Doctor Doctor (Mr. MD)

S01E05

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Holmes is engaged in the perfectly normal activity of choking corpses, because he apparently doesn't know that there's already an extensive body of knowledge on the subject of postmortem wounds. But it's okay, because he spots one body that bears evidence of being secretly murdered. After Holmes and Watson barge their way into the hospital room where it happened, they're on the trail!

First, though, they have to find out their victim's name, because the hospital administrator doesn't like Holmes. So they track down a barista named Dave, who was hitting on a perfume saleslady who was the victim's neighbor. Armed with this knowledge, they learn that there was a mysterious doctor who met with the victim at night.

Holmes studies all the medical records in the world, but Watson manages to narrow things down with her expert medical knowledge of how someone might steal epinephrine. This gives them nine victims of what is clearly an Angel of Death, and twenty-three potential suspects. None of them pan out, although they catch one of them stealing morphine. And that one gives them a little bit of information that eventually leads to them deciding that the killer speaks Ukrainian. And that means it was secretly the janitor all along!

Except we're not done yet, because there's still something that bothers Holmes. One of the victims doesn't match up with the Angel's usual plan, and the reason is that the head of surgery made a mistake and covered it up by getting the janitor to murder the evidence. Weird, right?

And while this whole thing is going on, Watson is reconnecting with an old friend. And she's also using her newfound deductive skills to instantly diagnose a case of endocarditis from just some mildly discolored toenails. The show pretends there's some doubt about the diagnosis, but there isn't, really.

Want more? The full recap starts right below!

Welcome to the episode! Holmes is choking someone! Specifically, a corpse. The morgue attendant is in the same beekeeping chat room as Holmes, so he lets him in. Holmes claims to Watson that the bodies have been donated to science, but if that were true you'd think Holmes wouldn't need to rely on his secret beekeepers' network. Also, I'm surprised we don't have full data on postmortem choking already. It's like on CSI when they're always dragging out dead pigs to shoot. Are they sure no one's already done that test? Holmes calls out Watson as being uncomfortable here because she's a disgraced former surgeon. She won't help him with his important tests. Holmes applies a chokehold on one of the corpses and thanks Bruce the Attendant. Then he notes a body that, according to him, died from a heart attack. Watson explains that there's a blue dot on the head which is a sign of radiation. Further interrogation reveals that this person was in room 704 when he died.

On the way to the room, Holmes tells Watson it was a murder meant to look like an accident. He barges into the room and bullies the janitor out by dumping water out in the hallway. I like the assumption that all the janitor can do is mop the floor and the only way to stop him is to make a messier floor somewhere else. He has a picture of the victim's finger which proves that the epinephrine was administered too late or too early or something. Point is: murder.

As Holmes investigates the room, people pound on the door. It seems like it would be easy to explain himself, but Holmes claims that he doesn't want to interrupt his process. Watson helps him conclude that the killer must have injected the epinephrine into the IV and turned the pump down so the death wouldn't happen while they were still in the room. Holmes is pleased that they have their method already. The people outside say they're breaking the door down and Holmes is pleased that he doesn't need to open it. They come in and Holmes demands to be brought to the Administrator.

After the commercial, Captain Gregson is in the hospital administrator's office, presumably trying to explain Holmes and his ways. Holmes and Watson are loitering in the lobby so Watson can be accosted by an old friend who calls her "Joanie." She's Dr. Carrie Dwyer. Holmes speculates on what could have come between them. Carrie asks if Watson is applying for the spot in cardio-thoracic, since her suspension was for only a few months. Nope! Watson claims to have left medicine behind her.

Holmes and Watson are allowed in to see the administrator, a Mr. Sanchez, who is unhappy with them. He is accompanied by a very tall man. Or maybe Sanchez is just very short. Holmes asks if the tall guy gets things off high shelves for Mr. Sanchez, and I love the little smile the guy allows him before he says he's Dr. Baldwin, the head of surgery. He wasn't treating the dead man, but he was in pre-surgery, which made him Dr. Baldwin's responsibility. Gregson orders Holmes to apologize to Mr. Sanchez, which will get them the body. Holmes demands the name and medical records, but they are refused. It seems weird that people are willing to believe it was murder but they're not willing to tell the genius detective the name of the victim.

