Elementary Review: 02 x 10 – Tremors
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
Elementary is back on track, Sherlockians. And it’s not just because Jonny Lee Miller looks adorable in an apron.
Tremors is one of the most compelling episodes of Season 2, potentially of the series to date, because it broke out of the crime procedural model a bit and focused instead on the gray areas of morality that drive so much of what Sherlock Holmes is about. Rules meaning nothing to Holmes. Employee handbooks? A waste of time. Black and white? Nah, he’s all gray. This mentality puts him at direct odds with the police department he works for and their desire to do things strictly by the book. But if an innocent man goes free because Watson and Holmes picked a few locks or skirted the rules, are they in the right?
These questions about rules come to a head because Holmes is being investigated by an internal legal unit for the NYPD for his role in an officer shooting. The investigation is the result of an altercation with a suspect from a previous case, who was cleared of the crime, but who lost his job due to Holmes’s aggressive, brash and unconventional interrogation methods. In other words, he interrogated the guy while he was at work. An argument on the street with this fellow quickly becomes dangerous when the man attempts to shoot Sherlock, but ends up shooting Detective Bell instead. Bell, in a heroic moment, dives in front of Holmes and Watson. The resulting bullet wound causes a paralysis in his shooting arm, effectively putting his ability to work as a detective in peril.
Guilt is a dangerous thing. Holmes won’t admit it, but he feels guilty for the role he played in Bell’s shooting. So guilty he won’t go to visit him. If he doesn’t have a solution to Bell’s problem, what’s the point he says? Watson urges Holmes to visit him anyway, not because he needs to offer solutions, but because both parties would benefit from trying to resolve the emotional weight of the situation. This is a continual theme on Elementary, which comes back again and again: In matters of interpersonal conflict, if Holmes doesn’t have a solution, he doesn’t know what to do. He tries to utilize his strategies as a detective to make his personal life more clean and simple, but well, this is Sherlock Holmes.
It’s never going to be a simple matter or right or wrong, guilty or not guilty, when your friend takes a bullet for you.
The judge presiding over Holmes’s investigation recommends the commissioner of police suspend their relationship with Holmes and Watson. In effect, they would no longer work as consultants for the NYPD. The judge feels the pairing have consistently put themselves above the law, instead of following it. He may be right, but how boring would Holmes and Watson be if they didn’t hang out on the fringes? Come on, judge.
The commissioner of police knows it’s not that simple though, either. Holmes and Watson have solved countless cases using methods his officers could not and so he asks Detective Bell for his opinion: what would he do? We never hear him say that he thinks Holmes and Watson should stay on, but when Holmes stops by to offer a solution (a physical therapist who travels to New York once a week), Bell refuses the help. Is it pride? Or is it the fact that he has already forgiven Holmes the only way he can: by giving him the right to stay on as a consultant? Hard to say. I love these two together, both as actors and investigators. Instead of ending things on a sour note, I really just wanted them to hug it out.
With scenes like this, Elementary is making me as emotionally soft as a warm pistachio pudding on the holiday buffet.
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 based 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