ELEMENTARY - News, Reviews, and Discussion

[Christopher]

I'm wondering how they'll write themselves out of last season's finale. It felt pretty irreversible.

(Maybe they could go the Sledge Hammer! route and say the new season is a flashback taking place before that finale. )

 

[Allyn Gibson]

From what I've heard...

Spoiler

season 7 is going to pick up a year after the season 6 finale. I suspect there will be some sort of handwave, like Hannah confesses or Morland pulls some strings or Sherlock's NSA friend gets involved, to clear Sherlock so he can return to New York.

 

[Christopher]

Elementary returns this Thursday at 10 Eastern on CBS. Here are the plot summaries of the first three episodes:

Spoiler

"The Further Adventures" - Holmes and Watson's new careers as consultants for Scotland Yard in London take them inside the tabloid journalism industry when a popular model is the victim of an acid attack. Also, as Watson grows increasingly homesick for New York, Captain Gregson is wracked with guilt over his unresolved rift with his former consultants, on the seventh season premiere of ELEMENTARY, Thursday, May 23 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT), on the CBS Television Network. Ophelia Lovibond returns as Kitty Winter, Sherlock's former protégé.

Read more: Listings - ELEMENTARY on CBS | TheFutonCritic.com http://www.thefutoncritic.com/listings/20190509cbs06/#ixzz5oHVWH6bd

"Gutshot" - Holmes and Watson try to work a stateside investigation from London when someone close to them is gravely wounded by an unknown perpetrator in the United States. However, Holmes' stateside legal trouble - the result of a confession to a murder he didn't commit - threatens to derail their efforts, on ELEMENTARY, Thursday, May 30 (10:00-11:00, ET/PT), on the CBS Television Network.

Read more: Listings - ELEMENTARY on CBS | TheFutonCritic.com http://www.thefutoncritic.com/listings/20190513cbs05/#ixzz5oHVjKK7H

"The Price of Admission" - Holmes takes extreme measures to secure his return to New York when he leans on his father's disreputable connections to aid his legal re-entry into the United States. Also, while Holmes looks for a way back to the United States, Watson helps the NYPD investigate a murder at a storage facility that caters to wealthy clients with items they want hidden from U.S. Customs, on ELEMENTARY, Thursday, June 6 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT), on the CBS Television Network.

Read more: Listings - ELEMENTARY on CBS | TheFutonCritic.com http://www.thefutoncritic.com/listings/20190516cbs05/#ixzz5oHVnTf8M

So it looks like they're not doing a quick and easy reset, but taking their time in resolving the consequences of season 6's finale. That's good.

 

[Caretaker]

Entertainment Tonight has an interview with Rob Doherty about season six and seven. There are minor spoilers about season seven’s storyline.

 

[thribs]

I hope they stay in London. That’s where he should be.

 

[Christopher]

Well, nice to see Holmes & Watson in London at last, and nice to see Kitty again. I kinda doubt they were actually in London, though. The locations still looked like New York to me -- and it was sunny. And if they'd really gone to the trouble of flying to London, they would've taken advantage of the scenery and had Holmes and Kitty meet in Trafalgar Square or the like, rather than going for such generic settings. Plus it looks like they're moving the story back to NYC starting next week.

Blonde Joan is going to take some getting used to. Lucy Liu is still a beauty, but I always found her hair color to be a major part of that beauty, and this is just not the same. (Hey. She's Lucy Liu, playing Joan, who's blonde. Joan Blonde-LL.)

The case Holmes solved in the teaser was a pretty close adaptation of "The Six Napoleons," right down to the name and motive of the culprit. That one's been adapted a lot. Sherlock did it in its final season with "The Six Thatchers," and it was the basis of the Basil Rathbone movie The Pearl of Death, as well as inspiring an Adventures of Superman episode. Anyway, I guess it's appropriate that they depict Holmes's work in London by adapting one of the canonical cases so closely.

So the article talked about wrapping up loose ends in the final season. Now that Game of Thrones is over, I really hope that means getting Natalie Dormer back at last. Although it sounds like they're going for a different big bad with the ominous name of Reichenbach. That spawns certain predictions about how the series is going to end, but I hope they avoid going the obvious route.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Why did they blonde her? That's not right.

You don't just blonde one of the most perfect women and she is one of the most perfect women.

 

[Christopher]

Why did they blonde her? That's not right.

