In a peculiar twist, it's almost astounding that we're already in Season 2 of Watson, yet the creators still haven't quite figured out who the core characters truly are. The flesh-eating fungal outbreak in Episode 4 is a gripping concept, but it's hard to focus on it amidst the quirky, character-driven subplots that seem to pop up everywhere. Ingrid, for example, has a mysterious obsession with dyeing her hair! Adam is consumed with the thought of getting married! Watson pines for Mary! It's like no one knows where the narrative should be centered or what's interesting about any of them.
At least the Shinwell storyline is enjoyable. In "Happy When It Rains," he grapples with the darker implications of his late-in-life career shift to nursing, which he never quite considered—namely, what happens when you can't "save" every patient. Although it's Shinwell who detects the fungus in the first place, his 16-year-old basketball prodigy patient loses a leg, and it's Shinwell—who apparently never sleeps—who takes it upon himself to coach the kid through the ordeal. I appreciate this consistency; since his betrayal arc in Season 1, Shinwell's whole thing has been about personal reinvention, so the nurse pivot was fitting.
However, everything involving Watson himself is a disappointment, which is strange because he's usually a standout due to his charisma alone. But the show's approach to his love life is incredibly bizarre. As I've mentioned, it's clear that we're building towards a reconciliation between him and Mary. But that means getting Laila out of the romantic picture. And the way the show has handled that is so cowardly that it's hard to believe. She essentially gets written out completely to avoid Watson having to be the bad guy in the relationship. Here, she calls him in the aftermath of a tornado, and he just screens the call, coldly explaining that whatever she wants can wait because there are bigger matters to attend to.
This short-sightedness makes Watson seem callous, which isn't a good trait for a doctor. He also has a weird fascination with storms. Now, eventually it's revealed that his habit of sitting on the roof and listening to music while it's raining is a reminder for him of an early date he had with Mary; it's also revealed that she also retreats to the roof during storms to be reminded of him. It seems weird they haven't figured this out by now, considering they're both always at work. The moment that happens at the end of Watson Season 2, Episode 4 should've happened every time there was a storm since they've worked there. But whatever.
Because Watson is reminiscing, he continuously tries to lend extreme weather events a romantic contour that seems super out-of-touch when there are patients in the hospital having their legs hacked off due to that very storm. It's a really weird characterization for the lead in a medical drama. He's more excited to daydream about his ex-wife while his current partner wonders if he's dead than he is concerned about the potential medical calamities that might follow. Even his solving the mystery by tracing its origins back to some dirty guinea pigs in the front yard of a man whom one of the patients and her pastor husband are in a throuple with feels rote, like another opportunity for him to show off.
And are we truly not going to delve into the intricacies of a religious throuple in a meaningful way? I guess not. In "Happy When It Rains," Adam is experiencing a sudden bout of cold feet regarding his impending wedding to Lauren, a plot device character from Season 1 who has been all but forgotten since. There is no build-up to this development, and it seems to emerge out of thin air, as if we were supposed to have been privy to it all along. Later, Lauren reveals she's pregnant, and Adam starts to panic about it too, since he doesn't really want kids, a sentiment that I don't recall him expressing before. But by the end of the episode, he's at the ultrasound scan looking pretty pleased about the whole thing. So what was the point?
The same can be said for Ingrid's hair. Sasha notices that she keeps dyeing it, and assumes it's a way to torment her in some way. But Ingrid later confesses it's just a means for her to try and slip into another identity in the hopes that she might one day recognize herself in the mirror. It's not a completely ill-fitting idea given her character arc thus far, but it's so randomly inserted and hastily addressed that there's no real weight to it at all.
Watson expects too much of its audience, I think, wanting us to buy into moments that haven't been properly developed or set up, just because it's telling us to. Not for me, thank you kindly. And based on how Season 2 is going thus far, I don't think it's going to improve any time soon.
