Elementary (Series)

"I know, Watson, you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the humdrum routine of ordinary life."

— Sherlock Holmes

Elementary is an American detective dramedy television series that premiered on CBS in 2012 and ran for seven seasons. It presents a contemporary update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective stories set in New York City. It stars Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson.

This version of Holmes was a consultant for Scotland Yard; he became a drug addict following a traumatic loss, then "hit bottom" and ended up in rehabilitation. Joan Watson has been hired by Holmes' father Morland to be his sober companion, to help him adjust from rehab back to everyday life.

Holmes has come up with an interesting post-rehab regimen to keep himself busy — he's going to resume his role as a consultant, this time for the New York police. Watson finds herself coming along for the ride, eventually becoming Holmes' full-fledged partner and a detective in her own right. They are usually assisted by Captain Thomas Gregson (Aidan Quinn) and Detective Marcus Bell (Jon Michael Hill).

Another CBS series entitled Watson (taking place in a different continuity) features some of the same creative team.

This page contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned.

Elementary contains examples of:

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#-E

555:
- The phone number dialed to a pager that detonates a bomb in "The Long Fuse".
- Pops up on another phone in "The Leviathan".
Aborted Arc:
- A late episode of season three has Captain Gregson turn down a promotion, which his colleague implies may have severe repercussions against him because there were higher ups who were very eager for him to be removed from running Major Crimes, with allusions to several possibilities as to why. This never gets followed up on, with Gregson's position seeming to remain secure even through further instances of Sherlock and Joan pushing things to their limit. It seems to give itself a slight out in having the colleague admit that his read on the situation could have been completely mistaken anyway.
- In season six, Detective Bell is approached by the US Marshals office who invite him to apply to join them based on a recommendation from Sherlock, who views it as an ideal career progression for Bell. After some consideration, Bell decides to pursue the offer and begins studying for their application process. His application is abandoned early in season seven after Captain Gregson is shot and he decides to remain at the precinct. The Distant Finale reveals that he eventually takes over as Captain when Gregson retires, confirming that he never resumed his application to the Marshals.
Abusive Parents: Titus Delancey from "Poison Pen". His older son Graham kills him because Titus had been sexually abusing him. His nanny Abigail Spencer, who killed her father for the same reason, can relate all too well.
Adaptational Gender Identity: Mrs. Hudson is portrayed as a trans woman rather than a cis woman.
Adaptational Location Change: The show is set in New York City instead of London. Sherlock and Joan do eventually move to the iconic 221b Baker Street home in London at the end of Season 6, only to return to New York at the start of Season 7 after the show's surprise renewal.
Adaptation Expansion: In the original books, Sherlock uses drugs on a recreational basis and this is never relevant to the plot. Here, his drug addiction makes him move to New York, brings Joan into his life and causes him serious trouble for the whole first season. Also, Joan's role is way bigger and she is no longer a Sidekick, but one of the protagonists and crucial for the story arc.
Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Sherlock and Joan meet through different circumstances, which overall makes their relationship quite different from the norm. In the original ACD canon and most adaptations, John and Sherlock meet due to John needing a roommate. In Elementary, Joan starts out as Sherlock's sober companion. This makes their relationship more intimate as well.
Aerith and Bob: Sherlock and Joan. Joan mentioned the strangeness of the name Sherlock in "Déjà Vu All Over Again" and Jennifer did the same in "Ancient History".
After-Action Patch-Up: Joan takes care of Sherlock's bullet wound in "Heroine" and in "On the Line" she takes a look at his broken finger.
A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
- The basis of "Bella". Is the titular AI really intelligent, and did she murder her creator? Probably not, and she was framed.
- Invoked in-universe in the ending scene of "Uncanny Valley of the Dolls." Sherlock gets instructions for how to give sex robot Skyler a preset script and plays a prank suggesting that Skyler is sentient, actually committed the murder, and would kill again if asked.
All There in the Manual: Holmes being a needle junkie.
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
—The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle, quite literally on Page 1
Alone with the Psycho:
- Holmes sometimes goes out of his way to be alone with someone who he knows is the psycho, such as in "Child Predator", "The Deductionist", and "On the Line".
- In "Heroine", Watson goes to a very fancy restaurant for a lunch with Moriarty.
Always Identical Twins: Averted in "While You Were Sleeping". A suspect drawing matches a woman who just happens to be in a coma. After finding out the woman has a twin, Holmes seizes on the twin sister as the killer — until they go to meet her and find out the two women are fraternal twins, not identical.
- In "The Leviathan", he did have a threesome with identical twins.
Always Murder: Sherlock usually considers investigating anything less than attempted murder to be beneath his skills. Even when a case starts with a lesser crime, it usually escalates in short order.
- Averted in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs" where Sherlock investigates a kidnapping with ransom demand. It's one of the few episodes where Everybody Lives, although the kidnapped child is in real and imminent danger.
- In "Dead Man's Switch", Sherlock investigates a blackmailer, which he says are worse than murderers in some respect. A short time later, Sherlock witnesses said blackmailer being murdered and moves to investigate that as well.
- In "Bella", Sherlock reluctantly takes a case involving theft of an artificial intelligence program, which he is not convinced passes the Turing Test. Sherlock solves the theft in record time, only to find that his client has been suddenly murdered.
- In Terra Pericolosa, Sherlock sends Kitty to investigate the robbery of a map archive. The curator suspects that it's the night security guard, who has disappeared; Kitty finds the man's body, turning the matter into a robbery-homicide.
- In "The Further Adventures", Sherlock and Joan are assigned to a case where a celebrity supermodel has been disfigured by acid, but the injury is not life-threatening. At the earliest opportunity, she commits suicide over her disfigurement, so Sherlock's case ends up with a dead victim after all.
Ambiguous Ending: In "Bella," a young woman confesses to murder but Holmes knows her professor actually did it. There seems to be no way to prove this, so Holmes threatens the professor with exposing his drug-addicted brother to criminal charges unless the professor confesses. The professor, though, did some research on Holmes and believes he is himself an addict. He says that he doubts Holmes would wreck a fellow addict's life like that, and the episode ends with Holmes wrestling with the question of whether to make good on his threat. It also ends without stating one way or the other whether Bella, the Artificial Intelligence the episode centered around, was truly able to exceed her programming (which her creators suspected but Holmes didn't buy).
And the Adventure Continues: The series ended with Holmes and Watson, reunited after he is no longer Faking the Dead and she has beaten cancer, going into Bell's office to start consulting for the NYPD again.
Animal Motifs:
- Bees. They work as a metaphor for Sherlock's connections with people and Watson, somehow, is usually associated with them through her beeswax-smelling hands, the honey dripping through her room's ceiling and the scene in the first season finale when Holmes names a new species of them after her.
- Clyde can also be interpreted as a metaphor for Holmes and Watson's friendship. In "The Red Team" Sherlock discourses about the longevity of tortoises and their endurance, which is a very accurate description of one of the oldest and most famous friendships in literature.
Anguished Declaration of Love: An unusual anguished declaration of platonic love in "The One That Got Away". Kitty manages to gasp this out to Holmes, in their final conversation, as she's leaving the country following the resolution of the Del Gruner affair.
Arch-Enemy: Moriarty. Even Holmes calls Moriarty a nemesis in "Heroine".
Arc Words:
- "I don't know what you're talking about"... uttered by a suspect nearly Once an Episode.
- "M" serves this role in the first season, representing the forces in Sherlock's life that still control him despite his best efforts: M. Holmes, Serial Killer "M" AKA Sebastian Moran, and James Moriarty.
- Speaking of, "The Woman", and her Present Absence, is incredibly important to Sherlock's character arc.
Armor-Piercing Question:
- From "Pilot": "Now I know it was a woman."
- In "While You Were Sleeping", after the murderer's sister said she would try to help her:
  Holmes: There were two pretermitted heirs, Ms. Ellison. Yvette killed the second one yesterday, so tell me: why was she still in a coma today? Why didn't she "miraculously" wake up this morning? Who did she have left to kill? Do you think perhaps it was someone who stood between her and the entirety of the family fortune?
- From "Flight Risk":
  - "Are you afraid of flying?"
  - "I know about Irene." Doubles as a Wham Line.
- From "The Leviathan": "Will the next client make you happy?"
- From "Heroine": "You are afraid of him."
- From "The Diabolical Kind": "That bothers you, doesn't it?"
Artificial Meat: The victim of the week in "How the Sausage is Made" was a scientist that developed a lab-grown meat that could pass FDA tests and be classified as genuine meat. His employers killed him because they didn't want that classification (as it would shut them out of the Halal and Kosher markets) and the scientist refused to alter his FDA submission.
Artistic License:
- "Le Milieu" is actually French slang for organised crime, not the name of the French/Corsican Mafia specifically.
- Although the show's treatment of addiction and the process of recovery is one of the most realistic in any medium, there is one notable oversight. At the end of season three Sherlock relapses. Midway through season four, he meets and begins a romantic relationship with Fiona Helbron. Within programs such as AA, new romantic relationships are highly discouraged within the first year of recovery due to the risk of unexpected stress they can cause. It's not a hard and fast rule, but one would expect Watson to at least mention this (particularly since Sherlock's only previous relationship ended very badly and directly resulted in him losing control of his previously-casual drug use); she doesn't, and even encourages Sherlock to pursue his relationship with Fiona.
Artistic License – Animal Care: Crops up from time to time.
- Clyde: tortoises/turtles should not be put on their backs because (among other things) the shift in position interferes with breathing and heart function - the waving legs are distress, not dancing.
- In "The One Percent Solution" Holmes describes the gamecocks as being manipulated into fighting by their handlers. While this has some (but not total) validity re: dog fighting, it is far less applicable to fighting lines of chickens. Fighting birds are bred for aggression, and while the process Holmes uses (positive re-enforcement/desensitization via food) makes sense, it would take a great deal longer than the few days shown. As a metaphor for Holmes & Lestrade, though, it's awesome.
Artistic License – Biology: In "Miss Taken" the impostor "Cassie" obtains Mina Davenport's DNA by shaving her hair and using it as a prop. But hair doesn't contain DNA, it's made of strands of protein. Only the follicular tags on the end of a hair have DNA (because they're skin cells) and those only come from hairs that fall out or are pulled out, not cut.
As You Know: Par for the course as a police procedural.
- In "Pilot", Holmes uses these exact words to Joan while explaining why surgeons use beeswax in their hands and why he was able to deduce she was one.
- Lampshaded and justified in Season 2, Episode 1, "Step Nine":
  Sherlock: The problem at hand: three US Attorneys have been murdered in the last year, all of them involved in the prosecution of a syndicate of pirates.
  Watson: Yes, I know, I'm working on the case too.
  Sherlock: Well, precision in all things, Watson. When one is constructing a geometric proof, one must occasionally review the givens.
Asshole Victim:
- In "Child Predator", the first kidnapped kid is the one who is torturing and killing other children for his own sadistic pleasure.
- In "You Do It To Yourself", the victim of the week convinced his "wife" to illegally move to the US so he could abuse her knowing she wouldn't be able to go to the authorities without revealing that she was an illegal immigrant. He arranges the circumstances of his death to make it look like she and her lover murdered him.
- In "Dead Man's Switch," a serial blackmailer currently threatening several rape victim's fathers with releasing a video of the rape on the Internet is murdered by one of the fathers. While the man had been blackmailed, he hadn't cared particularly about his step-daughter. He managed to persuade the blackmailer to cut him in— and once he knew where all the secrets were, he killed him.
- Subverted in "Internal Audit." The victim was a Corrupt Corporate Executive, yes, but he was a guilt-ridden Anti-Villain who would have been Driven to Suicide if he wasn't murdered first, and he helped a charity for Holocaust victims in his free time. It turns out his murder had nothing to do with his Ponzi scheme either: he had discovered that the charity was a front for money launderers and wanted to blow the whistle.
- A non-lethal example comes at the end of "To Catch a Predator Predator". Hockey coach Shane Fitzhugh was discovered to have abused one of his students Nadia Swain over 100 times, along with at least 2 other girls that he coached. Just as the police obtain enough evidence to have Fitzhugh arrested, vigilante catfisher Damien Novak shames Fitzhugh into fleeing the country, denying Swain the justice that she sought and triggering the series of events that would lead to her killing Novak. After Swain is outed as the murderer, Sherlock arranges through a police contact he made in Bali (where Fitzhugh fled to) to have Fitzhugh framed for cocaine possession, where he'll spend the rest of his life in an Indonesian prison. Sherlock questions Watson as to whether she thinks he's acting irrationally and the latter (who teared up reading Fitzhugh's abuse of Swain) coldly replies "I didn't say anything".
Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other:
- Holmes and Watson's relationship in the series grows into a close friendship and it's evident that they care for each other. Holmes even panics at one moment when he thinks Watson's been shot.
- When Joan is kidnapped and held hostage due to Mycroft's actions in Paint it Black, Sherlock is notably distraught and even states that if Joan were to be killed, he would murder Mycroft. By this point in the series, Joan and Sherlock's friendship is very important to both of them.
  Sherlock: Is that all you think she is? A counterbalance?
  Mycroft: I think she's the person you love most in the world.
Bait the Mole: Sherlock's father Morland Holmes attempts to expose a potential mole in his company by giving the suspects each a slightly different version of the same contract; since each contract has a unique typo in it to distinguish it from the others, Morland reasoned that he would be able to identify the mole based on which copy of the contract was given to his business rivals. Unfortunately, the mole figured out what Morland was doing when he saw one of the other copies, and abandoned his plans.
Batman Gambit:
- "Heroine":
  - The main plan of Moriarty, where she manipulates an ex-Greek smuggler turned businessman Christos Theophilus by kidnapping his daughter to goad him into assassinating a New York-based Macedonian surgeon named Andrej Bacara and his wife. With the help of the doctor's bodyguard/mole, the assassination is done so that initial reports suggested that it was done in the name of Greek ultra-nationalism, which would lead to far more bitter diplomatic relations between Greece and Macedonia in the latter's bid to join the European Union, since Bacara was the son of Macedonia's prime minister.
  - The plan Joan uses to capture Moriarty. Joan knows that Moriarty will go after Sherlock if anything happens to him and crafts the overdose story, deducing all of Moriarty's moves without her noticing. It works.
