John Takes a Major Medical Risk to Save a Patient on 'Watson'

John Watson is no stranger to risk. He jumped over a waterfall to save his best friend. He's always willing to try the most out there procedure to save a patient, but this week's Watson was the first time he put his – and his team's – career on the line; and it wasn't even to impress Mary. No, John was standing up for the underprivileged against the price-gauging medical industrial complex. You're not going to find any shame in his game over here. 

The patient of the week was a young woman named Taryn (Brittany Adebumola) who battled sickle cell anemia (also known as sickle cell disease or SCD) since she was a child. After multiple hospitalizations in several months, Mary brought Taryn to Watson to stabilize her latest attack so that Taryn could get into a clinical trial that may help ease her symptoms. 

The crazy part was that a cure for SCD existed, but it cost $3 million out of pocket – something that Taryn and the millions of other Black people affected by the disease could never afford. What was the point of a cure if the patients who needed it would never have access? It sounded like a scam and John was too bright and too capable to let Taryn suffer when he knew he could help. What's a little medical fraud between friends if it was for the greater good?

John recruited his friend and bio hacker, Dr Hobie McSorley (Nat Faxon) to help with Taryn's case. The existing cure for SCD would require rewriting an entire block of Taryn's DNA that would leave her infertile. John came up with a minimally invasive surgery that would only correct the affected sickle cells in her body and replace them with healthy cells. 

(The exact science is not important because this is a medical procedural; all that matters is that Watson believed it would work, and he's a genius.) 

The problem was that the surgery had never been performed before. If they try taking it through the proper medical channels, which would take years of approval and bureaucracy to get it approved by the FDA (a problem that has never been brought up on Grey's Anatomy). So, John and Hobie performed the surgery under the cover of darkness and told Taryn that if anyone asked, he did a simple mole removal. 

Surprise! The kind-of-made-up surgery worked, but the fellows under Watson's tutelage figured out he was up to something before he finished the surgery. He offered them the opportunity to leave without hearing anything about it, but Stephens demanded that they get the truth. The team then had to decide if they were going to report Watson or not. Stephens was the only one that felt it was morally imperative to turn their boss in, but the rest wanted to see if the surgery worked instead. 

Taryn did have to come back in for an emergency embolism. The team wondered if it was a side effect of the surgery, but it turned out that Taryn was pregnant! It was thought impossible because she had a copper IUD, but she was one of the one percent that the device failed. 

After spending her entire life thinking that she'd never carry a child, Taryn was ecstatic to hear the news. She was so grateful that Mary decided not to go through with the extra blood tests that would prove John had done something unethical to improve Taryn's SCD symptoms. 

Was this case preposterous when it comes to medical accuracy? Yeah, quite a bit. However, it exemplified the appeal of medical procedurals. What a wonderful thing to exist in a world where doctors can solve problems without putting you in massive amounts of medical debt or a ton of bureaucracy. Way to go, John. 

While John was inventing SCD cures, Ingrid and Sasha did some bonding. Ingrid was having trouble getting younger patients into her brain study that would use AI to help paralyzed people learn to walk again. She had a patient named Gigi that she really wanted to get into the study, but was running into a wall, so she asked Sasha how she would go about it. 

She baited Sasha with just enough information and deference that Sasha went ahead and wrote the recommendation for Ingrid and got Gigi into the study. The smirk Ingrid gave when she found out what Sasha did revealed that she had manipulated her into it, but then the end of the episode revealed that Gigi is Ingrid's sister. We don't know how she's paralyzed, but Ingrid has been aiming to get into that study to help her sister. Who wouldn't lie on a resume for an opportunity to help their wheelchair-bound sister walk again? 

Ingrid still can't be trusted, but at least her motives make a lot more sense now. We just hope the bond that she's created with Sasha isn't all fake. They actually make a pretty awesome and terrifying team. 

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