Elementary, Season Seven, Episode Twelve: Where's Suzi Meiringen?

The rare 6 AM on-demand viewing. Reserved for only the most critical of night-before television shows. And this morning . . . "Reichenbach Falls."

Spoiler time! Oh, yes, spoilers!

As we all surely recall from last week, Morland Holmes, the father Elementary created for their Sherlock as a combo Moriarty/Mycroft figure, has been killed by Odin Reichenbach, their Moriarty stand-in for the final season. His body is the body that pops up in the pre-theme-song part of the show. Sherlock is observant enough to clear the crime scene before we get to see it however, as it's in an exploding stolen car. And off we go!

Captain Gregson confronts Reichenbach, who is just as smarmy and confident as you want your villain to be. He's no Moriarty, though, but . . .. wait . . . Odin Reichenbach is a mathematician? Well, maybe he is a Moriarty. Odin and Morland both exist as reminders of what some might call Elementary's early sins, mistreating Moriarty and Mycroft in ways that took them off the show early.

Of course, with all this high-level plotting by super-geniuses going on, an Odin Reichenbach flunkie still is stupid enough to take an expensive watch off his victim and fence it. Like all tech billionaires, Reichenbach plainly doesn't pay his ground-level employees enough. But when that trail leads to a backyard incinerator full of human bones, an echo of "Norwood Builder" flashes into my head. Forensics happens quicker than at any time in history, TV or otherwise.

"Guy made my phone for crying out loud!" Eugene the medical examiner is really on it this week.  "Don't worry, I used Google." Eugene Hawes is one of Elementary's characters who probably only appears when a particular writer writes him in, as the poor fellow appears in about only as many episodes as their are seasons. Nice that he got to come back for season seven, as so many familiar faces have. Wish they all could have popped up more on a weekly bases, but this show has always been about the very economical basic four cast members.

Sherlock pops up at the school of Reichbach's pocket employee from the NSA to shake that particular tree, and Odin Reichenbach, in return, wants all NSA internet resources in his pocket as well. For a guy who named his Google-clone "Odker," Odin certainly has big goals. And, luckily, he likes jogging through the woods with his bodyguards so no one had to construct a super-villain lair for his scenes. He's a bargain super-villain.

Reichbach's latest murderer in the chain is an aged cancer patient, whom one wonders how he had the strength to drag multiple dead bodies around. He's a dead end, ironically.

"I'm the only Holmes left now," Sherlock says, just as I find out that Reichenbach's lieutenant Antonia is played by Rachel Holmes. And then he starts talking to Joan about doing the non-investigative thing to deal with Reichenbach. And then Sherlock Holmes and Odin Reichenbach meet on a bridge, alone.

"Some problems only have violent solutions," Sherlock tells Reichenbach, the man whose entire scheme for the world was to solve problems with violent solutions. "We're the opposite poles of the magnet, we're repellant to each other . . . you can't justify murder by inductive inference." So much neo-Holmes-Moriarty dialogue. "Living with the past, that's what justice is, that's what this is."

TWIST! BIG SPOILER!

Sherlock isn't there to kill Reichenbach. He's there to somehow make it look like Reichenbach killed him as Watson and the cops arrive. We see a body fall off the bridge. But as the post-shock commercial plays out, I'm wondering how anyone could ever think a "here's what will happen after I die" scheme could ever work. The world is just not that easy to control. But we do know that Sherlock Holmes doesn't ever die from falling off of of things. That's a law of nature. Bridge, building, waterfall, castle balcony over a waterfall . . . doesn't matter. Sherlock Holmes is invulnerable to falls.

So Gregson has Odin Reichenbach right where he wants him: In that NYPD suspect questioning room we've seen so many times before. "You killed a good man tonight. You killed my friend."

Odin points out that billionaires aren't so easy to convict, but Gregson has three words for that: "He trusted me." By the time we get to Marcus Bell and Joan Watson trying to come to grips with Sherlock's death, fall-invulnerability quickly becomes forgotten, as they're all really on it.

Ah, but then the fall-immunity kicks in and we get an Italian realtor showing a mystery person around a new home. That client's eventual name? Signor Altamont!  ZING!

One episode left, Reichenbach still has to be put away and Sherlock's in Italy. What's the series finale going to bring next week? The previews are only showing us past episodes, so who knows?