- In "Blood Is Thicker" Mycroft attempts one on Sherlock to induce him to return to London by saying that their father has threatened to cut him off. He knows that Sherlock will never directly contact their father and so will never discover the deception.
- Mycroft pulls a much better one on everyone in "The Man with the Twisted Lip" and "Paint it Black": cultivating an Upper-Class Twit persona and allowing Le Milieu to use Diogenes as a base in the States, utilizing Joan as a hostage and Sherlock's deductive powers to find a highly-sought after list of Swiss bank customers, double-crossing Sherlock before he can bring the NYPD in and going alone to make the exchange for Joan, and finally, when Le Milieu is ready to kill him and Joan, calling in an MI6 sniper team to take out Le Milieu.
- In "Bella", Sherlock decides to blackmail Isaac Pike by threatening to send his brother to jail for life if he doesn't turn himself in. Said brother is a drug addict. Isaac reasons that Sherlock would not want to deny another addict a chance at redemption, and will not go through with the threat. He does not turn himself in. Whether the gambit worked is never shown.
Beard of Evil: Isaac Pike from "Bella".
Berserk Button:
- To Sherlock: Anything relating to Irene Adler and her death. Another button was in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs" when Rhys tempted Sherlock to take cocaine to help with the case, he threw and nearly strangled the latter while shouting at him for even suggesting such a thing. And in "Paint It Black", we find out he will seriously threaten to murder his own brother if Joan comes to harm.
- To Joan: Don't even try to even mention her past as a surgeon and her dead patient. Underestimating her job as a sober companion or novice detective is not a good idea either.
Big Applesauce: While Sherlock did originally work with Scotland Yard, he moved across the pond to NYC.
Big Bad: As of "M.", we learn that Moriarty is definitely Holmes' nemesis.
Big Blackout: A severe winter storm takes out the power in New York City in "Snow Angels", and is central to the antagonists' heist plan.
Big Brother Instinct:
- Graham Delancey from "Poison Pen" killed his sexually abusive father in part because his little brother was getting to the age where their dad would start to be interested in him.
- We find in the Season 2 finale Mycroft has a major case of this, so much so that he was willing to be drawn back into the espionage game to keep Sherlock from being charged with treason.
Big "NO!": The murder victim does this in "The View from Olympus".
Big, Screwed-Up Family: In "Blood is Thicker" we have confirmation that the Holmes' family fits this trope. Sherlock is the rejected addict, Papa Holmes is "the one who shall not be named or seen" and known for his dirty work and Mycroft turns out to be working with someone to bring his brother back to England.
Bland-Name Product:
- In episode 3, The Investor's Post with its 'distinctive salmon-colored paper stock' is a stand-in for The Financial Times, another business-oriented newspaper known for being printed on pink paper.
- In the second season, examples include:
  - A hacktivist group called Everyone clearly standing in for Anonymous.
  - Lestrade mentioning his having done a Doug Chat which is standing in for TED Talks.
Blind Date: At the end of "A Difference in Kind", Joan gets the idea of setting up Detective Bell and her sister Lin on a dinner date as she and Sherlock consider asking Lin to help them sell Morland's safe house as he no longer needs a presence in New York.
Bluffing the Murderer:
- In "Snow Angels", Sherlock suspected that the emergency response administrator was in on the robbery but had no solid evidence. So the police staged a fake riot to see if the suspects would use this opportunity to help get one of the imprisoned thieves out. They did.
- In "The Female of the Species", when Sherlock and Bell gather a group of zoo employees together, Sherlock deliberately accuses an innocent man of murder on the assumption that the real killer will reveal his guilt by relaxing. He's right.
Bookends: At the start of "Pilot", Holmes and Watson are on the brownstone rooftop at night, and Holmes tells Watson to take a six-week holiday because he doesn't need her and because she obviously hates her job. In the last scene of the season one finale "Heroine", after Joan defeated Moriarty by herself, Sherlock and Joan are witnessing the birth of a new species of bee, which Sherlock names Euglassia Watsonia.
- The theme song — probably never heard during the episodes themselves — plays during the final shot of the Series Finale.
Brainy Brunette: Joan Watson, played by black-haired Lucy Liu, is a former surgeon.
Brick Joke: In season one it is revealed that when Holmes texts he uses an overload of abbreviations, making it almost impossible to read and Watson complains of it, saying it reads like a "teenager on a sugar high." In season 3, Kitty receives a text from Holmes and complains aloud that she can't understand his abbreviations. Watson, overhearing this, walks over, reads the text over her shoulder, and translates it perfectly.
Burner Phones: Frequently used by both heroes and villains. Sherlock keeps a box full of them in a closet.
The Bus Came Back: Kitty leaves New York in "The One That Got Away", but turns back up for the "Wrong Side of the Road" / "Fidelity" two-parter, two full years later.
But for Me, It Was Tuesday: In "Fly Into A Bad Rage, Make A Bad Landing", Sherlock and Bell interview a known wife beater whom they suspect of both a savage assault on Marcus's girlfriend and a murder. After the interview, Sherlock predicts that the man will not try to run, since he didn't on the previous two occasions when he beat his wife, trusting to his money and lawyers to protect him. Marcus points out that murder is a more serious charge than assault, but Sherlock rejoins that, "to a man like that, the difference is negligible."
The Butler Did It:
- In "The Rat Race", the killer turns out to have been the secretary, who was seen earlier in the episode.
- In "Lesser Evils", it was the Almighty Janitor.
By-the-Book Cop: Captain Gregson and Detective Bell.
Call-Back:
- The scene where Joan lands in jail and Sherlock comes to bail her out in "Déjà Vu All Over Again" is a shot-by-shot remake of the scene in "Pilot", where it was the other way round.
- The titular cyber-activist group that give Holmes and Watson so much trouble in "We Are Everyone" end up being very helpful later on when a British Intelligence mole who's after Mycroft visits the apartment. Watson sets up a video-chat with fifteen members of Everyone before letting the man in as a safety precaution, which ensures he can't do anything without witnesses and thus saves her from certain doom.
- In the Cold Open of "Their Last Bow", Watson enters the living room at 221B to find Sherlock watching several TV screens, just as he was doing when they first met.
Calling Card:
- The Balloon Man from "Child Predator" leaves behind balloons after abducting a child.
- In "M.", Moran leaves behind pools of blood after killing someone.
Canon Character All Along:
- A tough-guy baddie known as "M" is introduced, who the viewer might assume will be revealed to be this series' incarnation of the Big Bad, Moriarty. He turns out to be a different canon character, Moriarty's Mook Sebastian Moran.
- Then one canon character is whammed into another with the revelation that Irene Adler was Moriarty all along.
Can't Live with Them, Can't Live Without Them: Watson and Holmes in the first half of Season 01, so much.
The Caretaker:
- Joan Watson, by profession and by nature. Lampshaded by her friends in "Déjà Vu All Over Again".
- Sherlock for Irene in "The Woman", leaving Joan to do the main deducting in the episode.
Character Development: The main point of the show is the development of Holmes and Watson's friendship and their development as individuals.
Character Name Alias: In "Terra Pericolosa", a thief who specialises in stealing maps uses the alias René Duchez. Duchez was a member of the French resistance who stole plans that showed the defences of Hitler's Atlantic Wall.
Chekhov's Gun:
- The bag of rice in "Pilot".
- In the opening to "The Rat Race" Watson complains to Holmes that she can't read his texts because he uses too many abbreviations. Holmes is exuberant over texting slang, calling it English evolving for greater efficiency. After the Killer of the Week kidnaps Sherlock, she sends a text from his phone so Watson won't worry. Watson realizes it's not from Sherlock because it didn't read "like a teenager on a sugar high."
- In "The Deductionist", Holmes gives Watson a brief rundown of the continuity errors in the porno her sub-letter made. Watson later uses one of those errors to prove that her landlord was in on it.
- Angus, in "A Giant Gun, Filled with Drugs".
- The Osmia avosetta introduced in "Possibility Two" and used in "Heroine".
- Not exactly an object, but Irene's birthmarks in "The Woman".
- The bottle of milk in "Step Nine".
- The dog in "An Unnatural Arrangement".
Chekhov's Gunman:
- The doctor of the woman in coma in "While You Were Sleeping".
- The Almighty Janitor in "Lesser Evils".
Chekhov's Hobby: From "The Deductionist", Sherlock's single stick practice.
Chekhov's Skill:
- In "A Giant Gun Filled With Drugs" when Sherlock notes that a gangster is actually a undercover cop, one of the things he points out is the way he uses the bowl on the table as a mirror to see behind him. Later in "The Woman" Sherlock uses a lamp this way to avoid being shot In the Back.
- The pickpocketing in "We Are Everyone".
Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: In "Pilot", we're introduced to Javier Abreu, Gregson's left-hand man. The next episode we get to meet Bell, and Abreu is never mentioned again.
- Joan's brother Oren, who was last seen in the season 3 episode "T-Bone and the Iceman," and last mentioned in the season 4 episode "You've Got Me, Who's Got You?"
Chute Sabotage: In the fifth season episode “Bang Bang Shoot Chute” the Victim of the Week is discovered to have had his chute sabotaged and have been shot by two separate murderers.
Citizenship Marriage:
- At the end of "You Do It To Yourself" Holmes and Gregson help arrange one of these for a couple. The woman had emigrated from China and entered the US illegally because the victim of the week had promised to marry her, only to refuse once she arrived so he could keep her under his control and abuse her. One of his graduate students met her, fell in love with her and planned to marry for real. However, her "husband" found out and soon after learned he was dying of eye cancer, so he arranged his own murder with the intent of framing them both. Luckily Holmes is able to clear both of their names and he and Gregson are able to find a sympathetic judge who agrees to rush through the couple's marriage so she can stay in the country.
- In "Rat Race" Joan becomes suspicious after the man she's dating claims he's never been married but his body language suggests he's lying. Holmes looks him up and confirms he has a still-valid marriage on the books. When Joan confronts him he reveals it was a marriage of convenience to help a woman he met through charity work avoid being deported. They have no actual relationship and are waiting for enough time to pass for them to quietly divorce without risking her citizenship. Joan is impressed by his kindness, but the guy breaks things off when she reveals how she learned about his marriage.
Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Although it's mostly Joan's job as Sherlock's companion, Gregson and Bell have all taken the role when Joan's not there. They're all too pleased to pass him back, though.
Cold Sniper: The murderer in "The Cost of Doing Business", who starts shooting at people in the financial district for no apparent reason. He's targeting a specific victim, and the others are collateral damage and camouflage.
Collateral Angst: Played with. Sherlock takes a very damaged and PTSD-laden Irene into the Brownstone after finding her alive, and Irene mentions how hard it must be for Sherlock to cope with seeing her like this. Of course, this was just another ruse of Moriarty's.
Companion Cube: Sherlock's phrenology bust is apparently named Angus. When Joan and Rhys are held hostage at gunpoint, she smashes Angus against the gunman's head, incapacitating him until the police arrive. At the end of the episode, Holmes is seen carefully putting Angus back together.
Composite Character: Jamie Moriarty combines Irene Adler, the Ensemble Dark Horse of the original stories and supervillain Big Bad Professor Moriarty.
Conflict Ball: One of the major problems of Season 2. To create conflict between Holmes and Watson, the writers crafted ridiculous plotlines using Retcon, ignoring the evolution of the characters in the previous season and using sex as a plot generator. A source for some Broken Base argument, too. Sherlock and Joan's season two relationship: a necessary development or suffering from completely unnecessary Conflict Ball? It was almost universally regarded that Joan frequently calling Sherlock out on his faults in season one was a good thing, humanizing Sherlock and not letting him get away with breaking the rules and acting antisocial. In season two, on the other hand, Sherlock is constantly being rebuked by Joan for his behavior, even in situations where Joan would usually use Tough Love and reasoning instead of just scolding him. At worst, this made Joan into an unintentional Creator's Pet, as she is almost constantly in the right and never gets the same treatment that Sherlock does. In the first season, Sherlock and Joan were a team and depended on the support of one another, and the constant presence of a Conflict Ball in season two seemed almost a regression in their characterization from their partnership in the previous season. On the other hand, other fans viewed this conflict as necessary, since Joan needed a reason to leave the brownstone, especially since there doesn't appear to be a Mark Morstan what with her already having an ex with the surname.
Consummate Liar: Cassie from "Miss Taken". She pretends to be a couple's long lost daughter. She lies so well that only Sherlock is able to unravel the lies, and even then people have a hard time disbelieving her. When confronted with these lies she hardly breaks a sweat and creates a new story that explains why she lied in the first place while taking the blame off herself.
Contamination Situation: In "Through the Fog" Marcus finds an unattended bag which starts emitting smoke. He tosses the bag into an interview room, isolates himself in the adjoining room and alerts the Captain that he needs to place the building on lockdown. It ultimately turns out that the bag was an elaborate ruse so thieves could use the quarantine as a distraction to steal the precinct's computer servers.
Continuity Nod:
- In "The Rat Race" we meet Emily, Joan's best friend. She talks about Ty (Joan's ex-boyfriend, introduced in "While You Were Sleeping"). Then, in "Déjà Vu All Over Again" we see Emily again. In Season 02, she makes a brief appearance in "We Are Everyone".
- "The Leviathan" has references to Liam (another ex-boyfriend of Joan, introduced in "You Do It to Yourself") and the events of "The Rat Race".
- In "Details", Sherlock mentions the events of "A Giant Gun, Filled with Drugs" in the first scene.
- In "Déjà Vu All Over Again" we see Joan in jail as we saw Sherlock in the "Pilot". Both characters are aware of the similarities and talk about it. Sherlock even says that he has "the strongest sensation of déjà vu". Doubles as a Call-Back.
- In the final scene of "Heroine" Holmes mentions the exotic and lonely bee he received as a gift in "Possibility Two" and tells Watson that the bee was able to reproduce in his beehive.
- In "Step Nine", Sherlock mentions the self-defense classes he suggested to Joan in "Details".
- In "Poison Pen", Joan mentions a conversation she had with Sherlock about his childhood in "Child Predator".
- In "The Marchioness", Sherlock mentions the events of "Step Nine".
- In "Internal Audit", Joan mentions one of her first conversations with Sherlock in "Pilot".
- The couple that discovers the body in the Cold Open of "Henry Penny the Sky Is Falling" are renting out their apartment on Away-Cay, the AirBNB-esque service that was central to the B-plot of "A Study In Charlotte."
- "Over a Barrel" opens with flashbacks establishing that Jack Brunelle has repeatedly asked Sherlock for help over the course of the previous couple of years, only for Sherlock to be preoccupied with another case. In the three examples we see, the cases are clearly "Dead Clade Walking" (Joan says a man was murdered over a priceless Mongolian fossil), "Bella" (Mason and Sherlock studying the doll) and "Down Where the Dead Delight" (Sherlock has a file with a roller derby team).
- "Dead Man's Tale" opens with two guys buying the contents of a storage locker, with valuables including the first issue of the Midnight Ranger comic from "You've Got Me, Who's Got You?"
Corrupt Corporate Executive:
- Pretty much everyone at the investment firm in "The Rat Race". Even lampshaded by one of the suits:
  Jim Fowkes: There's a sociopath working for us? Let me let you in on a little secret, Mr. Holmes. We're all sociopaths.
- "The Long Fuse" has a couple of examples. A web designer for a corporate PR firm blackmails his boss when he realized he'd slept with her (and filmed it!) while she was a prostitute. Said boss responds with two attempts to kill the employee; one is successful, one winds up killing two innocent people four years later.
