Summary
Watson steps up its game in Episode 4, delivering a better balance between the case of the week and the characters, who are starting to come together a lot more now.
There might come a time in the not-too-distant future when I’m able to look back and say Watson got good around Episode 4. It’s weird, though, because “Patient Question Mark” isn’t even a hugely notable improvement over the first few episodes. But it didn’t give me a headache like the last one did, and it’s the first time I’ve found myself genuinely invested in the characters. That, if nothing else, has to be a start.
It probably helps that there’s less Moriarty stuff here – although some, admittedly – and more meaningful focus on Watson and his fellows, particularly Sasha Lubbock. I really like Inga Schlingmann’s performance in this; she’s pitching it just-right so that you can totally buy why an ex-boyfriend would still be painting portraits of her years later but also see a vulnerability that would keep her clinging to the fantasy of a current boyfriend who is stringing her along. This also gives her an interesting dynamic with Ingrid, but more on this in a bit.
Everyone’s working on the same case this week, which quickly becomes a cross-country investigation into the family of the first cadaver that Sasha cut open in medical school. The reason this is important is because she recalls the body having papillomatosis on the tongue; little nodules indicating a genetic disorder called Cowden Syndrome, increasing one’s risk of various cancers.
In Watson’s latest signal-to-noise exercise, one of the patients, an eccentric billboard lawyer named “Call Me Bill”, has a similar-looking tongue, and dies on the operating table when the team quickly discovers his colon is riddled with tumours. The rest of his family are able to get screened, which is an upside, and gives everyone the idea of tracking down Sasha’s unidentified cadaver to warn his surviving family of Cowden Syndrome.
This takes the form of a two-pronged investigation. On one tract, Watson, Sasha, and Ingrid visit the university morgue where they all trained and bribe Brenda the Battle-Ax, the medical examiner who remains in the same position she was in when they were all training and recalls them all vividly, albeit for different reasons, to let them have a look at the confidential records of the cadavers. The Crofts, meanwhile, go over Sasha’s copious university notes, looking for more clues.
I like how Sasha’s backstory weaves into the case here. Watson and Ingrid help to walk her through her recollections and recall important details about the cadaver, which help them narrow the search. But a key detail – the name – is obscured by a coffee stain, so we have to turn to another lead discovered by the Crofts. Two pages of Sasha’s notes have been torn out, and she explains they contained sketches made by an old art student boyfriend named Micah she once agreed to sneak into the university morgue. They track him down and discover that his art studio is littered with portraits of Sasha and that his original sketches depicted the cadaver as having an Amish star tattoo. Watson recognises the design from a quilt he was once gifted by an Amish community in Lancaster where he and Mary got engaged.
The Amish community identity the cadaver as a man named Jacob and point the doctors to his sister, Rachel Smith, whose son, Amos, just so happens to have a giant lump on his thyroid that may or may not be cancer. It isn’t – Watson still favours the “sike, it’s something else” school of medical diagnostics – but it’s similarly worrying, and Watson is able to save the day by draining what turns out to be an abscess caused by brucellosis from camel milk (a taste of home, you see.)
Eve Hewson, Morris Chestnut and Inga Schlingmann in Watson | Image via CBS
Anyway, let’s talk about the characters. As you can probably tell from the plot outline above, Sasha is of particular focus here – her background, her personality, and increasingly her love life. This manifests in a couple of ways. One is Stephens paying her very meaningful compliments, hinting at a brewing romance between the two. The other is Ingrid figuring out that she’s lying about her engagement.
This is telling about how observant Ingrid is – it’s continuously reiterated that she’s Watson’s “favorite”, a curiosity to him on the same level as Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty – but also that there’s a softer side to her. She takes Sasha back to Micah’s gallery and uses his unreciprocated devotion to her to highlight that Sasha is overlooking people who genuinely care about her to instead be strung along by someone who doesn’t. It’s a pretty harsh assessment, and Ingrid frames it as wanting Sasha to stop making her participate in the fake engagement excitement, but you can tell she’s just doing a good thing for someone she’s starting to like.
But Watson Episode 4 also makes time for Watson himself, especially regarding his divorce proceedings. While he’s saving Amos’s life, he’s supposed to be in a mediation meeting, a process we know he has been putting off because the only way Mary could get his attention was by flooding his office with green pens. But the Amish community is very intimate to him and makes him reconsider the memories he shares with Mary there. It also just so happens that he and met Mary in the cadaver lab, so even though Watson isn’t the focus of “Patient Question Mark”, it’s still very significant to his personal arc.
So significant, in fact, that it allows him to come to terms with the fact his marriage has run its course – he even shows up at Mary’s house at the end of the episode to tell her that he won’t be contesting the divorce or seeking legal counsel, and he’ll be at the next mediation meeting alone. If she’s determined to have the life she wants, and that life doesn’t include him, he’s happy to help her get there.
I’m not sure that I’m buying this – everything about Watson and Mary’s relationship suggests it’s much more likely to be rekindled than to end completely – but it’s a nice moment either way, and shows a better ability to thread personal growth through the case-of-the-week format than the show has exhibited thus far.
As mentioned, there’s less of the Moriarty stuff here, but there is an important development in this regard. Porsche shows up again to give Shinwell his latest assignment, which is to use a phone that will sync with the lab’s robot assistant, Clyde, and upload information about their patients to Moriarty. But Shinwell isn’t willing to take this laying down, so he attaches a tracker to Porsche’s car and follows her all the way to a hospital, where she wheels a cancer-stricken child inside. Her own? Potentially. But while it’s likely a weakness of hers that’s being exploited by Moriarty, it could also be a clue as to what she and Moriarty are doing, and why they need Watson’s clinic to do it. We’ll see.
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