- Title: Elementary – How the Sausage is Made
- wiki: link
While investigating a murder involving a one victim killed after eating sausages made from a second murder victim, the trail leads Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Watson (Lucy Liu) to a cutting edge laboratory where the ground-up victim was working on perfecting a meat substitute. At first Sherlock believes that such a discovery, and its effect on the marketplace, may have gotten the man killed by a meat conglomerate (or “Big Meat” as Holmes takes to saying), however a second, more devious, motive is eventually uncovered.
Opening with references to two classic Holmes stories (“The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” and “The Adventures of the Beryl Coronet“), the episode has a little more going on behind the scenes than we’ve seen recently. There’s also a major B-story involving Holmes rash action to stop going to meetings that ties back to the larger theme of his sobriety and creates some conflict between the partners, especially given Watson’s original role as his sober companion. The two never exactly argue, but the coolness between Holmes and Watson in this episode can hardly be ignored. Although Holmes does eventually return to a meeting, largely due to Joan’s intervention and words of caution, we have to wonder whether or not his boredom with his sobriety could foreshadow something ominous down the line.