- Implied by Holmes in "Déjà Vu All Over Again" about his father's lawyer.
- The Asshole Victims in "The Five Orange Pipz" are a toy company president who sold beads he knew were poisonous and his equally crooked lawyer.
- "Alma Matters" provides yet another example. William Trager runs Fairbanks University, a for-profit private college that saddles its disadvantaged students with crushing debts without really helping them. Even worse, Trager sometimes recruits particularly desperate ex-con students to commit crimes for him, including murder, in exchange for the debts being forgiven. In one case, a student is forced to confess to a murder he didn't commit.
- Also see the "Poison Pen" example in Framing the Guilty Party.
Covert Group with Mundane Front: In "The Hound of the Cancer Cells," Holmes and Watson visit a travel agency, and both notice the surprisingly tight security. They later find out it was a front for a Mossad field office.
Cross-Referenced Titles: Season 7's "Miss Understood" references Season 4's "Miss Taken"; fittingly, Cassie Lenue, the con artist from the latter episode, reappears in the former one.
Cyberpunk: Of a low grade nature. The series revels in the collision of hacker culture, the surveillance state, and cutting edge technology. People have been murdered with hacked pacemakers, drone-mounted shotguns, and tiny robotic mosquitoes.
- In "Bella", the titular character is an AI under investigation for murder, and the B-plot involves a Gentleman Thief who's been hired by a technology firm to steal it. Add some vans loaded with explosives and it could be a Shadowrun adventure.
- In "Hounded", the titular hound is eventually revealed to be a Boston Dynamics-esque robot dog on a remote-controlled killing spree.
Daddy Issues: Sherlock has a boatload with his father.
Dark Action Girl: Jamie Moriarty in "The Woman" and "Heroine".
A Day in the Limelight:
- "One Way To Get Off" put Captain Gregson in a larger role, exploring his past as a detective.
- "Details" focuses on Marcus Bell's family and backstory.
- "An Unnatural Arrangement" delves more into Gregson's personal life and how much it's affected by his job.
Dead Man's Chest: In "Terra Pericolosa", the body of a murdered security guard is hidden in the base of a display case at the archives where he worked.
A Deadly Affair:
- Season two episode "The Grand Experiment" has Sherlock and Joan hunting down a mole in the MI-6. Sherlock notes that all of the communications between the mole and his contact, Julian Afkhami, caused political consequences except for one of them. Sherlock realizes that it instead had local consequences: the mole let Afkhami know his wife was cheating on him, resulting in Afkhami hunting down and stoning the lover to death. This backfires when Afkhami's wife saves his bloody undershirt from the fire, resulting in his conviction.
- During the backstory of the season three episode "For All You Know", a city councilman kills a woman who he was having an affair with. A cleaning lady sees him disposing of bloody clothes, and tries to get Sherlock to help. Since Sherlock is in the throes of addiction at this time, he is unable to help and the woman is murdered too. In the present Sherlock himself is accused of committing the crime.
Dead Person Conversation: Sherlock has two of these, both explicitly products of his imagination and not a supernatural element.
- In "No Lack of Void" Sherlock learns that his good friend Alistair has died of an overdose after relapsing. He spends the rest of the episode conversing with a vision of Alistair while trying to process the loss, and what it might mean for his own sobriety.
- Towards the end of season 5 we see him having several conversations with a woman he tries to keep away from everyone else. In the season finale we learn that the woman is actually a hallucination of his late mother brought on by his Post Concussion Syndrome.
Death Glare:
- Watson employs this so often when Holmes says or does something that she thinks is outlandish, that it might as well be her default expression whenever she's talking to him.
- In "Flight Risk," when Watson asks Holmes about Irene, it was surprising that she didn't drop dead from the death glare she received.
- In "We Are Everyone", after being interrogated by the Secret Service for three hours, Watson gives a big one to Holmes.
Decomposite Character: John Watson's wife Mary Watson née Morstan becomes Joan's one off boyfriend Ty Morstan. There is also Joan's mother Mary Watson.
Deep Cover Agent:
- Sherlock unearths a Russian SVR spy ring in "Dirty Laundry". The victim and her husband have been long time sleeper agents from Russia with their own American-born daughter, and they're not the only ones.
- Ezra Kleinfelter, an expy of Edward Snowden, threatens to reveal several deep cover US assets' names if he is arrested.
Delivery Guy Infiltration: In "The Invisible Hand", a hitman murders two of Morland's employees and plants a bomb in his office by posing as the delivery guy from the bottled water company.
Destructive Romance: Sherlock and Moriarty's relationship.
Detective Patsy: In "The Visions of Norman P. Horowitz", Sherlock is contacted by Horowitz's brother, not to investigate his death by accidental overdose, but because before he died he predicted a series of deaths that is coming true, and Sherlock is on the list. Sherlock naturally feels he has to prove Horowitz could not predict the future, and someone killed these people to make it look as if he could. It was the brother, and the whole point of the exercise was to draw the attention of former Holmes client (and vague associate of Horowitz) Henry Baskerville, so he'd pay silly money for the rest of Horowitz's "predictions".
Dirty Cop:
- In "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs", the DEA agent is the bad guy.
- In "Details", Bell had blown the whistle on one such Dirty Cop who had been planting evidence and committed other transgressions while working on a major drug case together.
- In "All in the Family" The Deputy Commissioner in charge of the Counter-terrorism unit was revealed to be a mob plant put onto the force years ago.
Disability Alibi:
- In the season one episode "Flight Risk", Holmes and Watson investigate a plane crash. After determining one of the victims was dead before even boarding the plane, they look into a man who was seen in a photo arguing with the victim outside of the hanger, who Watson notes has an insulin pump. When they speak to this man, they determine by the way he fumbles around with his pill bottle that he is not capable of beating a man to death.
- In the season one episode "One Way to Get Off", Holmes and Watson look into a series of deaths matching the MO of a convicted killer. They find a suspect and Sherlock realizes the man is blind in one eye by the way he arranges his stuff on the shelves, and the marks on the ceiling from practicing his depth perception. He proves this by throwing an orange at the man, who is unable to catch it. He concludes this makes him innocent, since one of the deaths was a shot in the dark following a struggle, not something a man with poor depth perception could do.
- In the season two episode "Dead Clade Walking", Holmes and Watson investigate a death related to a fossil that would prove the theory that dinosaurs survived the K-T meteor impact. Holmes rounds up skeptics of this theory, asks them for DNA samples, and the match turns out to be a wheelchair bound man named Andrew Donnelly. Gregson is skeptical how this is possible, and the man is further exonerated by his lawyer providing an airtight alibi. Turns out the real killer is the museum curator Holmes and Watson talked to earlier, who co-authored a book with Donnelly, and they both had used the tool that was the murder weapon.
- In the season two episode "The Many Mouths of Aaron Colville" Holmes and Watson look into a number of bite-related deaths, with teeth marks that match that of a killer who died in prison. After determining that this is because the killer's teeth were a model for the dentures, they investigate the dental assistant named Divac, a sex offender taking chemical castration. Watson determines his innocence by noting that a mirror was shattered at the crime scene and the blood was not the victim's. If this had happened to Divac, his bones, brittle from the treatment, would have shattered.
- In the season four episode "Ready or Not" Holmes and Watson look into a missing doctor named Vincent, who they determine was a survivalist renting space in a doomsday bunker, run by a former Marine named Ronnie Wright. When they visit the bunker, Holmes determines that the bunker is an ill-prepared fraud, and finds a bloodstain belonging to Vincent. Ronnie Wright admits to disposing of the body, but claims he couldn't have killed him, because a bad rotator cuff prevents him from swinging a weapon overhead. He admits that he was injured while on his high school swim team, and that he was unable to enlist in the Marines.
Disappeared Dad: Joan Watson's birth father was gone from her life at an early age, though she became close with her stepfather, calling him Dad (he's also where she gets her last name).
Disconnected by Death: In "The Five Orange Pipz", the Victim of the Week receives a cryptic warning in the mail and phones his lawyer. However, his lawyer has already been murdered and Captain Gregson answers the phone. While Gregson is talking to the man, someone enters his apartment and kills him.
Distant Finale: The Series Finale takes place 3 years after the previous episode, with the final few minutes of the finale taking place a further year later.
The Dog Was the Mastermind:
- In "Child Predator", while Adam Kemper was abducted, he used his greater intelligence to manipulate his abductor into a submissive relationship, and then had him continue abducting children just to see the parents squirm at press conferences.
- In "One Way To Get Off", the copycat is the unknown son of the original serial killer and spends most of the episode completely off Sherlock's radar. The only reason Sherlock is able to identify him at all is because he happens to run into him while investigating his mother, who had claimed her husband, not the serial killer, was his father.
- In "The Woman", the fragile and traumatized Irene Adler was actually the Big Bad Moriarty.
Dominatrix: In "Poison Pen" it is revealed Sherlock is an acquaintance with one such woman. He and she developed this relationship over the topic of torture devices in the Middle Ages. In this episode, she found Titus Delancey's deceased body in a full bondage suit. When she did, she immediately called Sherlock, at which point he told her to call 911 and request Captain Gregson be the one to come. She gives Sherlock a nice whip as a thank you for helping her out of the situation.
Double-Meaning Title:
- "Child Predator". Holmes is after a serial killer who targets children. The killer is a child who IS a predator.
- "M." neatly sums up all the different forces intruding on Holmes and Watson's lives: M. Holmes, Sherlock's father; the serial killer "M", whose real name is Sebastian Moran; and Moran's boss, Moriarty.
- The Season One finale, "Heroine". At first glance it appears to imply Sherlock's addiction and the chance he will fall back into it. It really refers to Joan, not Sherlock, who comes up with the plot to capture Moriarty. Joan, who was dismissed as the "mascot" by Moriarty, is the reason the criminal mastermind is caught.
- "The One That Got Away". Del Gruner (a serial rapist/killer) and Kitty Winter (who's searching for him, and is also the only one of his victims to escape) both regard each other as this.
- The title of "The Female of the Species" relates to both of the subplots. In one story, a murderous zoo employee steals two zebras because they're both pregnant with an extinct species, the quagga, and he wants to sell the babies. In the other story, Joan correctly suspects Elana March of hiring the female assassin who killed her boyfriend, but can't prove it. Moriarty has March killed because she considers herself the only one allowed to defeat Joan.
Do You Want to Copulate?: Sherlock's girlfriend Fiona has broken up with him, but after he bares his soul in "Ready Or Not", she says "I think we should have sex now" and jumps into his lap. (Fiona has Asperger Syndrome.)
Dramedy: While the crimes of the week, the general story arc premise, and the past of both lead characters are pretty heavy and dramatic, the show pulls off genuinely funny and sarcastic situations all the time.
Driven to Suicide:
- Samuel Abbott in "Child Predator".
- Sebastian Moran in "A Landmark Story" in exchange for Moriarty not killing his sister.
- Lola Quinn in "The Further Adventures".
Dumbass Has a Point: The term "dumbass" should be very loosely used on this show. On several occasions, Holmes has laid into detectives who have incorrectly analyzed cases. The thing is that these detectives are making perfectly reasonable assumptions based on the evidence available. Their only fault is that they don't have Sherlock's powers of deduction or his almost ridiculously large knowledge base.
Early-Installment Weirdness: It's weird to watch the pilot and see Manny Perez as Detective Abreau, who promptly disappears from the series and replaced by Jon Michael Hill as Detective Bell. Given that Abreau came off as smarmy and inept, neither of which Bell is, the change was probably for the best.
Eat the Rich: In "Ready or Not", Holmes and Watson are investigating a murder in "The Keep", an Elaborate Underground Base meant to serve as an exclusive Doomsday shelter for wealthy people. Holmes notes with disgust that in addition to all the usual suspects - nuclear holocaust, a global pandemic or zombie apocalypse - the "wealthy prepper" lives in terror of a mass uprising by the poor with Torches and Pitchforks.
Elaborate Underground Base: Basically subverted in “Ready or Not”; an investigation of ‘the Keep’, an apparent underground facility based in an old Cold War bunker, allegedly intended to protect the elite in the event of a nuclear holocaust, swiftly reveals to Holmes and Watson that it’s all an elaborate scam to get money out of the intended residents. They deduce that the bunker provides the kind of superficial comforts that the target residents would look for, but it lacks more sophisticated details such as appropriate air filtration systems, the walls are damaged behind the immediate coverings, and the cupboards are full of empty boxes to give the impression of medical and food supplies being kept in storage.
Elite Mook: Sebastian Moran. Although if you take this person's statements at face value, it appears that their boss is a great believer in serving up You Have Outlived Your Usefulness with a side order of Chessmaster.
Embarrassing First Name: Del Gruner's full name is Adelbert. Sherlock can understand his desire to use the nickname.
Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
- In "The Deductionist", imprisoned serial killer Martin Ennis breaks loose to wreak havoc and get revenge against The Profiler, Kathryn Drummond, because her book destroyed his family. She falsely alleged that he was sexually abused by his father, who later hanged himself, and his mother died shortly after; his sister Patricia helps him break out of jail by deliberately inducing kidney disease so that he has to come to a hospital to donate his kidney. While Holmes openly speculates that Martin manipulated his sister to help his plan, Martin still takes time during his escape to call Drummond and declare to her that his parents were good people who had nothing to do with what he has become. Notably, Drummond is also stabbed and almost killed by Patricia, implying that she also wanted revenge like her brother.
- In "A Landmark Story" Sebastian Moran tries to kill himself under Moriarty's orders to protect his sister.
- In "Heroine", Moriarty is obsessed with Sherlock and can't let him go. Joan realizes that in her own twisted way, she loves Sherlock, and thus is able to create a plan to put her in jail.
- Moriarty does care for the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago and is less than kind to her former employees who use her in a plot to get rich.
- Discussed and dismissed with Del Gruner, a torturer, rapist, and murderer of women. At first it seems his child is something he does love, but Sherlock disagrees, instead feeling sparing the child and the kindness shown the child are simply another form of the man's narcissism. The better off the child does in school, the more praise earned highlights his help in the child's life.
Everything Sounds Sexier in French: In "Who Is That Masked Man?", Holmes and Watson are working an angle up in Canada, and Holmes question's Watson's use of "Nicolette" as an alias. She responds, "Everyone within a hundred miles of Montreal has a sexy French name. It would've been suspicious if I didn't."
Evil Cripple: Isaac Pike, the main villain in "Bella". He's confined to a wheelchair because of spina bifida.
Exact Words: Gregson promises a witness not to tell the witness's wife why the witness was at the location of the crime: to sleep with a teenage girl. Instead, he arrests the witness for luring a teenager into sex and allows the wife to find out about it from the news.

