Elementary, one of our favorite detective drama/comedies returns tonight with with an all new Thursday November 27, season 3 episode 5 called, “Rip Off,” and your weekly recap is below. On tonight’s episode, Holmes [Jonny Lee Miller] and Kitty investigate the murder of a postal store owner whose death is connected to the illegal diamond trade. Meanwhile, Gregson’s [Aidan Quinn] career is placed in jeopardy when he hits a fellow NYPD officer.
On the last episode, when a groundbreaking artificial intelligence software program was stolen, Sherlock agreed to take on the case, but enlisted Joan’s assistance in solving it when he became more interested in disproving the computer’s abilities than finding the thief. Meanwhile, Joan confronted Sherlock about his motives after she learned he has been in direct contact with her boyfriend, Andrew, without her knowledge. Did you watch the last episode? If you missed the episode we have you covered with a full and detailed recap, right here for you.
On tonight’s episode as per the CBS synopsis, “Sherlock and Kitty investigate the murder of a small postal store owner whose death is connected to the illegal diamond trade. Also, Captain Gregson puts his career in jeopardy when he hits a fellow NYPD officer.”
Are you looking forward to the season 3 episode 5 tonight? Be sure to come back here later tonight at 10 PM EST for our live recap of this episode, which is sure to be an awesome one. In the meantime, hit up the comments below and let us know how excited you are for season 3.
Tonight’s episode begins now – Refresh Page for Updates
A woman talks on her phone as she walks – she talks about a case she’s working on and stumbles into a puddles then curses. She tells her colleague she’ll call him back. She sees something odd in the water and kicks a scrap of paper. She turns up a human hand and screams. Sherlock asks Kitty to sign an NDA. He says it’s standard but she reminds him that they’ve worked together for months. He says he should have had her sign it from the go but forgot.
She’s training his turtle and says he thinks the reptile wishes her harm. He says they are stuck with him while Joan is in Denmark. They meet Marcus at the puddle and Sherlock checks out the hand. He says the storm last night washed away most evidence. Sherlock says the owner of the hand is dead and he thinks he knows where to find the rest of him. Sherlock says the hand wasn’t cut off cleanly. He says it was a jagged mess and says he thinks the man was dead under a parked car and when the car was towed, it took off his hand.
Kitty says it could have been a drunk lying about. Sherlock says if he was alive, he would have screamed and since he didn’t, he was likely dead. Sherlock tells Marcus he was certain and then indicates one of the cars at the impound lot. Sure enough, there’s a handless dead dude lying under it! Gregson was being held for some reason but is released to go back to his command. His boss says he’s sure Gregson had a reason for hitting a cop but he won’t tell him, so he’s in trouble. He says he gets it.
The coroner says the man was murdered – hit with a blunt instrument in the head. She’s amazed he wasn’t dragged out when his hand was cut off. They wonder if it was a mugging and the coroner says he put up a fight judging by the defensive wounds. Kitty notices he has no hair and asks if he was on chemo. The coroner says he was on aggressive chemo and was cancer-free. He also had a bone graft. Sherlock checks his clothes and says he was devoutly Jewish and they go to talk to synagogues.
They the brother of the victim – Moshi – he says he had bone cancer but kept faith. He says his brother owned a Postal Unlimited store. They go there now and speak to his employee. He says Moshi was a great boss and Sherlock asks why he would have come into the office last night. Sherlock says it looked like a violent and personal struggle. The guy, Amit, says he doesn’t know who he would have been arguing with.
Sherlock checks the security system and then the breaker box and then finds a safe he says was recently installed. Amit says there had been some robberies in the neighborhood lately and Moshi upgraded. Sherlock tries the same code as the security system and it opens. They find a ledger and wonder what he was keeping in secret. One of Gregson’s officers, his daughter, comes to talk to him. She’s angry that he jumped her partner in the middle of the street.
She says she told him what happened in confidence. He asks if she thought he would do nothing. She says she’s a cop and doesn’t need him doing this. Sherlock tells Kitty she can’t use his laptop anymore and he tells her there’s a new one in her room. She asks what’s up and he says he was violated. He says Joan was engaged in literary espionage and shows her a manuscript Joan wrote about his work. He says she deleted them but he recovered it.
