Elementary 3x24

[killerweasel.livejournal.com]

Discussion post for Elementary 3x24 'A Controlled Descent', season finale.

Spoilers in the comments.

What did you think?

Comments

[nausicaa83.livejournal.com]

I thought it felt like the appropriate final episode to a more subdued season. Less plot twists, a very melancholic feeling to the whole thing. I really loved the song at the end.

I'm happy we finally get to see Sherlock's father next year, although it's definitely going to be very traumatic for him.

EDIT:

Okay, I just found an interview with the writers and they said it was obvious that Sherlock had relapsed at the end. I thought it was meant to be a sort of "maybe he did, maybe he didn't" thing that was left to the viewer's interpretation! I wish they'd been clearer about it, or at least shown a bit of Joan's reaction. Sure, they were going for sad and all, but now it feels more like they clumsily cut halfway through the scene.

[mantriddrone.livejournal.com]

i get that heroin is bad, and i also remember that the original Sherlock is a part-time junkie. this particular Sherlock spends his life trying to recover! i'm honestly no longer interested in the life and times of heroin addicts. Really.
the writers should concentrate on having his solving a few more crimes and spend less time on relapse scenarios.
I’m also no longer into this show and will watch it if and when i catch it by accident. it’s definitely jumped the shark

[venusinthenight]

No mention of Alfredo at the end, which sucks. How hard is to include an additional sentence of dialogue wherein Joan lets Sherlock know that Alfredo's going to be released, or that he's going to see or is seeing a trauma counselor, or something to let the audience know he's doing better.

And all of this is also at the expense of character development for Joan. She STILL hasn't dealt with any residual PTSD from her kidnapping in S2. (I would think this'd rack her brain, especially as Alfredo is someone she knows.) She still hasn't dealt with any from Andrew's death. She's self-isolated. The writers don't care about her, don't care to give Joan any meaty storylines and relationships (or to expand on her existing ones), are just fine to give us -- for all intents and purposes -- scraps. Elana March amounted to nothing. Her relationship with Andrew, nothing. She essentially cut off her mother and Oren, and we've never met either of her fathers.

This must have been Elementary's version of "The Final Problem". And I was hoping it'd involve Moriarty vs. Joan. It would have been a nice subversion. After all, it was Joan who beat Moriarty.

That said, they'd been hinting at relapse possibilities since the S2 finale.

I gave S3 a chance. Screw this show. #characterdevelopmentisforwhitemen

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

I didn't think it was obvious. It seemed more ambiguous, which
I would think is a stronger way to end the season -- you aren't sure.

That said, this whole season was a dump-a-thon for me. Too many
trips down roads that went nowhere -- did anyone really care about
that other woman whose name I can't even recall now? And Joan
needs to be a doctor again. Her Nancy Drew act separate from Sherlock
is a waste of time. They should be working together, solving crimes,
and using reason and intelligence. That's what makes the show work.

I have to say that when I heard the show had been renewed I didn't
feel anything, but when I heard that "Forever" hand't been renewed I
was upset because I was much more emotionally involved with those
characters than with Sherlock and Joan.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

You are voicing what I've been feeling all season.

Such a waste of talent!

[venusinthenight]

I KNOW! *headdesk* I want to see Lucy Liu's Joan be awesome and well-rounded, dammit. Not just stand around and roll her eyes and deliver lines stoically with the rare glimmer of excitement. And I want to get to know her. I want @elementarystaff to tweet about how awesome an actor she is.

And don't get me started on the exceedingly gross underutilization of Ms. Hudson, or the fact all the Irregulars since Teddy in S1 have all been white people. Snooze.

*sings* We could have had it aaaaaaalllllllllll...

TL;DR

[starswan.livejournal.com]

It was utterly underwhelming. It lost steam in a big way once Kitty left. Why dangle the possibility of Moriarty early on and then completely fail to develop it?

How is Joan coping with Andrew's murder? What on earth happened there? It felt like we were going to be watching her going into a downward spiral while Sherlock looked on, feeling guilty like he was somehow enabling her. But one encouraging speech from him about how she should not ignore her social needs and turn into him and *boom* she's magically all better?
And how about boundary issues, of the sort that made her want to move out in the first place, of feeling too reliant? How about how she set up an office downstairs that he felt he could invade whenever he liked? Why did Joan never call him out on that more than once or twice, and never seriously? What exactly is going on between them anyway? none of these things are explored. Instead we get a second half of the season with rather grey, spartan backdrops, increasingly grisly and convoluted cases with the occasional bit of character development (Marcus, Alfredo, Harlan name drops, Everyone, a little bit of Gregson) to keep us hanging on.

