Elementary Review 03 x 15 – When Your Number’s Up
Reviewed by Liz Giorgi
Being Geek Chic For The Baker Street Babes
It is an accepted fact of watching serialized television that some episodes are going to be filler. They are merely transitions that get you from one set piece or story line to another. When Your Number’s Up is one of those episodes.
Joan has officially moved back into the brownstone and the transition seems almost too easy for her. She’s entirely unemotional when she tells Sherlock she is going to simply donate all her belongings and just bring her clothing and necessities with her. Sherlock, in a rare moment of emotional insight, finds this plan strange and suggests a storage locker, but she’s insistent. From Joan’s point of view, this transition is a permanent one and so why bother hanging on to a failed attempt at independence?
When thinking about what Joan describes as this “no personal life allowed” lifestyle as a detective, you expect high caliber, all-encompassing work. In other words, you wouldn’t likely describe cases like a victim’s compensation scheme gone wrong. But in fact, that’s what we’re dealing with this week. A woman is going around assigning value to human beings right before she shoots them and then leaves that dollar amount on their person. She is intentionally trying to manipulate the results of a victim’s payout settlement as a result of a plane crash so that it works more in her financial favor by killing the people who are most likely to benefit from a uniform settlement versus a projected value settlement.
Truth be told, it’s a boring case. There’s a glimmer of hope when Sherlock discovers a formula meant to put a price tag on a human’s value, but that is a short lived lead, because an irregular solves it in seconds.
The most important part of this episode isn’t that Joan is moving back into the brownstone, it’s how Sherlock is reacting to it. He’s taking his loud night time activities to the basement. He’s asking questions about her rushing her mourning process about Andrew’s death. He’s renting her old apartment just in case she’s changing her mind. In short, she has rubbed off on him. The level of care and empathy he displays in her time of transition is astounding. The sense is that Sherlock isn’t just a better detective because of his relationship with Joan, he’s a better man too. Further, he knows it and that sense alone drives him to be even more sensitive.
Despite all of Sherlock’s progress, so much of his relationship with Joan is about boundaries and navigating them. In order to define them more clearly, Joan opts not to get rid of her things, but instead to use the basement as her office. By creating a separate work zone, she contends, the two are forced to allow the other a modicum of privacy when they need it. There’s a shred of comic relief in it all too, because Joan dramatically nails the door to the basement closed, meaning Sherlock as to leave the brownstone and use an exterior entrance to get to Joan’s new office. The scene is satisfying, but feels sort of contrary to Sherlock’s earlier observations about her rushing back to the brownstone. Hopefully, it will all be worth 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 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.
