ELEMENTARY Recap: Lesser Evils

I really hope this a dream because Sherlock is aggressively strangling a woman who looks quite dead. Turns out they are in the morgue and he is doing a bruising experiment on the dead woman. Holmes does some more strangling and just as they are getting ready to leave Holmes sees a body that is on its way to the funeral home. Sherlock wants to know what room the patient was in, he doesn’t think he died of a heart attack so much as he thinks someone gave the man a heart attack.
Holmes pulls Watson into the dead man’s room and shuts them in, “We are investigating a murder.” Dun dun dun!

So I’d like to take this moment to say I think it is the janitor that did it. He was only on screen for a moment and had barely one line but something about him made me scrunch my face. That’s my prediction.

Security starts knocking on the door while Sherlock gets Watson to walk through how the man died (an epinephrine injection). Watson lends her medical expertise while Sherlock goes through the garbage.
Security finally breaks in the door.

The hospital wants an apology and they aren’t really being all that helpful with the case. They won’t even give them the dead man’s name. Holmes isn’t about to let it go and he starts doing some tracking, starting with a barista whose name they found on a receipt in the dead man’s trash. From that they find a women who had visited the patient. She tells them the victim’s name was Trent. The woman also mentions a doctor that visited Trent at night. Sherlock and Watson find that odd.
Sherlock thinks they have a bigger problem than just Trent’s murder, he thinks they have a serial killer, an Angel of Death.

They tell the head of surgery, who can’t believe they would have an Angel of Death at his hospital. Sherlock needs his help to get the medical information he needs from the hospital. He’d ask the hospital administrator but he doesn’t like him very much. The head of surgery says he will get him everything he needs and he does.
Holmes is going over the case files with Watsons help. Her medical experience is coming in handy. They find nine cases they think they can tie to this killer and twenty-three suspects.

Sherlock goes to the head of surgery to question him first. He is one of the twenty-three suspects. The head of surgery says it isn’t him; he does in fact have an alibi for Trent’s murder.

The detective and Sherlock are in the conference room questioning the suspects one by one. There are a very big number of doctors who are complete jerks. Oh and I should mention that the detective is again arguing with Holmes about who the killer might be. Enough already, Holmes is right more times than he is wrong and that questioning him thing is getting a little old.
None of the suspects jump out as a lead suspect and Sherlock is agitated about it. Although one of the suspects is a morphine addict, who is caught in the act by Sherlock and Watson and arrested.

Watson goes over the victims files again and finds that one of the victims wasn’t terminal; she had heart surgery and was slowly recovering. They wonder why the Angel made an exception for her.
The addict doctor is at the precinct being questioned by Holmes and The Captain. He tells them he snuck into a patient’s room, a few months ago, and when he was in the bathroom shooting up the morphine he had stolen someone came into the room. He hid in the bathroom so he didn’t see anything, but he heard a guy talking to the patient about his cancer. The next day the patient died of a heart attack.

Going back over the records Sherlock finds the victim that wasn’t terminal didn’t speak much English. She spoke Ukrainian so the Angel must also speak Ukrainian. This leads Sherlock to the, wait for it, janitor. They bring him in to be questioned. Turns out he was a doctor in the Ukraine.
Janitor: When a patient is in pain dying is not a tragedy it is a release.
The cops also found a journal of notes in the janitor’s apartment, medical notes pertaining to the nine dead patients. He says he freed them from their pain, besides they were terminal. Sherlock brings up the victim who was getting better, how was that mercy? The janitor says she wasn’t getting better at all, she was dying and in severe pain. This gives Sherlock pause.
At home Sherlock is going back over the files again. He can’t figure out how the janitor got the fifth patients diagnosis so wrong, but he has an idea.

We find Sherlock back at the precinct, this time talking to the head of surgery. Holmes says it has occurred to him that he wasn’t the first person to discover that the hospital had an Angel of Death. It’s a thinly veiled “threat” at the head of surgery. Turns out the head of surgery doctored the medical records for the fifth victim to show she had cancer and reduced her pain meds so she was in more pain than she should have been in, making her the perfect victim for the Angel of Death. All because he made a mistake during her surgery and didn’t want that strike on his record.

The episode ends with Watson looking over pictures of herself when she was a doctor before deleting them all.

Elementary airs 10/9c on CBS