"Spy for Reichenbach" was my first thought, once I looked up the character on IMDb and determined we haven't seen her before this episode. It kind of seemed that the point was more about wrapping up the interim captain's story arc instead, but maybe that's a misdirect.
It could go either way. "Spy for Reichenbach" was not my first thought, though. I didn't even think that until I read the idea here. I just assumed she was a b-plot character for Gregson to interact with. I'm pretty excited that... Spoiler ...Cassie from season 4's "Miss Taken"... ...is returning this week. I've recently been rewatching season 1, for the first time since it aired. (I picked up the first season, new and still in shrinkwrap, on DVD for about five bucks at a charity shop.) I'd forgotten how different the pilot was. Joan isn't Joan yet, there's no Marcus, and Sherlock is manic and abrasive, not to mention destructive. (Plus, visually, he just looks wrong.) Despite all those who said, at the time, it was simply an American rip-off of Sherlock, the pilot and the early episodes feel more like the Guy Ritchie films with RDJ and Jude Law in terms of style and Sherlock's characterization. IIRC, and I'm not to this point yet, I remember the feeling that "The Red Team" midway through the season was the point was Elementary found its footing as its own thing.
The "ripoff of Sherlock" charges were always off-base. The style, tone, and storytelling philosophy of Elementary were radically different from the start. It's a coincidence that two modernized versions of Holmes came along at the same time, but they're hardly unique; prior to 1950, virtually every screen adaptation of Holmes was updated to the present day, with the exceptions of the 1916 silent film and the first two Rathbone-Bruce films. (After all, the first couple of decades' worth of Holmes films came out while the stories were still a going concern, so naturally they treated Holmes as the contemporary character that he was. And for the next couple of decades after that, filmmakers mostly continued in the same vein. It wasn't until a generation had grown up seeing the Holmes canon as a period piece that they started doing the film adaptations that way.) I'm surprised to hear early Elementary likened to the Ritchie films, though. As I recall them, the films are big, flashy Guy Ritchie blockbusters, while Elementary was always more of a standard American detective procedural, albeit an above-average one in execution.
The visual style in "Pilot" is different in ways that actually feels shocking. It was shot with handcams. The brownstone was an actual location instead of a set on a soundstage. It felt a bit more cinematic, a bit grittier, hence the Ritchie comparison.
Did he die? I saw Robert Wolfe's dog Baxter passed from cancer on Clyde's Twitter feed. Nothing on Clyde though (who is apparently played by two tortoises).
I don't think Clyde died. (Clyde is played by two different turtles, so even if one died there's a back-up.) I think CBS wanted to make a video. As for "Miss Understood"... It's the final season, so let's introduce the hitherto unknown children of our main characters! I think that's a television cliche. I'm not sure if Cassie is really Sherlock's daughter genetically or if Cassie wants to be Sherlock's daughter in an emotional sense because she sees in him the only person who even gets close to understanding her. It's ambiguous, it depends on how much weight one puts on a conversation in which Cassie may have been bullshitting Joan. In any event, Sherlock takes a paternal interest in Cassie, much as he did with Kitty and, as far as I could tell, for his own unvoiced reasons, It's odd to introduce this to the series with just five episodes to go. Cassie struck me as having some very Arsene Lupin-like qualities. Lupin, far more than his literary contemporary A.J. Raffles, lives by a code of honor -- Lupin is a thief and won't hesitate to break the law to reach his ends, but he's also motivated by fairness and justice and is as likely to help someone as he is to rob them blind. In Maurice LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes (the name changed for copyright reasons), Lupin and Holmes aren't that different and, under different circumstances, could have been friends. (A concept used a series of young adult novels titled Sherlock, Lupin & I, originally published in Italy, which imagine Holmes, Lupin, and Irene Adler as childhood friends.) Cassie becoming Mina Davenport back in the day, then extorting the supermarket CEO in order to flush out the killer are things that Lupin would have done. Honestly, I was expecting the CEO to discover it was Sherlock in his mansion. Seeing Cassie there kinda threw me. As for the story, baby formula is stupid expensive! Fifteen years ago, I asked one of my employees if he wanted anything for Christmas. His girlfriend had had a baby two months before, and he said, "Get me some baby formula." He wrote down what he wanted. I went to the local warehouse club, and I think I spent sixty dollars. Sixty dollars! So I would totally believe that 1) there's a black market in baby formula and 2) there are people with a vested interest in keeping the price high who would kill for to keep things that way. All in all, I liked it. "Miss Understood" wasn't the episode I wanted with only five left -- like last week, I don't see this advancing the Reichenbach plot any -- but the character work, and seeing Sherlock get another human being open up, was nice. There are reasons I'm going to miss Jonny Lee Miller's Sherlock Holmes, and it's scenes like Sherlock and Cassie at the table and the scene of them at the end that are the reason why -- Miller's Sherlock is, deep down, a sentimental man who, with time and effort, has learned how to be a human being.
