Elementary: Up to Heaven and Down to Hell Recap

Synopsis for 4×15: A woman plummets from a balcony and hits an unsuspecting man on the sidewalk, killing them both instantly. Turns out it wasn’t a suicide attempt or accident; it was planned, all for one heck of a weird reason.

Rating: ★★★★☆

In “weird things Joan and Sherlock do” news, Sherlock dragged Joan out to a park late at night, in the cold, to observe some meth tainted meat. It had to do with an old case Sherlock was looking into, because some of the facts didn’t add up and he concocted the experiment to try and come up with answers. Joan wasn’t having any of it, and left to go find them both some food. She just so happened to run into Captain Gregson, out with a lovely lady friend (Paige), and the whole exchange of greetings ended awkwardly as Gregson neglected to make the connection that Joan works with him.

Elsewhere, after stealing a parking spot from some sort of fancy executive type, a man got out to pay for his parking and head inside to an event requiring ridiculous balloons. He never made it inside, though, as a woman (Roslyn Graham) plummeted from her balcony many stories up and crushed him. They were both dead. The NYPD had ruled it either suicide or an accident, but Sherlock looked more into it and determined that it was actually murder.

At the precinct, Gregson took Joan aside to explain the encounter with his lady friend the previous night. Apparently she was a former detective who put in her papers after she got caught taking a cut of some crime-related money. She wanted to keep their relationship on the down low to protect his career and his reputation, but after she figured out Joan worked with him she broke it off with him lest it cause backlash at work.

Back to the case, Sherlock and Marcus discovered that Roslyn had a dog, which became interesting later. They also found a DNA sample, and that her medications for arthritis had been switched out for clonazepam, a drug that could cause dementia-like symptoms similar to the ones she was experiencing.

They got in touch with her children, and eventually brought in one of them who was a doctor. He turned himself in, and admitted to switching her medications, but when they tried to pin him for the murder he insisted it wasn’t him. He switched her meds to make her seem incompetent, because she’d recently changed her will and left everything to the dog, cutting the kids out.

See? I told you the dog became interesting later. The executor of the estate, her lawyer, was the caretaker of the dog and was the one who got to manage her assets until the dog passed. He seemed to have motive, but it turned out he didn’t care about it and had been looking to find someone else to take care of the dog. After all, he’d just taken a prestigious job in Chicago and wasn’t hurting for money. They crossed him off the list after that.

After believing she was the reason Paige broke up with Captain Gregson, Joan went to talk to her about it. She insisted it wasn’t a big deal, but quickly came to realize that the reason she’d given wasn’t the real reason she wanted to break it off with him. There was something more to it, but Joan was promptly asked to leave before it could be revealed.

Sherlock revisited a real estate mogul from earlier in the season they had accused of murder. This time, they were trying to help him figure out why someone may have killed Roslyn to stop his new building project. Apparently he’d been trying to buy the “air rights” from neighboring businesses to build a taller structure, and now that she had passed, he would be unable to buy her property since it and its air rights would be tied up in litigation. He, and the designer, led them to a group called “Save the West Side,” which apparently opposed the project.

They looked into it but found out the group had been dissolved after its group leader was stabbed to death during a late night at the office. He was eliminated as a suspect since he was killed before Roslyn. Sherlock figured that there may have been a mole feeding Derek information he shouldn’t have had, and turned back to the company after they tracked the mole back to them. The designer of the new building insisted the files were unimportant, and that he had fired the mole who leaked them simply because he didn’t like the idea that there was a hole in his agency. There was no motive, according to him.

Paige went to Gregson and admitted to him that she hadn’t been honest about why she broke up with him. She admitted that two months previous, she’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and had decided to end their relationship because she didn’t want to put him through it. She insisted that they remain broken up.

Thanks to some digging on the part of one of Sherlock’s friends in the government, he was able to get the floor plans for the designer’s current office so he could break in and steal the plans for the new building. Except there was something interesting about the new building: it was shorter. Whoever killed both Derek, the “Save the West Side” group leader and Roslyn wasn’t trying to stop the building project, or move it forward.

They were trying to change the project to make the building shorter. The obvious suspect was the designer, and when they dug into it more they realized he had made a miscalculation about the stability of the new building that was caught too late to stop production. So instead, he killed two people to make the building shorter which would make the miscalculation irrelevant.

The problem? They got the files that led to the theory illegally. So they had to go back to the mogul and told him their theory and made it seem like it would be in his favor to give them the files and back their play. After all, he would be the one who cleaned out corruption in his project. It would look good for them, and allow the NYPD to arrest a murderer. They struck a deal, and the designer was arrested for his crime.

Gregson and Joan met across the street from Paige’s bookstore to talk. After being told about Paige’s MS, Gregson had done a lot of research about the progression of the disease and what it would look like to stay with her. He wanted to know if there was anything else he needed to know about it. Joan said no, but made it clear that it was not a kind disease and the later stages of it would be hell for her, and possibly him as well. He made it clear that Paige was worth it, and made his decision to try and restore their relationship.

Joan wished them all the luck in the world.

Multiple Sclerosis is a disease of the central nervous system that is debilitating and the cause is still unknown. If you’d like to learn more about this disease please check out the National MS Society and consider getting involved to help fund research to better understand it. CBS passed this message on through their “CBS Cares” segment directly after the episode, and we would like to echo their sentiment.