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Remember Moriarty? She's played by Natalie Dormer and she used to pose as Irene Adler, the love of Sherlock's life? Well, Holmes has been exchanging letters with her as she sits in prison. We learn about this just in time for a case to come up that might involve her. A girl has been kidnapped, and Holmes recognizes the voice demanding the ransom as the man who posed as Moriarty. He tries out the name "Fauxriarty," but I hope we're all mature enough not to stoop to that.
Because the kidnapping was done by one of her lieutenants, Holmes is confident that it's a Moriarty operation. He and Watson visit her in her spacious warehouse cell, where she has occupied her time by painting a giant portrait of Watson's face. Weird! She offers to help out with the investigation if she can have some unspecified prison favors, but that quickly turns into her being brought to the police station so she "help with the investigation." She provides sketches of the men who seem to have done the kidnapping, but Holmes doesn't trust her.
Watson and Moriarty go back to the site of the kidnapping so they can say mean things to each other. Moriarty thinks Holmes is only hanging around Watson so he can figure her out. When they come back to the police station, there's a call from the kidnapper, and the kidnapped girl gets to plead for her mommy. Holmes continues to be angry at Moriarty's presence, because he can't figure out his own feelings for her.
Holmes determines that Moriarty's sketches conceal a numerical code. And two policemen get killed by Moriarty's lieutenant, who steals a phone so he can read an email and see the sketch for himself. This gets Moriarty sent back to her ultra-secure warehouse prison, but she escapes by gouging her wrists with broken glass and strangling her jailer. She goes straight to the bad guy's hideout and shoots everyone dead, because it turns out that she was the kidnapped girl's mother! It was all a scheme by the lieutenant to get some GPS coordinates from Moriarty. She surrenders to Holmes because she figures she'll be free in a year through legitimate means anyway. At the end, Holmes considers burning his letters from Moriarty, but he doesn't. It's kind of touching!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The previouslies involve Moriarty, who was also Irene Adler, Sherlock's one true love, whose (faked) death sent him into the drug binge that led to the start of this series. I believe that means we'll be seeing Natalie Dormer again tonight. Hooray! She's a lot of fun.
At the brownstone, Watson announces that she's going on a date with someone from her dating website. Holmes is wearing his beekeeping suit, but he denies being out of clean laundry. In fact, once Watson is gone, he goes up to the roof to spray things on his hives. And then he takes out one of the combs, inside which he has concealed a sheaf of letters. He probably has easier places to hide things, but it's just more fun to hide things in a beehive, you know?
The letters are from Moriarty, of course. Holmes writes her a letter by hand in which he wonders if he's really getting a response from her. He seems a bit contemptuous of Watson's "series of curated mating rituals," although he admits that "love, for lack of a better word, is a game I fail to understand." As he writes, we see the other members of the cast: Watson on her date, Gregson being sad about his marriage, Bell at the shooting range. His hand is still shaking, and he doesn't shoot. Holmes continues: "I find you a challenge. One that in spite of all that you've done continues to sitmulate." We see Moriarty. If she's still in prison, it's an awfully large cell. She's painted a portrait of Watson that's just enormous.
We also see people in all black with night-vision goggles coming out of a van and breaking into a building. Once they're inside, they spread out, find a man on the stairs, and shoot him. These night vision goggles are unnecessary, in my opinion, because it's not pitch black in here. A young girl is woken up, then covered with a blanket.
The morning, the team is on the case. Gregson says the dead man was Max Fuller, a British national. Holmes says his ancestors built the railroad form London to Manchester. That's exactly the sort of meaningless trivia you can't stop yourself from saying if you know it. Mrs. Fuller woke up an hour after the invasion and found the body. There was no kidnapping note. Holmes would like to see the bedroom. But first, the phone rings, and the Caller ID is a question mark. Oh! It's the Riddler! Mrs. Fuller takes the call on speakerphone, and a smug British voice asks the other people on the scene to announce themselves. Gregson does, but no one else chimes in. The voice declares, "The price for the safe return of Kayden Fuller is fifty million dollars." Holmes recognizes the voice as the man who pretended to be Moriarty. He informs Gregson that Moriarty must be responsible, so he'd like to go talk to her. Even though she's in a SuperMax prison. Watson asks how he knows he's on her list of visitors.
