Elementary Revisited

In 2013 and 2014, I reviewed the first season of “Elementary” on my other blog and decided not to follow the series from then onward, going with BBCs “Sherlock” instead. After “Sherlock” jumped the megalodon (you can’t call the last episode of season 4 with a character who is so highly intelligent and insane she controls others by thought just jumping your regular, old shark), I have decided to give “Elementary” a second try. I was not disappointed.

I did enjoy the first season (which I finished watching just now) and I’m now looking forward to more of this Sherlock. I do enjoy the changes very much and they go a lot further (and are a lot more interesting) than in “Sherlock.”

One of the most obvious changes was, of course, the new location: New York City. Moving the stories from London across the Atlantic is an interesting move. However, since Sherlock has already lived there for a while, he clearly has acclimatized and that means he can do his stuff there just as well as in London.

The second very obvious change was the one from John Watson to Joan Watson. I fully approve of that change and have approved of it the first time I started watching as well. Why? Well, why not? Joan is a great character, played with a lot of nuances, and she dresses more suitably than quite some women in crime series I’ve seen. Still too many high heels, but it will probably take at least a century to get TV and movie productions to finally give their female characters more realistic shoes for their jobs, especially if they’re doing a lot of walking, running, or climbing (or crime investigation).

What else is new? For one thing, this Sherlock is very much into sex (which is a huge change from the original), but he’s not really into relationships (although the first season also tells us why). He’s a former drug addict, which is not really new, but it’s what brings Sherlock and Watson together: she comes into his life as a former surgeon who is now helping people through their rehabilitation phase. It’s not what keeps them together, though, her mandate ends around the half-season mark - which is when the main theme of the second half of the season picks up: Moriarty.

And that is the greatest and best change of this series. Don’t misunderstand me, I think Andrew Scott does a more than stellar job of portraying Moriarty in “Sherlock.” He’s a pleasure to watch on the screen and his turning up in “The Abominable Bride” is definitely one of the best things about the whole movie. But “Elementary” does something I wish would have been done before: it makes Moriarty a woman and fuses her with Irene Adler. I will have to say a few things about Irene further down the road, but for the moment, let’s look at the first part of this sentence again: Moriarty is a woman. Not only is Watson a woman in this series, no, the negative version of Sherlock Holmes is a woman as well. And it works out wonderfully, the audience is completely in the dark about it for a long, long time.

Another nice change is that Sherlock really teaches Watson how to be a detective, once she stops being his guardian. He doesn’t act like you often see, talking her down when she makes a mistake - he explains the mistake and what she missed or should have looked at more closely. He soon trusts her to do her own investigations, too. It’s very nice to see them work together as apprentice and master - and I hope they’ll become something akin to equals (Sherlock will probably always be a little better) in future seasons (which I will get my hands on now as well). It’s nice to see Joan Watson grow into her role - against friends and Gregson, all of whom try to talk her out of it, because of the dangers.

Not to mention that the season also includes one of my favourite bald-headed people, Arnold Vosloo (formerly known as Imhotep the Mummy), and my new entry to that list, Vinnie Jones (here known as serial killer M/Sebastian Moran). Even though I’m still a little pissed that they went with a very cliché hitman for the series (Vinnie Jones’ Moran does look very much like, say, Agent 47 or the aging hitman Vosloo played in a double episode of “Bones”), it’s a pleasure to see Vinnie Jones in that role. Moran is often reduced to Moriarty’s right hand who comes back to kill Holmes several years after his master’s death (since “The Empty House” is the only story he features in - and the premise here is thin), but in this series, he’s just one of the different killers Moriarty employs, although the first one Sherlock meets and the one who gives Sherlock the name of his enemy. He also gets something of a redemption (not arc, but moment) when he kills himself, because Moriarty threatens to kill his sister otherwise. Vosloo as the reluctant killer (who does it to save his daughter’s life) is also wonderful to watch - you can’t go wrong with a guy who can even make a CGI mummy look like it has feelings. It also was a great idea to introduce M, the first villain from classic Sherlock Holmes material, at the half-time mark of the season, then bring him back in as the grand finale approaches (I’m pretty sure he had fun in jail during the time in between).

Names from the novels and stories are thrown in during the series, like ‘Stapleton’ as an alias towards the end of the season - the name of the murderer in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” - or Musgrave as a person who suggested Sherlock to a client. The series doesn’t rely on the original stories, though, but is a very well-made police procedural. While that originally put me off a little (after the excellent “A Study in Pink,” can you really blame me?), I enjoy it a lot now, because it means I really don’t know what will happen in any given episode. New stories, new team, much more competent Gregson, which is much better to look at. While the original stories often give the impression that the policemen aren’t really up to the job, I’d rather say they’re not Sherlock Holmes - which isn’t bad as a such. Gregson is a competent man, as is his colleague Bell, but both also know that there are situations when Sherlock’s very strong mind can come in handy. That’s why he works as a consulting detective for them.

Back to Irene, then. At first, I liked the idea of keeping Irene Adler, whose role in the original stories is blown out of context in most movies and series, in Sherlock’s past, so him finding her as the finale picks up did throw me off a bit. Especially as it looked as if they played into the trope of torturing/killing a girlfriend (first, Irene is supposed to be dead, then she turns up, clearly psychologically tormented) for the advancement of the hero. But then the series did something that had me jumping up and down with glee: they turned Irene into Moriarty. Grouping them (her as a femme fatale working for him) is not a new idea, but it’s the first time I’ve seen a female version of Moriarty (which I would always have liked, especially with Sherlock often admitting he doesn’t understand women) and this version was known to him as Irene Adler who had a relationship with him. A relationship which drove him into drugs when she disappeared, seemingly killed by the serial killer M.

I love how Moriarty is portrayed in the two episodes in which we see her (one of them is her pretending to be emotionally tormented Irene, but I like the second one better). Cold-blooded, clear-minded, manipulating, calculating. She might not be a professor of mathematics, but she surely has a mind to rival Sherlock’s. In the end, it’s her drive to prove herself superior to him which does her in - a fitting idea, since that would also work with a man and is not one of those things you usually see female villains fall over. Seeing her complex network develop towards the end of the season, once Sherlock and Watson start to look around, is very impressive. Moriarty is clearly in control of a large organisation which she uses as she sees fit. If an employee becomes a problem, they’re removed - if necessary, even by forcing them to do so themselves (as she does with Moran, having Sherlock unknowingly relying the message that if he doesn’t kill himself, his sister will die). Now, however, I want to pit Moran’s sister against Moriarty, that could be fun (would it be so farfetched that Ms. Moran, too, is a good killer?).

Was the first season of “Elementary” without flaws? Surely not. But neither was any season of “Sherlock” I’ve seen. With a little more distance to the originals, the series is really good and I’m looking forward to the other seasons. I want to see Watson growing more into herself as a detective and her and Sherlock become an even better team. I want to learn more about Sherlock’s background. And I want to see more of their cases.