This episode was pretty solid! It didn't overwhelm me with awesomeness or anything, but I greatly enjoyed it. Let's get started.
Cons:
The subplot this week was good, but it felt very disconnected from the main plot. Basically, it featured a woman doing research on Joan out of revenge for Joan poking around in police officer's lives. This woman, Cortez, doesn't think it's Joan's business. I thought this plot thread had a lot of potential, and it actually could have been a main focus for an episode or two. But instead of exploring it to its full potential, it was wrapped up too quickly, and didn't connect to the episode's main story.
And speaking of main stories, I'm not convinced that anything in this episode had anything at all to do with the A-plot. That's fine in theory, but with a long season like this, it's disheartening to lose momentum for the main event. There was only one very small mention of the elder Mr. Holmes this week.
Pros:
The case itself was quite interesting. Essentially, a woman goes missing and Sherlock and Joan discover her body in the hospital where she worked. Only it's not a body like one would expect to find - she'd been stripped of her skin and organs, and her skeleton had been polished clean and displayed like a classroom teaching aid. The suspects include her two husbands - turns out, she's in a polyamorous relationship with two men. The three of them appeared to be on good terms. For a while it looks like maybe one of the people in her previous polyamorous relationship killed her, because she was on bad terms with them. But things loop back around - turns out, one of her husbands killed her for discovering his secret - he was giving chemo to patients without cancer to up his survival rate and make more money.
I enjoyed all of the twists and turns here - I must say, the skeleton thing was pretty clever! Also, I appreciated this episode's take on polyamory. I mean, the victim's relationship wasn't exactly a good one, given that one of her husbands killed her, but we did see a stable polyamorous relationship in this episode, and I liked the way it was treated as a totally viable choice. Also, the villainy of the bad guy was pretty extreme, in a good way. Not only was he scamming people out of money and health by telling them they had cancer when they didn't... he also went ahead and killed his wife and then displayed her skeleton as an effort to hide the truth. Yikes!
Like I said before, the subplot was really interesting, if underutilized. I liked the way it started, as Joan gets a call from a friend saying that somebody was checking in on her. As Joan does some poking around, she finds out the truth. Things are settled, in the end, with a fight. Joan and Cortez enter the ring and box it out. Although Joan takes a few sharp hits, she wins the fight and wins Cortez' respect in the bargain. I've always admired Elementary for taking on some tough topics when it comes to the police department and its politics. The cops are not always painted as unambiguously upstanding. There's a lot of corruption, and there's this whole "we protect our own" attitude that's very damaging.
In addition, I loved that Sherlock let Joan have her own space to work out what was going on. He was attentive and checked in with Joan, but he let her do her own digging. And then, when she gets hurt fighting Cortez, he's there with a home remedy for her black eye and ice for her bruised knuckles. Aww! These two are amazing partners.
On the Joan & Sherlock relationship front, I also have to mention the way this episode began. Sherlock and Joan are both handcuffed and trying to break free. Sherlock breaks free, but before he can be too smug, Joan manages to succeed as well. This scene was awesome - it really puts the two of them on more equal footing, and it was quite funny, to boot!
That's all I've got! This was quite a good episode.
8/10
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