Watson Season 2 Episode 20 Wraps Up The Series With a Rushed Ending After One of Its Weakest Stories

Critic’s Rating: 2 / 5.0

2

What on Earth was that?

Watson Season 2 Episode 20 would have been disappointing enough if it had just been a season finale.

But as the final wrap-up for the series, it fell even further short of what it should have been.

Watson Season 2 Episode 20’s Story Was Too Disjointed To Be Compelling

Watson used to be the show I couldn’t take my eyes off for a second, but the series finale didn’t hold my interest at all.

The Moriarity-type stuff never interested me. I was in it for the medical mysteries.

Sebastian Moran and his idle threats against Mary because he wanted Sherlock healthy enough to keep him captive did nothing for me.

It was a waste of time that could have been used to wrap up the series properly, rather than a weird episode that only entered the territory of the finale in the last five minutes.

Watson’s insistence on solving the real Sherlock’s medical mystery when he had only hours to remove a tumor before he risked losing everything might have been true to character, but it felt somewhat unrealistic.

This whole tumor arc ruined the last half of Watson Season 2, only to be solved quickly after all hope seemed to be lost. I didn’t want the series to end with Watson dying, but this was hardly better.

Not only was the tumor quickly removed in the last two seconds of the episode before a time jump, but its existence left me wondering what was real and what wasn’t, which was a distraction throughout the hour.

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Trying to figure out what was really going on was exhausting, and the medical mystery took a back seat to all of that weird Sebastian stuff.

Sebastian killing the nurse should have been a bigger deal than it was, too. She died, everyone was shocked, Sebastian was revealed as the killer, and then the story devolved into a question about whether Shinwell would go back to his old ways to deal with this.

Shinwell’s relationship with his supervisor has always been the least interesting part of his storyline. His becoming a nurse was supposed to be a redemption story, but that seemed to have been forgotten.

His supervisor/girlfriend told him that she didn’t want him to go back to killing people to get revenge, and then he had a weird conversation with his enemy before turning him over to the cops off-screen.

How incredibly anti-climactic! There seemed little point to the shooting and Sebastian’s entry here — it was all plot stuff just to give Shinwell a decision that he didn’t even make on-screen.

The only interesting thing about Sebastian was his dyslexia, which was used to explain why he joined Moriarity in the first place.

That was not cool. Dyslexia doesn’t make people violent, and it gets enough of a bad rap without stories like this that suggest these types of negative associations.

The Real Sherlock’s Illness Should Have Taken Center Stage

Watson was supposed to be a medical mystery show. It usually went off track when Sherlock showed up (Especially after Watson hallucinated him for months), but it could have redeemed itself by having one last medical storyline.

Technically, it did have one, but trying to find out what was wrong with the real Sherlock was the least of anyone’s concerns during Watson Season 2 Episode 20.

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The team did some work with Watson in his lucid moments.

But the episode quickly chugged along from Sherlock having amnesia to remembering who he and Watson were to eventually realizing the same radiation that caused the brain tumor altered his genes.

This mystery was not in any way satisfying. It was competing with too many other things, plus I half expected it to turn out that the entire thing was a coma dream Watson had after his brain tumor progressed to a near-fatal state.

Watson And Mary’s Ending Would Have Been Satisfying If They’d Had a Real Story

During the first half of Watson Season 2, the series built a genuine love triangle, with Watson slowly realizing his feelings for Mary, only to discover he was too late.

I was so excited to find out what would happen after the midseason finale, when Watson arrived with flowers, only to find Mary kissing Josh.

Sadly, what happened was… nothing.

Throughout most of the season, Mary dated Josh, while Watson dated Laila.

Mary planned to go to LA to be Chief of Medicine, leaving Watson behind, only an episode ago, and it was only when Watson lay hovering between life and death that she admitted what she really felt for him.

That’s not a story. That’s the writers realizing the series needed to wrap up and suddenly tacking on the happy ending the characters deserved, without Mary and Watson having to do the work to get there.

That brief time jump was better than the series ending with Watson going into surgery and us not knowing if he lived or died, but come on!

We also left Sasha and Ingrid in limbo, with Sasha breaking up with Stephens because of her confusion over who she wanted to be, and Ingrid possibly being charged in Beck’s death, but maybe not.

And poor Adam got a throwaway line about naming his son after Watson last week, but nothing else.

If you ask me, this was no kind of series finale, but what did you think?

Hit the comments with your opinions about Watson Season 2 Episode 20, along with whether you’ll miss this show.

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If you enjoyed this article, check out our coverage of Tracker and Marshals, the other CBS Sunday night shows.

Watson has ended, but all episodes of the series are currently available on Paramount+.

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