Elementary - Ancient History

Without a case to solve in days, and with boredom seeping in, Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) drags Watson (Lucy Liu) to the morgue looking for any unsolved death that may offer the promise of an interesting case. What they find is the hit-and-run of a former professional hitman who Holmes believes may have killed a man the day he died.

With no corpse Holmes finds it hard to interest Captain Gregson (Aidan Quinn) in the case but that doesn't stop him from interviewing the assassin's wife (Mia Barron) and examining his partners in the nursing home the man was building including a contractor (Wass Stevens) who hasn't been seen since the day of the assassin's death. Sadly, for Holmes, the man isn't so much dead as shacked up in cheap hotel with a pair of hookers.

With Detective Bell's (Jon Michael Hill) help Holmes gets a new lead by discovering the $25,000 in cash the assassin paid to his contractor the day he disappeared was all from a bank robbery more than a decade earlier which leads to a trip to a loan shark (Mike Starr) who was accosted by the scary Russian two days after he lent the assassin the money. The discovery of the second assassin's body finally confirm's Holmes's suspicons that their victim committed murder shorty before his death but still leaves several questions unanswered about the series of events that led to them both being killed within a few hundred feet of each other on the same day.


In the episode's B-story Watson agrees to help track down a friend's (Danielle Nicolet) former one-night fling whose case Holmes argues is a wild goose chase that can only end in tears for Joan's friend when and if she learns how the man with inevitably not measure up to her romanticized memories of their one night together nearly a year ago. However, the detective has ulterior motives in wanting Watson to drop the case as he later confesses he is the man who slept with her friend last year.

Both stories work well as Holmes' becomes impatient with not finding a body and Watson equally so after she learns Holmes lied and slept with her friend a year ago to get some dirt on his new sober companion. The main story is only solved once the detective changes his perspective and realizes the true motive for the murder. As to the one-night stand, Holmes takes Watson's advice to come clean which proves honesty is indeed the best policy as amorous circumstances repeat themselves a second time.