Outside the hospital. Holmes is furious that he apologized. But he has a lead: there were two coffee cups in the trash, one of which had lipstick. So there's a woman who brought the victim coffee. If they find her, they can learn his name. And there's a receipt from a coffee stand with "Dave" and a phone number written on the back, so off they go to the coffee place!

In a long line for coffee, Holmes grouses about how complicated coffee orders have gotten. I would have thought he'd have an elaborate theory on what you can learn from people's orders. They chat about this and that and Watson says she allowed her license to expire, so she's officially "not a doctor" at the moment, although she wasn't thrown out of the profession forever. She says it's hard to be a surgeon when you freeze up when you're handed a scalpel. Well, you could be one of those surgeons who use lasers. At the front of the line at last, they meet Dave. And even though there's a really long line, Dave has time to chat! He says he gives out his number a lot, but a little prodding gets him to remember the customer. He says it was a blonde doctor with a lab coat and cleavage and perfume.

Outside, Holmes and Watson agree that it wasn't a doctor, thanks to all that stuff. Doctors don't wear their lab coats out of the hospital, they don't show cleavage on the job and perfume is a no-no for a doctor on duty. So Watson leads them to a department store that has perfume ladies in lab coats. They find the blonde immediately! Which is lucky, because in my experience most perfume ladies are blonde. She says the dead man's name was Trent Kelty. She was a neighbor and visited him in the hospital after he lost sight. The night, visited him around 9:30 and offers to give them her Metro card to identify when she left. Jonny Lee Miller does a very nice "huh!" noise when she says that. Holmes clearly considered the suggestion and was surprised at how good he thought it was. He asks if she can remember anyone who would have wanted to hurt him. No, Mr. Kelty had no friends. She has trouble with the word "oncologist" (which is another clever moment) but says that a doctor was visiting him at nights. She was also not the one cutting up his pancakes.

Outside. Holmes says that whoever cut up the pancake killed him. He doesn't like proposing a theory before its complete, but the killer was medically knowledgeable and Mr. Kelty had a friend claiming to be a doctor. And the killer cut up the pancake into child-size pieces, suggesting that he viewed his victim as someone to be taken care of. The point is, it's an Angel of Death. That's "someone who kills sick people in the hospital."

Mr. Baldwin, the head of surgery putts in his office (because all fancy doctors on television have teeny putting greens in their offices) and isn't convinced of the Angel of Death hypothesis. Holmes demands access to all medical records and epinephrine records anyway. Dr. Baldwin says Mr. Sanchez is in charge of that stuff, but Holmes says that Baldwin's smile from earlier (when he made a short joke) means he doesn't like Sanchez. Indeed, Baldwin will help.

Holmes looks through medical records. Watson wishes him luck and Holmes says this, which is awesome: "Luck is an offensive, abhorrent concept. The idea that there is a force in the universe tilting events in your favor or against it is ridiculous. Idiots rely on luck." Right on, man. Anyway, Watson points out that she could be useful here, what with her having actual medical knowledge and all. Holmes has a chalkboard with all 73 possible victims, although obviously some are going to be legitimate deaths. Watson suggests checking the epinephrine records. There have been two thefts reported from the pharmacy, but they don't match up with any deaths. Watson proposes crash cart thefts, since crash carts are left unattended all the time. There are several precise dates that match deaths. There were no reports because hospitals normally only care about things like oxycodone. So they have nine deaths to investigate.

Holmes now has twenty-three suspects based on people who worked on the relevant dates. He worked on nurses as well as doctors on the theory that their last victim was blind. So even though he told perfume lady he'd been talking to a doctor, he doesn't really know. Watson leaves to go talk to Carrie. Holmes enters the elevator with that janitor he shoved out into the hallway. The janitor claims to accept Holmes's apology but he still pushes all the elevator buttons as he rolls his cart out into the hallway.

