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Have you ever been to a ballet dress rehearsal? It's very impressive. But this time, one of the dancers shows up cut in half so the dancing has to stop early. She wasn't actually killed by being bisected, though; her throat was cut and then she was hoisted into the rafters and wrapped with wire. The first suspect is Iris Lanzer, who took the dead dancer's lead role -- especially because the murder weapon was Iris's personal box cutter. Holmes is all giddy about meeting Iris, because she's a very important dancer, and she's got an alibi. So she's off the hook for now. Instead, the police focus on an ex-boyfriend.
The ex-boyfriend has an excellent alibi, and it turns out that Iris doesn't have an alibi after all. And when she announces that she's flying to Montreal to teach a master class, the police have no choice but to arrest her to keep her in the country. Her lawyer gets her out on bail and Holmes sleeps with her. Really! He claims that he was checking to see if she had a rotator cuff tear, but Watson is pretty sure he just wanted to have sex with a famous dancer. Sounds likely, right? The new theory is that someone is deliberately framing Iris, so Holmes starts investigating the many, many people against whom she has restraining orders.
At this point, Watson drops out of the main plot because she has to help a homeless person find what happened to his friend. This is challenging because it's hard to get a straight story when people have gone off their medication, but she spends much of the episode on her own investigation. She leverages Holmes's deep knowledge of tobacco to discover an evil couple that chains homeless people up in their basement so they can steal their aid checks. And it turns out that the reason she did all this was because her birth father is schizophrenic and out on the streets, so Holmes shows some compassion and offers to take blankets out to the park. It's heartwarming!
The only likely restraining order belongs to a sleazy photographer, but he doesn't seem to be an actual murderer. A voicemail turns up showing that Iris was having an affair with the dead dancer, and the photographer had spyware on Iris's phone, but he still seems innocent. In fact, he's got an alibi in the form of some hidden cameras that he snuck into Iris's bedroom. The investigation is stalled until Holmes does some technical work on the voicemail and discovers that it was leaked by Iris's lawyer. Eventually, he finds proof that he's the killer, because he was saving a hard drive with security footage from his crime. He was hoping to win a big exciting media-friendly trial with it, which is why he framed his own client. It's kind of elaborate, frankly.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!There is coffee brewing at the Brownstone. A Post-In note on Holmes's bedroom door says, "Coitus in progress or recently concluded." Watson is getting used to Holmes's directness at this point, so she shrugs and walks to the coffee machine. A woman walks out of Holmes's room and Watson gives her some coffee in a to-go cup. Her name is Tatiana she has to leave and deliver a sermon. "She's a pastor of some sort," shrugs Holmes. That's twice in one paragraph that people have shrugged! Watson runs down some of Holmes's recent erotic escapades, which have involved both a mortician and a magician. She claims there was no judgment in her voice, but I think there was at least a little.
A ballerina gets ready. According to the officious (but deferential) woman with the clipboard, she's "Miss Lanzer," and she needs to be told that Vincent is ready for the rehearsal. And the rehearsal begins! It's ballet. There are toes and arms and legs and all that sort of thing. Two burly dudes pull on ropes backstage so things can descend from the ceiling. And there's a loud thump, which disturbs everyone. They're even more disturbed when they see that there's a dancer that's been cut in half, right through her waist.
The police swarm is in full effect. Holmes and Watson come to the stage. The press already knows about the situation thanks to Twitter. Gregson says the dead dancer's name was Nell Solange. There are security cameras everywhere, but they all fed into a single hard drive, which has been stolen. Vincent Renato (the director, I think) is called over, and he says he choreographed this dance with Nell in mind, although she had to be swapped out when she proved to not be up to the lead role. Holmes and Watson examine the body. There's not as much blood on the floor as you'd expect, because her throat was cut before she was cut in half. A wire was put around her waist so she'd be cut in half when the scenery came down. Watson thinks the blade was small based on the shallow wound, and Gregson suggests a box cutter. They're led backstage, where Bell has some discoveries to show them. Hi, Bell! He still can't carry a gun or work a case solo, but he's at least in the field. He shows them a spot where there were some blood drops in this spot, which led them to test the whole area with Luminol. Sure enough, it was covered in blood. Nell's body was hidden in a trash can, and Bell found a box cutter in the same can. They think it was wiped clean of fingerprints. Holmes notes an Iris etched into the side of the box cutter.
