The drip, drip of monotonous episodes leading up the season 3 finale of Elementary may not have been building to a bigger climax than we ever imagined.
Season 1 took three episodes to tell its final story. Season 2, about the same. So when season 3 approached its final episode with no inkling that the bees of penultimate episode would play a large role, the finale seemed like it would be more of an anticlimax. Nothing more than a means to end the repetitive procedure that plagued the cases this season’s end.
There in lies the genius of the final episode of Elementary season 3, “A Controlled Decent.” Somewhere after episode 16 the case of the week took a turn. The personal stories were, for regular viewers like myself, a distraction from the cases riddled with an almost insufferable amount of twists. It became the norm to enter the eleventh hour waiting for Sherlock or Joan to debunk the mystery, so that we may be rewarded with another fleeting moment of character development.
To quote Sherlock’s view of a relapse, the finale seemed be, “a surrender to the incessant drip, drip, of existence” in the casework of Elementary. An anticlimax of the most disappointing kind.
Sherlock Holmes gave us an ending that proved to be a “grand trauma” filled with meaning.
The episode opens with Alfredo and Sherlock taking their friendship for a test run. But where “Who’s on First” and Sherlock’s relationship advice fails, he hopes obtaining a new sponsor will succeed. When Sherlock arrives at Alfredo’s garage the next morning, however, a man is on the phone with the police reporting his classic car stolen and Alfredo as the lead suspect. Alfredo’s smashed phone and the fact that his garage was left wide open pushes Sherlock’s mind in another direction. He sends Joan to the precinct to explain the situation and Alfredo’s relation to Sherlock.
Sherlock has another person to visit– Alfredo’s mother. The most interesting part of the encounter is that Mrs. Llamosa seems to have met Sherlock before. She can handle the pain that comes with news regarding Alfredo, but she worries more about those who fall into Alfredo’s orbit. If Alfredo did go down a dark path, much like Alistair, she hopes that Sherlock does not get pulled along.
All connections to Alfredo’s former ill-willed employer, Castle Automotives, prove to be a dead end, Sherlock looks deeper into Alfredo’s past. But his best lead, his former drug dealer, Oscar Rankin calls and admits that he has Alfredo. His sister, Olivia is missing and the only way he could think to get Holmes to take the case is by taking someone as close to his addiction as they come. A polaroid of Alfredo tapped to a chair with that morning’s paper is enough to get Sherlock to meet with Oscar while Joan heads off to Gregson.
Concern runs deep under Joan’s confidence in Sherlock, but Bell and Gregson have a more outward display of emotion, as they loudly deem Sherlock’s approach both reckless and stupid. Joan refocuses their attention to finding Alfredo. She and Bell head off to what serves as Oscar’s apartment where they not only find the stolen car, but a recently used napkin from a burger joint only found on Long Island.
Elementary began mere hours after Sherlock broke out of Hemdale Rehab facility. What is known about his life before that time is as much of a mystery as any case we’ve seen thus far, including the one that occurred during the height of his addiction. But Oscar is going to shed some light on the situation, taking Sherlock through the prequel to Hemdale, watching as each stage of deterioration slowly eats away at his recovery.
And that is where our story begins — for every step Sherlock takes back through his past, another stitch comes undone in his recovery. In Hemdale, where Olivia left two nights prior, Sherlock surveys the grounds of the place he entered when he hit bottom. Oscar tries to pry into his time at Hemdale, but where he was unsuccessful in vocalization, he succeeds in unlocking a train of thoughts inside Sherlock’s mind. Next stop, a place Oscar took Sherlock days after their meeting to help ease the pain of the emotional turmoil of Irene’s death — a shooting gallery.
With each new location a layer peels away. At this juncture we are closer to season 1 Sherlock than season 3. All the workings of his partnership with Joan remain in tact. He calls her, from a lifted phone, to update on his happy trails, reassuring her that he’ll be in touch.
Turns out, even a heroine den has some clues. Oscar and Holmes pick up a license that leads them to the apartment of Jonathan Bloom, a wealthy man notable for getting away with sexual assault. In a moment much like mid-season one Sherlock Holmes, we see him become unhinged, physically torturing the man until he finds out where Olivia went.
A car service delivered Olivia from Bloom’s apartment to an empty rail yard where Sherlock discovers her two day old dead body with Oscar’s footprints at the scene. He found her two days prior.
What was the grand purpose of this trip? Sherlock may have forcibly removed the cancerous Oscar from his life, but Sherlock’s influence on Oscar continued to eat away at him. If Sherlock Holmes was going to fall, Oscar was going to have him screaming his name on the way down.
Joan and Bell are able to track a powder Sherlock picked up on Oscar’s jacket to a gravestone engraver and in the back of the yard, they find a severely dehydrated, but alive Alfredo.
We’re not falling off the side of Reichenbach Falls. The anticlimax that Sherlock saw in a relapse is our climax of the season. Beating Oscar to a crumpled mess, Sherlock is one step away man who arrived in alone in New York. Rejecting the help of his partner, his friends, his loved ones, Holmes picks up Oscar’s stash and turns to the dark tunnel and the dead body with a needle in her arm.
Light does not appear again, except in the distant city skyline as Joan heads up to the rooftop of the brownstone three days later. Sherlock sits alone in a chair, hazy, unfocused, empty as she delivers the news that his father heard what happened and will be arriving tomorrow.
We have the data, now we have six (yes, six) long months to analyze it. After all, “what is existence, but the absorption of and reaction to the data the universe presents?”
Elementary returns to CBS fall 2015