Line #8 Headscratchers/Elementary


1	Headscratchers for ''Series/{{Elementary}}''.
2	----
3	* How can Holmes possibly have the legal authority to do some of the things he does? It's one thing when he's called to a crime scene after the police have already locked it down, but sometimes he speaks to witnesses/suspects without an officer present, or enters and searches people's homes for evidence without a warrant or even letting the police know he's doing it until afterward. Realistically, shouldn't this be causing loads of trouble for the NYPD?
4	** As of season 3 it's been made clear that Holmes ''doesn't'' have the authority, and his antics ''do'' cause loads of trouble for the NYPD and stir up no small amount of bad feeling as a result.
5	* For that matter, what is Gregson's position? He is stated to work at the Eleventh Precinct, but seems to take cases all over the city without raising questions of jurisdiction.
6	** Gregson works for the Major Crimes unit (or a similar name to that.) As it would be, his jurisdiction should be the entire city. Presumably, the precinct is merely a designation for that unit, given that there is no actual 11th precinct in the NYPD.
7	* I liked the episode "The Long Fuse", but one thing I wonder is why couldn't the villain remove the bomb from the vents? The episode established she had construction skills by how she boarded up a corpse in the walls of his home.
8	** I think she just didn't have the opportunity. It was in the middle of a busy office after all. Once she planted it she never had a window to come back and remove it after it failed to detonate. She figured if someone found the bomb later the police would just assume (after an initial scare) that it was planted by one of the eco-terrorists that were sending her company threats. Rather clever plan, all things considered.
9	** I find the real headscratcher in that episode to be how they treated the handwriting comparison (from a crossword puzzle, even) as the damning evidence, when it would be circumstancial at best. They really didn't have much evidence that the villains lawyers wouldn't be able to tear to shreds in court, did they?
10	*** Not really, ''but'', on a certain level it is still truth in television. It's semi-standard procedure for the police to act like their evidence is super-solid when talking to a suspect. The idea is that if they can make the suspect think the evidence is unimpeachable then they'll just confess immediately in the hopes of getting a favorable deal.
11	** Another major headscratcher in that episode: the murderer has killed her victim, and since the guy's wife is in UsefulNotes/{{India}}, she has plenty of time to dispose the body with no one noticing. Now, if she would've just dumped the body into the sea or buried it, no one would know why the guy vanished. Since the guy had no apparent enemies, the cops might've ruled it as a suicide (which indeed seems to be the case before the body was found). But what does the murderer do? She ''tears down the wall of the victim's apartment, hides the body inside, and rebuilds the wall so the wife won't notice'', something which must've taken her quite a bit of time and effort. (What if one of the neighbours had come to complain about the noise while she was doing it?) Now, this is pretty much the stupidest way one can think of to dispose a body. What if the wife had noticed the bulge in the wall, and the fact that the picture frames on it had been moved? What if the stench of the rotting body began to seep through the wall? What if the the wife simply decided to renovate the apartment? Since the murderer clearly had time to think about what to do with the body, how on earth did she come up with an incredibly stupid solution like this?
12	*** She wasn't a professional criminal and wasn't thinking straight. She presumably concluded that moving the body would be too risky and figured out a way to hide it without ever having to take it out the house. It was a stupid option but it's the sort of thing someone might think of while panicking a bit. I'd guess a few days later she probably came up with a bunch of better ideas but by then the wife was back so she just had to leave it.
13	* I don't understand how Sherlock figured out in "Dirty Laundry" that the couple were spies. The Russian traditions (though I've heard that many of them are more like folk tales) seem to be made too much of a deal of, and while they may show nationality, they may as well simply like the traditions or just happen to have some spare change around the place. I don't see how, in a post-UsefulNotes/ColdWar setting, that should make them spies.
14	** He figured out they were spies based on the videos the wife was recording from the delegates and various important figures. He figured they were Russian or at least of Slavic origin by those traditions.
15	* One thing I never truly understood, even upon rewatch: in "The Woman", how did Sherlock come the conclusion to that Irene was working for Moriarty just going by her missing birth marks?
16	** Getting a birth mark removed isn't something a captive being subjected to psychological torture would do or be able to do and, given that she had those birth marks the day before her death, the only time Irene could have had that birth mark removed was ''when'' she was a captive being subjected to psychological torture. Moriarty wouldn't care enough about a captive to either have it removed at all or to have it removed in a non-messy hospital-grade fashion (if it was truly threatening her life ''and'' Moriarty wanted to keep the bargaining chip of Irene). Therefore, Irene wasn't the imprisoned victim she presented herself as and, if she wasn't imprisoned, the only reason to allow Sherlock to believe she was still deceased would be if she was doing so at Moriarty's behest.
