Review: Elementary 02×06 – An Unnatural Arrangement
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
Elementary has a reputation for taking established characters and giving them a bit of a twist or designing a new storyline for them that gives the viewer a new view of the character. One character who has seemed relatively unchanged up to this point though has been Captain Gregson. This week that changes. When Gregson’s home is burglarized and a mad man reveals he is after the Captain, his personal life starts to unravel and the details are surprising.
Gregson and his wife are on a trial separation, which comes as a shock to his colleagues, but not Sherlock. Of course he picked up on Gregson’s early mornings and late nights in the office, but never mentioned it to anyone else. The stakes are high, because not only is Gregson hoping for a quick resolution, but his staff are now involved in the personal details of his life in a way that would make anyone uncomfortable. Actor, Aidan Quinn, has always been a consistent performer on the show, but he has a quiet sullenness in this episode that’s worth catching. In a particularly tense scene with his wife in the final moments of the episode, he shows a beautiful deference to the hurt of the moment that has to be seen. More on how that came together at the end of this review.
Meanwhile, Watson and Holmes are also on edge because Sherlock is meddling in cases Watson was hoping to solve on her own. Holmes is back to his usual self, seeing resolution as the primary goal above personal feelings and emotions. But this is of course the reality of what drives most of Holmes’s decisions. In Sherlock’s mind, by solving Gregson’s case, he also does his due diligence by his friend. By solving Watson’s case, he’s doing her a favor. No emotions involved.
And so he continues to solve the case. The killer wasn’t after Captain Gregson after all, he just thought he was, because of a Google search gone wrong. It’s all in the vernacular. When the killer broke into Gregson’s house, he asked Gregson’s wife for her “husband” – because he was looking for a fellow soldier from his tour in Afghanistan. The writers try to trick us into thinking we’ve got another broken relationship on our hands, but in fact it’s more complicated than a lover’s quarrel. The true motive for murder was an artifact found in a dig in Kabul, which was stolen by the ex-wife of the initial suspect. When Holmes figures out that the bowl is one in a million, well, he realizes he had the right suspect but the wrong motive.
At the core of this episode is the question of how relationships and in fact partnerships of a kind. Relationships of all kinds require vulnerability and in a moment of true openness by Sherlock, he attempts to patch things up with Watson by giving her access to his cold cases, which he offers in hopes she can solve what he could not. It’s so rare to see Sherlock admit he can’t solve something, it touches Watson and us, as the viewers.
What makes this episode comes full circle is actually something that happens half way through the 45 minutes when you realize that Gregson needed more than the solution to his burglary case. He was hoping for a solution for his marriage too. He needed someone to talk to, and he chose Sherlock. But again, this isn’t Sherlock’s forte, so he offers up Watson’s ear. It’s a cold, harsh and painfully lonely scene, but it’s who Sherlock Holmes truly is. So instead of listening, he looked into Gregson’s wife’s potential new suitor. He is no expert on marriage, but Sherlock does understand partnership. His partnership with Holmes and Gregson, most notably.
The very smallest gesture can speak volumes, Sherlock says, so whether it’s offering up the cases you can’t solve or taking the time to help your partner heal – those gestures are what will help a partnership remain in tact. This small offering, this tiny insight into what it means to be a partner, gives Gregson the answer he needs to move forward with his wife and we all hope for the better because of it.
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 social media and web strategist who currently works for a communications consulting firm in Minneapolis. She’s also a contributor for Apartment Therapy andThe Mary Sue.
You can contact her at elizabeth@beinggeekchic.com and follow her on Twitter @lizgiorgi
