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Elementary Season 2 - episode 11 - 'Internal Audit'

Holmes and Watson are called in to help investigate the gruesome murder of a high stake financier who has embezzled lots of his clients money.
Holmes notices that prior to his being shot, the victim was about to commit suicide and was interrupted by the murderer.
The episode also continued to explore the ramifications of Holmes actions that lead to Det. Bell being shot.

For me, the episode once again fell into the habit of bringing an issue about Holmes up one week, which I think was really done well last week, and then milking the same theme too much the next week.
That would be OK if on that second week, the deductions and observations, the things we love most about Holmes, were a little stronger within the case. Not that there were not a few.

I like the fact that Holmes is going to wrestle with this issue about Bell, but that can not be the main theme two weeks in a row without having stronger Sherlockianisms included.

It is good that Holmes is not allowed to resolve the issue with Bell in just one week (even when I don't always like the characteristics Holmes develops at times when wrestling with the issue) It is showing growth in the character. And I like the fact that Watson is holding her ground on the issue also.

It is going to be interesting to see over the rest of the season if Bell's new assignment involves Holmes in international terrorism.

The mystery in this episode was a good one and had some good twists. Richard Masur is one of the best at playing slimy hidden under a likable character.

Although there were a few Canonical references I think they were a little weak and had been done a few times before. I like how he discovered the suicide hidden in the murder.

References I caught ( and I am counting on Buddy2blogger to find more).

- His knowledge of botany
- His knowledge of geology
- How he hates distraction when working on a case

Quick question; Is technology becoming the new Baker St. Irregulars?

To give the show a little credit, it is having to build themes over several weeks to complete the back story of Holmes personality over, hopefully, several seasons.

Although a good episode, and definitely no one of the weakest, this week, for me, because it lack good Sherlockian habits, I give it

out of five. At least he didn't throw away any more Yorkshire Puddings.

From here to there and back again, sort of. Baker St. to the Alpha Inn.

'It was a bitter night, so we drew on our ulsters and wrapped cravats about our throats. Outside, the stars were shining coldly in a cloudless sky, and the breath of the passers-by blew out into smoke like so many pistol shots. Our footfalls rang out crisply and loudly as we swung through the doctors’ quarter, Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into Oxford Street. In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at the Alpha Inn, which is a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which runs down into Holborn.'

It is quite impossible to trace completely the path Holmes and Watson took in BLUE when they left 221b and headed to the Alpha Inn to inquire about geese. As with every walk we take, we don't always follow the shortest route, but sometimes the most scenic or the most familiar.
But we can come close.
There are several different routes they could have rambled, all of which could touch upon the streets mentioned in the quote.
And we have to realize that some of the street names have changed or been rerouted.

The walk would have been right around two miles, so when Watson said, 'In a quarter of an hour. . .', he must have meant from when they hit Oxford.

If you do a google map route, it misses Oxford street all together, but does hit all the other streets.

However, if you were to turn south on Harley Street  and connect with Holles St. you would hit Oxford. After Harley St. we could also turn south on several streets to get to Oxford.
After about Regent St., the further east you go on Wigmore the more your path would start veering away from the Alpha Inn.
And we must remember, the quote does not actually say they went to Holborn, just that the Alpha Inn sets on a corner of a street that runs into Holborn.

These would have been familiar streets to Holmes and Watson. They would have traveled them a lot.

It would be a wonderful walk to take sometime.

Next great line from BLUE

 “He brought round both hat and goose to me on Christmas morning, knowing that even the smallest problems are of interest to me. The goose we retained until this morning, when there were signs that, in spite of the slight frost, it would be well that it should be eaten without unnecessary delay. Its finder has carried it off, therefore, to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose, while I continue to retain the hat of the unknown gentleman who lost his Christmas dinner.”

OK, one last one. . . . for now.

Sorry Sherlock Peoria, someone else likes it also.. . .

I do not agree with the writers assessment of Doyle's writings, but I do think he is right on about 'Elementary'.

