Spoilers WATSON: New Sherlock Holmes-based series on CBS

[Christopher]

I think what got me going on the idea was the fact that if he was such a well known, first class detective, borderline celebrity as it were, it seemed strange to me that Lestrade didn't seem to know who he was.

In this show's universe, Holmes doesn't seem well-known at all, at least not in the US. In season 1, none of the fellows had ever heard of Holmes until Watson told them about him.

And it makes sense, since there's no indication that this Dr. Watson has ever published any tales of his adventures with Holmes. And it's not like Holmes ever sought publicity for himself, being content to let Scotland Yard take the credit as long as he had the satisfaction of solving mysteries and helping people in trouble. So it's understandable that this Holmes would not be all that well-known outside of the British or European law enforcement community (and criminal community). I do find it a little implausible that Lestrade has never heard of him, but it's consistent with the precedent within the show, so I chalk it up to a questionable writing choice rather than evidence that Holmes is unreal.

 

[Procutus]

Damn, I think I'm going to have to re-watch the first season, as there's a lot that I'm not remembering about it. Or maybe the missus and I will just binge both seasons once this one ends and see how it all fits together.

Like you, I just hope that it doesn't end on a cliffhanger that we will never see resolved.

 

[Aragorn]

They must've shown an episode out of order. A previous episode had Watson calling Shinwell who was at work (voice only), but this week he's still out looking for Sherlock and has been gone this whole time.

Also, this stuff with Sasha and Beck pretending to be her mother is really stupid.

 

[Procutus]

^

I was under the impression that phone call was made while Shinwell was out looking for Holmes. I'd have to re-watch the episode in question to be sure.

OTOH, perhaps Watson was hallucinating the call as well, LOL!

 

[Christopher]

This show is getting more melodramatic by the week. And TV can be very predictable -- as soon as I saw Watson and Laila in a car, I expected the car to crash, since why else would their scene be staged in a moving car, especially in the closing minutes when you expect something dramatic to happen? (It's a similar logic to shuttlecraft in Star Trek and other space franchises.)

So two different people this season have scammed Sasha about her birth mother, first Tzi Ma's "Uncle" Jun and now Beck. That's pretty repetitive. And when was the last time these doctors got a patient actually referred to their clinic through proper channels instead of just running into them randomly or learning of them through an acquaintance? It's getting ridiculous by this point.

I've never had a hallucination (that I'm aware of), but I doubt they flicker in and out like a TV losing the signal. Also, when that nurse Brenda who's filling in for Shinwell gave Watson the pep talk and the key to the mystery, I wondered if she was another hallucination, since I don't think we've seen her except in scenes where she was alone with Watson. Like, maybe the part of Watson's brain that thinks it's Holmes was putting on a disguise to offer advice in a form he'd be more receptive to. Although Brenda did seem to convey information about the patient that Watson wouldn't have known.

The patients' photosensitivity is similar to a condition I had myself once, when an experimental melanoma treatment involved a dye that made my skin and eyes hypersensitive to UV (on the theory that it would help a laser zap my retinal melanoma, which it didn't, though a different treatment a year later was successful). It was similar to porphyria, a condition that's believed to be the basis of vampire myths, since its symptoms include burning in sunlight, having retracted gums so that the incisors look fanglike, etc. I had to stay indoors with the windows covered for a couple of weeks, and then bundle up and wear heavy sunblock when I went back to school. Based on my own experience, I'm skeptical that a celery overdose would cause the skin to burn and blister as instantly as shown here. Maybe I'm wrong, but I expect that they exaggerated the effect. Also, in my case, we had to cover the windows since even indirect sunlight reflecting off surfaces could burn me, so I'm skeptical that the girl was unaffected while inside the glass doors and only burned once in direct sunlight. (I had the same problem with Buffy/Angel showing vampires loitering in the shade on sunny days.)

 

[The Wormhole]

Also, when that nurse Brenda who's filling in for Shinwell

Brenda's not a nurse, she's a doctor. She was featured in the first season episode Patient Question Mark as a teacher Watson, Mary, Ingrid and Sasha all had when they were at medical school.

 

[Christopher]

Brenda's not a nurse, she's a doctor. She was featured in the first season episode Patient Question Mark as a teacher Watson, Mary, Ingrid and Sasha all had when they were at medical school.

I wasn't sure if "nurse" was right, but she's filling in for Shinwell, so I took a guess.

 

[Procutus]

One has to wonder what the original intention was for the end of the season going into a third - as I'm guessing that the final eps were already in the can when CBS decided to drop the ax. Were Watson's hallucinations merely a prelude to Shinwell actually locating the REAL and alive Sherlock somewhere, who of course would admit that he had seen Watson since going over the falls.

And now that Psycho Ingrid knows that the image that Sasha received really wasn't her mother, what will she do? I'm not sure that all of these various threads are going to be wrapped up before the end of S2 - and like Christopher, I'm really hoping we don't get a cliff-hanger that was planned to set up the stories in S3.

I guess we'll know in about a month.

 

[Caretaker]

One has to wonder what the original intention was for the end of the season going into a third - as I'm guessing that the final eps were already in the can when CBS decided to drop the ax. Were Watson's hallucinations merely a prelude to Shinwell actually locating the REAL and alive Sherlock somewhere, who of course would admit that he had seen Watson since going over the falls.

And now that Psycho Ingrid knows that the image that Sasha received really wasn't her mother, what will she do? I'm not sure that all of these various threads are going to be wrapped up before the end of S2 - and like Christopher, I'm really hoping we don't get a cliff-hanger that was planned to set up the stories in S3.

