Elementary Season 6 Episode 2 Review: Once You've Ruled Out God
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This episode's enjoyable case of the week had many twists and turns, with each resolution leading another threat.
Also, Joan had to endure a family tragedy on Elementary Season 6 Episode 2.
It's hard to top an inspector for the Energy Department being struck down by lightning as the beginning of a case.
In any other case, a wife who is having an affair would be a logical suspect. But she was a cosmologist and the husband wasn't slain by the Big Bang but an experimental lightning gun. Also, she was having dinner with her cosmologist lover at the time, so she was quickly cleared.
Related: Elementary Season 6 Episode 1 Review: An Infinite Capacity for Taking Pains
At least she was able to steer Sherlock and Marcus to Sparky the Wonder Cannon, which had to be the most colorful name ever for a murder weapon.
When the fact that Sparky's van had been taken out in the rain by a tall driver, the murder was soon solved, which I thought had to be a record for the main storyline. But noooo ...
Then the murderer revealed, oh, by the way, somebody stole my plutonium. Way to bury the lede, guy.
There were too many examples of little things leading to big discoveries in this episode.
Joan had read an article about it being more efficient for delivery vehicles do not make left turns (how fascinating!). So when she saw, on traffic-camera footage, a delivery truck making a left turn in the dead of night, it was suspicious.
This, in turn, led to gravel in the tires that led Sherlock to direct Kohler's search to a particular area of New Jersey.
Related: Watch Elementary Online: Season 6 Episode 1
That region just happened to be home to a dead bomb maker whose property included a radioactive bunker. And, again, by the way, he was a white nationalist.
Next up was the white-nationalist leader, who Sherlock located through the Neo-Nazi's hobby of tabletop war games. Again, a dead end, except there were these European guys in search of a bomb maker.
Finally came a phone tip about a woman seeing a bomb being loaded into a taxi, with her overhearing that a mosque was the target. Wasn't that convenient?
But thankfully it wasn't the same storyline we've received on every other procedural in recent years: a terrorist organization of some sort threatening innocent people with a nuclear bomb.
No, we got a new twist this time, with the bomb just a diversion for a high-end heist. Sherlock saw just enough oddities in the footage to send Gregson and a team to exactly the right place to foil the robbery.
Granted, finding the little details that others miss is a big part of Sherlock and Joan's modus operandi. There just seemed to be a good deal more of that than normal on this episode.
Related: Elementary: 11 Reasons It Still Works
How much was Sherlock handicapped by his condition? Not that much this episode. It's going to be an ongoing storyline, but, unlike professional athletes, it's not going to keep him on the bench.
He's going to try to ignore it as much as possible until it flares up like it did with the bright lights in the interrogation room hurting his eyes.
As he stated, Sherlock is going to have good days and bad days. He'll have to turn off that big brain of his occasionally. It was humorous to watch him following Joan's advice and putting together children's puzzles. Let's have him acknowledging his obstacle more often.
Joan was sharp despite the travails of her personal life. Her estranged father, suffering from schizophrenia, died, again bringing her together with her half-sister Lin, introduced in Elementary Season 4 Episode 19.
The secondary storyline concerned a letter that her father had left for her, with no similar missive left for Lin.
Remembering a disappointing letter he had given her years earlier, she dumped it unopened in the trash. But, as Sherlock pointed out, she didn't destroy it. A part of her wanted to know what it said.
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I'm glad she finally opened it, as it was her father describing Lin so that the sisters could get to know each other. He didn't know that that had already happened, because he was out of touch not just with both of them, but with reality.
There was no Michael this episode, so hopefully, he's going to be an intermittent presence. He'll be back on Elementary Season 2 Episode 3 (that's not too much of a spoiler, is it?).
To check out Sherlock's recovery, watch Elementary online.
Did Joan get her closure? Does Sherlock have the patience to recover from his condition? How soon did you figure out what was happening with the case of the week? Comment below.
Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on X.