Elementary - One Watson, One Holmes - Review

"One Watson, One Holmes" finally brings hacktivist group Everyone out into the open, as one of their members comes to Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) seeking his help in identifying the true identity of another Everyone member, shortly before that unidentified member turns up murdered. Regular viewers will recall that in the past, Everyone has helped Holmes and Watson (Lucy Liu), but always at the cost of Holmes having to engage in some sort of public humiliation. (Regular and irregular viewers alike get a recap of some of these in the "previously on" montage, though, sadly, Everyone making Holmes wear a dress remains unseen.) Holmes initially takes some pleasure in rejecting Sucking Chest Wound's--real name Petros Franken (Joseph Cross)--appeal for help, since the initial request offers nothing to interest him, but when the murder of Species, the  Everyone member Sucking Chest Wound (hereafter SCW) was seeking, gets pinned on SCW, and Holmes's involvement with Everyone is discovered by Detective Bell (Jon Michael Hill), Holmes gets pulled in anyway.

This is a clever episode in several ways, because it weaves in developments involving the Everyone

group, because it also brings back into play sketchy governmental actions, and because it offers intriguing parallels between the A and B plots. Everyone's status as hacktivist group is key to the episode. SCW is seeking Species because there is an internal rift in the group. Members affiliated with SCW want Everyone to remain an essentially anarchist group, targeting whoever and whatever they want on a case by case basis (rather like Holmes, one might observe, who has his own interests and prefers to select cases that suit him rather than being bound by a specific commitment). However, Species and others have been agitating to convert Everyone into a more specifically ideologically-driven, political group. SCW hopes to discredit Species, thereby keeping Everyone politically agnostic.

Would he be willing to kill to do so, however? Well, if he were planning on killing Species, would he have sought Holmes's help tracking the guy down earlier that very day? Seems unlikely, doesn't it? It is, of course. I could quibble, I suppose, that SCW is too obviously a red herring who is being set up to take the fall, what with his unusually dyed hair conveniently turning up right under the murder victim and all. (Indeed, I made a pretty good, though not entirely accurate, guess about what was really going on while Species's body was still cooling on the floor.) Nevertheless, the case is interesting, as Holmes quickly sees through the frame and realizes that what is going on is effectively a classic "False Flag" scenario: someone on Species's own side in the internal Everyone struggle has killed him, framing someone on the other side in order to undermine opposition and consolidate the politicizing faction. Or so it seems. Actually, things are a trifle more complex.

Species is actually two people. There is a split not only within Everyone, but also within the internet entity known as Species. Holmes figures out that Species is two people, by the way, by analyzing his "fist"--his unique, or in this case his two unique typing styles. The term "fist" was applied originally to telegraph operators, and Holmes cites WWII codebreakers being able to identify specific German telegraph operators by their "fist." I wonder whether this was a quiet shout-out--if such a thing is possible--to the other contemporary Holmes, as played by Benedict Cumberbach, star of last year's The Imitation Game, a film in which the fact that certain telegraph operators can be specifically identified becomes a crucial piece of information in defeating the Enigma code. Holmes explains his theory to Watson after using a Morse code sender to wake her up.

This double duality of course reflects on the B plot, as the episode title suggests. While they are investigating, Holmes notices that Watson is not acting like her usual self. She is cold, unsympathetic to witnesses, distancing herself from friends, withdrawing, effectively, into work. Holmes points out that her becoming him is not a good idea. Their relationship works because there is one Holmes and one Watson; they don't need two Holmses. Later in the episode, and more significantly, he recasts his observations in terms of friendship. He notes that his relationship with Watson has taught him for the first time what friendship actually is, and that it works when friends move towards what is best in the other, not towards what is worst. In becoming a detective and honing her rational mind, Watson moved towards th best of Holmes. However, by moving towards his antisocial traits, she is moving towards the worst. The key irony of the scene is that Holmes's movement towards the best of Watson is crucial to his ability to communicate to her his concerns in an effective way. His first attempt failed because it was too Holmesian, focusing on how her behaviour is damaging their working process. His second attempt succeeds, because ti instead focuses on the human dynamic.

The contrast between Holmes and Watson and the internecine strife within Everyone--and between the

two men who comprise Species--is perhaps just a tad on the nose, but it offers an illuminating contrast between how a relationship between fundamentally different people can work, and what can happen when such a relationship goes sour. SCW wanted to resolve the problem by discrediting Species. Species 1 chooses to solve two problems by murdering Species 2--because Species 2 is less committed than Species 1 is to the political path, thereby weakening the political faction--and framing SCW for the murder. Talk about a dysfunctional relationship!

The breakdown of effective relationships is further reflected in the fact that Species 1--real name Brady Dietz (Adam Chanler-Berat)--is also an informant for the FBI, who are using him to radicalize Everyone, driving them to hack a company that is actually the front for a covert government op. If Everyone does so, they go immediately from pesky pranksters to criminals guilty of treason, and their hack would justify not only going after Everyone vigorously but also the institution of even more pervasive and invasive state surveillance. The episode tends to stress that FBI agent Branch  (Roslyn Ruff) is a careerist trying to make herself look good with a major bust, but I doubt it's an accident that her complicity in Everyone's planned hack makes it another False Flag attack: a government agency sponsoring an attack against the government precisely in order to create a new enemy to blame.

One need spend only a few minutes online to discover that there are literally innumerable conspiracy theories about US governmental False Flag operations. It is difficult to grant much credibility to most of these. On the other hand, it is telling that the world we live in is one in which the idea of a government deliberately fomenting dissent in order to demonstrate its danger to the state and to suppress it seems so likely an occurrence that it can turn up as a plot device in a mainstream television program. Even Holmes manages only to catch his killer and prevent Everyone from engaging in the hack; nobody in the government is called to task for this plot. We are left--as we are increasingly left in our entertainment (and possibly in reality)--with a government that can do whatever it wants with impunity.

Well, isn't that a cheery thought? Let's turn instead to you. How did you like this episode? Let me know in the comments below!