What I’m Watching: Elementary

Elementary: Season 3, Episode 8 “End of Watch” (B-)

I’m really going back and forth on this show week to week. It’s never all that bad, but this episode was a rather slow moving and unengaging hour, focusing too much on a side of Sherlock that we don’t often see that doesn’t seem to jive with the rest of who he is as a person. Sherlock’s one sincere vice is his struggle with drug addiction, and it’s been a difficult process for him to talk about that. It doesn’t seem entirely plausible that someone would pay close enough attention to every word he said to write a blog with frequent posts directly quoting him, and the way that it played out didn’t speak to me. It is nice to see that Kitty has her mentor’s back and that she’s ready to go after him and force him to take down the blog but for the resistance of Sherlock, determined to take care of a private matter himself. The plot of this episode seems particularly poorly-timed with the tragic events that unfolded in New York City yesterday, though this seems almost simple in comparison to the complexity of the race issues at play in real life. The use of the murders as a diversion, and especially the second shooting following the revelation of the first victim’s addiction-driven activities, makes their deaths seem trivial, and I suspect that, had this episode aired today or yesterday rather than late last week, CBS would have opted to pull it for fear of truly terrible associations.