Kitty says Joan didn’t publish it and says she has a right to document her work and he tells her she put his name on it so that’s not quite her work. He tells her it was diamonds – he says he thinks Moshi was a smuggler. He says he looked at the shipping advices and says Moshi kept a mail box open for a Nigerian diplomat who died. He says the divoting on the safe is one that jewelers use.
Sherlock says he’s not just a smuggler but is a hypocrite as well. He shows her a smudge in the book from a shrimp po boy – not kosher for sure. He tells her they need to check some fences. They go talk to Marcus who asks why Sherlock is so distracted. He talks to an officer whose lips he read from across the way. He was talking about a briefcase.
Sherlock heard the briefcase came from the department of sanitation. He says it was found and the other handcuff was a bloody mess. Kitty picks the lock on the briefcase and they found diamonds. But it wasn’t a simple robbery or else they would have kept the diamonds rather than toss them away. Marcus comes to Sherlock’s and finds him manipulating crash test dummies. He’s pulling hands off the dummy and says he’s figured out what force need be applied to rip the hand off.
Marcus asks if he really thinks someone could rip the hand off a man. Sherlock reminds him the man was weakened from cancer. He says this is a better explanation than the tow truck theory. Sherlock says the ME concurs with Sherlock and says it’s possible. Sherlock says the person would need to clean and jerk 500 pounds and he says he thinks they should check Ritchie’s gym – a big weightlifting spot near the murder site.
Gregson talks to his daughter Hannah and says Captain Moretti wants him to apologize to her creepy partner. She says it’s a gesture but he says she should never have gotten involved with Stotz. He asks how many times the guy hit her. Hannah tells him she’s not some battered woman. She says it happened twice and that was it and they are done. She says she wants to be promoted and this will kill her career.
Gregson says Stotz will do it to her or someone else if she lets him get away with it. She tells him to show up to her roll call on Friday and do what was asked. Kitty meets Sherlock at the gym and tells him she found no violent weightlifters in the system. They have to wait and Kitty says it’s a shame she doesn’t have the book Joan wrote about him to read.
Sherlock sees Dana Kazimir, one of the heavy lifters they ID’d. Sherlock notices a scrape on his left hand and goes to talk to him. He asks if he knows Moshi Shapiro and asks how he got the scratch on his hand. Dana asks who he is and if he has a badge. Sherlock says their colleague is there and has a badge. He tells him to get lost. Sherlock says he challenges him to a test of strength and offers $200 versus him answering questions.
Sherlock tells him they will use British arm wrestling rules. He says you must pull your opponent’s hand back toward your chest. Sherlock counts down and lets the guy’s hand go and he punches himself in his face. He goes for Sherlock but Marcus pulls his badge and he backs off. Sherlock picks up a bloody towel he wiped his nose with and takes it with them to run the DNA.
Later, Dana shows up at the cop shop with his lawyer. She says he has information for them including crimes that haven’t happened yet but soon will. She says they want lenience and a plea deal but says Dana will tell them anyway. Dana says the guy who hired him will kill other people. He says he was hired to rob and kill Moshi Shapiro.
He says the guy found him on a weight lifting message board. He says the guy had a foreign accent – Dutch maybe. He says he was told to dump the brief case in the dumpster but says if he had known what was in it, he would have kept it. Dana says he never met the guy who hired him. He says the guy asked him to do it again. The lawyer says they have three names the guy also wanted dead.
Dana says the guy is still out there and as long as he is, those people aren’t safe. Sherlock looks at the email and Marcus says the tech guys says it’s legit. His IP address was scrubbed so they don’t know where it came from. Marcus says it’s very blood thirsty and they note that he seemed to know Moshi’s schedule pretty stringently but didn’t seem to know the others as well.