17	* Irene Adler is believed to be killed by M, which means that a huge pool of her blood was found in her apartment. If she is alive, then how did she manage to fake 5,6 liters of her own blood, and fool Sherlock with it?
18	** She extracted (or had someone extract) her own blood, spaced out to give herself time to replenish it for future extractions, gathered enough that finding such a volume of blood would make it nigh impossible for any police authority (even Sherlock) to consider her alive and kept it in cold storage until she had Moran bring it over and dump it on her floor. Boom, instant crime scene. It's a super common way of faking your own death in fiction.
19	*** They had to make some tests, and Sherlock should be smart enough to notice that the blood wasn't fresh, but stored for a long time in some cold place.
20	*** If you consider that Irene was the most important person in his life and she just disappeared when the blood was all over her living room, his emotions dominated him and he was unable to make a precise deduction. Also, she always had contacts within the police. Sherlock is not the one who does the lab tests. She could very easily fake a result using her human resources.
21	*** We also saw demonstrated on screen in 'Possibility Two' (which, given it was early in Season 1, would canonically have taken place only a couple years after Irene's fake death), that a sufficiently knowledgeable expert with the proper equipment can easily doctor blood to fool a police DNA test.
22	** Remember the locked room and her secret project? It's possible she was storing everything there, blood included.
23	** Who says it was her blood? “Irene Adler” isn’t a real person, so there’s nothing to compare the blood to for a DNA test to show it’s “Irene’s” blood or not. Besides, M already has an MO: he kills people in their own homes. If you see a pool of blood in Irene’s home and no Irene, you don’t need to do a DNA test to check it’s really her blood. They could get the blood from any human woman and dump it and there would be no way of knowing whose it really was.
24	* Why is Elementary!Mycroft so utterly different from his canon self? There's no evidence of him being able to outdo Sherlock in a SherlockScan competition. He isn't an unacknowledged cornerstone of the government. He isn't antisocial. He isn't so utterly fixed in his ways that seeing him ''anywhere'' other than his residence, his job, or his club is a spectacularly unusual occurrence. The only thing Elementary!Mycroft has in common with the original is the name and his (former) weight.
25	** He's set for a recurring role in the second season. It's likely the other part of his life will make an appearance then. Perhaps his French conversation was government related.
26	** And even if the above statement doesn't come to pass, although it's quite possible, this is a show that has not been the most faithful to canon versions of the characters, Joan and Moriarty for instance.
27	** Also, canon does mention that Mycroft is lazy (or at least Sherlock perceived him as such).
28	** It's also possible that, like Elementary!Lestrade (Who is shown to ''have been'' exactly like his canonical self until Holmes left London and he ended up as the {{Deconstruction}} of his own character he is now), he ''used to be'' like his canonical self until Holmes left London [[spoiler: His severe cancer being to blame for such changes.]]
29	** In the books, Mycroft did some light work for the government. The accounts. Occasionally. It was extrapolated in adaptations that he was a precursor to M/the British Government/Mi6, because that gives his character a bit more to do. It appears Mycroft has been LostInImitation.
30	*** "You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he ''is'' the British government." Sherlock on Mycroft, ''The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.'' Though he wasn't in intelligence. His job was to be omniscient. If an issue concerned multiple departments, any number of people in each department might be able to explain how the issue impacted them, but Mycroft would be able to explain that for all of relevant departments, and how their interests and issues interacted to form the big picture.
31	** It actually looks like they transferred several of Mycroft's original characteristics to Holmes' father (his emails even list him as M. Holmes).
32	** Going by recent episodes, Mycroft may be more like his book self than previously seen. Keeping that hidden from the audience is actually a stroke in the creators' favor, really.
33	* How in the hell did Holmes predict three plays in a row of a baseball game in the Pilot? No matter how good you are at statistics and deduction, the outcome of an individual play is subject to chance. Just because a player statistically should, for example, pop up to center does not mean that he will. And if you tell me that it was a recording, then I'll tell you that Watson would have no reason to insist on staying to watch it if it was something she could have returned to anytime she wanted.
34	** He made predictions based on probability and was, in this case, right. He could easily have been wrong, yes, but he knew the odds and, given as he said he does enjoy the sport from an analytical standpoint, quite possibly knew the players and their personal tendencies. So he made a call that was reasonably likely and happened to be correct. If he'd been wrong Watson would have just written it off as him lying to get her to leave so he had little to lose by trying.
35	* How do they justify the idea that there's not enough evidence to even hold Michael when he returns for the season 6 finale? Even writing off his admission to Sherlock as a he-said/he-said, there's a direct link between him and the woman he killed earlier in the season (Hannah Gregson's roommate) and from her to the earlier victims.
36	** Linking him to them, yes. Linking him to their murders, no. Knowing a murder victim is suggestive under certain circumstances but it is not itself illegal.

Context Headscratchers / Elementary