I take it you didn't read the article. "They" didn't turn her blonde. Lucy Liu did that herself because she thought the series was over and wanted to make a change to her look now that she didn't have to be Watson anymore. Then the show got renewed, she told the producers "I'm blonde now," and they decided to write it in.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I take it you didn't read the article. "They" didn't turn her blonde. Lucy Liu did that herself because she thought the series was over and wanted to make a change to her look now that she didn't have to be Watson anymore. Then the show got renewed, she told the producers "I'm blonde now," and they decided to write it in.

No. Huge apologies I didn't see the article.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I kinda doubt they were actually in London, though. The locations still looked like New York to me -- and it was sunny. And if they'd really gone to the trouble of flying to London, they would've taken advantage of the scenery and had Holmes and Kitty meet in Trafalgar Square or the like, rather than going for such generic settings.

I think you're right. I'm pretty sure those were all locations in and around New York "faked" to look like London, just as the final shot of season 6 was. Digital trickery and greenscreening can do a lot today.

 

[Christopher]

Honestly, it didn't look to me like they even bothered to fake it digitally -- just with the UK-style cars and signage and such. The locations looked very Manhattan-like to me, and they tended to keep the camera angles in tight, so it didn't seem like there were any skylines or landmarks or anything being matted around the characters. There was one scene, when Holmes and Kitty were by her car and talking about Joan, where Miller looked like he might be greenscreened, but the street scene behind him was so generic that I didn't see why they'd bother.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I thought the scene of Sherlock and Kitty talking at her SUV looked greenscreened behind the SUV (the guy walking on the street behind the SUV looked odd), and I wasn't sure about the scene when Athelney Jones stepped outside to talk to the reporters (because of the building in the background), but by and large, I think you're correct.

As for the episode itself, I thought it was fine. The case was maybe a little too straightforward because there simply weren't any characters other than the killer who were plausible suspects, but the character work was what really mattered. It's interesting to see Joan as the "fish out of water," and it didn't surprise me that Sherlock didn't really notice. I assumed we'd see Kitty this season; I didn't expect to see her (and Archie) right off the bat. (Also, I loved Kitty's purple hair tips.) I hope we see more of Tamsin Grieg, because after spending some time establishing that Jones doesn't like Joan, I want to see some rapprochement by the end.

 

[Christopher]

I checked, and Athelney Jones is named for a Scotland Yard detective (male, of course) from The Sign of the Four. I should've known; I figured they were just going for a name that would sound as British as possible to American ears.

 

[Christopher]

I had some issues with this week's episode. Too much of the dialogue was "As you know, Bob" exposition, characters recapping previous events to other characters who already knew them. Odd that the second episode of the season would have that problem more than the first. Also, I have a hard time believing that Sherlock would just be blithely walking around in public in an age of ubiquitous surveillance, interacting with witnesses who'd be talking to the police, and leaving his fingerprints all over crime scenes and vehicles that would soon be gone over by police and FBI labs. I mean, he's supposed to be a master of disguise, isn't he? He could've at least put on a hat and sunglasses.

Also, this show, and probably CBS crime drama in general, goes to the "domestic terrorism" well all too often. It's getting kind of predictable. Besides, terrorism plots in Elementary usually turn out to be red herrings for something else, so it would be nice if we could've skipped past that part this time.

Plus it's weird that the explanation for Captain Gregson's shooting was that he happened to be looking into a missing kid off the books. It was oddly random and I'm not sure why he would've felt the need to investigate it personally without telling anyone in Major Case. Maybe there's a part of the story we don't know yet, but it seemed kind of a weak excuse to bring Holmes and Watson back to NYC.

 

[KimMH]

As for the episode itself, I thought it was fine. The case was maybe a little too straightforward because there simply weren't any characters other than the killer who were plausible suspects, but the character work was what really mattered. It's interesting to see Joan as the "fish out of water," and it didn't surprise me that Sherlock didn't really notice. I assumed we'd see Kitty this season; I didn't expect to see her (and Archie) right off the bat. (Also, I loved Kitty's purple hair tips.) I hope we see more of Tamsin Grieg, because after spending some time establishing that Jones doesn't like Joan, I want to see some rapprochement by the end.

I found it odd that once they finally called Joan “Doctor” it was meant as an insult. I understand in-verse Joan wanted to distance herself from that but it still irritates me that they never used her title and everyone else is Detective Bell/ Detective Holmes/Captain Gregson, etc.