F-K

Facial Horror:
- In "The One That Got Away", this is the fate of Del Gruner, the sadistic serial rapist/killer who held Kitty hostage in London, when she burns his face off with acid. This is a reference to Doyle's "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client", where the original Kitty did the same thing to Baron Adelbert Gruner.
- "The Further Adventures" has Holmes and Watson investigating an acid-throwing attack. Kitty lampshades that this is the same thing she did to Gruner. The victim, a professional model, is Driven to Suicide because her disfigurement will end her career.
Fake American: In-Universe examples.
- Sherlock occasionally does this while trying to obtain certain details, like the locations of persons of interest. Jonny Lee Miller's accent is surprisingly flawless... but then, anyone who saw Eli Stone or watched the fifth season of Dexter would already know this. Or Hackers, showing he's been faking the accent since the mid-90s.
- Irene Adler put on an American accent so well that she fooled Sherlock.
Faking the Dead:
- Irene Adler faked her own murder...among a few other things.
- Mycroft is forced to do so due to not only the high risk of his real career as a British Intelligence agent, but to also protect Sherlock and Joan from his enemies.
Family-Friendly Stripper: In "Murder Ex Machina" Sherlock follows a lead to the standard kind of network TV strip club in which all the strippers are oddly overdressed. Somewhat averted, as the stripper he's come to interview is in the process of unhooking her bra when he tells her to stop.
Feet-First Introduction: Used for surprise introductions in two episodes so far.
- In "Risk Management", our first glimpse of Irene Adler is a closeup of her bare foot with red paint on it.
- In "Corpse Du Ballet", we see another woman's bare feet padding out of Sherlock's bedroom following a night of lovemaking. The woman turns out to be Iris Lanzer, the prime suspect in the murder Sherlock and Joan are currently investigating.
Finger in the Mail:
- This trope is played completely straight when Sherlock receives the finger of a kidnap victim in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs".
- In "Ears to You", the husband of a woman who disappeared four years earlier receives a pair of ears in the mail.
Flaw Exploitation:
- Moriarty uses it against Sherlock when she faked her own death, knowing that Sherlock would be devastated.
- Then, in "Heroine", Joan uses Moriarty's obsession with Sherlock against her. It works.
Flawless Token: In contrast to the first season, when Joan made mistakes while going out on her own as a detective, the second season saw Joan smoothly running through cases, matching and sometimes even surpassing Sherlock, and continuously calling out Sherlock while rarely making mistakes herself. This seems to be a combination of both pandering (for a fandom that idolizes Joan) and Conflict Ball (since the plot demanded Joan and Sherlock have conflict incongruous with their behavior in the first season). No one's denying that Joan is extremely intelligent, but it's tedious to see such a well-developed character be reduced to "badass who takes no shit and never makes a mistake, ever" by fandom and writers alike. Thankfully, the third season dialed back down on this and Joan and her relationship with Sherlock returned to form.
Fluffy Tamer: Sherlock brings home 2 fighting roosters, and manages to tame them to the point where they make calm pets and even get along.
For Science!: In “Up to Heaven, Down to Hell” Holmes takes some time to analyse the body of a young man who was killed by an older woman falling on him from her tenth-storey penthouse, purely because it’s so rare to get the chance to examine the effects of one human body hitting another.
Foreshadowing:
- In "Pilot", Joan deduces that Sherlock hit bottom because of a woman. We discover that Irene Adler's murder (through Moriarty's orders) led him to addiction. Then, in "The Woman" we discover that Irene is Moriarty and, literally, she was the woman responsible for everything that happened to him.
- In "The Leviathan", the mysterious and omniscient Le Chevalier stole one of the most expensive paintings in the world and used it in his living room. In "The Woman", Irene Adler does the same with several paintings. This works as a Mythology Gag for fans who realized that she was Moriarty 40 minutes before the reveal and to foreshadow her true nature as a mysterious criminal who lives in the shadows.
- In "M.", Sebastian Moran tells Holmes that Moriarty killed Irene Adler with the sentence "Your Girl. That was him. That was Moriarty." In "The Woman" this sentence comes to life in the most literal sense possible.
- In "The Red Team", Joan's shrink asks her if she is aware that she can be the catalyst for Sherlock's relapse. In "Heroine", guess what happens. At first the audience think the relapse and the overdose is real due to Holmes and Watson's fight earlier in the episode, but turns out that Joan is the one who suggested the fake overdose to Sherlock. In both cases, she was the catalyst of a relapse — even though it was a fake one.
- Throughout the series, we see that Moriarty has ample opportunity to let the assassins kill Holmes, but they never do. In "Risk Management", it's flat-out stated and recognized in-universe that Moriarty wants Holmes alive. It hints on how Moriarty is obsessed with Holmes, and can't bear to kill him.
- In "The Woman", Joan takes over the investigation so Sherlock can look after Irene. In "Heroine", Joan is the one who figures out that Moriarty is in love with Sherlock and launches the plan to capture her.
- In "Risk Management," Gregson warns Joan about Sherlock, telling her that he "walks between the raindrops." Meaning that while he manages to safely maneuver through a dangerous world, the people around him aren't always so lucky. Sooner or later, someone in Sherlock's circle is going to get seriously hurt, or worse. In "Tremors," it finally happens—but to Bell, not Joan.
Frame-Up: "The Best Way Out Is Always Through" features an unusual example... because it's posthumous. Prison inmate Nikki Moreno is killed, and then the killer fakes her escape and blames his murders on her.
Framing the Guilty Party:
- Detective D'Amico did this to Wade Crewes prior to "One Way To Get Off", sending him to prison for 13 years.
- In "Step Nine", Mycroft explains the beginning of his and Sherlock's falling out: Sherlock believed that Mycroft's fiancé was having an affair. After he was unsuccessful in gaining evidence on the man she was cheating with, he decided to sleep with her and prove her disloyalty that way.
- In "Poison Pen", a banker dresses his recently deceased boss in a bondage suit and calls a dominatrix to the house to spank him so that the bank can claim that he violated the morals clause of his contract and thus not have to pay a $120 million pension to his widow. At the end of the episode it's revealed that he was already violating the morals clause by sexually abusing his children - one of whom poisoned him.
- In "On the Line", Samantha Wabash fakes her own murder to frame her sister's killer. Later, Sherlock considers planting evidence, but has a "Eureka!" Moment that leads to an arrest before going through with it.
Friendship Moment:
- Subverted, at first, in "A Landmark Story". Sherlock brings Joan to a morgue in the middle of the night, gets her to do an autopsy and compliments her skills.
  Joan: No. I am dissecting a body in the middle of the night. We are not having a moment.
- Played much more straight later in the episode, when Sherlock mentions that this time, he will not go haywire after finding Moriarty.
  Sherlock: The thing that's different about me, empirically speaking... is you.
  Joan: That is the one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me.
Freudian Excuse: Sherlock muses Del Gruner's parents naming him Adelbert is likely one reason he became a torturer, rapist, and murderer of women.
Fright Deathtrap: The 'Run to Your Doom' version happens in "Hounded" when Charles Baskerville is struck by a truck while fleeing from what a witness describes as a huge glowing animal.
Funny Background Event:
- In "While You Were Sleeping", while Joan is talking to her ex-boyfriend on the phone, Sherlock places his violin in a metal garbage can, and sets it on fire with a giant whoomp.
  Holmes: You were right, Watson, I felt like Jimi Hendrix there for a moment.
- In "The Rat Race", Sherlock orders an expensive bottle of wine at a restaurant and has it sent to a couple at another table where the man is about to propose. If you keep watching over his shoulder, you can see the proposal before we refocus on them when she shouts "Yes!"
- Funny foreground event in "The Long Fuse": Detective Bell has been questioning the Earth Liberation Militia guy they think planted the four-year-old bomb, when without warning Holmes bursts in and begins lecturing them both about why this guy couldn't be the bomber. Bell sits in the foreground to Holmes' right, staring straight off into space with a look of "oh for @*$#'s sake" on his face, for fifteen whole seconds.
- In "Snow Angels", Sherlock bursts into Joan's room and demands that she get changed. Since this is Sherlock, Joan is forced to change her clothes under her blankets and sheets while Sherlock is ranting in the foreground.
- In "Details", Holmes was asking Bell how many times he and an officer to whom he was just talking had sex. Cue Joan rolling her eyes and moaning in the background.
- In "A Landmark Story", Watson is taking care of the laundry in her room, we see an old air conditioner falling past her window. She stops for a moment and then discovers that Holmes was doing experiments.
Funny Contact Name: A close variant when Sherlock is revealed to have set a custom ringtone for Watson, who is implemented in the series as his sobriety companion: the "Psycho" Strings sound effect.
Fun T-Shirt: Sherlock has several.
Game of Nerds: In the pilot, Sherlock admits to a certain fascination with “all of the statistical analysis, all of the strategy” of baseball.
Gender Flip:
- John Watson is now Joan Watson and played by Lucy Liu.
- Watson's wife Mary Watson née Morstan becomes her one off boyfriend Ty Morstan.
- The British man Professor James Moriarty is now a "she". Irene Adler's true identity is Moriarty. "We Are Everyone" reveals her true name to be Jamie Moriarty.
- "The Further Adventures" introduces a female version of Inspector Athelney Jones from The Sign of the Four.
Genre Deconstruction: This series takes everything about having a quirky antisocial detective and through turns it on its head: no, the police are not useless, and they can barely tolerate some self-proclaimed genius who creates two headaches for them for every case he helps solve.
The Ghost: Watson's biological father is mentioned multiple times throughout the series but never appears in person. He eventually passes away off-screen shortly before the sixth season episode "Once You've Ruled Out God" where Joan and Lin attend his funeral.
Gilligan Cut: In "Over a Barrel," Holmes and Bell are under a serious time crunch to find some members of a criminal gang. Bell laments that they can't just walk around the gang's territory with a sign that says "Looking For Bad Guys." Cut to Holmes doing exactly that.
Good Running Evil: In season four, Morland ends up running Jamie Moriarty's criminal organization. Members of the organization, knowing his capabilities, had long wanted him to, so after Joshua Vikner is taken down he accepts their offer. Sherlock is disturbed by this, but Morland explains that taking charge of the organization is the best way of dismantling it. Morland can be ruthless and selfish, but he's not evil.
The Hacktivist:
- Everyone.They start harassing Sherlock and Joan when they begin tracking an NSA leaker, though they back off after the two prove him guilty of murder and even come to their aid in later episodes (for the price of subjecting Sherlock to amusing pranks).
- In season three, Everyone undergoes what one member refers to as a "civil war". The group is split between The Cracker types who want to set an agenda focusing on specific political targets while the Playful Hacker members want to maintain their status quo as a neutral group who show off their skills.
Hallucinations: Sherlock turns out to have developed them in late Season 5. Specifically, he sees and has conversations with his long-dead mother, who is trying to get him to seek medical help for this and other symptoms he's experiencing, such as memory loss. She claims that she represents "the part of you that wants to get well."
Hamster-Wheel Power: Part of the Rube Goldberg Device in the Title Sequence is powered by a white mouse in a wire wheel.
Handcuffed Briefcase: In "Rip Off", the Victim of the Week had his hand ripped off so the killer could steal a handcuffed briefcase containing conflict diamonds. The briefcase was then thrown into a dumpster unopened, which confuses the police.
Hassle-Free Hotwire:
- Subverted in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs"; Holmes has a little trouble starting a van this way. Then again, he is escaping from an ambush while simultaneously talking on the phone with Watson, who's under attack at the same moment.
- Watson learns how to do it in "Déjà Vu All Over Again".
Haunted House: In "A Stitch in Time", an old woman thinks she lives in one. Holmes and Watson prove that the effects of the "haunting" are caused by the villains' activities at the house next door. A noted skeptic had already investigated, which led to his becoming the Victim of the Week.
Have You Told Anyone Else?: The killer in “When Your Number’s Up” asks the guy she hooked up with if he told anyone else about them, and upon receiving the answer "no", shoots him.
Hero Insurance: Holmes and Watson break into multiple people's homes, hack or steal their phones, etc. to gain evidence. Not only are these felonies for which they could face time in prison, but since they consult with the police, all that evidence could be suppressed against defendants if this were revealed. However, aside from in one episode this never becomes a problem. It may be that the police know what they're up to and are looking the other way so they have Plausible Deniability.
- Discussed in season 6 when they are looking for a replacement for Bell, when Gregson vetoes their choice because she's too much like them, where Bell would at least make an effort at keeping them within the rules.
Higher Understanding Through Drugs:
- Discussed and averted in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs". In this adaptation, Holmes was once hooked on drugs, but is currently sober. A former friend and practicing drug dealer comes for Holmes' help when his daughter is kidnapped and being held for ransom. The drug-dealer spends a good deal of the episode trying to convince Sherlock to use cocaine again, because he believes the detective works better and can close cases quicker when his mind is under the influence. Sherlock refuses and eventually loses his temper and nearly strangles him, then proceeds to solve the case sober.
- An inversion is also suggested in the series, in that Sherlock used drugs in hopes of dulling his ever-active deductive senses.
- Discussed and averted again in For All You Know, when Sherlock is suspected of having murdered a woman during his drug-using phase several years ago. He was so badly abusing drugs that he regularly had blackouts and couldn't even remember ever meeting her in the present day.
Hired to Hunt Yourself: In "The Hound of the Cancer Cells", an executive at a pharmaceutical company relates how she was tasked with finding an anonymous whistleblower who was casting doubt on the company's research. It turns out that she was the whistleblower (half of a whistleblower team, actually).
Hollywood Law: A pretty severe one, given the premise of the show. Sherlock and Joan are often shown questioning witnesses/suspects without police presence or permission, entering and searching private property on their own without a search warrant, plus sometimes Sherlock collects evidence from crime scenes for his own personal use. It's difficult to understate what a huge no-no this is in criminal investigations. In the real world the defense attorneys for the criminals Sherlock captures would have a field day with this, these criminals would have all had mistrials, and Sherlock himself would be under arrest, not to mention no longer consulting with police.
- Eventually this comes up and is very, very thinly masked with Blatant Lies by Sherlock (e.g. claiming that locked doors were "just open").
- In "Art Imitates Art" an artist creates images using photos taken off social media without permission. No one mentions the fact that the owners (many of whom are very angry about this) could have him charged with copyright violation and the photos taken down.
- A Russian says he's uncowed by police threats of sending him home to where he's wanted if he doesn't cooperate, as the US doesn't have any extradition treaty with Russia. However, the police fail to point out that extradition or not, they could still turn him over to Russia. The extradition treaty simply formalizes this, obligating one country to turn over wanted fugitives if the other goes through proper procedures.
- In "Be My Guest" Sherlock goes after a man holding a woman captive without telling the police, saying they wouldn't have enough evidence to get a warrant. Which is not true, since he read the man's lips showing he was conspiring to have her murdered, and saw a photo of her on his phone with a chain around her neck. Based on his testimony, that would be more than enough for a warrant, which Sherlock being not only a highly knowledgeable genius but having worked with the police for years, should know by now.
- “Up to Heaven, Down to Hell” features an interesting example of this when Holmes and Watson find the incriminating evidence to identify the killer through illegal methods but are able to get ‘legal’ permission later. Essentially, a major development project was discovered to have a construction flaw, so the architect killed two people to prevent this knowledge being made public and prevent the developer from acquiring the necessary air rights so that he would be ‘forced’ to adjust his plans for a smaller building. Holmes is able to find the evidence of the design flaw by stealing the plans from the property developer’s office, but subsequently contacts the developer to ask the man to claim that he gave Holmes permission to look at those plans, Holmes arguing that the other man knows he’s good enough to find other incriminating evidence and this way the developer comes out looking like the good guy.
Honorary Uncle:
- Kitty Winter returns in season five with her infant son. Joan happily accepts being called "Auntie Joan" after learning about the baby. Kitty eventually asks her and Sherlock to become the boy's godparents, a symbol of the bond between all three of them.
- When Joan begins the process to adopt Sherlock offers to co-parent in any way she's comfortable with. She suggests her child might refer to him as "Uncle Sherlock", he counters with "Detective" and "Uncle Detective" as possible alternatives.
Hyper-Awareness: Sherlock, who considers this both a blessing and a curse. Joan shows symptoms of it earlier in the "Pilot" as well.
Inherently Funny Words: Probably the reason why Sherlock is so insistent that the target area in singlestick is not "the top of the head" or anything else other than "the pate!"
If I Wanted You Dead...: In "Alma Matter", after Sherlock learns about a past attempt on Morland's life, he confronts his father about his motives for not telling him about the attempted assassination; Sherlock openly speculates that his father believed he was the one responsible for the attempt, Sherlock stating that Morland can be sure he didn't do it as Morland is still alive.
Inspector Lestrade:
- His name is Gregson this time, but still. (For those unaware of the reason for the pothole: Gregson is the name of a colleague of Lestrade in the original stories — he appears in the first Holmes story, "A Study In Scarlet". Lestrade appeared far more often than Gregson in the original works, but both serve identical roles — as is now the case for Elementary and Sherlock.)
- In "Step Nine" we are introduced to Gareth Lestrade, who actually works as a Deconstruction of this trope.
Internal Affairs: In "The Best Way Out Is Always Through", Marcus finds out that his new girlfriend, Det. Shauna Scott, is an IA informant at her precinct. They break up, Marcus gets over it and apologizes, but Shauna tells him that she took his words about spying to heart and has decided to work for IA full-time.
Interpol Special Agent: Lucas, Morland Holmes's Interpol Friend on the Force, although his only investigative superpowers are his skill at abusing his connections to obtain information, and his acceptance of cheques.
Invisible Writing: When Sherlock and Joan retrieve the Body of the Week of the "Art in the Blood" episode for an autopsy, they are more than a little surprised to find that his apparently ordinary arms had been stolen and nothing else. After some investigation they find out that his ex-wife is a tattoo artist and he had her cover his arms with tattoos that only show up under UV light.
Ironic Echo: Watson enjoys doing this:
- First, in "While You Were Sleeping": Holmes attempts to test whether a coma patient is really asleep by jabbing a needle into her thigh, proclaiming that there are "lots of nerve endings there." Later, Watson threatens that if he falls asleep during his NA group session, she'll do the same to him.
  Watson: Lots of nerve endings there.
- Second, in "Details": Holmes is trying to get Watson to take up self-defense out of concern for her safety. He goes about trying to prove the need for this in his own unique way: He beans her in the back of the head with a tennis ball and points out that it "could have been a knife." At the end of the episode, Watson retaliates by beaning him in the face with a basketball.
  Watson: Could have been a knife.
- Third, in "Déjà Vu All Over Again": She outlines her theory of the murder and the suspect calls her "a woman with a crazy story." Gregson counters by pointing out they have proof that supports what Watson is saying, prompting this line:
  Watson: But don't take my word for it. I'm just a woman with a crazy story.
- In "Risk Management", Sherlock says that the easiest way to track someone is through their phone. At the end of the episode, Sherlock goes to an address Moriarty sent him, while lying to Joan about his intents. He gets out of the taxi and finds her waiting for him.
  Watson: In this day and age, the simplest way to track someone is via their cell phone.
- A non-Watson example occurs at the beginning of "Solve For X." A mugger punches out his victim when he says, "Please, I don't want any trouble." Said mugger stumbles onto a murder while running away, then says the same thing to the murderer before getting two in the chest for his trouble.
"It" Is Dehumanizing: Which is why in "Bella", Sherlock insists on referring to the titular AI as "it" instead of "she".
It's All About Me: A good assessment of Odin Reichenbach in the final season; while he presents himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to prevent crimes being committed in future by killing potential perpetrators, when Sherlock presents Reichenbach with an alternative system of simply helping potential killers get over the issues that might drive them to murder, Reichenbach has three innocent people killed just to suggest that his current method is superior. Add in the later revelation that he had an innocent woman killed so that he could buy her brother's company, and Reichenbach comes across as an arrogant man on a power trip who just likes having a semi-justifiable reason to kill people.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sherlock is an Insufferable Genius who is often utterly oblivious to other people's feelings but is far from heartless and can be genuinely kind on occasion. He simply attaches no value to their feelings in personal relations.
Jerk with a Heart of Jerk:
- Moriarty. After seducing Sherlock, faking her own death, destroying his life and sanity, leading him to drug addiction, going back to his life pretending to be mentally ill and filling his heart with guilt, she tried to set him apart from Watson, made threats to his emotional health, and in the end, after thinking he had overdosed tried to manipulate him into her clutches again.
- Gareth Lestrade. Took credit for Sherlock's work for years, then ignored all Sherlock's attempts to help him and in the end of "Step Nine" took advantage of Sherlock's wit again.
- Detective Gerry Coventry from "On the Line". He resents Holmes' Brutal Honesty when they're publicly arguing about Lucas Bundsch's guilt (although Holmes was right to criticize him)—so much so that he gives Holmes and Watson's address to Bundsch, who promptly tries to intimidate them. (Hey, Bundsch was exonerated—even though Holmes and Watson think he's a Serial Killer—so no harm done, right?) Later, Gregson finds Coventry Drowning His Sorrows and gives him a What the Hell, Hero? speech.
Karma Houdini: In "Bella", Isaac Pike goes free, even though Sherlock and the police know he planned Edwin Bornstein's murder. His student-cum-henchwoman Erin Rabin confesses to the crime due to Isaac's cult leader-like hold over her.
Knife-Throwing Act: American Football player Phil Simms appears As Himself in "Just a Regular Irregular". Apparently he is the world's greatest knife thrower and only went into football because there is no money in the impalement arts. He is Sherlock's knife-throwing expert and Sherlock consults with him about how a murder during a knife-throwing act at a circus in the 1930s could have been committed. Simms tells Sherlock that his theory is impossible and then demonstrates his knife-throwing prowess before leaving.

