Elementary - Seed Money - Review

Like recovering addicts, Elementary can seem to be making progress only to backslide. Last week's episode was very much a return to form, whereas this week's, despite having some interesting and amusing moments, such as Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) hanging upside down to oxygenate his brain, or smelling hideous plant food to stinulate his mind, seems to be thrashing about a bit. There is less sense of interconnection between the A and B plot than there was last week, and neither plot is resolved particularly satisfactorily. Holmes's (Jonny Lee Miller) crisis of last week is referenced but seems not otherwise to have had much impact on developments. Instead, the episode puts in motion several other new developments. How appealing these will be remains to be seen.

We begin with Kitty (Ophelia Lovibond) at a support meeting, in a nice echo of  a recurring device with Holmes. The show tends to focus more on Holmes as a recovering addict than on Kitty as a recovering victim, at least of late, so this reminder of their common ground is helpful. Of course, it also sets up the episode's conclusion; no doubt we have all been waiting for Kitty's past to come back, and it does in tonight's episode. *sigh*

Sadly, Elementary goes yet again to the "personal connection" well, when Kitty is approached at the meeting to help a fellow rape survivor find her missing daughter. I suppose it's not too implausible that if one happened to know a detective, one might approach that detective to help out with, say, an identify theft or a missing persons case (twice, now, in short succession), but it's beginning to feel like laziness rather than careful plot construction. Indeed, the entire Kitty plot is underdeveloped, and not in any way evident to me linked to the A plot. The key piece of evidence Kitty needs to solve the case--that the missing girl has in fact been seeking her rapist father (how exactly she has been able to track him down at all remains completely unexplained)--depends on Kitty's noting that both the girl and the man have  the same genetic anomaly in how their thumbs are formed. Yay for Kitty using her powers of observation, but the episode did not do a particularly good job of allowing us to see the evidence as well.

Presumably, this story of Kitty helping the child of one victim come to terms with her past is supposed to resonate with the conclusion this week, when a new murder victim turns up bearing scars on her back identical to those Kitty has on hers. So, the man who took, raped, and tortured Kitty has come to New York. What are the odds? (Far greater in a television series than in real life, I'd wager.) No doubt we will now move back to Kitty's trauma as a major theme for a few episodes as she must face her past, track down her attacker, get justice the the crime committed against blah blah blah. This is just a story that has been done too many times for me to feel much excitement about yet another variation on it, though I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. For now, anyway.

As for the A plot, we have a typical Elementary series of twists. The couple who died simultaneously in bed were indeed the victims of foul play, but only as collateral damage; fumes caused by the "necklacing" of another victim in the basement seeped into the ventilation system and killed them. Necklacing is a particularly nasty way of killing somone by putting a tire filled with gas around his neck and settig it on fire. Such a spectacular and cruel murder method is usually asosciated with particularly vicious criminals such as the drug cartel with which the victim seems to have been tangled up. But he was also tied up with Agrinext, a Monsanto-style company producing genetically modified food (which allows Holmes to condemn their bee-slaughtering practices, thugh the episode mostly avoids serious exploration of the implication sof genetically modified foodstuoffs). And, he was also a flower counterfieter. (Really. No, really.) Was he murdered by the cartel? Their style of killing, except he was already dead when he was necklaced. Was he killed by Agrinext?  If so, why, and why via necklacing? And wahat about the two subsequent victims, necklaced right outside Agrinext's building? Or maybe a counterfeit flower client discovered the fraud and got payback? The undulations here are moderately interesting but ultimately unsatisfactory, because most of the red herrings are more interesting than the ultimate answer. Despite the spectacular murder method, the involvement of two massive organization sof comparable ethical stature (Agrinext and a drug cartel), and the genuinely bizarre flower counterfeiting thing, the ultimate motive and perpetrator end up being the sadly banal and usual: betrayed lover getting vengeance. Admittedly, a high proportion of crime is indeed entirely banal and usual, but the resolution here just seems anticlimactic.


Intertwined with the investigation is the latest set of developments for Holmes and Watson (Lucy Liu). Watson is going to go work as an investigator for an insurance company, and Holmes is going to promote Kitty to full partner. Given that the A plot includes the drug cartel and Agrinext negotiating over who will retain the services of the genetic genius capable of cloning flowers (which serves the cartel because he can also create improved marijuana stock--the skill for which the company wants him as well, in anticipation of legalization), there is perhaps some degree of echo between the A plot and the characters' lives: Watson torn between sticking with Holmes and seekig out a new relationship/job. The orchid clones might strengthen that point. Holmes realizes that the victim is a genetic genius when he realizes that what he thought was the last surviving example of a particular orchid is actually a clone of that orchid. He makes the realization when he discovers a second, identical orchid. Perhaps it is a stretch to see the two orchids as symbolic of Holmes and his protege, the image he has made of himself, but the episode does invite us to make the connection. For instance, key dialogue unfolds between Holmes and Watson while the orchids are on the table.

For me, this would be the most interesting aspect of the episode. Overall, though, the episode was not one of my favourites. But that did you think? Let me know in the comments below.