Summary
Watson hasn’t impressed in Season 2, and it’s at its most confounding yet in Episode 4, with subplots cropping up out of nowhere and cowardly storytelling making its characters less compelling.
In a weird way, it’s almost impressive that we’re on Season 2 of Watson and yet nobody involved in its creation has quite figured out who any of its core characters are. There’s a flesh-eating fungal outbreak in Episode 4, but it’s difficult to pay much attention to it because weird character-driven subplots keep popping up all over the place. Ingrid keeps dyeing her hair, for some reason! Adam is worried about getting married! Watson is pining for Mary! It’s like nobody knows where the focus should be or what’s interesting about anyone.
The Shinwell stuff, at least, I don’t mind. He occupies an unusually large focus in “Happy When It Rains”, as he grapples with the darker implications of his later-in-life career shift to nursing that he never quite considered, namely, what happens when you can’t “save” every patient. Even though it’s Shinwell who detects the fungus in the first place, his 16-year-old basketball prodigy patient loses a leg, and it’s Shinwell – who apparently never sleeps – who takes it upon himself to coach the kid through it.
I don’t mind this because it’s consistent. Shinwell had his betrayal arc in Season 1, and since then, his whole thing has been about personal reinvention, so the nurse pivot was fine. And sure, there are going to be some teething issues as he gets used to that, and as everyone around him, though particularly Nurse Carlin DaCosta, who I think is being positioned as a potential love interest, gets all the old jokes out of their system. On balance, this is the only aspect of “Happy When It Rains”, except perhaps the fungal case itself, that genuinely works.
What doesn’t work is anything to do with Watson himself, which is weird since he’s usually a standout on the strength of his charisma alone. But the show’s approach to his love life is incredibly bizarre. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s clear that we’re building towards a reconciliation between him and Mary. But that means getting Laila out of the romantic picture. And the way the show has handled that is so dramatically cowardly it beggars belief. She has essentially been written out completely to avoid Watson having to be the bad guy in the relationship. Here, she calls him in the aftermath of a tornado, and he just screens the call, coldly explaining that whatever she wants can wait because there are bigger matters to attend to.
The short-sightedness makes Watson seem callous, which, for a doctor, isn’t a good trait. He has a weird fascination with storms, too. Now, eventually it’s revealed that his habit of sitting on the roof and listening to music while it’s raining is a reminder for him of an early date he had with Mary; it’s also revealed that she also retreats to the roof during storms to be reminded of him, which it seems weird they haven’t figured out by now considering they’re both always at work. The moment that happens at the end of Watson Season 2, Episode 4 should’ve really happened every time there has been a storm since they’ve worked there. But whatever.
Because Watson is reminiscing, he continuously tries to lend extreme weather events a romantic contour that seems super out-of-touch when there are patients in the hospital having their legs hacked off on account of that very storm. It’s a really weird characterisation for the lead in a medical drama. He’s more excited to daydream about his ex-wife while his current partner wonders if he’s dead than he is concerned about the potential medical calamities that might follow. Even his solving the mystery by tracing its origins back to some dirty guinea pigs in the front yard of a man whom one of the patients and her pastor husband are in a throuple with feels rote, like another opportunity for him to show off.
And are we really not going to properly explore a religious throuple? I guess not.
Elsewhere in “Happy When It Rains”, Adam is getting cold feet about his wedding to Lauren, a plot device character from Season 1 who has scarcely been mentioned since. There is zero build-up to this, and hasn’t been in the previous three episodes of this season. It just emerges out of nowhere like we’re supposed to have been paying attention to it the whole time. Later, Lauren reveals she’s pregnant, and Adam starts panicking about that, too, since he doesn’t really want kids, a sentiment that I don’t recall him ever expressing before. But by the end of the episode, he’s at the ultrasound scan looking pretty pleased about the whole thing. So what was the point?
It’s the same thing, sort of, with Ingrid’s hair. Sasha notices that she keeps dyeing it, and she assumes that it’s to try and torment her in some way. But Ingrid later confesses it’s just a way for her to try and slip into another identity in the hopes that she might one day recognise herself in the mirror. It’s not a totally ill-fitting idea given her character arc thus far, but it’s so randomly inserted and hastily addressed that there’s no real weight to it at all. Watson expects too much of its audience, I think, wanting us to buy into moments that haven’t been properly developed or set up, just because it’s telling us to. Not for me, thank you kindly. And based on how Season 2 is going thus far, I don’t think it’s going to improve any time soon.
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