Summary
Watson Season 2 gets back to the medical mysteries in Episode 3, but it still isn’t quite working on multiple different levels.
With Watson Season 2 having moved on from Sherlock Holmes as quickly as he was introduced, Episode 3, “Expletive Deleted”, has the advantage of being able to push forward with the case of the week as a pure medical mystery. Sure, Watson still can’t get over Holmes’s oblique mention of the “Pittsburgh Mystery”, and it’s keeping him up at night, but there are other, more pressing things to contend with, including the bizarre case of a 30-year-old woman who looks like a 10-year-old kid, and Ingrid’s official return to the office. Predictable spoiler alert: I’m not sure I loved either of these things.
The “Pittsburgh Mystery”, for instance, means nothing as yet – it’s just a way to keep Sherlock at the forefront of Watson and the audience’s minds. It’s also such a general term that it’s bizarre for Watson to be hyper-fixating on it to the extent that he is. I’m not sure I buy that he’d become totally and immediately immersed in this matter to the extent that he’s sleeping on the couch and sabotaging his relationship with Laila, but I suppose stranger things have happened.
As ever, whenever Watson is struggling with anything, he runs right to Mary. In “Expletive Deleted”, her patient is a foul-mouthed little girl who has crashed a Mustang and broken her arm. However, the girl, Max, claims to be 30, and her teeth support that. She explains to Watson that she simply and mysteriously stopped developing at the age of ten, and hormone therapy only made her ill. Since her mother couldn’t afford cross-country trips to clinics, she was forced to live with her bizarre circumstances – and now, they might be killing her.
On the face of it, this isn’t bad as far as Watson’s cases of the week go, and it plays into the title character’s fascination with genetics, which sort of excuses why he’s always so keen to treat someone as a lab rat. But it has a couple of big issues. One is the gimmick that the episode takes its title from – the fact that Max, determined for people to see who she really is, swears all the time. But this is a CBS procedural, so all the foul language is censored with bleeps and animations, reflecting an almost childish attitude that bleeds into the bigger problem, which is that the plot hinges on Max being an adult in a child’s body who constantly acts and is treated like a child.
You can sometimes feel Watson Season 2, Episode 3 railing against this impulse. There’s a whole thing about Max believing that she has cancer and resigning herself to her death, since she has no quality of life anyway, and Watson has to have a bunch of conversations with her wherein he respects her right to die if she so chooses. But it’s still an adult actor conversing with a child actor, and the dynamic follows suit. I never once believed that Max was a 30-year-old, a predicament that becomes even more ridiculous when Watson hedges Max continuing to live on there being another patient just like her somewhere else in the world. Because he’s Watson, he manages to find one after staying up all night making phone calls, and introduces Max to Pauline, who’s actually 41 but looks the same age as her.
I never bought it, in other words. Luckily, this isn’t the only thing going on in “Expletive Deleted”. But, unluckily, this show is really bad at developing subplots among the supporting cast. For instance, Watson’s relationship with Laila has turned into a non-starter, and the primary way in which the show has highlighted that is by totally sidelining her. I’d be upset too, frankly, since whenever Mary says “jump” Watson asks “how high?”, but at this point, it’ll be weird trying to re-inject a romantic component into that relationship since it hasn’t really evolved throughout the seasons. Watson’s whole deal is keeping the women in his life at arm’s-length until they go away.
I suppose it stands to reason, then, that the most interesting woman in his life is really Ingrid, now reframed as his “nemesis” thanks to Sherlock. And while this episode tends to go out of its way to reiterate that Ingrid is working on herself – she has scenes with both Crofts, and a really nice one with Sasha, who remains her best sparring partner, that in a roundabout way constitute an apology – it also goes out of its way to embroil her in another potentially sinister plot, this one involving a guy named Beck that she met at her sociopath support group. There’s a version of the same problem the show has with Max in its treatment of Ingrid, who is supposed to be this kind of edgy, unpredictable figure – she outright threatens to kill Beck if he doesn’t leave her alone – but is generally only seen to be doing good things, or wrong ones for the right reasons. In the absence of a proper Moriarty, I do worry that Watson might be trying to make its own. Based on how things are going thus far, I’m not sure it can spare the time.
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