The 'Watson' Season Finale Made the Dumbest Possible Decision

Spoilers

I am not a serious viewer of CBS’s Watson. I watched the pilot. It was OK. I kept checking in, spot-checking and half-watching episodes, mostly because I didn’t particularly care about the weekly medical cases. They’re boring. It feels like the kind of show where writers skim through medical journals to find the most obscure diseases imaginable and then build entire episodes around those diagnoses.

The interoffice drama didn’t do much for me, either. In fact, I paid so little attention while watching that, until a couple of episodes ago, I genuinely thought Stephens Croft and Adam Croft — the identical twins played by Peter Mark Kendall — were the same person with a split personality. The two characters are so different—not just in their personalities but in their expertise—that I assumed they were some kind of Jekyll and Hyde character Watson hired as a clinical experiment. I thought Watson brought him on because he found the split personalities intriguing and useful for his medical practice.

I seriously believed that the two sides of this guy’s personality were talking to each other for most of the season. I even thought the idea was kind of clever: one side was the Id, the other the Ego; one was an addict, the other clean. In my mind, it was fascinating to imagine how the different parts of his personality affected his physical body. Which is to say, I spent a lot of time daydreaming while watching the series. Apparently, I invented entire plotlines to make up for the tedium I felt. I think I may have also been influenced by Jen’s earlier piece on the series, suggesting that maybe Watson isn’t real. The brain works in mysterious ways to stave off boredom.

But I did keep watching for one reason, and one reason only (OK, actually two reasons). I didn’t even catch it in the pilot because I zoned out before the stinger, but Tori told me about it, so I went back and rewatched the end: Randall Park is playing Moriarty. Like Tori, I intermittently half-watched because Randall Park is a national treasure, and even trapped in a plodding, mediocre medical procedural, he’s still a joy to see.

Unfortunately, there was never nearly enough Randall Park to keep it interesting. He was mostly absent, popping up briefly in episode seven before finally returning for the last two episodes. In this version of the Sherlock Holmes story, Moriarty supposedly killed Holmes by pushing him over a waterfall (as in the novels). Watson dives in to save Holmes but wakes up in a hospital room. He and Moriarty survive, but Holmes is presumed dead.

Throughout the season, because Moriarty is evil … and well, just because, he blackmailed a couple of Watson’s employees to sabotage Watson’s research and tamper with his medication, messing with his head. By the end of the season, Moriarty had orchestrated the theft of some crucial DNA and infected the twins with a fatal strain of hepatitis that could only be cured with the stolen samples.

By the end of last week’s episode, they found enough residue from the stolen samples to cure one twin. In the season finale, they had to figure out how to convince Moriarty to provide the missing samples. (I’m pretty sure the science behind all of this is bullshit, but it’s not important anyway.) Watson came up with a clever plan: Ingrid, the employee who had been a double agent for Moriarty, decided to switch sides and work for Watson. She snagged a cuticle from Moriarty, and Watson concocted a disease to infect him with — one that would temporarily blind him and eventually kill him without a cure.

Moriarty relented and handed over the samples to save the other twin’s life because he didn’t want to die. Watson, in turn, cured Moriarty of his blindness, but not the disease that would eventually kill him. He wanted Moriarty to have his sight back just so Watson’s face would be the last thing he saw before he died.

But the point is: he died. The only real reason to half-watch this show is now dead. You don’t kill off Moriarty at the end of the first season, and you definitely don’t kill off a character played by Randall Park this early. It’s madness! (And not for nothing, I don’t buy that Watson would intentionally murder Moriarty — this is a medical procedural, not a superhero series).

And it would guarantee I’d stop watching Watson, which CBS has already picked up for a second season, but for the other reason we’re still watching: Matt Berry is the voice of Holmes. If Sherlock survived the waterfall and returns, it means we might actually get to see Matt Berry. So, I guess it’s another season of half-watching and barely paying attention for me.