And Sherlock has been the strongest, the most confident in his abilities this season without the introduction of artificial stimulants in awhile. I felt like his sudden apparent redescent into junkiedom a bolt out of the blue. So he is beside himself last season when Joan leaves, so much so that he runs off to London where he is living in some sort of pared down industrial looking flat, weeping alone and feeling guilty about everything but that isn't enough to push him over the edge??

Oscar is supposed to be this great big influence, purportedly, I mean what else can you possibly conclude, and yet I see little outward (or extrapolated inward) evidence of it. We're told loads , but not actually shown proof of his influence. We are or were shown how deeply Joan has affected him. Again, her leaving was not enough to drive him back to narcotics but this was??? And again ??????? Loads of ????

It's simply not believable to me.

And I second one of the comments about Joan's reaction or rather her lack there of.
Just, what on earth are they doing with her character?

I was excited when it was returning in the new year to see them back in the brownstone together working on cases together but it fizzled. They seemed to spend more time wandering about or down at the station that in their home. Sort of made me wonder why she bothered moving back in. And for christ's sake, decorate your room already, Joan! It's been bare, save the bed, since Season 1. Is she living there or not?:P

or how about the ep where it seemed that even the occasional sexual daliance is no longer satisfying to Sherlock? We get no development of that except that now, oh, we're supposed to backtrack and equate with him needing a fix? We as viewers are not obtuse but there ought to be more for us to go on.

The show has definitely lost a bit of the spark that it had. It feels more grim but in a rather non-committal way.

And I know this is a bit silly, but I was also getting a little tired of the rather formulaic wrap ups where everyone stands in a square around the accused and takes turns explaining why they know that they did it no matter how much that they deny it! Queue Gregson stepping in and arresting them. The End.

Re: TL;DR

[nausicaa83.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything here.

[nausicaa83.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is they're sacrificing character development to spend more time on the case of the week. Which is actually the most boring part of every episode. Yes, the killer is the second person Joan and Sherlock talk to. Case solved.

It's like this season all the important character development happened off-screen: Joan gets over her boyfriend's death some time while we're stuck watching a weekly convoluted murder, and what about her mom, or is she worried in any way about Moriarty's interest in her? She suddenly seems fine, so we're led to assume she got over her problems somehow, but we're not actually shown.

Considering how important Kitty was for Sherlock, it's weird he almost didn't mention her at all after she left. They squeezed the important moments in between cases, as if they didn't have enough time for the characters, only for the whodunnit.

Let's hope next season they'll have learned their lesson, and give us the Elementary we fell in love with back. I miss it.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

That's it -- Kitty.

I really don't think she meant anything at all to him. I certainly
never felt any connection between the actors. And when she was
gone, that was that. Talk a waste of half a season on that!

Yes, why bring in the boyfriend for Joan and then kill him off with
no emotional investment at all? It's like the people writing the show
don;t speak to each other -- and they've never actually watched
it. That's frustrating!

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

Thinking about Joan's descent after the boyfriend was murdered --
as a writer I think it would have been much MORE interesting if
JOAN had started using drugs. The cycle would have come around
fully and now Sherlock has to be HER "sober companion." And we
all know that doctors are especially at risk for drug abuse. It would
have made sense dramatically AND given Sherlock and Joan a
stronger connection and reason for working together.

But, alas…

[horrorfangirl.livejournal.com]

Personally I thought the whole thing with Oscar was a bit strange. I found myself almost hoping that he was working with Moriarty with the way he was leading Sherlock by the nose nearly the entire episode, it would be something she would do. And the thing with the sister, shesh. How are we suppose to care about a character when we have barely any background story to her prier to this episode?

And frankly, I couldn't really buy the idea of Oscar would have the patience to really carry out a kidnapping, let alone the strength to knock a man unconscious, drag to the trunk of a car and left a body the size of Alfredo's into said trunk.

[starswan.livejournal.com]

THIS.

Once Joan announced that she was moving back in and looked a bit bright-eyed and somewhat "off" with Sherlock looking concerned/tender/frightened/guilty, I thought that they were going to start developing her fall in the aftermath of everything that had happened to her. It was the natural next step.

Alas, indeed. :/

[starswan.livejournal.com]

Right?

Where on earth did a junkie of his caliber get all of the mental and physical energy to carry all of that out?? Perhaps if they had given us some real background, wrote it like he had some weird obsession with Sherlock in a more tangible way, and/or had him breakdown about his sister positing that as the fuel that enabled him to get all of these plans together. I still don't know if I would have found it terribly plausible. Still.

[horrorfangirl.livejournal.com]

Exactly my point, starswan. Honestly I find the writing on this show to be so unbelievably lazy. It drives me crazy! The only good thing about the end of the episode is that we finally get to meet Sherlock's father. Who the writers have teased us with for three seasons, it's about bloody time!