Summary
Watson suffers a bit in Episode 5 for focusing too much on its title character and not the fellows, but the underlying plot raises some worthwhile talking points.
“The Man with the Glowing Chest” isn’t about a man with a glowing chest, though one does briefly feature. He’s played by Nat Faxon in a grinningly ridiculous cameo that sums up a lot of what’s wrong with Watson, a show by its very nature clinging to the brim of Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker without any sense of what made those mysteries tick. But in Episode 5, for the first time, it forms a coherent point, and a vital one to boot. It just has no idea what the best way of making it is.
This show was at its best in the previous episode when it expanded its horizons to focus more on the fellows. It’s time to admit, I think, that John Watson is the least interesting part of his namesake show, which is noticeable here because the balance is reversed; Watson shoulders the brunt of the drama, and the fellows scarcely feature. You can feel the difference. Episode 3, which was largely about Watson having headaches, felt the same way.
But the core plot is, for once, worthwhile on its own terms. Taryn (Brittany Adebumola) has sickle cell anemia which has worsened progressively over the last few years and seems to be on fast-forward now. Watson is tasked with getting her well enough for Mary to be able to enlist her in an experimental trial. But given the precise circumstances of her condition and the sleazy business around sickle cell in general, which can be cured through gene therapy techniques that ordinary folks have been priced out of, Watson takes it upon himself to cure Taryn completely, behind the backs of the fellows, Mary, and the FDA.
This is the excuse Watson Episode 5 has for shutting the fellows out of the core plot, and it makes sense but remains lamentable. There’s a bit of business with Eve and Sasha, and some with the Crofts, both of which we’ll briefly get to later, but it doesn’t really feel like enough. Watson himself is just… kind of uninteresting. His staunch principles and smug do-gooderism leave him little wiggle room for genuinely interesting dilemmas. By the time he and Shinwell are flouting the law to save Taryn, it feels like the only correct option available anyway.
To be fair, part of why this feels inevitable is because of how egregious the underlying subtext about the pharmaceutical industry’s gross and exploitative price-hiking of life-saving medicines and treatments is, which isn’t Watson’s fault. He makes sense as an avenue through which to explore this particularly because sickle cell is a very prevalent issue, especially among the Black community; Netflix’s Supacell is explicitly about reimagining the disease as a superpower.
Nat Faxon in Watson | Image via CBS
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and biohacking – that’s what Brian Johnson is into – are interesting topics too, which is what gets Faxon’s Hobie involved in the plot, but they’re only lightly touched on in “The Man with the Glowing Chest”, which mostly takes a more arch, emotional route through Taryn’s recovery. You can kind of see this in all the fellows being in unequivocal support of Watson, despite him risking all of their careers without their knowledge.
The essential conflict here isn’t between Watson and his patient, though, but between Watson and the harsh realities of the medical industry, which is at least a valuable and coherent viewpoint. It almost beggars belief that these kinds of advanced miracle cures exist and are out of reach due to nothing but greed; that extraordinary technology isn’t being put to use saving as many lives as possible. But Watson himself, as a character, is just a bland conduit for this subject.
But what about the fellows? Eve does have a little to do, at least. It turns out she didn’t get to run the Spinal Signal Program, but she is involved in the study, trying to recommend patients. For help in this regard, she turns to Sasha, which is a nice way of paying off the developments made in their relationship in the previous episode. Because Eve is a bit of a wild card, I’m still not entirely sure whether to trust her; is she using Sasha? Does she plan to use the copious notes she took on the case to blackmail Watson down the line? And what’s her relationship to Gigi, one of the patients whose recommendation Sasha submitted who, it turns out, lives with Eve?
You can see how this stuff is all a lot more interesting than anything involving Watson. The same can’t quite be said of the Crofts – there’s a bit about Adam being surprised to learn that Stephens relapsed five years prior, and they attend an AA meeting together – but it’s hard to argue that Watson is better when it’s a team effort, and Episode 5 feels worse off for its focus on Watson alone.