L-P

Lack of Empathy: In "Turn It Upside Down," Sherlock and Joan become aware of the "DANTE (Depravity and Atrocity Numeration Test) Survey," which a psychiatrist created to test how people rate the severity of various crimes. The apparent purpose of the test was to aid courts with sentencing guidelines, but Sherlock comes to believe that someone may have used it for another purpose: namely, to identify sociopaths who would be willing to commit crimes. Joan suggests that a person who rates crimes such as murder with a low severity would "lack empathy."
Laser-Guided Karma: Del Gruner, philanthropist, wise business man, and rapist, torturer, and murderer of at least four women, with Kitty Winter nearly being one with only scars on her back from his torture is last seen with his face burned by a powerful acid thrown on him by Kitty.
Last Breath Bullet:
- In "Snow Angels" a security guard is shot square in the chest and dragged behind his guardpost, but he still manages to roll over and get off one shot at the bad guys.
- In "The Diabolical Kind" Devon Gaspar and one of his cohorts gun down two uniformed NYPD officers, only for one of them to shoot the cohort, and get killed by Gaspar.
Last-Name Basis: Sherlock with everyone, but not the other way around. Taken up to eleven when he remarks that he thinks of most of the other detectives in the Precinct as being "Not-Bell".
Latex Perfection: Discussed in "Who is That Masked Man?" A killer wore latex masks to get close to his victims by pretending to be people they knew, but only in poor lighting conditions. Sherlock knew that the masks would fail on any close inspection, because he had tried the same thing back in London and failed spectacularly.
Lawman Gone Bad:
- In "One Way to Get Off", we learn that Gregson's former partner D'Amico planted evidence on Wade Crewes because the police couldn't prove his guilt legitimately. When By-the-Book Cop Gregson calls her out on this, she's more concerned with the potential impact on her career than the miscarriage of justice.
- The villain in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs" is an undercover DEA agent who tries to make some money on the side by kidnapping the daughter of Holmes' old drug dealer.
- The culprit of "Details" is an ex-girlfriend of Detective Bell's, who was also a beat cop. She had been trying to get promoted into Vice, but after learning that Bell went to Internal Affairs with evidence that her late superior was a Dirty Cop on a major drug case they were all working on, her chances were next to nothing so she took it out on Bell.
- In "The Five Orange Pipz", the villain behind everything is a corrupt FBI Agent. His motive was to gain access to the titular toys, which could be made into GHB, so he could sell them as drugs.
Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- In "Details" Joan says "I'd like to be paid on Thursdays" to indicate that she's staying on. The series aired on Thursdays when the episode was made,
- The B-Plot of "Miss Taken" involves Watson's stepdad publishing a novel featuring a heavily fictionalized (and sexualized) story based on the exploits of her and Sherlock. She'd rather it didn't exist, and hopes Sherlock doesn't find out. Turns out he doesn't care, and he informs her that he's already been the inspiration for several fictional characters across multiple media.
Like an Old Married Couple: Holmes and Watson. This trope is explored in "An Unnatural Arrangement". Watson is unhappy with the imbalance of her partnership with Sherlock and they discreetly fight with each other. Sherlock muses about the intricacies of their relationship, and even makes a comparison with marriage.
Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Watson is light, Moriarty is dark.
- Appearance-flipped in that Joan is brunette while Moriarty is blonde.
Living in a Furniture Store: Generally averted in Sherlock's house. There is usually a mess in the kitchen and things like books and pizza boxes are scattered around the floor and tables.
Locked Room Mystery: "Enough Nemesis to Go Around" involves one where the room is an elevator. Sherlock notes these are a rare find for investigators and he has only dealt with seven in the past.
Loophole Abuse: Holmes is a consultant, not a cop, which means he can do things the NYPD can't—such as search people's homes without a warrant, which no, he can't. While this might be Holmes' self-justification, it would be Hollywood Law if played straight. In reality, persons acting on behalf of police agencies are bound by the same rules of evidence as sworn police, to prevent exactly this kind of loophole. Additionally, even if the evidence were admissible, it would still be a felony to break in the way he does. This gets discussed in Tremors.
Ludicrous Precision: In "T-Bone and the Iceman", there is "an 81 percent chance" that a suspect is lying, rather than 80 or 85.
Mad Libs Catch Phrase: In Season 1, Sherlock often introduces himself and Joan by the following template: "I'm Sherlock Holmes, a consultant for the NYPD. This is Ms Watson, my [employee]." [Employee] usually doesn't match Watson's job at all, such as "valet" or "bodyguard", although in one episode (speaking to a woman with Alzheimer's), he introduces her by "this is Joan, she stops me from doing heroin". This goes away in Season 2 when they are actually partners, although he does once introduce her as "Ms Watson, America's foremost expert on home security".
The Mafia: The victim in the episode "All in The Family" was the son of a Mafia don. Joan turns out to know a lot about the major players as she grew up in Queens and liked to follow the news about the mob's activities.
Make It Look Like an Accident:
- In "The Rat Race", Donna Kaplan the secretary arranged four accidents and other inconspicuous deaths to climb the corporate ladder.
- In "Flight Risk" Sherlock deduces that one of the plane crash victims was dead before the plane crashed. It turns out that he stumbled upon the plane being sabotaged, so the villain killed him and stowed his corpse onboard, expecting the plane to go down over water.
- In "A Landmark Story" Sherlock tangles with contract killer Daniel Gottlieb, who specializes in this. He kills one guy by tracking his daily routine and then making it look like a window air conditioner broke loose and fell on his head, and is about to provoke a swarm of Africanized honey bees to attack a jogger when Sherlock catches him refilling their food supply.
- The assassin from "The Cost of Doing Business" uses a variation as his modus operandi. He kills his intended victim in a public place with a sniper rifle, then shoots whoever else is around to simulate a random killing spree. The intent is to hide the motive for the intended victim's death.
Male Gaze: "You've Got Me, Who's Got You" opens with Sherlock forcing some members of Everyone to donate their clothes to a clothing drive Joan is participating in. This means literally the clothes they're wearing, making them disrobe there in the brownstone. There are several schlubby guys and one reasonably good-looking woman. No surprise who the camera focuses on.
Master of Disguise: Unlike other versions of the character, this Sherlock doesn't go for elaborate disguises for his work. Indeed, one episode openly discusses it with Holmes stating that even the best makeup and latex has limitations and it's nearly impossible for someone to replicate a person in voice and mannerisms to fool friends up close.
Holmes: I assure you, there's no such thing as a master of disguise. If there was, I'd be one myself.
- That being said, Sherlock does frequently create characters when making phone calls as someone other than himself, complete with either ludicrously-detailed backstories, or choosing to troll Joan when she asks about them - when asked why "Manny Tarkanian" has a lisp, he replies "Childhood sledding accident. But let's not get caught up in the backstory of a passing alias."
Meaningful Echo:
- In the "Pilot', Watson bails Holmes out of jail when she is working as his sobriety counselor. In "Déjà Vu All Over Again", Holmes is the one bailing Watson out of jail when he is working as her mentor and professor.
- In "M.", the I'm going to miss this... speech.
Men Can't Keep House:
- Sherlock certainly can't. In "Dirty Laundry," he claims that it's part of an experiment to see if a lack of cleanliness correlates to drug relapses.
- Averted with Detective Bell, as shown in "Details." As Joan describes it, his apartment is immaculate.
- Averted with Mycroft as well.
Men Don't Cry: Averted with Sherlock, hoo boy. He nearly cries by the end of "While You Were Sleeping", then again in "M." and falls apart in "Risk Management" when he discovers that Irene Adler is actually alive.
- He is also seen crying in "The One That Got Away" (s3e12) after he’d been fired by MI-6 and abandoned by Kitty, thus finding himself in much the same situation that had originally compelled him to start taking drugs.
Mirror Character:
- In "While You Were Sleeping" Joan sees similarities between her and Sherlock's emotions regarding themselves and their pasts.
- In "The Woman" Irene Adler says exactly this to Sherlock about Moriarty and him. In the end, when we see that she was Moriarty, her theory is proved real, since both of them fell in love with each other.
- In "Step Nine", Joan comes to this conclusion about Mycroft and Sherlock after Sherlock tells her that Mycroft exploded what was left of Sherlock's possessions and considers it a clean slate.
- In "Art in the Blood", it's revealed that while Holmes is a brilliant detective who uses his formidable mental skills consulting for law enforcement, Mycroft turns out to be a brilliant intelligence asset who uses his formidable mental skills consulting for MI6.
- In "Bella", Sherlock pressures the killer by threatening to turn in his junkie brother for a "three strikes" incarceration. Somehow, he intuits that Holmes might have a history of substance abuse himself, only to guess that he might not be ruthless enough to send someone else with the same problem up the river.
- In "The Deductionist", Sherlock catches the killer by cashing in on the fact that he understands how the killer feels about being analyzed by the criminal profiler.
Mistaken for Misogynist:
- Subverted in "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs", Sherlock at first attributes Joan's grumpiness to it being her "time of the month", but he's already worked out that that's not for another ten days at least. Joan calls him out on it:
  Joan: Couching it as a scientific observation totally negates the misogyny.
- In "The Best Way Out Is Always Through", Sherlock says that true prison breaks are rare, and prison breaks perpetrated by female inmates are almost unheard of. Joan gives him an offended look, and Sherlock explains that it's simple statistics: female inmates don't fail more often than males, they just don't try as often.
Monster Clown:
- "Crowned Clown, Downtown Brown" deals with the murder of a man who was impersonating a Monster Clown as a publicity stunt for a horror film, and accidentally stumbled on criminal activity.
- "Red Light, Green Light" begins with Sherlock having a nightmare about encountering Captain Dwyer at the grave of Captain Gregson (who was dangerously ill in hospital at the time), before they are interrupted by an ax-wielding Monster Clown that kills Dwyer.
Morality Chain: While Holmes and Watson wouldn’t be ‘villains’ without Detective Bell, Gregson notes at one point that he appointed Bell their regular police contact because he knew that Bell would keep them in line in the sense that he would let them use their position as consultants to do what regular police couldn’t without doing anything that would outright break the law in a manner that might risk compromising their cases.
Motive Rant: Often averted, but the killer in "Ancient History" gets one.
Mr. Fanservice: Sherlock is often seen shirtless, including his Establishing Character Moment.
Münchausen Syndrome: The murder in "Pick Your Poison" was motivated by the victim's son discovering that she had been doing this to him for years, although Joan admits to having little sympathy for the son despite this, as he also kills the doctor who told him the truth even when doing so would have revealed the false prescriptions she was selling.
Murder by Cremation: An episode has one of the victims of the week being killed in a crematorium retort (alongside another who was already dead), although technically unintentionally; the killer simply having been trying to destroy evidence, and unaware that one was only unconscious (as revealed by the disturbing image of a blackened handprint against the door). Sherlock points out how it was ultimately an inefficient way of disposing of evidence, as the bones are left intact (allowing for cause of death to be determined), and even leaves behind identifiable prosthetics.
Murder by Remote Control Vehicle: In "Murder Ex Machina", the two shooters who kill a Russian oligarch and his bodyguard are then killed themselves when the controls of their car are hacked, causing them to drive off a bridge.
My God, What Have I Done?:
- Sherlock goes through this when he realizes he helped the true mastermind in "Child Predator" walk out of the police station with a full immunity agreement. Sherlock makes up for this by using the agreement's Exact Words to make sure the killer is punished anyway.
- The killer in "Lesser Evils" when he finds out that a teenage girl he killed because he thought she was terminally ill and was facing a slow and agonizing death, had actually just had surgery and was recovering; he was tricked into killing her to hide the truth about a botched surgery.
- Again, in "A Landmark Story", Sherlock himself once he realized that the coded message that he showed to Sebastian Moran to decipher is actually an order for Moran to kill himself or Moriarty would kill Moran's sister.
- In "On the Line", Sherlock proves that Samantha Wabash made her suicide look like a murder to frame Lucas Bundsch, whom she believed killed her sister. Eventually, Sherlock realizes that Bundsch is a Serial Killer who has claimed many victims, including Wabash's sister. Fortunately, once again Holmes and Watson prove their case.
Mythology Gag: There are many, many references to the original canon as written by Arthur Conan Doyle... so many that they now have their own page.
The Needs of the Many: Odin Reichenbach justifies the vigilante killings he orders with this principle, saying it saves far more lives as the people killed would have murdered thousands. He even has a number of major intelligence and law enforcement officials behind him, since they agree. However, while he is a genuine Well-Intentioned Extremist, as time goes on he proves himself capable of having anyone murdered to benefit his project or protect his secrets. For example, he kills an innocent woman as part of a plan to take over her brother's company because the company's tech will improve his crime prediction system.
Never Found the Body: Irene Adler. Sure enough, she turns up alive at the end of "Risk Management".
Never the Obvious Suspect: Unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories it's loosely based on, Elementary uses this trope a lot.
Never Trust a Trailer: Some of CBS' promos give false impressions of the episodes. Two examples from the third season:
- The ad for "One Watson, One Holmes" focuses on a scene where Sherlock is hooked up to a medical monitor—and quickly flatlines. The scene is from the beginning of the episode, and is never mentioned again; it turns out that Holmes is just practicing how to fake his own death.
- The ad for "A Stitch in Time" concentrates on Holmes and Watson investigating an allegedly Haunted House, a plot thread that's discarded by the end of the first act.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
- Invoked in “The Deductionist”, when serial killer Martin Ennis gets out of prison and escalates his actions to explicitly defy the analysis of FBI profiler Kathryn Drummond, who incorrectly profiled him as being the victim of sexual abuse as a child in her book and thus caused the deaths of his parents (his father committed suicide and his mother basically died of a broken heart a year later). While Drummond notes that Ennis didn’t need her to give him a reason to kill, Holmes counters that Ennis didn’t have this reason until she provoked him.
