Elementary: A Study in Charlotte Recap

Synopsis for 4×13: Sherlock and Joan investigate death by mushroom tea and the mystery of the revolving tenants next door.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Apparently Joan’s new neighbors didn’t have respect for quiet, and she went to Sherlock to complain. He happened to be doing an activity that would tune them out, but agreed that their noise was persistent. Joan insisted she would go and talk to them at some point.

Across town somewhere, a university professor was having a trippy mushroom tea party. He studied mushrooms and had created a tea to take some of his students on a spiritual journey. With the tea made, he passed it around and then took a moment to go upstairs to ask his noisy neighbor to turn it down.

What seemed like it might be the crime of the night turned out to be a young man playing video games, and in exchange for a promise of mushrooms he said he’d turn it down so the professor and his students could get lost in whatever it was they were doing. The professor returned to the party to find everyone there had asphyxiated and died, and before he could dial 911 he died, too.

Joan went to complain to the neighbors only to find out that they would be there temporarily. The owner of the next door brownstone had turned it into an “away-cay,” the Elementary universe’s equivalent to AirBnb or other similar services which offer extra space for rent. Joan was less than trilled about this, especially when she realized the tenants had been specifically told they were allowed to make however much noise they wanted. She planned to find the owner to have a talk with him about the situation, since it was keeping her from getting a full night’s sleep.

Sherlock, meanwhile, took on the case of the professor and his dead students. The first suspect was the professor’s book partner who had cut out of a deal with the now-dead professor. However, suspicion was diverted from him almost immediately and Sherlock went with the NYPD to search the professor’s house. They found “blue angel” mushrooms stashed in a safe in the couch, with a note from another researcher.

A woman named Charlotte had provided them, but when they went to track her down they found her dead with mushrooms growing on her in a scene that was like something out of Hannibal. Both had been killed by a concentrated amount of deathcap poison, from the deathcap mushroom.

They turned to a company that could have created said poison, which had a conflict with Charlotte. The representative didn’t seem interested in entertaining the idea that her company was behind the killings. She provided a list of facilities where the poison could have been concocted.

Joan went to the owner of the brownstone next door and found him at his shop. She wanted to talk to him about the Away-cay ad, and he practically laughed at her complaining about noise. Apparently back when she had first moved in, he’d been chased out of his own home due to all the weird noises and smells coming from Joan and Sherlock’s apartment. He’d sent an email in an attempt to come to some sort of compromise, only to have never heard back from Sherlock about the situation.

Soured by their bad neighborly habits, he decided to rent it out for temporary stays in order to give them a taste of their own medicine. One could hardly blame him, considering he’d been chased out of his own home. Joan later confronted Sherlock about it and he reminded her that it wasn’t only his fault, but there was blame to go around for both of them.

For the case, they turned to Charlotte’s ex-boyfriend who insisted he didn’t kill her. They’d left on somewhat good terms, since she wanted to get married and start a family and he didn’t. He led them to her fiancé, Griffin, who said he hadn’t killed her, either. While Joan spoke with him, Sherlock crept around the back and opened the back shed which was found to be a drug lab. Griffin admitted they’d been selling counterfeit erectile dysfunction drugs because both of them were hurting financially, but Charlotte was the one who handled the money and he never saw a cent of it.
Sexual arousal appears not only after the foreplay and sexual stimulation, but also if you just think about sex or look at the beautiful girls in summer clothes. I’m not a quick draw; I prefer doing it long, and last time the stable erection maintained until the sweet finale.

They tracked the drugs to an online company that was distributing them, and from there they found out that Charlotte, instead of payment, had asked the company to buy up properties in a certain area. Apparently she was buying up properties near the facility the team had investigated earlier for stealing her intellectual property.

They were under EPA investigation and a way to circumvent costly regulations would have been to buy up those properties (which were cheap at the time) and expand out so they wouldn’t fall under new regulations. Instead, Charlotte bought them up under the assumption she’d be able to sell them to the company out of revenge at a huge mark-up.

The representative from the company said she wanted to help in any way she could and provided whatever information the NYPD needed, but it was a dead end. No one in the company had anything to gain from killing Charlotte, and money wasn’t really an issue. They had to find a different motive, and they did, in Harper, the other professor who had gotten out of a book deal with the professor who died.

Apparently, he and Charlotte had been together (per a tattoo on her body that matched his initials) and while tripping, had gotten married. After a while though she broke off their marriage and left him, going after him for money from his book deals. She was the reason he’d given up on trying to make money on the books, since if he wasn’t making it, there was no way she could take it.

However, he found out about the holdings she had and the little scheme she had going to sell the buildings to the company that had screwed her over at a huge markup for a nice profit. He decided, out of his own revenge, and since they were still legally married, to kill her so that all of the holdings and profit she would have made would have gone straight to him as next of kin. They found the poison he had manufactured, and promptly arrested him.

There was a fire at the brownstone next door and Joan immediately suspected Sherlock had been behind it, after he claimed he was going to “take care of” the situation. He had an alibi, a weird one, but an alibi nonetheless. So Joan investigated into it more and found out that it had been arson.

A boutique hotel owner in the neighborhood was unhappy with the number of Away-cay locations that had popped up and stolen business so they hired an arsonist to go into the next door neighbor’s brownstone and set a fire. He would be getting an insurance settlement, and Joan offered a peace treaty: if he would agree to move back in (knowing what he was getting into) then he could get soundproofing put in with the help of the insurance settlement and some money from Joan and Sherlock. That way they’d have a neighbor they knew, and who knew them, and he’d be able to live in his home in peace.

He agreed. It was cute.