Holmes is in Baldwin's office as Baldwin walks in. Holmes says that three of the nine victims were his, which Baldwin explains as the sickest people being his patients. He takes on patients no one else will treat. Holmes lists a number of failures Baldwin has had. In fact, he's on probation! So, Holmes suggests, maybe he started killing patients to get back at the hospital. Baldwin explains that surgeons don't care about pain. Unlike an Angel of Death, he's not interested in whether people have pain. Holmes says it's a novel alibi. Also, Baldwin was on a train yesterday, which is an alibi in the more traditional sense.

Carrie breaks off her conversation with Watson because she has a pre-op consult. She gets Watson to come along. The patient a young lady named Morgan, who plays soccer. She has a darkened left toenail. Watson says she's no longer a doctor. Morgan does not ask, "So how come you're in here while I'm being examined, then?"

Bell does the interviews instead of Holmes. Logical! Holmes is notoriously a jerk. Dr. Cahill, the current interview subject has been on call for 29 hours and is touchy about how exhausted he is. Bell says that one victim is James Romano, who had pancreatic cancer, just like Bell's mother. Bell spins a story about how he wishes someone would have had the strength to end her pain. Holmes blows up Bell's spot, saying that he's trying to gain his empathy. I'm going to assume that the awkwardness of the story was because Bell is a bad actor, not because the guy playing Bell is... if that makes sense. Cahill is dismissed. Holmes explains that the guy was nervous, but stopped when he learned it was the deaths.

Watson and Carrie. Watson says Morgan has endocarditis. But Carrie already checked her heart and heard no murmur. Watson asks her to run a test so Morgan doesn't crash during the surgery.

Holmes and Watson check in. Holmes's suspects all came up clean and Watson says it's hard for her to be around her friends. She gets a text saying Morgan didn't have endocarditis and is visibly disappointed about it. Holmes demands that she hold the course, even though the first test was negative. I like how engaged he is in her problems here, because up until now, he's been distant about pretty much everything. And then Holmes is distracted by the car of Dr. Cahill, which he identifies from the Bobcats bumper sticker. Bell thought Cahill was a good suspect, although Holmes dismissed him. And Cahill said he was sleepy toward the end of his shift, which was five hours ago, but the presence of his car implies that he hasn't gone home yet. He's not even allowed in the hospital right now!

In the hospital, Cahill sneaks a hypo from a crash cart. He enters a patient's room and starts to inject an IV tube. Holmes busts in and Cahill is dragged off. But then! The hypo was empty; he was trying to steal morphine from a PC machine.

Brownstone. Holmes yells at himself for not recognizing Cahill's twitchiness. But he doesn't care about him anymore, because he's concentrating on the murder. All twenty-three of the people on his list are no longer suspects. But then! Watson notes that Samantha Cropsey, the second-to-last victim, was not terminal. She had a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft, but she wasn't going to die. So why did the Angel make an exception? Gregson calls. Cahill's talking! He's got some sort of information for them!

Interrogation room. Cahill explains that he's wiped out and keyed up after a shift, so he can't sleep without the morphine. Holmes isn't all that interested. Anyway, a couple months ago, he snuck into a room that turned out to be an Angel's victim. He snuck into the bathroom to... Holmes interjects: "I believe the words you're looking for are 'shoot' and 'up'." The way he says this is very Blackaddery. I think it's the way he enunciates the "p" in "up." If you're wondering why I gave this episode such a high grade, it's because there have been a lot of little moments like this that I've really enjoyed. The show overall is still a standard procedural that uses the name Sherlock Holmes, but things like that can make it stand out for me.

Anyway, when Cahill went to leave, he saw someone coming into the room. He didn't recognize the guy's voice, but he and the patient talked for an hour. The doctor went into detail about how the patient was going to die. Gregson sneers that Cahill needed a new morphine source, which makes Holmes glare at him.

Holmes and Watson! Talking things over! Holmes says that the Angel's approach as described by Cahill is exactly like the one perfume-lady described. So they know more about his methods!