- The set-up of "On the Line": Samantha Wabash kills herself to frame Lucas Bundsch, whom she believes killed her sister. Sherlock proves that it was indeed a suicide, but during the polygraph test realizes that Samantha was right in suspecting Lucas of killing her sister. He spends the rest of the episode trying to finish Samantha's work.
No Ending: "Bella" ends with Sherlock debating whether to implicate the murderer's brother on a drug charge to attempt to force the murderer to confess.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
- In "Pick Your Poison", a doctor who has been selling false prescriptions using Joan's identity (among others) learns that one of her patients is a victim of Münchausen Syndrome when his mother contacts one of the doctor's other identities looking for a new doctor (she can't stay with one doctor for too long in case they realise that his condition is faked). Knowing that revealing this knowledge will also require her to expose her false identities, the doctor told the son the truth about what was being done to him. In retaliation, the son manipulates one of her other patients so that his mother and the doctor are killed, even though the doctor was willing to potentially ruin her own life to try and help a relative stranger.
- In "The Latest Model", Sherlock and Joan try to peacefully neutralize Wesley Conrad, a potential killer whom Odin has targeted. It doesn't go as well as they'd hoped. While Conrad leaves the film director he'd been stalking alone, he (apparently) kills his parents and himself instead. Odin angrily tells Sherlock and Joan to Get Out! and doubles down on his efforts to assassinate potential murderers. Subverted after The Reveal that Odin actually had the Conrads murdered.
Noodle Incident:
- In "The Deductionist" after some amateur porn actors used Joan's spatula in their production, Sherlock gives her a new one ... and a toothbrush to replace her old one. Joan notes she didn't see them touch this in the final film. Sherlock notes they didn't. He is quiet on the rest. The reason being, to explain it would get the censors' hair in a dander, as the implication is that the actress in the film took a money shot and used Joan's toothbrush to wash her mouth out.
- From the same episode, Sherlock explaining an earlier case at the rehab group. A Noodle Incident for the casual viewer, Mythology Gag for the keen fans.
- In "You Do It To Yourself", Holmes makes a comment on the duration of a pig's orgasm. Given his known preference to only learning things that would be relevant to his work in the belief that a human's memory capacity is finite, one has to wonder what kind of case required him to learn this.
No-Tell Motel: In "To Catch a Predator Predator", Sherlock uses this exact phrase to describe the hot-sheets motel where a man is shot to death.
The Not-Love Interest: Neither Sherlock nor Joan is attracted to the other at all. Not that people don't keep mistaking them for it. In fact, this is actually a subplot of "Déjà Vu All Over Again", when Joan's friends think she's being emotionally manipulated by Sherlock and stage a misinformed intervention.
Obfuscating Insanity:
- Adam Kemper plays the role of a victim with severe PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome, only to be revealed as the real mastermind.
- Irene Adler was faking her amnesia and her PSTD symptoms. Amongst other things.
Obfuscating Stupidity:
- Sherlock will on occasion lie about what he deduces, such as when he initially claims that Joan left being a surgeon when a friend died, only to admit later that he knew she was forced out because she accidentally killed a patient.
- Mycroft's career for the previous decade: chef, restauranteur, long-suffering victim of his brother's insults, highly valued MI6 asset...
Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
- We never do find out what Kitty said to Chris Stotz in "Rip Off," only that it terrified him enough to make him quit the police force and practically beg Gregson to tell her he'd done so.
- In No Lack of Void Sherlock is surprised by two extremely pissed-off men, one with a large crowbar and the other one quite burly. Skip one scene and they're lying unconscious on the ground; Sherlock himself is out of breath and covered in what's suspected to be anthrax powder from a bag rupturing during the fight, but no worse for wear aside from that.
One-Word Title: The series itself, plus the episodes "Pilot", "M." (a one-letter title), "Details", "Heroine", "Tremors", "Bella" and "Hemlock".
Only Known by Their Nickname: One of Sherlock's irregulars is known only as The Nose, because he has a really excellent sense of smell.
The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Jamie Moriarty gets extremely annoyed when Joan's life is threatened by Elana March. The two of them have unfinished business, and Elana is getting in the way.
Out of Focus: Joan Watson is introduced as the main character along with Sherlock and one of the faces to promote the show. However, in season 2, Joan is mostly out of focus as the story becomes more about Sherlock and his personal problems. Season three pushes her further out; as she's now working solo, with Sherlock's protege Kitty taking Joan's original role in investigations.
- Though she still has important roles in both seasons, getting kidnapped in the end of season 2, being involved with Mycroft, & deducing Mycroft's real reason for getting involved with MI6. And in season 3 she has an important plot about her involving the death of Andrew, she acts as a second mentor for Kitty (Sherlock refers to each of them as Kitty's mother and father), and she ends up moving back in. She also continues to solve her own cases and helps Sherlock solve his.
Page Three Stunna: Lola Quinn, the victim of the week in "The Further Adventures", is a glamour model who had acid thrown in her face. During the investigation it's mentioned that the paper that ran her pictures was one of the last in the UK to still have this feature (which is Truth in Television as most UK tabloids have dropped these pages). Holmes and Watson eventually discover that the newspaper's owner was also Lola's mother, having given birth to her in secret as a teenager. The paper maintains the page specifically to help build Lola's modelling career.
Papa Wolf:
- In "Dead Man's Switch", Holmes has been handed the tricky case of a blackmailer threatening to publish a graphic video of a teenaged girl's rape on the Internet, only the blackmailer has been murdered, leaving his incriminating materials in the hands of his unidentified accomplice. Holmes needs to delay the announcement and investigation of the murder just long enough for him and Watson to find the accomplice, and gently pressures Gregson into agreeing by reminding the captain that he has daughters, and can well understand the consequences if the young woman in question becomes "a star online" (to use the blackmailer's cruel expression).
- In "Rip Off", Gregson lays a beat-down on a cop who was harassing his daughter, who has recently joined the NYPD. She gets angry at him because she told him about the harassment in confidence, and now everyone in her precinct is whispering about her behind her back, wondering what the cop did and what she told her father. Gregson is unrepentant, saying she and everyone else in New York City should know better than to expect him to stand back and do nothing if anyone lays a hand on her.
- In "Rekt in Real Life", Shinwell Johnson calmly confronts a young thug who's been harassing his estranged daughter. It's especially effective because he's a former convict trying to straighten out his life and he hadn't seen his daughter since he got out of jail. Subverted in that she gets angry at him because she never wanted to see him, but asked for him as she needed the gangster out of her life.
  Shinwell: I'm Chivonne's father. Given the way you've been treating my baby girl, stalking her, and making her life hell, by rights, you should be lying in a pool of your own blood right now.
Parental Substitute: Throughout the third season, Joan and Sherlock behave like a divorced couple that is mostly amicable but still prone to arguing, and Kitty often fills the role of their teenage daughter... even though Sherlock and Joan are 100% platonic, and Kitty's a grown woman who's only a few years younger than them. This includes Joan telling Sherlock to let Kitty have space so Kitty can have more fun, both of them encouraging Kitty to go to therapy, and Sherlock giving her chores and scolding her when she screws up, but never failing to express his pride when she does really well. There are also a couple hilarious moments when Sherlock and Joan begin to argue and ask Kitty to weigh in, only for Kitty to say, essentially, "Leave me out of this!" (Any child of divorce can probably relate.) They both have a protective streak when it comes to Kitty as well — both are deeply concerned with her emotional state and fear her getting hurt again, but it manifests in wildly contrasting ways. Kitty, for her part, doesn't seem to mind it, even admitting to Sherlock that it makes her "feel very loved." Sherlock even lampshades his and Joan's status as this; when asking Joan to help him train Kitty, his reasoning is, basically, "She needs a father and a mother," specifically pointing out that Joan's more nurturing and emotional than him. Joan points out that they're not Kitty's parents... but it doesn't stop her from agreeing to help.
Parking Payback: At the start of "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell", a driver steals a parking spot from a limo driver who has been waiting for it. Ignoring the honking traffic building up behind him, the limo driver opens his trunk to extract something, obviously planning to inflict some vengeance on the offending car and/or driver. However, whatever payback he had planned in preempted when the other driver is killed by an elderly woman plunging off the balcony of an apartment building.
The Password Is Always "Swordfish": In "Rip Off", the Victim of the Week uses the same code on his office security system and his safe. It is '1-2-3' followed by the street number of the business.
The Perils of Being the Best: "Worth Several Cities" opens with Sherlock being kidnapped by a South American drug gang and forced to investigate the killing of several of their members under threat of death, just because of his reputation.
The Perfect Crime: Sherlock himself considers the elevator murders in "Enough Nemesis To Go Around" to be this.
Pet Heir: "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell" involves a murdered senior woman who left her a $12 million inheritance to her Shih Tzu instead of her children. The issues involved in this are deconstructed, as the lawyer charged with the dog's care has to give up his planned new job in a more lucrative practice in another city to care for an animal he isn't particularly attached to and deal with years of legal complaints from the children trying to get around the will.
Platonic Co-Parenting: When Joan shares the fact that she wants to adopt a baby, Sherlock states that he'd be happy to help raise her child as an Honorary Uncle. This eventually happens in the series finale.
Platonic Life-Partners: Holmes and Watson, following the long tradition, somewhat codependently so.
- Lampshaded somewhat in "Bella," when Holmes says to Watson: "Even though we might draw further or nearer from each other depending on circumstance, you and I are bound, somehow." That "somehow" is of course the fact that the story works better when they're together.
Police Are Useless: Averted, and very, very much parodied.
Sherlock: Have you always been this observant? I'm asking sincerely, I'm wondering if exposure to my methods has helped you in any way.
Bell [sarcastically]: Actually, before you came along, I've never closed a case. Neither had the rest of the department. Most of us were thinking of packing up, leaving. Letting the city fend for itself!
Polyamory: In "All My Exes live In Essex", Holmes and Watson find security footage of the murder victim kissing a man who isn't her husband. The husband reveals to them that he, his wife and the "other man" were actually in a polyamorous relationship. He and the second man were together first, and their deceased "wife" suggested the group arrangement as she'd previously been in a 6-way relationship. They kept their situation a secret out of concern that it might be used to strip them of custody of their daughter. It eventually turns out that the woman was murdered by her legally-recognised husband, but he did it because she'd discovered his serial malpractice and not because of their relationship status.
Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Sherlock, much like his original counterpart.
- In "Déjà Vu All Over Again", Watson saying she's going to do her "best Columbo impression" when interviewing a suspect gets her a blank look from Sherlock.
- In "Tag, You're Me":
  Watson: Fluent in three dozen languages, but the man has never seen Say Anything....
  Bell: That's a Eighties movie, right?
  Watson: You want me to punch you, right?
- In "From Russia With Drugs", Marcus compares the victim of the week to Scrooge McDuck for being found on a bed covered in cash. Sherlock Holmes has apparently never heard of the character and has to ask who that is. Joan fills him in by telling him to think of his own father "as a duck".
- In "The Ballad of Lady Frances", the Victim of the Week was shot, according to Sherlock, over a guitar that "once belonged to someone named Eric Clapton. Have you heard of him?"
Posthumous Character: Irene Adler was treated as one for most of the season, her death having caused Sherlock's spiral into drugs. Turns out, she was Faking the Dead.
Power of Trust: By Season 2, Sherlock has come to see the deep value in genuine partnerships. To have someone he can trust to have his back and be with him in the dark. While he sees marriage as a foolish idea, he notes there is a difference between a partnership and marriage. For this, he talks to Gregson to reconcile with his wife as he has a worthy partner in her.
Pragmatic Villainy: In "Over A Barrel" Bell and Holmes discover a gang which used to run drugs and was hunted by a stronger and more dangerous crew switched to selling illegally imported Canadian maple syrup from several dozen drums they acquired. The dealer notes there are a lot of benefits as the syrup doesn't spoil, they have no other competition, and they make as much money from the sales to restaurants who don't want to pay the import fees or deal with Canada's tight grip on their export.
Properly Paranoid:
- British Intelligence had an analyst investigate Sherlock back in London when he began consulting with the police as they were concerned someone with his skill set could be a threat. They're proven right. Just before he went into rehab, he unwittingly acted as a courier for a terrorist group. Later, he's responsible for nearly blowing the cover of Mycroft's operation.
- In "On the Line," a young woman kills herself in an effort to frame a man she believes killed her sister. He was a suspect in the original investigation, but was quickly cleared. The lead investigator thought she was simply paranoid and delusional in her grief, and refused to even entertain the idea that she may have been right, but Holmes quickly realizes her suspicions were 100% correct. Fortunately, he later proves it.
Protagonist-Centered Morality: Alistair said that being friends with Sherlock means he will go years with no contact then call out of the blue with a seemingly insane request, and the audience can see his selfish version of friendship in the way he treats Harlan. Sherlock assaulted his former drug dealer, but was able to stay out of jail and keep his job because his Fiction 500 father used his money to bribe Sherlock's way out of trouble. In an episode in which a vigilante inadvertently caused more problems by luring and beating up sexual predators, Sherlock used corrupt cops in a foreign country to frame one of the predators for drug trafficking. The audience was always meant to side with Sherlock.

