Elementary 02 x 19 – The Many Mouths of Aaron Colville
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
So things got in the way of this review and for that, I apologize. You know, nerdy things, Sherlock things. 221B Con was a big success and I am better you’ll all love the live podcast from the Con in the weeks to come. Then there were the Shorty Awards, which we didn’t win, but were honored to be nominated for. Somewhere in there, Jonny Lee Miller attempted to understand how the same teeth could co-exist in many mouths at once.
When a pair of murders show eery similarities to what police thought was a previously solved case involving bite marks on victims, the entire history gets re-examined. And it also causes Joan to do some re-examining of her own. The man who had previously confessed to the bite mark murders, Aaron Colville, ended up on Joan’s operating table while she was still working as a surgeon. In the heated moments after he was stabbed, her residing surgeon let the man die, in Joan’s assessment, which causes her to feel slightly haunted by the concept of justice. Had he been innocent after all, he died for no reason. Ah, but Joan needn’t worry, because other moral quandaries of even greater confusion are about to wrap around her.
Prison dentistry is not a sophisticated service. By and large, most prisoners received very basic services, but at one point, a dentist who goes unnamed started to create free dentures for the inmates who had no teeth at all. Without realizing the implications of Colville’s conviction, he made a copy of his mouth and created dentures based on the mold. How ironic.
Joan and Sherlock surmise that the teeth could not have been distributed to many inmates, which is true, and they are able to narrow the suspects down to four. However, as is often the case with Elementary, it’s not this simple. Yet another man who worked with the dentist in question ALSO received this dentures. I will not reveal his fate, but I will tell you that it’s more complicated than it seems at first. For this I am thankful, because it does tend to build more elaborate webs for unwinding than the traditional crime procedural and I must commend the writers for that.
In the end, the murderer is actually surprising. While you expect it to be someone with no teeth, our killer in question definitely has a full set. And for Joan, the resolution brings to light an important lesson that she too must accept when making decisions in an operating room OR while investigating a case: we all must learn to live with our choices.
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
