2.22 Paint It Black Paint It Black shunted Mycroft’s story a distance along the tracks and allowed us plenty of time with the always-good-value Holmes siblings. After Mycroft spent the episode clumsily blundering his way through the Pierce Norman investigation while his brother made deductions from Ficus trees and fly larvae, it was a relief to find out that the character wasn’t the lumpen buffoon Sherlock saw him as. Nor, it seems, is Mycroft quite as criminal and shady as Elementary would have had us believe. Underneath that bridge, Rhys Ifans disintegrated the louche and out of his depth Mycroft, reassembling him as stately and Bond-like in the space of the episode’s three titular words. Few actors could manage such a seamless transition, proving that, as Jonny Lee Miller and Aidan Quinn were, Ifans is another casting triumph for Elementary. Less successful than the Holmes brothers pairing this week was Watson’s kidnapping plot, which ultimately amounted to very little. With a third season on the way, the danger to Joan’s life was non-existent for the viewer no matter how many heavily accented Corsicans threatened it. Granted, the whole thing allowed Elementary to restate Watson’s importance to Sherlock as “the person [he] loves most in the world” and to show her implicit trust of him, but that’s hardly news to the audience. Paint It Black was Lucy Liu’s directorial debut on Elementary, explaining her reduced screen time, but even taking that into consideration her story was a damp squib. Overall, it was an entertaining, if not exactly rollicking instalment of Elementary. There’s plenty of meat left on the bones of the Holmes brothers’ relationship to be picked over in the remaining episodes, not to mention the ever more imminent arrival of “Lovecraftian monster” Holmes Sr. in season three. We’re left, just as we should be, wanting more. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
