ELEMENTARY Recap: You Do It To Yourself

Sherlock is sick, fever and all. That doesn’t stop him from taking a case though. He shows up at the abandoned warehouse where a man with no ID is dead and his eyes are gone. Holmes does his thing and deduces the man is a professor of East Asian Studies. Detective Bell seems skeptical but at least he doesn’t say anything.

They go visit the widow of the professor when Watson gets a call from Rikers. She takes the call from a guy named Liam while Detective Bell and Sherlock continue talking to the widow.
Detective Bell and Sherlock head to Garrison University to talk to the professors colleagues while Watson heads to Rikers to see her old client.
They check out his office and Sherlock notices how small it is, Sherlock doe some more of his voodoo and deduces the professor was at a gaming parlor last night. That is why he picked the office with the number 13 on the door. Same as his apartment number and the last numbers of his cell phone apparently. In Asian cultures 13 is a lucky number.

At Rikers Liam needs Joan’s help. Liam says he is accused of a hit and run. He doesn’t think he did it though. He may have been high but he would have known if he had hit someone. He wants her to put a good word in with her friend at the D.A. She says no. His parting shot, “You treat all the guys you slept with this nice or just me?” So maybe he wasn’t just a client.

Watson meets up with Sherlock and Bell while they check out gaming parlors in Chinatown. The people inside the last one they check into pretend they don’t speak English. Holmes walks right up to the janitor, tells him he owns the place, something about his expensive shoes gave the janitor ruse away, and starts running over his theory of how the professor died at his club. The man starts speaking English and has a story about what happened, but Holmes says he is lying. He suggests they get the video from last night and see the truth. He then points out a hidden video camera made to look like a smoke detector. The video shows a man robbing the players. The professor however won’t give up his wallet and when that happens the gunman shoots him in the eyes.

There is a portion of the video that shows the gunman’s face so Watson and Holmes go down to the precinct to look at mug shots. While Holmes is doing that he also pulled Liam’s arrest record, in case Watson wanted to look at it and be sure he was guilty.
Detective Bell finds the gunman and they pick him up. He had the wallets from the robbery in the garbage at his house so he is sunk. Except wait, he says he was hired by someone to do the crime. There was an envelope with a grand in cash one night when he gets home. Then he got a call offering him nine grand more if he killed the professor by shooting him once in each eye.

They take this information to the Captain; it looks like the gunman’s story checks out. Sherlock even thinks he knows who the mastermind could be. Yes, I used the word mastermind to describe a man who hired a petty thief, please just let that slide.
Sherlock thinks it was the professors teaching assistant, he lives in the same neighborhood as the gunman and the professor wrote an unfavorable letter that ended up keeping him from a full time job at Berkley. They question him and in his bedroom they find a burner phone, the same burner phone that was used to contact the gunman. Sherlock however wants a word with the Captain, he doesn’t think it was the teacher’s assistant; he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to hold onto the burner phone like that. Doesn’t matter though because while the Captain and Sherlock are having this discussion the teacher’s assistant confesses.

Back at home Sherlock is watching the interview tapes from the teacher assistant’s interrogation. He says it isn’t right. He didn’t do it. On the floor in front of him is a lot of paperwork, bank statements, etc…from the teacher assistant. Watson looks at it and comments that he sure did download a lot of music, 100 songs in the last month.
I should mention that Sherlock is feeling much better than before. He is almost back to his old self. I’m not sure that is comforting or not.

Watson asks Sherlock to go over Liam’s file with her. She does some deducing of her own and doesn’t think Liam did it. She is going to go to Rikers in the morning to talk to him again.

The next day Sherlock and Detective Bell go to visit the professor’s widow. Holmes recognizes the music the teacher’s assistant downloaded as being on mixed tapes at the professor’s house. He thinks she and the teacher’s assistant were having an affair. She doesn’t deny the affair but she does say she doesn’t know anything about the burner phone that was at the assistant’s house. Sherlock says she either left it there by mistake or she set him up. Either way the assistant confessed because he thinks she did it and he loves her so much.
She starts to cry and shows Holmes and Bell a book, it is a book on how to beat a suspect without leaving marks, her husband used the techniques on her, he also made her do terrible sex things. She says she wasn’t even married to the professor; he brought her to the US and then went back on his word to marry her. She didn’t kill the professor though and she doesn’t think the assistant did either.
I’m not saying she did it but that is a lot of motive right there.
Sherlock asks why they should believe any of this and she said the professor made videos. She goes to open the file on his computer but it is empty. Bell tells her they are going to have to finish this conversation in the precinct.

Watson gets home that night to see Sherlock on the floor with a computer taken apart in front of him. It is the professor’s computer, he is just borrowing it. He wants to find the evidence that proves the professor abused his wife. He doesn’t think she is guilty and he is upset that if he was wrong ICE will separate an innocent woman from her child on a permanent basis. He wants to make it right.

Sherlock asks how Watson’s day was with Liam. She said she was able to prove he didn’t do the hit and run so that’s pretty productive. Holmes quips maybe she should take over the case he is working on.
Holmes gets a text; it is the autopsy report from the professor. He had Chinese herbs in his system that are used to treat eye pain, something Holmes finds ironic since he was shot in the eyes.
Next thing we know Watson and Holmes are at the precinct telling Bell and the Captain what happened. The professor had cancer; the kind of cancer he had makes your eyes very painful. Then Holmes says the professor set the whole thing up. Assuming he was the bastard his wife said he was and assuming he found out about the affair – when he found out he was going to die and soon from his cancer he set his plan in motion. He hired the gunman, left the burner phone at the assistants and wrote the bad recommendation that would give the assistant motive. Then he deleted the files on his computer so the wife couldn’t prove he was abusive and had his eyes shot out so the evidence of his cancer would be erased.
The Captain says he might be right but they need proof.

At home Sherlock is going over the evidence from the case again. Watson wonders out loud how the professor found a gun for hire so close to the assistant’s apartment. Holmes says he would have looked up the sex offender registry. The more violent the sex crime the easier the jump to murder for hire could have been. Sure enough the gunman’s picture pops up, but so does someone else’s and he lived closer to the assistant. Maybe the professor tried him first.
Turns out he did. The first guy he tried to hire refused him and even got the professors face on a video from outside his apartment.
This evidence clears the assistant and the widow. The Captain even pulls some strings and helps the couple get married so she will not get deported.

That night Watson is sitting at the 59th Street Clinic where Liam said he would check himself in after he was released from Rikers. Holmes shows up and they sit together. It’s about as sweet a moment as Sherlock is capable of.

Elementary airs Thursday 10/9c on CBS