Elementary: Murder Ex Machina Recap

Synopsis for 04×09: After a nightclub shooting of some Russian socialites, the shooters tried to get away only to have their car malfunction and leave them dead. Sherlock and Joan are set to investigate.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Apparently Clyde won’t be making anymore appearances for the rest of the season. The acting turtle who plays him must have been too busy, or I guess in hibernation itself, as that’s what the character ended up doing. Joan found the turtle in a box with a ‘do not disturb’ sign on it, and Sherlock explained that given how touchy the weather had been, he wanted to give their little friend a consistent climate in which to take a winter nap.

Morland Holmes showed up in order to ask Joan out to dinner for unknown reasons. Suspicious.

Two guys shot up some socialites as they were coming out of a club before driving off. As they were driving, their computerized car took the control away from them and sent them hurdling toward their deaths. It was certainly a clean way to murder someone, at least from the perspective of whoever hired the hitmen to do the dirty work in the first place.

Joan mentioned to Sherlock that his father had asked her out to dinner and he had one request: don’t sleep with him. After all, she’d already slept with one Holmes. The last thing he wanted her to do was sleep with another. Not that Joan was planning on it by any means, of course.

The first step in the case was to investigate who could have been controlling the car. The code led them to a coder named “Mittens,” who happened to work for a tech company. It turned out her real name was Fiona, and she was autistic, which meant it was difficult if not impossible for her to lie. Joan and Sherlock ruled her out as the killer pretty quickly due to that, as she insisted that she was not the one who orchestrated the killing even though it was her code used. Someone at her company, or a company that hacked them (Tetrabit) could have used and modified her code to do the deed.

The VP of Research and Development was the one who pointed out the hacking, and insisted that it was just normal competition between the two companies which is why he didn’t think much of it. With the murders involved, however, he couldn’t help but wonder so Sherlock and Joan turned to Tetrabit’s CEO. Naturally, he insisted they had no reason to kill the Russians, or the hitmen, over a new port deal believed to be connected to the murders. He insisted that the only one who had anything to gain was the city of New York itself.

All of the companies who would have been hurt by the new port deal being made in the city would have had something to lose. The leader of the union dealing with employees who would be displaced by the new deal had actually been at the club when the Russians were shot. All signs seemed to point to him, but he pointed the finger at someone else because he had been at that bar cutting a deal with the Russians who would have control over the ports and had the power to make sure his guys were covered.

So the team went to the club, and Sherlock recognized one of the strippers there. It turned out he knew her to be a Russian spy, and she said she had been listening in on the wealthy Russian man who had been shot when one of his guys had recognized her. That’s when they booked it out of the club straight to their deaths. She thought they were worried because she believed him to be off mission.

Joan went out with Morland and they had quite a conversation. He pointed out that he knew Mycroft was still alive, though he hadn’t seen him in quite some time. Then he explained he had asked Joan out in order to consult her on a medical issue. He’d been banking his own blood and wanted her opinion on the facility. She was happy to give it.

The case took an international turn when Mason, one of Sherlock’s irregulars, tried to help them track down a woman believed to be connected to the case. His signal got back traced and he bailed because it suddenly became dangerous. As he was on his way out, Sherlock and Joan were called down to the station only to come face to face with the woman they’d been trying to track down. It turned out she was a diplomat, attempting to help negotiate a deal with Russia and the Ukraine. She explained that the men who killed the Russians were Ukrainian, so perhaps someone was using them to try and make the deal go south.

She told them she was taking the case from them, but that didn’t stop Sherlock. He continued to investigate, and spoke with an arms dealer who would profit from the ongoing war to try and get an idea as to why someone would have killed the Russians. The arms dealer, who had been selling weapons to the Ukranians admitted he’d also been selling software to the Russians.

He had no motive for playing either of them against each other and hadn’t even been paid for what he’d sold. In a continued game of “point the finger,” he said people in alternative energy were the ones who had the real motive. The sanctions leveled at the Russians regarding energy were what was really at stake, and someone invested in that could have had reason to want to continue the war.

Joan returned to Sherlock’s father and explained that while the facility he was using seemed adequate, she had a better suggestion.

Sherlock tracked Fiona down again to ask her for her help. They could use her code to get the person, who just so happened to be the VP of R&D. They were able to hack his car and bring him right into custody. Apparently he’d invested a lot of money in a special type of engine that would be able to take the market, but the Russians had made a better one. However, due to the war and the sanctions leveled against them, they weren’t able to put the engines on the market. Therefore, if the war kept going, so would the sanctions, which would eliminate competition.

They caught him, in what was one of the most convoluted cases of the season.

Joan was suspicious about Sherlock’s father banking his blood, and wondered about the way he’d been eating at their dinner. She looked into a French murder case his father had been connected to, where a French woman that Sherlock’s father was dating had been shot to death. She had a suspicion that Sherlock’s dad had gotten caught up in it too and that he’d gotten shot in the crossfire and part of his stomach had to be removed. It seemed there was a lot more to Morland than met the eye.