Summary
Watson Season 2 continues to benefit from Sherlock’s absence, with “For a Limited Time Only” delivering another compelling medical mystery, even if some of the character drama leaves a little to be desired.
With no Sherlock in sight, Watson Season 2 always seems to work better. More so than that, Episode 13 finally remembers Laila exists! More to the point, it also – very briefly and inconsequentially – sticks her in the middle of Watson’s pining for his ex-wife, which reaches a fever pitch in “For A Limited Time Only” because she’s shacked up with someone else. The fact that Watson seems to resolve at the end to commit fully to Laila is a little weird, considering we’ve spent weeks in her absence teasing a reconciliation, but you don’t come to Watson for consistent character work. And if you do, well, good luck to you.
On its best day, we come to Watson for a compelling medical mystery, and at the very least, this episode provides that. Quite by chance – does this clinic take on clients any other way? – Sasha happens to meet a woman in the church who is vomiting into a plastic bag and feels as if she has something she needs to atone for. As it happens, these two things are connected, and Sasha becomes an angel of sorts to this lady who feels so guilty about ripping off her ex-husband that her heart keeps stopping.
The boyfriend, Beanie, is a good guy who runs a pierogi place and didn’t deserve to be defrauded, which is doled out gradually across the hour at Watson and the genome Scooby gang try to figure out what keeps bringing her back from the dead in a condition known, fittingly, as Lazarus Syndrome. In a bit of a self-destructive spiral, Aubrey had spent all of the money Beanie had saved to open a high-end pierogi restaurant, and now she’s trying to recoup the funds despite her sudden rebirth tending to be temporary for people with the condition. She’s on a very limited ticking clock, and she’s using the borrowed time to try to sell all of her belongings and drum up funds.
As Aubrey’s condition shifts and worsens, the team discovers that she suffered a miscarriage, which caused cells of the fetus to stick around in her bloodstream, something known as microchimerism. The errant alien cells helped to repair her tissue and heal much faster after her first “death”, but the root cause of her problems still needs to be determined and addressed, which turns the predicament into more of a character drama. As far as themes go, I do admittedly like what’s going on here. The idea of a lost baby’s cells sticking around to save its mother’s life is lovely, and I was relieved that there isn’t a twist of any kind where Aubrey turns out to be a con artist or anything. Her guilt is earnest (she’s played very well by a guest-starring Tori Anderson), and things with her and Beanie are left on a sweet but not too-easy note.
So far, so good, then. Watson Season 2, Episode 13 also ropes in the entire clinic, with everyone contributing to solving the case, preventing them from being occupied by often rubbish character-focused subplots. There’s a teeny bit of that, but there’s very little room for it. Aside from Watson’s new assistant, Brenda, badgering them about their backlog of cases – how nice for that to finally be acknowledged – and a brief reminder that Shinwell is still on sabbatical, there isn’t a great deal of serialised storytelling at all.
Except for Watson and Mary, obviously. In “For A Limited Time Only”, Watson meets Mary’s new boyfriend, Josh Gibson, after treating one of his players (he’s a football coach). They take a group photo afterwards, and after obsessing over it at home, Watson notices something slightly amiss in Josh’s left eye, which he feels compelled to fixate on and tell Mary about. Obviously, his fixation continuously manifests as imagining himself walking in on Mary and Josh kissing, but he frames the whole thing as his medical curiosity getting the better of him, even though he’s clearly jealous, too.
Naturally, Watson is right that something is wrong, and his imploring Mary to get him checked out results in a totally treatable condition being identified. But for Watson, it’s kind of a turning point moment where he put the well-being of Mary’s partner first, and in so doing, kind of accepted that Mary had a partner and things between them weren’t going to be rekindled. That night, he’s all lovey-dovey with Laila, who of course has no idea about him being conflicted with Mary in the first place. If this is supposed to be romantic, I’m not buying it. It kind of makes Watson look terrible. But on the plus side, I think we might have finally put the whole Mary angle to bed.
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