Elementary Review 02 x 22 – Paint It Black
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
In the final moments of last week’s episode, Joan Watson was captured by a frequent patron at Mycroft’s New York restaurant. She had discovered he was a wanted murderer and well, he’s a jerk, so he took her. As Holmes so clearly says at the beginning of the episode, “your very bad friends have taken my very good friend.” Mycroft and Sherlock are going to have to work together to get her back and the contempt could not be thicker.
This episode is meaningful for different reasons though. It’s the directorial debut for Lucy Liu, who deftly manages to create an intensity that clearly transitions us into the final two episodes of the second season. Liu has some shining moments as a director. In particular, the sequences in the brownstone between Mycroft and Sherlock have a potent darkness hanging in the air. While visually the same, the tension is evident. One particular shot frames the pair between the stair bannisters, each clearly separated emotionally and physically. Another haunting moment shows Sherlock laying out myriad devices for inflicting pain on a man he believes has the “list” of tax evaders the NSA and the criminals in question both want. The slow tenor of the scene and stillness of the camera requires complete focus as a viewer, so you can’t miss a thing. It’s simple, but powerful.
I have to commend Elementary for giving Liu the opportunity, even if I thought her performance suffered a bit as a result. All of her scenes with the captors seemed flat and uninterested. She was rightly distracted, but in one particularly frightening scene, her captor shoots his cousin point blank. Watson seems shocked, but she’s not her usual self. There’s no anger. No intelligent retort. This may have been the writing of the scene, but I was left baffled by it.
And while Liu’s performance may have suffered slightly, Ifans and Miller have never been more effective. Miller blew me away with every moment of this episode. He manages to evoke this sense of intention that not only drives the entire narrative, but keeps me focused on him whenever he is in the frame, no matter how many other characters surround him. While examining a body in a country home, he stares with a wry twist in his lip and I could feel myself my mind weighing his deductions. What does he see? What does he know? How important is it? The camera didn’t show us – so we had to derive all potential options from his face. It was masterful of Liu to keep the camera disconnected from the evidence and plainly brilliant for Miller to deliver so much meaning with so little information. Similarly, Ifans played the double crossing line with ease. I was repeatedly convinced he was a bad guy, then a good guy and then a bad guy again. Even as the credits rolled, Ifans had me guessing. Those eyebrows do a lot for the man.
SPOILER ALERT.
In the final moments of Paint It Black, we learn Mycroft has effectively “saved” Watson, but at what cost? We still don’t know who he is really colluding with and every word out of his mouth seems to be only a half truth. I don’t buy that he got involved in the whole scheme for the money and Holmes is mysteriously left without any resources from the NSA. My honest prediction? Mycroft knows Moriarty. And that creepy man on the other end of the phone? Just another nameless voice being used for her gain.
Liz Giorgi is the Baker Street Babes’ Elementary Guru and runs the fantastic nerdy blog Being Geek Chic. You can find her former reviews of Elementary here on her site.
She’s a writer and filmmaker. She’s also a contributor for Apartment Therapy and The Mary Sue.
You can contact her at elizabeth@beinggeekchic.com and follow her on Twitter @lizgiorgi