Sherlock points out that Amit is on the list – Moshi’s employee. They go talk to him and Sherlock asks if Amit knew about the diamond smuggling. Amit says Moshi didn’t talk about but a guy came in the store last month and threatened Moshi. He says he didn’t tell them because he was scared. He says the guy’s name is Leonard and shoved him and threatened about prices being too low.
Amit says Moshi told him Leonard was a jewelry dealer and had mistaken him for someone else. He says Linda Divine and Tony Barrios, regular customers, were in there too. Those are the other names on the list. They figure out Leonard is from South Africa – which does sound Dutch. Kitty goes to see Gregson and says she saw him with his daughter and says she read their lips.
Kitty says she saw that Hannah doesn’t want him to talk about it, but Kitty says he should. They go talk and Gregson tells her he has to shake the man’s hands. Kitty tells him she had a tough experience and that changed her relationship with her family. She says the looks on her family’s faces reminded her of what happened. She tells him Hannah doesn’t want to look weak and shouldn’t have to.
She tells Gregson she’s sorry for what he’s going through. They bring Leonard into the cop shop and Marcus shows him the diamonds they took from his apartment. He says his visa is expired and he has blood diamonds. Marcus reminds him that he’s facing a life sentence in South Africa for dealing in blood diamonds. He tells Leonard to confess to killing Moshi and plotting the other’s death.
Leonard says he had no reason to hurt him and says Moshi was retiring. Sherlock busts in and uses the lingo from the email – fat stacks, icing someone and more. Leonard doesn’t even understand the words. He tells them that the emails are full of American slang – things that a native South Afrikaner would never use. Marcus says he’s going to get the confession but Sherlock says he won’t sign it because he didn’t do it.
Sherlock tells her that Leonard is innocent of the killings. He asks Kitty to imagine a different suspect whose means and motives fit the crime. Sherlock tells her an independent third party is responsible. Kitty tells Sherlock he hasn’t read Joan’s book because he’s scared of her judgment. Kitty says he may get answers from the book along with some other surprises. She offers to read it for him.
Sherlock says Joan didn’t share the manuscript with him so he can’t share it with her. She pours a coke on the laptop with the book on it and ruins it. She tells him it’s done now and tells him he can focus on the case. Sherlock gets a ping on his laptop from Marcus saying they found Dana’s money for the hit. Joan looks at the pic that came with the email.
She shows Sherlock it was money rubber banded using rubber bands like at the postage store. She theorizes that Amit was a junior party in the smuggling ring and left the shrimp stain in the book. She says Amit may have been upset when Moshi beat his cancer and that’s why he killed him. He’s also a member at the same gym as Dana.
Marcus brings Amit in to sign his statement and he sees Dana’s lawyer. Kitty tells him he’s there to confess to murder and obstruction. Sherlock says they know he paid off Dana with supplies from his office – Kitty says you shouldn’t steal office supplies. Sherlock tells him that Kitty suspected him first. They tell him they know she was working with Dana’s lawyer and got her to rig the statement he gave.
That’s how he got himself on the “kill” list. Amit says he is a poor college student and has student loans but Sherlock points out his ritzy belt he’s wearing. Amit offers to give up his supplier to mitigate his sentence. Gregson approaches Stotz at roll call. They shake hands. Hannah seems pleased. Gregson turns to go and Stotz tells him he’s quitting the department.
He says he’s joining his cousin’s personal security firm. He asks Gregson to please tell her. Gregson says Hannah should already know but Stotz says no – the English girl – please tell her I’m quitting. He seems nervous. Kitty has some files and is leaving when Gregson finds her and tells her it went well today. He tells her Stotz is leaving the force and she says she’s glad it all worked out.
He asks her what she said to Stotz. She asks if it matters and leaves. She comes home and finds Sherlock tidying up crash test dummies. He asks for her help to return them tomorrow and she says she’s nackered. He tells her she was right about Joan having a right to tell her stories and that he did have some anxiety about reading the book.
Sherlock tears up her NDA and says she should feel free to write her own memoirs if she feels the need. She says she’s not much of a writer but he says someone might be interested to read it if she wrote it. Hmm. Wonder if he read Joan’s manuscript?
THE END!
