In Praise of Shinwell Johnson

AGH I’m so behind on everything–letters, annotations, and reviews. It’s freaking me out a bit.

The NC Zoo is waiting on the NC budget to clear so they can finish working on their new Asia section, by the way. They have a new director, though.

Star Wars Day was Monday, so here’s your jam for the week.

In Praise of Shinwell Johnson

So I’ve been slowly re-watching Elementary in my free time, and I recently completed the fifth season, which involves a character named Shinwell Johnson, loosely based off of a character in the original Holmes stories. His is a divisive story arc in the fandom, which is fair; I know that I wasn’t a huge fan of his character, how it took up so much time, and it felt like the writers weren’t sure what to do with him. It’s possible that they weren’t! Re-watching this season made me think, however.

[For full disclosure, I should also point out that the actor who played Shinwell, Nelsan Ellis, died shortly after the fifth season aired–which I did not know when I started brainstorming this essay. There’s a dedication to him at the beginning of Season Six.]

Shinwell’s story goes a bit like this: during a case, Joan Watson remembers that the suspect was in prison the same time as a patient she once served in her career as a doctor, Shinwell Johnson. She looks him up, gets the information she needs, and decides she wants to help him work out his life. Over the course of the story, we find out that he used to be a member of a notorious gang, the South Bronx Killas (SBK), and begins working as a criminal informant to help take down his old gang. Sherlock his skeptical, but he and Joan eventually try to teach him enough skills to survive in that role, even going so far as to illegally wipe evidence that might implicate him in something and blow his cover. When Sherlock finds out that he did actually commit a murder he was suspected for, Shinwell beats him up for getting involved. Shortly afterward, Shinwell is killed in his efforts, and our heroes have to work to take down SBK for good.

It feels as if Shinwell pinballs back and forth between whether or not we’re meant to like him. There’s one episode in which he threatens Joan for being too involved in his life; it’s laid out that it’s probably a tactic to make her keep her distance and to not let anyone else know that he’s undercover trying to take down his former gang. Regular contact with a detective will raise suspicions! And then he beats the crap out of Sherlock! That’s clearly meant to be read as villainous.

But everything he’s doing is in service to a greater good: dismantling his own gang from the inside. The problem is that the way he goes about that is incredibly sketchy, and it’s entirely possible that there are crimes he’s committed that he’s not only going to get away with, the police don’t even know about or have proof for. Joan reveals after his death that he evidently had a signed confession that he planned to have turned into the police at some point.

You see what I mean when I say it feels like they hadn’t quite worked out where to go with this character?

In the end, though, I kind of like it. This isn’t the first time that main characters have done morally ambiguous actions in the show–it happens in the first season a few times–but it is the first time that we see them making these decisions, in regards to another character that is also morally ambiguous, and questions come up as to whether it was the right thing to do or not. It’s not just, “Doing something sketchy to stop a bad guy.” It’s, “We’re helping someone by doing something sketch, and that someone might not be entirely trustworthy.” 

And we can’t really make a full account of what sort of man Shinwell was–he was killed before we get to that point. Sure, it seems that he was planning to come clean and reveal all so he didn’t get away with crimes he committed, yet he still didn’t actually do that because he wasn’t given the chance to do so. That’s a frustrating complication to the assessment of the character. We can’t fully decide if he was a Good Guy or not.

Maybe that was intentional on the writers’ part, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. It makes a very fascinating character, though. He’s certainly one of the more memorable characters on the show, which is impressive as I don’t think anyone outside of hardcore Sherlock Holmes fans even know that he’s based off of a Doyle character from the original stories. I’d get sick of it if more characters on the show were like Shinwell, I just appreciate the odd place he has in the story, now that I’ve had some time to think about it more.

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