Summary
After a couple of half-decent episodes, Watson Season 2 drops the ball again in “Shannon Says Bex Loves Micah”, a strange episode that doesn’t seem willing to address its most interesting ideas.
It turns out Laila is still in Watson Season 2 after all, but her sudden reappearance in Episode 9 causes more problems than it fixes. I guess we’re expected to pretend that Laila has been here this whole time, and definitely to overlook all the obvious romantic chemistry that is very much still present between Watson and Mary, since “Shannon Says Bex Loves Micah” proceeds like it was originally intended to show up somewhere else in the season.
This episode isn’t really about Watson and Laila other than in a superficial way, since it involves Laila’s son, Micah, whose being on the spectrum is used quite conveniently and cynically, since his forthrightness means he constantly asks Watson really direct questions about whether he’s his mum’s boyfriend or not. There are probably worse ways of clarifying a relationship’s status, but I struggle to think of any at the moment.
The episode isn’t really about Micah either, if we’re being totally honest. Initially it is, since the hook is that he has developed a kind of dependent relationship with an AI chatbot who he has customised to take the form of Shannon Purser from Stranger Things, but instead of exploring the really complex social factors that might have gone into that, we instead pivot to someone else’s medical crisis that Micah’s attentiveness has alerted Watson and his gang to.
This is a weird way of going about things. “Shannon Says Bex Loves Micah” has the distinct feeling of an episode that wants to be about AI, and about how an autism spectrum condition can make forming and maintaining relationships exceedingly difficult, and about the relationship between two of its core characters that it has simply pretended doesn’t exist for weeks now, but it can’t quite bring itself to be about any of those things properly because it’d require a level of writing and emotional nuance that this show simply isn’t capable of. Instead, all focus shifts to a really rote medical mystery in which the day is saved because Watson just asks a relative a bunch of questions that he should have asked earlier, and one of the answers provides the solution.
This isn’t how you satisfyingly plot a medical drama. I could have done that! It’s the same with Micah too, since there’s a hand-wavey implication at the end of Watson Season 2, Episode 9 that his dependency on the AI is “cured” because he gave up his phone for a month. So, he was basically grounded? Is that all it takes? Talk about unsatisfying.
Perhaps it’s a bit more frustrating because it’s relevant. I have two children, both of whom are dependent on their phones in a way that seemed incomprehensible to a child of my generation, and I would have liked the exploration of the subject to be a bit more thorough and serious. Watson had no trouble really leaning into criticism of longevity dorks, a less interesting topic since it only applies to a tiny sliver of the uber-rich.
Also weird: Purser is playing herself, or at least a version of herself, and Micah repeatedly brings up Stranger Things, which just so happens to be airing its final season this month. I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but the cynical side of me can’t help but imagine executives in a boardroom somewhere shaking hands over the cross-brand synergy. It’s distracting.
For once, it’s the supporting characters who offer something a bit more meaningful. We’ve been tussling with these specific issues for a while now, so it doesn’t feel like they’re coming completely out of nowhere – which character-driven subplots in Watson so often do – and you can connect both of them back to the events of the first season, which is also worthwhile, since the show often proceeds as if it never happened. After what we saw with Ingrid last week, I’m glad to see Sasha earnestly wondering whether she’s capable of change and whether she might be actively dangerous. And after seeing Stephens struggle with the idea of therapy and his own mental health, his finally asking for help is a big step.
Oh, and Shinwell and Nurse DaCosta’s little romance? Really solid stuff. All of this works quite well.
It’s just a shame that it’s working in a pretty rubbish episode that really highlights a lot of the show’s most persistent problems. Even this close to the finale, after a run of solid instalments, it’s still basically a coin toss whether you’re going to get a passable episode or not.
