Episode Title: “Solve For X”
Writer: Jeffrey Paul King
Director: Jerry Levine
Previously on “Elementary:”
According to Barbie, “math is hard,” and it’s also deadly on this week’s episode of “Elementary.”
When a mugger is shot and a mathematician killed, Sherlock (Jonny Lee Miller) invites himself to the scene of the crime by (pretending?) to confuse a message from a lover with a text from Detective Bell. And it’s a good thing he does, as keeping up with the crafty maneuvers of this killer proves almost as challenging as the famous math problem the victims were trying to solve.
A press release for the episode boasts Broadway’s Jeremy Jordan as a guest star, but the appearance of “Mad Men’s” Rich Sommer aka Harry Crane is also worth noting, as he makes for an excellent half-naked mathematician, surprising Watson (Lucy Liu) when she arrives home to find him shirtless and puzzling over the dead man’s work.
As for Jordan, he plays Joey Castoro, the son of one of Watson’s patients, a man who died due to her mistake. It’s been a while since we’ve visited Watson’s past and the introduction of Joey puts the former surgeon in an interesting predicament. While Watson’s visiting the man’s grave, Joey shows up and the two go out for coffee. Joey tells Watson he’s dropped out of college and plans to open a bar with a friend, only he’s a little short on funding.
This isn’t the first time Joey’s come to Watson for money and Sherlock is wary of the young man, who he feels is taking advantage of Watson’s guilt over his father’s death. Sherlock gives Watson twenty-grand, which he suggests she use to buy off Joey.
Watson isn’t comfortable with either option. Instead, she comes up with a much more noble solution: using the twenty grand to pay for Joey’s education. It’s a “clever” move, as Sherlock puts it and it also helps ease some of Watson’s guilt, by helping Joey get the education his father always wanted for him. The young man tells Watson he’ll think it over, but at least she can take comfort in knowing she did the right thing. As for Sherlock, he tells Watson he’d like to go with her the next time she visits Joey’s father’s grave, as he’d like to pay his respects to the man who changed the course of her life. Watson is clearly touched by the gesture and it shows how much Sherlock values having her in his life (as a friend, I’m still hoping).
Back to the case, Sherlock and Watson learn that not just one but two mathematicians have been murdered just as they were closing in on a solution to the math problem knows as “P versus NP.” Solving the problem could have major implications in the world of computer security, as it would allow hackers to break through the most sophisticated encryption code.
Sherlock and Watson focus in on college professor, Tanya Dempsey (Lynn Collins). Dempsey’s got a motive, as she too was working on the problem and there’s some major prize money at stake, not to mention corporate interests in the solution. However, her alibi checks out when security footage shows her at a restaurant at the time of the murder.
Frustrating Sherlock and Watson is the fact that the evidence pointing to Dempsey is overwhelming. A break in the case comes when Watson astutely points out that the time stamp on the video appears to be incorrect when she catches a man buying “Happy Hour” drinks at the bar. This leads the detectives to determine that Dempsey had in fact already solved “P versus NP” and used a code written by the programmer she was having dinner with that night to manipulate the video and create evidence implicating her ex-boyfriend. Dempsey is taken into federal custody as her work poses a threat to national security and Watson gets the MVP for spotting the discrepancy in the video.
In this episode we also learn that Watson is schooled in handwriting analysis, perhaps by Sherlock, who in his own right, is an expert on every kind of poison imaginable. A little hard to believe, but it sure makes for one of the most entertaining police procedurals around. “Solve For X” not only gives us a novel premise (by the way “P versus NP” is real and still unsolved) and tosses in plenty of quirk and comedy to lighten up the whole double homicide thing in a way that only a shirtless Rich Sommer hyperventilating over a math problem can.
