Defying Moriarty Has Its Consequences
Editor’s note: The recap below contains spoilers for Watson Episode 11.
As the two-part season finale looms on the horizon, Watson’s (Morris Chestnut) past catches up with him in Watson Episode 11 — but not in ways that anyone would anticipate. Season 1 has done very little to establish why James Moriarty (Randall Park) has it out for Watson, and it seems like the series plans to keep it that way. Instead, while Shinwell’s (Ritchie Coster) situation reaches a fever pitch, the pseudo-penultimate episode focuses on Watson’s time in the Army with a plotline that feels distinctly early-aughts in all the worst ways.
Episode 11, entitled “The Dark Day Deduction,” opens with Dean Kett (Robert Bailey Jr.) trapped within the memory of his tour to Afghanistan. A young Afghan boy named Izar (Jedidiah Alkiresha) bikes into their camp and fails to halt when Dean tells him to, but he lets it slide — a detail that comes back to haunt Dean later on. This memory is revisited throughout the episode as Dean slips in and out of psychosis, and each time it reveals new details about why this incident remains at the forefront of Dean’s mind. His wife, Hazel (Shakira Barrera), tells the attending nurse that she doesn’t want her husband to see another psychiatrist: she wants him to see Watson.
In a rather surprising move, the series reveals that Watson was previously enlisted in the Army, and did a tour in Afghanistan alongside Dean. He tells the interns that his military service was a means to pay for medical school (which makes sense), but it ultimately feels like a true eleventh-hour reveal. At least when Sherlock opted to make Martin Freeman’s Watson a former military doctor, it served his character throughout the entire series. Here, it feels like a frivolous detail that has little impact on the character until this episode. Coupled with how Watson frames their time in Afghanistan, the plotline proves to be quite Islamophobic and regressive. Perhaps this plotline would have been less surprising in an episode of House, circa 2005, but in 2025 it feels wholly unnecessary. There are ways to address the socioeconomic demands of medical school and PTSD without leaning upon the tired tropes of friendly young Afghan boys being secret suicide bombers.
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While the Dean and Watson storyline is problematic, the medical mystery behind Dean’s psychosis is at least interesting. Watson agrees to treat him, but Dean wants nothing to do with him. Dean blames Watson for losing his leg in the bombing because Watson was so focused on treating a local Afghan woman, Ramiza (Fuzhan Meier), who he believed had the ultra-rare genetic disorder, familial chylomicronemia syndrome. Since Dean won’t let Watson treat him, he has Dr. Lubbock (Inga Schlingmann) pretend to dislike Watson to ingratiate herself to Dean, but that only works for a short time. Dean attacks Lubbock and makes a break for it, and they eventually find him up on the helipad, where Watson is able to talk him down from his delirium, to an extent. They eventually discover that Dean was working out a lot in an attempt to pass the Army Fitness Test, and the increased exercise triggered a latent disorder: Guillain-Barré syndrome. Toward the end of the episode, Dean is in pretty bad shape, and he admits to Watson that he was actually responsible for the bombing, as he failed to react in time. He spent years blaming Watson for something he did. With the right treatment, Watson is able to essentially cure Dean of the worst of his symptoms, and put to bed their strained history.
Could Watson and Mary Rekindle an Old Flame?
While Watson has had its ups and downs throughout the season, one of the best — and most consistent elements — has been the chemistry between Watson and his soon-to-be ex-wife Mary (Rochelle Aytes). During the Valentine’s Day-set episode a few weeks ago, things finally began to shift into place for the pair, and Episode 11 continues to build on that dynamic. The two are spending time together (alone) at the top of the episode when Watson is called in to treat Dean, and Mary stays by his side throughout most of the episode as he confronts his past and searches the hospital for the runaway patient. She’s even there for him in the final moments of the episode when he finally gets to reunite with Ramiza, thanks to Dean.
The final scene also establishes that there’s something Mary wants to talk to Watson about, but she doesn’t get a chance to because of his video conference with Ramiza. Surely, as things start to (seemingly) ramp up with Moriarty in the final two episodes, this will come back into play. It would be a shame if Watson didn’t seize on their chemistry and make all of this back-and-forth worth the wait throughout Season 1.
Shinwell Accidentally Damns One of Watson’s Interns
The other major plotline playing out throughout Episode 11 is Shinwell’s predicament as Moriarty’s unwilling double agent. Last week, he chose to defy his direct orders to acquire the interns’ DNA for Moriarty, and he pays the price for that decision this week — or, at least, someone close to him pays the price. Moriarty’s agent (Kacey Rohl) pays Shinwell a visit towards the top of the episode to let him know just how disappointed Moriarty is with his decision to provide them with fake DNA. Shinwell tries to flex his own muscle (seeing as he does have some sort of criminal background) by discussing the agent’s sick child, which he discovered back in Episode 4 — but this doesn’t really shake her.
Unfortunately, Adam (Peter Mark Kendall) walks in on their clandestine conversation. Shinwell and “Shelly” play it off like they’re having a secret forbidden romance, and Adam believes it, but that isn’t enough for Moriarty’s top brass, it seems. Later on in the episode, she stalks Adam’s girlfriend Lauren (Amanda Crew) into a restaurant bathroom where she covertly steals her makeup bag. At first, it seems like she stole her lipstick to retrieve her DNA for a sinister purpose, but it seems like there may be something even more sinister at play. While Episode 11 doesn’t reveal what Moriarty’s agent did to the lipstick, it goes to great lengths to telegraph that not only did she return Lauren’s lipstick, but Lauren’s wearing it when she and Adam exchange a kiss in the final moments of the episode. Is it poisoned? Will they both face the consequences of Shinwell’s betrayal?
Shinwell faces his own consequences for defying Moriarty, as he is released from his service to the evil mastermind. It’s a relatively uneventful severance, which likely means that something worse will come into play in the final pair of episodes this season. In addition to the fact that Lubbock makes a pretty strong statement about her plan to help Derian (Eve Harlow) fend off Moriarty’s blackmail attempts, it seems like something untoward may happen to one — if not all — of Watson’s interns in the coming weeks. But why? Watson has done very little to establish a clear motive behind Moriarty’s schemes, and, while his motives are murky in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon, television audiences require more than a handwave over Moriarty’s desire to be an agent of chaos.
New episodes of Watson premiere Sundays on CBS.
- Watson fails to rise above tired, regressive stereotypes to introduce an unnecessary backstory.
- Watson chooses to introduce new character details in the third-to-final episode of the season, rather than fleshing out the pre-existing plots.
- The series continues to derail every bit of forward momentum.
