Watson Season 2 Episode 2's Sherlock Holmes Return Disappoints

Critic’s Rating: 4 / 5.0

4

Was it just me, or did Watson Season 2 Episode 2 seem like it should have been the series pilot?

Watson’s medical mystery was told in flashbacks to Holmes, who had shown up out of nowhere, and Watson also explained to him who everyone was.

Sadly, many aspects of this fell flat, but it also felt like a soft reboot of the medical mystery show.

Holmes’ Return Shortchanges The Medical Mystery

Watson spent most of the hour telling Holmes about his latest medical mystery, only for Holmes to quickly solve it.

That was incredibly disappointing. The whole point of Watson is for him and his team to solve medical mysteries!

This felt rushed, as if the writers wanted to get the mystery out of the way so they could focus on setting up their season-long arc about what Holmes is really up to.

The format of the episode was different and interesting, but once Watson finished telling his story, it had nowhere to go.

I’d rather Watson had told Holmes how he and his team solved the mystery instead. I’d have loved Holmes reaction to learning how Watson solved mysteries without him.

It also wasn’t clear why the original suspect couldn’t have done it, other than the TV trope of the first suspect accused always being wrong.

The Mystery Was Interesting, Too.

The writers obviously wanted to center the episode around Holmes and Watson’s relationship, but it’s a shame they had to waste one of their best medical mysteries.

At first, it seemed like the story was based on the COVID-19 pandemic, with five people presenting with cold and flu-like symptoms and fearing they’d infect everybody.

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The guy who died even fit into that model, as he could have been an asymptomatic carrier.

In this case, the disease supposedly came from a wooly mammoth who had been preserved for hundreds of years. I was eager to find out how Watson and his team could isolate the disease’s DNA from the fossilized animal and use that to find a cure.

Sadly, none of that happened.

I Didn’t Mind the Baking Soda Reveal

Sure, the doctors using an ancient fossil to isolate and study diseased cells would have been way cooler, but at least Watson’s realization that the group had been poisoned was based on medical science.

It started out well enough with every person with the infection being a suspect, but for some reason I didn’t quite understand, how they narrowed the suspect list down so quickly.

Holmes’ deductions were annoying to me because Watson figured out most of those things already. They didn’t add anything new to the conversation other than a gut feeling that Watson had the wrong suspect.

It irks me no end that there was no explanation as to why Holmes thought Watson was wrong.

Additionally, this one should have been Watson’s mystery to solve. Watson traditionally lives in Holmes’ shadow, and the book version of the character usually has no confidence in his investigative abilities and is mostly there to tell readers how brilliant Holmes is.

Still, these types of medical events are Watson’s specialty. He should have been the one to investigate and come to conclusions here — and in fact he did.

Holmes constantly telling him things he already knew was so disrespectful and not what I expected of Sherlock Holmes at all.

Sherlock Holmes Set Up a New Mystery or Two Before Running Away

Holmes supposedly wanted to catch up with Watson, but Watson did most of the catching up.

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No matter how many times Watson asked, Holmes never really answered the question of how he had survived the waterfall and why he had pretended to be dead.

What little explanation he did give only followed the reason Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had tried to throw Holmes off a cliff in the book series: he’d grown tired of these types of mysteries and felt too much pressure to continue.

The only clue we got to what Holmes is really up to is that he wants to fight against the rise of oligarchy.

Most of us agree with him, but there needs to be more to the story than that, and it needs to come out soon.

It seemed strange that Holmes would show up unexpectedly, stay up all night trying to get Watson to give him a mystery to solve, and then… leave.

It almost feels like Holmes’ reappearance was a gimmick to attract a larger audience, yet it also feels like a replacement for all the Moriarty nonsense last year.

I know that Watson is a tribute to the Sherlock Holmes books, so there have to be references to their plots and structure, but I still prefer the medical mystery aspects to the intrigue, which often feels like a distraction.

What Was With Holmes Calling Ingrid Watson’s Nemesis?

She helped Moriarty, but so did Shinwell, and all Holmes had to say about him was that he was surprised Shinwell was studying medicine now.

I don’t entirely remember what she did, but the team is going to have to deal with it.

She’s back (assuming she accepts the job), and Watson’s made it clear he won’t accept anyone else in her role.

It’ll be interesting to find out how she manages her anti-social personality disorder once she’s back full-time.

She seemed to be focusing on her therapy until now, and having to concentrate on her job again might split her focus and set her back.

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If you like Watson, you might also enjoy our coverage of CBS’ other two big mystery shows, Elsbeth and Matlock. We also cover Hulu’s Only Murders In The Building.

Watson airs on CBS on Mondays at 10/9c and streams on Paramount+ on Tuesdays.

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