What I’m Watching: Elementary

Elementary: Season 3, Episode 6 “Terra Pericolosa” (B-)

This is currently my only Thursday night show (until certain NBC series return), and I’m rapidly losing interest. It’s not that it’s gotten bad, but it’s lost much of the flair and originality that initially made it so watchable. In theory, hunting down a rare map and the many people interested in it should have been interesting, but it just didn’t grab me the way that it should have. It did feature one recognizable guest star, Maggie Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep and former star of “Emily Owens, M.D.” and “Extant,” which will return next summer, and, as tends to be the case when there is just one familiar face in a given episode, she deserved far more suspicion than others interviewed. This hour had a lot to do with the relationship between Kitty and Sherlock and how Watson perceives it to be inappropriate and problematic, since Sherlock is calculating and manipulative in how he ensures that Kitty will be at his beck and call, always working hard to get his approval. Fortunately, they did come to a good understanding with it, as Sherlock recognized that he was keeping Kitty at arm’s length because he didn’t want her to get hurt, and she deserved to be in charge of her own life. While Sherlock and Kitty’s relationship is only getting better, I think it’s not doing good things for how Sherlock and Watson get along, forcing Watson to exist again only in relationship to Sherlock, which isn’t nearly as compelling as when she gets to be her own person.