Elementary Season 3 Episode 18 Review: The View From Olympus
Kathleen Wiedel
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I’m standing in for your regular reviewer this week, and I have to say, if Big Brother had a love child with a Criminal Minds script, that might go a ways to describing Elementary Season 3 Episode 18, “The View from Olympus.”
After a not-Uber (“Zooss”) driver was apparently murdered by a cabbie, Sherlock and Watson were sent on a dizzying tour of suspects and motives, in the process uncovering a pedophile, a blackmail scheme, and a stalker who used his company’s app to follow every move his target made.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of watching cop shows and police procedurals, it’s to keep an eye on seemingly-minor characters introduced early on. That said, the writers did quite an impressive job snowballing me with red herrings and white noise.
The idea that someone can follow you so closely is unnerving, to say the least. And the original victim, the Patient Zero, as it were, had no clue that the cretin was stalking her through her Zooss app and saw her wherever she went. There are some very serious privacy questions that get addressed only briefly here.
The fact that the application is called Olympus implies that those who view the data from “above” are like gods. In Greek mythology, though, even the gods could be defeated. Of course, by the time Sherlock and Joan found their way to the stalker, I was all sorts of confused about who did what to whom and when. At least it wasn’t immediately predictable, so props to that.
Plus, there was the B-story of one of Sherlock’s bed-buddies, Agatha, showed up for some “stress relief” while she was in town. This plot produced some absolutely great quotes, I have to say.
First, we got a clear sign that Sherlock does not appreciate U2:
Sherlock: Wailing Goggle Man alone must burn enough fuel in a year to send a rocket to Mars.
Agatha: "Wailing Goggle Man"?
Sherlock: Yeah, yeah, the Irishman with the songs.
Agatha: Bono. His name is Bono.
“Wailing Goggle Man,” indeed! I wonder what Bono thinks of that description? Later, Sherlock uncovered Agatha’s ulterior motives for showing up at the brownstone to swap body fluids, and was that fun or what? He spent half the episode hiding from Agatha, which, ah, engendered some curiosity from Joan. (I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself with that pun! I'll now go hang my head in shame.)
Sherlock: She's asked for a donation.
Joan: What, to an environmental group?
Sherlock: To her uterus.
Sherlock certainly has a way of putting things, doesn't he? Of course, he eventually figured out that his ever-distant father was behind the scheme in order to continue the Holmes line. As motivations go, I’ve heard worse… though that’s not exactly saying very much.
I found it curious that in all this, Mycroft’s name never came up once, not even in the conversations between Sherlock and Joan… which is odd since Joan and Mycroft slept together in the past. Since Mycroft isn’t dead so far as I know, surely he was relevant to the discussion.
The “donation” plotline ultimately provided insight into Sherlock and how he perceives the world, as he explained to Agatha when he declines her request to father a child with her:
No, it *hurts*, Agatha. Everything I see, everything I hear, touch, smell. The conclusions I'm able to draw, the things that are revealed to me, the ugliness. My work focuses me. It helps. You say I am using my gifts. I say I'm just treating them.
Sherlock
That put into perspective a bit how and why he came to be a drug addict. He is special, to be sure, but Sherlock knows the price he pays for his “remarkable” abilities, and he did not want to inflict that pain on another human being.
Is he wrong? Possibly; after all, there are no guarantees than any offspring of his would be like him in the way he feared. I don’t think he appreciated that we are not all fated to become our parents. Additionally, I think that any person who is responsible for creating life with another person should be exactly that: responsible for that life. I suspect Sherlock might have projected some of his own experiences with an absentee father.
I did like Joan trying to cheer Sherlock up with ice cream. I wonder if it worked?
Elementary Season 3 Episode 19 is titled “One Watson, One Holmes” and is scheduled to air on Thursday, April 9 on CBS. In the meantime, you can catch up on previous episodes right here at TV Fanatic when you watch Elementary online!
