Elementary, “While You Were Sleeping” Recap: Twins are weird. Period.

By Caroline Evans

[Join Caroline each week for her recaps of Elementary. This girl knows her Sherlock.]

Elementary dug into my fear of twins last night, pairing them up with a murder mystery involving shots to the head, a coma patient and the smell of women’s deodorant. Yeah, I said it. Twins are scary. As kids they’re cute (barring any appearances in The Shining), and they can dress alike and look all adorable and stuff. But when they grow up and start talking in that secret language they created in the cradle, and if they continue to dress alike, it gets weird.

The MOTW (mystery of the week): Holmes and Watson investigate a pair of murders in which the victims appear to have been sisters and in which the scent of women’s deodorant hangs in the air (I’m calling B.S. What women’s deodorant is strong enough to hang in the air for several hours?). The murders are traced to Yvette Ellison, an heiress whose appearance checks out witnesses’ accounts, but is, conveniently, in a coma. While Holmes attempts to find a needle to figure out whether she is faking, Watson takes the more practical and less dramatic “hold-the-hand-over-the-face-and-drop-it” approach to verify the coma. Holmes and Watson then suspect Yvette’s twin Rebecca, disguised as Yvette, of killing the two women in an attempt to keep them from claiming the fortune the two legitimate daughters recently inherited. But that trail comes up cold. While listening to a woman talk about a relationship that went south because of her drug problem (Holmes and Watson were sitting in an NA meeting at the time), Holmes is hit with an epiphany and rushes to the hospital room, where he announces in front of everyone that there was one more illegitimate child and, strangely, her address. Then he punches a police officer. And then he’s arrested.

I guess it wasn’t that strange because what is revealed is that Yvette’s coma was medically induced by her doctor, also her lover and partner-in-crime. Yvette heads to the address to kill her half-sister, only to discover that the whole thing was a setup.

The verdict: The show is still finding its footing, and the plot was pretty predictable, but it is refreshing to see a procedural in which the detectives actually rely on detective work rather than flashy technology. I enjoyed seeing Watson use her medical expertise in this episode, and I hope that element will continue. Still the odd friendship between Holmes and Watson is still lacking. What is essentially needed is a friendship on par with that of Greg House and James Wilson, which is very difficult to do in general and especially difficult with members of the opposite sex.

The Sherlock Factor: Like my estimable colleague, John Everett, I am a dedicated Sherlockian (I belong to a club and everything). But unlike John, who reviewed the pilot for this site, I welcome non-canon interpretations of the Sherlock Holmes series that breathe new life into what had until recently become a worn and staid character (see The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, or for a real mindfuck, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story). Unfortunately, this show is not one of those interpretations. But man, does it try. This episode saw the introduction of Holmes’s violin, and we heard his Victorian assertion that the mind is like an attic, with finite room that he has to clear out to make way for new knowledge. When Watson says the brain doesn’t work like that, and we know because we’re not Victorians anymore, Holmes simply replies “mine does.”

This is the inherent problem with this series, as well as the wildly popular Sherlock series on PBS. As clever as we might think it is to take Holmes out of his time and place and plonk him down into our own, an essential part of him will be absent: Victorian London. Sherlock is a little better, because it reworks some of the original stories into the modern day, but both shows play out for Sherlockians like one-third of the main cast is missing. Can you imagine a modern day where Sherlock Holmes is showing up for the first time? I can’t.