'Elementary' Season 1, Episode 5: 'Lesser Evils' Recap

Holmes is choking someone. He’s really putting muscle into it, too. But don’t worry, it’s just a dead body, and he’s testing out post-mortem bruising in the morgue. He teases Watson for being uncomfortable, but she denies it.

As they’re preparing to leave, he looks a little closer at his second “victim.” He asks about his autopsy, and his friend in the morgue tells them there was none. He died of a heart attack. Watson agrees, noting that the man was receiving radiation treatment for a brain tumor, and probably therefore threw a blood clot and had a heart attack. Holmes disagrees, asking for the room number where the man died.

They race down the hall and get to room 704, Holmes explaining as they go that the man was given epinephrine, which killed him. Watson reminds him that’s used when a patient crashes. They get to the room and Holmes rudely halts the janitor from cleaning it by chucking the patient’s water pitcher into the hall and telling him he’d probably better clean it up.

Inside they shut the door, ignoring the shouts and banging.  Holmes asks if she noticed the mark on the patient’s hand, which would have indicated that the epinephrine was injected before he died, not after, when he was coding. They are investigating a murder.

He explains that the nurse said the victim was alone when he coded, so somehow the killer must have gotten away before then. Watson points out he could have put the epinephrine in the IV and turned it down, giving him time to escape before the code. Holmes dumps the trash on the bed, sorting through it before the door busts open. He demands to see the administrator.

Luckily, Captain Gregson comes and gets Holmes out of trouble. Watson and Holmes run into a doctor, Carrie, who makes polite conversation with Watson. Holmes points out that he can tell they had a falling out but used to be friends. Carrie asks if Watson is applying there, since her suspension is over, but Watson says she is moving on.

They go to see the administrator, Mr. Sanchez, who is eager to press charges but willing to listen. They also meet Dr. Baldwin, head of surgery. He says he was not treating the victim but he was pre-surgical and therefore under his jurisdiction. They tell Gregson they will give the police access to the body and once Holmes apologizes, but refuse to release records.

“He’s dead do you think he’s worried about his privacy?”

Watson and Holmes head off, Holmes explaining he is going to find the woman who brought the victim coffee, by the receipt with a barista’s number on it he found in the trash. They go to the coffee shop, waiting in the long line as people order.

“The Magna Carta was less complicated.”

Holmes says Watson lied to him about not being able to practice medicine anymore, but she says it wasn’t a lie since she her license expire. He admits he hadn’t realized how traumatic losing her patient was to her.

They meet Barista Dave, who gives out his number a lot, and hits on Watson. But he remembers this lady, a sexy doctor in a lab coat and wearing great perfume. They leave, Holmes discouraged. No way she was a doctor. Watson can help—they go to a high-end perfume store, where the ladies wear white coats, and find the lady described.

She is surprised to hear the man, Trent, died. She says she used to visit him and read to him when he went blind, more because she felt bad for him than because she liked him. Her alibi for the time Trent was murdered checks out. They ask if anyone would hurt him, and she says part of the reason she visited so often was because he had no one. There was only a doctor who used to come by at night, and help him cope; the doctor chatted with him and discussed his prognosis. Holmes finds out Trent’s cancer was terminal.

Holmes discusses what he is piecing together, which is that the killer is someone with some degree of medical expertise, and tended to people to needs not out of empathy but a craving for dependence. This is deemed a certain kind of killer, an “Angel of Death,” and he will kill again.

They go to see Dr. Baldwin. Toxicology has confirmed that Trent was killed, and Holmes wants access to the medical records. Baldwin agrees to talk to Sanchez to get them released, and by talk, he means threaten to hold a media conference.

Holmes writes up all those who were terminal who died of heart related events at the hospital. There are 73. He can’t develop a pattern off the information he has. Watson suggests he look into epinephrine missing from the pharmacy but he already has, and nothing turned up. She says that it could be taken from the crash carts, and pulls out another file that would list when it showed up missing. The dates that it has disappeared from carts coincides with nine deaths.

Using work schedules they narrow it down to 23 suspects. At the hospital, Watson leaves to get coffee with Carrie and Holmes runs into the janitor in the elevator, and awkwardly apologizes. The janitor accepts his apology, but on the way out at his floor, hits a few extra buttons.

Holmes goes to interview Baldwin, who is surprised he is a suspect, but he had quite a few of the victims under his care. He also had a 75% failure rate for a new experimental procedure and two strikes on his record. Baldwin defends himself that he takes on patients no one else would. Plus, he has an alibi for the day Trent was killed—he was on a train.

