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Thursday, December 18, 2014

'Elementary' 3x7 'The Adventure of the Nutmeg Concoction': Do You Have a Nose for Mystery?

Elementary was a bit odd this week. The show returned somewhat to developing the relationship between Watson and Sherlock, although Kitty and Sherlock pretty much solved the whole thing on their own... even though it began as one of Joan's cases, which Sherlock rudely stole from her! Still, the episode was very entertaining, despite (or perhaps because of) its weirdness.

The following gifs are also available on this Tumblr post, and I have included the Baker Street Podcast (which I co-host) for last week's episode below. It was posted late, and the one for this week is not yet available, so I'll post it when it's ready. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

As I mentioned, the case starts out as Joan's. The goal is to find a missing sister, but Kitty walks in and rudely inserts herself, under Sherlock's instruction. It's all in the name of boredom, but ends up being a much bigger case than any of them initially realize.
An FBI profiler has already decided that the missing woman, Jessica Holder, was murdered, and that she was murdered by someone who also killed six other people. He has decided to call the guy Pumpkin because he leaves behind a nutmeg odor at each crime scene. Sherlock, and Kitty, and the viewers, and just about everyone but Joan immediately realize that the whole thing sounds ludicrous.
Sherlock recognizes the profiler's profile as utter hogwash, and that none of the murders are connected. The only annoying connection is the smell of nutmeg.
Kitty and Joan find the location of a lock that belongs to a key on Jessica's key ring.

It goes to the apartment of Noah Kramer, a defense attorney who was cheating on his wife with Jessica, so Joan and Kitty break in and question him for awhile.
Turns out he's even more of a jerk than a mere adulterer, because he basically had Jessica killed by telling her that one of his drug trafficker clients, Raymond Carpenter, had killed people. As a good person, Jessica wanted to tell the authorities, but Noah tipped off Raymond so that he would kill her.

So, Jessica's murder is solved, but there are still those pesky other murders that involved the smell of nutmeg. When Ms. Hudson lends a hand and hears about nutmeg at a new crime scene that seems to be completely unrelated to Jessica's murder, Sherlock enlists the help of an interesting fellow known as The Nose. He smells nutmeg, but also the presence of sodium hydroxide. The Nose's nose quickly turns downward when he learns that he's basically sniffing body-melting substances.
Sherlock makes the connection: all the crime scenes have the same "cleaner." This means that if they can find the guy and get him to talk, they could possibly solve multiple murders by multiple murderers. There could be hundreds!
While Joan works tediously to find the cleaner by looking through records at a crime-scene-cleaning school, Sherlock attempts to use the fun, entertaining tactic of fake-murdering Kitty with pigs blood, and searching for a cleaner on the dark net. Of course, this simply lands him temporarily in jail.
He still finds a way to bypass the hard work by noticing a mural that leads to an artist who was once a crime scene cleaner, but decided to begin working for criminals. Just when they've tricked him into testifying, however, our cleaner gets cleaned. The only evidence is a piece of equipment that had been installed in his knee.
So, after the cleaner's knowledge of the murders literally goes down the drain in his now-dissolved brain, Sherlock decides to start over, ordering Kitty to pull down everything from The Wall of Evidence. As she does, she notices that the building superintendent at the cleaner's apartment was at Raymond Carpenter's trial. He turns out to be Raymond's son, and the cleaner's apprentice! Rather than be left out to be murdered by rivals of all the criminals who had him clean up the bodies of the people they killed, he decides to testify.
Kitty, for helping to solve a potentially huge case involving multiple murders and murderers, is rewarded with the benefit of listening to her music at higher decibels for one night. She chooses Beethoven's Sixth, since she recalled the music earlier while searching the sixth floor for Kramer. She used to play it on her clarinet until her father sold the instrument.
Sherlock and Watson also have a few entertaining moments wherein Sherlock compares her to "a baboon with inflated genitals" and "a romantic terrorist." This is because she flirts with an old boyfriend (who played The Ice Truck Killer on Dexter) while Andrew is in Denmark. Sherlock basically tells her to go for it and have fun, while Joan feels guilty for having a bit of a wild side.
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