221B Recs

Music Title & Artist: "Love Game" by The Vitamin String Quartet (Lady Gaga cover)
Vidder: redscullyrevival | GeekyKristie
Pairing or Character: Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson
Verse: Elementary
Warnings: blood, corpses, drug paraphenalia.
Link: tumblr announcement post (and on youtube, because tumblr URLs are exceptionally fragile)
Vidder's Summary: Different kinds of love, different kinds of games; the evolution of relationships.

Reccer's Comments: A beautiful study of the progression of the S1 partnership, from its origination in a paid sober companion and her resentful client, building through the tricky business of learning to work with each other instead of against each other, to the ultimate triumph of teamwork and trust against a manipulative mastermind. The music is by turns prickly and lyrical as the vid details the frustrations and rewards of the developing partnership, and the absence of vocals allow us to observe the dynamic on our own terms. Various events of the S1 arc are obliquely referenced, but the vid relentlessly returns to the painstaking slog of the work, to the hours upon hours, casefile after casefile, that these two spent building their partnership.

There's a cry you sometimes hear in the Elementary fandom that no one is here for the cases, that we care more about the partnership, the character development and backstories, and less about the whodunnit of the week. (Unsurprising! By the end of the current season, we'll have seen twice as many cases as were in the original canon, and even those original sixty cases had more than a few retreads and what-were-you-thinkings among them.) Even Holmes himself has commented this season that he's come to re-evaluate the relative importance of the work in his life. "Love Game" was made immediately after the S1 finale, but its casefile-centric perspective of the Holmes and Watson relationship makes it fascinating to rewatch as the first seeds of that long, long arc:

When you and I first started, I quickly recognized your merits both as a detective in your own right and that you facilitated in my own process. I’m better at the work I do because of you, but over the years the relative importance of those those two values has flipped. I now value the work that we do first and foremost because I do it with you.