‘Watson’ Season 2, Episode 10 Recap – A Messy Midseason Finale

Every time Sherlock Holmes has shown up in Watson Season 2, it has heralded bad news. That’s a weird thing to say about a show focusing on John Watson, but this is a very odd show at the best of times, so the idea of the Sherlock connection being the worst thing about it is, to be frank, the least of its problems. A lot of those problems are very evident in Episode 10, “Never Been CRISPR’d”, a messy midseason finale that reintroduces a dumb subplot and character from Season 1, brings Sherlock back into the fold in bizarre circumstances, pays tokenistic lip service to a couple of supporting character subplots, and just generally operates as though it has no idea that this is supposed to whet audience appetites until the show returns in March 2026.

That seems a notably long way off, especially considering the cliffhangers we’re left with here aren’t great. Beck is still stalking Sasha, whose mysterious fake uncle is now dead, but both of those things are uninteresting. Sherlock might have a brain tumour, but we won’t know for a while since by the end of the episode he has disappeared again, and Watson catches Mary with another man… which shouldn’t matter since he’s also with another woman, but the show keeps weirdly forgetting she exists. Outside of last week’s ho-hum instalment, she has spent most of the season AWOL.

Is it nice to see Hobie again? I’m still smarting with how Season 3 of Loot treated Nat Faxon, so it’s nice to see one of his dorky characters get a happy ending here, but he isn’t exactly midseason finale material. If you recall, he was the biohacker from the first season with the glowing chest. He’s back here in “Never Been CRISPR’d” – which, okay, is a pretty funny title – because his new girlfriend is into extreme genetic body modification like he is, but their well-planned and romantic hotel gene therapy session almost kills her. Oops. Now it’s up to Watson to solve it, since he apparently doesn’t have anything better to do.

Side note: Does Watson’s clinic have any patients other than those that are suddenly rushed in under extreme circumstances and somehow get the attention of the entire staff? There’s no wonder Mycroft is annoyed about the funding.

Anyway, the A-plot is the least interesting thing going on in Watson Season 2, Episode 10, so let’s talk about what’s going on around it. By the way, I think its inclusion speaks to a larger issue that I’ve briefly discussed before, which is that the season feels like it has been chopped up and shuffled around, with episodes coming out of order. I said that when nobody commented on Laila’s sudden reappearance after being absent for weeks. But it also explains how you go from a really good episode about a suicide bomber threatening to blow the office up to a really run-of-the-mill one about some idiot causing his own problems.

In the absence of a Moriarty figure, and now that Mycroft has also mysteriously vanished, it’s Beck who is gradually being positioned as the Big Bad of the season. He has already gotten himself involved with Ingrid, who is still undecided on whether she should continue sleeping with him or not, but his long-term sights are set on Sasha. I think, since he’s a narcissist, he’s targeting Sasha because she challenged him during the bomber episode (narcissists tend not to like that sort of thing). It’s not exactly a fiendish master plan. It’s also weird that Sasha is going to have this going on while she’s dealing with the whole fake uncle thing.

As for Watson and Mary, who even knows at this point? There’s a bit of a thread in the Hobie plot about Hobie’s earnest love for his new girlfriend – who, by the way, he had never met until he destroyed her genetics with his homebrew glowing tattoo serum – inspiring Watson to tell the woman he loves how he feels, and we can infer that he had settled on that woman being Mary, only to catch her smooching another dude. But we’re deep into the second season of a show that has constantly reiterated that these two are separated. Watson has had another partner all season, and the show’s way of avoiding that problem has been to simply excise her from almost every episode. Now we’re supposed to buy into the idea that he’s crushed Mary is moving on?

None of it works. These don’t feel like mid-season finale developments at the best of times, but they’re not even interesting on their own terms, and the idea that Sherlock Holmes, a character known for being intensely logical but also eccentric and inscrutable, potentially having a brain tumour on the grounds of… acting eccentrically and inscrutably, just rings a bit false to me.

I suppose we’ll see how all this shakes out in March. But the bigger question is whether anyone will still be tuning in by then.