Elementary: A Difference in Kind Recap

Synopsis for 4×24: The conflict between Joshua Viknar and Moreland Holmes comes to a head, as the team realizes they’re in deeper than they originally thought.

Rating: ★★★★★

The finale picked up where the previous episode stopped, with Sherlock and Joan discovering a bomb in their home. Thankfully they’d gone the secret way, so as not to alert their attempted bomber of their presence in the home. Sherlock easily disarmed the bomb, much to Joan’s disdain.

They ended up leaving the Brownstone and going to their neighbor’s apartment to figure out who had been staking it out, and see what clues they could dredge up. After only finding a few clues, and deciding that it hadn’t been Viknar, but someone trying to set him up as the bomber, they came to the conclusion that a dissenter within the ranks had orchestrated the frame job.

Naturally, Sherlock insisted they needed to figure out who it was and make a friend. The enemy of their enemy, after all.

Whoever had been in the apartment, however, had not been the bomber. Instead, it was Mr. Grey, a man employed by Sherlock’s father as the head of security. He’d ended up hospitalized around the time the bomb would have been placed, and they went to visit him. He pretended to have no idea who either of them were, though Sherlock knew it was an act.

He thanked Mr. Grey for saving their lives, because he’d approached the attempted bomber and had gotten the crap beaten out of him for his trouble. However, he’d also eventually killed the man in question, thus stopping any possibility of the bomb being purposely detonated. Sherlock thanked him, told the nursing staff to take good care of him, and left Joan to go check out a church near the scene.

He found his father and his father’s security team standing over the dead body presumed to be the attempted bomber. Moreland claimed he didn’t do it; but Sherlock knew it had been Mr. Grey who delivered the kill shot. He also apologized, told Sherlock he didn’t really blame him for Sabine’s death, or any of it. Moreland also explained that he wasn’t willing to continue this revenge plot when it would put his son in danger. He would not lose his son to a desire for revenge, and offered to help in any way he could to bring down the head of Moriarty’s organization.

Sherlock and Joan looked into who could have been behind it, and came up with a good lead. An Iranian representative in the UN had the connections to the bomber that indicated her as a likely suspect for the hit. Sherlock, not having the status necessary to get a meeting with her, told Joan they needed to read Moreland in on the case. She reluctantly agreed, and Sherlock and Joan enlisted Moreland’s help in getting to the woman who might have the answers they were looking for. Moreland arranged the meeting and they showed up at her home under false pretenses, but she allowed them in anyway.

They were direct, which was refreshing all around. She did not bother pretending she was not the one who put the bomb in their home. She explained it was the only chance she had at usurping Viknar who was careless with the organization and threatened the stability of it.

She let them in on the history of the organization, and explained that after Moriarty had been taken out there were about seven candidates who tried to wiggle their way into the leadership position. She’d always been in direct opposition to having someone from the inside as the leader; she believed they needed an outside source to lead the organization. It was quickly revealed that particular outside source had been Moreland at the time, though he’d had no idea.

Before the offer could even be made, Viknar found out, believed Moreland to be a threat, and took a hit out on him. It was that very hit that ended in his father’s injury and Sabine’s death. While Viknar hadn’t killed the older Holmes, he’d bought enough time to secure his power as the new leader of Moriarty’s organization.

Sherlock wanted to bring down Viknar, but refused to do it through murder. So instead, he and Joan looked at alternate methods. They were going to take a page out of the previous book and try to frame him, but for a murder that already occurred, not a new one.

They turned back to the Dante Survey participants and the psychopaths it had identified. Any of the ones dead or already incarcerated were fair game, as they were able to look into their past and find what they’d done but never been charged for or connected to. Eventually they found the death of a young woman that matched up with a time Viknar was in the country.

Joan was going to find a knife covered in the woman’s blood, and put together a scheme to get Viknar’s fingerprints on the weapon. While Sherlock went to get the blood sample, Joan went to Viknar and handed him a cell phone with Moreland on the other line. Moreland claimed he wanted a treaty, but Viknar insisted that time had passed. The only thing that would bring peace would be Moreland’s head on a pike.

However, they were able to get the fingerprints they needed and Joan took the knife in question to her source in the FBI. Sherlock and his dad had a short chat, and Sherlock told his father that had he taken the position at the head of Moriarty’s organization, he wouldn’t have lasted long. He didn’t have the stuff of an evil mastermind.

When Joan met with her contact, Agent Burke, at the FBI he asked her if it had somehow leaked. Viknar, the guy she’d said looked good for it, had gone on the run. They couldn’t find him. They determined it was probably a leak from within the FBI itself, but he told her and Sherlock to lay low because they’d potentially be targets.

Sherlock also told his father to lay low, and his father insisted that he would “be gone in the morning.” They took that to meant he would get himself safely out of the country, and went home. When Mr. Grey showed up at the Brownstone and claimed he hadn’t been able to find Moreland, and that Moreland had let go his entire security team with a generous severance, it tipped Sherlock off that his father had other plans. Moreland was going to meet Viknar, and Viknar seemed to think Moreland was there to die.

When they got a lead on Viknar’s location, Sherlock, Joan, and the FBI investigated. There was a body, but when they approached it, it turned out to be Viknar that had been killed. Sherlock received a text to meet someone on the roof, and left Joan and the FBI to meet his father.

Moreland explained that dissenters had reached out and created a plan that would allow him to take over the organization. When Sherlock seemed to believe his father was taking on the role of evil mastermind, Moreland corrected him. The only way he’d be able to dismantle the organization once and for all would be to dismantle it from the inside, and that was going to be his goal and intention. He also did it to protect Sherlock and Joan from the very organization that would try and hurt them.

Moreland also left Sherlock with an observation: loving Sherlock was a dangerous craft. Almost everyone who loved him ended up in precarious or dangerous situations. He should take that into consideration when it comes to Joan, and do what it would take to “protect the one he loves the most.”

After they were done with their meeting, Sherlock met with Joan at his father’s old safe house which had been left to him. He offered it to her, giving her a space to get away from the Brownstone, and she immediately shot it down. It was business as usual with them, whatever it meant for their safety, and she was not about to get scared by what they went through.

The season ended on a lighthearted note, as Joan and Sherlock went to meet her sister for lunch, and Joan revealed she’d invited Marcus along. Perhaps at one time, Sherlock had been defined by the danger around him and his reckless regard for his life and the life of those around him. However, regardless of what his father believed, he was a different man than he used to be, and the terms of the situation were not the same as they once were.