Contributor: Bronzethumb
Written by Craig Sweeny
Directed by Rosemary Rodriguez
It’s stunning in a near-paradoxical way how the latest episode of “Elementary” manages to play to the show’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, it gives a slightly greater scope for Jonny Lee Miller to be brilliant in this pseudo-Holmes role and gives him and pseudo-Watson new and interesting ways to bounce off one another. On this basis, “The Rat Race” should be the most successful episode to date, but then the shadow of the BBC’s “Sherlock” rears its head and all is dashed.
With no particularly interesting murder cases on the books, Gregson gives Holmes a chance to alleviate his boredom by giving his name to a Wall Street firm in need of a consulting detective. Despite his dislike of bankers, he takes on the case of locating a missing executive, but when the executive turns up dead in a secret apartment, seemingly the victim of a heroin overdose, Holmes starts the believe he’s stumbled onto a serial killer. Meanwhile, Watson gets fixed up by one of her friends, and starts to realize the toll that a keen deductive eye can take on someone’s psyche.
It’s not hard to draw comparisons between this episode and “The Blind Banker” from series 1 of “Sherlock”. In fact, it gets easier and easier as the episode goes on, as the general structure and a lot of the little details wind up mirroring the British installment. This comparison is nothing but bad for “Elementary”, which has always struggled to be its own show and escape the stigma of “Sherlock”; when audiences familiar with both shows are forced to compare them, of course this very procedural and somewhat bland version of Sherlock Holmes is going to suffer.
This seemingly-derivative A-story is contrasted by some good character beats for the two protagonists. They’re really Holmes and Watson in name only by this point, and a total separation would do wonders because the writers could take further liberties and develop both characters the way they did in “The Rat Race”. When the case starts to involve drugs, a very real change comes over Holmes, one that prompts new depths from Miller’s performance. Similarly, there’s a sad new dimension to Watson as her foray into dating goes bad specifically because of her association with Holmes; it’s not that he’s interfering, but rather that she’s starting to see the world as he does and it makes things difficult.
There’s a narrative for this version of Holmes being laid out over “The Rat Race”, and deliberately done in the wrong order. It both begins and ends with this version of Holmes explaining why it’s a burden to think as he does, recalling similar scenes in the Guy Ritchie film and the BBC series, and for a brief, shining moment, “Elementary” looks like it has the stones to compete. But it’s just a momentary thing. These characters, who aren’t Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson but nonetheless have narrative potential, would do well in a better show, one with stronger content. But again, this show fails to step out of the shadows of what’s come before.
Score: 7/10