Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: A- | 2 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Not the Wire
By Monty Ashley | Season 1 | Episode 16 | Aired on 02.14.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.While Detective Bell is driving home, his car gets riddled by bullets. The obvious suspect is a drug kingpin who recently got out of jail. He doesn't admit anything when he gets interrogated, so Holmes steals his basketball and throws it on the roof. Holmes can be kind of a jerk sometimes. The next morning, the kingpin is dead and Bell is suspect number one. Holmes finds the murder weapon in Bell's bathroom, which also looks bad for him.
Bell takes a moment to confront his brother, who just got out of prison and is given to muttering ominous things about how Bell should learn what it's like to be in prison. And punching Bell in the face in the police station with plenty of witnesses. But it probably wasn't him who framed Bell, because he's the next person to turn up shot. And he writes a message in blood on the floor to exonerate Bell, which is a nice twist on the old dying-message routine.
While they're waiting for Bell's brother to come through surgery, Holmes discovers that Bell blew the whistle on his old boss, who planted heroin on that drug kingpin from earlier in the show. And that means that this other police officer -- who Bell used to date -- was trying to frame him. So Bell is cleared. Hooray!
And in more personal news, Holmes tells Watson that he knows she's not a sober companion anymore. He knows that she's sticking around because she's interested in his work, so he offers her a new job as his partner and apprentice. And she takes it! She'll still make him go to meetings, but we have finally moved on to a new phase of their relationship where her only purpose isn't to watch him like a hawk for signs of heroin use.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Watson comes home. From that, we can deduce that she's been somewhere else. That doesn't have anything to do with the episode; I just wanted to show that I can do some deducing myself. There's a bulb out in the brownstone's foyer, and a mysterious ski-masked figure demands to know where Holmes is. He's stolen her mace so she has nothing to spray him with. Watson runs, and then she slips and falls. It turns out to have been a trick by Holmes. He would like her to learn some violent skills, since she was in physical danger last week. Holmes is going to bring in a series of martial arts experts to train her. He'll also surprise-attack her. She's not entirely delighted by this news.
Bell is driving around at night and delivering a phone message to Gregson. You're not supposed to talk on the phone while driving, man. That's probably why he doesn't notice the car behind him until it starts honking. When it pulls up next to him, gunfire riddles Bell's car, and he runs it up a ramp so it does an A-Team flip. You know what that is, right? It's when a car hits a conveniently concealed ramp and flies into the air and lands on its roof. Everyone should know that.
In the police garage, Gregson decides that it was an MP5 that shot up Bell's car. Holmes says that they're pretty accurate weapons, so it was not a marksman. Because if it were, Bell would be dead. They were in three-round bursts. He thinks Bell should not have jerked the wheel because he would have been fine otherwise. He's also investigated Bell's history, and he has no shortage of possible enemies. This pleases Holmes -- e figures a policeman isn't doing his job right unless criminals want to kill him. Bell says he already knows who did it.
His answer is Curtis Bradshaw. He was an "aspiring drug kingpin" with a crew of almost a hundred. Bell was on a detail targeting him, and they put him away for eighteen months on a minor charge. Naturally, he recently got out. One of the detectives on the detail stole heroin from the evidence room and planted it on Bradshaw. But an anonymous source tipped them off. Bell put away most of Bradshaw's lieutenants, too. He has a picture of Bradshaw's car. And indeed, it looks like the one that was next to him. Also, Bradshaw vowed vengeance when he went to jail. People, don't vow vengeance in public. It just gets you in trouble. Gregson says Bell's obviously not on this case. But Holmes is! And also probably a police officer, but we never see evidence of that.