Two things weakened this for me. One, I don't find Ally Ioannides (Cassie) very appealing -- she's dead-eyed and kind of bland and a bit off-putting. Two, the camera/editing work was bizarrely clumsy, with constant cuts between static angles that were sometimes onscreen for a fraction of a second, like it was being shot multi-camera and switched live by someone who didn't know what they were doing or was very rushed. (Although I'm not sure it could've been multi-camera given some of the reverse angles.) No, make that three things. They crammed too much into this, like they're compensating for the shorter season by jamming in all the stuff they wanted to do. The throwaway exercise-ball murder solution at the start was the cleverest part of the whole episode; I would've rather seen a story about that. And having "The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" unfold off-camera was a pointless indulgence using up time that would've been better spent having the capture of the murderer happen on camera instead of just talked about after the fact.
Last night we had two mysteries -- Sherlock investigates a crime that Reichenbach believes will happen in three days, and the usual suspects investigate the murder of a model. Of the two, I found the former more interesting.. I've seen speculation online that Reichenbach arranged the final twist, in order to prove to Sherlock that he was right in general if wrong in the details. I'm not convinced. As for the model murder, when the murderer appeared on screen for the first time I went, "Oh, that's the person who did it," but I had nothing to go on at that point. I get that the Medical Examiner was crap at her job, but I don't know how she could have missed in the autopsy that the earlier victim had just given birth. Next week is the antepenultimate episode. Given that, and that Morland is returning, I expect that Morland will die at Reichenbach's behest, to set up the two-part series finale. I don't know what I want from that finale except a Natalie Dormer appearance and Sherlock and Jamie riding off into the sunset together. If not that, then Sherlock saying to Joan, "There's an east wind coming."
I would prefer that, because otherwise it's a pretty predictable, obvious, manipulative plot twist on the writers' part. I guessed well in advance that there'd be some Shockingly Dark Twist at the end, because I've seen enough TV to know the formulas. I feel the episode was weakened by the need to divide it between the Reichenbach investigation and the formulaic murder-of-the-week. I know the CBS formula gods demand that a murder happens and gets solved in every episode, but maybe the guy's murder-suicide could've happened midway through and the rest of the episode could've been Sherlock & Joan trying to determine whether it was all that it appeared or whether Reichenbach staged it.
I'm watching season 6 because I've been super slack with this series and not caught up. I'm way behind.
CBS has released synopses of the final three episodes: Episode 11, "Unfriended," directed by Lucy Liu: Spoiler Holmes and Watson join forces with Holmes' father, Morland (John Noble), to enlist his vast criminal network to help disassemble tech billionaire Odin Reichenbach's crime prevention system. Episode 12, "Reichenbach Falls" Spoiler Tech billionaire Odin Reichenbach inadvertently provides Holmes and Watson with a lead that could give them evidence that brings him to justice. Episode 13, "Their Last Bow": Spoiler Amidst Holmes and Watson's battle with tech billionaire Odin Reichenbach, the investigators receive word of their old enemy and Sherlock's former love, Jamie Moriarty, on the series finale.
Series finale? Somehow I thought this was the first of two final seasons. I must've been mixing it up with Agents of SHIELD. Spoiler: Episode 13 That bit where they "receive word of" Moriarty is discouraging -- it suggests that they're resolving Moriarty's arc offscreen because they couldn't get Dormer back.
I was hoping the title of the last episode would be "Reichenbach Falls." I'll stand quietly and wait for the rotten tomatoes...
I like "Their Last Bow" for the final episode title, since "His Last Bow" is the last story (chronologically) of the Doyle canon.
Sherlock ended season 2 with "The Reichenbach Fall," season 3 with "His Last Vow," and season 4 (the series finale as things currently stand) with "The Final Problem." So it's already covered all the appropriate finale titles, and if anything is kind of overloaded with finales by now. Overall, Elementary has been far less prone to use episode titles drawn from the Doyle canon. They've only had a few: "The Man with the Twisted Lip," "The Five Orange Pipz" [sic], "The Illustrious Client," and the pun titles "The Hound of the Cancer Cells" and "A Study in Charlotte." Plus titles based on non-title lines from the canon, like "The Game's Underfoot" and "Whatever Remains, However Improbable."
OK I'm up to "meet your maker" in season 6 so far loving it. Joan's cool with her suit and tie combo.. That's a neat look for her.