Watson Season 2 Episode 19 Review: The Rule of Three

It’s the penultimate episode of the series with all the emotion we might expect on Watson Season 2 Episode 19, “Rule of Three.” And then there are the final few seconds.

The hour opens with Lauren prepping for a c-section and John and Mary already on the road. Within moments, her first OB-GYN collapses in the OR and they’re stranded by a flood, consulting with everyone on a kind diner owner’s phone.

From the new OB-GYN’s delayed arrival to bleeding that nearly kills Lauren (much like in Watson’s dream), we come very close to tragedy several times. Finally, though, she rebounds. Little Olivia, Isabella, and Hamish are all doing well, too.

Everyone else awaits updates while tensely managing their own drama. Sasha is reeling from Beck’s actions. Ingrid seems to be dealing with killing him but is troubled when Lestrade arrives to ask her a few more questions.

The eventual good news (and having a baby named after him) persuades a still reluctant Watson to have the surgery he and Mary are headed to Baltimore for. But she has news of her own. She’s accepted a role in Los Angeles and will be moving away.

Amid both the chaos and an HIV scare, Shinwell and Carlin have several quiet, sweet moments. But their talk of marriage is interrupted by a new patient for Shinwell. It’s Sherlock. The real Sherlock. Who doesn’t recognize his old friend.

Despite the heavy hints that have been dropping since John realized the Sherlock he saw was a hallucination, the true man’s arrival—in the flesh and very much worse for wear— works well enough to land some shock value.

The apparent amnesia feels like a bit too much, if only because we have a single episode left to handle it. His haggard appearance does more to highlight Watson’s skewed view of how several years of survival would affect his friend.

What will this reunion mean for our titular hero, assuming Sherlock even remembers him? Watson has been imaging that Sherlock is alive for months. Will he even be able to process that this is really happening and not another symptom?

While he’s literally outside the central focus of this episode, the weight of his treatment hangs in every conversation he and Mary have. We can relate both to his fear of what could go wrong and her frustration with his reluctance.

Her own love is just one of several powerful motivators for him to have the surgery and is going to make it even more difficult to witness her departure. Then again, there might not be enough time life to see that happen, either.

I am at least somewhat hopeful that we’ll end with the comradery between our characters in the best place it’s been for some time. Seeing everyone rally behind Adam and Lauren provides some of the best emotional scenes of the series.

After all we’ve been through to get here, it’s a shame we won’t see more than a few glimpses of these three tiny lives, their overwhelmed parents, and the larger family around them. I’m still just glad they all made it here at all.

With Shasha processing that she never really heard from her mother and Ingrid potentially admitting why she really killed Beck, this happiness maybe short-lived. And we do still have both a tumor and a presumed-dead legend to consider.

However much we get to see, it almost certainly won’t be as much as we would like. Still, the solid writing and acting in this episode give me hope that the finale will at least do as right by our characters as it can.

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Watson airs Sundays at 10/9c on CBS.

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