"ELEMENTARY" AND THE HOLMES TRADITION

by Ian Grey

December 8, 2013   |   1

Shooting most effectively on so many cylinders is Robert Doherty's "Elementary." It's the smartest, most intimately passionate iteration of Sherlock Homes around, and that's saying a lot, considering that we're in the midst of a bull market for all things Holmes. The new wave of stand-alone episodic TV disproves the notion that long-arc, cable-style storytelling equals excellence. Stand-alones are, in their resemblance to short stories, more nimble, more likely to rip to the gristle quicker—and the retooling of stand-alone-driven series demonstrates that programs made in this vein needn't depend on eternal stasis, or hitting the reset button each week. There's the oft-brilliant, mythos-heavy "Person of Interest" and new wave of globe-trotting, green screen TV, represented by the politically explosive comic book that is "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." And  there's "The Blacklist"'s excuse to show James Spader be deliciously almost bad to the bone. Ana Faris and Allison Janney take five-camera comedy more darkly Oedipal as than most indie joints in "Mom." These shows all have ongoing stories, but those stories are mostly buried. The real action is week-to-week and in the moment.

The secret to the Holmes craze is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's crime buster is little more than an assemblage of data points in search of a human to hang them on: the pipe, disguise skills, the love of a seven-percent-solution of cocaine, the seething contempt of women, the superhuman deductive reasoning. He's so under-written that revisers can't resist him. And so Guy Ritchie rendered him an action hero his Sherlock Holmes films. Steven Moffat's "Sherlock" gave us a short-run take on a tech-hip, maybe asexual, couture rock star-style version of the detective. Putin only knows what the Russians are doing  in their own remake, but with American cable TV's import craze being what it is, we may find out soon.

"Elementary" has proven that trad TV is by far the best fit for our strange detective. Like basic TV narrative, Doyle's stories, in form, style, narrative and resolution, offer the guaranteed pleasures of absolute, unchanging familiarity. There's some surprise in who did it, and even more in how and why, but what you're here for is old friends doing the same old things the usual way. (One wonders how much pleasure Doyle took at hiding the utterly queer relationship between these gentlemen in plain sight. Whatever the case, read today, the stories often come off as pre-emptive 'shippers.)

"Elementary" makes big changes in its source: London becomes New York. The queer element becomes the basis of endless future gender studies papers asJohn Watson becomes Joan (played with born-New Yorker charm by Lucy Liu). Doyle's cross-dressing, weird cowboys, Mormon freak-outs, forced wig-wearing and other bits of kink are dumped in favor of sundry despicable 47-per-centers and Ayn Rand fans. Most radically, Doyle's stick figure of a detective is made a fully fleshed human, in stories free of the ultra-violent problem-solving and standard-brand cynicism that soils the likes of "The Blacklist." Not many shows—cable or network—have the courage and heart to end an episode as "Elementary" did, leaving quandaries unresolved as its characters notice, together, wordlessly, the healing beauty of the East River at sunset.

The show's triumph starts with the casting of Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes. Frail, tattooed and muscularly stringy from anxiety-control calisthenics, Miller's the most physical iteration of the detective, an ex-addict whose deduction obsessions are most valuable for keeping him focused on the straight and narrow. He shares an un-renovated Brooklyn brownstone with Dr. Watson, at first merely his 'sober companion', but quickly an intellectual peer whose insights he quickly comes to respect and utilize. 

But the most radical rewrite in "Elementary" is the way the wrapper says "Sherlock Homes" while the actual item is a twofer. At its core, "Elementary," is the story of two people who met just after hitting bottom, and what happens after that. For Holmes, it's an end to unbearable loneliness. For Watson, it's surviving the purgatory years of self-recrimination after a botched surgery killed a patient.

As the first season came and went, something unique was in the process of developing, something I've come to call 'additive stand-alone' storytelling. It's a form that remembers the long story but isn't about it, a form that instead deep- focuses on current details, textures, emotional peaks and valleys, and themes that grow in emotional value over time and in memory, motivating character action as the show progresses.

Looking at Doherty's resume, I couldn't help but notice his work as a writer on "Star Trek: Voyager," which for seven seasons used the same additive technique to tell the very slow but steady growth of the human-turned-Borg, Seven of Nine, from heartless semi-automaton to full-fledged human—without explicitly telling that story, but via the steady accumulation of incident and growth. It was a story told via the narrative of memory: Seven's and ours.

