Summary
Watson Season 2 has taken a ridiculous turn, and “Respect the Process. Respect the Quirks” is especially silly, having written itself into an inescapable corner.
Last week, Watson delivered its biggest, dumbest twist of Season 2 thus far, revealing that Sherlock Holmes has been a figment of John Watson’s imagination all along. A hallucination brought about by the accident he suffered way back before the first season, he has been able to get a foothold in Watson’s mind every time he has eased back on his medication, which is a weird thing for a doctor to be doing on a regular basis. In Episode 16, “Respect the Process. Respect the Quirks”, this manifests as Watson arguing with himself all the time. It’s very silly.
Crammed into the margins of this is Sasha’s effort to connect with her birth mother. The episode opens with her writing a heartfelt message to her explaining all of the various office goings-on, especially since the second year of interning is approaching an end, and everyone is feeling extremely stressed about the third year (hopefully someone lets her know that CBS has axed the show, so she needn’t be worried about Year 3 at all). We’ll return to Sasha at the end, but there’s an equally dumb development here, too.
But the arguing! Watson is now well aware of the fact that Sherlock isn’t real, but instead of simply not engaging with the hallucination, he argues with it constantly, which is largely played for a very weird kind of slapstick tone. And that’s a bit strange because “Sherlock” is making some solid points, chief among them being Watson’s relationship with Laila being built on a bed of dishonesty, given that she disappeared for half the season and he spent that time trying to move to Mary again. Sherlock keeps pushing Watson – which is really Watson pushing himself – to be honest and open with Laila, but Watson keeps threatening to up his pill dose and banish Sherlock to the annals of a healthy(ish) mind.
As accurate as Sherlock’s points are, they’re also basically a consequence of the show’s disjointed structure and – I strongly suspect – episodes being filmed and aired out of order (there’s another weird bit where Watson tells Brenda the Battle Axe, another character who hasn’t been glimpsed for weeks, to tell Shinwell, who’s in England, to end his search for Sherlock. But we’ve already seen Shinwell since he left – he was in one of the present-day sequences in Episode 14.) It’s really hard to buy into Watson’s internal dilemma when he wasn’t remotely bothered about Laila when she was essentially missing.
It’s also Laila who brings about the case of the week, this one about a young girl named Cora whose symptoms don’t quite align with her supposed cancer diagnosis. Her mother, Shelly, is deeply suspicious and keeps making claims that the medical reality doesn’t support, though there’s clearly something wrong, since when Cora goes outside, the sun causes her skin to aggressively blister. Further investigation reveals that her home life, along with her sister, Abby, leaves a little to be desired, casting Shelly as a potentially well-intentioned but misguided suspect.
What this is building to works fine, but isn’t especially interesting. Shelly is revealed to be a paranoid schizophrenic who believes she is keeping her children safe from harm, but her aggressive measures are causing more problems than they’re solving, especially an aggressive celery-centric green juice regimen that is causing the extreme photosensitivity. Faced with the prospect of losing her children, Shelly’s sister eventually takes the reins of their care, albeit with Shelly’s support and complicity. It’s a decent case, undermined somewhat by the fact that Watson keeps talking to himself at every opportunity.
Watson Season 2, Episode 16 really drops the ball with Sasha’s story, though, which finally loops Beck back in. Despite it initially being Ingrid who introduced Beck into this dynamic, he has now firmly set his sights on Sasha, which involves impersonating her birth mother and luring her into revealing a bunch of personal and work details that help him flesh out his demented Sasha-themed mood board. This comes to a head when Sasha finally receives a picture of her supposed birth mother, and it’s an image plucked from Google. Ingrid is hilariously able to find it by searching for “rich Chinese grandmother”. It’s like the third result. Beck hardly seems like a master criminal.
The climax delivers another big late-season cliffhanger, this one finding Watson crashing his car and potentially killing himself and Laila because he turns around while driving to argue with Sherlock, whom he’s imagining is in the back seat. It’s incredibly dopey, and not the first time he does this throughout the episode. Given the show isn’t coming back once it ends, this almost doesn’t matter, but it’s still a shame to see the whole thing going out in such a ridiculous fashion.
