Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: A- | 4 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Four-Year-Old Bomb
By Monty Ashley | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.29.2012
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Watson spends most of this episode trying to get Holmes a sponsor so she can leave him in a few weeks. This is an interesting plot not because there's any chance that Watson will leave but because it will be fun to see what the show will do to keep her around. Holmes rejects her first recommendation because he's a boring guy who spouts platitudes. So he goes with a car thief who seems like he could actually be a pretty good fit. He's got patience, which will come in handy.
The mystery of the week involves a bomb. It blows up in an air vent, killing two people at one of those cool web design firms where people ride skateboards indoors and carry around Nerf basketballs. The bomb was triggered by a pager that was called by a guy with a history of arson. But he was just trying to call his local deli, which has a phone number one digit off.
So Holmes investigates further and establishes that the bomb was actually four years old, so it was probably meant for the previous occupants of the space. This turns out to be a company full of spin doctors (the political kind, not the jam-band kind) led by Lisa Edelstein. So she left House so she could deal with a more direct version of Sherlock Holmes? The first suspect is a bomb-maker for an extreme environmental group, but this turns out to be the only bomb he didn't make. The second suspect is a guy who got into a fight four years earlier and vanished, but he turns up entombed in a wall in his house.
However, he leads them to a safety deposit box that contains a taped-over VHS copy of Cheech and Chong's Next Movie. And instead of containing hilarious marijuana-based jokes, it has an old recording of Young Lisa Edelstein being a prostitute. So it turns out that she built her company on money that she got from hooking, and then she was blackmailed much later. And her pipe bomb didn't work so she shot her blackmailer instead. The end!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Holmes watches all his televisions at once. He's got one of those Serial Experiments: Lain setups where there are six televisions positioned randomly in front of him. He explains to Watson that the mind is a muscle and must be exercised to keep from becoming flabby, etc. He's also reading a book, just to prove he's not addicted to television. When Watson complains, he's willing to turn off one television. Watson suddenly wants him to select a sponsor, because she's not going to be his sober companion forever. He says something about how great drugs made him feel, but he's just quoting the next bit that's about to happen on The Invisible Man. It's not clear whether he's just seen the movie before or if he's deduced the next line of dialogue. The point is, he does not want to go meet a potential sponsor, even for coffee.
Now the scene shifts to some horrible web design lab where people ride skateboards and shoot Nerf hoops in the office. I should admit at this point that I work on the Internet and my cubicle has several Nerf guns in it. But these guys are doing it on purpose. And they explicitly mock old people, just in case everyone doesn't hate them already. There's a beeping which turns out to be coming from inside a vent. They think it's a phone, which is silly. Phones don't beep like that.
A zooming camera shows that inside the vent, there's a phone number on a device attached to a bomb. It explodes! Probably should have turned off the ringer, huh? Seems weird that you'd want your bomb to beep before exploding.
Later, the whole team is at the scene. Gregson says the bomb exploded at 9:15 AM that morning. Boy, those slackers were hard at work already! Bell's looking into "whether anybody had beef with the firm." Holmes and Watson look at the wreckage, which is all over the place. There's a World's Greatest Dad mug that's undoubtedly ironic. Holmes says Watson won't miss all this when she's gone in a few weeks to be with her new client. She says she doesn't have a next client, but she won't miss the crime scenes.
Among the debris, Holmes finds some packing paper that shows that it wasn't weapons-grade explosives. Because your real professionals don't use wadded up newspaper, which makes sense. Gregson says the bomb squad said the same thing and are looking into recent burglaries of stores that sell bomb supplies. I like that the bomb squad has been here and learned some of the same things that Holmes is revealing, because it's easy to go too far in the other direction. Holmes doesn't have to be the only person who can do detecting. Holmes finds a circuit board from a pager, which he thinks could be the bomb's detonator. He knows it's from a pager because it doesn't have a transmitter. It's in really good shape for something that was less than an inch from the explosion. It'll be two-three hours for the police to track it down, so Watson drags Holmes off to a meeting. This is a really good excuse to switch gears to the other plot!