With Watson Season 2 swiftly progressing beyond Sherlock Holmes' introduction, Episode 3, "Expletive Deleted," boasts the advantage of diving headfirst into a pure medical mystery as the case of the week. True, Watson is still reeling from Holmes's oblique reference to the "Pittsburgh Mystery," keeping him up at night, but other, more pressing matters await our attention. The bizarre case of a 30-year-old woman who appears to be a 10-year-old child, alongside Ingrid's official return to the office, are just the tip of the iceberg. Predictable spoiler alert: I'm not sure I entirely embraced either of these developments.
The "Pittsburgh Mystery," for instance, is a mere crumb of a clue, used to keep Sherlock at the forefront of Watson and the audience's minds. It's a general term so vague that it's baffling for Watson to fixate on it to the extent he does. I'm not convinced he'd become totally and immediately immersed in this matter to the extent that he's sleeping on the couch and sabotaging his relationship with Laila, but stranger things have indeed happened.
As always, when Watson is in a bind, he turns to Mary. In "Expletive Deleted," her patient is a foul-mouthed little girl who crashed a Mustang and broke her arm. However, the girl, Max, claims to be 30, and her teeth back up her claim. She explains to Watson that she simply and mysteriously stopped developing at the age of ten, and hormone therapy only made her ill. With her mother unable to afford cross-country trips to clinics, she was forced to live with her peculiar circumstances—and now, they might be killing her.
On the surface, this isn't a bad case for Watson's weekly mysteries, and it plays into his fascination with genetics, which excuses his penchant for treating patients like lab rats. But it has a couple of big issues. One is the gimmick that the episode takes its title from—the fact that Max, determined to be seen for who she really is, swears all the time. But this is a CBS procedural, so all the foul language is censored with bleeps and animations, reflecting an almost childish attitude that bleeds into the bigger problem: the plot hinges on Max being an adult in a child's body who is constantly treated like a child.
One can sometimes sense Watson Season 2, Episode 3 railing against this impulse. There's a whole thing about Max believing she has cancer and resigning herself to her death since she has no quality of life anyway. Watson has to have a bunch of conversations with her where he respects her right to die if she chooses. But it's still an adult actor conversing with a child actor, and the dynamic follows suit. I never once believed that Max was 30—a predicament that becomes even more ridiculous when Watson hedges Max's continued living on the fact that there must be another patient just like her somewhere else in the world. And because he's Watson, he manages to find one after staying up all night making phone calls and introduces Max to Pauline, who is actually 41 but looks just as young as she does.
In other words, I never bought into it. Fortunately, "Expletive Deleted" is not solely defined by this aspect. However, unfortunately, the show excels in developing subplots among the supporting cast. For instance, Watson's relationship with Laila has turned into a non-starter, and the primary way the show highlights this is by completely sidelining her. I'd be upset too, frankly, since whenever Mary says "jump," Watson asks "how high?," but at this point, it would be weird trying to re-inject a romantic component into that relationship since it hasn't really evolved throughout the seasons. Watson's whole deal is keeping the women in his life at arm's length until they go away.
It stands to reason then that the most interesting woman in his life is really Ingrid, now reframed as his "nemesis" thanks to Sherlock. And while this episode goes out of its way to reiterate that Ingrid is working on herself – she has scenes with both Crofts and a really nice one with Sasha, who remains her best sparring partner, that in a roundabout way constitute an apology – it also goes out of its way to embroil her in another potentially sinister plot, this one involving a guy named Beck that she met at her sociopath support group.
There's a version of the same problem the show has with Max in its treatment of Ingrid, who is supposed to be this kind of edgy, unpredictable figure – she outright threatens to kill Beck if he doesn't leave her alone – but is generally only seen to be doing good things, or wrong ones for the right reasons. In the absence of a proper Moriarty, I do worry that Watson might be trying to create its own. Based on how things are going thus far, I'm not sure it can spare the time.
