What I’m Watching: Elementary

Elementary: Season 3, Episode 21 “Under My Skin” (B+)

I’ve always been a fan of Alfredo, and it’s good to see him as a focus of sorts for this episode. He didn’t actually appear all that much, but he was a part of the hour’s most poignant scene. Telling Sherlock that they weren’t friends prompted a very interesting response from the police consultant who doesn’t tend to value personal relationships. His willingness to can Alfredo as his sponsor so that he could invest instead in their friendship and helping to ensure that he didn’t get sent to prison or slip back into addiction was sweet, and it prompted an immediate reply from Alfredo that wasn’t terribly warm but indicated an acceptance of the dissolution of their professional connection and a transformation into a personal one. The main case was a fearsome one with a scared injured woman pleading for her life to no avail when her paramedics were shot because she too was killed and left with no organs. It’s a worrisome concept to think that people fly to foreign countries for weight loss surgeries only to be unknowingly outfitted as drug mules. As a plotline on this show, it was very effective, and served as one of the more involving recent mysteries. This show has been featuring the actual commission of a crime at the start of a number of episodes this season, and I like that as a device to introduce the case since it provides some important information but still leaves plenty to be deduced over the course of the episode.