‘Watson’ Season 2, Episode 14 Recap – The Best Hour of the Season

Part of the reason I get so frustrated with Watson is that when it’s firing on all cylinders, it has the potential to deliver truly interesting medical mysteries. Season 2 hasn’t had many of those, but Episode 14 finally delivers with something that feels truly novel but also emotionally resonant and complex. “Wrongful Life” is my favourite outing of the season, despite a few little oddities, including Laila being missing again and Watson going back to flirting with Mary – after all the progress we made! – and Shinwell being back from sabbatical, but nobody mentioning that he went on sabbatical in the first place.

This case is deeply personal to Watson, so it begins with a flashback to 2007, to Watson’s first ever patient when he was working at UHOP’s Fertility Clinic. A woman named Marlise Garner is implanted with a viable embryo, which should be good news, but it turns out to be a bit more stressful than expected.

Cut to 2024, when the Holmes Clinic first opened. Back then, the usual gang was still fresh-faced fellows, and their number included a woman we haven’t met before – Paola Barajas, a surgeon who had already been there a week and whom Ingrid took an immediate dislike to since she had already claimed one of the four desks (one less, everyone realises, than the number of fellows present). Long story short, Paola ended up going elsewhere thanks to Ingrid’s jealous interference, but before she left she performed a spine fusion surgery on Marlise’s son, Kyren, who had been born with a rare VACTERL – vertebrae, anus, cardiac, trachea, esophagus, renal, and limbs – association and had remained Watson’s patient for his entire life, undergoing a series of extremely complex and dangerous surgeries. Watson’s first patient became the fellows’ first patient.

In the present day, Kyren is on the cusp of attending the Penn State Robotics Program after deferring his place due to a long-winded recovery process following the spine surgery. However, a few sneezes slip loose one of the rods in his back, putting him back on the operating table. His spine didn’t fuse after all, so now he’s looking at even more major surgery, as well as presenting Watson and the Scooby gang with a mystery to solve – why wasn’t the surgery successful in the first place, and what can be done to ensure it is in the future?

In a nice turn, though, this case becomes less about the mystery – there’s an occult infection hidden in the spine itself, it eventually turns out – and more about the emotional ramifications of Kyren’s lifelong treatments and suffering. He begins to deeply resent Watson for keeping him alive in such agonising conditions when he feels it would have been better for him to have never been born in the first place. VACTERL is difficult to diagnose in prenatal conditions, but Marlise knew about a ventricular septal defect – a hole in the heart, basically – that might have presaged other issues, but Watson reassured her that it was very treatable. Kyren begins to see this cajoling as selfish on Watson’s part, and eventually hits him with a “wrongful life” lawsuit, arguing that he never should have been born.

Watson Season 2, Episode 14 takes this idea – a little wacky on paper, I’ll grant you – extremely seriously. And it really works. Kyren is played by Thamela Mpumlwana, and he delivers a superb turn as a kid truly at the end of his tether. The legal viability of the lawsuit aside, Kyren’s story is so powerful that no jury would rule against it, so the clinic is in considerable financial jeopardy, while Watson himself is left in emotional disarray at his greatest success story morphing in real-time into his greatest failure.

There are no easy answers here, either. Thanks to Ingrid’s personal growth, she’s able to appeal to Paola, who agrees to a collaborative surgery with Mary that’ll hopefully properly fuse Kyren’s spine after the infection has been removed. But it’ll be a month of IV antibiotics before that, and then goodness-knows how much physical therapy after. His education and career will be put on hold again. Even though he’s grateful to Watson for intervening even after the lawsuit, at which point he’s supposed to be treated elsewhere, Kyren doesn’t magically renege on his point of view. Watson has to work on his empathy instead of his scientific curiosity and finally start treating Kyren as a friend instead of a project to make any ground.

Kyren doesn’t drop the lawsuit, either. UHOP is forced to settle, which at least gives Kyren and Marlise a financial safety net. Nor does “Wrongful Life” inform us about the outcome of Kyren’s latest surgery – it ends just as he’s about to go under the knife. It isn’t really the point, though. The lessons that his unique case had to teach have already been learned; sometimes, even state-of-the-art technology and medicine aren’t enough, and what patient care comes down to is good, old-fashioned empathy. And to think Watson could be delivering episodes like this every week, and sometimes doesn’t bother in order to excuse lame Sherlock Holmes cameos.

Speaking of which, I think there’s one of those coming next time. Buckle up.