ELEMENTARY Recap: The Leviathan

A masked man is breaking into a fancy looking vault; he is followed into the vault by two or three more masked men.  They make off with some very nice jewelry.

At home Watson comes downstairs to find two ½ naked sisters in the living room and the doorbell ringing.  Watson has seen enough and she leaves for a run.

At the door is a man with a security company, the company is the foremost maker of bank vaults.  Mr. Earling, who is at the door, is the owner and head engineer.  He is there to talk about The Leviathan a safe that his company has said is impregnable.

Sherlock: Did you people learn nothing from the Titanic?

Apparently The Leviathan was broken into in under a year after it was first sold.  The bank robbers were caught but they never talked about how they managed to break into the vault.  They were brilliant and the perfect mix to get the job done.  Now it has happened gain.  Mr. Earling wonders what the chances are of a team good enough to break into the vault coming together twice.

This man clearly never watches Leverage.

The heist took place at the Diamond Exchange, and $40 million was stolen.  Since a Leviathan goes for seven figures he wants Sherlock to figure out how they got into the vault so it can be fixed and never happen again.

At the Diamond Exchange Sherlock is going over the security.  Sherlock actually gets stumped.  He sits on the floor in front of the vault for hours until Watson shows up.  Then Watson sits with him so long she falls asleep.  Watson wants him to admit he can’t get through the vault door.  He admits it but then he takes an axe to the display panel.  It must be frustrating to know everything and then be stumped by something.

The next morning Holmes is still going over the information from the heist as Watson leaves to have brunch with her Mother.  It goes as you might expect, her Mom is overbearing and pushy and belittling to Watson’s career choice.  While there Holmes calls her and asks her to meet him at Sing Sing at 2:30, the locksmith from the original heist has agreed to meet with them.

The lock-pick says each one in the original job had a specific task.  He only got them into the outer door.  The guy in their team who died in prison a few years back got the code and didn’t tell any of them how he did it.  He did possibly sell his information when he found out he was dying though.  Lock pick only has an alias for the buyer – Le Chevalier.  Le Chevalier has allegedly stolen some very rare very pricy items over the years but no one has ever seen him.  Watson thinks he sounds like a fairytale.  Sherlock says no one has ever found Le Chevalier because Holmes himself has never gone looking for him.

After a few moments at the precinct Holmes thinks he has figured out the identity of Le Chevalier, Peter Kent.  While waiting in the living room for Peter Kent, Sherlock sees a painting that seems out of place as it isn’t an original like the others.  He breaks the glass, cuts the painting and behind it he finds one of the paintings Le Chevalier has been accused of stealing.

Unfortunately for Sherlock’s theory, Peter Kent had a stroke two years ago.  They are shown to his room where he is not even able to dress himself.  So even though he is Le Chevalier he isn’t involved in the heist.

Sherlock has another idea.  Three of the original robbers took plea bargains but one tried his luck at a jury trial.  Sherlock needs to see the trail transcripts and notes; he thinks there might be something in there.  Watson thinks he is just mad because he can’t figure it out himself.

They take the stolen painting among other things to the Captain.  Well that’s not entirely true, Sherlock keeps the painting – hanging it over the fireplace at his apartment.  A $50 million dollar painting so that seems reasonable.

Watson: I’m not okay with this

Sherlock: You don’t like where it’s hanging?

Turns out Sherlock says he will give the painting back later.

Watson’s brother calls, he is excited to see her tomorrow for dinner along with her client.  Sherlock took it upon himself to text her brother and pretty much invited himself along to Watson’s family dinner.

Sherlock spends all night reading the transcripts and he must have found something because he brings breakfast in bed up to Watson and tells her they have to be at the Property Clerks Office when it opens, so get up.  A scrap of paper is being held there, a scrap of paper that was part of the trail and was viewed by the jury three times during deliberations.

At the Proper Clerks Office the scrap of paper is a list of the four robber’s coffee orders next to their names.  At the top of the sheet of paper is some nonsense that looks like what your printer spits out when it is trying to print.  Sherlock thinks it is code, a very special code.  It’s an algorithm that they used to attack the number generator on the vault.  Watson and Sherlock think whoever in the jury that wanted to see the scrap of paper three times could read the code and he is the one who set up the second heist.  They get to Jim Guthrie’s (the jurors) apartment to find it an active crime scene.  He jumped out of his window not too long ago, killing himself.

When the Captain gets on scene with Detective Bell they talk to Sherlock about why he doesn’t think this was a suicide.  Sherlock does his thing and deduces.  He finds some blood drops and an uncut diamond just like the ones stolen in the heist.

It’s time for dinner with the family; Sherlock is oddly charming and talks Watson up to her Mother.  When they leave Watson says thank you and Sherlock deflects her compliment.

On the drive home Sherlock is going through Guthrie’s phone.  Yeah, he borrowed it from evidence.  He has the names and phone numbers of three people in his notes section.  Three people he was on the jury with.

At home Sherlock is going over the original case and explaining to Watson how the new team was all jurors in the original case.  Four of them figured out they had the same skill sets as the original team.  What’s more the fourth member of the new team has a brother who is the manager of the Diamond Exchange.  She was the inside “man”.

The Captain pulls all of the jurors from the original case into the precinct.  All except Alex, who was the engineer in the second team of thieves, he is nowhere to be found.  They get DNA from the jurors that are there though.  Then they do some more tracking and find Alex, the missing juror, dead under some cardboard outside his house.  He’s been dead for at least two days so he isn’t the man who murdered Guthrie.

Meanwhile the DNA from Guthrie’s apartment comes back to an Army Chaplain named Audrey.  More tracking down ensues.  Inside her house they find nothing to indicate she was a murderer and in fact it turns out she has been deployed and isn’t even in the country.  Something they might have checked out before breaking down her door.

Watson notices something; she sees something that is given to bone marrow donors.  That is why her DNA would have shown up at the crime scene even though she wasn’t there.  Sherlock looks surprised and has the Captain bring one of the jurors, Lopez, into custody.

In interrogation the Captain asks Lopez for a blood sample, it gives a cleaner read than the mouth swab he did earlier.  He declines although at this point I don’t know why he bothers.

Sherlock says that when you have a bone marrow transplant your body starts to manufacture cells with the DNA of the donor, which is why he has the DNA of the donor in his blood but not in his saliva.

They got their man.

That night Watson is throwing out the champagne Sherlock got as a gift from the security company for solving the case when the doorbell rings.  It is Watson’s Mother. She says she is only unhappy with Watson as a companion because it doesn’t seem to make her happy.  Now that she has seen her and Sherlock together talking about his work she knows she is happy.  She likes the work Holmes does.

Watson’s Mother: People find their paths in the strangest of ways

Elementary airs Thursday 10/9c on CBS