They're interviewing the dancer we saw earlier in the show. She says she was looking for her knife earlier, but corps dancers apparently take her things as souvenirs. Holmes explains that Iris Lanzer is a master, and he claims to have seen her in London. Bell asks why she has a personalized box cutter, and Holmes explains that it's for customizing her shoes. You have to do all sorts of ridiculous things to ballet shoes to get them in shape for dancing. You kind of have to do the same thing to humans, but I digress. Even though Iris took Nell's spot in the dance, she feels that Nell was not in competition with her. She was "unformed." Holmes would like to know her movements (in the sense of "where were you during the murder," not "dance movements"), and she seems amused at the idea of being a suspect. She went home last night and was seen by her live-in housekeeper. She suggests checking with Nell's ex-boyfriend Nicholas Orman. According to Iris, he used to be with the dance company and he had a temper.
Bell is assigned to go with someone named McAndrews to talk to the ex-boyfriend, and he's happy to have Holmes and Watson with him. Watson accuses Holmes of being a dance fanboy because he doesn't think Iris did it, but he feels Ms. Lanzer is too good to consider Nell a threat: "It would be like me wanting to kill the world's second-greatest detective." And anyway, she has an alibi. Watson looked Iris up online, and she's beat up at least one photographer. Holmes admits she's a diva, but is fairly certain she's not a murderer. Watson gets a call. Someone from Haven for the Homeless got in a fight with a cop and is in the hospital, so Watson goes off to pursue her own plot.
At the hospital, two police officers explain to Watson that Morris Gilroy was shouting about "Freebo," who they take to be his imaginary friend. The cops seem a little unhappy about having had to wrestle him down. Although he swung first, and they call him "a nutbar" so they're not entirely sympathetic. They're not arresting him, but they're not all that interested in finding out what he's talking about. He's strapped to his bed and is shouting that "they took Freebo." Watson calms him down by promising to do her best to find Freebo.Nicholas Orman says he's a dancer at "Jerzey Boyz," a club in Newark. Nell dumped him, but he thinks she was seeing another guy because she was so preoccupied all the time. She threatened him with a restraining order. Oh, and he worked last night, as you can see from this pith helmet full of bills. So his alibi is pretty solid. But Gregson calls to say that Iris Lanzer's housekeeper was off last night, so her alibi has vanished.
The police interview Lanzer with her lawyer, who insists it was an honest mistake. Iris says she went straight to bed because it was the night before a dress rehearsal, and she just assumed her housekeeper was there. Holmes asks if she knows Nell's latest boyfriend. She doesn't think Nell was seeing anyone. She wants to end the interview so she can get a flight to Montreal for a master class she's teaching. Gregson isn't ready to clear her, so he'd prefer that she stick around. She gets snitty and announces, "If you need me, I'll be in Montreal." They arrest her. The lawyer promises to get her out in a few hours. Holmes has his doubts about her guilt, but Gregson feels he didn't have much choice. I guess you really don't want your primary witness to leave the country in the middle of the investigation.
Watson comes into the NYPD. Bell says the tabloids are interested in this case, because ballet dancers are more famous in the world of this show than they are in real life. Iris is back home already. Watson gets the subject back to her case, because she wants help finding Army Sergeant Zeke Frebeaux ("Frebeaux" is like "Freebo," see?). She has a picture she'd like to have distributed, and Bell is happy to help.
Back home, Watson gets coffee and fills a to-go cup. The woman that comes out on Holmes's bedroom is, of course, Iris Lanzer. She was hoping for cappuccino. Watson is shocked at Holmes's unprofessional behavior. Shocked! Holmes claims it's perfectly fine, but Watson judges him good and hard. He says that Iris found him and initiated things, but that doesn't really explain why it's okay for him to sleep with a suspect. He noticed in her interview that she had a stiff right shoulder, possibly a tear in her right rotator cuff, which would make it impossible to operate the pulley that prepared the dramatic appearance of Nell's bisected body. And she'd probably lie about having an injury, because aging dancers have to present an image of perfection or everyone assumes they're breaking down. So last night, he studied her movements and convinced himself that she does indeed have a rotator cuff tear. Watson is still skeptical, so he tells her, "Sleep with her yourself if you don't believe me." Iris comes in and says Nolan (her attorney) will give Holmes full access to her legal files on the theory that maybe someone she has a restraining order on is taking revenge. But Watson has to go to Queens to follow up on a Frebeaux sighting. Holmes thinks this might be a waste of time, and she just says, "His friend asked me to help."
