Don’t you hate it when crime procedurals hire way too famous an actor for a part, thus, giving away the killer far too early in the episode and deflating any sense of drama from the story? Yeah, me too. It’s been said before, but this week it was easy to see that CBS often falls into the trap of making CSI: Baker Street when it doesn’t know what else to do.
When a brutally murdered ballerina is found during a dress rehearsal, a dance company is completely uprooted. The prima ballerina, Iris Lanzer, becomes a suspect early on, because it turns out she replaced the now murdered girl as the lead late in the production. It would seem that competition would be the cause for murder, but this is where CBS does itself a disservice. By casting Scott Cohen as Iris’s lawyer, it’s easy to pick him out as being too famous and too prominent to take a small bit part. Of course, it could be a fake out, but in this case it all comes down to a really thin motive that doesn’t necessarily ring true. It does, however, give Sherlock a chance to geek out about the ballet, which was both surprising and delightful because it harkens back to the 1970s Billy Wilder film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The comical film infamously pairs Holmes with a Russian ballerina who proposes that they have a baby. Her hope is that his intellect and her beauty will produce the perfect child. As you can imagine, the two never pair up in the 1970s film, but that didn’t stop CBS from giving Holmes another ballerina flirtation.