Elementary - T-Bone and the Iceman - Review

 
Elementary gives us another bizarre murder and another opportunity to apply the dynamics of the crime to the dynamics of the relationship between Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Watson (Lucy Liu). The A plot involves a murder victim flash-frozen when she died, which leads to a conflict between two brothers over the one's unwillingness to provide a bone marrow transplant for the other. The B plot involves Watson's mother Mary (Freda Foh Shen) trying to get Joan to intervene in a family fracas. Family tensions, and what family will and won't do for each other, therefore figure prominently in both plots. Why the title sounds like the name of rappers, though, that I can't figure out--any thoughts? As for relevance to the episode, the terms refer to the t-bone car accident that leads to the first murder and the fact that cryonics are involved--nicely punned on here in the name of the company: CRYO-NYC.

Cryonics, for those who don't know, is the process of freezing bodies shortly after death, on the assumption that at some point in the future they can be thawed out and restored to life, one way or another--through medical advances, nanotechnology (the claim offered here), consciousness uploading, whatever--but as of now, there is little to suggest that anyone opting for cryopreservation will ever experience such restoration--indeed, Holmes refers to CRYO-NYC's corpsicles as "dead nutters." It's more of a SF concept than a likely way to cheat death, though people do really opt for it. (You may have heard that Walt Disney did. He didn't.) As such, this is another episode that nudges Elementary up against the edges of Science Fiction, without quite qoing over the line. (We might recall episode 3.9, "The Eternity Injection," specifically in this instance, as that episode also dealt with an attempt to escape death via medical intervention.)

Admittedly, the episode has some fun with the SF/pop culture associations for the idea. The initial murder victim is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, seeing one of the frozen corpses that has been stolen, after t-boning the van carrying it and therefore being killed to silence her. Bell (Jon Michael Hill) invites Holmes and Watson in to the case because he thinks they will find the corpse interesting: it seems to have undergone instantaneous mummification. This turns out to be the result of being exposed to refrigerant, bursting out of tanks because of the accident, but it nevertheless makes her almost something of a horror-movie character, though she's not an ambulatory mummy.

However, murder suspect Vance Ford (Patrick Breen) is a SF/horror movie buff. Hanging on his
apartment walls are several posters for (non-existent) genre movies on the walls, as the blocking ensures we see in several shots.  As Holmes and Watson question him, no matter which angle the camera views the scene from, there is usually a movie poster visible somewhere in the shot. He explains this in part by referring to his film-making ambitions, thuogh it is unlikely he will ever complete a project. He reports that he is in the final stages of leukemia and will be dead soon anyway. He's hardly likely, therefore, to be going aorund murdering people, and even if he were, he'd have nothing to lose by confessing. Or so he says.

Ford, though, is not a suspect in this murder; instead, he was a suspect in the murder of Jim Sullivan, whose body has been stolen from CRYO-NYC. In a typically twisty Elementary plot, Holmes and Watson, in tracking down the  refigerant responsible for the mummification of the first victim, stumble across a warehouse with a row of frozen bodies laid out on the floor. (Amusingly, holmes confesses that much surprises him, but that this does.) It turns out that CRYO-NYC has a bit of a space crunch problem so occasionally engages in this sort of off-site temporary storage. When they track these back to the source, they discover that one body is missing; Jim Sullivan's has been stolen. Sullivan was also murdered; what are the odds that these two murders are unconnected?

Company president Abraham Misraki is played with sleazy verve by Mark Margolis, who many audience members will recognize from his numerous appearances in many shows, usually as a crook of some sort of other. His explanations of th eprocess and of the rationale for "storing" bodies in an empty warehouse, basically relying on cold weathe rto maintin cryonic stasis, offer a delightful skewering of corporate-speak. It's an inspired piece of casting, as well, as the usual "most familiar face" guest-star rule, and Margolis's predominant character type, might create some audience misdirection, leading us to suspect he's behind the skulduggery. After all, if he treats bodies so cavalierly, is murder really that bid a stretch?

Furthermore, ince we meet him in the episode before we meet Ford, we might temporarily fall for it. However, since Patrick Breen is also a very familiar face, the fact that he seems a less likely suspect--he is weakened by leukemia and walks with a limp, so hardly seems as if he could have the strength to carry out the crimes--the guest star rule might lead us to conclude that in fact he's the really guilty party. Until he, too, ends up murdered, that is, and in a manner consistent with how Sullivan was killed, and, apparently even by the very man he claimed to have witnessed leaving the site of Sullivan's murder. He seemed to have been lying about that suspect, as Holmes concludes from an analysis of his speech patterns in different statements, but if so, how can the suspect he described so closely match the description of the break-in suspect at CRYO-NYC described by not one but two of the company's techs? Ford's movie-buff status circles back here, in a neat bit of typical murder mystery ecomony. Watson has more than once indicated that the sketch of of Ford's "suspect" looks very familiar. Turns out that's because Ford cribbed the description from a character in one of the movies featured in the posters on his apartment walls, as Watson eventually deduces. Holmes may be able to figure out the science stuff,  but trust Watson to pull in other esoteric bits of knowledge to fill in the gaps.

Sullivan, it seems, was in fact Ford's long-lost brother (both having changed their names for reasons
unexplained--a bit of a soft plot point), but he had refused to provide a bone marrow transplant to help Ford fight his leukemia. So, Ford killed him. To get a marrow sample, he colluded with the CRYO-NYC techs to steal Sullivan's frozen body. When things go pear-shaped, the techs kill Ford, stage a break-in, and cast the blame, again, on Ford's invented suspect. When they foolishly confirm that a still of the actor from the movie is the suspect, they get nailed. Mystery solved. And a decent one it is, if a bit implausible: Ford killing his brother because Sullivan would not help him beat a disease is plausible enough, but the two techs then replicating that initial murder seems to me something of a stretch. Three murderers in one episode seems like one too many.

Regardless, the catalyst for the action is a toxic family relationship, which is reflected in the B plot. Watson's mother suspects her son is having an affair and tries to get Watson to intervene. Watson is reluctant, but does so, and family tensions abound. Mary's suspicions seem to emerge from incipient memory problems actuated by old age, but she resists seeking treatment, until Holmes tricks her into going for a neurological test. Even though family tension is key to both plots, the contrast emerges from the ultimately supportive role family adopt towards each other in the B plot--and in a way that is perhaps not unexpected but nevertheless nice to see confirmed. Holmes explains his intervention to ensure Mary gets the medical care she needs by telling Watson that she has more family than she thinks. Family is more than blood. Ford and Sullivan don't share a name, but they do share blood, a familial connection that evidently has no meaning for them. Sharing neither name nor blood, Holmes and Watson are nevertheless family. It is perhaps not quite a Hallmark moment (especially as it takes place in a mausoleum), but it is nevertheless a good sign that the Holmes/Watson relationship is back on track.

I'm looking forward to further developments. How about you? Let me now in the comment section below!