Back at the brownstone, Watson is surprised at the twenty-seven letters arrayed in front of her. Holmes claims he maintained the correspondence so he could talk to a criminal genius, as any sensible detective would. Watson doesn't buy this for a second. He refers to the fake Moriarty as "Fauxriarty," which is an incredibly strained pun. I will not be using it, because I didn't think of it first. Gregson calls to say that the three of them will see Moriarty in the morning. But she's not in Newgate anymore. In the world of Elementary, Newgate is in New York, not London.
They're at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which Gregson thinks is a secret prison. Holmes calls it a "black site." While she was off the show, Moriarty has traded some information for better housing. They're met by someone named Ramses Mattoo (and not, as I originally heard, Randolph Mantooth), who's the guy in charge. He claims that he "dots the I's around here," but we never see him doing any paperwork. Moriarty is their only "guest," and she only gets art supplies and a daily copy of the New York Ledger. Holmes warns that she's a vile seductress, but Ramses explains that he's gay. Although he explains it in a way that confuses Gregson, so Holmes has to clarify. Ramses is impressed by Watson's face. And sure, she's Lucy Liu. But he's talking about the giant painting.
When they enter, Moriarty looks up from her Ledger and tells Holmes, "You look a bit tired." He snaps back, "You look a bit evil." It's not the best repartee I've ever seen, but I think Holmes is dealing with some emotions so he's not at his best. Moriarty reveals that she knows that Watson's hunt for a soul mate have not been fruitful, which naturally gets under Watson's skin. Moriarty is relaxed because she believes that she won't be here in a year. Gregson recaps the kidnapping and murder. Moriarty immediately shows off that she knows that Uriah Fuller built the railroads that connect London to Manchester, just like Holmes did, but she says she had nothing to do with it. She suggests that maybe her old lieutenant was just being ambitious. She says she could tell them his name, likeness, and known confederates, but she'd need some sort of inducement. Holmes says he's willing to continue the correspondence but she knows he'd do that anyway because he's hooked. She says there's a list of favors she's asked for.
Kayden is being kept in a fairly nice kid's bedroom by a man who's trying to make friends with her by offering to play cribbage. She's kind of interested, but as she comes closer, there's a knock on the door so he has to leave. Outside the room, his chief goon (named Clay) says the boys are getting jumpy. He promises Clay that they'll hear from Moriarty "soon enough."
Back to the police station. Watson asks Holmes if he's okay. He ignores any possible emotional component to his relationship with Moriarty, so Watson asks what the "empirical value" was when he told her about Watson's dating life. Their sniping is interrupted with the revelation that Ramses has brought Moriarty to the NYPD. She smirks that the police will have "full use of my knowledge and faculties." In fact, she smirks most of her lines. It's a very smirky Moriarty.
Moriarty is left in the main bullpen while people have an argument about her in Gregson's office. Holmes is convinced that she's going to escape, so Ramses describes the many security measures they've taken. For example, there are RFID chips implanted in her hands. Holmes says she's gone, but he's just kidding around so he can say, "Just thought you should get used to hearing that." She's also wearing imaginary handcuffs that can electrocute her remotely, and at this point we're getting into the kind of thing they use on supervillains. Ramses says she's perfectly safe, although he admits that this is the first time she's been out of the prison. He insists that she's had zero access to anything that could send a message to confederates. The only outgoing letters have gone to Holmes, which is news that generates a little side-eye from Watson.. Gregson asks why she couldn't help them from her cell, and there's no real answer to that, so Ramses has to claim that she "cashed in some big chips" to do this. And if the NYPD don't take her help, the FBI will.
In the meeting room, Moriarty identifies her lieutenant as Devon Gaspar, formerly of British military intelligence. But he was so important that they'll deny all knowledge of his existence. He's also got several aliases. She's provided sketches of him and the people she thinks he's probably working with, and it's pretty convenient that she's an artist. Gregson won't send them to the media right away, but he'll send them via a FINEST email to all police officers. Holmes declares the investigation over and tells Moriarty to give his best to all her jailers. But she's been promised a look at the site. Holmes wants to investigate her info first to make sure she's not just making things up, so Watson offers to go with Moriarty to the site.
