- When the leader of a local street gang abducts Holmes to compel him to find the person responsible for a hit on his men, Holmes and Watson get caught in the middle of an international hunt to recover a centuries old, priceless artifact. Also, Watson debates whether a personal favor Shinwell asks of her is outside her comfort zone.
- Joan shows Shinwell Johnson (Nelsan Ellis) a grungy apartment/room. He agrees that it's better than the halfway house. She will get forms for him to sign.
Near a warehouse, several henchmen bring Sherlock out of a car and present him, wrists bound together with duct tape, to drug dealing gang leader Halcon (Jon Huertas). Halcon shows him four dead bodies laid out in a row on the warehouse floor, explaining that one was his drug supplier Torres, and three were part of Halcon's gang. He wants to kill whoever did it, and wants to hire Sherlock to find out who it was. Sherlock looks around and draws several conclusions about the incident, including the number and military training of the attackers, the height of the one who pistol whipped Torres, and the location of the smuggler's stash, which had contained meth but is now empty. Sherlock negotiates, refusing to be paid but instead requesting the identity of a dealer who has been selling heroin laced with poison, causing multiple deaths.
At the brownstone, Joan is appalled that Sherlock would take the job. He shows her a shoe print he found, which is North Korean. They check photos of the port and find a ship that has the false national flag used by North Korean smugglers.
At the station, Captain Pak from the ship quickly confesses to the killings, the drugs, everything. He has no correct details about the murders, but doesn't want his employer to harm his family. They convince him to tell the real story. Apparently Torres had stolen Pak's cargo: a shipment of meth, and a very special box entrusted to him by a communist party official. Pak was ordered to retrieve the box, but when he arrived at the warehouse, the men were already dead and the box was missing. So Pak and his team took their meth shipment and left.
At the brownstone, Shinwell signs the paperwork for the apartment, then asks Joan for another favor. He can't locate his daughter, Chivonne, whose mother died a year after he went to prison. Joan agrees to look into it. Then someone shows up at the door: a trio of men from Taiwan, who offer Joan a finders fee of $50 million if she gives the missing box to them. They refuse to tell her what's in the box.
Later, the daughter of an important chinese official shows up, relaying her father's message that China's wealth is far greater than Taiwan's. It is clear that China also wants whatever is in the box.
Sherlock meets Halcon at an industrial area but tells him he has no progress to report. Halcon sneers and says that he didn't contact Holmes for that, but to report his own progress about the heroin dealer. A henchman opens a nearby dumpster and Sherlock looks inside. Visibly disturbed, Sherlock turns to Halcon, saying that he wanted the dealer's identity, not his dismembered body. Halcon says that's how he does business.
On her side case, Joan has discovered Chivonne's guardian. The woman tells Joan that Chivonne has been through enough, and that Shinwell is not a man who can change. She refuses to permit Joan to tell Shinwell where Chivonne is.
The team learns that Torres had a lover's nest away from the city. When Marcus and Sherlock visit, they find the lover is a man. He explains that Torres had brought the box to the house, gleeful about auctioning the item off to the highest bidder. After a week of meetings with different buyers, Torres left, along with the box, and was murdered. While at the house, Torres had posed the item on his desk for photographs. Sherlock asks if the item was about four inches square, and the lover confirms this. Sherlock examines the desk top, then sprinkles sand on it. When he blows it away, a square of chinese symbols is revealed. Sherlock identifies the symbols, and thus the missing item, as the chinese emperor's great seal.
The seal has been missing for centuries, and is priceless. Sherlock says the emperor once traded it for 15 cities. The seal ostensibly conferred political power and authority on the holder. Joan relates a chinese legend stating that he who returns the great seal to China will become Prime Minister. If Taiwan got hold of it, it could be used as a weapon in their continuous political conflict with China, possibly sparking a war.
Using Torres' phone, they look for sites where the buyer meetings took place; unoccupied buildings that he owned. At one, they notice the garage door threshhold had been deformed in two places, as if a tank had driven across it.
Joan and Sherlock stand outside an office building, watching a parked car. He explains that an armoured car is heavy enough to have dented the threshhold, and that there was only one man he knew that habitually preferred them. Sherlock tried to get an appointment to see the man, Wayne Vachs (Ron Rifkin) but was told he is out of the country. It is obviously untrue, so they are waiting to "ambush" him. When Vachs appears, his very tall security guard stops them from approaching, and a woman hands them a restraining order to stay away from Vachs.
Joan puts the word out to the internet collective "Everyone", and quickly receives information to use against Vachs. Sherlock stands outside Vach's office building, using a megaphone to call out the names of men Vachs "murdered" in a mine collapse due to safety violations. Vachs' legal representative tries to stop Sherlock, but he produces a list of politicians and officials who conspired with Vachs to avoid the safety requirements and then ensured he was unpunished.
This blackmail gets Sherlock in to see Vachs, who has two surprises. First, he does not have the seal, and second, he won the auction and claims that the seal is his. He has provenance documents claiming that the seal entered the USA decades earlier, exempting it from a 2009 law that prohibits ownership of historical chinese artefacts.
Sherlock has an expert friend, "C", who works at an auction house. She quickly identifies the documents as fake, but she has information of interest. A man that usually buys such artefacts was out of the country a while back. His office told her that he was in a place without internet access. North Korea is such a place.
Before they can talk to him, he is found dead, apparently killed by the same tall man that killed Torres. The great seal was the murder weapon. Shockingly, it was found at the scene and taken into evidence.
At the police station, Sherlock is inking the seal and stamping paper to be sent to experts for authentication against historical prints.
Later, Sherlock confronts Vachs in his office, giving his understanding of events. He says that Vachs is bankrupt, that a collapsed mine had lost a lucrative resource. It also polluted a nearby area, for which the EPA was going to wipe him out. Meanwhile, China had discovered a valuable resource, and was offering a business opportunity. Sherlock says Vachs was going to return the great seal so that he could win the business deal. But instead, he had the murderer leave the seal at the last crime scene so that the police would return it to China. China would know that he arranged it all.
Sherlock admits he has no proof of this. But he convinces Vachs to confess, rather than be subjected to Halcon's revenge for Torres' murder.
Joan meets Shinwell at a park, and begins to tell him what she learned. But Shinwell has already found his daughter, and is watching from a distance as she plays soccer. He knows he cannot speak to her, that he must prove himself.
At the brownstone, Sherlock concludes the case by hanging up one of the prints from the seal.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content