Watson Season 2 Episode 6 Review: Buying Time

Months after Moriarty, another powerful figure meets a sort of cosmic justice in a Holmes Clinic bed on Watson Season 2 Episode 6, “Buying Time.”

Casey, a young man whose deteriorating health can’t be diagnosed at the only clinic he can afford is shown on split-screen with Joseph Bell, an “expert” in living beyond 100 who wants to loop the Holmes Clinic into his schemes.

Watson initially offers to treat Casey using the clinic’s funds, but finds Mycroft is withholding them. He relents to Bell on the condition that he covers all Casey’s medical bills, but the cancer their patient is diagnosed seems somehow un-killable.

The team deduces that the illness was manmade and inadvertently given to Casey during an experimental trial supposedly meant to test one of Bell’s treatments. The twist? Joseph has also tested the same sample on himself.

Is it just coincidence that the clinic helps Casey recover while Joseph’s state rapidly worsens? Almost certainly. Even so (and even though we’re hardly grieving the loss of Joseph) there’s something disconcerting in the tone of his eventual death.

Meanwhile, Stephens and Ingrid discuss therapy, with Stephens rejecting it on the belief it drove his and Adam’s father to suicide. Also, John meets Mycroft only to be bribed for knowledge—because the elder Holmes believes his brother is still alive.

For a show that has performed medical miracles, Watson here gives a stark story of what happens when vanity reaches the point of making someone feel invincible. We see Joseph as a charlatan from the start, but still a dangerous powerful one.

Casey is his literal and moral opposite; just someone who seems too young to be as sick as he is and whose lack of resources makes everything still worse. We want him to recover. We may not want Bell to die, but we aren’t too broken up over it.

Still, the actual scenes of his death, pared with Casey walking away in good health and able to afford a nice car, are something else. With a lighthearted song playing in the background, the attitude to his flatlining is casual, almost lighthearted.

While this certainly isn’t on the same level as intentionally giving Moriarty a fatal illness, it’s the biggest instance of questionable ethics we’ve seen since that happened. It takes solid writing and acting to make that work in protagonists.

It’s a dark episode straight through to the subplots. The secret Stephens reveals is much too heavy to properly explore in the time it’s given, but we can see that the surface is barely scratched. It’s likely to become very relevant very soon.

And Mycroft being just as shady as anyone else won’t surprise any Arthur Conan Doyle fan, but I still wasn’t expecting that ending. Among all else, this may finally be the proof we need that Sherlock is indeed alive, and not just in John’s mind.

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Watson airs Mondays at 10/9c on CBS.

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