Summary
Watson‘s Season 2 premiere has its moments, but it’s inarguably hamstrung by clunky writing and a mandate to be a Holmesian mystery as well as a straight-up medical drama.
The worst thing that ever happened to Watson was Brilliant Minds. Both shows are similar enough that the comparisons are unavoidable; medical procedurals with a focus on very strange, often brain-related cases of the week. Its first season made it clear that Watson was more interested in being a medical drama than a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and Season 2 reiterates that, but it just can’t resist the urge to slip into Sherlockian territory at a moment’s notice. The overall effect, startlingly visible in Episode 1, “A Son in the Oven”, is of a relatively conventional medical drama, but Sherlock Holmes just pops up at the end.
It’s so weird. This is why Brilliant Minds being so good hurts Watson, even when the latter’s doing okay. It’s a lesser medical drama that can’t commit to just being a medical drama because it’s always being pulled in multiple directions by franchise obligations and expectations. You could see all this becoming really obvious in the tail end of the first season, with the rush to kill off Moriarty without jeopardising the serial status quo too much. And you can see it here in a case that’s really quite engaging on its own terms, being slightly undermined by the last-minute appearance of the presumed-dead Sherlock Holmes himself (played by Robert Carlyle, which, okay, is fair enough.)
I can only imagine that putting Watson’s relationship with Mary at the forefront of “A Son in the Oven” is also very deliberate, maintaining a half-hearted love triangle between Watson, his ex-wife, and his new beau, Laila. Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, is the patient here, after falling mysteriously ill while baking and quickly developing symptoms consistent with dementia. So, you know, just like this week’s episode of Brilliant Minds.
The writing is brutal in this premiere. So much of it is devoted to clunkily reminding audiences what happened in Season 1 that it’s actively off-putting. A cluster of opening scenes – showing Watson with Laila, Sasha in bed with Stephens, Shinwell studying, etc. – is bad enough for being on-the-nose, but the dialogue repeatedly reiterates key plot points. Shinwell gives the entire room a dressing down about Ingrid’s departure, reminding them of their own low points – most of which constituted an episode or two – and obviously paving the way for Ingrid’s return. He also later apologizes to Watson for his betrayal and thanks him for giving him a second chance, clarifying that dynamic.
There’s even a very familiar reminder that Watson’s hiring practices tend to focus on candidates he considers to be long-term genetic experiments; we had this same conversation in the first season, and it’s all to set up Watson hiring Ingrid’s replacement, who at this point will almost certainly be Ingrid herself. It’s just so clunky.
Anyway, about Elizabeth. She doesn’t have dementia, obviously. At first, it’s assumed she accidentally poisoned herself while baking, but her symptoms aren’t consistent with cyanide poisoning, and they’re also worsening. She can’t remember Watson at all, despite his having been married to her daughter for years, and eventually she even forgets Mary, too. After a two-week time skip, her symptoms compound with a delusion that she’s twenty-five years old and pregnant. As far as anyone can tell, she believes she’s at the last point in her life that she can coherently recall.
As is always the case, Watson Season 2, Episode 1 employs a ticking-clock device. Elizabeth’s liver is failing, and she needs a transplant urgently. The risks to Mary would be too high if she were to be the donor, so Watson has to find an emergency replacement, which he does in record time by piecing together little hints that Elizabeth has dropped along the way. It turns out that she and her husband had a child when she was 25, before they were married, and gave him up for adoption. His name is Miles, and Watson is able to track him down to a nearby bakery. It’s all a degree of contrivance that doesn’t exactly sit right. Watson has this habit of just quipping, “I’m a detective,” whenever he figures something out that it’s totally unreasonable for him to have gotten to the bottom of. It’s the needs of being a Sherlock mystery chafing against the medical drama framework.
And yet this all somehow has a pretty nice payoff. Miles is understandably reluctant to give some strange woman part of his liver, but when he visits Elizabeth in the hospital, he recognises her. She has visited the bakery he owns every day to see him. He never knew who she was, but he recognised in that moment that she was always there for him, ready to brighten up his day or give him some advice. It’s a very sweet, heart-string-tugging moment that obviously results in Elizabeth surviving and getting to meet her grandchildren. It’s almost too neat and tidy, the kind of thing that, say, Brilliant Minds probably wouldn’t do. Which returns us to the problem I outlined at the top.
“A Son in the Oven” ends by teasing two things. One is the return of Ingrid, whose application for the neurology position she vacated is slipped in with the other, no doubt unsuitable applicants, and who is now coming to terms with the fact that she apparently has Antisocial Personality Disorder. The second is the return of Sherlock Holmes. That should set the cat amongst the pigeons, but I’m not sure it’ll necessarily fix any of the myriad problems that Watson evidently still has.
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