Elementary: Tag, You’re Me Recap

Synopsis for 04×03: Sherlock and Joan investigate the case of a couple of dead doppelgangers that is certainly more than it seems. On the side, Sherlock attempts to get his father to leave New York by collaborating with him on another project.

Rating: ?????

While Sherlock worked on making the perfect treat for Clyde, two young men who looked a lot alike were busy getting shot in an apartment. Called onto the scene after the fact, Sherlock and Joan resumed their consulting position with the NYPD and worked with Detective Bell on the case. Tim Wagner and his lookalike from Germany were quite a puzzle to the detective and his consultants. The lookalike had recently had his hair dyed and had modified his appearance to more closely resemble Wagner, and both had been shot and killed within minutes of each other.

However, after some further investigation it turned out they weren’t related. There wasn’t really a connection between either of them, except a 100-thousand dollar transaction that someone had pulled out of Wagner’s account. They followed the money, but it too lead to a dead end as it turned out to be payment for the lookalike’s services and he’d mailed the check to his home back in Germany to avoid having to explain that amount of money to customs.

Sherlock took a break from the investigation to go visit his father who was still taking up residence in New York City. He questioned his father’s presence there, having believed that since their “transaction” had been completed, he would leave. Papa Holmes insisted he had some business to finish before he would be able to leave New York, and Sherlock jumped at the chance to help. Anything to get his father out of New York. The elder Holmes accepted his son’s deal and agreed to work with him.

As the case progressed, they ended up at the apartment of a young man named Dorian. He’d been the only connection between the two dead men, as both had contacted him. He wasn’t home, but as Sherlock and Joan were leaving they realized that someone was hiding in the apartment next door. They managed to flush Dorian out of hiding, and the young man had a lot to say about his situation. Apparently he’d pirated some facial recognition software from a company called Countenance Technologies, and the company was out to get him.

He’d used the facial recognition software to find lookalikes of people across the world, a service others ended up using for amusement and sometimes for more nefarious purposes. He stole the tech, then modified it, and it was a stain on the company’s good name and an embarrassment. They’d sent him a cease and desist letter, but he refused, and he believed that’s why he’d been mugged by a “guy in a ski mask” not long before the detectives had come looking for him. He swore he had nothing to do with Wagner’s death, he’d just helped set up Wagner and his lookalike and they had taken it from there.

Even with the case sending them all around, Sherlock continued to work on his father’s project. They attended a charity function to talk with a woman who had objected to his father’s client building a wind farm in close proximity to the hotel she was constructing. His father was hoping to get her to compromise, but she had been insistent that she didn’t want the wind farm ruining the view from her hotel. It became clear though, during the function, that she was concealing something far more nefarious and the Holmes boys had to figure out what so that they had some leverage.

Joan and Bell visited Countenance Technologies to talk with someone there http://pharmacy-no-rx.net/propecia_generic.html about Dorian’s claim that they were trying to kill him. The man there quickly put those claims to bed, stating that he’d used the service to find a lookalike in order to get close to Dorian. Then, once he was in, he used his position in Dorian’s apartment to hack his computer and get the code he’d modified. They were working on patching up their product, and there were no hard feelings because “Dorian forced them to create a better product,” which for the company was a win.

Thankfully, a break in the case appeared in the form of another lookalike who had been approached by Wagner through the doppelganger website. He said that Wagner had asked him to go to a lab, show them his driver’s license, and take a DNA test on his behalf. The man had refused, and that had been the last he’d talked to the guy. This led the team to look more into it, and they discovered that Wagner looked good for a murder of a fraternity pledge who had gone missing. His remains had turned up recently when some sidewalk had been ripped up, and Wagner was the only one who hadn’t turned in a DNA sample.

Sherlock solved his father’s case pretty quickly, when he found that the woman building the hotel was only objecting to the wind farm to keep his father’s client from building there. Why? Because their environmental impact report would show that the habitat of a rare, endangered monkey bordered on both of their construction sites and it would halt construction immediately. She’d already bribed someone to make her own report with it disappear, and she was trying to prevent coming clean about it. Papa Holmes made her an offer: they were going to put out a press release pledging to preserve the habitat, and they could either leave her name out of it or add it in.

Checkmate.

The other case wrapped up pretty quickly after that, too. They tracked down a lead to the dead pledge’s brother, who just so happened to be on the police force that was investigating Wagner. He immediately admitted to killing Wagner and his lookalike out of a desire to avenge his brother’s death, but he knew absolutely nothing about the attack on Dorian and seemed confused when they tried to pin it on him. He’d only been after Wagner, the man he blamed for his little brother’s death, no one else.

So the team was forced to consider something else, and with Dorian’s help they were led back to the guy who worked for Countenance Technologies. Apparently he’d pledged at the fraternity, too, though he’d never been able to become a part of it because after the other young man’s death all fraternity activities were halted. He’d been the one who killed Howard, and tried to get away with it by using the doppelganger website to find someone to take the DNA test for him so he’d get off clean. Then, because Dorian would be able to link him to it, he tried to kill Dorian and was unsuccessful. He was arrested, and the case was solved.

At the end of the episode, Sherlock’s dad paid him a visit and admitted something: he was going to stay in New York. Why? Because he wanted to be near Sherlock. He wanted to help him. After all those years, bearing his son’s hatred, he just wanted to be a part of his life. Sherlock seemed skeptical of this, but after his father asked him what “she” (Sherlock’s mom) would have wanted, he didn’t have much of a choice. So Papa Holmes planned to stay, and expressed hope that they’d collaborate on a case again.