This show is still the guy I would LIKE to fall in love with and he keeps telling me, "Kid, I'm no good for you." And he's right. The mystery plots are still stupidly convoluted with the killer's motivations being completely boilerplate and the acting (again, relating to the mysteries) being geneerally MEH! at best.
For instance....even if I was wrong about the actual outcome, I figure the father in Dirty Laundry had to be a bad guy simply because he was played by the same actor who plays, Duck Phillips on Mad Men and that bastard abandoned Chauncey, the beautiful Irish Setter onto the streets of New York. I also called early on that the daughter would be the killer. Again, I got plot-twisted out of it, but the plot twist out of it was less than believable, and honestly, I refuse to believe that the EEEEVIL spy handler will somehow NOT be swapped because of one murder.
M felt incredibly rushed to me. I could believe it ended where and when it did. Nothing seemed to really happen except Vinnie Jones (literally) walking out of a Guy Ritchie movie (although not a Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie) and a bit of tastefully edited torture porn. I get that Holmes is ONLY fixated on who is behind Irene's death (and I do love that) however the idea that this is so much more important than his over-all quest for justice, so that "I'm not a serial killer, I'm an assassin" gets him off the hook, doesn't quite work for me. I do sort of see where "justice" in the abstract is less important than the puzzles, a la House. House only hates when the patient dies because it means he didn't solve the puzzle in time. Holmes needs to be right more than he actually cares about most crimes, but the morality skew in this case just didn't ring true to me. In fact the whole episode just felt like a place-holder, including Watson's angst over leaving.
I LIKE the sober-companion set-up, but the fact that it was put in place with a "sell-by" date AND the fact that she IS Watson, puts everybody in a awkward position because from an *ahem* Doylist perspective, we know she can't leave, but everyone in-universe has to pretend she might, even if they all seem to know better as well.
However, I'm willing to forgive all of that and yet another ludicrous plot set-up in The Red Team, because yeah, baby, I'm shipping Holmes/Gregson and Aidan Quinn brought all kinds of slashy/angry/hurt/betrayed sexy angst this week and kind of forced JLM to play to his level and it rocked. So even though I had a hard time believing the specifics, the emotions did work for me, right down to the OUCH of the punch. I am more sure than ever, even if it's my own tin-hat, batshit fanon that SOMETHING happened in London. Probably before Irene. In fact, it stopped because of Irene. If and when I ever write this, it's going to be a delicious angst supreme parfait.
I loved the bar scene, because among other things, it showed that Elementary actually takes the idea of drug addiction AND alcoholism seriously. (If you've read my House babbles, you know this was and is a very sore point with me. To reiterate....Greg House was clearly a drug addict and an alcoholic and yet when he was supposedly clean, he was blatantly using alcohol and it was NEVER raised as an issue.) Holmes claimes he's in no danger of relapse and yet he KNOWS he shouldn't be in a bar. That a casual drink is not and can never be an option. I LOVED THAT. The fact that Gregson chose to put him in that situation, knowing what he does...well that's the depth of the hurt and that's the core of a good ol' K-gal angsty slash ship.
I know you're no good for me, but I just can't stay away.