Thursday, January 15, 2015

'Elementary' 3x9 'The Eternity Injection' GifTweetCap: Sherlock Rudely Wakes Joan for Eternity!

"The Eternity Injection” episode of Elementary is a fantastic episode for Sherlock character development. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the case, which really starts to drag by the end of the episode. The following gifs are also available on this Tumblr post, and below is the Baker Street Podcast, which I co-host. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
First off, we finally get to see Alfredo again! Apparently, the reason we don't get to see him is because of Sherlock's boredom with recovery. Alfredo leaves his mark, however, leaving Sherlock with a new car-alarm nemesis named Odin.
Odin is a formidable opponent, as he will not allow anyone near without taking their photo, and notifying authorities if the possible thief does not back away within a short amount of time. Odin is one of the best secondary characters in this episode, and there are several of him hiding throughout Sherlock's home.
Sherlock soon steals another of Joan's clients who is looking for her missing friend Marissa. Both of them are nurses who used to work with Joan. Joan doesn't seem to mind so much, although she seems very concerned after hearing that Sherlock has been skipping drug abuse meetings.
Sherlock soon finds a dumpster nearby Marissa's last credit card charge. He digs through some malodorous garbage for a body, and guess what? He finds one!
Sherlock finds a list of five dosages for a drug on Marissa's body, and they also find that $150,000 was wired into her bank account from an ominous-sounding company called Purgatorium. DNA from her killer is also on the body, which leads to another body: Christopher Jacoby, her killer!
Jacoby also received $150,000, which leads Sherlock to conclude that Jacoby was part of an illegal drug trial for a drug that made him insane, and Marissa was the nurse who administered it. Unfortunately, there are four other victims of the trial, since there were five dosages on Marissa's list. Everyone forces Sherlock to write a treatise on Twilight and read it in the lobby of a convention hall in order to get the names of the other four people who received the wire transfers from Purgatorium.
Once he receives the names, Sherlock deduces that the drug involved time dilation because all the victims experienced similar time-dilating delusions. They are all dead or missing, presumably murdered by whoever ran the drug trial.
Before leaving, Odin strikes again, hitting Watson with his thundering complaints of standing too close.

They finally locate Louis Carlisle, the only living participant they can find. The only problem is that he's highly paranoid, and sporting a non-functioning hand.
Carlisle gives a sketch artist the description of the man he deemed to be in charge of the operation, and they find the man who fits the sketch working at a pharmaceutical company. His name is Dwyer Kirke.

Later, Sherlock finally gets honest with Joan, telling her how he truly feels about the daily grind of sobriety, and the monotony of maintaining it. It's all OK though, because his depression causes her to stay the night, and you know what that means...
The rude awakening returns in full-force with a bugle Reveille. That was a close call, but Sherlock will never relapse again if he can find new ways to wake Joan for the rest of his life. This is yet another reason for Joan to move back, although not for Joan's sake. No, for her it would be a way to torture herself.
Back to the case, Bell arrests Kirke, who regularly visits his ailing aunt. He would rather go to prison than give up the name of the man who set up the drug trial, which leads Sherlock to believe that it must be a private benefactor who paid for Kirke's aunt's care.
Turns out he's just some old fart who wants to take the drugs to live forever. Once he knows he's caught, he takes the drugs and goes to sleep so he can have some drawn-out freedom time before prison. Whatever! Maybe he'll dream about hell, but we'll never know: it's another of those open-ended cases. Highly unsatisfying.
But in better news, Sherkock defeats Odin with an EMP (electromagnetic pulse). In less-fantastic news, Joan offers to move back, but Sherlock refuses the offer, sort of. What the hell, Sherlock? Just say yes!
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Thursday, January 8, 2015

'Elementary' 3x8 'End of Watch' Gif-Tweet-Cap: A Nice Change of Pace

Elementary went serious with the episode "End of Watch." There was nothing funny to see here, but it was a nice change of pace. In fact, it was one of the best episodes of the series so far.
The following gifs are also available on this Tumblr post. I co-host the Baker Street Podcast as well, which you can hear below or find on iTunes.
We start with the murder of cop Alec Flynn. Sherlock makes a big scene of his first clue. Granted, it’s the most significant clue of the episode: the cop was carrying a fake gun.
Joan picks up on the next significant clue when she uses her sober companion knowledge to deduce that Alec had been an addict and sold all of his things for drug money. He had blamed his partner for getting into a car accident, in which he was injured and required addictive pain medicine. The partner is innocent, however, and we soon learn that Alec took his addiction way too far. In fact, Watson finds that Alec sold his own gun for drug money. Not only that, surveillance shows that he sold many other cop guns from the armory and replaced them with toys as well!
Meanwhile, Sherlock learns from a fellow drug abuse group member that all of his significant revelations concerning addiction have been posted on a Tumblr blog called "Brain Attic" (even the title is one of Sherlock's ideas). He spends much of his time and effort trying to fix the situation, leaving Joan to find most of the clues on the case.
After realizing that Alec had basically begun selling off guns to arms dealers, then trading that money with a drug runner known as "6," the other cops decide that Alec was not a cop after all. Perhaps he should not even be considered human.

Kitty comes up with a clue as well, noticing from a surveillance camera that the inhuman-cop killer has a glass eye. This leads to a man known as Buros. They are too late in finding him, however, and he kills another cop.
Back in the Brain Attic, Kitty helps Sherlock find the man responsible for destroying his help-group anonymity: a douchebag named Daren. He refuses to take down the site, even after Sherlock tells him directly that the site is threatening his own sobriety.
Daren the Douchebag is confronted more forcefully inside the group meeting room, where Sherlock threatens to tell his wife that he is cheating (based on clues he picks up while standing within make-out distance of him). This is one of the best scenes Jonny Lee Miller has ever delivered on Elementary. Excellent!
The second murdered cop turns out to be a legitimately good guy. Sherlock uses another of his odd brain exercises by sending blow-arrows through a photo of Buros, and the representation of Alec's drug runner.
Joan makes yet another connection, realizing that "6" is the number on a football jersey, leading to one of Alec's buddies from a football team. The only clue he provides is a quote from Buros: "There's more than one way to use a guy like Alec." With that, Sherlock concludes that Buros is raiding the armory while all the cops are at the funeral for the second cop he killed (Alec's funeral had been canceled on account of him being a sorry excuse for a human being).
Buros is successful with his raid, causing Sherlock to kick himself for being so preoccupied with Daren's plagiarism. Joan saves the day again though, connecting fibers left from Daren's boots with upholstery knives from one of his raided storage containers. Sherlock closes the loop with the realization that Buros was acting very quickly, as if he was on a deadline. The revelations remove truck and plane as possible modes of gun shipment, leaving cargo ship. Buros' gun shipment is located and taken down!
Later, the cops prove that they have a sense of humor when they arrest Buros with a knock knock joke.
But then they prove that they were only getting him in a light-hearted mood so that they could humiliate him entirely in front of the whole police force. Now he feels even more stupid for falling for that knock knock joke.
At the end of the episode, we see that Daren has taken down Brain Attic and replaced it with "I'M SORRY." Unfortunately, Sherlock still decides to quit sharing in his help group, at least for now. Poor Sherlock!
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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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