[Warning: this post contains spoilers for Elementary season 5 episode 11.]
In this episode, Joan and Sherlock race against time to find a woman being held captive in an unknown location. Meanwhile, Joan is trying to teach Shinwell how to pick locks as part of his informant training, but Shinwell has been too busy to practice, revealing that he’s been trying to shore up his position in the gang he’s informing on by making a drug deal. Interestingly, the theme of captivity is echoed in both Sherlock and Shinwell’s story lines, as they both find themselves tied to something that they feel they have to see through.
The episode starts out with a woman making breakfast, a scene that soon turns dark when the man she’s making breakfast for pulls down her sweater to reveal a collar, to which he clips a lead before leaving. The scene is extremely well done, with the cheery music and bright lighting making an effective contrast to the disturbing reality behind the facade of domesticity. It’s a great start for the crisp, well-timed episode to follow.
In the next scene, Sherlock and Gregson are at the offices of an auction house interrogating a man who stole from the company. As they’re talking, Sherlock sees a nearby worker (later identified as Ryan Decker) at his desk glancing nervously at them and talking on his cell phone. We recognize him as the man from the opening scene. Reading Decker’s lips, Sherlock discovers that the man is afraid that the police are there for him, and tells the person on the phone to “take care of her” in an ominous way that totally sounds like murder. Sherlock gets up and follows Decker, steals his phone, and manages to see a video of the leashed woman we saw in the opening before Decker notices. There’s a fight and Gregson breaks it up. Sherlock apologizes and tells both Decker and Gregson that he made a mistake. Then he goes home and tells Joan that they need to break into the man’s house to find the woman.
This plot line reminds me of one of my favorite moments from season one. In “One Way to Get Off,” Sherlock wanders into a suspect’s basement while the suspect is being questioned upstairs, and hears a woman weeping behind a hidden door. He calls out to her to identify herself. Her response makes him realize that she’s a prisoner, and he practically tears the cabinets away from the door and starts hammering at the lock. Once the door is open, revealing a cowering, half-naked woman in chains on a mattress, he holds up his hands, crouching down, softly murmuring in Italian that they’re police. Once he’s close enough she throws her arms around his neck, and Sherlock slowly puts his arms around her. It’s an amazing moment, because this is when Sherlock is still very much an abrasive misanthrope, a jerk to victim and suspect alike. And yet he shows considerable anger that this woman has been abused and considerable tenderness toward her.
Sherlock and Joan don’t find the woman at Decker’s house, but they do find some pirated movies, and use that to bring him into the station. (They “Caponed” him, a term Sherlock used in season one, stemming from how the FBI brought down gangster Al Capone on tax evasion charges.) Decker refuses to cop to kidnapping, and the police can only hold him for a couple days, so our crime fighting duo gets to work trying to find Decker’s accomplice, the one he told to “take care of” the captive.
Joan questions Decker’s ex-wife, who is an immigration agent at ICE. She clearly despises him, and tells Joan that she doesn’t interact with Decker much after the divorce. She reveals he used to work for ICE in IT, and built the system they use. Joan wonders if he might have installed a “back door” in the program so he could still log on to scope out possible victims. She gets permission to have her expert look at it (read: Mason, everyone’s favorite teenage hacker! We don’t get to see him on screen, sadly) but he finds nothing. Looks like a dead end.
Finding the accomplice isn’t going well, so Gregson suggests that they cut Decker loose and have him tailed in hopes that he will lead them to the woman. Unfortunately, shortly after he’s released his detail reports that they’ve lost him. They have a two-mile radius search area, which would take forever to canvas. However, Sherlock remembers some terrible paintings of the seashore in Decker’s house, and deduces that he must have painted them himself. (Because why else would a guy who works for an auction house have truly crappy art hanging on his walls? Professional pride, man!) He figures it means Decker has a place on the shore. A search of the area turns up a huge patch of blood-soaked sand (so much blood that whoever’s it is could not have survived) and a set of keys that belong to Decker. The keys eventually lead them to another house, and the SWAT team finds a woman being held captive inside…but it’s not the woman Sherlock saw on Decker’s phone! A search of the house reveals that the fridge was stocked around the time of the original phone call Sherlock witnessed, suggesting that “taking care of” was actually meant literally. Joan notices that there’s soy milk in the fridge, a particular brand that she saw Decker’s ex-wife use in her coffee! (I love it when small details wind up being hugely important.) She’s the accomplice, truly despising Decker yet still tethered to him due to shared secrets. They track her down, and discover her dousing her house in gasoline, about to burn it all down. In the trunk of her car is the woman, bound but alive. It turns out that the blood on the beach belonged to Decker, whom his ex-wife killed to tie up loose ends and finally be free.
While working on the case, Joan is also trying to train Shinwell, particularly concentrating on lock picking. He isn’t responding well to training, however, and reveals that he hasn’t been practicing because he’s been trying to shore up his position in the gang by making a deal with a drug supplier. Joan is frustrated with the situation, telling him that he’s putting himself in danger, since drug dealers might be able to tell he’s an informant. He doesn’t heed her advice, though, and meets with the dealer, who asks him to take a sample back to his people. We can tell from Shinwell’s expression that he doesn’t like the idea of having those drugs, but is trying to figure out how he could refuse. Later on, after the conclusion of the kidnapping case, Joan comes home to find Shinwell in the brownstone, sitting in front of the rack of locks, most of the locks open (he also picked the front door lock). He tells Joan that the deal fell through, because he noticed that the dealer kept touching his face, a signal Joan had taught him meant he was probably lying. He’s learning after all, and the training is already having noticeable benefits.
One of the things I like about Elementary is how the themes of the case are often reflected in the lives of the characters. Sherlock was held captive by the case. Once he read that man’s lips, he had no choice but to rescue the woman. While this episode might highlight it, this tenacity is of course one of Sherlock’s central character traits. How many times have we seen him unable to let a case go, even when it looked like it was over, just because something didn’t fit right? How many times has he refused to be satisfied with putting a bad guy away, or rescuing somebody, when there was another bad guy to catch, another victim to save? He is in many ways a prisoner to this compulsion.
Shinwell has his own tether. He wants to do right by Joan and Sherlock, but he also has a deep seated need to take down the gang that had destroyed his life, so much so that he will sacrifice his training to further that work. One of the things I love about Shinwell (and man, do I love Shinwell!) is that he’s fiercely independent. He has few qualms about going his own way and doing what he thinks is right, even if Sherlock and Joan disagree. It makes it all the more significant when Shinwell decides to come back to training after he experiences first hand the benefits of what he’s being taught. Joan is teaching him how to pick locks both literally and metaphorically, and the scene with Shinwell in front of the locks rack shows he understands that and is willing to work for it.
One thing I was sort of expecting from this episode was the return of Kitty Winter. The rumor of her return has been floating around for some time now, and this, an episode about women being kidnapped and held for a long time against heir will, just like she had been, seemed perfect. But alas, no fugitive British female detective. I’ll keep looking out for her.
Hopeless Fangirl 