It's a mode that assumes viewer attention, a respectful mode. A perfect example of additive stand-alone storytelling is this show's means of showing hog Holmes is coming to respect Watson, without any obvious signals or landmark moments. At a certain point, for instance, Sherlock chooses to notgreet Watson's arrival with the sexually charged provocation of his sweaty, post-workout, half-nude body. He instead answers the door in a button-up shirt and offers tea.

This Watson is not the shrinking violet of Doyle's male version. She has a network—a world—of friends, old colleagues, a shrink, a separate reality principle against which she tests her increasing fascination with detective work. There's sexual attraction galore, but these are adults with more important things to do than paw each other.

Of course, purists will loudly call foul. But not to worry—that's just what purists do. Doherty, on the other hand, is a lover of the original texts who's nonetheless willing to try to fix its most glaring flaws. So it's to women-hate and Irene Adler we must go.

Doyle's Sherlock pretty much despised women. The one exception was Irene Adler, first glimpsed in "A Scandal in Bohemia." An early modern fatale and a doozy at that, Doyle's Adler is a former opera contralto from New Jersey committing blackmail. But what matters is that she accomplishes the inconceivable: she outwits Holmes, several times, and then disappears.

An 'Irene Adler' shows up on "Sherlock" as a standard issue dominatrix (Lara Pulver), and in Ritchie's action movie as a fatale played by mystifyingly miscast Rachel McAdams who has sex with Holmes because he's played byRobert Downey, Jr.

"Elementary" refuses to let Adler strangle on old tropes. It boldly remixes bits of Holmes mythology to help us understand the wounds behind this hetero Holmes' pained aversion to most women. We learn that the reason for Holmes' recent near-self-obliteration with opiates was tied to his inability to stop Adler—whom he loved utterly—from being killed by a serial killer named 'M.' (Nice shout-out to Fritz Lang). In a series of fizzy Doyles-ian flip-flops, 'M' turns out to not only be Irene Adler, but an Adler who's a sociopathic criminal (Natalie Dormer) who's also his arch nemesis, Moriarty.

And so Holmes is stripped of everything in his life that he thought he loved andhated. It's Watson's work that brings Adler down. After, Sherlock must learn to find meaning, as he puts it, "post-love."

Doherty, however, reasons that man does not get by on Adler alone, and so in the recent and devastating "Poison Pen" episode, Holmes is hurled back to deal with the girl he's spent his life trying to forget because it reminds him of the shockingly violent wreckage of his upbringing. This episode's murder case has our recently devastated hero meeting again with a murder suspect namedAbigail Spencer (Laura Benanti), a women who in her teens was also accused and exonerated for the killing of her monstrously abusive father. It was a case that caught a young teenage Holmes' attention, so much that he became pen pals with Spencer: she because of the invasive crush of tabloid fascination, Sherlock to escape the terror and physical pain of daily bullying.

We also learn how the guilt born of Sherlock's eventual teen betrayal of Spencer has misshapen the character we've been watching all this time. In every way, Holmes needs Spencer to be innocent but does Abigail want to be forgiven?

To just speak of the Sherlock Holmes component, "Poison Pen" ends in the finest "Elementary" way—with an act of surprise kindness that has nothing with the idea of closure. Grown-ups know that no such thing exists, but time spent with a friend watching the East River flow does.

SOURCE

thanks TO

Thanks Sherlock Peoria for the lead. . .

Elementary

I like how the photo got all three principles in.

And this is an interesting way to look at BLUE

How to write like Dr Watson

Another good line from BLUE

"No, no. No crime," said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. "Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such."

"So much so," l remarked, "that of the last six cases which I have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal crime."

Seven Degrees of Sherlock Holmes - #32 - Roland Young, then Greta Garbo

OK, as one last tribute to the Watson's, it was going to do Roland Young, so here goes. . .

Roland Young (1887-1953) was Watson to Barrymore's Holmes in 1922

But it turned out to easy. You see, in 1930 he was in a film called The Bishop Murder Case

But who do we see playing the detective in the movie? Why, Basil Rathbone  (1892 - 1967)

So I decided to stop doing Watson's and go back to the normal game.

So I chose Greta Grabo (1905 - 1990), even if she wants to be alone.

In 1932 she was in a little film called Grand Hotel

In which Roland Young's Sherlock, John Barrymore (1882 - 1942) also starred.

So we have come full circle.

There you have it, there you are.

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