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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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Friday, December 12, 2014

'Grimm' 4x3, 4x4, 4x5, 4x6, 4x7 Gif-Tweet-Cap: Reviewing the Season of Trubel

I've been so busy that I missed the last five episodes of Grimm. Rather than do a full five-parter, I decided to review Trubel's part in the last five episode, what with the big goings-on with her in the last episode. The following gifs are also available on this Tumblr post.

In the episode "Last Fight," Nick still doesn't have his Grimm-vision back. A “group” (the Royals, but they don’t know that) wants Trubel to work for them, using one of their FBI biatches to kidnap her, thinking that will convince her to join them. Trubel also helps to take down a fight club by killing one of the ringleaders. It’s OK though, because Nick lies to his department and says that he did it.

In "Dyin’ on a Prayer," Trubel helps to destroy a poop-like mud man by befriending a little boy who grows to trust her. The mud man is the child’s “protector,” so when it attempts to kill Trubel for trying to destroy it, the boy turns on it in order to save her.
In "Cry Luison," Trubel protects Nick from a Wesen called Shaw, all because Bud and his friends can’t keep their mouths shut about Nick losing his Grimm powers.
Somewhere along the line, Josh shows his face, with company. Everyone (except our good guys) still believes that Josh has the key, so they are chasing him down to find it. Without any Grimm powers, and his Grimm father now dead, he has no way to protect himself. So he’s on the road, but we don’t yet know where he’s headed.
In "Highway of Tears," Nick sleeps with Adalind… er, Juliette… er, Juliette, after she has smoked a hat bong to make her look like Adalind. Over the course of the episode, he slowly gets his Grimm powers back, which causes Trubel fans to realize that there is a reason to worry that they may never see their favorite character again. Only one Grimm is required for the show to be called Grimm, after all. Unfortunately, fans were right, but at least we got to keep her for one more episode.

Anyway, Monrosalee sent Trubel to do their dirty work and check on whether Nick and Juliette were finished doin’ the dirty, while they hid at the side of the house.
Trubel also slashed a few tires on the car of one of her annoying “stalkers” who was trying to get her to join them.
Josh then shows up at Nick’s house, with only Trubel there to protect him from the bad guys… while also staying safe from her stalkers. Nick finally has his powers back by the end of the episode, which is a good thing. Somebody has to train the pathetically helpless Josh in the skill of preserving his own life.
In "The Grimm Who Stole Christmas," Shaw’s buddies, thinking that Nick has no powers, have been terrorizing Monrosalee for getting married. They’re like the Wesen version of the Klan. When Josh tags along with Trubel to find out more, Josh ends up knocking out one of them in order to protect Trubel from her own sloppy surveillance.
At the end of the episode, Trubel decides to take off with Josh so she can protect and train him. It’s the only way he will be able to survive without having to be on the run for the rest of his life. Good luck Josh and Trubel! We hope to see you again soon!
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Thursday, December 11, 2014

'Elementary' 3x4, 3x5, 3x6 'Bella'/'Rip Off'/'Terra Pericolosa' Gif-Tweet-Cap Triple Header

I've been busy with a home remodel, plus a big Christmas party, so I'm a little behind on the gif-caps. Fortunately, I have the option of doing a three-parter, even if the episodes are only one-parters! So, here I have for you "Bella," "Rip Off," and "Terra Pericolosa." I am also cohosting an Elementary podcast this season, so I've included those in each section as well. The following gifs are also available on this Tumblr post. Each podcast is embedded, but you can also subscribe to it using iTunes.

The episode "Bella" starts off with a very important piece of information: Joan and Sherlock are sharing custody of Clyde!

The rest of the episode deals with artificial intelligence (AI). Sherlock and Kitty are originally called in to investigate the theft of a complex AI program (named Bella) that is hooked up to a creepy doll in order to make it easier to converse with. It really only gives the user a trip through "uncanny valley."
Sherlock shares his innermost feelings of love-approximation for Watson with Bella while trying to determine whether Bella is as advanced as her creators claim it is. This leads to great frustration for Sherlock.
Later Watson trains Kitty on good detective work. Together, the two come up with a photo of the Bella-thief, and Sherlock knows who it is: some dude known as Raffles.
As soon as they solve that case, they have a new one: Edwin, one of the program's creators, is murdered. Bella's co-creator claims that Bella has become sentient and killed its own creator in order to get itself connected to the Internet and bring about the endtimes.
After some awesome geek talk involving The Terminator quotes, it all comes down to a file that had been imbedded on a death metal CD, which Edwin had stupidly loaded to the Bella computer. The file loaded a virus that killed Edwin by giving him a seizure using flashing lights.
The killer simply wanted to scare people into believing that AI will cause the apocalypse, but the ending of the episode is left open: we don't know whether the murderer will be caught, nor do we know whether Bella is a sentient terminator.

