Summary
The recent addition of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t improve Watson Season 2, at least not in “Back from the Dead”, which has a decent mystery of its own but many of the usual problems.
I guess enough time has passed for an episode about a pandemic, even a tiny one that only flirts with the idea of becoming a wide-scale health event. It probably says a lot about Watson Season 2 that this is the most interesting observation about Episode 2, “Back from the Dead,” which features Sherlock Holmes after he made a surprising debut in the premiere. As it turns out, the inclusion of Holmes doesn’t really improve this show so much as set up some stuff down the line. Most of the usual issues still unfortunately remain.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an Englishman, so I’m generally of the opinion that anything is better with the presence of Sherlock, and Robert Carlyle’s flouncing take on the character is good. Whenever he’s on-screen, he injects a bit of exaggerated mystery flourish to proceedings, examining the elements of Watson’s life – especially his failed marriage with Mary and his relationship with Ingrid, whom Sherlock describes as his “nemesis”, pretty obviously foreshadowing – as though they’re components in a classic Holmesian mystery. In other words, he makes Watson feel a bit like a Sherlock Holmes show.
But as I’ve persistently claimed since the first season, Watson doesn’t work as a Sherlock Holmes show. It’s a medical drama, and all the accoutrements make it a worse one than it might otherwise be. You can see it here really clearly. All Sherlock’s presence does is give “Back from the Dead” a framing device, with Watson regaling his best friend with the story of what happened at the clinic that day. It’s an odd medical mystery that, thanks to the interjections of Sherlock, keeps threatening to tip into a more criminal one, and you can feel the two halves chafing against each other.
On its own terms, the case is fine. A woman, Dr. Woodward, is brought into the clinic exhibiting flu-like symptoms that she believes might be caused by an infectious disease that has remained buried in Siberian ice for thousands of years. She’s a scientist whose recent efforts to examine a herd of long-frozen woolly mammoths defrosted by global warming might have infected her entire expedition team with a “zombie virus” that may, in due course, spread throughout the entire hospital and into the wider world.
Watson Season 2, Episode 2 rather cynically uses the very threat of a pandemic to build most of its tension. The members of Dr. Woodward’s team quickly arrive in the ER exhibiting the same symptoms, and there’s a very notable sense of panic that the virus may spread. It becomes a ticking-clock device as Sasha and Stephens check out the remains of the woolly mammoth – it looks remarkably terrible – and Watson tries to prevent Ingrid from killing him for contacting her psychiatrist without her knowledge.
As it happens, Mallory, one of the expedition team, drops dead of a heart attack while Watson and Ingrid are bickering, and in their (unsuccessful) efforts to resuscitate him, they’re potentially exposed to the virus and forced to quarantine together. There isn’t a great deal of progress made in their relationship before Watson figures out that the “virus” isn’t an infectious disease at all, but instead a foodborne illness stemming from soda bread laced with poisoned baking soda. This means Mallory’s death was murder, not an unfortunate accident, and the culprit turns out to be one of Woodward’s research team, who believed in her cause so strongly that he was willing to do just about anything to raise awareness around it (Woodward’s book sales have spiked since the so-called “zombie virus” was leaked to the press).
While all this is going on, we cut back frequently to the conversation between Holmes and Watson, which is kind of annoying in a few ways. One is that it has a really sophomoric recurring gag about Sherlock saying things that are supposed to be dramatic but sound a little unintentionally homoerotic. This is supposed to be a smart show, right? Another is that, predictably, Sherlock has already figured Watson’s case out really easily, which is on-brand but also undermines Watson a bit. And the mammoth stuff goes on so long that you can just tell very little about Sherlock’s survival and intentions in Pittsburgh is going to be revealed.
This is a problem for Watson in general, and especially in Season 2. After doing away with the Moriarty arc, it seems allergic to the idea of developing ideas over multiple episodes. So, Sherlock is here in “Back from the Dead”, and by the end of it, he has departed again with the promise of reappearing down the line for a third-act surprise. The show might as well have just reintroduced him then and skipped this bit entirely. The main function of his return here is to convince Watson to re-hire Ingrid after implanting the “nemesis” idea in the minds of the audience. It’s very obvious. You can see it in a subplot with Sasha, too, which is hilariously truncated. She mentions to Stephens that, inspired by Mary reconnecting with her long-lost brother in the premiere, she started exploring her own biological family (she was adopted). Since then, her uncle has been bombarding her with more information than she necessarily wanted. This is introduced and seemingly resolved in the margins of this one episode.
It all just speaks to a show that, if you ask me, is still suffering from a sort of identity crisis, trapped halfway between being its own thing and something more brand-aligned. Hopefully, with Sherlock out of the way again and Ingrid coming back into the fold more officially, it can try to forge its own path in subsequent episodes.
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