulled from Boyd’s eye turns out to be the tip of a garden gnome’s hat. When Garrison Boyd met his end it was partially due to a diminutive wood spirit. Irony never fails to amuse.
In our preview we mentioned that a cult similar to The Leftovers’ Guilty Remnant would become the prime suspect and we were not entirely wrong. The Church of Atomicism, a cult clad in purely earth tones, assign their members to stalk and keep records on specific people including Garrison Boyd who lived his life to disprove people like them. Instead of trying to get the leader to transfer anything more than energy, Sherlock speaks with a young woman, a level 3 conduit, Aria, who not only decides to go back to her old life by the time she is done speaking, but gives Sherlock the files they collected on Boyd.
Colin Eisley, a real estate agent whose sordid past with the FCC and Wall Street left him with every bit of his finances monitored so closely even he doesn’t know what is going in his blind trust accounts. Boyd paid him a visit while he was still being tailed and it is revealed that Eisley had Boyd go out under the guise of being hired by the woman’s daughter to disprove that the house was haunted by the woman’s deceased husband out on Long Island.
Sherlock and Joan head out to serve as skeptics in their own way until the elderly woman produces a tape with the recordings of her deceased husband yelling at her for her extramarital affairs. The tape that she produces is not her deceased husband but someone speaking in Arabic and the sound of digging tools. Once inside the neighbors basement, who vacation in the winter, Sherlock crawls into a hole where he unearths RUBY the fastest transatlantic cable that runs under the ocean to transmit everything from stock prices to cat videos.
Boyd got as far as they did until he met his end by garden gnome. Upstairs, Joan finds a yogurt drink in the fridge that is only sold in six stores from which she already got receipts and enough to take to Sherlock to get him off her back for trying to balance cases.
Beat cop versus terrorists, Sherlock is still perplexed why Joan is taking on Hannah’s case at all. Sherlock does not see anything in Hannah that remotely points to her being suited for life as a detective. He saw it in Joan, he saw it in Kitty, and as Mitchum Huntzberger told Rory Gilmore at her newspaper internship, she makes a great cop, but as a detective she just doesn’t have “it.”
Back to the case at hand, Sherlock lets Joan sleep in and informs her that he found someone who knew the only person to visit the stores with the yogurt drink. Yolanda Massey is hesitant to give up information, but that is only because she does not know anything about her neighbor. At that, Sherlock tells her to get out of the building because Nadim Al-Haj heard them talking and is currently dousing his apartment in accelerant. Sherlock barges in, but it is too late and the apartment and his work go up in flames and Nadim is out the window with a tube.
The device that Nadim was building was nothing more than a splicer that acted as a circuit board that takes information and put the same information out in four milliseconds. As they toy with this and try to loop Collin Eisely back as a suspect, Hannah’s case is solved by Joan who advises her to take the information to her superior. With the three suspects and a lead on where they are taking the supplies, they have enough to make a bigger bust and take down the bigger players in the process. But Hannah is impatient and knows that no one will give her so much as a footnote if she didn’t cash in early. “A chip off the old block” reads a photo of Hannah in her father’s precinct, but he is less than excited about how Hannah got there. Hannah needs to learn how to do better and do it on her own.
The case of the RUBY cables turns out not to be a plot of terrorism, but a way for Collin Eisely to ensure that his computer generated trades in his blind trust make the maximum amount of money possible. By giving the firm managing his accounts access to the information 4 milliseconds before the wires transmit the information to other larger firms servers, he has an advantage that got him into trouble in the first place. Since he could not pay off Nadim in cash after he killed Boyd, Eisely handed down a piece of art from his expansive collection, explaining the tube that Nadim took with him out the window.
A machine that takes in material and produces the same information unchanged from input to output is the best way to describe this episode. Nothing changed, if anything, we got that four millisecond advantage for another case to come involving Colony Collapse Disorder.
Watch Elementary season 3, episode 21, “Under My Skin,” Thursday, April 23 at 10:00 p.m. ET on CBS.
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