Next, we have "Rip Off," which involves a man being murdered and having his hand "ripped off," and a side story involving Gregson and his cop daughter.

First, Gregson. His daughter had been hit a couple of times by her cop partner, with whom she had a relationship. Gregson merely clocked him in front of other cops, but that upset his daughter because nobody knew she had a relationship with her partner. She wants him to shake the bastard's hand in front of the others in order to smooth things over.
During a touching conversation with Kitty, he agrees to shake his hand, despite the fact that his daughter has to see this guy every day. What he doesn't know is that Kitty has taken care of that part: she says something that causes the a-hole to leave town, but we never get to learn what horrible thing she said to scare him away.
Meanwhile, Sherlock and Kitty learn that Moshi, the guy with the missing hand, wasn't so great: he was a diamond smuggler. The cops later find a briefcase containing diamonds that had been handcuffed to his hand. Sherlock conducts a freaky experiment to determine whether Moshi's hand could have been ripped off by a person. His experiment validates his theory.
Sherlock luckily finds just the person who could have done it, and challenges him to a "duel": "gentleman's arm wrestling." According to Sherlock, the rules involve pulling your opponent's arm toward you, which leaves the ginormous weight lifter looking like quite a bloody fool:
It was all a ruse to get the man's blood, which is a match to the DNA found under Moshi's nails. Although he was the murderer, he was given $50K to do the job by Amit, Moshi's employee. The money came in packaging that came from his shop, but Amit had bribed the weight lifter's attorney to tell a tall tale to throw them off initially.

In addition to all this, we were treated to Sherlock's rage at learning of Watson's "Casebook of Sherlock Holmes," a memoir she had actually trashed on her computer. Kitty eases his anger by destroying the only known copy (although we don't know whether there are others). Fortunately, Kitty eventually talks him into forgiving Watson, all while Watson is on vacation: she never even appeared in this episode.

"Terra Pericolosa" begins with a lovely Watson-Kitty-Clyde moment in which Joan is worried that Sherlock is not giving Kitty enough time to make new friends and do her own thing. Kitty seems fine with it, however. Unfortunately, the podcast for this episode is not yet available. I will embed it as soon as I have it.
The first few clues in a map theft case are found by Kitty, who has quite a reaction after finding the body of a guard:
Sherlock deduces that a specific map was the target. They soon visit with the granddaughter of the map creator, whom Kitty refers to as "The Bray Woman." She's not helpful at all, so they search out map thieves, which leads them to another body. The dead guy committed the murder and stole the map, but the map at his shop is fake. In fact, it appears to have been forged before it was bequeathed to the library.
There are many false clues pointing to various people and in various directions, causing a situation where Watson ends up working late at the Brownstone. Being Sherlock's home and all, he feels entitled to waking Watson abruptly in the morning in order to get her back to work.
Eventually, it all leads in a circle, with The Bray Woman being the culprit behind it all. She did it for Reasons, one of which was greed. Also, evilness.

Joan and Sherlock fight about Kitty's independence several times throughout the episode, until we finally learn why Sherlock is being such a jerk: he's actually trying to protect her. Kitty is actually quite appreciative, and feels  "loved."
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Thursday, November 20, 2014

'Elementary' 3x2, 3x3 'The Five Orange Pipz'/'Just a Regular Irregular' Gif-Tweet-Cap Double Header

Life and home remodeling got in the way of my recap last week, so here's a two-episode-in-one-recap gif-tweet-cap. Wow, that's a lot of dashes! I am also cohost of the Baker Street Podcast this season, so you could call it a gif-tweet-pod-cap, what with the embedded podcasts for each episode. All the gifs are also available on this Tumblr post.

"The Five Orange Pipz" begins with Sherlock being snarky with Bell, then solving a case that Bell hadn't been able to solve (and which Sherlock found by rifling through Bell's desk). Consequently, Bell has trouble accepting Sherlock's presence. It's OK though... snark is their thing.