I’m sure there’s a very good reason for all that but it is a bit of a blemish on an other wise very likeable series for me.

I was very glad to see Kitty and Archie and I feel like as much as anything it sends a message of hope. In spite of what she’s endured and seen she’s thriving.

 

[Christopher]

I found it odd that once they finally called Joan “Doctor” it was meant as an insult.

Not "Doctor," "Doc." There's a difference. And it works in context, because this Watson is a full-fledged detective now, and a police detective was refusing to acknowledge her as such.

Besides, Joan is an ex-surgeon, and in British tradition, surgeons are not called "Doctor," because historically surgeons went through a different qualifying process than other medical practitioners. That's no longer the case, but the tradition remains. So for a British DCI to call a former surgeon "Doc" was improper by her own standards and therefore doubly disrespectful. It was a pointed use of an Americanism (not just the actual title but the nickname "Doc" as well, I'm pretty sure) as a way of coding Joan as a foreigner.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

"Gunshot" was an... odd episode, and I really had no idea where it was going when we hit the reveal of the fertilizer bomb midway through. That may be because this season is supposed to be more interconnected and serialized than previous seasons. I was playing with thoughts like "Did Gregson just stumble by accident into an attempted domestic terrorist incident?" and "Is it possible that the kid was killed by a perp who didn't know the kid was planning to take out the Long Island Ferry?" In some ways, it felt very much to me like Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk, in which Holmes takes on one mundane case and ends up drawn into a much larger, much darker story. (I didn't like Silk. It felt more like an exercise by Horowitz to hit all of Sherlock Holmes' greatest hits in a single book than a novel of its own. Also, I worked it out a hundred pages before Holmes did, and that's never a good sign.) We're still early days in this story.

I liked the character work, especially Sherlock's conversation with Paige. I thought her bit about how Gregson loved Sherlock, even though he could never say so, went the other way as well. I wasn't bothered by Sherlock running around New York in plain sight and living in the brownstone; Sherlock's pursuit of answers sometimes blinds him, and other times his certitude of his own brilliance makes him arrogant, and this, I think, was a little bit of both -- he needed answers to Gregson's shooting, and his respect for the FBI, never high to start with, is basically non-existent now after they tried to railroad Joan.

I saw some people speculating online last night that Moriarty could be behind the terrorism plot, but that doesn't feel like Moriarty's style to me. It's too brazen, too public.

 

[Christopher]

I wasn't bothered by Sherlock running around New York in plain sight and living in the brownstone; Sherlock's pursuit of answers sometimes blinds him, and other times his certitude of his own brilliance makes him arrogant, and this, I think, was a little bit of both -- he needed answers to Gregson's shooting, and his respect for the FBI, never high to start with, is basically non-existent now after they tried to railroad Joan.

Maybe, but it seems like a missed opportunity to showcase Holmes's disguise skills.

Honestly, I wondered if it was even really necessary for Holmes to come to New York in order to include Miller in the episode. He could've been teleconferencing from London on Joan's tablet. That wouldn't have let him do the scene in Gregson's hospital room, but it would've allowed him to participate openly in the rest. Or he could've teleconferenced from the brownstone and pretended he was calling from London, assuming it went through the usual satellites and network relays, which would probably obscure any signal lag differences.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Maybe, but it seems like a missed opportunity to showcase Holmes's disguise skills.

Oh, I agree. I'd have liked to see Sherlock come in through Customs at JFK with white hair, a goatee, and I guess a black eye patch. Think Slade Wilson.

Honestly, I wondered if it was even really necessary for Holmes to come to New York in order to include Miller in the episode. He could've been teleconferencing from London on Joan's tablet. That wouldn't have let him do the scene in Gregson's hospital room, but it would've allowed him to participate openly in the rest. Or he could've teleconferenced from the brownstone and pretended he was calling from London, assuming it went through the usual satellites and network relays, which would probably obscure any signal lag differences.

Sherlock could have run his personal Internet traffic from the brownstone through a UK proxy server, which would add some time lag. Double the usual, actually, since his packets would have gone from New York to the UK and back, but I doubt anyone would notice that Sherlock was a little laggy.

 

[Christopher]

I laughed as soon as I recognized Daniel Davis as the guy who called Sherlock to the site of the murder. I've been saying I wanted them to bring Moriarty back, but I didn't mean that Moriarty!