Summary
Watson Season 2 is up to its old, ethically questionable tricks in “Buying Time”, a mockery of wealthy longevity dorks that takes curious pleasure in proving a fatal point.
It’s pretty uncontroversial to describe John Watson as a bit of a do-gooder. He isn’t exactly known for moral ambiguity – in the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, he was actually a bit of a guiding compass for Sherlock, who could get carried away – and we now have one and a half seasons of his namesake show to support this idea. Season 2 hasn’t taken any risks with Watson’s underpinning sense of righteousness, at least until Episode 6, which takes really disconcertingly obvious pleasure in killing a rich dude because he’s a moron.
Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t mourning the rich dude. But I still found the jaunty delight the show takes in his demise to be rather curious, especially for a medical drama about finding outside-the-box solutions to unusual ailments. It’s a very strange way to cap off what is fundamentally a pastiche of the Bryan Johnson-type longevity-obsessed biohacker, which has already been parodied in this season of Brilliant Minds (Watson just can’t escape comparisons with that show, can it?).
There’s another component here, which is the generally abysmal way that poor folks are treated within healthcare systems designed to profit from their illnesses. This creates a dovetailing quality to the fate of Casey, a young athlete whose sudden deterioration in health he can’t afford to treat, and Joseph Bell, the ultra-wealthy bro who wants to live a record-breakingly long life. Bell is, fittingly, played by Johnno Wilson, who also played a dorky gym-bro in that influencer episode of High Potential.
Casey and Bell are deliberately paralleled multiple times in sometimes very obvious split-screen juxtaposition, even before the episode’s plot progresses and reveals that Casey’s predicament is a direct consequence of Bell’s efforts to extend his own life. Casey had volunteered for all kinds of medical trials to drum up some cash, and one of them was conducted by one of Bell’s shell companies. He had been injected with one of Bell’s experimental life-prolonging treatments that caused him to develop an indestructible cancer in his spine.
Initially, Bell had approached Watson to become part of his ridiculous expert team, all devoted to developing new ways to keep him alive for longer. It was an offer that Watson found galling until Mycroft’s meddling meant that the clinic wouldn’t fund Casey’s treatment, forcing Watson to work for Bell for a month in exchange for him footing the bill. This is taken a step further later, when it’s revealed that Bell is at fault for Casey’s cancer and that, predictably, he also tested the same product on himself. Watson essentially blackmails Bell into writing Casey a blank check to create a life of luxury for himself when he recovers; in exchange, Watson, who is the only doctor in the world to have developed a cure for this particular type of cancer, will treat Bell.
This is where Watson Season 2, Episode 6 gets a little strange. Watson being willing to extort Bell for money by holding his own life over his head is a strange way for a doctor to get down, and following this, there’s more deliberate mirroring that shows Casey getting better while Bell gradually ebbs away. There’s an ironic quality, of course, since the guy who was adamant about living forever dies, while the poor young man he exploited for his own immortality ends up better than ever on his dime. But it’s super weird that the show takes so much pleasure in Bell’s demise, as if it’s implying that being rich and arrogant warrants execution.
A-plot aside, “Buying Time” also does that typical Watson thing in just injecting a character subplot out of nowhere that we’re supposed to care deeply about, despite no build-up for it having taken place. This one involves Stephens’ aversion to therapy, which Sasha – for some reason – asks Ingrid to try and talk him into. Stephens believes that therapy drove his father to suicide, which is quite the bombshell revelation to be coming out of nowhere in a throwaway conversation, and there’s simply no time to give it the proper attention something like this needs.
The same is true of Watson’s incredibly hostile relationship with Mycroft, who is meddling in the operation of the clinic for reasons that eventually become obvious at the end of the episode – he believes that Sherlock is alive, and if Watson only confirms it, he’ll back away from the clinic entirely. This is on-brand for Mycroft in other adaptations, but we’ve barely met him in this one, so it’s bizarre to see him spring up during video calls out of nowhere.
Will Watson rat Sherlock out? Before this episode, I’d have said definitely not. But now we know he isn’t as morally squeaky-clean as he likes to pretend, I guess anything’s possible.
