Elementary

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Elementary relocates Sherlock Holmes to contemporary New York after rehabilitation, where Joan Watson, a former surgeon, is hired by his father as a sober companion. In the pilot, Holmes consults for Captain Thomas Gregson on the apparent home-invasion murder of Amy Dampier. The scene’s apparent attacker was admitted by the victim, and Holmes follows that contradiction to her husband, psychiatrist Richard Mantlo: Mantlo drugged and steered delivery worker Peter Saldua into killing his wife, then killed Saldua and staged his death as suicide. Holmes and Watson uncover the chain of deception together. Created by Robert Doherty, the 2012 CBS series stars Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes, Lucy Liu as Watson and Aidan Quinn as Gregson. Watson’s initial job is personal supervision, but the pilot gives her a place in Holmes’s investigations from the outset.

In “Child Predator,” the return of the Balloon Man pattern after another child vanishes sends Holmes toward Samuel Abbott, a former kidnapper. Abbott is found with the current victim, but the apparent solution collapses after he dies by suicide during the confrontation. Holmes sees that Adam Kemper, a boy Abbott once abducted, has used his survivor’s story to conceal that he continued the kidnappings himself. Adam secured immunity through a plea deal, yet Holmes finds DNA connecting Adam to a separate murder in which Abbott was not involved, placing that crime outside the deal. Police arrest Adam after the case exposes how he manipulated the investigation and legal protection. Watson helps reconstruct the abduction, while Holmes revisits a witness account that initially seemed to confirm the obvious suspect. The case turns on distinguishing the person who was once victimized from the person committing the new crimes.

“Lesser Evils” links a series of deaths among terminal hospital patients to two separate acts of concealment. Holmes identifies Ukrainian former physician and hospital janitor Gura as the “Angel of Death”; Gura admits killing nine severely ill patients because he believed he was ending their suffering, and police arrest him. The deeper hospital crime belongs to chief surgeon Mason Baldwin. He had left a clamp inside Samantha Cropsey during surgery, then falsified her biopsy results and reduced her pain medication to make her appear terminal and unable to expose his mistake; Gura killed her. Holmes tricks Gura into revealing what he knows despite patient confidentiality. In Watson’s parallel medical thread, she diagnoses Morgan with endocarditis after a friend dismisses the danger, secretly gets a test ordered, and the positive result confirms her concern. Her intervention saves the patient and puts her clinical judgment back to work.

In “Flight Risk,” a charter plane crashes with four people aboard, but the body of passenger Hank Gerrard has a wrench injury inconsistent with death in the crash. Holmes discovers that someone put Gerrard in the cargo hold after killing him. The plane was sabotaged with silica sand in its fuel system so it would fail over water and lose traces; the extra body weight caused it to crash earlier than planned. Company executive Charles Cooper had been smuggling through the charter operation; pilot Joe Newell had become a threat, and Gerrard caught Cooper sabotaging the aircraft. Cooper killed Newell and the passengers, then framed employee Owen Barts for Gerrard’s murder. Holmes notices that the wrench planted in Barts’s garage had been recovered from brackish water, and traces a glue-sealed wound to Cooper. Holmes links Cooper’s concealed wound to Barts’s murder and confronts him with the evidence, allowing police to make their case. Watson also investigates Holmes’s fear of flying and learns the personal history behind his recovery.

“The Long Fuse” begins with a bomb that kills two employees in offices previously occupied by Vanowen S.C. in 2012, four years after it was built. Its old battery and dated newspaper fragments show that it had been intended for 2008; an altered trigger explains the delayed explosion. Eco-terrorist Edgar Knowles confesses to earlier bombings, but his nitrate-based devices do not match this one. Holmes finds that the remaining bomb used potassium chlorate and links an imprint on its packing paper to a crossword clue. The search reveals that copywriter Pradeep Singh disappeared in 2008; Holmes locates his body concealed in a wall at home and rules him out as the bomber because he had worked beside the live device. The real bomber is executive Heather Vanowen, whom Singh had blackmailed over her past. She planted a bomb to frame Knowles, then shot Singh and hid his body; the handwriting match leads to her arrest. Watson’s observations help Holmes reconsider his initial theory.

The “Leviathan” investigation follows a second breach of a celebrated, supposedly unbreakable vault and a $40 million diamond theft. The vault changes its access code every two minutes, so Holmes examines the earlier trial of the first robbery team for a way the copyists could have learned its method. He realizes that juror Justin Guthrie, a software engineer, decoded the evidence; the jury’s varied skills supplied the rest of the plan. Guthrie, electrician Alex Wilson, locksmith’s son Jeremy Lopez and insider Amelie Widomski coordinate the copycat theft. Holmes traces the new team through details connecting the old case to jurors’ expertise, while Watson’s family dinner prompts her to consider whether detective work is becoming her own chosen profession. The story’s resolution comes from treating the original trial as an information source: the vault’s design was formidable, but the jury had been given enough evidence to reconstruct how to defeat it.