Elementary flatlines as Sherlock takes on a killer in a hospital.

The episode opens rather bizarrely with Sherlock (Jonny Lee Miller) choking corpses in a mortuary to look at the bruising. This is very reminiscent of the scene in BBC’s Sherlock where Sherlock whips a dead body. I’m not saying Elementary is copying I’m sure it happened in Conan Doyle’s books; Anyway this provides us with a look at Sherlock’s disturbed nature, that hasn’t really gone as far as yet in this series. One corpse appears to have died of a heart attack but Sherlock and Watson (Lucy Liu) work out that it was in fact murder using their combined medical knowledge. The investigation takes them to a hospital where they wort out an “Angel Of Death” is walking the wards killing the terminally ill.  

Sherlock tells Watson to trust her gut instinct when she bumps into an old hospital colleague and spots something that might be wrong with her patient. This is also true of this weeks case. I guessed it was the Janitor fairly early on, with not that many suspects to choose from and being sent down a blind alley with one of the suspects who was just guilty of stealing drugs it’s never the person we’re made to think it is. I find this case far too similar to last weeks where a secretary was guilty of the murders at a bank, again it’s wasnt one of the main staff but someone who can go around unnoticed. There was however another twist with one of the surgeons manipulating the murderer to kill one of his patients he messed up on, another death would have ended his career. By this point I was looking to see how long was left of the episode.

There was a sub plot of Joan helping out her old colleague by diagnosing an illness that she hadn’t noticed in one of her patients that could have killed her if gone untested. Joan turns out to be right and she stops her old colleague from going through what she went through. We learn a little more about why Joan left her medical career but it’s not very interesting if I’m honest, it’s difficult to care. Liu is definitely the week link in this series leaving Miller to carry it. There is a lot of medical jargon that went right over my head and I didn’t really get how Sherlock worked out it was murder at the start but I went along with it and managed to keep up with the case from there on. Definitely not the strongest episode of Elementary, maybe a change from the case of the week is needed or at least a less obvious one. Other detective shows, my personal favourite ‘Monk’ for example which ran for eight seasons and despite having an arc running throughout pretty much delivered the case of the week every episode and managed to keep things fresh.

Elementary is missing the clever cases that Sherlock Holmes should solving. If I can work it out before him then there’s something not quite right. Hopefully this is just a blip in what has been a rather enjoyable series so far.