‘Elementary’ season 3, episode 5 review: Where was Watson?
Thursday night, CBS aired a new episode of “Elementary,” though it could have been described as “The Sherlock Show Without Watson.”
To call this season strange would be an understatement, and this was more clear tonight than ever before. For some reason, Lucy Liu and her character decided to take a little vacation in this story, and the attention was instead all about Sherlock and Kitty Winter. We don’t hate Kitty; she actually reminds us a whole lot of Clara from “Doctor Who.” The problem is just that there isn’t the same sort of great back-and-forth with these two characters that we there being with Sherlock and Joan, and we miss that dynamic.
Even if Joan wasn’t around, we still saw her presence felt courtesy of some writing that Sherlock discovered that proved that she was keeping track of the finer details of his life … which made him want to officially send in a non-disclosure agreement to her. He wanted to silence her, even though he never felt a need to do this at any point before getting around to this point.
The story with Gregson and his daughter was powerful, since it showed both him and Kitty trying to take varying positions of power. Still, we have seen so many stories in this vein on crime shows the past few weeks that they are all starting to blend together. The same goes for the case of the week.
In the end, our base reaction when it comes to this episode is rather simple: It wasn’t terrible, but it was completely forgettable. We miss Watson, and we won’t remember any of this in a week’s time.
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Laycock
November 30, 2014 @ 2:47 pm
When either of the main characters are missing (Watson this episode, Sherlock the beginning of Ep 1) the show is out of kilter. The plots don’t matter. There are a hundred shoot em up cop shows on tv. It’s the delicious relationship between Watson and Sherlock that keeps me watching.
They should have increased Bell and the Captain’s roles, maybe brought Kitty in as another cop. Kitty is too disruptive to the chemistry of the show’s main strengths.
Emmy woodhouse
November 28, 2014 @ 1:47 pm
What makes Elementary different from other shows is that subtle and implicit attachment between Watson and Sherlock and how Sherlock always tries to find a balance between his emotional attachment to Watson and his conviction to be a mentor. Along with that, usually cases help expose Sherlock’s genius, stamina and discipline. In this episode, however, Sherlock could have been any detective. His conversations with Kitty were banal and for an episode whose aim was to rehabilitate Kitty to the eyes of the viewers, frankly, she wasn’t given any compelling or insightful script to allow her do justice to herself. I feel for Ophelia Lovibond, because her lines are so basic and lack any depth. This would ultimately damage any interaction she might want to develop with any of the characters in the coming episodes. This episode was not very interesting and there was definitely a sense of distance in Sherlock’s interaction with others, in other words his soul wasn’t really in it. Jonny Lee Miller’s style of acting needs proper drama and clearly that is not quite possible without his co-actor Lucy Liu.
Holmesandwatson
November 28, 2014 @ 11:22 am
Absolutely agreed. I missed Watson so much, and even though the episode itself wasn’t bad, it could’ve been so much better and memorable (regarding the casebook stuff) with Watson. But I think lucy liu had the Emmy presentation that week hence the reason for her absence.