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Elementary: Season 2, Episode 5. Ancient History (2013)

October 26, 2013 David Marshall 4 comments

This review discusses the plot so, if you have not already watched this episode, you may wish to delay reading this.

Elementary: Season 2, Episode 5. Ancient History (2013) starts with Dr Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) at a loose end, wandering the bric-à-brac stalls with another of her friends, bemoaning the lack of a murder case to solve. Although she’s deeply embarrassed, her friend asks Watson to find Tony, a one-night stand who’s apparently a photojournalist and good in bed. When this is put to Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller), his response is to go to the morgue in search of an interesting case. In the nineteenth drawer, he finds the corpse of someone killed in a road accident. How he died is not in dispute, but our hero believes he had just killed someone else. It’s all in the scars on his hands which suggest he’s used a wire garrote. When Marcus Bell runs his fingerprints, it turns out he used to be a Polish professional assassin but seems to have retired, settled down and taken up work as a nurse (under a false name, of course). There’s just one problem. Without a corpse or a missing person’s report suggesting foul play, there’s no case. Holmes and Watson therefore go to discuss married life with the grieving widow. She knew he had a dark past because of his tattoos, but believed he had found God and committed himself to good works. Holmes is hot on the trail of people our reformed assassin might have killed. The first theory is a builder with whom he had an argument. Then it’s a loan shark who lent him money from an old robbery. Who would have thought it was so hard to find someone dead.

Watson (Lucy Liu), Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Detective Bell (Jon Michael Hill) unnecessarily wearing body armour

From this brief description of the set-up, you’ll understand this is intended as a lightweight episode. There are to be no “heavy” murders to solve. This time, the scriptwriters have decided to do faint humour. We’re to smile when the crooked builder who was supposed to be working on our deceased’s clinic took the money and spent three days partying on hard drugs with “cheap” prostitutes. The moneylender who lent that money sits in his sister’s nail salon all day next to an autoclave with a padlock on it waiting for customers to come in and borrow money. The only time the script gets it right is in the last scene which gives Watson the opportunity to score a glancing blow on Sherlock’s feigned indifference.

So what is the episode really about? Thematically, we’re interested in the notion of trust. Looking first at the deceased, he had a past which involved death to order and theft from his own organisation. Could his wife really believe he had reformed? It seemed they shared the same religious convictions. They were working together to raise enough money to open a clinic. Was he really going to be able to realise their dreams? Would the moneylender really have trusted the man with $25,000? Would the deceased really have given the $25,000 to the builder knowing his track record? Then we come to Watson’s friend and her missing lover. After Watson improbably makes progress in her solo investigation, Holmes admits he was “Tony”. This happened at the beginning of their relationship when Watson had just arrived as a sober companion. Holmes did not know anything about her. Could she be trusted? So he took to following her. When she met with her friend, he decided to follow that friend after they separated, picked her up and took time to get information about Watson. That was the “ancient history”. As a result of his investigation, he found Watson eminently trustworthy and has now formed this unorthodox partnership with her. Should she be upset about what Holmes did? Should she tell her friend the man she had slept with was Sherlock?

It’s good to see the four principals have a reasonable chance to interact. Captain Tobias Gregson (Aidan Quinn) and Detective Marcus Bell (Jon Michael Hill) actually have more than the usual token lines of dialogue. Nevertheless, this is not one of the better episodes. What might have been quite an interesting investigation ends up feeling trivialised, and the metanarrative between Holmes and Watson is not constructively advancing an understanding of their relationship. Early on, Holmes met the Watson family but there’s been remarkably little attempt for him to meet the no doubt wide circle of friends Watson has (or had before she quite her job as a surgeon). If he really was investigating her, why did he not look into the surgical case which caused her to quit? There was no hint of this when the son of the man who died later appeared to “borrow” yet more money from her. Knowing what had gone wrong professionally would inevitably have been of interest to Holmes when it came to the question of trust. If she had proved incompetent, he would never have allowed her to get close to him or intermeddle with his cases. So Elementary: Ancient History comes across as contrived without any groundwork laid in previous episodes to give it credibility.

For the reviews of other episodes, see:
Elementary: Season 1, Episode 1. Pilot (2012)

Categories: TV and anime Tags: Aidan Quinn, Ancient History, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elementary, Jon Michael Hill, Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, murder, mystery, Sherlock Holmes

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