ELEMENTARY Recap: Child Predator

I don’t know if it is because I have a child or if it is just common decency but child predator cases really creep me out. That being said, this week’s episode of Elementary is about a child predator nicknamed Balloon Man.

We start in 2005 with a guy taking a child on his way to school. The reason they call him the Balloon Man is he leaves a bunch of Thank You balloons from where he abducts the child. That’s just not okay.

At home a shirtless Holmes is going over an open serial case, something he sometimes does. It is the case of the boy that we saw get abducted a moment ago.
-Side note I wonder how many of those tattoos are Johnny Lee Millers.

Watson remembers the case and as of last night the Balloon Man took his seventh victim. Holmes of course gets called in to consult on the case. He checks out the residence and speaks with the parents. They take him surprisingly well considering he thwarts their attempt to do a TV plea for their abducted daughter.

Holmes finds a bottle of wine in the fridge and calls out the Dad as a liar. The Father said he was at the bodega around the corner buying wine when his daughter went missing. The price tag is on the wrong part of the bottle to be sold at a bodega so where was her really? The Dad looks shocked and ready to deny it but Holmes lays it all out of him, he was with his mistress. He admits meeting up with his mistress on the street but only for a moment.

Holmes sits in on the questioning of the mistress. She did see a car run a red light, it could have been Balloon Man. The car was actually a van, a dark brown van.
Watson, Holmes and Detective Bell go back to the neighborhood to canvas for someone who might have seen a brown van. They conveniently find paint transfer which shows the van while now brown used to be blue and white like a decommissioned police van.
They get a hit on the BOLO for the van and they chase after it. A guy in a hooded sweatshirt jumps out and tries to run but is caught. He is way too young to be Balloon Man.
Thanks to a birth mark on the guy it is determined he is in fact the first victim of Balloon Man, Adam.

Back at the precinct they try to question Adam but he doesn’t say anything. He is clearly traumatized and might sympathize with his captor. Holmes wants to question Adam, but the Captain is a little hesitant due to Holmes less than delicate nature. He gives in though and Holmes sits down with Adam. Holmes starts talking about his childhood and a child who picked on him at boarding school. He makes a point that Adam seems to resonate with Adam.
“Funny the things we do for the people we care about.”
Adam opens up to Holmes but his parents get there and ask for a lawyer. The questions stop there.

Watson and Holmes go home to go through all of the files from the previous abductions to see if they can find something they may have missed earlier.
The next morning Watson is asleep but Holmes is wide awake and seems to think he has a lead. He thinks Balloon Man was an exterminator and now a paper delivery guy. He finds a name match in the files. Samuel Abbot.

SWAT goes to the apartment listed on his driver’s license but it is empty except for congratulations balloons left for the cops with a flash drive attached. The flash drive contains a video of Samuel, he wants Adam back. He calls him his son before panning over to the missing girl crying on the bed.

The missing girls parents are in the police station requesting the trade be made for their daughter. Obviously the Captain says they can’t do that. The parents storm out.
Holmes goes back in to talk to Adam, he isn’t a cop and therefor can talk to him without a lawyer. Holmes tries to reason with Adam, you loved your Dad but you didn’t love what he did. Adam starts to cry and open up. Holmes is honest with Adam and in the end Adam tells Holmes he will sign the immunity papers and tell the police everything.

The cops find Samuel and the missing girl just moments before Samuel takes his own life. Holmes is standing over Samuel looking at him thoughtfully when he hears a sound he follows it to a broken window in Samuel’s bedroom. Holmes announces that Samuel is not the Balloon Man.

Holmes is in Adam’s bedroom to confront him. He says his room at Samuel’s apartment, the room where he says he cut his hand on the window, was furnished and cozy whereas Samuels’s room was a dirty mattress on the floor. He tells Adam he knows he is Balloon Man, he occupied the master bedroom because he was the master. Holmes is begrudgingly impressed that Adam tricked him and turned the tables on Samuel.
I have said these child predator shows are creepy, right?

Back at his house Holmes is throwing a knife into the wall where he has the immunity papers pasted up. He has back pain from doing squats to stay awake and not sleeping. Then something comes to him.
The next morning he finds Adam in the park watching kids. Holmes asks him about his 5th victim, Billy. When they found Billy’s body there was skin under his nails, and it matches Adam’s DNA. The wording of the immunity deal states that Adam is immune for crimes he committed with Balloon Man, except Balloon Man was in traction in the hospital recovering from surgery at the time of Billy’s abduction and death. Adam starts to look a little worried. See this is what happens when you think you are smarter than everything else and you get cocky. The police are there to take him into custody.

At the end of the episode Watson takes Sherlock’s files and makes him get some rest, he hadn’t slept the whole episode.

Watson Holmes relationship needs to be touched on for a second. This is the first episode where Holmes actually acknowledges that Watson is helping him and he might need her. I’m glad because they are a great team and with the showrunners saying they will never be a will they won’t they couple it makes for a nice working relationship.

Elementary airs 10/9c on CBS