Nolan is shouting denials into a phone as Holmes enters his office. He employs a remote control door-closer, which Holmes identifies as Exeter's "Commodore" model. It's less impressive when your mark knows everything about remote-control door-closers. He looks at the boxes of documents as Nolan says how much he admires Iris's single-mindedness. Nolan would rather the files not leave the firm, so he's going to leave Holmes alone with them. He thanks Holmes, who looks unsettled for some reason.
Watson stops a woman named Rachel Brown and asks if she was arguing with Zeke Frebeaux a few weeks ago. She was, and she says Zeke is her brother. He's been on the streets on and off for about three years, with severe PTSD and some drug problems. Rachel tries to look him up once a month and she got him to come back to her home for clothes and a meal, but he wouldn't stay. They had a fight outside, which is probably what get reported. He said something about the shelter at St. Ignatius, but Watson has already checked there. Rachel frets about how cold it is, and Watson says it's not Rachel's fault. Her phone bings, and it's a text from Holmes: "If free, meet me @ 2412 Pomeroy." The "If free" is very considerate for Sherlock! Rachel is surprised that Watson's still going to look for Zeke. It means a lot to her.
At 2412 Pomeroy, Holmes tells Watson that none of the fans with restraining orders are decent candidates. But there's a sleazy photographer named Jake Picardo who sued Iris and seems like a possibility. Holmes complains that Watson smells like a chimney, and goes on to comment that someone who was near her smokes "Double-T's," a particularly cheap and nasty cigarette. When she doesn't respond, he comment, "Still haven't read my monographs on tobacco, I see." I love that, because Holmes's monographs on tobacco ash are my favorite ridiculous detail from the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Anyway, Iris recently renewed the restraining order on Jake Picardo, so they're going to talk to him.
Jake is mad that Iris won't pay for the camera she broke. And the court learned about his coke problem and he got fired. And now he's freelance, which is more expansive. He points out his spy camera, which took a picture of Watson's butt. She offers to smash his camera for him. Holmes asks for an alibi, and Jake says he was holed up in his van watching for a kid from a vampire movie. That could be almost anybody. He claims that Iris is into all sorts of "manipulative crap," but when Watson asks for examples, he tells them to leave. And Holmes is being called back to the precinct by Bell.
A reporter at the New York Ledger got an anonymous thumb drive containing a voicemail from Iris for Nell. In it, Iris tells Nell not to walk away from her. They were together for sexytimes!
Holmes and Watson have returned to Nolan's office, where Iris admits that she had an affair with Nell, who broke up with Nicholas to be with Iris. She was smitten. Iris seduced her and got her to step aside in the big dance. But then Nell ran into someone else Iris had done that to. And by then, Iris had started to care for Nell. Enough that she could see why someone might step aside from a major role. But Iris says they patched things up the day and Nell deleted the message in front of her. Holmes says her phone was quite hot when he took "some commemorative pictures," which is a bad idea for a famous person to do. She hands her phone over and admits the battery drains quickly. Holmes thinks it's been cloned, and he has a whole theory.
At the police station, Bell confirms that there was Spyware on Iris's phone, put there by Jake Picardo. Picardo denied it, but the signals went to his IP address. He lawyered up, of course, but now it's time for Bell, Holmes, and Watson to talk to him. He admits having cloned the phone, but he denies leaking the voicemail or killing Nell. He offers that he could make a statement about where he was, but he needs immunity first. Then he just goes ahead: "I was going to shoot a porno in Nell Solange's apartment with a bunch of hidden video cameras." Ew. He set up three cameras in her bedroom and one in the shower. He tells them to check those cameras, which will show him there at the time that Nell was being murdered.
Brownstone. Holmes says the cameras confirmed Jake's alibi, so he didn't kill Nell. He thinks the killer is probably the leaker of the voicemail. And he's decided that this is a recording of a recording, so he's running some audio scrubbing software on it to find out where the second generation was recorded. Watson says Morris is on his meds now, and she's going to ask about Frebeaux while he's more coherent. And she'll be donating clothes while she's there. Holmes asks why she's helping "this man," and Watson doesn't answer right away. Then she launches into some backstory: "My father is, uh...he's schizophrenic. And homeless." I thought we'd met her father already, and Holmes thought so too. But that guy, the author in Scarsdale, is her stepfather. Her birth father is on the streets. Her mother was pregnant when he got sick. And he's been in institutions, but mostly on the streets for 15 years. She volunteers a lot in hopes of seeing him. And let's face it, "Sometimes he recognizes me" is a sad sentence. He won't go into treatment. It's been almost two years since she saw him. Holmes just says, "Hm." And now his audio scrubbing is done. Watson leaves and he listens.
