Here’s our take on Elementary‘s fourth season:
- “The Past is Parent” – 4.5
- “Evidence of Things Not Seen” – 4.5
- “Tag, You’re Me” – 7
- “All My Exes Live in Essex” – 5.5
- “The Games Underfoot” – 4
- “The Cost of Doing Business” – 5
- “Miss Taken” – 3.5
- “A Burden of Blood” – 5
- “Murder Ex Machina” – 4.5
- “ Alma Matters” – 5.5
- “Down Where the Dead Delight” – 6
- “A View with a Room” – 8
- “A Study in Charlotte” – 8
- “Who is that Masked Man” – 4.5
- “Up to Heaven and Down to Hell” – 6
- “Hounded” – 8
- “You’ve Got Me, Who’s Got You?” – 5.5
- “Ready or Not” – 7
- “All In” – 6.5
- “Art Imitates Art” – 5.5
- “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” – 4
- “Turn it Upside-Down” – 7
- “The Invisible Hand” – 1.5
- “A Difference in Kind” – 2
Elementary continues to entertain with complicated mysteries and the ongoing evolution of Sherlock and Joan’s partnership. This season’s ratings average out at a perfectly respectable 5.5, but it could have been better.
The big weight dragging this season down is the ongoing arc about the tangled relationship between Sherlock and his father Morland Holmes. Although John Noble gives a fantastic performance of Morland Holmes as a rich man who can’t quite buy off his own conscience, we are sick to death of stories about fathers and sons who don’t get along. The arc takes up too much oxygen in this season and leaves some episodes that otherwise had potential with not enough air to breathe.
The lowest episodes of the season are at the end, “The Invisible Hand” (1.5) and “A Difference in Kind” (2), a two-parter in which the Daddy Morland story crashes into the ongoing saga of Moriarty and her international network of evil. The collision of these storylines is poorly handled and ends up feeling perfunctory and more the product of the need for an “exciting” season finale than the internal logic of the characters involved.
For the best of the season, though, we have a trio of 8s, each of which stands alone and apart from the Morland drama: “A View with a Room,” in which Holmes investigates a video shot inside the headquarters of a violent biker gang, “A Study in Charlotte,” about a dead mushroom expert, and “Hounded,” in which a man is chased to death by what seems to be a glowing dog. Two of these episodes—“A Study in Charlotte” and “Hounded”—riff on classic Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles) in interesting ways, although “Hounded” is more faithful to the original while “Charlotte” just borrows some scene-setting. All three of them present Holmes and Watson with unusual problems—a video that seemingly couldn’t have been shot, a set of deaths that may have been accident or murder, and a phantom hound on the streets of Manhattan.
Apart from these episodes, though, most of this season is in the okay-but-not-great range between 4 and 6. This season is solid, but not exceptional. Still, the chemistry of the characters and the inventiveness of the mysteries keep Elementary afloat, as always.
Image: Sherlock and Joan consult a skeleton, from “All My Exes Live in Essex” via IMDb
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