Back to the hospital, but only with Watson. She asks Carrie to run a better test for endocarditis, because the one that Morgan passed is only accurate 75% of the time. Carrie won't do it. Watson says if she operates on her, she could die. Carrie: "She'll be fine, Joan. I'm operating on her. Not you." Now the charitable way to read that is, "It's my decision. Not yours." But given that we know Watson accidentally killed a patient, it seems like Carrie could be saying, "I'm doing the operation. Not an incompetent like you."

Watson joins Holmes. He's interested in her results! I like that a lot, actually. He is disappointed in her giving up and then he dismisses the entire thing from his mind to return to the matter at hand. He has a form from one of the victims. And it features two handwritings! Inichka Jones had to fill it out for the Ukrainian patient, meaning that this victim spoke Ukrainian and not English. And the Angel must have talked to her, because that's what he does. None of the doctors at the hospital speak Ukrainian, but, says Holmes, not all doctors stay doctors.

In the interrogation room: it's the janitor! He had blue and yellow rags on his cart. He admits that he used to be a doctor in the Ukraine, but now he's just a janitor. Holmes and Gregson lay out the victims. "We believe they were all murdered." The janitor admits that he remembers them. "When a patient is in pain, dying is not a tragedy," he says. Gregson says they had a warrant, so they searched his apartment and found a log of notes about precisely these nine patients. The janitor says he "freed them" after confirming for himself that they had no hope of recovery. Holmes asks about the one they found who was getting better, but the janitor doesn't understand: "Better? People do not get better from metastasized cardiac cancer." Holmes says she didn't have cancer, but the janitor insists they found a mass and she was dying. Also that Holmes is making up lies, just like the police in the Ukraine.

Outside the interrogation room, Gregson praises Holmes. Holmes is freaked out that the janitor is telling the truth about Samantha Cropsey's condition. He doesn't care that they've caught the Angel. There's more to do! And a good thing, too, because we're only 45 minutes into the show.

Holmes sits cross-legged in the brownstone, studying files. Watson proposes sushi for dinner, so Holmes lists diseases related to raw fish. He's trying to determine why their Angel got Samantha wrong. The door buzzes and it's Carrie. He calls her "Joanie's friend," which is weirdly disturbing. Then when it's clear they're not going to have a conversation, Holmes shouts for Watson and strides off. Carrie is here to tell Watson she was right and that the third test revealed that Morgan did indeed have endocarditis. Some anonymous person put the test request in Morgan's file. Watson admits nothing and says Carrie was lucky. And that she knows what it's like not to be lucky. Carrie says, "You were always a good friend, Joanie. But you were a better doctor." And she leaves.

Holmes was listening in on the conversation (from five feet away) and praises her instincts: "Well done." And he's gotten an idea! "Get your coat!"

Gregson's office. And Dr. Baldwin! Holmes asks if he's brilliant. Baldwin allows as how some people call him that. Last night, Holmes realized he might not have been the first person to realize there was an Angel of Death in the hospital. But records show Baldwin did investigate the bodies of his two patients. Baldwin's defense is that they were his patients, so naturally he investigated their deaths. Holmes says he might have noticed the same thing he did. But Baldwin left a clamp in Samantha Cropsey's chest. Fixing that would have earned him his third strike. So he made Samantha an attractive patient for the Angel of Death. He forged the results of a cancerous discovery and put in her file. And then he lowered her pain meds to get the Angel's attention. Samantha has been exhumed, and the clamp was indeed in her rib cage. Baldwin speaks hypothetically and says that they may have just proved that he made a mistake, but there's no evidence of faked records. Well, Holmes checked out the janitor's records, which were very complete. Instead of copying out information, he took pictures of the official charts! And upon being presented with this evidence, he told them where they were hidden! Baldwin is sanctimonious. Gregson says it's Murder 2: twenty to life.

On television, Baldwin gets packed into a police car. Holmes watches the body language over and over on TiVo. Watson is going to bed. Holmes congratulates her on being "quite a doctor." She admits that she had her moments. Holmes suggests that she might give it a go again one of these days. And when she's in bed, Watson spends time looking at her old pictures of doctoring. Then she deletes them all.

Follow Monty on Twitter at @monty_ashley and read his blog, Mysterious Exhortations.

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