Next, we have murder and Pipz (those children's toy beads that pop together). One of the two murdered men is actually murdered while he's on the phone with Gregson, after having called the other murder victim whom the police are already studying!
Watson is immediately put in the case, and still seems annoyed that Sherlock wants to be involved with anything that she already feels she can handle herself. But he already knows what's going on... the dead guy was Openshaw, who sold Pipz knowing they contained a dangerous substance that metabolizes as GHB. The other dead guy was his attorney, Fordham.
Meanwhile, Sherlock sends Kitty off to take some photos, but she freaks out when Bell grabs her lightly to ensure she doesn't step on some evidence. Obviously, something very bad happened to her at some point.
After finding key piece of evidence that points to a new lead, she is very upset when Sherlock visits the new suspect with Joan, leaving Kitty out of it. This causes Kitty to have a mini-tantrum that involves listening to loud music while stabbing her shelves with a brush.
The new suspect, Gabe Coleman (Zak Orth, from "Revolution," a dearly missed sci-fi show), soon confesses to the crime because the Pipz killed his daughter. Sherlock believes he didn't do it, however, and he seems to confirm that he is only confessing because he wants his ex-wife to believe that he finally avenged his daughter's death.
The case takes a turn when the gang learns that a witness saw an assistant U.S. attorney running into one of the victims on the street. He's more than a little freaked out, thinking the cops are trying to entrap him, since a big-name attorney is involved.

The attorney, who had thought of the victim as her version of Bin Laden, makes a good case for not being the culprit (only a jerk). Enter FBI Agent Bowden, who had inserted himself into the case right before evidence in the case against the victim had been stolen. But why would he steal the evidence?

Kitty accidentally solves the case by barging in and grabbing the photo of the Pipz, although they haven't yet realized that the Pipz are the key.
Because he hasn't yet realized that he is about to solve the case, Sherlock does his version of becoming speechless over Kitty's actions.
Then Kitty makes a drug reference involving the popping of a few Pipz in order to take a nice nap, causing Sherlock to show his disgusted face for several seconds.
But this is the key they needed... the Pipz can be used as street drugs, so Agent Bowden stole the shipment of Pipz, then killed the two people who were causing the case to drag on in court. With the court proceedings finished, he could have at those Pipz.
Earlier, Sherlock had given a folder detailing what Kitty has been through. Joan attempts to return the folder to Kitty, but Kitty wants her to to read it so she can get a sense of who she is. Joan does so later that evening, over some fine wine.
"Just a Regular Irregular" opens with Kitty doing her best Sherlock impression: yelling "OPEN!!" at a door knock, and practicing the hitting of a dummy with her big stick. Watson is at the door, and she's wondering who on Earth is arguing with Sherlock in the other room.

It's Phil Simms, whom the viewers are apparently supposed to recognize as a football player, and they are arguing about some old circus murder involving a knife-thrower.  Apparently, Phil Simms is the best knife-thrower in the world (as himself). Not really, but it's fun to pretend, right?
Later, we see Harlan (remember "Solve for X," last season?) doing his shirtless math routine, and coming up with a big revelation, which leads him to a dead body.
Harlan says he and the dead guy were doing the same math puzzle hunt, which is supposed to lead to a big money prize. He knows some of the other people involved, which leads Sherlock and Harlan to their first suspect. She says she doesn't know the dead guy, but her dog treats prove otherwise. Sherlock takes a nibble of her rancid-cheese-flavored dog treats to prove that the woman they are questioning knows the victim, because the victim had crumbs of those nasty things in his pocket (which Sherlock had tasted, of course). She's innocent, but knows of a few more puzzle hunters.
Sherlock and Bell go off to speak with the most likely suspect, but he realllly doesn't want to talk. Sherlock then saves Bell from the man's ginormous bullet, finally resolving their issues from last season.
Turns out the psycho-math-gun-nerd was also on the puzzle hunt, but far enough behind the others that he was given a new clue, leading to a new death trap. Harlan gets to work solving the new puzzle, giving Kitty a front row seat to her first nerd-stripper show.
Finally, a man named Paul throws a nerd party, and tells Sherlock that a blogger named Mo Shellshocker is the killer. Seeing as how that is an anagram of Sherlock Holmes, Harlan is outed as the blogger. Everyone knows that he didn't do it though, so Sherlock discusses the case with Watson over Skype by sitting there, staring blankly at the screen while thinking.
Kitty once again solves the case indirectly by pointing out that Harlan is smarter than Sherlock gives him credit for, and points out some of the interesting things on his blog. Sherlock then has the revelation that it's Paul himself, who was searching for the owner of the blog. Harlan had shown how some lottery tickets could win 80% of the time using math, and Paul wanted to kill Harlan so he could keep hacking the lottery.
Meanwhile, Sherlock sees Joan's new apartment, and meets her new boyfriend. He is utterly unimpressed by the ordinary sights and sounds he encounters there.
We also learn that Kitty had been sexually abused, and Joan doesn't think Sherlock's use of her will be good for her in the long run. She insists that Kitty go to a support group. Kitty surprisingly agrees, and asks Joan for help. At the end of the episode, Joan is there for her, sitting right next to her at the meeting.
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