Summary
Watson continues to awkwardly straddle the line between crime thriller and medical drama in Episode 2, but Eve Hewson is also quickly emerging as the show’s MVP.
Episode 2 of Watson is about a guy who thinks he’s someone else, which is pretty apt since this is a show that can’t seem to decide what it is. Sherlock Holmes is an icon of crime fiction and Watson is famously his sidekick; the fact he’s a doctor in virtually every interpretation of the character is almost beside the point. “Redcoat” tries to spin a typical medical drama plot within the framework of a crime procedural and none of it really takes.
It doesn’t help that “Redcoat” is coming almost a month after the premiere, which is a silly way to kick a show off and expect it to retain any kind of audience in this TV landscape. But whatever. The episode proceeds as if no time has elapsed in between, even if most of the detective work comes from trying to remember who everyone is and why we should care.
Anyway, the case of the week is intriguing enough – Andrew Tanner, an American Revolutionary War reenactor whom we meet dressed as a Redcoat, is shot in the head. However, he survives, only to wake up believing himself to be famed Scottish sharpshooter Patrick Ferguson, who fought for the British during the Revolution. And this isn’t a case of Foreign Accent Syndrome, as initially suggested; Tanner has fully embodied Ferguson and seemingly can’t remember anything about his own life and family.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find this plot interesting, and it develops along fairly compelling lines. Because of this, I think I’d have preferred it to unfold in the typical manner of a medical case rather than a crime mystery, which is largely how it unfolds. Watson even makes a point of telling his eccentric team that they have to think and act like detectives, with him acting as a kind of de-facto Sherlock, always asking questions he already knows the answers to. The medical stuff is mostly confined to a lot of jargon that the characters exchange in the same manner they would any other clues. There isn’t a vast difference between this and, say, High Potential.
The theory quickly becomes that Andrew engineered everything to ensure that his wife and daughter received his life insurance payment after his death. He has a family history of Huntington’s Disease, and rather than die painfully of the condition, which was seemingly beginning to manifest, he’d rather go out on his own terms and ensure everyone was catered for. But suicide wouldn’t result in a payout, hence the elaborately staged break-in and feigned identity confusion.
But Watson has to prove this, which he does. In another twist, he also discovers that Andrew doesn’t have Huntington’s Disease, but Wilson’s Disease, which shares some symptoms but is treatable. It’s a fairly contrived happy ending but I didn’t mind it, personally. I don’t think this is the kind of show that is going to relish putting its audience through the emotional wringer.
Morris Chestnut and Rochelle Aytes in Watson | Image via CBS
That leaves the rest of Watson Episode 2 to flesh out some of the characters, and it’s Ingrid who quickly emerges as the focal point. If you recall, Watson was a bit vague about why he had hired Dr. Derian in the first place but implied there was something compelling about what turns out to be a pretty compulsive lying habit. “Redcoat” delves a lot more into the idea of Ingrid’s dubious ethics in a few ways.
If nothing else it doesn’t seem like she sees her dishonesty as a character flaw. When she and Watson try to recruit a surgeon named Brodie Davis Emerson (nicknamed “BDE” in an example of the show’s lacking sense of humor) and he catches her in a few mistruths she’s mostly worried that she might have a tell that gives her away; later, she practices her lies in the mirror.
So, this is someone to whom lying doesn’t just come naturally but is an integral part of her character. An old “friend” of hers, Dr. Isaac Niles, also shows up to shed more light on her backstory. When they were students together, she may or may not have implicated him in a drunk-driving incident that completely ruined his career, ostensibly to take the competition off the board. Ingrid denies this, of course, but it seems almost certain that Niles is being truthful and is right that she’s an “incredible danger” to everyone around her.
Eve Harlow is doing a very good job with this character if nothing else. I thought she was particularly compelling in the first season of The Night Agent too, even though she was playing a generic bad guy. There’s something very captivating about her and she’s easily the most intriguing character here.
You can tell that Watson Episode 2 expects us to be a lot more invested in Shinwell playing both sides, though. He’s clearly reluctant to do so and expresses concern that Moriarty’s latest scheme – to swap some of the pills he’s prescribing himself to treat his TBI, communicated through another double agent named Porsche – might hurt Watson. But he goes through with the job anyway, making one wonder – if not necessarily care – what Moriarty has over him. And what’s in the pills, obviously.
