‘Watson’ Season 2, Episode 12 Recap – You Are What You Eat

So, what exactly is going on here? I’m used to Watson being rubbish, and I assumed that Season 2’s mid-season premiere being above-average was a consequence of it being unconventional. But Episode 12, “A Family Meal”, is a much more conventional medical-mystery that is one of the better ones this show has produced, with not only a real case but also a surprising amount of emotional and psychological depth. What has happened?

Granted, Sherlock gets mentioned a few times, and that always sets my alarm bells ringing a bit, since Watson is – ironically – way worse when it remembers that it’s Sherlock Holmes-adjacent. But that stuff’s all setup for later episodes that I’m sure I’ll complain about in due time. Until then, we’ve actually got an interesting dilemma to unpack.

Things start with a fake-out. A drunken hookup goes wrong, and a poor man ends up with a penile fracture. If this doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that Watson and his fellows would usually deal with, well, you’re right – that’s because it’s not the case of the week. With a bit of probing, Ingrid discovers that the man’s mystery partner – “a baddie” he met on Tinder; his words – is exhibiting some pretty serious neurological symptoms. Her eyes were twitching, she couldn’t stop laughing, and she had balance issues. Sure, she was drunk in a dark room trying to ride a stranger, but symptoms are symptoms.

And so begins a manhunt, since it’s important that the woman is tracked down before whatever is wrong with her kills her. This doesn’t take very long but, again, it isn’t really the point of the episode. The woman, Wren, agrees to come to the clinic for some testing after Shinwell bribes her with $500, but there doesn’t seem to be anything amiss. And yet her symptoms keep worsening, so it’s time for some more investigatory legwork.

It’s eventually revealed that Wren and her younger brother were survivors of a plane crash. Wren, then 12 years of age, took charge and kept her brother alive, but both their parents died. Not exactly well-versed in Arctic survivalism, Wren was nonetheless able to hunt a ready supply of Arctic fox meat, or so she claimed. Of course, Arctic foxes aren’t populous or stupid enough that a 12-year-old with no survival training could farm them for months. Wren was really feeding her and her brother another foodstuff – the corpses from the crash, including their parents.

The big twist of Watson Season 2, Episode 12 is that Wren has Kuru, an incredibly rare and fatal neurological disease transmitted by eating the brain tissue of deceased relatives. Yikes! This disease accounts for all of Wren’s symptoms, but again, it isn’t really the point. The point is how the diagnosis relates to her own feelings of grief, guilt, and self-loathing. She never told her brother, Robin, the truth, and he has since ostracised Wren for her worsening erratic behaviour. She’s too ashamed to tell him how they really survived, and attempts to bring about her own death by locking herself in the hospital freezer. There’s so much trauma bundled up in all this that it provides a surprising amount of depth to a case that was already pretty interesting to unravel.

It’s also Ingrid, of all people, who is able to bring Wren back from the brink, reminding her that her actions were motivated by trying to keep her little brother alive. That’s also how Robin sees it. Even knowing the truth, he doesn’t blame his sister for what she did, and instead introduces her to his daughter, who was named after her, and resolves to help her manage the symptoms of the condition, which is incurable.

Even the character-focused stuff is, for the most part, quite good here. Of particular note is that Adams and Lauren are having triplets, which is big news even in a family prone to twins, and it’s causing Adams to seriously re-evaluate their financial situation, which means perhaps having to compromise on his values to flog products he doesn’t believe in. The things we do for our kids!

The weak portions are, as ever, anything involving Sherlock. For some reason, Shinwell has decided to take a leave of absence and abandon his nurse training – and presumably his blossoming relationship with DaCosta – to chase Sherlock halfway across the world. I have no idea why he’d do this, and all the theories I can come up with are unconvincing. It’s a move that this show seems to pull consistently, simply removing pieces from the board – still no sign of Laila! – rather than having to write themselves out of a corner. So, I’m not looking forward to wherever this is going. But I do think “A Family Meal” is, at least on its own terms, unusually deserving of praise.