Elementary Review 03 x 10 – Seed Money
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
For weeks, I’ve been getting more and more excited about Kitty Winter. Her role as a budding detective under Holmes’ wing has not only made Sherlock more relatable, but it’s revealed a new side to nearly every character she comes in contact with on the show. Through Kitty, we’ve learned that Captain Gregson’s daughter is also a police officer when he enlists Kitty’s help with a sexual harassment at the department. We’ve discovered a new wrinkle in Holmes’ ever-changing relationship with his sobriety and he has revealed a caring, almost big brother like quality in his care for her. In her relationship with Joan, we are getting to see Joan as a partner with another detective as she sees her own past through Kitty. Seed Money felt like a culmination of all these things, as all our main characters had big announcements this week.
Our team is actually split up in their investigative work: Kitty takes a job trying to locate the daughter of one of her fellow survivor’s group members and Holmes and Watson attempt to understand why a botanist/geneticist has been killed by the cartel who employed him to produce marijuana. It’s fun to watch Holmes and Watson fall into their own patterns again, but even more interesting to see how Kitty has taken the lessons she has learned from Holmes as she manages to find the young woman in record time. Her story is sad: she is the product of her mother’s rape and has been living a runaway life on and off since learning of the news. When Kitty notices that both the girl and her biological father possess a dwarfed thumb, she realizes that the girl has been trying to exact revenge on the man by telling her friends that a man in a white Jaguar has been following her around. The conversation between the daughter and Kitty is compelling to watch, but it also reveals how strong Kitty is despite the violence she suffered at the hands of madman.
We’ll get back to that madman in a minute. Don’t worry.
Holmes and Watson were solving an equally compelling mystery. The young man who had been found dead by tire firing, which is apparently a common cartel murder tactic, wasn’t just good at growing marijuana – he was apparently an expert flower breeder. So expert, in fact, that he managed to reproduce a flower that was believed to be missing. After selling the cloned flowers through black market auctions, he started to attract the attention of a large agricultural corporation called AgriNext. This company hoped to hire him away from the cartel for the price of $5 Million, but the cartel wasn’t having that and so they killed a few of the higher ups at the company. However, why would they kill their supplier?
In fact, they didn’t.
Our victim had a tendency of giving really rare flowers to his lovers, and one of the higher ups who missed the attention of the cartel, was actually dating our botany genius and in a jealous rage, she accidentally killed him and tried to frame the cartel. So yes, the man did die because of his habit with flowers.
The mystery in this case was fun, but the real value of this episode is how it progressed this season ahead more than any other episode this season. Sherlock, Kitty and Joan are all on the precipice of major change because of reveals made in the final moments, including the fact that Joan has taken a job working as an investigator for an insurance company. Honestly, this feels like a ruse and I can’t imagine it will last long, but the disappointment on Sherlock’s face was probably reading on my own as well. Really, Joan, an insurance investigator? Meanwhile, her boyfriend is nowhere to be found in recent weeks and I don’t wonder if this is all connected somehow.
Sherlock, in hearing Joan’s news, decides to tell Joan that he intends to promote Kitty to full time detective. And in a sweet moment in the final minutes of the episode, we almost believe Sherlock is about to deliver the news to Kitty. But just then, Sherlock gets a call from Gregson that he needs to come to a crime scene. Alone. What he finds is the victim of the madman who harmed Kitty before she met Sherlock.
As the credits rolled, I half expected a “to be continued” style treatment to appear on screen that read: The Game is On.
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 the founder and director at Mighteor, a video production company that focuses on creating beautiful and meaningful videos for the web. 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.
