Very Late Thoughts On the End of Elementary

Elementary is dead, long live Elementary.

Yes, I only just now got around to watching the final season of Elementary, which aired early last summer. And it was the best of adaptations, it was the worst of adaptations. It didn’t have Sherlock‘s slick style; it often crossed the line from implausibility to goofiness.* It mis-stepped as often as it knocked it out of the park. It let itself get tangled in the tropes of a procedural and network-television requirements.

But it also had a great cast who brought even the corniest lines to life. On prime-time TV, it made room for versions of canon characters who weren’t white, male, straight, able, and/or cisgender.** It treated Holmes’s addiction seriously but not grimly, and it made the case for emotional vulnerability and connection over self-isolation and arrogance.

It also did something relatively rare on TV, and it did it really well: it depicted a moving, intimate, platonic friendship between a man who is attracted to women and a woman who is attracted to men.***

That this was deliberate is clear. It’s not that Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu would have lacked chemistry if the writers had decided to take the story that way. Instead, the show worked hard to build their intimacy without treating it as romantic.

Nowhere is this as clear as in the final scenes of the series finale. First, ex-captain Gregson explicitly compares Holmes and Watson’s relationship to his own romantic relationship with his late wife. He reminds Holmes that Watson is the one person that Holmes loves. And he uses that word: “love.” 

Neither Gregson nor Holmes makes a big deal of this–the actions and words of both make it clear that committed romantic relationships and friendships differ in kind of love but not in degree. Holmes does argue that the situations aren’t the same, but not because he and Watson aren’t lovers. Instead, in his view, the main difference is that time was running out for Gregson, since one party in his relationship was terminally ill, but he and Watson have plenty of time.

Although some of the plot twists in this scene felt over-the-top, it’s noteworthy as a display of Holmes’s character development–the real meat-and-potatoes of this show. Elementary is about accepting love and intimacy with others, and in doing so, it gently subverts many of the more common will-they-won’t-they tropes.

In the scene I described above, we’re used to seeing characters like Holmes protest the idea of “loving” someone (see: the whole “I *lobe* you” scene on House, M. D. when House and Cuddy hook up , or the way Mulder and Scully hastily clarify that they’re just friends when other characters comment on their closeness). In contrast, Elementary‘s Holmes has grown enough to acknowledge that his feelings for Watson without fanfare or panic.

And Elementary‘s finale isn’t the only episode that subverts these tropes. For example, earlier in the series, Holmes and Watson confront a common tee-hee romantic trope: they learn that someone else has been writing stories loosely based on them in which, among other inaccuracies, they have sex. Instead of getting flustered and angry, Holmes finds the whole thing amusing; Watson is furious not because the fiction has dredged up romantic feelings she isn’t ready to confront but because her privacy has been breached in a really creepy way.

Will-they-won’t-they plots usually rely on insecurity in relationships: both characters feel unable to be emotionally vulnerable about their attraction to the other. Usually, this results in bickering, overcompensation, and repression. Will-they-won’t-theys seldom resolve with the gradual emotional growth of the characters; instead, the tension grows and grows until the cost of repressing love becomes greater than the cost of expressing it. Sexual attraction often weighs heavily on the “express it!” side.

Which, hey: is really fun. I love me some bickering, emotionally repressed couples.

However, Elementary‘s Holmes and Watson grow into the opposite of that. External circumstances don’t coerce them into revealing that they actually do like each other; pants-feelings don’t hormonally overcome their lack of emotional intelligence without addressing it.

Instead, Holmes and Watson fitfully, painfully grow an intimate friendship by learning to trust each other, to set boundaries, to enforce those boundaries, to communicate effectively, and to forgive each other for mistakes. Watson explicitly helps Holmes build some of these skills and understand why they’re important.

We also see over and over that they don’t need each other–they aren’t two halves of a whole who can’t survive without their second self. When they’re on their own, they survive. They thrive. Although both run into problems and pitfalls, apart, they both build successful careers.

They stay together, then, because they choose to be. Because they’re two people who care about each other and want to be together.

Could this have been done with a romance? Sure. But I appreciate that it wasn’t.

See, social convention in Western culture–in Holmes and Watson’s culture–strongly discourages masculine folks from developing this kind of emotional intimacy outside of heterosexual romantic (or “potentially” romantic) relationships.  If all the emotional work that Holmes did led to a healthy, emotionally intimate, heterosexual romantic relationship, well, that would be a good start, but it wouldn’t go as far as Elementary does.

As Holmes learns to navigate emotional intimacy with Watson, we see him open up to other friends: to Marcus Bell, the NYPD detective who often works cases alongside him; and to Captain Gregson, the father-figure-ish head of the precinct. We see him teach others–sometimes new friends, sometimes characters who end up betraying him–how to be emotionally vulnerable themselves. We see him learn from other role models, like his narcotics support group sponsor. We see him grow to a point where he can do emotionally difficult things, like break up directly but kindly with his perfectly nice girlfriend when the relationship isn’t working.

Moriarty’s dangerous plans (and those of other antagonists) come in the form of temptations: close yourself off, they argue, because nobody will ever understand you. All you’ll get is pain and frustration, and you’ll cause anyone you do care about to get hurt. Embrace our isolationist ways that won’t force you to put your feelings on the line–dedicate yourself to your psychopath lover, stop trying to resist your addiction, cut yourself off from healthy human connection.

In this show, Watson and Holmes’s friendship works better than a romance ever could, because Holmes is learning how to be a good friend, whether it’s within a professional relationship, a romantic one, or a therapeutic one. He is learning how to accept and give emotional intimacy without leaning on physical intimacy as a substitute. (Elementary establishes this Holmes as specifically and explicitly comfortable with physical intimacy, which he considers to be separate from any emotional attachment.)

The series occasionally misfires–of course it does, perfect stories are rare if not impossible *coughTheWireSeason5*–but overall, its theme is clear and consistent: even the smartest detective in the world benefits from emotional intimacy with the people they love, and that love doesn’t need to be reserved for their OTP. It can be for everyone.

Which is why this Holmes and Watson fit this show perfectly.

* Bad guy, threateningly: You know I majored in math, right? They told us that some problems just can’t be solved. They don’t add up. I don’t believe that. I believe every problem has a solution.

Me: *thinking*…. Some problems can’t be solved as defined. That’s… that’s literally been proven, mathematically. All you have told me and this good guy is that you are a shitty mathematician who makes poor analogies.

– or –

Pathologist: *reassures team he Googled something instead of using bad guy’s made-up fake Google*

Me: Wait, there’s fake-Google and Google? Is Google the Bing of the Elementary-verse???

** I mean, it didn’t always do these things well. (For example: casually claiming that a character physically couldn’t lie because “she’s autistic”… that’s not how it works). But bless its heart, it tried, which is sadly more than most other adaptations of these characters.

*** That is: in Elementary, we are shown Holmes sleeping with women and Watson sleeping with men. Both seem astonished to find people attracted to more than one gender exist in a case where that comes up, but, hey, let’s not make assumptions.