A Case of Alien Hand Turns Out to Be 'Watson's' Twistiest Adventure Yet

The title of this week's Watson is "The Man with the Alien Hand." That immediately brings up images of James Moriarty (Randall Park) and his fused fingers, but he wasn't the eponymous character in this case. That honor belonged to a wealthy man named Cameron Phipps (David Thompson) who underwent surgery to separate the two lobes of his brain to cure his severe epilepsy. The significant side effect was that it left his left hand to act on its own volition, and apparently, Cameron's hand really wanted to kill him. Well, actually, it turned out to be more deadly for the people around Cameron than himself, as this became one of the clinic's twistiest cases yet.

As the team worked on the case, Ingrid (Eve Harlow) was eager to prove that she could still be helpful to John (Morris Chestnut) in hopes that he would talk to Mary (Rochelle Aytes) about letting Ingrid keep her job. The neurologist could accept giving up her place on the spinal study, but she did not want to lose her spot at the Holmes Clinic. It was going to take a lot more than heartfelt apologies for him to win over the hospital boss after the ethical lines that Ingrid crossed. 

She wasn't the only one crossing lines, either. Shinwell (Ritchie Coster) got a new assignment from Team Moriarty at the top of the episode: collect DNA samples from all of the fellows. Moriarty already had Shinwell's DNA, but he was looking to do something dastardly with the rest of the team. 

Cameron's best idea for curing his wandering hand was to have it amputated. He couldn't find a surgeon willing to do it, and John wasn't going to agree either. He did decide to take Cameron on as a patient; however, mere hours after their first meeting, Cameron was brought into the emergency room after he threw hydrochloric acid on himself at a lab that he and his brother, Damian (Corey Sorenson), were touring. Ingrid was team amputation, but John still refused without an injury to the hand. Instead, the team came up with the idea to paralyze the parts of Cameron's brain that controlled his left hand. 

It was a risky surgery that had never been done before, but John argued to the Phipps brothers that Cameron's condition was so rare that there was no real "standard" care for it. In the meantime, they injected Cameron with Botox to keep his hand still until they found a surgeon willing to do the experimental surgery. The injections were effective for a brief period, allowing Cameron to leave the hospital. He was about to start his walk home when the alien hand reawakened, and Cameron began to strangle himself. When Damian intervened, the hand latched onto Damian's coat and threw the older brother in front of a bus. 

That left John trying to explain "alien hand syndrome" to the cops, who had two dozen witnesses who saw Cameron throw his brother in front of a bus. He was able to convince the lead detective, Lestrade (Rachel Heyward), to allow Cameron to return to the hospital under protective custody, where he would be monitored until the neurosurgeon John, selected from Korea, could arrive and perform the surgery that would permanently dull Cameron's ability to use his left hand. 

John was convinced Cameron's alien hand syndrome had caused Damian's death until Cameron's childhood housekeeper (Jill Teed) showed up at the hospital. She informed him his father had a cardiac incident after learning about Damian's condition and was stuck in the ICU. After dropping the truth bomb, she followed John to the hallway and begged him to discard the shipment of "Phippsmeats" that Cameron had sent him as a thank-you. Apparently, this was the fourth time he had tried to start the business, but the meat did not taste good at all, and the name was (obviously) unappetizing as well. 

That reveal set John into crime detective mode, rather than medical detective mode, reviewing traffic footage from Cameron shoving Damian in front of the bus. There were enough noticeable subtleties in Cameron's behavior to make John think that he threw his brother in front of the bus on purpose. He believed that Cameron did have alien hand syndrome, but it was not what killed Damian. He went back to Lestrade to admit he was wrong. He also hypothesized that Cameron purposefully threw the acid on himself to set up the push. To support his theory, John had Stephens and Sasha search for individuals in Cameron's past whom he may have targeted in a trial run before the lab incident. 

In the meantime, John went to Cameron to question him about Damian. It took the mention of a mutation in Cameron's DNA that made him recklessly impulsive for the man to crack. He didn't fully confess, but he did boast it would make him a genius if he came up with a plan, got the smartest people in the world to buy into it, and had the charges dropped. His full sociopathic colors came out, and John knew he had been had as Stephens and Ingrid found a medical student, Vijay, who claimed to have given himself medical burns. They set him up with an interview for the Holmes clinic, but their questions led the kid to say he'd rather keep his deal with Cameron than take whatever Ingrid and Stephens were offering him. 

This case was the case that just kept on giving. After realizing that Cameron was a cold-blooded murderer, Detective Lestrade had Phipps' family board room documents sent over to help John with his amateur investigation. The Phipps family housekeeper's son, Keith, delivered the documents. It only took Sasha and John a glance to determine that the young man was a secret heir to the Phipps family fortune. His mother confirmed her son's parentage, but also admitted that she had signed multiple NDAs that prevented her from arguing for an inheritance for her son. 

Apparently, Keith had tested his DNA for a lineage website and discovered that he had 36 half-siblings. That confirmed that John Phipps, Cameron's father, also had the impulse-control or "promiscuity gene" mutation. 

That number of heirs essentially rendered the Phipps family fortune moot. Cameron wouldn't have two cents to rub together once Keith alerted all of the half-siblings, which was poetic justice for all of his crimes. That would have been enough, but Vijay came straight to John when Cameron stopped paying up for his burn services. He offered to give a statement that allowed Detective Lestrade to put Cameron in cuffs. We'll see if Vijay is also able to convert that statement into a job as a chemist at the Holmes lab. 

Shinwell decided he couldn't turn over the fellow's DNA to Team Moriarty because he knew the evil professor would use it to take the team "off the board." Instead, he concocted fake DNA samples to give to Moriarty's henchwoman (Kacey Rohl) in hopes of buying himself and the fellows a bit more time. Ingrid struggled significantly with her connection to Team Moriarty. Ingrid was focused on keeping her cool at work, but Sasha (Inga Schlingmann) was focused on whether Ingrid was doing all right. She noticed the tension between Ingrid and John and wanted to help, but as we know, Ingrid really sucks at allowing people to get close to her. 

Our enigmatic neurologist had less of a choice in allowing Team Moriarty to get close. They began texting her as she assisted the team in working on Cameron's case, intensifying the pressure for her to join them and help the professor gather information on John. They sent pictures of her father to make sure Ingrid knew they weren't kidding about wanting her cooperation. 

Finally, Ingrid caved and told Sasha everything about her father and that someone was blackmailing her over the murder. It turned out that Moriarty himself was texting Ingrid. He promised he would be in town the following week and demanded that they meet up at "the usual spot." Ingrid may have Sasha in her corner now, but she is still under the professor's thumb. 

Watson continues Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on CBS. Episodes are available to stream the next day on Paramount+.