Summary
As ever, Watson Season 2 is much worse off for the presence of Sherlock Holmes in Episode 15, and a particularly silly twist throws the entire run into jeopardy.
It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which my eyes glaze over whenever Sherlock Holmes shows up in Watson. I understand he’s kind of the point, obviously, but he’s so surplus to this show’s requirements that his presence always feels like a net negative. Season 2 has been better whenever he hasn’t been around, and reached its zenith in an outing that had nothing to do with him. Episode 15, “A Third Act Surprise” – oh, get over yourself – immediately feels frustrating, wedging the core case in between Watson’s plate-spinning for Holmes, and cramming side character drama in amongst all that.
The main case isn’t even very good. It relies on cheap soap opera contrivance – an evil identical twin! – and most of the development occurs off-screen, depriving the audience of the medical aspect of the medical mystery. And don’t even get me started on the needless Sherlock twist, which we’ll get to in a minute.
But yeah, the main case starts out innocently enough, with Sasha and Stephens attending the funeral of a patient they met at the clinic and discovering that her daughter, Hollis, has a weird cough that she needs to get checked out. Further testing reveals that she has kidney failure and needs a transplant. Luckily – or not, depending on your perspective – her mother had handed off an envelope to Stephens containing Hollis’s birth certificate and DNA results revealing she has 42 half-siblings, any one of which could provide a viable kidney.
If you’re wondering how one gets quite that many half-siblings, it’s all related to a sperm scandal. Hollis was conceived from an anonymous donor, but there are regulations in place that prohibit a donor from donating more than 25 times, so even that wouldn’t quite account for the sheer volume of relatives. Watson puts the fellows to work in scraping away the various layers of this mystery, with Sasha, aka “Miss Congeniality”, tasked with contacting all of the siblings in the hopes that at least one might offer up an organ to a total stranger.
What this is building to is the revelation that one of the donors, Dr. Oliver Day, has an evil twin brother, Dr. Harrison Day, who is willing to offer up a kidney to Hollis, but only in exchange for immunity for his various crimes. Nice guy. I strongly suspect that this entire plot, which is strongly about children, exists to further develop the respective subplots of Adam’s pending triplets and the future of Sasha and Stephens’ relationship, but it’s given so little room that it all feels really underserved.
This is because Watson Season 2, Episode 15 also devotes too much time to Sherlock, who turns up lurking in the clinic with grand designs of solving every open murder case in the city of Pittsburgh. As with all of Sherlock’s previous appearances, he also helps Watson solve his case by dispensing relevant brain teasers while he busies himself with his more important personal projects. I can’t stand him.
The point of “A Third Act Surprise” is to build more and more suspicion around Sherlock. He’s supposed to have a brain tumour, if you recall, but that’s steadily revealed to perhaps be a fabrication. He claims to have already had the corrective surgery, which is highly convenient. Remember how Shinwell apparently left the city and gave up his nursing career to find him? Never mentioned, at least not that I noticed, but it doesn’t matter anyway since Shinwell returned last week with no fanfare and never mentioned Sherlock at all.
This is the problem with the Sherlock stuff. It collapses the whole show. And this has never been more true than it is in a final, last-minute stinger, which implies that Sherlock might exist only in Watson’s mind. So, maybe it’s Watson with the brain tumour? It’d be a fair twist if we hadn’t already seen Sherlock do things like write messages on boards. It feels like too much of a cheat for my tastes.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that Watson – rightly, in my opinion, despite a couple of decent episodes – hasn’t been renewed for Season 3. Perhaps the closing angle will be Watson himself becoming the patient, and his fellows having to put everything he has taught them to the test in saving his life? If it means less Sherlock, I’m all for it.
