Elementary - Season 2

Boom.

With Moriarty in prison, season 2 of Elementary focuses on another favourite from the canon's minor characters, Mycroft Holmes (played with insouciant flair by Rhys Ifans.) Leaner and less arrogant than the Mycroft of the books, Sherlock's restaurateur brother is the target of the deductionist's scorn for his idleness and lack of ambition, but strikes up a friendship - and more - with Joan, and proves to be significantly more than he seems (as should be little surprise to readers of the original stories or fans of Sherlock.)

While I am among those who fear the day that the series can no longer resist a romantic entanglement between Sherlock and Joan - a sure sign that the shark has been well and truly jumped - linking Mycroft and Joan is a very effective narrative gambit. It's pleasing enough just to see a female character who is capable of having a relationship which is casual, but has both a sexual and emotional component, but it also creates tension between the lead pair which exposes flaws in their partnership and reveals to Sherlock how much he values Joan without having him realise that he wuvs her.

Hey gang! It's Sean Pertwee!

Mycroft also brings with him some of Sherlock's baggage from England, including his old Scotland Yard oppo Gareth Lestrade (Sean Pertwee), a vainglorious plod who enjoyed the reflected glory of Holmes's work a little too much and commands none of the respect Sherlock displays for Gregson and Bell.

All that, and a season full of cases lifting more or less from the original canon. The arc-driven episodes this season have a tendency to suffer because they move away from the core dynamic which includes the NYPD characters, and from crime to espionage, a move which was not entirely successful in some of the later Doyle stories.

Elementary - The Rest of Season 1

Thanks to my flu, I powered through the remains of Elementary Season 1, and may even make it through Season 2 before it runs out on Sky boxed sets.

Natalie Dormer, femme fatale for hire.

The plots are many and varied, but the arc and the grist of the series basically covers its handling of two of the more controversial figures in the Sherlockian canon: Irene Adler and James Moriarty (note; spoilers will apply.)

Basically, no-one ever really knows what to do with Adler. She tends to be shoehorned into a romantic role, and usually that of a master criminal, if not on Moriarty's scale. It's an odd departure from the original, in which she is just a smart, tough, independent woman who is being victimised by her ex - Holmes's client, whose case he actually takes lest instead he employ a blunter instrument - whose goal is to be allowed to marry and live her life in peace.

Adaptations find this difficult to deal with, perhaps because for a figure that looms so large, she doesn't actually do very much. Mind you, neither does Moriarty, who only has one appearance, in which Holmes concludes his pursuit of the Napoleon of Crime with what is revealed later to have been a dismissive curb stomp duel. Adapters tend to reverse the balance of power, making Moriarty the stalker.

Elementary goes one step beyond, making the American Irene Adler (Natalie Dormer) the assumed identity of British criminal mastermind Jamie Moriarty. Dormer plays both roles to the hilt, although she's clearly having way more fun as the slinky, lethal Moriarty. Adler is once more the love of Holmes's life, rather than merely a woman whose intelligence impresses him, but by making her a fiction I find I mind this less. That 'the paragon of her sex' is a mere figment of Moriarty's imagination speaks volumes of this Holmes with his awkward mannerisms, operational approach to sexuality and tendency to stand way too close to people.

Elementary - 'Child Predator', 'The Rat Race' and 'Lesser Evils'

Holmes and Watson bond over squat.

A triple bill of Elementary, courtesy of a day working from home due to a cold.

In 'Child Predator' the criminal is a serial kidnapper and murderer of children, known as the Balloon Man for the party balloons he leaves at the homes of his victims. Once more, this Holmes displays his priorities: Solving the case is more important than being nice to people, especially if it means saving a life. People may be little more than puzzles to him, but they are puzzles who matter.

A process of elimination.

Some people matter more than others, however, and in 'The Rat Race' Holmes establishes that bankers are at the bottom of his lifeboat list as he hunts for a serial killing sociopath in the boardroom. He even triples his usual rate for their benefit, making a mental note to come up with a usual rate to triple. In an establishing trend, this and the other two episodes all feature a double-blind mystery, with the reasoning and methodology pointing to one perpetrator, who masks the presence or identity of a second.