Q-S

Race Against the Clock: In "Paint It Black" French crime syndicate the Milieu, which has kidnapped Watson, gives Sherlock and Mycroft 48 hours to find fugitive banker Pierce Norman.
Race Lift:
- The very white, very English John Watson is now Joan Watson and played by Lucy Liu.
- She's not the only one. Mary Watson is now Joan's mother and is also Asian.
Radiation-Induced Superpowers: Mocked in "You've Got Me, Who's Got You" when Watson lists the origin of several superheroes involving radiation and Sherlock wonders how they're not all dead of cancer. He also notes it's a shame the bullets used to kill the real-life superhero victim of the week weren't radioactive, and later snarks that he got his deductive abilities from being bitten by a radioactive detective.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech: Sherlock seems to get a lot of these from several people.
- Watson gives a brief one to him in the pilot episode that leaves him speechless.
- Captain Gregson in "The Red Team". He finalizes it by punching Sherlock in the stomach.
- Alfredo in "Dead Man's Switch".
- Moriarty also delivers one in the "The Woman/Heroine" and concludes by saying that she is superior to Sherlock and he is a game she will win everytime. And then she loses.
- Sherlock gives one to Bell in "All In The Family" for allowing himself to give up on his own physical recovery and his career as a police detective. It's meant motivationally and it works.
Recruiting the Criminal: Starting in Season Two, Sherlock begins to enlist the help of the hacktivist group Everyone, asking them for information or goods he can't get himself. Despite the group tormenting Sherlock and Joan at first, they're always quite willing to help out... provided Sherlock perform some sort of annoying or humiliating task. Sherlock, for his part, just rolls with it.
Red Herring Secret: Holmes, Watson, and the police encounter a lot of Red Herrings, because very often their suspects' alibis for certain crimes is that they were committing other crimes:
- "One Way to Get Off": Their initial suspect is found to have a Sex Slave chained in his basement, who confirms that he was with her on the night of the murders being investigated; as Bell says sourly, the alibi is rock-solid because it's being supplied by the one person least inclined to lie on the suspect's behalf.
- "Possibility Two": the police think they have the suspect dead-to-rights, based on DNA evidence; in desperation, the suspect reveals his alibi: he was taking blackmail photos of his neighbor kissing the family's babysitter. He may violate his parole and get sent back to prison, but that's preferable to being charged with murder.
- Inverted in "Poison Pen": the wife's alibi for the murder of her sexually abusive husband is that she was busy preparing to murder him, while someone else went ahead and did it. Holmes remarks that's a new one, even for him.
Reformed, but Rejected: Shinwell Johnson's early years as a convicted drug dealer has left him estranged from his family. His teenage daughter, after not seeing him for so many years, seeks him out for help getting a gang member who's been pestering her to go away. He succeeds, but his daughter ultimately rejects him for it. She bluntly tells her father that she only sought him out because she had no other choice with her problem, and that she wants nothing to do with him after that.
Reformed Criminal:
- Alfredo Llamosa, who first appears in "The Long Fuse". He's a former car thief who now works as a security consultant for car companies and is Sherlock's sobriety sponsor.
- Shinwell Johnson is a former criminal who's trying to straighten his life out and becomes acquainted with Sherlock because Joan used to treat him when she was a surgeon. He occasionally provides them with leads on cases, but his effort in helping them take on a powerful crime ring results in his death.
Refuge in Audacity:
- Le Chevalier, from "The Leviathan". Where do you hide the valuable painting you stole? Behind a false wall, on which you hang a print of said valuable painting.
- In "The Woman", we are introduced to Irene Adler and her private collection of art masterpieces stolen from several museums and exposed beautifully in her living room.
Replaced with Replica: The plot of "Terra Pericolosa" concerns an old map which will identify the original owners of certain plots of land, which is important now. The map is stolen and two copies are made: one is a fairly obvious forgery, so that when the second copy, a more meticulous forgery, is discovered it will be assumed to be the genuine article.
Reset Button:
- In the second-season finale, Sherlock leaves New York to work for MI6. Before the third season premiere is over, he's back in New York working for the NYPD, although Joan won't take him back as partner and Sherlock in fact has a new trainee.
- The end of Season 6 was written as a series finale with Sherlock and Joan going off to 221B Baker Street in London to solve cases while Detective Bell got hired by the U.S. Marshals. But the surprise renewal of the series for a seventh and last season led to a big Reset Button push. By the end of the Season 7 premiere Joan is homesick so she goes back to the USA, and in the next episode Sherlock follows her so he can investigate Gregson's atttempted murder, putting his own freedom at risk; the third episode has him pulling some strings and shenanigans so the murder charges are dropped against him and he can solve cases again. As for Detective Bell, a "federal hiring freeze" has left his job as a federal marshal hanging, so he's still with the NYPD.
Retcon: A minor one, but Gregson's first name was originally given as Tobias, or "Toby." He's now solidly referred to as Thomas, or "Tommy."
The Reveal:
- From the Season 1 Finale: Irene Adler wasn't murdered by Moriarty; she is Moriarty.
- From the Season 2 final episodes: Mycroft's mysterious employer is British Intelligence.
Reverse Whodunnit: Most episodes do not use this structure but “When Your Number’s Up” does. We see the killer commit the murder in the opening scene, then follow Sherlock and Joan as they figure out not only who did it, but why. We also get additional scenes with the killer that clarify her motive.
Ripped from the Headlines:
- "Lesser Evils" is inspired by the Kristen Gilbert murders, a nurse who killed four patients (and was suspected of killing eighty others) with epinephrine at the Veteran's Administration hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts in the early 1990s. There's even a drug-addict coworker as a Red Herring.
- "Step Nine" has a killer commit murder with a plastic gun made from a 3D printer and then destroy the gun to hide the evidence. The technology to make such a gun was less than a year old at the time of airing.
- "We Are Everyone" was obviously inspired by the Edward Snowden scandal. The Snowden Expy is helped by a Julian Assange-type character (sans the rape allegations). It should be noted that the Snowden expy is portrayed totally unsympathetically, being willing to kill and endanger lives rather than face the legal repercussions of his leaking national security secrets (and it is implied that he did it just to get attention).
- "The Five Orange Pipz" episode involves toy beads that that contain substance that metabolises into potentially lethal GHB when swallowed due to the manufacturer substituting the substance for the more expensive non-poisonous substance. This is a nod to a similar problem with Bindeez toys.
- "One Watson, One Holmes" involves a schism in Everyone, which is transparently based on Anonymous. A few months earlier, shortly before the start of the season, there was a schism on 4chan, with many users migrating to 8chan.
- Part of "The Games Underfoot" episode is people searching for a cache of videogames that the manufacturer buried during The '80s because of the negative reception, which is a reference to thousands of copies of the infamously bad E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial licensed game that Atari buried in a trash dump during the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and its rediscovery that was chronicled by the Atari Game Over documentary.
- "Crowned Clown, Downtown Brown" featured creepy clown sightings similar to the ones prevalent in September/October 2016.
- The solution of "The Art of Sleights and Deception" turns out to revolve around an anatomy textbook that was written and illustrated by a Third Reich-era German doctor who dissected the bodies of Holocaust victims to create it. This is inspired by the real-world controversy relating to the ''Topographische Anatomie des Menschen'' by Eduard Pernkopf.
- "Breathe" has a pharmacuetical executive who jacks up the price on medications to the disgust of virtually everyone, based on Martin Shkreli.
- The "ghost of Brooklyn" debacle in the episode "On the Scent", in which a number of unrelated murders are mistakenly believed to be by a serial killer due to accidental contamination of forensic kits with the DNA of a worker at the manufacturing plant, is inspired by the real-world German case of the "Phantom of Heilbronn".
Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
- Sherlock goes on one against (who he believes to be) Irene Adler's killer in "M."
- This is also Serial Killer Howard Ennis' motivation in "The Deductionist". Ennis wants revenge on FBI profiler Kathryn Drummond because she falsely accused Ennis' father of sexually abusing him, which led to the death of both Ennis' parents. His sister is in on it too.
- Moriarty goes on one near the end of "The Diabolical Kind" when her former henchman Gaspar kidnaps her long-lost biological daughter in an attempt to extort information from her. She escapes from jail and methodically slaughters the henchman and his cohorts.
Room Full of Crazy: Sherlock's giant wall of Moriarty-related stuff. Joan calls it his 'wall of crazy' at some point.
Rube Goldberg Machine: Featured in the Title Sequence.
Running Gag:
- Sherlock and his fondness for prostitutes.
- Early on, Sherlock had the habit of introducing Joan as various titles. Those included "personal valet", "bodyguard", "consultant slash housekeep", "she keeps me from doing heroin", and "America's foremost expert on home security".
- Holmes waking Watson up in several ways and times of the day to share his thoughts on the latest case. It was even used in the show's promotional ads.
  - That one gets turned on its head in "The Female of the Species", when Joan gets her revenge by dropping a very heavy book on her dinner table, waking him up because he fell asleep at it.
- The Anonymous-Expy Everyone making Sherlock perform humiliating tasks in exchange for tracking stuff down for him.
- Sherlock's distaste for big, powerful organizations doing shady things, which he is never shy about expressing. Given his father's line of work, this may be part of his daddy issues.
Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Unlike most adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock is an interesting aversion of this trope. He navigates social circles fairly well, and has no trouble finding sexual partners, including one Twin Threesome Fantasy. However, his main flaw is expecting everyone else to see things from a logical and not emotional standpoint, and he admits he can be a dick a lot of the time. After betraying Captain Gregson's trust, the captain no longer trusts Sherlock, who thinks that Gregson is being immature. Also, he wants to prove Mycroft's fiancé is only interested in the family money, so he repeatedly sleeps with her. He does spend a lot of time training, investigating, and practicing, ignoring unnecessary little things like sleep.
- Part of the reason Sherlock can cope on this level may be that he's learned he doesn't have to specialise; where other Sherlocks seemed to basically keep track of everything he'd need to know for investigations on his own, Miller's Sherlock relies on his Irregulars for specialized knowledge of particular subjects he wouldn't expect to deal with on a more regular basis.
- As of Season 3, Watson has been trained to or close to his level of skill. It's worth noting that everyone in the show who's in his league (Holmes, Watson, Kitty) are all profoundly hurt in some way, though Watson is otherwise fairly normal and Holmes was just as skilled before his major trauma. The one exception is Moriarty, who's just a sociopath.
Samus Is a Girl: Moriarty is a woman. And also Irene Adler.
Second Episode Substitute: In the pilot Captain Gregson has a Hispanic partner named Detective Javier Abreu who was skeptical of Holmes' deductive skills and questioned the necessity for his consultation. From the second episode on, Captain Gregson has an African American partner named Detective Marcus Bell who is skeptical of Holmes' deductive skills and questions the necessity for his consultation.
Secret Agent Masquerade: In "Turn It Upside Down", one of Moriarty's agents pretended to be a CIA agent to get a research scientist to help design an online questionnaire that could be used to identify sociopaths, ostensibly for national security, but really to identify potential hitmen.
Separated by a Common Language:
- In "Internal Audit", Sherlock meets someone new.
  Randy: You're Sherlock, right?
  Sherlock: And you are?
  Randy: Randy.
  Sherlock: Name or adjective?
  Randy: What?
  Sherlock: Short for "Randall" or state of sexual arousal?
  Randy: Are you asking me if I'm horny?
- In "Rip Off" this becomes a plot point where Sherlock figures out somebody can't be the commissioner of a murder because he doesn't understand the slang used in the e-mails sent to the hired killer.
  Sherlock: When we find this man, he should stand trial for murder, and crimes against the English language.
Serial Killer: New York is swarming with them to the point of rivaling Dexter.
- "Child Predator" has Samuel Abbott AKA "The Balloon Man", who kidnapped children, leaving a batch of balloon on the site of the disappearance; the children in question would turn up dead or never be seen again. It turns out his first victim Adam Kemper had mentally overpowered Samuel and was the one doing the killings.
- In "The Rat Race", Donna Kaplan the secretary arranged four accidents and other inconspicuous deaths to climb the corporate ladder, and tries to kill Sherlock to frame her boss Jim Fowkes.
- "Lesser Evils" has the janitor who was euthanizing terminally ill patients in a hospital. One patient actually wasn't terminally ill, but her surgeon tricked the killer into believing she was in order to cover up a post-operative mistake that could have ended his career.
- In "One Way To Get Off" thirteen years before the story, a killer murdered three couples by taping them to pillows, executing them, and taking a high heel as a trophy. Wade Crewes was convicted of the murders but insists that he was framed. In the present, two more couples, and a bystander who happened to be present, were killed using the same M.O, even the same gun. While the evidence against Crewes was planted, it turns out that he was guilty, and he had convinced his illegitimate son, Sean Figueroa, to commit murders to make himself look innocent.
- "M." has the eponymous killer who had killed dozens of people, including Sherlock's love interest Irene Adler, by suspending them from a tripod, slashing there throats, and letting them bleed out. He turns out to be an assassin named Sebastian Moran, and he claims Irene was killed by his employer Moriarty. Later we find out Irene was Moriarty who faked her death.
- "The Deductionist" has Martin^noteOr Howard depending on the version Ennis who had killed blonde women by skinning them. He then breaks out of the hospital when donating a kidney and shoots up a convenience store, deliberately sparing a woman who fits his typical victim profile.
- Michael Rowan, a recurring villain throughout Season 6, is another example.
Series Fauxnale: When the show got a sixth season, nobody knew if it would get renewed after that, so the last episode of the season was intended as a Grand Finale, complete with a major change to the series' status quo. But then CBS okayed Season 7...
Setting Update: Modern-day New York City as opposed to late 1800s London.
Sexiled: Sherlock often hangs a sign on his bedroom door saying "Coitus in progress or recently concluded" to warn Joan not to knock. In another episode he pays for her to spend a few days at a luxury hotel so he and his current partner can have the whole house to themselves.
Shame If Something Happened: In "Command: Delete," NSA Agent McNally says this about Joan after Sherlock reveals that he knows McNally is working with Odin Reichenbach.
Sherlock Scan: It's hard to tell when Holmes is actually analyzing but it's definitely there. It's sporadic at most. Soon after meeting him, Joan has picked this habit up as well and sometimes uses it to notice things about Sherlock. What is unique in that the show's Sherlock Scan filter pops up not only when Sherlock or Joan are deducing.
Ship Tease: ...Not as much as some installments, but this is still Holmes and Watson we're talking about. The first line he says to her is "Do you believe in love at first sight?" He was actually reciting lines from the soap opera on TV. Though the creators stated that they intended too keep the characters' relationship platonic, and did so throughout the series.
Shirtless Scene: Sherlock has a lot of these.
- In "Pilot", Sherlock is shirtless when he is introduced and Joan meets him.
- In "Child Predator" we first see Sherlock sitting with no shirt on and looking through some boxes. The funny part is he remembers having it on when he started his search the previous night and has no idea how or why he took it off.
- In "Solve For X" he is shirtless and doing exercises in the middle of the night in the brownstone.
Shocking Voice Identity Reveal: when Kitty Winter hears the voice of Del Gruner, Watson's new boss—and realizes that's he's the Serial Killer and rapist who victimized her (and many other women, none of whom survived).
Shout-Out: So many that they have their own page.
Shown Their Work:
- Malbolge, which appears in the episode "The Leviathan", is a real esoteric program language, and the code depicted in the episode is actual code (although it doesn't do what the episode says it does). The writers got help from a PhD mathematician for the episode.
- P versus NP, which is depicted in the episode "Solve for X", is also a real problem in the field of computer science and is pretty much as major as the episode shows it to be.
- Dead Clade Walking is a real theory in palaeontology and it is indeed Serious Business.
- "Bella" had a very accurate portrayal of how artificial intelligences work, and of issues in the ethics of AI research.
- More generally, the portrayal of addiction in this show has been highly praised by recovering addicts as being among the most realistic depictions on television.
- Just look at the Mythology Gag entry: This might be a different presentation of Holmes than most fans are used to, but let no one say the writers haven't read up on their Sherlock Holmes.
Siblings in Crime:
- In "The Deductionist" Patricia Ennis was in on her brother Martin's plan to get back at Kathryn Drummond. She poisoned her liver so Martin could escape when donating his, and then tried to kill Drummond with a pair of scissors.
- In "Dead Man's Switch" Anthony Pistone killed Charles Augustus Milverton, so he and his brother could take over the blackmail business.
Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: Falls middle of the scale, but leans more on the character side. General consensus is that the Mystery of the Week isn't amazing, but Sherlock and Joan character arcs are built incredibly well. Even supporting characters like Gregson, Bell and Alfredo are relatively well fleshed out.
Smokescreen Crime: In "End of Watch", a police officer is murdered by a masked man so that his funeral will draw most of the department away from a planned robbery of the Emergency Services Unit's armory. The murdered officer's funeral is cancelled after Holmes and Watson discover he was stealing department weapons and fencing them to feed his drug addiction, forcing the killer to murder a second one.
Snark-to-Snark Combat: The entire basis of Sherlock's relationship with his father consists of them trading barbs with each other. Even if Morland is attempting to be nice to his son, there's still an underlying current of snark.
Spotting the Thread: Naturally, Holmes is an expert spotting the one minor little inconsistency that ends up unraveling the entire criminal plot. Watson is soon just as adept in spotting the same clues to solve the case.
- A rare case of neither of them is in an episode where they investigate the murder of a doctor who was a wealthy Doomsday prepper. The man had invested thousands of dollars in a high-tech "bunker" for the rich unaware it was all a scam. Holmes and Watson confront a suspect who turns out to be a reporter about to expose the scam himself. When asked how he knew, he explains that his attention was caught by the complete lack of a paper trail for the thousands of gallons of fuel and numerous supplies such a place should have.
Springtime for Hitler: "Dead Man's Tale" features an example which is so clearly inspired by the Trope Namer, the episode actually includes a brief clip from The Producers (1967). A man stages an expedition to search for a sunken ship, promising his investors a massive share of the treasure supposedly buried on board. The idea was that when he failed to find any treasure, they would get nothing and he would pocket the unused money they had given him. Unfortunately for him, evidence quickly surfaced that there really was gold on the ship, so he had to stage an elaborate plot—including murder—to make it disappear.
Stalker with a Crush: Turns out to be part of the murderer's Backstory in "The View from Olympus". He stalked a woman and eventually broke into her house, then killed an employee who was about to expose him.
Status Quo Is God: They made a real effort to shake up the show in season 3, with Watson forming her own detective practice and Holmes getting a new partner, Kitty Winter. None of the changes were popular, and as soon as the winter hiatus for season 3 ended, they immediately resolved Kitty's character arc, put her on a bus, and orchestrated Joan closing her business and moving back in with Sherlock. (In fairness; all of that was spread across five episodes.)
Stealth Pun:
- In "The Man with the Twisted Lip", someone sends a mosquito-like drone to spy on Sherlock and Watson. They got bugged.
- In Snow Angels, Holmes and Watson are tracking an ambulance full of stolen paper money. Since power is down, Holmes has gone old school with a paper map; he uses Clyde the Tortoise with a cross taped to his back as a stand-in for the ambulance. While the protagonists discuss the case, Clyde is busy stuffing himself with lettuce.^noteDon't Explain the Joke: The pun may not make sense to those unfamiliar with U.S. currency, which (unlike the colorful bills found in other countries) is dichromatic. The backs of the bills are printed with green ink, thus "greenbacks", or "lettuce."
  - Quite a slow-burn one here; in the 14th episode of Season 3, "The Female of the Species" an officer of the NYPD whose name was established in the first season is sleeping on Sherlock's couch. He is woken by an old fashioned mechanical alarm-clock placed next to a sign reading 'Detective Bell'.
- How does Alistair describe Sherlock's brain when he was mourning Irene? Addled.
"Strangers on a Train"-Plot Murder: The seventh-season premiere has Bell busting a dude for a "switching murders" plot in which he killed the parents of a guy he met at anger management class, and that other guy killed Bell's suspect's wife.
String Theory: Holmes often works this way, placing pieces of evidence in collages on the walls of the brownstone so he can look for connections and leads. It's played for laughs in one episode when Everyone has Sherlock write an essay on why Bella should have chosen Jacob over Edward, he places pages from the books on the walls and comes to the conclusion that they should have engaged in polyamory instead.
- In "Dirty Laundry" Watson demonstrates her growing interest in becoming a detective by forming her own board after she becomes invested in the Purcell case. Despite the investigation being officially closed, her board helps Sherlock spot a clue that doesn't fit and leads them to the actual murderer.
  Sherlock: I must say, Watson, I'm flattered. It's a lovely homage to my methodology.
Sub-Par Supremacist: In "Once You've Ruled Out God", while he and Watson are investigating the background of a "shot caller" for an Aryan prison gang, Sherlock gives his short, brutal, and dead-on accurate assessment of racial supremacists:
Joan: I don't know how this guy ended up in charge of anything. He's a high school dropout and his whole life is a rap sheet.
Sherlock: Well, you only have to be the brightest bulb of a dim lot. Racist ideology mostly attracts failures and reprobates. Gives them a sense of elevation that they cannot otherwise justify.
Suicide, Not Murder:
- A woman faking her own murder got the plot rolling in "On The Line", loosely based on the Conan Doyle Thor Bridge story. The audience saw her go through with it in the cold open, including a 911 call where she identifies an old enemy of hers as her "assailant". Sherlock figures it out pretty quickly, but soon regrets exposing the plot, because the man she framed was a sadistic serial killer.
- A first-season episode, "You Do It to Yourself", featured a professor shot dead in front of witnesses, in his eyes — which looked like a vicious revenge killing. The truth is, he hired his own hitman after being diagnosed with an incurable and fatal illness, whose first symptom manifests in the eyes — and out of spite, he arranged things so that evidence would point to his Teacher's Assistant (and his wife's lover) hiring the hitman.
The Summation: Given by Sherlock every episode. Often with assistance from Joan.
Sure, Let's Go with That: Lestrade accuses Sherlock of mucking around with the case files of muggings in order to make it easier for Lestrade to solve. Sherlock does this trope, because Lestrade is clearly pleased to have 'caught' Sherlock, and Lestrade's spent weeks moping, so Sherlock doesn't want to let him down.
Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- The updated premise itself: Sherlock isn't a cool recreational drug user, he's a recovering addict.
- The episode "Tremors" illustrates the consequences of Sherlock's antics finally catching up to him: A suspect pushed too far by Sherlock's antagonism tries to kill him. Bell suffers a career-threatening injury as a result and [temporarily] ends his friendship with Sherlock, and Holmes are Watson are dragged before a committee to answer for their less-than-legal methods that led to said injury.
- The season 3 episode "The Adventure of the Nutmeg Concoction" features Sherlock attempting to lure a criminal who disposes of dead bodies for hire by posting photos of a supposedly murdered Kitty to the dark web. He ends up being arrested by police running a sting operation for people that would make such enquiries (resulting in some uncharacteristic embarrassment, much to Watson's amusement).
- In Season 5, Sherlock gets a Tap on the Head. In Season 6, he suffers from post-concussion syndrome, which threatens to end his detective career. And worse.
Suspect Existence Failure:
- In "Solve For X," Holmes calls Bell to tell him who he thinks the killer is, and before he has a chance to say so, Bell informs him about another victim, naturally the same man.
- The pilot has the suspect Peter Saldua turn up dead. It turns out that Saldua was the one who killed the victim, her husband manipulated him into doing it and killed him and made it look like suicide.

