Elementary insurance.

If I am going to give it up to Elementary on any front, it's going to be guest casting. (With the notable exception of some regional foozeball hero last week.) And the news this week continued the trend as the announcement came that they're bringing in Stuart Townsend.

Townsend is one of those actors I've liked a lot of the great characters he's gotten to play, as well as his playing of them, but they never seem to have clicked with the general public. Dorian Gray in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the vampire Lestat in The Queen of the Damned, and Carl Kolchak in Night Stalker. Seems he's either a vampire of hanging out with vampires a lot of the time.

On Elementary, Stuart Townsend will be playing a global insurance company manager of some sort who wants to hire Joan Watson full time. This, of course, is mainly to give Mr. Elementary a handsome fellow in Joan's life to react to, as that relationship is the focus of the show, needing a few bumps for its narrative arcs.

But what if Elementary actually drew its inspiration from Canonical sources?

Insurance isn't really a hot topic in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, so the choices would be few . . . or one. When John H. Watson found himself attracted to a certain blonde, Holmes expressed his own feelings thusly: 

"The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor."

So forget about Irene Moriarty or Kitty Winter . . . if Elementary was going to take notes from our favorite stories, Mr. Elementary would be meeting his murderous dream girl during Stuart Townsend's multi-episode appearance.

Now that . . . that might be something intriguing. For now, however, we'll just have to content ourselves with the prospect of Stuart Townsend.