Elementary Review: 03 x 09 – The Eternity Injection
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
Many of the women who make up the Baker Street Babes are also huge Doctor Who fans, myself included. Time stories or stories about time travel are not only wildly exciting in my view, they are one of the most fertile grounds for exploring characters. So when this week’s episode showed promise of going in that direction, it seemed like an amazing concept. Even more compelling was the idea that we would think about not time itself changing, but rather, our human experience of time changing.
And then, like the ending of The Eternity Injection, the concept fell flat.
So how did we get there? A nurse who used to work with Joan shows up at the Brownstone with an interesting case. A fellow nurse has gone missing and hasn’t reported to work in days. Even more strangely, her last known sighting was at a convenience store on the other side of Manhattan from the hospital and miles away from her home in Brooklyn. When Holmes takes the case, he turns up her dead body in a dumpster near the location – but it doesn’t reveal much except a list of mysterious dosages. Her bank account, however, is more revealing. The woman recently earned a $150,000 paycheck from an untraceable company in Switzerland.
In the morgue, they discover a connection to a missing New York man who had also receiving a mysterious lump sum payment and who had also recently applied for a job with the state. His wife reported him missing weeks earlier, but he hasn’t been seen since and had no previous issues. A Baker Street Irregular is brought in to cross reference his picture with security cameras across New York and turns up the man living homeless in Central Park. Alas, the poor sap is dead by the time they find him and his brain tissue, specifically his cerebellum, is so damaged that Holmes and company have a hard time piecing together why anyone in that state would be killed. His journal offers some insight – he’s been experiencing time at an alarmingly slow rate.
So we have a nurse with five patients and one of them turns up dead with strange symptoms. Holmes taps into a network of hackers, known as Everyone on the show, to find anyone else who received the same amount of money from the same company in recent months. The writers take advantage of an opportunity to polk fun at Holmes’ lack of pop culture knowledge by making him dive into the Twilight series as his payment to Everyone. It was silly and well-played by Jonny Lee Miller, who also got a chance to really show off his progression as this character again this week thanks to a sub-plot about Alfredo returning to the flat looking for his help with a car alarm named Odin. Alfredo’s return reveals that Holmes is finding himself bored with recovery and life itself as a recovering addict. The tenderness of these moments between Sherlock, Alfredo and Joan are touching and vulnerable. They easily outshine most of the rest of this episode.
In the end, Holmes and company find a patient who is surviving this mystery drug, but just barely. He reveals the identity of the scientist, which in turn leads them to his funder. And this is where things fall apart. The scientist is trying to create the world’s first time slowing drug. While time continues at a normal pace, humans could experience time much more slowly by increasing their brain function. So, in theory, a person could “live longer” or learn a new skill in the matter of a day. The old man funding the drug is dying and so he took no issue in testing it on 5 willing participants, even if it wasn’t done through normal channels and could kill them.
We’re left not knowing if the dying millionaire will live through his injection – if we’ll ever find out what happens to its inventor or if this is a cliff hanger that Holmes, Watson and Kitty will dive into next week. It ends so abruptly and so confusingly, that the satisfying conclusion that seems so profoundly consistent in Sherlock Holmes stories, be it Elementary or any other depiction, is… well… missing.
So while this story is winding and has potential, it doesn’t really have an end. And maybe that’s the point? Just as Sherlock doesn’t seen an end in sight for the tedium of sobriety, perhaps there is never really an end to our quest as humans to control time. Because while some of us just want more time, when you’re desperate for life to reveal its purpose, more time is the last thing you need.
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.