At the kidnapping site, Moriarty sort of pretends to investigate, but mostly she just does random stage business like moving things around and opening and closing drawers. She muses about how frightened Kayden must be, and Watson tells her to stop pretending to care. Moriarty admits that Watson is more intelligent and interesting than she initially thought. Then she gets delightfully condescending: "It's what you crave, is it not? Acknowledgement from a superior mind, evidence that you matter?" Watson says her partnership with Holmes was Holmes's idea, which clearly bothers Moriarty. But she says she's drawn to things she doesn't understand: "Once I've figured you out, I'll move on. Same as Sherlock." Watson says Moriarty thinks she's in love with Sherlock, but she's not sure. She's extrapolating from her theory on why Sherlock is acting like this. But Moriarty says that Sherlock is the only one she can talk to, and holds herself up as the only person Sherlock can talk to, indeed, the only person he can relate to at all. This is all supposed to be poking at Watson, but I wonder if Moriarty realizes that Holmes has a brother.
When Watson returns to the brownstone, Holmes is speaking angry French into the telephone. He's using an old-fashioned heavy telephone so he can hang up with more emphasis. That's good thinking; it's hard to slam down an iPhone. He was talking to someone to Interpol and the names and faces from Moriarty don't check out. Watson suggests moving on and going back to the abduction site, which no one's investigated properly. I like the way Watson keeps suggesting actual investigative techniques that no one is willing to follow up on. Holmes asks if she had a good talk with Moriarty and she shrugs, "You have been hogging her for the past few months." She tells Holmes it's natural to still have feelings for Moriarty, because she was also Irene. But Irene's gone and Moriarty will not change. Holmes clears his throat like he's going to deny having any interest in Moriarty, but he sits down and helps go through the files.
Elsewhere! A police officer checks his phone to see the FINEST email. His partner returns to the car and they go to investigate a call. They drive through a very dramatic camera angle before finding a guy in a gray hoodie under a bridge. He has a bottle in his hand and doesn't answer them. Once the police get out of their car, he shoots! And the other cop gets shot from behind. The bad guys check the police phones; one is locked, but the other one isn't, and the man holding it sees a sketch of his own face. One of the police officers sits up and shoots the guy in the hoodie and gets shot again. The main bad guy leaves, with two dead policemen and a dead bad guy at the scene.
The morgue. Gregson confirms that the dead bad guy matches one of Moriarty's sketches. Holmes decides that the only reason they'd be out shooting cops is because they needed access to the FINEST email that would contain Moriarty's sketches. Although Gregson was just about to send the sketches to the media, so maybe they could have waited twelve hours.
Holmes storms into the room where Moriarty is sitting. He shouts, "Robert Baden-Powell!" He invented Scouting in England. He also developed a technique for hiding messages in drawings of bugs. Moriarty says he called it "The Weaponization of the Pastoral," because, again, if you know something like that you're obliged to say it. She denies hiding anything in the sketches she made, but Holmes is convinced there's something going on with the stubble on Gaspar's chin. There's a pattern! That he hasn't decoded yet! Moriarty starts to deny it, and Holmes shouts at her to stop lying to him. She glares at him. But then! There's a call to the police from Devon Gaspar, so everyone has to stop what they're doing and go listen. Devon says killing the police was necessary when he realized they'd turned to his "old friend" for assistance. He threatens to disappear tomorrow. Kayden has been asking for her mommy, so he lets Kayden have the phone even though Mrs. Fuller is nowhere around. Kayden sobs and says she wants to come home. Moriarty looks unhappy about this. When the call is over, Holmes orders Moriarty out of the precinct, and Gregson backs him up. Ramses takes her away, back to her Brooklyn warehouse.
Brownstone. Holmes has gotten a series of numbers out of the sketches. He tries adding dots, translating it to a GPS code, and that leads to Svalbard, an island off Norway. He tells Watson, "The woman is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma I've had sex with. I would be lying if I said I was the strongest assessor of her motives at this point." Good one. He's having someone bringing him the last two weeks of the New York Ledger on the theory that she might have been sent a message that way. They're by the kitchen door and he brings them in. The only reason they were there was so they'd have a reason to move the scene from the living room to the kitchen. Watson suggests that Moriarty looked angry when Kayden was on the phone. In Watson's opinion, she "looked like she wanted to kill the guy."