St. Ignatius Shelter. Morris apologizes for all the yelling from before. Now that he's more coherent, he can explain that he saw Zeke getting forced into a van. But he's not very good at describing the people who did it. The best he can do is "White. I think." He's having trouble holding onto Zeke's stuff. He allows Watson to check out the bag, and there's a pack of Double-T cigarettes. It's all Zeke would smoke, so I think we know where this is going. And there's a notebook with family pictures. The lady that's his sister is not who Watson talked to!
Nolan is annoyed to see Holmes in his chair. At least Holmes was facing the door instead of that trick where you sit facing the wall until someone comes in so you can spin around dramatically. Holmes says he learned that the voicemail was recorded in this room, because he heard the [click, whooshing] of the door. That's actually how the subtitles describe the sound of the remote-controlled door. Iris consulted Nolan in case something went bad with her affair with Nell, and Nolan recorded the meeting and thus the voicemail. With proof of Nell and Iris's affair, he knew he could make it a media sensation. So he stole Iris's box cutter and snuck into the theater to commit the murder. Then he leaked the voice mail to reveal the motive. Nolan thinks the sound of the door closer doesn't identify it all that specifically, so he's not worried. Iris now has a new phone and Nolan won't tell anyone where she is. And by the time she has to be in court, Nolan will have convinced her that Holmes has turned against them. The idea is that Nolan killed Iris so he could frame Nell so he could make it a media sensation and become a big, famous lawyer by defending her. That seems a little crazy to me, but I guess that's why I'll never be a famous lawyer. Holmes calls him a "mediocre barrister at best," since he doesn't think Nolan's good enough to win the case. Nolan promises that Iris Lanzer isn't going to jail. We get one more [click, whoosh] as Nolan opens the door and shoos Holmes out of his office.
Watson has brought two policemen to Rachel's house. She denies that Zeke is there, even though the whole place smells of Double-T's and Watson saw her throw a package of Double-T's away. Her husband Cliff claims the cigarettes are his. But Watson has a search warrant and the police are coming in on the suspicion that Rachel and Cliff have been cashing Zeke's checks. There's a padlock on the door to the basement, which is odd.
Holmes learns the conclusion while watching his iPad: three homeless men were being held chained in the basement. I have to say, if you're going to kidnap people and keep them chained up in the basement, it's awfully considerate of you to buy them their favorite cigarettes. I'm also not sure about the timeline here, because someone saw Zeke arguing with Rachel outside her home two weeks ago, and then he was dragged into a van sometime later. Watson comes in and says Zeke's doing okay, all things considered. But he's staying on the streets and rejecting treatment for his issues. Watson accepts that, saying, "It has to be up to him." Holmes says she should be proud of herself. Sure; she finished her case already. Meanwhile, Holmes still doesn't know where Iris is. And her lawyer has lots of knowledge of the case that he can use to get her off. Holmes thinks he's holding something back that will free Iris. Maybe he took a picture of himself! Then he stops and says, "There were pictures taken of him that night. And I think he's going to use them to exonerate Iris."
Holmes walks into a bathroom where Nolan is practicing his upcoming speech to the media. Gregson and Bell follow. Holmes says that Nolan undercharges Nell, so perhaps he's overcharging someone else. That was a sufficient reason to get a search warrant, and they found the security hard drive in his safe. Remember the hard drive they mentioned early in the episode? It has all the security footage on it! It seems strange that the staff for a lawyer wouldn't call him immediately when the police roared in there with a search warrant. Holmes says that Nolan saved the footage because it shows "some guy in a mask." That would exonerate Iris but not necessarily incriminate him. Iris is free and Nolan's under arrest. Holmes assures him he looks great for the cameras.
Brownstone. Watson is watching Iris on the television saying that Nell Solange was very special to her and that she'll miss her very much. Holmes comes down with extra blankets that he would like to take to the park, saying, "I understand it's going to be quite cold tonight." Watson goes to get her coat. Holmes smiles. The mysteries tonight were very silly, but I like any time Holmes advances slightly closer to normality.
Follow Monty on Twitter at @monty_ashley and read his blog, Mysterious Exhortations.