T-Z

Take That!:
- In "The Deductionist," Sherlock reveals that he loathes behavioral profilers. While she was right to a certain degree, her insistence that Martin Ennis was abused as a child drove his father to suicide.
- In "We Are Everyone" Watson notes that a man has a lot of Ayn Rand quotes on his site. Holmes calls her "Philosopher-in-chief for the intellectually bankrupt".
- In "One Watson, One Holmes", Sherlock succinctly gives his view of think-tanks:
  You're partisan hacks who twist facts until they cohere to a pre-existing viewpoint. All whilst hiding behind the seemingly academic label of a think tank. I despise you and people of your ilk on both sides of the aisle.
- In "Under My Skin", he calls John Philip Sousa "the musical equivalent of a leaf blower."
Tantrum Throwing: Sherlock throws a lot of stuff around in "Paint it Black", on more than one occasion. He is about as pissed as he's ever been before, going so far as to grab Mycroft about the collar for his role in the situation. However, Mycroft is quick to notice that some tantrums were just Sherlock obfuscating something he discovered and didn't want others to notice. He implied Sherlock did this as a child.
Teens Are Monsters:
- "Child Predator" has Adam Kemper, the so-called victim of kidnapper Samuel Abbot. He actually abused his kidnapper and forced him to kidnap and kill children, then pretends to be a guilt-ridden victim of Stockholm Syndrome to get an immunity deal for his crimes. Thankfully Sherlock pulls a Rules Lawyer and get him convicted.
- "One Way To Get Off" has Sean Figueroa, who was convinced by his biological father to commit murders to make said father look innocent. He killed two couples, and a bystander who happened to be present.
Tempting Fate: In the pilot, Joan tells Sherlock that he can introduce her however he wants. So he introduces her as his personal valet and she immediately loathes it. It's become a Running Gag for him to introduce her in various ways.
- It's interesting to watch the progression of these as the show goes on. As Holmes starts to trust and respect Watson more, he introduces her as more polite things, like "my associate." Unless he's angry with her, in which case he'll introduce her as something demeaning or embarrassing. By season 2 he's introducing her as "the foremost expert in home security in the United States".
Thanatos Gambit:
- Turns out to be the cause of the plot in "You Do It To Yourself".
- Subverted with Moriarty and the death of Irene Adler. See Faking the Dead.
Thieving Magpie: In "Dead Clade Walking", Sherlock and Joan are trying to find a smuggler who deals in valuable but illegal artifacts. Said smuggler is called "the Magpie".
The Thing That Would Not Leave: In "Ears to You", Lestrade becomes this to Sherlock and Joan.
Tie-In Novel: Two so far: The Ghost Line, released by a British publisher in 2015. A second, Blood and Ink, followed in 2016.
This Is the Part Where...:
- In "The Rat Race", an annoyed Joan asks "This is the part where I'm supposed to ask you how you knew that, right?" to Sherlock after he deduces she was on a date.
- Holmes and Bell have a similar exchange in "You Do It To Yourself":
  Bell: I know you're just waiting for me to ask you why you think that. [Beat] Why do you think that?
  Holmes: I'm glad you asked!
  ...
  Bell: Now aren't you going to ask me how I know that?
  [Holmes just stares.]
  Bell: ...Fine, whatever.
Title Drop:
- About five minutes into "A Giant Gun, Filled with Drugs". The episode centers Sherlock's old dealer turning up again, and Sherlock referring to him as a trigger. Joan gives us the Title Drop.
- In "Possibility Two" Holmes gives us the Title Drop mentioning the two leads of the crime. Possibility one is actually invalid, and possibility two doesn't even exist yet.
- In "Déjà Vu All Over Again", when seeing Watson in jail, Holmes says he is having "the strongest sensation of déjà vu".
- In "Step Nine", Joan suggests to Sherlock that it's a good time for him to work on his "step nine" (N.A. recovery).
- In "An Unnatural Arrangement", Sherlock uses these words to describe to Watson his opinion about marriage.
- In "Dead Clade Walking", Sherlock uses the term "dead clade walking", and explains the term to Watson.
- "Paint it black." The command phrase for MI6 to open fire on the Milieu agents about to kill Joan and Mycroft.
Time Skip: Most of Season 7 is set a year after the Season 6 finale, with the Grand Finale taking place after that. Since the previous seasons were set during The Present Day, this means that the entire season takes place Next Sunday A.D..
Took a Level in Badass: Joan's been growing steadily as a investigator over the course of the season, but it comes to a high point in "The Woman", when she takes over the investigation single-handedly when Sherlock's taking care of Irene. She traces a rare colour of paint to a handful of shops, giving the cops a lead.
- And better: In "Heroine", she is the one who alone deduces Moriarty's actions and creates the plan to her capture.
- By the time "Step Nine" rolls around, she's taken the level in physical badassery as well, effortlessly taking down a fleeing crook with a collapsible baton.
- In "We Are Everyone", she learns pickpocketing by herself, impressing Sherlock and collecting evidence to capture the killer of the week.
- Season 3 opens with Joan as a consulting detective herself, and she seems to be at or close to Sherlock's level.
Took a Level in Kindness: Sherlock himself. Really, the sign of excellence in the series. While Sherlock is teaching Watson how to be a detective, she is teaching him how to be a bit more humane. And they are both actually learning.
Toplessness from the Back:
- Sherlock's hired intimate associates in many episodes.
- Sebastian Moran's hooker, in "M."
- Irene Adler in "The Woman", leading Sherlock to deduce that she's not all she says she is because a few birthmarks are missing. If she had really been held captive and mentally tortured, her captor wouldn't have bothered to have them removed—she wouldn't even be getting regular checkups to be able to learn if they were pre-cancerous.
- A woman in "Ears to You" during an Imagine Spot, to show the human ears growing out of her back.
Trauma Conga Line: Sherlock goes through a huge one before the "Pilot", which brings him to New York and sets up the whole Season 1 arc. It only gets worse in the Season 1 Finale, courtesy of Jamie Moriarty.
The Triads and the Tongs: "Who Is That Masked Man" begins with the murder of three Triad mobsters, and much of the plot concerns the NYPD's subsequent attempts to keep two rival Triad gangs from starting a Mob War.
Troll:
- Sherlock frequents an online forum for conspiracy theorists and has been known to make up conspiracies out of whole cloth.
- Lucas Bundsch plays an elaborate hoax on Sherlock and Joan for no apparent reason other than to mess with them.
Tropaholics Anonymous: Probably inevitable given that this iteration of Sherlock Holmes is a recovering drug addict. Watson takes him to meetings in several episodes.
True Companions: Sherlock and Joan worked their way through the whole first season and finally became best friends to each other.
Trumplica: William Hull, who shows up in episodes in seasons three and four, is a burly, arrogant, New York-based real estate mogul and casino owner with ambitions to run for public office.
Two Lines, No Waiting: Several episodes have Sherlock dealing with one case, while Watson, Gregson, Bell or some combination of them investigate a second one.
Unique Pilot Title Sequence: Or lack thereof, actually. Every other episode has a Rube Goldberg Device to drop a small cage on a figurine. The pilot throws up the title as a splash-screen with a few bars of the theme. The splash screen version is occasionally recycled to save time on certain episodes.
The Un-Reveal:
- We never get to hear what the security-shattering plan was in "The Red Team".
- Or the solution to P versus NP in "Solve for X" (although since it hasn't actually been solved in real life, that was pretty much a Foregone Conclusion).
- Did Aaron Colville receive substandard medical care due to his infamy?
Vehicle-Roof Body Disposal:
- Played straight in "Blood is Thicker". A delivery driver hears a loud bang while delivering a parcel but fails to notice it's from a body hitting the roof of his vehicle. The woman, who had been stabbed and thrown off her balcony, isn't discovered until much later on his route. Holmes is able to work out where she came from based on the interior of the vehicle and backtracks to her apartment.
- A variant of the accidental version occurs in "Rip Off". The body of the Victim of the Week is shoved under an illegally parked car. The body gets snagged on the undercarriage of the car and is dragged away when the car is towed.
Vigilante Man: The Victim of the Week in "To Catch a Predator Predator", Damian Novak, was one of these. Having had a sister who was raped as a teenager, he catfished sexual predators on dating sites, tricking them into thinking that he was an underage girl to bait them and then beating confessions out of them and posting shaming videos of them online. However, the trope becomes deconstructed over the course of the episode. One of his victims, while a deeply unpleasant person who sexually harassed one of his employees, was framed for soliciting a minor by Novak's brother-in-law so he would get leverage in a lawsuit against him. Worse still, Novak's actions turn out to have been the motive for the killer, a victim of sexual abuse named Molly Parsons. When she was younger, she had been one of several victims of Shane Fitzhugh, one of the predators Novak shamed. As an adult, she came forward to the police, who took her accusation seriously and looked into it, even finding more victims willing to testify. Then, Novak targeted Fitzhugh and shamed him online, and the exposure drove Fitzhugh to flee to a non-extradition country, resulting in the collapse of the legitimate legal case that could have gotten him sent to prison.
Villainous Lineage: This is the motive for the murder in "A Burden of Blood." A Serial Killer's two children agree never to have biological children. The sister accidentally gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby, leading her brother to kill her for breaking the deal.
Visual Pun:
- On Sherlock's giant Moriarty wall of crazy there's picture of Napoléon Bonaparte pinned to it, referencing the name Holmes gave Moriarty in the original books — The Napoleon of Crime. Doubles as a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
- Pointed out in "Snow Angels", when Sherlock has a mock-up of the city with Clyde representing the ambulance and padlocks being used to represent landmarks and checkpoints. When Joan points out the unintentional pun of using locks to show the city in lockdown, Sherlock is indignant.
Vitriolic Best Buds: Following the great tradition, Holmes and Watson, especially early-middle of the season. Their conversations can go from Friendship Moment to snarkery in one breath.
Waistcoat of Style: One of Sherlock's standbys for attire.
Walk and Talk: Once an Episode.
Was It All a Lie?: Sherlock to Irene Adler in "The Woman/Heroine". It wasn't.
The Watson: Watson! As an audience surrogate of course, from a female point of view, the show works as a deconstruction of this trope, bringing Watson as a Deuteragonist and not a Sidekick. Watson also gets to deduce things for herself from time to time, which a typical Watson didn't. (Conan Doyle's original rarely did.)
We Are Everywhere: Moriarty has "eyes and ears everywhere", including inside prisons and police stations.
We Have Reserves: In season 5, Shinwell explains to Sherlock his relationship with his gang SBK started with one of their lieutenants taking him in and giving him a purpose. Then he helped find young men in need of a place and guidance, and inducted them into the gang. Then when he did time for the upper bosses, he saw the young men who he "gave a purpose to" coming into prison soon too. And the ones they recruited. And so on. Shinwell realizes from this to the top brass of the gang, there will always be some desperate kid who they can mold into a useful tool but discard when need be.
Well-Intentioned Extremist:
- Danilo Gura from "Lesser Evils" is an Angel of Death who murdered nine people via fatal overdoses of epinephrine, and it's implied he killed more people back in his native Ukraine. His victims were patients with terminal illnesses and he viewed his actions as freeing them from their pain and suffering.
- Kathryn Drummond believes that the father of Martin Ennis has sexually abused him, but she didn't have concrete evidence to show that he did it, so she paid off Ennis' neighbor to make up a lie.
- Odin Reichenbach is violating the privacy of the millions of customers using his software and using the information he finds to pre-emptively kill those he believes are planning to do harm to others. While the desire to prevent crime is a noble one his methods are completely amoral and, as Sherlock and Joan point out, not a foolproof system as some of the people he ordered executed may have had no intention of acting on the aggressive words they posted online. And then he jumps off the slippery slope...
We Used to Be Friends:
- In "A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs", this is Holmes' reaction when his former drug dealer Rhys offers him some cocaine, believing that it'll help Holmes find Rhys' kidnapped daughter.
- As of the end of "Tremors", this is Bell's attitude toward Holmes after Holmes accidentally gets him shot. They eventually reconcile, though.
Western Terrorists: The Story Arc for Season 7 involves them, as Gregson's shooting is tied into the discovery of an aborted plot to bomb a New York-to-Connecticut ferry.
Wham Episode:
- "M.": Sebastian Moran shows up as a psycho serial killer. Sherlock catches him, tortures him and nearly kills him for murdering Irene... only to discover that Moran is not psycho, works as a hitman and did not kill Irene Adler, revealing his boss' name: Moriarty.
- "Risk Management": The ending reveals that Irene Adler is still alive, apparently being kept in a Gilded Cage by Moriarty.
- "The Woman/Heroine": Irene Adler is in fact an identity assumed by Moriarty. Moriarty is revealed to be have become careless, since she has also fallen in love with Holmes. Joan becomes the heroine of the show being the only one who was able to deduce Moriarty and capture her.
- "We Are Everyone": Joan Watson starts writing the Sherlock Holmes chronicles and Sherlock reads a love letter from Moriarty.
- "Blood is Thicker": We discover that Mycroft is working with someone to separate Sherlock from Watson.
- "The Man With the Twisted Lip": Sherlock has a packet of stolen heroin in his possession and Mycroft may or may not have arranged for Joan to be drugged and kidnapped.
- "Paint it Black": Mycroft didn't arrange Joan's abduction, but he is an MI6 agent.
- "The Grand Experiment": In case of his death, the victim was going to burn Mycroft. Mycroft is forced to fake his death, sever his ties to Joan and Sherlock, and goes into hiding. Joan decides to move out of the brownstone and Sherlock takes a job offer from MI6 with Lord Walter.
- "Unfriended": Sherlock goes after Odin by having Morland damage his company. Odin retaliates by having Morland killed.
Wham Line:
- From "Flight Risk": I know about Irene.
- From "M.": Your girl. That was him. That was Moriarty.
- From "The Woman": Then a few hours ago, she tried to have me killed.
- From "The Diabolical Kind": Kayden Fuller is Moriarty's daughter.
- From "Art In The Blood":
  Mycroft: British intelligence is not here to arrest me, I am British intelligence.
- The last line of "All In ":
  Joan: [to the client of the week] Why didn't you just tell me you're my half-sister?
- From "Scrambled", Sherlock is talking to a woman who isn't introduced to the audience by name but appears to be a long-time friend of his.
  Sherlock: Why do you look like my mother?
  His hallucination: I'm the part of you that wants to get better.
Wham Shot:
- "We Are Everyone" has two:
  - Watson starts writing the chronicles of Sherlock Holmes and the camera is focused on her computer screen.
  - Sherlock reading a letter from Jamie Moriarty. She apparently still writes him letters from prison.
- From "The Man With the Twisted Lip":
  - Sherlock hides a pack of stolen heroin in a hollowed-out book. Joan is drugged at Diogenes and kidnapped.
What the Hell, Hero?: After giving Holmes the cold shoulder throughout "The Red Team" for his actions in "M.", Gregson finally sits down with him and rips into him, calling him out on the fact that he acts like a child half the time, is completely self-centered, and doesn't seem to have any regret for trying to murder a suspect on Gregson's watch. Gregson ends the speech by saying he'll let Holmes keep consulting, but that he'll never fully trust him again. And then he punches Holmes in the gut for good measure before leaving.
- Joan also doesn't hesitate to call out Sherlock's occasional misogyny.
- In "On the Line" and "Tremors", Watson and Gregson frequently talk to Sherlock about his bad behavior and his ego. In "Tremors", his attitude is catastrophic, probably causing permanent damage in Bell's arm thanks to a bullet and getting himself and Watson fired from the NYPD until Bell himself decides to make an intervention. However, Holmes' relationship with Bell also took a hit...
Who Wants to Live Forever?: Not in the sense of actual immortality, but in "Ready or Not", when the investigation leads to 'the Keep', an exclusive bunker intended for the rich and powerful in the event of some kind of world-ending catastrophe, Sherlock notes that he personally would prefer to die with the masses than be stuck for the rest of his life in a bunker with people who think that outliving the rest of humanity is a good thing.
Working with the Ex:
- In "The Deductionist", Sherlock has to work with his ex-lover FBI profiler Kathryn Drummond when an escaped serial killer is on the loose. He isn't happy at all with this arrangement, though.
- "Details" reveals that Detective Bell and another police officer in the same department were together for some time.
- "The Marchioness" has Sherlock working for an ex-lover, who also happens to be Mycroft's ex-fiancee.
Worthy Opponent:
- Le Chevalier, in "The Leviathan". Watson even mentions that "he has style".
- The villains of "Snow Angels." Sherlock is so impressed with their plan to steal millions of dollars with no one ever knowing that he says he would be tempted to let them get away with it, if only they hadn't accidentally killed a man during step one.
- Moriarty qualifies as one. Even Holmes calls her a nemesis.
  - As of 3x14, "The Female of the Species", Moriarty now considers Joan one; and murders someone who tries to kill her.
Xtreme Kool Letterz: Invoked with the spelling of the titular toys in "The Five Orange Pipz".
Yandere:
- "Possibility Two" features a geneticist discovering the "warrior gene" in people, causing sociopathy and violence. She is later murdered by her fiancé, who possesses this gene and stabs her because she was becoming distant and he suspected she was about to leave him.
- In "Heroine" we see that Moriarty is definitely one for Sherlock.
You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In "Paint It Black" after Joan tried her best, under her condition of being kidnapped and working in a backroom, to save a man in her kidnapper's employ (and the man's cousin no less). But because he was bleeding internally and this wasn't caught in the first surgery or some other complication developed, Joan pleads with her kidnapper to take him to a hospital. The man just shoots his cousin on the table. Later in the episode, Mycroft is trying to convince the villain that he is still of great utility for the Milieu and that it would be a mistake to kill him and his friends but the mob boss orders all the witnesses killed anyway. This then turns into a inversion when it is revealed that Mycroft was actually working for British Intelligence and was asking the mob boss to reconsider because he did not want to have to have to kill his very useful Milieu contacts in self-defense.
You Need to Get Laid:
- Joan's first meeting with Sherlock in "Pilot" is when she enters the brownstone just as a prostitute is getting dressed and leaving. Sherlock explains that he doesn't actually enjoy sex all that much, but finds it necessary to keep his brain sharp.
- Sherlock advises Joan in "While You Were Sleeping" that she should take up her date's invitation to a second meeting because it would help her mood.
- He repeats it later on in "Step Nine" when he's convinced his brother has asked her out on a romantic evening. He hasn't, but she ends up sleeping with him anyway, which only pisses Sherlock off.
Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: In the season four finale, Morland Holmes is horrified to learn that Moriarty's organization considered him a suitable candidate to lead them in her absence.

Elementary

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