Moriarty's cell in Brooklyn. She's painting while Ramses walks around and talks to her. She uses the phrase "Heaven forfend," which I love. Nobody ever forfends things these days. Ramses says the NSA found "those numbers you hid." She looks up at him. Intercut with this scene, we watch Holmes and Watson in their kitchen, as Holmes admits that he still feels a pull toward Moriarty and has imagined that she could change, like him. Two years ago, he was a drug-addled misanthrope, but now he's sober and has cultivated relationships with actual people. Moriarty asks Ramses, "Would it surprise you to learn that during the course of my internment here, I have devised exactly seventeen means of escaping?" I choose to believe that's a reference to the classic Thinking Machine story "The Problem of Cell 13." It's well established that geniuses in detective stories can get out of prison cells through sheer brain power. Ramses tries to banter with her, saying he can only come up with ten. Holmes spots an ad for a used car that might contain an Ave Maria cipher. But as he's describing it, he realizes that Moriarty is one of the victims of the scheme, not the perpetrator. Moriarty tells Ramses that her jars of paint are glass, and they're not conductive, so all she'd have to do is break them, then shove the shards between her wrists and the shock-cuffs. As he kneels down to see some spots of blood on the floor, she strangles him from behind.
Holmes says there were two coded messages to Moriarty in the newspaper. One said, "You know what I want. Tell me where it is." And now they know that whatever it is, it's in Svalbard. So the 50 million dollars is just a red herring. And the second message was, "Be prompt. Your daughter's life hangs in the balance." So Kayden Fuller is Moriarty's daughter! That means she probably wasn't faking it when she was worried about Kayden, huh, Watson?
Wherever she's being kept, Kayden lays has a good cribbage hand, and Devon has her move her peg. Before we can learn if Kayden is a genius at card games, there are two gunshots from outside and he tells her to get under the bed and not answer the door. He moves out. There's the sound of a man crying. Clay tells Devon, "I'm sorry. She told me to shoot him. She knows things. I've got family too. I don't want her coming for them." Moriarty comes out behind Devon. She shoots Clay dead and grievously wounds Devon. She briefly explains that she knows what properties they own, which ones would be appropriate for holding a kidnap victim, and which ones have the same type of clay subsoil that were on the dead bad guy's boots. I like that she uses the same deductive techniques as Holmes. In the books, he's all about tracking the mud on someone's boots. Devon says the girl's safe and tells her to finish him, unless she's going to let him bleed out. She answers, "Oh, I'm afraid I've got something a little less passive in mind for you." I find her pretty convincing as a scary person here.
At Moriarty's cell, Gregson says she used Mattoo's handprint to escape. And Mattoo's alive! In fact, she didn't kill anyone at all on her way out. Holmes observes from the blood on the floor that she'll need medical attention, and that she's gone to fetch her daughter. His phone rings. Moriarty tells him, "The Bronx. A condemned building near Cortland Park. Top floor." The police have to wait outside.
Holmes goes up the stairs, alone. Moriarty is sitting on the floor, surrounded by bodies. She tells Holmes that her daughter has been sent away. And she was born well before Moriarty met Holmes. Oh, I hadn't even thought of that! Yeah, we don't need Holmes to have a kid. Anyway, the Fullers needed a child at the right time. She casually adds, "I assume the girl's real father needs a lesson in discretion." Heh. Holmes carefully steps around Gaspar's body and squats to her. He asks what's on the island of Svalbard. It turns out to be the Global Seed Vault. I like that Moriarty knew its precise coordinates. But that's not what Devon was after; apparently Moriarty maintains a "dossier of interesting facts." Neat! Some are from a mentor that I guess we'll meet eventually. She feels that even knowing the dossier's exact location wouldn't help a dummy like Devon Gaspar. And she knew once the game was afoot, she'd get assistance from "the keenest mind I've ever met." Holmes tenderly looks at her bandaged wrist. She chose not to run because she believes she'll be a free woman soon enough. She leans forward as though to kiss him and says his letters have influenced her. She didn't kill Mattoo because she knew it would have been repugnant to Holmes. She asks, "Tell me, is that how you learned to be one of them? By learning to care how your actions seemed in the eyes of another?" He answers, almost tenderly, "I'm not sure I am one of them." She sags into his arms. This is the sweetest love story between two sociopaths I've ever seen. He carries her out and tells the police she needs a hospital. Watson is there, and she meets Moriarty's gaze.
Holmes looks into the fire at the brownstone. Watson says Moriarty will make it. She asks, "You all right?" He answers, "I am. Thank you." The letters are on the arm of the chair. He stands, looks at them, looks at the fire, and... does not burn them. Instead, he returns them to the beehive and puts it away.
Follow Monty on Twitter at @monty_ashley and read his blog, Mysterious Exhortations.