Watson may have ended its first season with the villain Moriarty dead, but that doesn’t mean we can’t see Randall Park in Season 2. After all, there are different ways to bring back a dead character on TV, including with the use of flashbacks and hallucinations.
In fact, TV Insider specifically asked executive producer Craig Sweeny after the Season 1 finale if we could see Moriarty haunting Watson (Morris Chestnut) going forward. After all, Watson’s actions led to Moriarty’s death. Can’t you just imagine him popping up to provide some sort of commentary or vocalize Watson’s inner struggles?
“I definitely wouldn’t rule it out,” Sweeny said. “I mean, definitely the act will haunt Watson, and you’d be a fool to say, I would never allow Randall Park to act in our show. I mean, I would love to see him again.”
Moriarty’s final moves against Watson and his team of fellows saw both twins Adam and Stephens (Peter Mark Kendall) poisoned. Since he had Ingrid (Eve Harlow) sabotage the cure, there was only one dose left (given to Adam). But then Ingrid revealed Moriarty’s blackmail to Watson, who used the villain’s DNA against him after an earlier visit to the clinic. After he handed over what they needed to cure Stephens, it was too late, however. The cure for Moriarty didn’t work as well as Watson had hoped, the doctor said, and he sat with him as he died.
“We didn’t start the season going, ‘Oh, Moriarty is going to die at the end of the season.’ But we created this constellation of circumstances where no matter what happened, no matter what they did with him, even if they put him in a lockdown prison in Colorado where there’s no contact with anybody, he still has this trove of DNA somewhere that would allow him to do to essentially anybody in the world what he did to Adam and Stephens,” Sweeny explained. “And so I believe that Watson really approached that from a perspective of doing the least harm and even though it upended and that decision will have a lot of ramifications on the character going forward, I don’t think even given that he would change what he did because it was a question of, how do I minimize the damage from this situation?”
Looking ahead, Watson’s decision “really challenges his conception of who he is and what he’s capable of,” continued Sweeny. “And I think you’ll see it particularly in the season premiere. We’re doing a lot of new narrative stuff in Season 2. It’s not all about looking back on what happened. But I think he does enter the season with a sense that I might not know myself as well as I thought I did, even though he probably wouldn’t do it differently. I think he’s really shaken and rattled by it and it’s affecting the way he’s dealing with the people around him.”
Morris Chestnut loved that shocking move from his character. Not only does it open up the show to explore what that means for Watson as a doctor, who’s supposed to help people and not cross the line he did, “even though it was for a good cause,” it also leads to questions for him “just even as a person, once you crossed the line like that, how does it make you feel? Can you really, really live with yourself? Did you like it? Is it something you want to keep pushing?” he wondered. “There’s so many things that it brings up, which is, I’m excited for Season 2 because I believe Craig is going to be exploring all of those questions.”
There’s also the possibility that we see Moriarty in flashbacks. After all, there’s still a question of whether or not Sherlock Holmes (voiced by Matt Berry) is really dead; he fell with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Perhaps we could see Moriarty in flashbacks leading up to that, should that question be answered, or even just addressed, in Season 2.
Do you want to see Randall Park reprise his role as Moriarty to haunt Watson or for flashbacks? Let us know in the comments section below.
Watson, Season 2, 2026, CBS