Summary
Watson Season 2 returns and immediately goes off-script with a very uncharacteristic Episode 11, though the change in pace was welcome for me.
Watson has always had a fairly detectable medical-mystery pattern, so it was perfectly fair to imagine that Season 2’s mid-season premiere would really embrace that pattern, perhaps picking up from a few of the threads left dangling from that extremely mediocre mid-season finale. Instead, Episode 11 completely abandons the usual approach, at least for most of the episode, instead focusing on a bigger calamity that pulls Watson and his team into more run-of-the-mill crisis management.
In short, a sinkhole has opened up beneath a residential neighborhood, trapping many people underground, including Marnie and Keith, who get the vast majority of the focus since the mystery, when it arrives, involves their baby. The ER is overrun, so Watson and the Scooby gang have to assist in triaging patients and managing the load. As a result, most of the character-focused plots are only cursorily mentioned or not included at all. There’s a bit of development in Ingrid’s ongoing saga with Beck, Watson’s rekindling romance with Mary, and Shinwell’s developing connection with Nurse DaCosta, but it’s otherwise all business.
And you know what? I liked this approach, since most of Watson’s character-driven subplots are dumb beyond words. I must still quibble with certain things, obviously, since it just can’t do for a show to avoid a potentially difficult writing hurdle – like Watson ending his relationship with Laila – by simply having that character disappear from the show entirely, but even if you reduce it to a pure numbers game, there’s just less irritating and nonsensical stuff in “The Tunnel Under the Elms” than there usually is.
The focus on Marnie and Keith is a bit odd, though. These two are married, and the former is heavily pregnant, so you can understand why Watson makes such an effort to guide them through their predicament while they’re trapped. But when Keith discovers divorce papers, he starts bringing that up to Watson as though it changes the medical realities, and the vibe felt, at least to me, like we’re supposed to care about whether these two stay together much more than we actually do. Some of the completely neglected side-stories coming out of the sinkhole, such as the dude with the gnarly length of rebar through his neck, were more immediately engaging.
The reason Keith’s weird focus on the divorce doesn’t work in context is that it kind of plays out on a script level like he’s trying to decide whether to let Marnie and the baby die or not based exclusively on Watson’s relationship advice. That’s obviously not the case, but it threatens to come across that way since it isn’t very well written. The reason this bit is included is that it shines a different light on a later development when Marnie gives birth, but it highlights a lot of the show’s basic script problems.
The bad news for Watson Season 2, Episode 11 is that its big moment is a woman giving birth in extremely trying circumstances, airing only a few hours removed from Paradise doing the exact same angle in a much better way. They’re very different shows, and you probably shouldn’t compare them out of fairness, but the similarities were hard to ignore. Watson does move on from the birth, though, since that’s when the mystery of the week kicks in – Marnie and Keith’s baby, Rose, is Black, which is a little weird since both of her parents are white.
Naturally, the audience is supposed to assume the same thing as Keith – that Marnie was having an affair, which is probably why she was filing for divorce. But the fact that this is coming up at all in a show like Watson is already an indication that something else is afoot, so it kills some of the potential intrigue. It might have been a more engaging twist for Watson and his team to determine that Keith wasn’t the baby’s father, rather than find a genetic explanation that allowed a happy ending. But here we are.
The standout stuff in “The Tunnel Under the Elms” belongs once again to Shinwell, who clearly isn’t comfortable indulging in Nurse DaCosta’s flirty footsie routine without first unburdening himself of his darkest secrets, which include, among other things, facilitating the murder of an ostensibly innocent man. Sure, it’s really silly that this conversation is taking place during an ongoing crisis, but Ritchie Coster really sells this character, and I find Margot Bingham very compelling as well.
There’s a moment spared for Ingrid. As it turns out, Beck is suing the hospital after the whole suicide bomber thing, and since he and Ingrid both see the same hospital-employed therapist, his frivolous lawsuit has created a conflict of interest. Mary has no choice but to tell Ingrid in no uncertain terms that she can’t continue to see that doctor, which is obviously what Beck wants, but is also a pretty necessary step in protecting the hospital’s reputation.
Beck re-targeting Ingrid also kind of veers away from the mid-season finale’s suggestion that he was shifting his focus to Sasha, only further validating my theory that these episodes were shot and are airing out of order, but maybe he’ll return to that in due course. In the meantime, though, Ingrid decides to jump the bones of a handsome newbie EMT she was flirting with all episode, which for her is usually a bad sign that she’s spiralling. I guess we’ll see.
