Elementary - Recap: And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Recap and review of Elementary - Season 1 Episode 20 - Dead Man's Switch:

After what felt like an interminable hiatus, Elementary is back, and "Dead Man's Switch" is one of its best this season. While there's an excellent case at the center of this week's investigation, a complicated blackmail scheme that involves the families of rape victims, the real meat and potatoes of the episode is the ongoing arc of Sherlock's sobriety. The show has never entirely allowed this element of the character fade to the background, yet it hasn't been addressed quite as directly since Joan (Lucy Liu) transitioned from Sherlock's sober companion to his investigatory assistant. However, with this episode, Sherlock (Jonny Lee Miller) is wrestling with his past failures in a way that deepens the character, as he recognizes the effect of his failures more clearly than anyone else, because they are his own, and he's the only one who really knows about them. To be specific, Sherlock has told nobody that he relapsed a mere 24 hours after entering rehab a year ago, and it's a secret that makes the encouragement of his sponsor, Alfredo (Ato Essandoh), all the more painful to endure. This builds and builds until it all comes out in a torrent of self-effacing anger, pain and sadness, in what is Jonny Lee Miller's best performance on the series so far (or, at the very least, his showiest). The exploration into Sherlock's faults, and the strengths that offset them, mark this as one of the show's finest hours.

The case this week actually involves Sherlock directly. Alfredo comes to Sherlock for help with his own sponsor, a man who is being blackmailed by an associate of the man who raped his daughter. The blackmailer has threatened to release a video of her rape online and to the media if the father doesn't pay, and he has a failsafe in the form of an accomplice, who will release the video on the blackmailer's behalf if anything should happen to him. Sherlock accepts the case and ascertains that the blackmailer is one Charles Augustus Milverton (David Mogentale). He tracks Milverton to his home, sneaking in once the blackmailer leaves for a brief while. He is able to confirm that videos of the rapist's other crimes exist, which means that the fathers of the other victims must be getting blackmailed as well. However, no sooner does Sherlock come to this conclusion than Milverton returns home. Sherlock tries to go out the back door, only to find that someone is coming from that end as well. With nowhere else to go, he hides. From a safe vantage point, he witnesses Milverton being murdered by the mysterious assailant, who leaves after the deed is done. Sherlock goes to a man he "respects and admires" with his dilemma, Captain Gregson (Aidan Quinn), who wants to open an investigation after Sherlock tells him all he knows. But there's a problem: Sherlock knows that Milverton's accomplice will release the video if he knows that the blackmailer is dead. So Gregson begrudgingly agrees to keep a lid on the murder for now, but Sherlock only has a limited amount of time to solve the case.

It's one of the best cases they've done, if only because it's about more than just a murder. In many ways, they all are, but this had a lot more twists and turns, I felt. The investigation takes Sherlock and Joan to a fraudulent, gimmicky TV lawyer, and to the rapist himself, a man named Brent Garvey, who is confined to a hospital bed from having gotten jumped in prison, and who admits to losing the tapes to Milverton in an auction once he failed to pay the fee on the storage unit they were stored in. The investigation only gets more complicated, as we end up at the apartment of Milverton's original accomplice, Stuart Bloom (Randy Louis Swiren), an overweight man who's apparently been killed -- and whose decomposing body rests in an overflowing bathtub, in one of the grossest visuals I've seen on TV in years. Ultimately, the case brings us to Anthony Pistone, the father of one of the girls who was raped. Pistone confesses to killing Milverton for threatening his daughter and blackmailing him. Yet that isn't the end of the investigation, as Sherlock and Joan are able to deduce that the man's involvement goes deeper. Eventually, it's revealed that Pistone's "daughter" is actually his stepdaughter, and that while Pistone initially set out to kill Milverton, the blackmailer was able to turn Pistone into his new accomplice by offering him a piece of the action. Pistone took Bloom's place and joined in Milverton's blackmail operation, eventually murdering Milverton in order to take 100% of the profits (though Pistone employed his own brother as his failsafe in the scheme). It's a terrifically dense investigation that is that rare procedural case that keeps you guessing.

However, the best stuff here involves Sherlock's growth as a character. The aforementioned scene in which he confesses his brief relapse to Joan is Emmy-worthy (I've embedded it below), but his performance throughout the episode is remarkable as well. Alfredo keeps pestering Sherlock to attend the meeting and accept his one-year sobriety chip, yet Sherlock refuses on the principle that accepting the chip would be a celebration of his weaknesses and failures, and that sobriety is not ongoing; either you're sober or you're not. Sherlock rationalizes that he's sober, and that should be enough. Yet Alfredo responds by saying that the ceremony isn't really about Sherlock, it's about the other recovering addicts at the meeting. Sherlock proving that he can go a year sober will encourage others in the meeting and give them the hope that they can recover too. He tells Sherlock to get over himself, and he would be right to say so, if it had actually been Sherlock's one-year anniversary. But it's a day early, and he simply can't bring himself to accept the chip, on principle. After coming clean to Joan, he comes clean to Alfredo, leading to Sherlock regaining some peace of mind, tattooing himself as the episode comes to a close, and Joan offers him an anniversary gift, in the form of a framed stanza from Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”):

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

"Dead Man's Switch" is a terrific episode that blends an engaging investigation with compelling character dynamics. Elementary may not be CBS's highest-rated procedural, but I'd argue that it's probably the network's best.