‘Watson’ Scoop: Ingrid Could Become Sherlock or Moriarty

“Is Shinwell the only person betraying Watson?” Morris Chestnut wonders.

He stars as the titular doctor in Watson, CBS‘s modern take on the Arthur Conan Doyle characters. The series picks up six months after sleuth Sherlock Holmes and the villain Moriarty (Randall Park) faced off at Reichenbach Falls, and the former didn’t make it (maybe?). The latter is now keeping a close eye on Dr. John Watson and has his right-hand man Shinwell Johnson (Ritchie Coster) unwillingly working for him. But with that reveal, as well as the introduction of Kacey Rohl‘s character, posing as a pharmaceutical rep but working for Moriarty, who knows if Watson should be trusting the rest of his team (Peter Mark Kendall‘s twins Dr. Stephens Croft and Dr. Adam Croft, Eve Harlow‘s Dr. Ingrid Derian, and Inga Schlingmann‘s Dr. Sasha Lubbock)?

He doesn’t trust them “entirely yet,” executive producer Craig Sweeny tells TV Insider as part of our latest digital cover story, “but he trusts his instincts in hiring them. Part of what we see over the course of the season is that the team really be profoundly tested. The Moriarty story doesn’t just touch on Watson, ultimately it touches on everybody on that team in a life and death kind of way, and so what we see is that trust develops in a really powerful way.”

Eduardo Araquel / CBS

Watson already knows that Ingrid lied on her resume (about playing Lady Macbeth in college) and called her out on it in the series premiere. He told her he hired her because of the conflict inside of her: Every impulse pushes her to put herself first but she tries to be a decent person anyway, and he says he wants to see which side wins in the end … or maybe Moriarty gave him a clinical interest in people like her. She’s also his neurologist and treating him for a traumatic brain injury after he followed Sherlock into the falls to try to save his friend. So how can Watson trust her as his doctor when he knows she’ll lie?

Well, that plays into the fact that Watson is, as his team suspects, studying them. “He brings people into his life, particularly these individuals, that he loves to study and learn [from],” notes Chestnut.

But it’s different with Ingrid. “It is a fascinating dynamic that we go deep on over the course of the season,” says Sweeny. “Watson holds Ingrid on a slightly different level than he holds everybody else intellectually. He sees her and he goes, okay, this person could be Sherlock if things break a certain way, or she could be Moriarty. She has the potential to go either way, to be either of the sort of dominant intellectual figures in his life.”

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He teases, “What we see unfold is, is that a process that Watson simply wants to observe for his own genetic experimental purposes, or does he come to care about her enough to try to put his thumb on the scale and influence her to go a certain way? She is put to the ultimate test as far as what kind of person she wants to be over the course of the season.”

When it comes to her treating him as his doctor, “Is that just a relationship of convenience because Watson wants his neurologist to be under his thumb, his employee essentially, or will he eventually submit to her care?” wonders Sweeny.

What’s your take on Ingrid so far? Will she be more like Sherlock or Moriarty? Let us know in the comments section below.

Watson, Sundays, 9/8c, CBS