Carrie has to run after coffee, but she invites Watson to come with her to the pre-op counsel. Watson who meets Morgan, who tore her ACL. Watson notices Morgan’s feet as Carrie examines her patients. Watson points it out to Carrie later, saying it could indicate a congenital heart defect and she could crash during surgery. She suggests Carrie run an echocardiogram. Carrie agrees, teasing Watson about her continued interest in medicine.

Detective Bell is interrogating a surgical resident, who seems odd and twitchy, and says he is sleep deprived and just wants to go home but Holmes dismisses him. He relaxed when the murder came up, it wasn’t him.

Holmes and Watson leave the hospital late with no leads. When Holmes asks about Carrie, Watson admits that being around her hospital friends was difficult, and she lost a lot of them, especially Carrie, who couldn’t understand her pulling away. She gets a text from Carrie then, telling her that the echocardiogram was clean. Watson is dismayed she was wrong.

They notice then the car of the surgical resident, matched up by his key ring and bumper sticker. Holmes is surprised since he had wanted to leave and go home so badly. They rush into the hospital and track him down, finding him with a syringe in a room. The orderlies grab him, but Watson notes the syringe was empty. He wasn’t injecting, he was siphoning off morphine.

Holmes is annoyed he didn’t recognize the symptoms in the man, but Watson says he still caught a doctor who was taking morphine, and should be pleased. But he’s not—at home he takes down all the other suspects, but Watson stops him, noticing an anomaly. All of the victims were terminal but one. She was recovering from heart surgery, but she was definitely recovering.

The surgical resident, caught, is eager to talk to the police. He explains how a few months ago he was stealing morphine and hid in a bathroom when someone came in the room. It was someone who spoke like a doctor, and talked to the patient about outcome. The patient died the next day. This confirms that the killer talks to victims and gets to know them before he kills them.

Watson finds Carrie again and insists that she do another test on the girl, Morgan, but Carrie says she is fine and won’t perform an invasive test because of a hunch.

“She’ll be fine, Joan. I’m operating on her, not you.”

Watson is discouraged, but Holmes is not. Holmes has Watson go over a form he discovered from one of the victims. He notes that the signature and the body are filled out by two separate people. The patient only spoke Ukrainian, and since the killer liked to speak to his victims, so he must have Ukrainian roots or the ability to speak it fluently. He already checked the doctors. None speak Ukrainian.

They bring the janitor in. Holmes notes that he saw the blue and yellow flags on his cart, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The accent is hidden very well, but they know he is from the Ukraine once they thought to look into him. They also found medical notes in his home about all of the victims.

“I freed them. I freed them from the pain-wracked prison their bodies had become.”

The janitor gets angry, insisting that the girl was dying, and in terrible pain. He accuses Holmes of making up lies to suit him, and refuses to talk any more. Holmes and Gregson leave.

He’s telling truth or thinks he is, Holmes tells Gregson, troubled. He is convinced the girl he killed had terminal cardiac cancer. But why?

At Holmes’ home, the doorbell rings. It is Carrie. She tells Watson that she was right. The lab found the girl’s heart condition when they ran the tests… a request which had anonymously been added to the chart.

“You were always a good friend, Joanie. But you were a better doctor,” she admits as she leaves.

Holmes says she did a good job saving the girl by altering the chart—and it has given him an idea of why the Angel might have killed the girl.

They go to see Dr. Baldwin again. Holmes surmises they were not the first to realize that deaths were occurring. He postulates that Baldwin made a surgical error and left a clamp in Samantha’s chest during the surgery. This would have earned third strike and ended his career, and since he had realized the Angel was killing terminal patients, he reduced Samantha’s pain medication and altered her chart to say she had cancer. When she died, he removed the cancer results. In fact, they can prove it. They already exhumed her body and found the surgical clamp in her rib cage.

Baldwin insists that all that was proven was that he made a mistake, but there is no evidence that he faked records and killed people. Luckily, Holmes visited the Angel and got copies of the photographs he had taken of the medical charts—he was more than happy to help when he found out he was manipulated into killing someone who was healthy.

Baldwin is looking at 20 to life.

At Holmes’, he and Watson watch Baldwin’s arrest on the television. Watson is happy for Holmes, but exhausted. Holmes tells her he enjoyed getting to see her in her element at the hospital. He gently says that maybe she’ll give it another go one day.

Watson, in bed, thoughtfully looks through pictures of herself and her friends at the hospital on her tablet. Hesitantly, she hits delete all, and they vanish.