Well, I certainly didn't see that coming.

I'm not referring to the case of the week on Elementary Season 6 Episode 9.

Nor am I talking about Sherlock's reunion with Alfredo, his former sponsor, and longtime irregular.

No, I'm talking about the seeming death of Sherlock's brother Mycroft.

Sure, Mycroft has faked his death before and gone into hiding.

But the people who were after him are gone, so there's no reason for Mycroft to play dead anymore.

Could the powers that be actually have killed off such a mainstay in the Sherlock Holmes canon? If so, why?

Shock value, for sure. But with a seventh season already announced, why kill off such a mainstay only a third of the way through Elementary Season 6?

I expect them to get rid of Michael at the end of this season, much as Shinwell got murdered toward the conclusion of Elementary Season 5.

Those characters were largely created for a TV show. They weren't part of a 125-year-old literary legacy. (Yes, Shinwell was a reimagining of a minor Holmes character.)

Mycroft was Sherlock's older brother. Despite all the drama between them, I can't believe that their story is over on Elementary.

The previews showed Sherlock's father Morland returning on Elementary Season 6 Episode 10. Hopefully, Morland's visit will shed some light on Mycroft's situation. I can't believe he'd come all that way just to talk about his updated will.

There's got to be more going on than is readily apparent from that last scene.

Then again, maybe this episode's title was a none-too-subtle double-entendre. We'll soon find out.

Sadly, I feel that the reunion with Alfredo was all just to set up the Mycroft bombshell. So the Alfredo-Sherlock relationship just got short shrift as a result.

Alfredo has been out of the picture since Elementary Season 4 Episode 5. So how about a little catching-up time?

No, instead Alfredo had the hare-brained idea of enlisting Sherlock to help him rob an auto dealer who owed Alfredo $100,000 for work he had done.

As Sherlock pointed out, that's what small-claims court is for anyway. Sherlock was already on Gregson's bad side for not telling him about his condition, so he's certainly not going to add breaking and entering and grand theft to that.

Of course, legal channels wouldn't work for Alfredo, since he needed the money to save his ne'er-do-well brother Dante, who went into business with the wrong people.

Sherlock blamed Dante for instigating many of Alfredo's bad choices, so he wasn't inclined initially to help Alfredo bail out Dante.

All this brought up brother issues, namely Sherlock's rift with Mycroft. He decided to be the big man and forgive not only Dante, who had no problem with taking Sherlock's money, but also Mycroft.

Only it seems Mycroft is no longer around to reconnect with Sherlock, at least for the time being.

Finally, there was the case around which all this sibling rivalry was woven.

The whole episode was almost an indictment on the strange things people try in the name of science.

There was the idea of selling teenagers' blood to the elderly in hopes that it will give them youth. I suppose that's no crazier than people buying parts from endangered animals to improve their sex drive.

A $5 million prize for coming up with the secret to eternal life almost seems cheap, especially since it was likely going to take several generations to work through all the required steps to reach immortality.

It was refreshing to have the biology professor's murder as a result of greed rather than something skeevy, such as an affair with an undergraduate.

There was no shortage of suspects: the professor's partner, his rival researchers, an anti-science nut, even a high-school honor student whose blood was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I loved how no one blinked, other than Lacey's mom when Lacey explained she was only selling her blood for money.

It was a nice touch to circle back to the son of the Galahad Prize founder, who was killing people simply to protect his inheritance. It just seemed highly unlikely to me that he was going to have to pay out that money in his lifetime.

It was pretty convenient to find Hunter's blue fingernails in the trash still at his office, what, about a week after Elijah's murder. They have to get better maintenance crews.

Sherlock's post-concussion syndrome is looking like a thing of the past. He mentioned it once in passing, then moved on. I'm sure it's going to flare up again at the worst possible time.