Londoner Agatha Spurrell (Anastasia Griffith), one of Sherlock’s friends with benefits, has business in New York, so is visiting the brownstone; she’ll be under pressure, says Sherlock, so he plans to “offer myself sexually to help her de-stress”. That’s enough for Watson to ship out to a hotel for a few days, although she and Sherlock still work together on the Case of the Week, in which Galen Barrow, a driver for an Uber-alike company named Zooss, is apparently murdered by a taxi driver. There’s a hint of a hot-button issue here, but when the killer is tracked down – rather quickly, it should be said – he’s not a taxi driver after all, but was coerced through blackmail into committing the crime. Which of course takes the story off in another direction.
Meantime Watson can’t help but notice that Sherlock, who had earlier been anticipating sexual gymnastics, is unwilling to spend time with Agatha at all. It turns out that Agatha wants Sherlock to donate his sperm to her. This storyline was probably supposed to bear the episode’s emotional weight; it didn’t, though, at least in part because there was never the slightest possibility that Sherlock would fulfil Agatha’s request. All in all ‘The View From Olympus’ was better than last week, but still not one of the season’s best.