It would be a cardinal error to speculate without data.

'Lesser Evils' is much more about Watson than about Holmes. Although a not insignificant presence in most episodes, this one brings her to the fore with its hospital setting and a chance encounter with an old friend from her surgical days as our mismatched detectives search for an Angel of Death.

An interesting emergent theme is that Joan Watson is quicker than most John's to pick up something of Holmes's methods, and as a consequence notes herself becoming less trusting of humanity in general. This is touched on in at least two of the above episodes, but brought into focus in 'The Rat Race' when a chance statement by her date triggers a (at least partially correct) paranoid response worthy of Holmes. Holmes calls this the cost of seeing everything for the puzzle that it is.

Elementary - While You Were Sleeping

"You may not have noticed, detectives, but his man has been shot!"
(Featuring replacement second cop, Detective Bell (Jon Michael Hill.)

Elementary continues with a robbery/homicide which proves more complicated than at first appears. The robber turns out to have seen the murderer, and gives a spot on description... of a woman in a coma. As Holmes begins to discern a complex and cold-blooded plan, he must struggle with the skepticism of new police liaison Detective Bell and with Watson's attempts to fix him.

'While You Were Sleeping' combines a thoroughly modern mystery with plenty of proper Holmsian twists: The complex plotting over a relatively simple crime; the plausible-sounding but probably quite doubtful methodology of the killer (monkey glands, anyone;) a violin; and of course a chance for Holmes to expound his theory of finite brain capacity vis a vis his parentally-mandated AA meetings.

The episode also highlights one of the key differences between this Holmes and Doyle's original: Doyle's Holmes was blunt, but polished in his public manner; this one is a rampaging bull in an emotional china shop. I say this not as a complaint. Sherlock is similar, and I suspect for the similar reason that a modern Holmes does not have to negotiate as strenuously polite a society as Victorian England. This is Holmes with his few remaining social filters shut down by a world without formal courtesies.

Elementary - 'Pilot'

Lucy Liu, Aidan Quinn, Manny Perez and Johnny Lee Miller; apparently
Perez will be token-swapped for a black guy for the main run.

Thanks to Sky boxed sets (for now at least) I'm catching up on another show I missed out of the gate, Elementary, the CBS modern take on Sherlock Holmes.

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) is hired to act as sober companion to Sherlock Holmes (Johnny Lee Miller), who is established as the kind of addict who breaks out of rehab the night before his formal release. They are a troubled pair, Watson a former surgeon who lost a patient and Holmes a former consultant for Scotland Yard whose trauma is not revealed in the Pilot (although if you know anything about a) Holmes and b) adaptations of Holmes you won't need Watson's astute probing to deduce the involvement of a, nay the, woman.) Holmes has devised his own post-rehab regimen, which involves resuming his consulting work, thanks to a connection with Captain Thomas Gregson, an NYPD detective who studied counter-terrorism methods with Special Branch post-9/11.

The first case tackled by Holmes and his new shadow involves a woman attacked in her home and apparently kidnapped, until Holmes finds her dead in her panic room. He quickly concludes that she is the second victim of a nascent serial killer, but when the murderer - a man with severe mental illness - is found dead, he becomes convinced that something more devious is at work.

The investigation is a solid opener. The writing also allows Liu's Watson to match Holmes step for step. There was a lot of schtick about gender-swapping Watson, but in its opening stages at least there is no sign that the writers are setting up a romantic relationship. Miller's Holmes may not be spot on Conan Doyle's creation, but neither is Cumberbatch's, and what both get right is the mixture of rage and precision, of detachment and involvement. Elementary's Holmes is as abrasive and disdainful of human frailty as he should be, but also utterly incensed by those who abuse that frailty.

The core relationship between Holmes and Watson gets off to a good start. Joan Watson is sharp and acerbic, with a flair for investigation that even Holmes notes with some respect. She is very much a match for Holmes, if not quite in intellect then in her force of personality, avoiding my least favourite thing about Sherlock, which is Watson's near constant bafflement. Martin Freeman does baffled very well, but after an excellent showing in 'A Study in Pink', it was a real shame to see him slip quite so much into Holmes's shadow.