Review of Elementary Episode 2.15 "Corpse de Ballet": "Let's Dance"

 

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) fans might be feeling a little vindicated after this week's episode of Elementary, since we got Watson not only solving a case solo (while also assisting holmes [Johnny
Lee Miller]) but also opening up a very little bit about her past. Watson's compassion is key to her success, as her willingness to give a mentally ill man the benefit of the doubt and try to find his missing homeless friend--when the police write him off as crazy and his missing friend as imaginary--leads to the discovery of a particularly skeevy plot to kidnap homeless people and claim their disability cheques. We see Watson engage both in investigative work, to track down the identity af the missing man, and deductive work, as she puts together the pieces. She is coming into her own, as this episode signals. Amusingly, even though she has apparently continued not to read Holmes's monographs on cigarette ash (a nice carryover from the original Conan Doyle stories), she's able to apply that expertise when his keen olfactory senses recognize a distinctive tobacco scent on her, thereby giving her the key datum to put the story together. True, Holmes gives her a key piece of information, but putting it together is all Watson.

We learn as well that Watson has her own skeletons in the closet (echoes of last week's episode), when she tells Holmes about her father. Like Holmes, she has family trauma in her past, in this instance a schizophrenic father who is himself homeless now. This situation adds resonance to Watson's case this week, though I suppose one might quibble that both our leads don't really need troubled familial relationships. However, the differences in those troubles help underscore the differences in how Holmes and Watson deal with reality, Watson by opting for compassion and emotional engagement, Holmes for reason and emotional detachment. These differences make them complementary figures and help explin why they work so well together. I tmight also help explain why Watson seems to have taken relatively easily to the unconventional world she now inhabits.

Holmes's emotional detachment manifests itself this time in the most extensive version of his use of casual sex, this time with a suspect in his case, which involves ballerina murder, a story that might have been called "The Case of the Bisected Ballerina" (more gruesome images of this scene than the one I have used here can be found online, but this gives you an idea of how this episode pushes a bit further into the gory than is usual for Elementary). The murder is bizarre and spectacular, the plot satisfyingly twisty, with Holmes having
to untangle a bizarre plot to cast suspicion on a prima ballerina, Iris Lanzer (guest star Aleksa Palladino), not in order actually to frame her for the murder but instead to generate publicity for her. Watson investigates  a plot to hide away victims in order to profit from them, while Holmes investigates one in which a victim is turned into a spectacle in order to benefit from publicity. These two cases perhaps do not resonate with each other quite so well as we have seen in other episodes, but they do have complementary elements.

Holmes engages in a profound ethical breach by having sex with the prime (prima?) suspect, on which Watson quite appropriately calls him. Miller and Liu clearly etch the ethical differences between their characters in the confrontation scene, continuing to build subtle and nuanced characters, each of whom has understandable and plausible attitudes, without one or the other being allowed to carry away too much of the right. Here, Holmes is right, in a way, in that his assessment of Iris's actual guilt is accurate, but Watson is more profoundly right about the potential danger of such an ethical breach--a point Holmes seems to grasp, at least temporarily, when, for a while, it looks as
though Iris may have fooled him.

The answer is actually much more interesting than murder out of professional or sexual jealousy, the initial motives considered. Instead, we have a far more intriguing--and sociopathic--situation, in which Iris's lawyer (guest star and familiar face Scott Cohen) has calculatedly murdered another ballerina merely to generate some column inches for his client. I confess I found this episode more interesting than many of the other recent ones, not only for its epsecially spectacular murder (bisected ballerina dropped form the grid onot a stage? yikes!) but also for its avoidance of prosaic motivations. Holmes stories don't require bizarre crimes and motives, but they sure don't hurt.

How about you? What did you like and dislike about the episode? Let me know in the comments below!