Monday, July 29, 2019

Elementary - The Latest Model


"The Latest Model" offers two cases for Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Watson (Lucy Liu). First, Odin Reichenbach (James Frain resurfaces with a case involving a potential killer. As he proposed to Holmes, he offers the detectives a chance to prove to the billionaire that his system isn't correct in identifying and eliminating the man prior to his crime. The case here involves a podcaster (Roderick Hill) whose idea was stolen by a filmmaker who has turned it into fame and fortune while prolonging lawsuits to bankrupt the podcaster from ever seen a dime. As Reichenbach suggests, evidence does seem to point to the man committing crime that would injure both the guilty party and several bystanders. Holmes comes to an alternate solution to prevent the crime from occurring, and seems on the brink of pushing the billionaire into a less violent solution to the would-be criminals he identifies, but given the events at the end of the episode I'd say there is little chance for collaboration between Odin and the detectives (or any reason to suggest him changing his methods).

The other case involves the murder of a model that bears a striking resemblance to a crime that occurred more than a decade prior, including the location where the victim's body was dumped. Quickly solving the original murder, and the means which the woman's body was moved, it takes longer for Holmes and Watson to identify the motive behind the recent woman's death. Although the motives for the crime don't match the murder from years prior, it turns out they are related to the death of the woman's sister months before.

The case involves a bit of a red herring with a medical examiner slacking off while doing her autopsy on the first sister where missed evidence should have led it to be investigated as a homicide to begin with (and could have prevented the murder into the second sister who killed for looking into her sibling's death). As we've seen before, I expected the show to reveal some magnificence or complicity in the crime by the M.E., but sometimes incompetence is just that (with no hidden motives). The true motive for both killings only become evident after the detective track down the DJ ex of first sister, who provides a vital piece of information that had been lacking in both the medical examiner's report and in the interviews the detectives conducted with a social worker who it turns had a very strong motive in seeing the woman dead.

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