I guess we'll know in about a month.

I'm kind of hoping that despite the hallucinations the real Sherlock shows up in the end.

TVLine revealed the season/series finale dates for all the CBS shows. The Watson one says:

Spoiler: Watson series finale description

"The Cobalt Fissure" – A seemingly random murder outside of UHOP sets the stage for the arrival of someone from Watson and Sherlock Holmes' past.

 

[Christopher]

TVLine revealed the season/series finale dates for all the CBS shows. The Watson one says:

Spoiler: Watson series finale description

"The Cobalt Fissure" – A seemingly random murder outside of UHOP sets the stage for the arrival of someone from Watson and Sherlock Holmes' past.

Hmm.

Spoiler

What characters from the Holmes canon haven't already appeared? We've had Shinwell, Mary, Moriarty, Mycroft, Lestrade, and Irene, and I think even Mrs. Hudson was alluded to last season. Who does that leave? Inspector Gregson? Kitty Winter? Charles Augustus Milverton? Henry Baskerville?

 

[Christopher]

Weird episode this week. I'm not a fan of the trope of characters having dreams or hallucinations that are not only coherent narratives, but are structured like television episodes. I also think the show is riding too hard lately on the "Watson is super-brilliant" thing, to the point that it makes even the real Sherlock Holmes feel superfluous. I could buy Watson being brilliant at medicine while still falling short of Holmes at crime-solving, but now we have Watson doing Holmes-level crime-solving without even knowing he's doing it.

Every time they cut away to Adam and Stephens, I wondered why I should care about any of it when it was obviously unreal. It was eventually justified, that it was Watson's incredible super-brain predicting what would happen with the babies, but still, all the character interaction and emotion was just Watson hallucinating, which makes it feel meaningless. It's actually a little creepy that he has such vivid fantasies about his employees' personal lives.

Still, the main virtue of it was that it gave Robert Carlyle a chance to play off the rest of the ensemble for a change instead of just Morris Chestnut. Sometimes episodes are written mainly as an excuse to let the actors play something, even if it doesn't entirely make sense in-universe.

 

[Procutus]

Still, the main virtue of it was that it gave Robert Carlyle a chance to play off the rest of the ensemble for a change instead of just Morris Chestnut. Sometimes episodes are written mainly as an excuse to let the actors play something, even if it doesn't entirely make sense in-universe.

For what it was, I thought the episode was fairly well done, though I have to agree with you on the fact they're making Watson seem almost omniscient in his brainy-ness.

But the above point is the part I enjoyed the most, seeing Carlyle get to interact with the rest of the cast - a glimpse of what the show might be like with the occassional visit to the Clinic by the real Holmes.

And sadly, I think, that's as close as we're going to get to it.

 

[Christopher]

Really, the defining attribute of John Watson as a character has always been that he's the everyman who doesn't have Holmes's deductive gifts but has other virtues that complement Holmes and keep him grounded. I could buy it in Elementary when Joan Watson became a successful detective in her own right, because that was the result of years of training by Holmes, and there was a sense that she had to work harder than Holmes to achieve the same result. Making Watson every bit as much an observational and deductive genius as Holmes feels redundant. It makes them the same character -- literally, in this case. And I think that's a poor storytelling choice. What's the point of doing a Watson series without Holmes if you're just going to turn Watson into Holmes instead of stressing the things that make Watson a distinct character?

 

[Procutus]

What's the point of doing a Watson series without Holmes if you're just going to turn Watson into Holmes instead of stressing the things that make Watson a distinct character?

That's a very valid point and it makes you wonder where they were planning to take this into the now cancelled next season. Presumably there was plan to tackle John's tumor - and how much that was contributing to his deductive abilities.

 

[Christopher]

This week's episode felt like a rehash of that House episode about whether to save a murdering dictator, but more half-hearted, though I guess I'm glad the ending didn't go as far here (at least not in that subplot). The whole scenario felt kind of contrived, typical of the melodramatic plotting of this season. They can't just have Watson dealing with his treatment, they have to get him dragged into an international diplomatic crisis.

The climax of the Beck subplot was both more and less melodramatic than I expected, or I guess melodramatic in a different way. I assumed Beck was trying to trick Sasha into going to China so he could abduct her on the way to the airport, so that the others wouldn't know she was missing. Instead it seems that he was just messing with her for nebulous reasons and didn't have a well-defined endgame, which makes it weird that he'd go to such elaborate lengths. But of course, they had to go and have Ingrid cross the line again. When she got Beck to confess to murder, I was hoping that she had her phone recording it and would get him that way. But no, that wouldn't be melodramatic enough for this show. (Although looking into it, I don't think it would be admissible in court, since Pennsylvania law requires two-party consent for recording "any conversation that common sense tells you is private." But at least it would've let Sasha know the truth.) And of course, it only takes one dictator telling her to embrace her inner psychopath to get her to throw out months of hard work in therapy, since modern serialized TV characters routinely make life-altering decisions as a result of a single brief conversation earlier in the episode. (Lucifer was particularly bad about that, though it could be somewhat justified by the title character's mercurial personality. Though other characters in the show did it too.)

Why was Lestrade sitting with Watson when he consulted about his tumor treatment? I haven't gotten the sense that they were friends or more than occasional professional collaborators. It seems like they just didn't have any other characters to pair him with in that scene now that he's apparently broken up with Laila.